everyday is a child with teeth #2: without guilt
The whole week I was thinking about a short little poem that went: Last year I devoured/ this year I abstain/without guilt/which is also an art
I remember I posted it on Instagram some new year’s ago (2016? I’d definitely found it on Tumblr). I thought it was sort of funny that my “mood” was a content rerun. But then I couldn’t find it on my feed or in my archived posts which was weird because I so clearly remember posting it and I do not remember deleting it. In any case I googled it. It’s by Margaret Atwood and more importantly, I completely misremembered it.
I started really laughing. Not me finding freedom in tradwife lifestyles! A misremembered feminist Margaret Atwood poem is very funny.
But the point remains that I do have a newfound desire to abstain. I don’t know from what exactly. I want to try to find my way back to the secret creative rituals I had even ten years ago, when I still managed to make things for myself and that was enough. When I was a teenager I had notebooks full of poems; later a giant sketchbook full of collages. Unfinished zines. I want to abstain from “having” “a pitch” whenever I do something/anything. I want to abstain from the content rat race, (she wrote on her substack.) I want to abstain from personas and personal brands however much I can while doing the job I do. But these aren’t resolutions. Maybe more like thoughts following the beginning of a sweeping view of my life as I approach 40.
(Weirdly, while writing this I am thinking of Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All. I imagine myself gathering all the things I want I love I care for and just bringing them all to me and keeping them there just for me. These things are mine! I look at it and I understand it would be better suited with Atwood’s original poem, but it makes more sense to me this way because I want it all.)
They say “No is a full sentence” or whatever, so <the absence of> must also somehow mean <a fullness of>.
Back to the poem (Laia’s version); it reminded me of this email I sent to myself in January of last year that just said “I want to write with the courage of a white on white canvas.” I looked through my picture folder for the painting that likely went with the thought but I couldn’t find it. I was at a museum but I don’t remember which one. I don’t think it really matters anyway.