7/100, I am not singing for you

Beach after Poor Things. Such excellent sleeves. Textile geek in my comes out. Hard to get past the costumes. Will, another time. To the objectivity of it all, to the woman as object rather than subject - the battle of becoming one over the other. That’s what it’s about. That and dressing ourselves up.

But here, the sun sets over Beachy Head. Showing off really. If it’s like this in February what will it be like by summer? Hate sunset really. Who wants to see a day end? Prefer instead the beginning of things; dawn and driving up a hill in rural France, fresh off the boat, was I 11 or 12? No one to ask. An old lady outside a Boulangerie sweeping the pavement. The freshness of it all. Prefer that.

Turning east, candy clouds, pinking. A horizon with nothing on it.

Sunday. Think of how much work there is to do before tomorrow. Think of the newness of things. Think of meeting a writer last week or the week before last, and how she’s been around longer than me, knows more than I do. She tells me when we meet accidentally, that the only was to get through the strangeness of publication is to be well on your way with the next thing. I nod. I am. One thing I’m doing right. She says it’s what you have to hold onto, now the other thing is public, is your secret thing. A thing away from the critics, the booksellers, the public. I nod again because I agree. It’s the only thing. You’re not as good as your last piece of work but only as good as the next.

And thinking of it now, the waves rolling in or out and how is it I never can tell, it seems these secret things are like being newly pregnant, with neither baby nor foetus. This not baby, not foetus, just embryo manifesting as new found disgust at bananas and little else, is your secret you pat as you sit on the side of the bath, promising if you’re given just the smallest chance you’ll nurture into being, before the scans and the growth charts and the needles the pain relief, the sleepless years and milestones hit and missed, those first few months of you and it and the near impossible-ness of it all. These are the parts I like, before the critics and goodreads and the social hoopla and I wish Barthes was right, how I’d like to duck out off all the surrounding stuff just to make the thing in the first place, before the loglines and the pitch documents and the proposals and the synopsises, because I am not singing for you, and the second I start is exactly when I need to stop.

(Before I am sued or charged for lyrics which cost an awful lot, of course the I am not singing for you, is stolen from Bright Eyes and of course Conor Oberst is one of the finest songwriters, and no, I’m not available for questions at this time.)