A scrapbook of enchantment

Writing can be pure drudgery.

The turning of a whole universe, with its sounds, smells, feelings, meanderings, connections, into 2D black and white. Sometimes it feels like a sacrilege, to turn such things into this mundane form — they never arrive on the page with the same enchantment that brought them, so mysteriously, into my mind.

But the drudgery I get knotted in most days when I sit here at my desk

watching birds on the birdfeeder outside my window and the weather change across the valley, I know is a drudgery of my own making. A hangover of an academic training. One that means your own words cannot be your own words, they must be weighed against, built upon and through the words of others. And it’s why the words I am full of each day come out onto the page in stilted form.

Slowly.

Tentatively.

Coaxed out gently, dredged up from beneath the layers of critique (which usually edge into criticism and doubt) I have been trained to carry in the service of scientific rigour (which is valuable but damaging to honest creativity).

To get them on the page I must placate them with reminders that, “It’s okay, we’ve done the research, we know what we want to say, and you can say it — you can have an opinion, you can say it how it is (how you see it)”.

Sometimes I feel gagged. ‘Can I say that?’ ‘I need to find a reference to back up that point’. And that soon creates a sense of tediousness, the drudgery of the constant wading through text and thought (the texts and thoughts of others) just to make the point that is already in my mind — one which arrived there out of the ether, as if by magic, informing me it would like to be written but which I am now crushing the life out of.

It’s not that I think the drudgery, the wading through and connecting of fact, is unimportant or not valuable. I do. But I go there too quickly, and in doing so I strip away the vibrancy (of an idea, thought, argument, musing).

And when it all becomes too much, when I am stuck too deep dredging through the mud I listen to John Moriarty.

I read him too. But mostly I listen, because listening to him, to that melodic, metrical way with which he seems to (en)chant his thoughts into the world re-enchants me.

Enchantment. What a beautiful word

Etymology of Enchantment from etymonline.com

It’s one of those ones that you immediately know came from French, not English. All the most expressive, descriptive, evocative words in English seem to come from French. English, I so often think, is a dull language, utterly lacking in words which truly capture or express a feeling (have they been lost over time as upper lips got stiffer?).

I have spent entire walks ruminating on this. How English always falls short of my needs to express or convey a feeling (but it’s the only language I’ve got). Say a word for an emotion in English and it barely creates the feeling of it in you.

Happy. Say it out loud. It uses hardly any muscles of the face. It is tonally narrow. It evokes nothing. You must make yourself smile as you say it to feel the happiness.

Say Happy in Irish, “Sona” (Sun-ah), just to form the sound of it is uplifting, you think of the sunny-sun, and the ending vowel sound is sweet and joyous on the tongue.

Say Peace in Irish, “Suaimhneas” (Soo-v-nis) and you will feel soothed, calm, at ease, say “Peace” in English and, especially if you say it too quickly, it feels like you have just hissed at yourself.

Even the words for particular illnesses fall short of capturing the feeling of them. Saying “I have a cold” in no way captures the snotty, sniffing, throbbing, misery of it.

One of the women I interviewed gallantly told her story through a horrendous cold (see, I have to add in ‘horrendous’ because cold alone doesn’t cut it); one so bad that it reminded her of how to say “I have a cold” in Irish, “Tá slaghdán orm” (or rather, the direct translation being “I have a cold on me”).

“This one is definitely a slaghdán of a cold” she said.

The sound slaghdán (Shly-dawn) makes as you say it captures the visceral experience of a cold.

Anyway, I digress.

Enchantment

I need to re-enchant myself often because my academic training has trained me to dis-enchant myself, to dis-connect myself (from my own thoughts and feelings) and only through a conscious re-enchantment will I ever write the Women of Ireland Project book I want to write (which, touch wood and all that, is coming along nicely). The one that has fact and rigour but is also evocative and a bit odd (weird and beautiful).

So, these last few weeks, as I have been aurally bathing myself in hefty doses of John Moriarty, I have been considering how to keep steadily re-enchanting myself.

How to capture the whole universe of sounds, smells, feelings, meanderings and connections that pour into my brain and body when I ponder what I want to express about a particular topic? How to keep them 3D (even 4D), in all their texture and substance before I butcher them on the chopping block of my 2D black and white page and serve them nicely filleted and deboned?

Make a scrapbook —

the answer came, as John Moriarity said “We have to become children again, because it might be that the fairy stories of the world bring us nearer to the world than E = mc^{2” —}

A scrapbook of enchantment.

When, back in 2020, I was working on giving some form to the thing that has become the Women of Ireland Project, I couldn’t think of a good name for it. Couldn’t think of what would capture what I was hoping to do. All I could think about was how my goal was to do something which was, essentially, a larger, more detailed and in-depth version of the ‘projects’ you had to do in school. Like those ‘projects’ for science or history class where you go off and compile all the information you could find on a particular topic/person/period of history and then bring it together in some narrative format and tell a story about it, what you figured out and what you learned. So, Women of Ireland Project stuck as a name.

In primary school, in the days before word processors were common, we used scrapbooks to do our school ‘projects’. I loved it. I loved gathering up all my bits, writing out ‘info boxes’, cutting out images and shapes to fill the pages, figuring out the best ways to present information on the page, and how to organise it all into a story.

I also had a secret-weapon — my Mum. A woman who is endlessly creative, can make anything from anything and who doesn’t see a blank, rectangular page but a world of possibility. She never stuck information on a page she crafted it on to it. Gave things texture and feeling. Came up with clever ideas about how to show something in an abstract way. Hiding things behind fold-out flaps we created in images and concertina-ing bits of paper to make things ‘pop-out’. No knowledge got flattened onto the page, it was kept 3D and vital.

And this is what I need to do. I need to keep myself and what I am trying to write 3D and vital, because if I don’t it will be flat before I flatten in onto the page.

I need a scrapbook of thoughts. A scrapbook of enchantment. A place to keep the texture and the sound and the feeling of what I want to write entact. A place to keep the magic in. A primary school answer for an adult-world problem. A place to become a child again.

And as I sit in the dark of an evening with my glue-sticks, and scissors and markers and pens, cutting out images, giving texture and shape to what is abstract and illusive, I find that no longer am I coaxing the thoughts in with promises and assurances — instead they come gladly to play on the page.

Playing with ideas in my Scrapbook of Enchantment