The New Black

The background has, as you can see, gone dark here.* I felt like a change and was thinking about a poet whose study, the place where she did her writing, was a windowless room in the basement where the only source of light was from the computer screen. I would perhaps find that difficult, but see that it can lend you a kind of tunnel-vision state which is conducive to creative work. Whenever I am fully engaged in something the focus is like this. Even when sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook, there are moments, if all is going well, when everything around me goes dark and I feel as though I am inside the language. I experience this more often with a notebook than when writing straight onto a computer screen. This may in part be because if I am in front of a screen for any length of time I am affected by the - what do you call them - emissions, or something, especially with a laptop. A pity, because I do like the notion of screen as magical doorway into otherspace. But notebook is good too, the soft brown Moleskine cahiers with densely-textured creamy paper or larger A4 hardback.

There is also a simplicity about black - the little black dress that I never actually owned, but I can understand its appeal, the core of simplicity which you can build on. Here every possible moment, which is to say the moments that I am able to "do" anything, is taken up with the stuff of daily life and the getting together of our soon-to-be new place by the sea. A whole day can be spent getting handles for kitchen units. I didn't know. Signs Cottage is, by ordinary standards, unmodernised. I have only just realised this. So in every possible way, there is the urge to simplify, to have what is necessary, beneficial - essential. Working on it.

*nice for a day or two, but too hard on the eyes.