Little bits
Sometime during 2020’s lockdowns, I found a Youtube clip (via Twitter) that left me gobsmacked by its ingenuity:
We’ve all seen other clips of people who have used household items to make a domino effect, and they’re always fun to watch, but this was an especially witty attempt. I loved how several times, for example when the glass is spilt or the baby appears, things seem to be about to go to pieces but it turns out that these apparently random elements are part of the choreography. The design has a neat juxtaposition of mess and precision, which is apposite for our volatile times when people, shut up indoors, are forced to micro-manage their environment but, in coping with a pandemic, feel subject to chaos.
The thing this clip shows is someone responding with creativity to the theme of being constrained to interacting with mundane objects. This reminds me of Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room. Published in 1794, and written while de Maistre was under house arrest for 42 days for his part in an illegal duel, it parodies the travel diaries of his day by taking a tour of his room and going into rhapsodies on the ‘sights’ he sees.
Although she wasn’t imprisoned in her room, and therefore able to write about people and not just items, another person who lived a more physically constrained life than we are used to was Jane Austen. In the (pre-digital) times in which she lived, people, and especially women, did not travel far or often and were limited to much smaller face-to-face networks than we have available to us today. Austen’s writing focused minutely on her small social world, but she did so with an acute eye for human nature that makes her writing dynamic and still resonant today. Austen said of her work that she was working with:
“the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour."
I’m not sure how it worked, but this is Jane Austen’s method for editing her manuscripts. Image from Open Culture website.
I’m not suggesting that you pin your hopes on churning out something like Pride and Prejudice during your self-isolation, but…
… why not find your own precious bit of ivory to whittle?
Given that normal life has been disrupted, and that our previously habitual range of social checks and balances have been distorted by varying degrees of social interaction, working conditions, financial pressure, and anxiety about health and wellbeing, your challenge of resisting a slide into gloom or disorientation falls disproportionately onto you and your frazzled brain and whatever your cordoned off or altered environment provides.
What resources do you have to work with?
What ‘ordinary’ things could you be looking at from a new perspective? A towel, a baby, a glass of juice, a candle, a jar of springs? The clips mentioned above show creative people working with things in ways that explore different visual, aural, or tactile textures. Can you play with your stuff and discover things that delight your senses?
The same applies to the ‘stuff’ that lives inside us.
You have your own imagination and curiosity.
Take a look at the workaday thoughts and reactions that trudge through your head every day. These have probably now been jolted off piste; what is their trajectory? Where have they fallen? Observe them where they lay, watch where the light hits them and where the shadows are cast. Mentally pick them up and turn them this way and that. What haven’t you noticed before? And what can you do with these new insights? Write them down? Draw them? Sing them?
This weird adventure will be over one day.
When we are allowed a bigger and more stable world to roam in, what highly worked little bits can we take with us back into it?
Speaking of little bits, I have started up a Substack publication that regularly emails out creative prompts and resources: little bite-sized pieces – thought exercises, prompts, inspirations – that you can mull over at your leisure. Subscribe here.
