Episode #15: Digital marginalia, the paradoxical grief of completion and becoming Connie Cyclonic

In this episode I try to find ways of bringing the art of marginalia to a podcast, realise I may be somewhat addicted to the psychological tension created by an incomplete project and reflect on a profound experience that began with the discovery that a water bottle would fit on my head.

TL;DL
01:05 Old Father Jackdaw
05:23 On digital marginalia
09:34 Mouhamadodou Lo and his Children
11:00 Becoming Connie Cyclonic
19:26 Generic Existential Distraction
20:27 The paradoxical grief of completion and the art of potential space
26:08 Richmond Lock and Weir
27:42  Silent interview, workshops and EELS ARE COOL t-shirts

Links to things I mentioned
Mouhamadodou Lo and his Children on Spotify
Video of the making of Connie Cyclonic
Video story of Connie and the Creature at Samphire Hoe
Silent interview with Joe Lycett
Mask Workshop
Dancing with the Inner Critic Workshop
EELS ARE COOL T-SHIRT

The written substack version of this episode can be read on my Substack.

If you're wondering why this is an accidental podcast then listen to the first 5 minutes of episode one.
 
Comments, questions, requests and stuff to stevexoh@gmail.com
 
 

(Total listening time 30’ 21") 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 15 of Creative Adventures, an accidental podcast. And I'm boiling hot as I record this, because we've had no rain here in South West London, and it's just been constant sunshine for I don't know how long now. At least since the last episode came out. And of course I have to shut my windows when I record the podcast, otherwise you'll just hear traffic noise and crazy jackdoors. So if I sound like I'm slowly deflating as the episode goes on, that's why I'm just running out of batteries. And sadly the hot weather has really finished off my wildflower garden that I'd been trying to grow. I mean I've been watering it with a watering can every day, but I think it's just too hot for the wildflowers. There's a couple of little flowers I can see them now, but it wasn't the bee haven that I imagined it to be. And it's been a strange day today, because I ended up taking a jackdaw to a wildlife rescue sanctuary. And it's a jackdaw that I named Old Father Jackdaw, who I met maybe a couple of weeks ago. And it was one day when I was just leaving the flat and I saw this jackdaw walking around the alleyway. And even though they're curious birds, they normally fly off when anyone approaches, but I basically walked up to it and its beak was open, which is what what corvids do when it's hot because they they pant like dogs, and it just didn't look in a good state. So I went back to the flat and got a little bit of water and some monkey nuts, broken up monkey nuts, and just left it down for it. And when I came back it wasn't there anymore, so I thought either it's got better or it's rehydrated or something's eaten it. But then the next day it was suddenly on my windowsill in my bird feeders, and that's when I named it Old Father Jackdaw. I mean I don't know its gender, but it just looked like this wise old Jackdaw that had seen a lot in its life. And I sort of became friends with it last week, and it would just sit at whatever window I was at, like if I was sitting on my sofa, it would sit by that window. If I'm sitting at my desk like I am recording this, it would sit at that window, and it would sometimes drink some water and eat some food, and I just liked it being there. But then just before the weekend I heard a commotion outside the window. Like the jackdoors make a lot of noise anyway, like I've said before, they're like a wild pack of monkeys. But this one I could hear a sort of different noise underneath the the monkey noises, and it sounded like something suffering. And I looked out and there was about four or five jackdoors pinning down old father jackdoor and just pecking his head and pulling his feathers out. So I shooed them away and he sort of hobbled off into the corner, and he didn't look in a very good way, but he was able to fly and he sort of wobbled off in the air, and I thought that was the end of it. And then the next day he was back at the bird feeders and he looked a bit tattered, but he was eating and he was drinking water. But then today the same thing happened, and I could just hear all of this jackdoor noise and I looked out and he was being attacked again, and I shooed them away and he hobbled off into the corner again. And then every time I left my desk, it seems that they'd come back to try and finish him off. And the last time I went there was four or five jackdoors pecking him, and I mean it's a bit of a gross thing if you're eating your dinner. His head looked like corned beef. They pulled out so many of the poor thing's feathers. And I couldn't bear it. I mean, I never know whether I should intervene in nature or not, or just let nature run its course, and I completely accept that these were my it was my discomfort that was making me want to act. But I also couldn't just sit working or be on calls with people whilst I heard this poor bird being tortured