See You Soon #6: Detachment Style
On the power of suggestion, adhesive, and remembering to fuck around
Hi Friends.
A few weeks ago, right after finishing my revision, I found myself classically busy. Because of timing with deadlines, a workshop I was unexpectedly teaching, and reading favors I had agreed to, I was staring down just over 200 pages to get notes to people on, within about 3 days. I had already worked through the weekend (and would unfortunately continue to for the whole of the month; so much for finishing a draft freeing up time!). I kept making lists of things I didn’t want to forget to do, things I had really meant to do in the weeks before, but couldn’t even fathom putting on the weekly to do list with any seriousness. And instead of reading pages, or writing the emails I needed to, or reviewing lesson plans for class, any of which would have eased my feeling of being underwater, I pulled out my collage materials. My brain told me this was not a good use of my time, but I’ve gotten smart enough to ignore my brain.
Collage is fairly new to me, a hobby I started in the spring, after a bit of a joking conversation with a friend who I forced to pick an imagined artistic medium for me to work in. As a sidenote, this is a fun question to ask a friend to answer for you: what medium you’d work in in visual arts, or perhaps writing, if you do none of the above. Like, which of your friends could be sculptors or poets in another life1? When I’d asked my friend this very question, she’d said collage; I took it as an assignment (thank god she didn’t say metalwork or performance art) thinking I would just send her a little collage in the mail to continue the joke2. But once I saw how accessible and forgiving and satisfying collage was, how great it was to just fuck around with something other than words, it took hold of me, fast.
It was a relief to make a thing that I didn’t have to put my whole self into, that I can’t, for now, even see much of myself in, the way I can sometimes too easily, with writing. I suspect I will; I suspect, like I tell my students, it is already there. But for now I like my detachment from the collages, the way I don’t have to use words for them (though I always title them, how can I not!). I like that they are a little crude, and not at all my best work but also the best I can do. I like that I don’t need to be amazing at collage, or sell them, or impress anyone with them, that they are not to be reviewed by anyone on Goodreads or god forbid, workshopped. They’re for me, my hands, my pleasure. That’s exceedingly rare in my life, and I’m sure in yours.
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