August 2008

All right, I admit it, I have been avoiding the website.

Actually I have been avoiding as much as possible that isn’t my kids’ book because I love writing it, and once again, work has saved me, in the sense of taking me to a better place.

It has been a very tough two years – lots of lovely things, yes, but a very tough and testing time. I can’t explain why here, because I won’t have a private life – because although this is me talking to you, whoever you are, in quite an intimate way, I know that it is also a public place, and I have to be careful not to turn it into Jerry Springer.

So let’s say if summer 2006-7 was very hard, 2007-8 has been near impossible. And yet, I cultivated my garden, I didn’t do drink, drugs or food, so I kept my body sane even if my mind felt it was keeling or reeling or disappearing sometimes.

After I finished The Stone Gods I was in such a state that sometimes I stood at the station and the train came and I couldn’t get on it, so I had to go home and try and explain by not explaining why I hadn’t been able to do XYZ.

There’s a common myth that creativity is linked to dark states and depression; it isn’t anything like as simple as that. I think it is to do with being open, which you have to be if you want to be honest in your work, and it is to do with the liminal state of creativity – a place that happens on the cusp or the boundary of two worlds and is exhausting, exhilarating, but also frightening, and full of shapes that are unknown.

The reason that I live as I do – both strictly, in that I am regular in my habits, and simply, in that I avoid pointless activity and pointless clutter, is to keep myself in readiness for work, fit for purpose I suppose, and to keep at bay the enervations of modern life – enervations which are bad for creativity, which is high enough in its own right, without getting strung out by crazy life.

My rigor over these two years has helped me greatly, and made it possible for me to get through without medical intervention. I have conserved my energy, used the good things of nature, kept very fit, and lived even more hermetically and austerely than usual.

People say, but JW likes champagne – what is austere about that?

Answer – I would rather have one bottle of champagne to last 3 nights of the whole week, and then drink nothing, than just drink out of mild misery every night.

Anyway, I haven’t been miserable. I have been wrestling with huge things, which is not about misery but confrontation.

I have found that if you are wrestling with huge things – real things, then it is important not to let fake stuff or waste of time stuff or excess stuff enter your life during that time. Energy needs to be directed.

Strangely, times of insight or simple happiness become much more precious, and also a reminder that this is a journey, not a hole, however black and constricted it feels. It helps to be cheered and lifted by little things, and sometimes I found that concentrating on the beauty of a simple single natural object, like a flower or a bee, could lift me up and give me hope.

It was the night sea voyage.

And did art help? Of course it did, profoundly, honestly, without sentiment or platitude. I read a lot of poetry, listened to music, and I let my dreams speak.

After I finished the Stone Gods I could not work, except for my journalism, which was a lifeline, and gave me an agreed and concentrated space. Then, just around Easter this year, the signs of Spring inside, as well as outside, began, and I started, quite spontaneously, to delight in writing a book, and that book is leading me to the close of this particular process, a process I now see that began with The Stone Gods, and will finish, joyfully, in about 10,000 words, when I complete The Battle of the Sun.

When people say that art is a luxury it is because they have never known its healing power.

I cannot yet speak fully about what has been happening, but it is as though great sludges of the past – adoption, Mrs Winterson, issues for me about my work, about rejection, about love and loss, really a whole lifetime of stuff, has been brought out of the swampy place where it bred malaria, and let into the air and light.

Truly horrible.

Until the water starts to clear, and you even think you might swim in it.

It is my birthday soon. I shall be in Paris with some friends new and old, and I might even go up the Eiffel Tower to celebrate my new feelings of freedom.

There are no quick fixes. No fast track in matters of the heart and soul.

I stood in my beautiful abundant garden, full of butterflies and bees and things to eat, and I thought that the soul in the self and the soul in the world needs to be like this garden – productive, energetic, a bit wild, a bit cultivated, deep soil, a pond, creatures of every kind thriving here, and something that will go forward, a continuity, both endless, yet sensitive to the seasons. Life has a backward movement as well as a forward momentum – and this has been a burrowing digging turning time for me.

That my work is working – on every level now, that I sleep well through the night, that I dream, that I get up glad of another day, this is very good.

It does change.

The photograph is me at the Shakespeare and Company Book festival in Paris – and while I look like a creature not entirely human, which I have always suspected about myself, Sylvia, next to me, who owns the shop, is an angel.

In this long story of the last two years, finding Shakespeare and Co, and everyone there, has been part of the healing and new happiness. A gift, and we do get gifts, even when it is so dark that we can’t see what they are.

So I think this August, Happy Birthday to Me.