outside the window. So I climbed out the window onto the little roof with a box and a tea towel, and he let me pick him up. He wasn't too happy about it. He's just such a skinny little thing. And I put him into a box and took him to a wildlife sanctuary. And I don't know what's gonna happen to him, but hopefully he'll recover or at least finish out his days without being constantly attacked. The people in the wildlife sanctuary said that he didn't seem like an old Jackdaw at all, just a young one with different markings that might have had an injury like a limp or something, and then the other ones were just trying to get rid of him because a weak bird hanging around with them can attract predators and spread disease and things like that. But yeah, I was sad I'd sort of made this little Jackdaw friend, but the rescue place said that I can send them an email in a week or so, and they'll give me an update on how old Father Jackdaw is doing. And thank you so much for your messages about the last episode, which was, as I said at the time, a complete experiment, and I was really glad I did it because it reminded me of the importance of breaking my own process, and it seems that a lot of you really appreciated that as well. I mean, I I'd like to be out on the river on a kayak with the wind blowing on me right now, but it's also nice to be back in the studio and not be so bothered about audio quality. And I think that experiment last month sort of exploded my imagination because this month I've got too many things that I want to talk about. Because I normally have two or three main things that I cover in an episode, but there's loads and loads of little things that that I want to share. But none of them really fit the format of the podcast. They're more like little things that I'd want to doodle in the margins if it were a book. So I'm not sure how to include them, but I want to. And I was thinking maybe I could pad them out into like a bigger piece, but then I'd just be talking about stuff that I don't really want to talk about, and it would end up being like one of those linked in thought leader pieces that's just one thing that's vaguely interesting and it just gets padded out with a load of fluff. So these little things that I wanted to share feel more like marginalia. The kind of thing that if this podcast were a book, there'd just be stuff that I'd doodle in the margins. Like I did at school with my maths book and or all of my books, but I particularly remember my maths book, of just drawing thoughts and cartoons and there'd be bulldozers that would be shipping in the numbers that would then get used on the maths pages, and then there'd be sums and people saying, This is hard, and my teachers didn't appreciate that at all. And I think marginalia originated around the same time that books started appearing. And by marginalia I mean like the doodles and notes and drawings, they're in the margins of a book or in the gaps, and they offer an insight into the thoughts and opinions and feelings of the previous reader of the book, or sometimes even the author. And some of the earliest surviving examples of marginalia are over a thousand years old, and these little scribbles and doodles of revealed political loyalties or religious disagreements or dark secrets, and sometimes they provide what we'd now call in modern times a director's commentary from the author. And there's a famous example that was attributed to the scribe of a fifteenth century manuscript, and in Latin it says nunc scripti totum pro cristo damihipotum. I've no idea if that's pronounced anything like it's supposed to be pronounced. Latin really isn't my strong point. But that translates roughly as now I've written the whole thing, for Christ's sake, give me a drink. So these little pieces that I wanted to share probably don't qualify as marginalia by that definition, but for me they're like little tangential thoughts that I want to include, but are utterly unrelated to anything else. And that makes me realise that the neatness of digital platforms, like be it an audio platform like this or even on the Substack, they've pretty much eradicated marginalia as a form of writing. And I remember I had a similar issue when I published my first book many years ago, and my daughter, who was age six back then, did some wonderful marginalia illustrations, like little creatures and little characters and cartoons, and I included all of those in a really beautifully haphazard and messy way in the physical paperback version. And then of course everyone was saying, Can you bring out a Kindle version? And I realized that I couldn't use the margins and the gaps in the same way on an e-reader, so I just didn't produce one, and there was only ever the physical copy. But I want to experiment and I want to see can I create audio marginalia in this podcast? Just some little sidebar things that are unrelated to anything else, but I want to share. And I don't know how you do that in an audio format, but what I was thinking I would do is I'd scatter a few of them throughout the episode, and because I don't have a margin, I'll play my Cassiotone keyboard to signify that we are in the margins. I've no idea if that is a really bad idea, but I want to give it a go. And like I said in the last episode, what's the worst that's gonna happen? You fast forward through the marginalia, I never do it again, you unsubscribe and never listen, but it sort of feels worth it. I recently became utterly captivated by a song called Muhammadudulu and His Children. It's like this hypnotic and warm and soothing instrumental piece with a man and some children talking over it in Sengalese. And after I'd listened to it about seven or eight times, I wanted to find out more about it and discovered that the story behind the song is utterly brilliant. And the story begins with Swedish music producer Carl Jonas Vinquist getting into a taxi driven by Mohammedo Lu, only to realise that he'd forgotten his wallet. And Mohammedudu said, don't worry about that, we can sort it out another time. So the next day, Mohammed Oudu and his children went to Carl's studio to collect the taxi money, and Carl invited them in, and they spent the day just messing about with musical instruments. And Carl had an instrumental track that he'd been working on and didn't know what to do with, and he had the idea of inviting Mohamedudu to sing over it. And Mohammedudu reluctantly agreed and decided to read a poem he'd written about the plight of Senhaliese farmers and fishermen. And his children improvised in the background, like doing call and response to the words that he said and playing improvised drums. And the result is this amazing, peaceful and hypnotic piece of music that came about completely by accident, and had Carl remembered his wallet, might never have happened. Earlier this spring, my studios replaced their bottle-fed water cooler with a mains-fed one, which was brilliant because not only was it a good way to make sure we didn't run out of cold drinking water, it reduced the amount of plastic involved in the whole process. And a couple of days before all the empty water bottles were collected, I walked past them in the kitchen and looked at one and thought, I think that would fit on my head. So I took one of them and hid it in my studio. And I had no plans beyond noticing that it would probably fit on my head. But over the next couple of months I began to improvise with a bottle. And I'd made a big mask of a character called Len before that I may have mentioned on the podcast, and Len is this strange character that led dance lessons at a music festival. So I decided I wanted to create another big character, but a more feminine one. So I cut the bottle to give it a chin and added a nose and painted two big blue eyes with eyeshadow and eyelashes. And I decided that the mask would be called Connie, after Connie Converse, who was a brilliantly weird outsider musician. And I settled on the surname Cyclonic, so my mask would be called Connie Cyclonic. Because I've always been fascinated that whenever I've heard the Radio 4 shipping forecast, and they always say Dogger 8, turning four, becoming cyclonic. And becoming cyclonic just sounds amazing. And so I loved the idea of becoming Connie Cyclonic. And the more time I spend making and crafting Connie, the more I got to know her, and I realised that she had long black hair and a fringe, and wore this lovely long tiger print dress. And I decided that Connie would make her first public appearance at the Samphire Hose Solstice Celebration, which is a brilliant nature focused art residency that I did last year and I was taking part in in June. And as the residency was organised by the Bee Friendly Trust charity, Connie decided that she wanted to wear black and yellow striped socks and gloves and a pair of chunky crocs that I decorated with various bugs and bees. And Semfi Ho is an amazing place in Kent. It's a nature reserve at the bottom of the white cliffs that was created from the spoils of the Channel Tunnel. So all of the earth that was dug out from the Channel Tunnel was dumped at Senfhi Ho, and it's just become this amazing place. And you drive through a strange tunnel in the cliffs to get there. And one of the striking features about Samphi Ho is this weird blue tower. And I realized that Connie should do something in the tower. And I came up with a thing called an intimate audience with Connie Cyclonic. And what I thought it would do would involve members of the public waiting outside the tower and coming in one at a time for some sort of fortune-telling experience. But instead of using Tarot, I thought, what would Connie use? Because she's she's strange and mysterious, and decided that she'd use a combination of Brian Eno's oblique strategy cards, Animal Top Trumps, and Panini World Cup football stickers, because the World Cup was on at the time. And this led me to another two weeks of making a strange little box with these hinged compartments that the different cards could go in so the audience could choose the order that they were drawn in. And I loved creating this imaginary world for Connie to inhabit. And I realised that music felt important here and that Connie would probably like Connie Converse