DAY FORTY FOUR

Do you have a favourite time of day for making or crafting? Does your brain feel more limber at some times rather than others? 

 

Nowadays most of us are run by the clock and other commitments so we don't always have a choice of when we get to do the things we want to do; to choose when to work is something of a luxury. It's tempting to think that things were different in the past, back before the factories and railways and the standardisation of time, but maybe it really wasn't so much. Back then artists and crafters were very dependent on natural light and so were governed by the seasons and the turning of the sun. That or I suppose they laboured on myopically by candle and torchlight.

I'm writing about time because I'm drafting this post outside of my usual rhythm. I normally do these in the afternoon but today it's an early morning job, for no particular reason than I am waiting for a tradesman to call and having tidied the kitchen and put the hoover round, I can't think of anything else to do. 

Originally writing was a nocturnal thing for me. I'd start late in the evening (more likely when the TV finsished at around midnight) and carry on until I couldn't keep my eyes open. It was either that or do jigsaws long into the small hours. I didn't realise at the time but subsequently learned my night time habits had some roots in depression. I'm not sure how general a thing it is but my depression was the sort where one's mood lifts in the evening and falls during daylight; daylight was when I would stay under the bed covers as much as possible, perhaps simulating some version of nightime, but more consciously, looking to avoid the world and everyone in it. I lived in a shared house and everyone in it followed a more normal routine so I felt compelled to creep around my room silently and do quiet things until I heard the first stirrings of someone getting ready for work. That was my signal to go to bed.

 

It was many years before I disentangled the act of writing from the thought that it was a) a night time thing and b) something you did only if you were feeling lonely and miserable.

Other crafting activities have tended to fall where they will, dependent on time and necessity. If I have the time I will usually carry on with something until I am too tired to carry on with it or I come up against a problem and feel the need for some time away. This has led to some marathon sessions, of woodworking in particular; ten or twelve hours at a stretch punctuated only by tea and sandwiches is not uncommon. It has also led to lengthy periods of 'time away from it' - 15 years on one occasion. 

 

In the six weeks I have been doing these daily posts about 90% have been written between 2 and 3 pm, and the others have been on days when I have literally forgotten that I have a blog post to write and so a frantic 25 minutes has ensued as I try to meet my 5pm deadline. There was no reason for doing them at that point in the afternoon, it just so happened that the first one was writtten at that time and so I decided to stick with it.

The picture above has some interesting conotations when thinking about time, art, creativity and so on. 

It is the clock from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. More accurately, it is the clock from the Gare d'Orsay, the 19th century train station which was redeveloped as an art gallery in the 1980's. Its ornateness gives an idea of how important time was to the railways and how accordance to time came to be a defining feature of modernity. 

 

Writing this I'm hearing echoes of yesterday's post where I suggested that the very act of making or crafting is a subversive activity. Perhaps in allowing crafts to take us out of time, to absorb us, to create flow, to make time fly, we are engaged in another small act of subversion and resistance.

 

Onwards...unhurriedly.

 

 

 

Picture credit: Boaventuravinicius, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons