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I need to work on better titles

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by

rachelvb
in , ,

Today is going to be a slow day. The French Press steeping, waiting. There’s time to slowly make coffee, to slowly wake up, to slowly remember my dreams from last night.

I was gettin’ it on with Sarah Jessica Parker in a yellow hotel room. OK? Not bad for two skinny broads. She was being chased by the mob and they were tracking her with a paper drawing of her body and ghost foot prints – like the marauders map in Harry Potter. I think I had too much sugar last night.
I went to bed worried because I didn’t have a pen or paper on the bedside table next to me. And all this morning I kept rolling over a line over and over again to remember it. Mouths caught like zippers, Zippers caught like mouths, Complicated mouths and zippers. I’m not sure what struck me about it, why half awake/half in dreams I told myself to remember. We lay in bed this morning. Two minds silently buzzing. I know mine is full or worker ants – collecting, hauling things bigger than myself. Sometimes when it’s working I have no concept of silence. I don’t even realize I’m not speaking.

On Friday we pulled into the driveway around 11 pm. A raccoon’s face caught in the headlights. I don’t think I’ve ever seen on that close before. Just dead on the highway. We left the car running, the spotlight upon him, we stayed to watch like a drive in while he rummaged through the weeds. And then the shock of meeting us wore off, he bumbled into the night.
I’ve been wondering where self expression ends and art begins. Will I know the difference when I get there, if I get there, if I’m there? When do the things we write about become art? How do I know? So much of my instinct to write begins with self-expression, the need to express or explode. Is then the art within the revision? Within the crafting and shaving and carving a heart and eyes and bones?

Shit, I forgot to pay my student loan.

Comments

2 responses to “I need to work on better titles”

  1. Angella Lister Avatar
    Angella Lister

    Mouths caught like zippers. What a fabulous image, and perfect today.

    I think self-expression is art, and that the need to express or explode is what drives all art. Perhaps it becomes art to other people when they appreciate it as such. But that doesn’t mean it’s not already art. It is your art the minute it is born. That’s what I think anyway. love.

    Reply
    1. rachvb Avatar
      rachvb

      Dear Angella,
      I hope you had a wonderful trip! I’ll pop over and see how it was, I’m sure you have some lovely pictures.
      I just finished reading Virgina Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and in it she says “There are books on all sorts of subjects which a generation ago no woman could have touched. There are poems and plays and criticism; there are histories and biographies, books of travel and books of scholarship and research; there are even a few philosophies and books about science and economics. And though novels predominate, novels themselves may very well have changed from association with books of a different feather. The natural simplicity, the epic age of women’s writing, may have gone. Reading and criticism may have given her a wider range, a greater subtlety. The impulse toward autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.”
      I realize it’s always the “unanswerable question” – what is art? I wonder if it start with self-expression and we mold it into art to become something more than ourselves? Art with a purpose? I suppose what I look for is connection, to fee less alone in my body, my mind, my life. I think for me, the purpose comes in revision or is starting to come in revision. I can hone in on the spark, the heart of what I’m trying to say ultimately and craft around it. It does, however, all start with the self-expression. It is all very connected. A stage of art. A very vital stage.
      xo

      Reply

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