to be playing in the background. So I found an old portable cassette player on eBay and recorded Connie Converse's album How Sad, How Lovely, onto it. So on the day I arrived at Samfire Ho, I went to look at the tower and realised that there wasn't really anywhere for Connie to sit, and I spent the entire day making this huge oversized throne out of driftwood, and some kids come and helped me. And then late that afternoon, just before Samphire Ho shut, I moved the throne into the tower, and members of the public came into Connie with questions that were important to them. Things like Should I leave my job? Should I get a dog? What's next? What's the meaning of life? And Connie would just turn over the cards with a sea crashing in the background and this tinny tape player playing this brilliantly bizarre album. And it was a very weird and very wonderful experience for anyone that came along. But the thing that surprised me most was how utterly lovely it was to be Connie. And the next morning was the morning of the solstice, and a brilliant artist called Nicholas led a procession from the tower down to the beach. And everyone was wearing masks that they'd made or decorated their hair and bodies with seaweed and other found objects. And I decided that despite the heat and dangerous lack of peripheral vision, I wanted to complete the procession as Connie. And I find it hard to describe the experience that I had, other than to say that being Connie felt like it liberated parts of me that I didn't know needed liberating. And because she couldn't see very well, she had to have her arm held for the entire walk to the beach, which was about an hour at the pace that we were going. And the thing was that Connie liked being looked after in this way. And she appreciated her limitations. Whereas I think I'd have all sorts of hang-ups and wanting to assert my independence in that situation. And Connie took the tape player with her, which again I wouldn't I hate it when people play music in public. I've spoken about that before. But it brought her comfort and as everyone walked, she played quietly the music, and it felt comforting. And when the group stopped and someone spoke, or Nicolas addressed us all, she'd press pause, let everyone speak, and then press play again afterwards. But the most striking thing was when people spoke to Connie. Like Nicolas asked her which direction should the group go in, and members of the public just came up and asked her questions. She didn't panic. She just paused and stood there, sometimes just staring at the person that had asked. And because she was mute, she didn't need to find any words. So it was almost like the whole experience of being non-verbal felt completely joyful, like it lifted the pressure of not having to find the right words. And when we eventually reached the beach and had a little solstice ceremony around a fire, Connie realized that she wanted to walk into the water. And she did. And and she walked in in her crocs and her tights and her dress until the water reached round I don't know, round about her thighs. And then she just turned back to look at the beach and the humans on it. And it just felt like time stood still. There was no need to perform or Connie wasn't bothered whether people misunderstood her or thought she was being really weird. There was just this sense of peace and contentedness of everything. And then other members of the group came out and joined her in the sea and just held hands for a moment. And when Connie walked out of the sea, it suddenly hit me that I'd have to say goodbye to her and become me again. But I had no idea how to do this. I felt reluctant to disconnect from this strange but oddly liberating part of myself. So when I got on the sea I just lay down flat on the stony beach and gradually removed her head, like ever so slowly, a bit like how I imagine an astronaut would take off a space helmet. And as the head came fully off, my eyes just filled with tears, and I just felt a huge amount of emotion being released. And I remember thinking, I don't know what to do now. But then all of a sudden one of the kids who'd been helping me build the throne said, I knew it was you in there, and that just felt like the most perfect transition back into reality. And I've no conclusions to any of this. I can't say, and this is what being Connie taught me. I mean I've worked with masks for many years, and I appreciate how they can give us access to parts of ourselves that are unknown or atrophied or repressed. But this whole experience of becoming Connie at Samphire Ho, at the solstice, in nature and with others, it felt like one of the most profound creative experiments I've ever undertaken. And what's bizarre is an experiment that only happened because I realized that a water bottle would fit on my head and followed the chain of thought that that took me on. Generic existential distraction is a genre of music that I've just come up with to describe the type of music people play outdoors. And I've spoken about this in other episodes. It's that style of music people seem to default to when sitting by a river or