Emotion recollected in mild agitation
Kate Keogan on meeting up with her fellow mentees and the inescapable intensity of the writer’s gaze …
Dialect mentees (l to r): Audrey Healy, Keely O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Hemings, Kate Keogan
I notice… . I wonder… . It reminds me of… .
My daughter gave me The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling for my birthday earlier in the year. It’s a beautiful book, and an inspiring one. Above are the cues that John Muir Laws uses when he takes his journal out and about.
Yesterday was an unusual day. With trepidation I went back to the pool for the first time in well over a year. Oh, how I have missed being held by cool water! Afterwards, whenever I caught the smell of chlorine on my skin I smiled. Then in the afternoon I visited the Museum in the Park in Stroud, to meet Juliette from Dialect and the other mentees: Sarah, Keeley and Audrey. When did I last spend time IRL with people who are not immediate family? It was at a Writers’ HQ retreat day, even longer ago than my last swim!
Successive lockdowns notwithstanding, I have yet to get round to missing human contact. I was apprehensive, even as part of me floated above the whole experience, conscious of the water I was swimming in. But it turned out to be rather lovely. A gift, in fact, to be amongst other writers; not at my ease, no, but in the right place. Me being me, it was wildly over-stimulating and, as always, I was first to leave.
I notice: how each person carries themself; how their hands move or are still; the tilt of their head; the complex choreography of their face when they speak; the pitch and rhythm and tempo and dynamics of voice; birdsong; the sun and breeze on skin and in hair; moving patterns of light and shade; the visual textures of metal chairs, fabric, the gorgeous planting; the colours and forms of flowers in themselves and how they influence each other; the aroma of those flowers, laundry detergent, shampoo; the internal sense of time passing… . Not to mention the ever-present interior monologue. And then I must attend and contribute to the actual content of the conversation.
This is normal. But I wonder: is it a creative-person thing to be quite so aware of this kind of sensory stuff? An extreme-introvert-at-large thing? Or just a strange Kate thing? There comes a point when I reach saturation and shut down. And so I leave before that happens. I wonder how it would have been had I followed my instinct and sat for half an hour afterwards in the beautiful garden focusing on one single plant until my attention was brought back to a more humanly-navigable scale. But… we had only just met and I fear it would have been too weird. I didn’t want my actions to be misinterpreted as lack of interest or, worse, rejection. In fact, I felt a sense of tremendous goodwill towards everyone. I hope a little of that, at least, came across.
And today? “It reminds me of…”? Isn’t that where the writing comes in: assessing the significance of these things; making meaning from them; finding or forging the connections between things? It is in pieces. I am in limbo between sending Pascale a batch of poems, last week, that I am not remotely satisfied with, and our next session on Monday. I am not getting nearly enough sleep. Everything is still in acceleration-mode. I have a nagging worry about migraines and the anxiety/OCD that have at times followed upon this state, the one taking my words and the other my perception of any control over my thoughts. I look around my own garden and can’t sufficiently separate myself from the unstemable exultation of it and my mind interprets it all as a kind of burning and I long for cool water, for blue and blue and more blue.
Kate Keogan is a mentee on our Arts Council supported scheme. This blog can also be read on Kate’s website here. You can follow Kate on Twitter @kathedron
