It’s 5:30 am and I’ve been awake for hours .. . at first resting, then noting thoughts, then listening to a podcast relaxedly, then getting inspired and needing to write some more … on things that aren’t time sensitive (when much other stuff is, or feels it is*) … and articulate some more creative juice and then listen again … and then again, write, and note the spoken quotes that resonate. This podcast and I were having a felt conversation.
It’s not one I want to let you in on, or not yet. It’s one I see happening again, in the future, picking up where we left off before daybreak: in agreeance, each having found the same spot and own terms on the topic. What it reminded me of in doing this, was the creative space of the midnight artist, and a long ago penned poem.
The 4am-ness of things**. That’s what I mean by midnight. The quiet hours, where time exists outside of time, and the creative brain wakes up to work on something, something that exists, or needs to come into existence in, and perhaps from, the creative dark.
There’s this thing that I’m noticing happen in my practice as I prepare for my upcoming project … the preparation. Not simply the practical, but the intuitive emotional, in some way raw human spiritual-esque preparation that my system knows it needs to do. I am mostly just dancing with it, doing what feels like the next step in the moment … essential to do, and to do now, without penning it down, deeming it on a to do list for later … because there is risk of losing connection in the pause.
I was reflecting on NEST the other day, how the idea for my residency, in my mind at and before the start, was to experiment with objects and create maybe 6 small visual poetry pieces. At the end of the week, invite people in to look at them. Nothing major, just a couple of lovely smalls. That’s it.
I walked into the studio that first day, and in order to do this, I felt the need to prepare. I went about making the space feel good, feel right … so I could have a pleasant backdrop to the small little arts that I would be crafting.
The image in my memory is that at the end of the week, I would be there with a line of white table on which 6, at most, small 10cm ish crafted and assembled object works would be lined up, each with some space around itself, sitting there contained and on display. Instead, my intuitive preparation and space making led to this: an entire room converted into a nest. The poetry of this isn’t lost on me now, but at the time … I was, at least consciously or intellectually, oblivious.
It started with finding use of an endless scroll of half metre wide paper: to cover over the ‘ugly’ bits … the safety hazard posters or whatever the visual offence was. The paper became like a first twig, and I like a bird gathering … and then another object got brought in … oo good one, I like this one … this is good it goes nice with that … ooo the leaves outside are blowing in, let’s invite some more … another layer added … and another … the thin tables edging the room each day becoming more detailed shelves for all my treasured salvaged finds, and stage for the small vignettes appearing by design reflex and joy within the space … which had suddenly and unexpectedly spun itself into a nest. By the time I was done, there were nests within the nest … a woven clothes nest and inflatable egg with another circular gathering space inside.
I’m writing this, as a reminder, to myself, and perhaps to you, to follow the intuitions in the creative process, to, as my mentor Margaret Cameron told me, and possibly her mentor before that: ‘go where the pleasure is’.
The art, I know, will land. The exhibition I’m working on, under time and energy and distraction constraints, will land. And I will land there with it … with what I need in place, by playing this project’s dance through as it comes.
And so in celebration of that, and the new, old and developing thoughts, ideas and creative visions I’ve been spending my otherwise intentioned time on, meditating with midnight on … seemingly in spite of myself and my better intentions … but I suspect the opposite, in fact I know and trust the opposite … I’ll pop these old words here:
[they’re not perfect, and not quite how I would pose them now, but that’s ok, we’ll accept their imperfections and misplaced judgements … knowing that poems, like people, grow … and that we can always learn to meet them where they are … and ourselves along the way.]
*it literally is. but we’re going with the gut here folks.
**out of curiosity I looked up the dates of my poem doc and Rives TED talk
both 2015***, and if you add those numbers and divide by 2 poets, you get 4
coincidence?
*** update. I have looked again, during a new 3 am
(the 2015 date was curiously out of line with my memory
of writing the poem, yet)
2015 was a date I saw attached to the document
… it is no longer
it was likely when I last opened the file.
The following piece was written in
2004
2006
2008
or all of the above
midnight artist
The three a.m. societal art of silence
– when the routine stops they sleep –
but my muse is racing
having been fuelled
with the excess creativity leeched into the air
by the after-dinner soft sofa slothfulness
of a blasé TV nation.
I feed on their wasted time,
nourished by the stillness
of their vitamin filled vegetable minds
into artful motivation.
I am creation
raw
and tuned into the self.
From the scattered debris
on my living room floor
I can’t find the use
in binding these prolific hands.
I tailor my future from relics of the past;
wooden pegs, old bandages,
lost buttons, loose threads
and antique recipe literature.
Textured browning pages feel delicious.
My embroidering hands beg
hand-sewn buttonholes
to preserve this moment’s potent muse.
The same muse that inspired old wives
to invent mock brains from porridge,
a drive to rival the numb infusion
of uninspired channel flickers,
the brazen art
that lets us run our rainbow tongues
over midnight courses
while sleeping minds go hungry,
dream blind.
© indigo eli. Terms of Use.
indigo eli 
Loved it. I _did_ wonder whether it could also be entitled “evening coffee”, but maybe that’s rude, and I’m just kidding! 😀
hahaha. greenasjade, your ‘kidding’ is not rude. in fact it made me smile … and ponder.
your posed alternate title, fun and dear as it is to receive, does not fit … why? for one: the last coffee I had was for lunch/afternoonsies, but that’s neither here nor there, for two: if I could evoke this embodied creatively pinging sensehood with simply a cup of coffee in the evening times, one: aha, a magic elixir is found! (unfortunately not), two: I wouldn’t have had/felt/imagined? my mouth so shut for the past ten years.
there’s magic in this dance, and somehow the trick is listening or feeling out for the music … perhaps in resting, and waiting for it … maybe it’s always there … but numerous things have to line up so you can get out on the dance floor.
this comment, after yours, is entitled “thoughts, with late morning coffee … after a heady dance” 🙂
Well, thanks for the fleeting pleasure of this dance, a quick nod of the head, as we briefly meet, spin past each other and onwards 🙂