I’ve told you about seed beds before. I have a bookcase full of seedbeds— books and stories and aphorisms— that I return to again and again. Right now I’m tidying myself into nowhere: can’t find anything I just put in neat place. I had several bulging folders labelled Blogs and I can’t find them. I was planning to whiz through them and give you a list to think about or dismiss as you wish. But now I can’t find them. I do have some stray folders: Techie Ideas, Seed Beds/Notes/Ideas/ Cash Crop Ideas, oh, and books. If I bought all the books in that folder I’d have to move, not for lack of space but for lack of money.

It must have occurred to you as it has to me, that I was never going to find the time for any of all this. What was I thinking? I never dallied with immortality., but i thought forever was a long time coming.

Not any more.

So I’ll give you a list and close a few folders. Perhaps that will make me feel better.

WILL POWER :

*a muscle one could exercise and strengthen OR

*a limited supply, too easily depleted.

*deadlines help (self-imposed?) will power.

I learned a new word: akratic from the noun akrasia, noun (chiefly Philosophy) the state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgement through weakness of will. DERIVATIVES akratic adjective ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek, from a- ‘without’ + kratos ‘power, strength’. The term is used especially with reference to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

I just lost one (all the writing disappeared) with a great example which I researched but won’t repeat.The idea is good and has been used a lot: a sub-genre of memoir or journal: setting a task for a year and writing about it it—in a blog. I can think of quite a few…

Wild by Cheryl Strayed ; Eat, Pray, Love or whatever the order is, by Elizabeth Gilbert. and more….

My favourite is P.D.James’s autobiography, told in a diary format, beginning on her birthdate and going through the ensuing year, not necessarily in that year. “On this day in such-an-such a year,”..she’ll write and recall a significant event in her life that happened on that date. Because of her and her book (Time To Be In Earnest), I went on the QEII when she was a guest lecturer to get her autograph and to give her a copy of my book about diaries, (Reading Between The Lines).

I could go on and on but it’s late and I have a headache. Not blog material.

This is like dying and being my own executrix. As I dig deeper and deeper into the layers (like rings on a tree) of my (so-called) creative life, I find more and more scraps and messages and ideas and unfinished or not- begun projects. I’ve already been pleased to find a few lists of things (stories, plays, movies) that I actually finished (maybe only the first draft, then not sold, but finished). But then I find stray wisps—why did I keep them? To haunt me. I never liked Joan Didiion’s writing [Joan Didion,. American writer, b. 1934) and I really hated The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), her book of mourning for her husband. I found it self-indulgent, self-pitying but also arch and arrogant, but that was because my own experience of mourning was vastly different. Everyone’s is. However, who am I to criticize? It ended up on Broadway, a one-hander starring, Vanessa Redgrave.

[The Year of Magical Thinking (Original, Play, Solo, Broadway) opened in New York City Mar 29, 2007 and played through Aug 25, 2007. Wikipedia]

Anyway, Didion wrote something somewhere that I liked, about those scraps of ideas. I can’t quote directly but I remember what she said. Keeping these scraps is like keeping bits of string, not long enough to do anything with, but slowly accumulated until you have a ball of string.

And then what?

Well, I have several large balls of string. Reading the bits is like re-living my past intellectual, creative life and what’s left of it. It is, really, as if I were the executrix of my own cultural estate. And I realize, in this strange, isolated time, as I can’t use the time as I did when I was alone, that this may be the “opportunity” to settle my estate. More work, and very humbling.

Matt wants to watch TV now. I can’t get Netflix or YouTube because I am computer illiterate, so I have to relinquish my usual writing space and hide in my office with the door closed and work at the desktop on a couple of reports I have to submit. Not a hardship. I know I am very fortunate.

This is not a complaint, just a bleat, not worth Vanessa Redgrave’s notice. Think of Gray’s Elegy.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

(Lots of us flowers.)

It’s okay….

Hark! how the sacred calm, that breathes around,
    Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
In still small accents whisp'ring from the ground,
    A grateful earnest of eternal peace.

No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
    Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester'd vale of life
    Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.