in a park or in another public space. And it's that kind of nondescript musical distraction from confronting the existential nature of silence. And I've decided this is called generic existential distraction music. And you can identify it because it seems to be very auto-tuned with unremarkable lyrics and unremarkable melody or rhythm. And my observations are nobody seems to be enjoying listening to generic existential distraction music, but they simply seem to be reassured by its presence. So it's more like a comfort blanket for reality rather than an expression of musical tastes. Last week I completed the kayaking portion of my River Thames project, which you probably know because I talk about it all the time. But was the idea I had to go from the source of the River Thames to the sea. And I originally was going to walk it, but because so much of the footpath doesn't go alongside the river, I decided to kayak it. And I only decided that back in May, so I completed the massive kayaking step in a relatively short space of time. It's like eleven trips over three months and 270 kilometers or something. But during that time I experienced a familiar paradox and it's frustratingly familiar. It's like I felt compelled to complete this part of the project as quickly as I could, at the same time as knowing deep down that I would feel a sense of sadness and loss as soon as I completed it. And I've experienced that so many times before with projects, with a Sound of Silence project. I couldn't wait to finish recording episode 100, knowing that as soon as I'd recorded episode 100, I'd feel really sad about it. And I know myself well enough that this isn't simply a case of imagining that achieving a goal is going to change anything in my life. For me it feels much more nuanced and confusing than that. In the 1920s, the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zygenick noticed that waiters seemed remarkably good at remembering unpaid orders, but quickly forgot them once the bill was settled. And to cut a long story short, this became known as the Zygenic effect, the tendency for unfinished tasks to occupy our minds more fully than completely. And it helps explain why cliffhangers are so compelling or awkward or unfinished conversations or situations in our lives take up more space in our thoughts. And in psychology, the Zygenic effect is usually presented as an argument for why completing things is satisfying, because it releases that mental tension that's created by something being unfinished. But for me, I wonder whether I actually enjoy that mental tension and find meaning in dwelling in it. Being immersed in something that's incomplete but is within my power to complete. And I guess I experience it to a lesser extent when I discover a television series that I really enjoy. And I can't help binge watch as many episodes as I can, even though I know that every episode I watch brings the ending closer and I'll be sad when it finishes. The British psychologist Donald Winnicott believed that much of what makes life meaningful happens in what he called potential space. And he described potential space as like this area that exists somewhere between our inner world of imagination and the external world of objective reality. And a whole other podcast episode on objective reality, whether that is actually possible or not, anyway. But yeah, so potential space being our inner world, our imagined world, and the reality that we find ourselves in. Something that's neither entirely fantasy nor entirely real, but a place where creativity can thrive and we can imagine and make meaning. And Winnicott saw this as one of the most important aspects of healthy human development and went on to argue that creativity isn't simply something that artists do, but is a way of engaging with life itself. And for Winnicott, children explore potential space all the time through play. Like a teddy bear is neither just a toy nor a living companion, but it inhabits that space in between. For a child it can become both at once. And as we grow older, this capacity for potential space moves from toys to things like art or music or relationships or other creative practices, religion as well, maybe. And so whenever we become deeply absorbed in something that feels simultaneously real and imagined, we are inhabiting what he calls potential space. This makes me wonder whether I experience an unfinished project with a well-defined end as a kind of potential space. And that tension between wanting to complete it as soon as possible whilst also wanting to savour it and it never end invites me into this wonderfully meaningful state of flow that I've become quite addicted to. And I find that fascinating. I've not made complete sense of it really, but to consider that maybe it's never the project that enchants me or fascinates me, but the potential space that it opens up through that tension between completion and incompletion. And perhaps I'm not even trying to eliminate that tension, but to surf it. And maybe that tension between completeness and incompleteness is what allows me to find a state of flow. It creates