Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. 
It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.
It’s late. I’m 9 months pregnant and I just did a 14 hour day so I could clear a little desk space to spend some time on the big LOVE project – ie Notebooks. Wanted to upload some pics, but short on time and energy. This is a bit like when someone’s in a workshop and makes all these excuses for their draft before reading it. JUST GET ON WITH IT. (This is also the sort of NOTE I write in my Notebook, but going straight to screen here. Making amendments as I go – edit is on. No touch scratch of pen, paper. Sense of audience is stronger whether that is mythical or not.)
1. Woke clutching the long sausage pillow that alleviates aches due to drum stomach big as an old, creaky schooner, full of mercury, saline and child.
2. Delivered a hard disk full of words and words and words about beds. Frames. Timber. Mattresses. Editorial signs. Camden. No ocean: just canal. Water though. Keeps me afloat.
3. Business lunch Savile Row. Never walked down it before. Stuffed sardines rolled with a bread and cucumber salad. Cuttle fish kebab with Sicilian prawns. Sent back the cuttlefish to get it heat blasted.
4. Walked up Regent Street in the sloshing rain. Didn’t want to go underground but couldn’t find the bus-stop. Scared of waters breaking in the tunnel, flooding the whole Underground system in one, mighty gush!
5. Took tube to Brixton. Lost my mineral water somewhere en route. Must have left it in Z’s office in the cobbled yard where W used to keep two horses. Sniffer dog sniffed me: black labrador.
6. Had half a mind to slope to the Lido to swim. Wanted to swim in the rain. In the heavy rain. The urine-soaked chlorinated water. Blue and grey. What colour is rain? Almost empty. Opted for desk that is made of glass – the colour of rain.
7. Ordered Singapore fried rice, egg fried rice, pok choy. No more prawns. Ignored tuna maki. Watched S bite into the back of a soft shell crab.
7.00am freewrite
Started writing about the Beatles and ended up thinking about lobsters.
Looking at the How to Eat a Lobster mug Z bought me from Maine. I still crack their skins to get to the tender flesh – to suck it – they have exo-skeletons but then in the claws those quill like fine bones. Years ago I read how the lobster can live for 120 years and how they have a long childhood and a painfully shy adolescence…the family hold hands as they cross the seabed – wrote sea bred the… But the idea of mating: biology versus…what? Psychology? Sprituality? The light/life force? Love expressed in so many ways. Do you need a brain to love? Do trees love?
Not quite sure where I’m going with this yet, but this is the pithiest, funniest, most salient and supremely quotable book I’ve read all year. Andy Warhol really was a genius. In a singular, weird, unadjectival Andy Warhol way.
He takes on all the BIG subjects without fear or hesitation: love (prime); love (puberty); love (senility); beauty; fame; work; time; art; success; money; atmosphere…
All are deep and shallow at the same time. Uncompromising. Contradictory yet sharply focused. His style is so direct and readable. He manages to combine absolute frivolity with honest insight. Something you might want for a certain type of poem but can’t quite attain tonally.
One of my favourite chapters is on work.
‘After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn’t work because they need the exercise and they’ve got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it’s too much work. But if you have time for it, and you need that exercise – then you should do it. But you could really save yourself a lot of trouble either way by first figuring out whether you’re an energy-getter or an energy-loser…It’s just as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as it is for an unattractive person to have sex, so it’s helpful if the attractive people happen to get energy from sex and the unattracitve people happen to lose energy from sex, because then their wants will fit in with the direction people are pushing them in.’
I’ve decided one of my themes over the summer will be love. Summer is the best time for such a theme. Andy Warhol had a lot to say about love. Not sure he got or gave a lot: maybe in his own special way. In fact, he has such a horror of intimacy and being touched one wonders if he was mildly autistic. The brilliant thing is I don’t know much about his biography other than the broadly iconic stuff; so I got to know him through his philosophy.
Sex, though, is not love, but it can be confused with love. I remember my dad warning me about such folly years ago, but I didn’t talk about that sort of thing with him then and I still don’t. I like the way he talks about sex under ‘work’ though. No confusion there. I’ve also been thinking about writing about love in the sixties. Andy Warhol is a 75 degree turn from The Beatles – or thereabouts. Or perhaps 180. More on this later.
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
Check her website for more.
