Madness lies over there

This is the reason I gave up my artistic and creative endeavours.

Art needs time, and attention. I have to think about the project I start. When I start to think about the project I start, I think of nothing else. Nothing else matters. For days.

That is a disaster. I forget to feed the children lunch. And supper. I hear them cry, and I don't respond. Their pleading is an interrupting nuisance.

Then there is the stuff that keeps the house churning. I don't do that, either. Washing dishes, laundry, kitchen table clearing, floor scraping.

Worse, any significant moment, date, or time is invisible to me. I cannot recall, organise, plan. I ignore everything, everyone. I go to sleep, get up, forget to wear pants.

One day, sometime later, when I'm coming round to consciousness, I might jump up and shout, Do we have any children?

Which is why I love days like today, and I hate them.

They are liberating, and they imprison me.

I became timelost in bookart. I started to make seven, nine, twentythree notebooks. I completed one clipboard. Here it is.


This is for our outdoor fieldtrips, so it must be durable and practical. It must have bulldog clip, string, tied up pens that I can't lose.

But I'm tired of pink butterflies, pastel stencils and delicate flowers. I imagined I might like to stride around the fields pretending to be an amateur magician instead. Then I can collect slugs and snails for potions and lotions.

For the inside pages, I cannibalised old drawings and designs. It doesn't matter they are already written over. I like the idea of new writing layered on old writing. It will look like a magician's code.


And I won't be able to read any notes I make.

You see? It's not as if it's any use. One moment's thought would tell me it is totally useless. It just follows the illogical path that it started, regardless of sense, experience, or the wisdom of hindsight.

This is the type of insanity that leads me next to dismantle a perfectly sound book, simply because I have seen the inside binding and I decide that I like it for another project. One that is half conceived, incompletely imagined, and will require more glue than we have.

It is also the fixated madness that leads me to think it is a good idea now to feed black plasticine into the laminator, never for one second considering the physical properties of black plasticine pressed by heat, but imagining only the magical sparkle of the silver glitter that I have sprinkled onto it as it eases its way, too late, onto the smooth and heated rollers.

I should be stopped. It's the only way normality can be resumed, the children fed, the laundry done, the floor scraped.

And give the bookart world a chance to heave a big sigh of relief.