this psychological landscape that I can inhabit and explore and adventure in. And once the project's finished, that landscape collapses. And I've always experienced post-project grief. But this makes me think that maybe the grief isn't it the loss of the project itself, but the loss of that psychological landscape that the project opened up for me. That beautiful, tantalizing, addictive tension between completeness and incompleteness. So this leaves me contemplating a somewhat beautiful paradox. That the only way I can continue inhabiting this delicious tension is to keep moving towards the very thing that will eventually make it disappear. And even though it doesn't make complete sense to me, it feels helpful to realise that. And maybe it makes absolutely no sense to you listening to this, but to realise that it's potentially not the thing, not the project itself, but the way that I create this potential space and this psychological landscape for me to explore is what I find most meaningful in life. I've recently discovered that the amazing weir and lock at Richmond was only created in response to the original London Bridge being demolished. And I don't know if you've seen photos of the original London Bridge, but it had very, very narrow arches. And the water used to flow through there so deep and so fast. But the bridge also just created like a dam that would hold the water back upstream. So when the bridge was removed, it completely changed this, and the river around Richmond dried up at low tide to such an extent that people would picnic and play cricket on the exposed riverbed. But of course, back then the river was a major source of trade and commerce. So it drying up and meaning that no boats and barges could get through became a really big problem. So Richmond Loch was built to hold the water back on this ebb tide, and it sadly brought an end to riverbed cricket, but it made the river navigable once again. And so if you ever get to visit Richmond Loch and Weir, I I think it's an hour or two hours before high tide, these huge gates go down to hold all the water back so that when the tide goes out, boats can still get through. So that's it for this episode. I remember at the end of the last episode, I was thinking that was a rambly one, but this one feels all over the place. And hopefully that's okay. Just blame the heat. I mean it's 8 pm here now and it's 30 degrees inside, so if this didn't make any sense, just put it down to the heat and maybe the emotion of taking old Father Jackdaw to the rescue centre earlier on. But a couple of things before I go that you might be interested in. I've mentioned on previous episodes about my old Sound of Silence podcast, which was a project I did in 2018 that was to record a hundred episodes of silence face to face with people and broadcast it. And it had a surprising amount of listeners tuned in to all 100 episodes of silence. So recently when the comedian Joe Lyset started putting out a silent interview, lots of people got in contact with me to say, Have you seen Joe Lyset's doing a silent thing? And people commented on his posts and that. And I I like Joe Lyset, I'm a fan of his work, and I was delighted that he was exploring the bizarreness of silence. But because so many people commented, he got in contact with me and said, Look, are you okay with me doing this? I don't want to step on your toes. And I said, Yeah, I love it. And so he invited me to be on his silent interview, and we met and for some reason that I can't remember, I decided to dress as a rook and we recorded a silent interview together, which you can see on Joe's Instagram or his YouTube channel, and I will put a link to that in the podcast notes if you'd like to watch Stroke listen to it. And I've got a few workshops coming up. I've got a mask workshop, which is sometime in October, I'll put a link to that. And the two-day inner critic workshop, the Dancing with Our Inner Critic workshop, which I run with the gestalt psychotherapist Simon Covitia, which is a wonderful creative exploration of this part of us that can despise our creativity. And also many episodes back I spoke about eels and I became fascinated by eels. And on the back of that episode, I did a little drawing of the eel life cycle with the writing in the middle that just says eels are cool. And by popular demand, I've just bought that out as a t-shirt. It's lovely yellow screen printed drawing on a charcoal grey t-shirt. So if you'd like an eels are cool t-shirt, then I will stick a link to that in the podcast notes. And that's it, I think. I've been drinking water throughout recording, but I'm slowly dehydrating. And I'm like a balloon two days after a party, I think. If that's you imagine me looking and speaking like that at the moment. So I'm gonna go and re-inflate somehow. And I'll be back in a month's time. Not sure when the next episode comes out, sometime early September, I guess. And hopefully, we will have had some rain by then. And if I get an update on old Father Jack Door from the Rescue Centre, I'll let you know. But in the meantime, take care, I'll speak to you soon. Bye for now.