More about writing and wanting to write

During my penultimate year of high school, my best friend and I went on a “Winterschool for the arts” at the University of the Free State… In a town-city called Bloemfontein. This is irrelevant, but it was pretty cold and sortof depressing because it was cold yet dry, without any hills or mountains (I am after all a hill and mountain girl) which made the place ugly. Anyway, I attended classes on short story-writing, which was a little bit annoying due to my lack of clicking with the lecturer and my realization that I will probably never be a short story writer. However, I did learn valuable things, mainly about being an actual person, and a bit about descriptive writing.

One thing that I do remember is the following warning; when there is a story in your head, DON’T TELL IT TO ANYONE, because then you won’t be able to write it, because the story will essentially be out of your system. I experienced it again earlier this week, when I had already thought up a blog post surrounding an anecdote in Chemometrics class, but I told two friends about this anecdote. And I’ve found that every time I’ve sat down to write this specific post, I could not get myself to do it, which is a bit of a shame. But also kindof cool. Now I just want to write about things that happened this weekend, which I’m not really sure I should, perhaps you’ll get the story about Chemometics too…

The trees are red…

This morning, over unexpected waffles and unexpectedly being in my department’s tea room, someone mentioned that all the trees in one of my town’s main streets had been wrapped in red cloth. Somebody mentioned that it was the doing of landscape artist Strijdom van der Merwe – which rang a bell – and I subsequently decided to go and have a look. I forgot, and was later,during random wanderous shopping, reminded. So I went.

 

I drove my little red car along the street that I’ve driven it along countless times. It looked pretty damn cool. But while I was driving, I started feeling sad. Sad in that almost-wanting-to-cry-but-not-quite-having-wet-cheeks kind of way. Why? I was asking myself whist driving. I came up with a combination of missing wanting to be somebody else, not really needing to impress anybody with being cool, somebody that i don’t know who died unexpectedly, the dirtyness of my flat, missing a winetour on Saturday and the rainy time that is up ahead. And on the way back along the street, I found myself wondering whether that is not what realty makes it art and not just some sort of urban decoration – the ability to go beyond looking cool and to actually affect people in some way or another. The medium gives the piece instant exposure -and the ability to touch non-artgoers; the people who don’t read books or go to galleries on seek these things in other places. Which perhaps REALLY makes it art.

 

Which makes me wish a little bit that I was an artist and not a chemist…