Let The Dog Run - Hatty Campbell-Taylor
Spiral by Louise Bourgeois, 2005
I dream that I’m looking after the dog, but I keep forgetting to feed her or let her out. Days pass in the dream, and my guilt at not caring for her properly jostles with an instinct to keep her inside and therefore safe.
The feeling of this dream is familiar. The urge to close in on something precious, keep it still and in my line of sight. It speaks to squeezing ‘make art’ or ‘do writing’ into ever decreasing increments of time. If I lock ‘making art’ in this room, I think, it’ll happen – then I neglect to let it see light.
Louise Bourgeois speaks to this feeling in the way she talks about spirals. The way she describes it, there are two directions. The inwards and outwards trajectories represent a seeking or relinquishing of control:
“the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance…
the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself.”
Time seems to be inextricable from the experience of being - if ‘to be’ is to exist somewhere in relation to life and death, day and night, and so on. As long as we be, we have time. But we’re so concerned with how to be in it. Like the dog in the room, we seem desperate to try and contain it.
When it comes to doing the things that nourish, I find the circling in can be a knee jerk response to a perceived lack of time. A desire to make a small clearing in which The Thing can happen. We talk about ‘finding the time’ most commonly around things that we care about or that make us feel good: friendship, exercise, creative pursuits. Time is found, squeezed in tight corners. We squash and jostle and say this (next thursday, before 8am) is when inspiration shall strike.
Running Dog Photo by Hatty Campbell-Taylor
Conversely, when spaciousness does arrive, you can feel it. You don’t need to schedule it in. Recently, long walks with someone I care about, talking and talking and talking, seem to land me on that outwards trajectory. The shape of my days look the same, yet I’m spinning in a different direction.
The reality is that, for most of us, time sits in direct relation to work. The schedule of our days doesn’t allow for a great deal of divergence. Time, in a labour-centred context, is linear. It’s about progress and production and always on. This way of being is new - it’s post-industrial. As artist and educator Marta Rose puts it, it’s really great for capitalism and really bad for us.
Until very recently, our way of being (in life, in time) was organised by the rotation of seasons, with periods of growth and of rest. As Rose points out, Seasonal Affective Disorder has a name because we are meant to keep functioning as though nothing has happened. ‘Disorder’ is wholly contextual.
“As long as we be, we have time. But we’re so concerned with how to be in it. Like the dog in the room, we seem desperate to try and contain it.”
So, how - in the economic reality of rent and bills - do we find space? I think the spiral has something to teach us. ‘Spiral time’ is a term used by Marta Rose to describe a way of being. To live in a spiral, or an elliptical orbit, she says, is to live with capacity for spaciousness and perspective. Where progress is iterative, and happens through a gathering and regathering of information. In this frame of being, moments of speed and of rest are inherent.
Viewed in this way, the spiral speaks to more than a need to control. It describes an allowance for the fluctuations of being: as in how summer turns to autumn and then winter. I find relief in this loosening of grip. The suggestion that both inwards and outwards trajectories are vital to the essence of life. That in one, the other is made possible. Where space might be cleared not by circling in, but by looking outside of ourselves. Found in connection, collaboration, and walking. In letting the dog have a run.
Later, the spiral inwards brings space to reflect. To regather and ask what it all means.
I write with the dog at my feet. The door, still very much open.
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Hatty is based in Bristol. Writings and makings: @hat__cam