The Tarot of Songwriting 14 - Temperance

David Lynch, routine, and The Malice of Objects

If you want to know how I am doing, you need look no further than my living room - is the furniture in the same position as last time you saw it? No, of course it’s not. My cleaner thinks I’m a psychopath. “Every time, change!” says lovely Polish Anna every other week, whose lack of English gives her a directness I find oddly comforting. “ but still no bed for baby!”. Yes, Anna, because every day presents a change of need. Like clothes, like fasion, like the seasons - is that so strange?? And the baby has no bed because I cannot fathom possessing something with so little multifunction as a toddler bed. For as long as I can remember, the status of my mind has had a direct relationship with the arrangement of my furniture and the order of my belongings. I can’t be the only one. The connection I make between furniture placement and internal comfort can appear quite literally unhinged, as anyone who has ever shared a living space with me will attest.

There is a rich history of disordered eating in my family, indeed in my generation. When I was in analysis, I would frequently and proudly make reference to the fact that I had managed to avoid the pervasive and pedestrian grasp of anorexia - a provocation to which I would get no response, as usual. Until one session, in which I recounted to my analyst what I had been up to the previous evening - making a thorough inventory of my belongings, which I had so far whittled down to 120 items. Why? They asked. I don’t know - space, efficiency. Control. Ah, they said, right. Ah, I said, riiiiight.

I shook off that kink eventually but retained an older and more forgiving one of constantly and incessantly rearranging furniture and books. Nothing in my living space has ever known peace or permanence. And at this point, it’s safe to say they never will. The malleability and adaptability of my environment has, at times, been a very important part of my working life - no more so than recently when I turned my home into a recording studio in order to make an album in a way that suited my needs as a new parent. My living room in the last 4 years has been the birthplace of a 7ft tulle puppet, a rehearsal space, a printing room, my study, my writing room, my lockdown lecture hall, the setting for the actual birth of my child, a nursery and a yoga studio.

The LUMP Animal puppet I spent a month making for live shows for an album that 45 people listened to

The funny thing is, all of those things could have been done in the basement, that much longed for room-of-ones-own for which I should be incredibly grateful. The basement of my home was turned into a recording studio by the previous occupant, and that is largely why we moved to the house, which is not in an area we would have otherwise chosen. But I hate being down there. I hated it from the second we moved in. If an environment does not feel energetically right, I find it very hard to work. I don’t belong in a fucking basement, I mutter to myself whenever other goings on in the house force me down there. Over the years I have lived here, instead of doing something sensible with the space, making it a spare room or something, I have slowly chipped away at it, painting it darker and darker, removing the carpets and emptying it of any charm or function it could possibly have - so that now it is a better visual representation of how it makes me feel - presently resembling the lair of a maniac. This is a form of inanimate sadism at which women are particularly skilled, though more often, it’s a performance taken out on their own bodies.

The happiest and most conducive environments to writing in which I have lived were tiny apartments on the top floors of buildings. For my first few years in LA, I lived in a perfect studio flat, and everything I owned fit into two suitcases. It was a converted factory with big windows. Mine looked out to the back of the building, where there was a charmingly wretched little courtyard below. My routine while I lived there was exquisite. I would wake up at 6 am and drive to Hollywood for an hour and a half of hyperventilation yoga, then drive home high as a kite with a green smoothie, black coffee and an American spirit. I’d sit at my window and read until midday, every day, then go for a hike in Griffith Park, running like an animal until I made it to The Observatory, then on to Dantes Peak, then a hot, sweaty amble back down. Then coffee and correspondence at the same cafe every day, then home to write and smoke by the window, then maybe a walk to the book shop or market, then dinner, one glass of red wine, two squares of dark chocolate, then bed. Every day, the same - sometimes interrupted in the evenings by outsiders. You might look at that routine and think one of two things: either it reads as an insufferable brag or a mild psychological disorder. It’s both, and you need not be jealous or concerned as my life at this moment could not be further from the one I’m recounting here. Apart from waking up early.

I wrote I Speak Because I Can (age 19) while renting a single bed size room on the top floor of my friend’s mum’s house (which I loved), and Once I Was An Eagle was written at the window of a tiny attic floor flat in Shepherds Bush where I could see the Kensington Olympia trains going by and people walking around unaware of my watching them. While I lived there, I would get up every morning at exactly 7 am and have exactly one piece of toast and leave the house at exactly 7.30 and walk for exactly an hour to a coffee shop in town where I would buy The Guardian and do the crossword over one coffee then get another coffee to read and write with. On the weekends, I allowed myself coffee with milk and an egg with my toast to make me feel like I, too, had a working week and, therefore, the rewards of a weekend. (I was 22).

my living room in its current form

Long before having a child, my blissful, mildly disordered routines encountered a major problem in the shape of GJ. I’d lived with boyfriends before, but they were all musicians and away touring most of the time. Before GJ, not even my closest friends knew what I did in the day. GJ turned out to be the kind of person who would turn left down a farm track en route to somewhere just because it looked interesting and not worry about it adding hours to the journey. What if you never got to know what was down there? was his attitude - the attitude I fell in love with. We bought a beat-up van when we first met, chucked a mattress in it and travelled around Europe for a few months, and this habit of his never failed to quite literally throw me off course. It forbade me the punctuations of a day to which I had grown attached - if we weren’t going to reach somewhere by a certain pre-determined time, then I wasn’t going to be able to read the required amount of pages of my book needed to reward myself with lunch - plus other arbitrary needs and rewards I had created for the schedule that I felt held my frail little world together.

These rules and rituals, along with solitude, were primarily what I thought I needed in order to write, in order to be sufficiently distracted and filled with inspiration that a song could feel possible to approach, like a wild animal. Then, amongst the chaos of falling in love, I managed to write an album, Song For Our Daughter - with GJ mostly sitting right next to me. This had the contradictory effect of rendering a life’s work, my secretive and solitary routines, null and void. And, of course, GJ was just the warm-up - I wrote Patterns in Repeat in stolen minutes here and there, without having read many books or taken any notes, just on the high of being absolutely entranced by my newborn and birth experience.

The contrarian in me likes the relinquishing of dogma—the apostate. There is no greater bore to me than the dogmatic bore, who either reads too much Christopher Hitchens or Carl Sagan, is too left or right-wing, or, as is common in my field, is prone to banging on and on and on about the virtues of recording to tape. It’s why I love this clip of David Lynch, fellow rigorous follower of daily ritual, talking about why he prefers digital to film -

I find it very charming how much pleasure he’s taking in being this contrarian.

David Sedaris has also had various rigorous daily routines, which he continually adapts to whatever his circumstances dictate. Though mentioned in good humour, it’s often suggested in his writing that his routines were driven by something compulsive rather than just merely suspicious. Same as Joan Didion. Both titans of opposite spectrums of non-fiction.

There is undoubtedly value in applying rigour to one’s somewhat meaningless day-to-day life, but it must be in service to a cerebral malleability. When you can maintain an undercurrent of stability in an unpredictable body, you're well set up for anything. It’s vital for creativity to hold on to nothing too tightly, even - or especially - pillars made by your own hand. This is the spirit of Temperance, in my understanding.

---

It’ll be a long time before we get another like David Lynch