A very short post this week, but I hope no less worthwhile for all that. A by-product, or maybe a pre-condition, of writing this kind of blog is that I find myself always alert to wise things said by one person which are echoed by wise things another person has said in another place and time. Such interconnections suggest themselves readily, and often, the plaiting together of these disparate but complementary threads can really help to make a strong thought embed itself even more strongly in my thinking.
Last Saturday, we made the most of the late May heatwave by spending the afternoon in the company of two great friends, C and C, sitting at the top of their garden, eating cucumber sandwiches and crumpets and cheese and cake, and chatting about all sorts of big stuff and small stuff.
They’d spent much of the last week at the Hay Festival, and I’d done a bit of allotment minding for them while they were away. As a thank you, they bought me packs of biltong and salami produced from a regenerative beef farm in the Black Mountains, and a secondhand copy of How to be Alone, Sara Maitland’s contribution to the School of Life series of books.
I haven’t read the book yet (or eaten any of my snack meats), but it immediately made me think of a little video I had seen a few days before on Instagram, of Ian McEwan speaking at Hay, where he had this to say:
“So it was much easier to be a young independent writer in the seventies than it is now… Generally the most crucial thing, the difference, is there was no internet and there was much more capacity for solitude.
One didn’t take out one’s phone — I’m addicted to mine, like everyone else — in every other moment, like the luggage carousel. But you’ve been offline for an hour and a half, you’ve got to have your phone. Whereas you’d pace up and down in the seventies and think your thoughts, assuming you were alone.
So my big worry about the internet is precisely it’s denying us all, un-teaching us, the joys of treating your mind like a garden that you might wander through.”
Maybe it was easy to latch onto the concept of the mind as a garden while spending that glorious afternoon in C and C’s own garden, or even recalling the scorchio Bank Holiday I’d spent weeding and watering C and C’s allotment.
That Ian McEwan clip had, in fact, already reminded me of a photograph that I then excavated from the depths of the camera roll on my phone, taken the first time I read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist. It’s a quote from the cartoonist, educator and artist Lynda Barry (the actual original source of which I still can’t pin down anywhere):
“The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.”
It’s probably a bit of an impudence for me to point out how problematic our phones are when you may well be reading this on yours right now.
I spotted something else on Instagram recently, which I curse myself for not having screenshotted, meaning I can’t quote it accurately now, let alone attribute it correctly. The post said something to this effect: how awful it is when people talk about spending so much time on their phones and using AI so much, as if these were things to be proud of.
There are lots of dangling threads here which I’ll try to tie up in future posts — there’s definitely something to grasp in the relationship between electronic devices and our seeming inability to tolerate solitude, boredom, and the burdensome problem of being expected to know or learn things — an inability to which those devices have been presented as the ideal (or only) solution — an inability which those selfsame devices perpetuate, and may well have helped to cause.
For now, though, I’m going to try being a little bit more 1970s Ian McEwan — being intentional about leaving my phone alone more often, and finding some gardens to wander through. Some of those gardens will be literal ones filled with plants and wildlife; others will be more metaphorical ones, deep beds packed with the kind of soil Lynda Barry would no doubt encourage me to dig in, getting my hands dirty again with some good old-fashioned creative labour, and seeing what I discover in the process.
