writing about writing
It’s a bit of a cliché, isn’t it? You’re watching a film, and suddenly there’s a somewhat meta line of dialogue that makes you go ‘Ha! They’re right! I am watching a film!’. Shakespeare’s constant use of plays-within-plays, every song about writing a song (the only time I will ever mention Dear John and the 2023 UK EuroVision entry in the same sentence). It’s a tale as old as time. People love to make art about making art. In fact, some of my favourite pieces of media have arisen from this framework: In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado deconstructs the author’s relationship experience in ways that only a writer could, each chapter with a different style of writing. Stephen King’s Misery and my recent read, RF Kuang’s Yellowface, are both books which centre their plots on writers. Meanwhile the TV show Staged, and films like Adaptation and Asteroid City are pieces of media about making pieces of media.
It is probably my consumption of media like this that makes me believe that writing - and writing about writing - is the best form of therapy. Other than, you know, actual therapy.
I recently went back and read my old diary/ writing project from when I was 15. Why I did this is both unknown to me and besides the point - I uncovered this quote.
“how young writing makes me feel”.
My younger self goes on to say that this ‘feeling young’ isn’t in a good way. Youth often has the connotation of goodness, or innocence, I suppose for a reason. When women laugh (they are told) too much, too often, and then ache for the skin of their youth; when my grandma watches me dance and remembers how flexible she was at my age and laments this to me over tea; when I find I’m growing grey hairs and prod at my face in the evenings, when I find myself wishing that I looked younger. This is all, of course, a) ridiculous (I’m not even nineteen) and b) VERY ridiculous and too deeply entrenched in various societal systems for me cover in a short-ish post about writing. Maybe I’ll do another one about age and beauty and how I find it comforting to see the markers of time in people’s appearances. For now, read this post from Lily.
I do not find the concept of youth to be inherently tied to innocence, or any desire to ‘go back’ to it. My younger years were, to put it rather bluntly, not a great time. Young is, in my own personal thesaurus, a synonym for unsure, insecure (don’t know what for…), anxious or closed-in. I find myself, now I am older, more open to my expressing myself, and more able to share this expression with the people I love and surround myself with. But writing—
Writing still makes me feel young. It makes me feel like I’m 13 again, hiding any and all of my work for fear of damaging what perfect image I had constructed for myself. 13-year-old me was a well oiled machine, running on the fuel of validation, and any attempt at creative expression was just too risky to chance. Creative outlet was almost synonymous with judgement, something I strove to avoid at all costs. Writing still makes me feel like I am searching, casting a line which I cannot see, and blindly hoping it snags on to something.
The question is, then, why keep doing it? Why has writing been a significant part of my life, my artistic expression, for years, in private? Why do I feel relatively comfortable performing on a stage, but not presenting a paragraph of writing?
I am hoping that this substack (a summer of substack?) will answer these questions for me. The last time I set about a writing project like this, it was when I was in the worst depressive episode I have found myself in thus far, just before my 16th birthday. Now, as I find myself coming up to 19, it’s time to start again, from a better place.
les grandes baigneuses - cézanne
There is a wall in the National Gallery. It’s unassuming, its paint such a plain hue that I can’t seem to recall it now. I am fifteen, and I am standing in front of this wall with my (now ex-) partner, who gazes at it, then moves on. I can hear the echo of their shoes pass behind me but I stay still. I first saw the painting hanging on this wall when I was ten years old. I think about the past version of myself standing in this spot, the things and the people she didn’t know, and how different our experiences of this painting must have been. If I go back to view it now, I know I’ll have another different experience. And I stood in that spot on the cold wooden floor, and thought this, staring at the backs of eleven bathing figures.
I think I was having a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off moment.
The painting later became my phone wallpaper, and then the image displayed on the banner and profile picture of this substack.
This is Les Grandes Baigneuses, or The Bathers by Paul Cézanne - the National Gallery version, no less (the others are in the Philadelphia Museum of art, MoMA, the Barnes Foundation and the Art Institute of Chicago, all in the USA. In fact, that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off scene was filmed in the Art Institute of Chicago!).
I am not an art historian, nor an artist, but my feelings on this painting run deep. The sense of community and almost vulnerability that Cézanne has depicted here is just beautiful to me - it seems that no longer is the female nude scandalous, or anatomy to be studied, but a symbol of comfort or vulnerability, shared with each other. The way the figures interlink, lean in to each other, and meet at tangents, the contrast of their skin to the deep blue hue of the background, it all creates an idea of togetherness or unity. All this to say I love the style of post-Impressionist art (expect to hear more of my thoughts on some other artists in the future), and this painting is where it all started. It was the first painting which made me truly reflect on the idea of art as expression, and the meaning of art lying with the observer just as it does with the artist. All this talk of writing and art certainly has a meaning to me, which is why I write it. But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to ascribe meaning - to this, and to everything else you may read on this website.
Read some poetry. Write a letter. Drink some tea. Come back soon.
— r <3
Ahh I really love this!!