My meet-ee brought me a sort of cutting from the Czech national emblem tree today. The lime tree. Its tiny flowers smelled sweet and it felt like a little romantic gesture, in an innocently platonic setting. It was sweet, though also funny (both 'ha, ha' and peculiar) to start the day like that. But I soon got into the swing of being disciplined and back 'down to earth' but I think the miserable-looking sky helped with that. If it had been sunny, maybe I would have been more inclined to be rebellious and just talk, if not run away to hold the meeting at the zoo or something, instead.
I'm becoming more reckless and stubborn though, I've noticed. I just want to do things 'my way' and I just haven't the patience for someone else's agenda. I want to be able to take some days off, even though my bank balance would urge me that this is VERY UNWISE (if it could talk) because I need to have time to do some reading, and of course, writing, but above all, I need THINKING time. I need the luxury of sitting and thinking and wondering what to do and being able to choose my creative methods for the morning and pursue them. Then I can find out afterwards if they were a good idea or not.
This is what I had to explain to another meet-ee today. The fact that most creative people don't know exactly what they're setting out to achieve when they start on a painting or a poem or a song. They start with a little idea and follow it to see if it will take them anywhere interesting. So if you read poetry with the hope of uncovering the 'key argument or opinion' of what the author was trying to say, you could be missing the point entirely. Maybe the author didn't really know until she finished it. Perhaps the goal became a mixture of several things, not one clear-cut landmark. My poor meet-ee had been berating himself for 'not understanding poetry'. Surely the point is, it depends which poem, and which mood the author was in when they wrote it, that will determine if there are indeed specific 'points' to be uncovered and 'understood' or not. And if you end up berating yourself for 'not getting it' then maybe that particular piece of work just isn't for you.
I think perhaps I am simply too tired to say anything more definitive or, alas, interesting than that. It's that perennial dilemma: is a boring blog post better than no post at all? Probably not. Just like getting bills and bank statements does nothing to fulfil the desire to get some 'post' in the letterbox addressed to you, so this blog post is a dismal disappointment. Sorry, that's all I could manage on 5 hours' sleep.
