the art of distraction

on parenting, money and clarity of thought

Welcome to a new year of The Murmuration. In 2024 this newsletter will continue to excavate the rich but often untapped seams of our human experiences, offering bi-weekly essays which deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other and this good earth.

My more personal journal entries and reflections will continue to be published as part of Golden Hour on alternate Sundays for paid-subscribers only. If you have found yourself enjoying my work, or recommending it to others, please do consider supporting it financially by upgrading your subscription. Thank you!

Anni Albers (L: Wall Hanging, 1926 R: Untitled, 1969)

I’d like to be hermetically sealed off at this time of year. Left completely alone in my study with lots of tea and books and knitting, but right now my hermit’s cave is also home to an increasingly verbal one year old, who has no interest in her mother’s creative endeavours, thank you very much. I sit here regardless, looking out of the window, thinking thoughts and working through problems, sometimes I have a baby on my lap and sometimes she’s at nursery. ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, wrote Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise. We muddle through. 

Women walk a tightrope when it comes to making art. On the one hand, they have no shortage of ‘material’—life throws up three new stories before breakfast. What they so often lack is the time to take that material and turn it into something artful. To give it the love and craft it needs to ring true in the ears and eyes of readers. Instead, somewhere between dropping the kids off at school and emptying the dishwasher, that passing vision unmoors itself and drifts out into the ocean of unwritten things. 

And so these women do not become artists.

The artists, we are traditionally told, are those who are of the world but not actually in it; they are removed, isolated, aloof. Above us in both word and deed. They are mostly men, and they are not emptying the dishwasher. They are too busy making their art! Take the high-priest of literature, Jonathan Franzen. Apparently he believes that ‘you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the Internet’. He believes this so strongly that so he jammed an ethernet cable in his ancient Dell laptop and then took a hacksaw to its little plastic head. The silent implication of his philosophy is that those whose lives are cluttered and distracted are not serious about their craft.

This vision of the tortured, reclusive artist slaving over his masterpiece is one that is so ingrained within our consciousness we rarely stop to think about its helpfulness. As I’ve said before, the notion that our work must be painful, laborious and generally a form of punishment is an idea that has it’s origins in calvinism and the protestant work ethic. But does work in = artfulness out? I’m not so sure. I think the larger reason Franzen can write his novels is because he occupies an economic context which affords him clarity of thought. He is able to have an idea, take it to the page, then refine and realise it. 

In Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? the Swedish writer Katrine Kielos-Marçal hits the nail on the head. ‘Feminism has always been about economics.’ she argues, ‘Virginia Woolf wanted a room of her own and that costs money’. The things that really stop us from tending and properly devoting ourselves to our creative work are finance and time related. The average person simply does not have the economic means to amass a body of artistic work, which ultimately requires a huge amount of time to come to fruition. Marçal goes on to consider who was responsible for making the economist Adam Smith’s dinner each evening (it was his mum), and we might ask ourselves a similar question: ‘Who does Jonathan Franzen’s online food shop?’

Because when we talk about the things that distract us from our creative work, this is what we’re really talking about. The pressure to put food on the table, to cover the heating bills, to pay for nursery. The ‘mental load’. These are the basic chores which keep our domestic show on the road. Try as I might to ignore the piles of dishes accumulating ontop of the dishwasher, there will come a point in the day where I get up from my desk to sort it out. My husband, who works in London, eats in an office where staff clean up after him.

What Cyril Connolly failed to realise, of course, is that the pram in the hallway is itself artful. It is a source of inspiration and love which is worthy of artistic representation. And women have long found ingenious ways to reveal the beauty of their ordinary lives and the act of caring for others.

The tapestries in the image above are by the textile artist Anni Albers, whose artwork successfully challenged longstanding ideas of ‘craft’ versus ‘fine art’ by daring to suggest that materials and techniques traditionally associated with women’s work should be hung in galleries alongside paintings and discussed critically. I’m thinking also of the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, who turn scraps of sackcloth into beautiful works of art, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Ghost in the Throat, which opens with this remarkable refrain:

This is a female text, composed by folding someone else's clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. This is a female text, born of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of nursery rhymes.

As I begin this new year I am full of worry that I will not make art from my distractions. That they will get the better of me. That my love will get the better of me. To echo what Lucy Jones spoke of so beautifully earlier this week, ‘Motherhood has been the most socio-political experience of my life … the children? Perfect. The institution. Failing us all.’ It is difficult and impossible and expensive¹ and deprives us all of the multivarious perspectives of women. As a consequence, I am convinced that the art we experience today is only the faintest tip of the iceberg. Imagine what kind of books we would read and what kind of art we would enjoy if we lived in a society which took the creative lives of women seriously. 

Few women will ever have the luxury of creating in an airtight container, nor, when it comes down to it, would many of us find it an appealing prospect. The ‘creative genius’ working in utter isolation is neither practical nor a recipe for interesting art, in my opinion. What we do want is to be afforded enough time for our ideas to reach the world in their fullest, most capacious way. 

We live in hope.

FURTHER DISTRACTIONS

1. The artwork featured in this essay is taken from ‘Women’s Work: From feminine arts to feminist art’, by Ferren Gipson.

2. Katrine Kielos-Marçal
   has a brilliant substack called Wealth of Women where she covers feminist economics with her signature verve and wit.

3. This week I was very taken by Rachael Allen’s essay ‘Difficult and Bad’ where she talks about the anti-intellectualism that is rife in publishing and its complicated relationship to class.

1. To give you some idea of the costs involved in childcare these days, our most recent monthly bill was just shy of £1,000.