News, views and stuff

A friend was recently saying to me how she likes to leave footsteps in the sand. When people say this, they usually mean they want to leave something behind them, some sort of legacy. It’s a strange metaphor, however, because footsteps in the sand aren’t the same as footsteps in concrete. By nature, they’re ephemeral. I’m a recent convert to blogging, and I guess that each blog is a footstep in the sand, the most recent being the most visible.

And that’s pretty much how I feel about most of what I do. And how I want it to be. I mean, wouldn’t it be dreadful if somebody had actually decided to publish that embarrassing novella I wrote when I was 21? Or if somebody unearthed that even more embarrassing, deeply introspective journal I had around me at the same time? Fortunately, both these, and a lot more of the same ilk, have long been buried in landfill.

But bringing things to the present: maybe this is why I was never destined for ‘greatness’, but most things I do only interest me for the time I’m actually doing them. After that, they become ‘so last season’ . This new art project, oh yes, this is the new black. For a week or two. Same with some writer I’ve just ‘discovered’, or some artist I’ve known about for many years but whose work I’ve suddenly started seeing with eyes opened anew.

And I have my moments of wanting to change the world, but I’m so glad I’m not a politician, forever being confronted by what I said last year or the year before, and having to justify the discrepancy between then and now.

When I first assembled my website, three months ago, I wrote how confidence-building it felt to be weaving together all those loose threads of a life. I still feel this. It’s good to look at those black-and-white photos I once processed in my improvised darkroom, or to be reminded that not so long ago I was actually writing poems. But everything on my website is of course edited. It doesn’t include all those nebulous beginnings of novels, all those botched drawings and paintings. And the lovely thing about it is that it really is just an assemblage of footsteps in the sand – to be washed over and re-assembled with a few clicks of the mouse whenever I feel the whim or the urge.