dancing through the gloom

I'm writing this in recovery from falling off my bike, a spectacular vault across the handlebars that has left me with a split eyebrow, a swollen cheekbone, a bruised lip and grazed knee: looking, that is, how I've been feeling for weeks, beaten-up and blue. Work – commissioned, paid work – dried up some time in June, apart from a single precious long-term project (bless you, Unfolding Theatre) whose deadline isn't until February. [Correction added later: there was also this piece for the Orange Tree, a brief flashback to journalism days; and of course the week at the Edinburgh festival with The Sick of the Fringe. Apologies to both for forgetting.] And while I could have spent the beginning of the school year wisely, seizing the opportunity to stretch out as a writer, or return to abandoned pursuits, X or overhaul my web presence to accentuate my brand (puke), what I've actually done is spiral down into a salt-stained gloom. A sense of failure is dismally self-fulfilling: you think you're not good enough, so you don't even try, which proves you're not good enough, for anything. And the problem runs deeper than self-pity (in which I've been triumphant: no failure there): once again I'm suffocated by a sense of pointlessness. I've fought the urge to dump this in the bin with every word. And no, I don't know why I say any of this in public, except that other people's accounts of anxiety and self-loathing help me, often, and I saw Jamal Gerald perform FADoubleGOT this week and was touched by the invitation with which he begins: this is me telling my truth, and I hope it encourages you to tell yours.

So here is something true: magic Megan Vaughan getting a job at the Live Art Development Agency earlier this year gave me the courage, for the first time since attempting to shift how I write about theatre, to apply to take part in the Agency's DIY programme. I participated in two: the first left me a wreck; the second, unprofessional class, run by dancers Jamila Johnson-Small and Mira Kautto as their collaboration immigrants and animals, might prove the beginning of rehabilitation. Ordinarily I'd never have applied for a dance workshop – I've never been to any dance classes, and amid the panoply of failures it's a source of particular shame that every one of the dances I've choreographed for the Actionettes has been performed by the others under a kind of duress and quickly forgotten – but there was something about Jamila and Mira's invitation that told me this would be OK. “we want to share our practice which is basically fucking about for ages in a room, getting tired and calling it work. we think that dancing on a stage need not look different to dancing in a club, kitchen or bus stop”, all of which are things I do; “some dancing that is a gleeful waste of time, a resistance to capitalism and the development of cultural capital (or capital of any kind) or function or product; non-practical bodies dancing towards no particular purpose or end”, all of which I believe in profoundly.

There were five workshops and I was invited to two (not, sadly, the one that took place in the pre-Raphaelite room at Tate Britain where they danced to Kate Bush). In my first, Mira and Jamila shared the tasks and music that form the basis of their show Pony, and invited each of us to interpret them for ourselves; we ran through them once for practice, and then performed for each other in two groups, which might have been excruciating (the performance-for-critique aspect being what broke me in the other DIY), except that Mira and Jamila held the space so generously: there were no wrong answers, wrong movements, wrong versions, only ways of moving, each as radiant in possibility as the other. For the second, they invited us to dress in “formal attire, whatever that means for you”, and serenaded us with cheesy pop – the kind of songs played at a wedding or adolescent disco – with barely any instruction for how we might respond to them. That they didn't know the words a lot of the time, that their voices quavered on the high notes, that they giggled at themselves and the struggle of the song, all contributed to the atmosphere of permission. Did I pick up any new techniques or moves? No. Did I manage to slough off self-consciousness for a couple of hours? Absolutely, and that is precious – the more so because each room held a performer I look to with awe, Gillie Kleiman in the first, Laura Dannequin the second. When Gillie told me that she'd enjoyed dancing with me, I brushed it off, told her I'd just been doing nonsense; but inside I was so grateful, to her and to the opportunity, not only to think through dance but to remember that the hierarchies of art that feel so real are just another social construct designed to oppress and harm.

Here's something else true: when I watched Jerome Bel's Gala at Sadler's Wells, it felt like a continuation of unprofessional class, not just because I could imagine myself part of it but because Mira and Jamila could so easily have shaped that performance and stepped up to that stage. I arrived there a mess, limbs aching, blood seeping through the skin splints holding my eyebrow together, but I had an inkling that being there would make at least my insides better and it did. Gala is glorious. There's an acid-bath article about it on the New York site Culturebot by dancer/thinker Lily Kind that dismisses it as “cliche, gimmicky, dull, cowardly, and exploitative … presenting bodies traditionally underrepresented in dance and theater [but] presenting them as interchangeable, as check boxes for their particular brand of otherness instead of as their actual, unique, individual selves”. And there's a less furious but equally critical comment elsewhere by another American dancer, Gregory Holt, which describes it as “reactionary rather than transformative”, adding:

Bel created a sentimental mirror that affirmed our desire to be open to diversity without challenging the basis of access to the festival space, funding space, cosmopolitan art space he is working in. In this way, he narrowly exploited ‘diversity’ to cement his own cis-white-male voice without sharing in the political and artistic risks facing marginalized artists who are also trying to show their dances.

All of which I appreciate (it is, after all, Bel and not immigrants and animals behind this work), without emotionally agreeing. Such joy suffused me in the room that I spent half the show crying, helplessly, snottily, partly as a release (of the pain of the fall, of the pointlessness of being alive), but mostly at the ineffable beauty of humanity, the ways in which limbs can move, awkward yet proud. A joy so serious that the laughter in the room unsettled me, especially that directed at anyone whose gender expression wasn't binary; too often it sounded like the clanging, judgemental, ugly laughter of enforced marginalisation.

Admittedly it took me a while to warm to Gala: the opening slide show of differently shaped theatres and stages just bored me, as did the exhibition of ballet pirouettes and jetes. The switch came with the three-minute collective solo improvisation in silence; because this was the flashback to unprofessional class, and because within the muddle it was possible to see the dancers as individuals, each with their own quirks. This is what I loved about Gala: the ways in which it underlined the point that “dancing on a stage need not look different to dancing in a club, kitchen or bus stop”. In this it reminded me of another beloved work, Krissi Musiol's long-term project The Dance Collector, in which she visits public spaces – cafes, whenever I've encountered it – and chats to anyone she encounters there, asking them to give her a dance move which she can incorporate into a bigger choreography of place, to be performed in the same room a couple of hours later. Some people gift her stories of meeting their spouses in a dance hall in their youth, but far more give her the instant response, “oh no, I don't dance, I don't have anything”, and it's only through kind and patient conversation that Krissi will discover the movement they can give her, whether it's the dance of the football terraces when a goal is scored, the dance of wringing out the dishcloth when the kitchen is tidied, or the dance of reaching for an item on a high shelf in the supermarket.

I guess I trusted Gala in a way those American writers didn't; trusted that it gave its dancers the same freedoms – not just of movement but from criticism – that Jamila and Mira gave me. I trusted that the Company/Company section, in which one individual after another steps forward and leads the group in a dance of their own devising, really did feature solos of individual and idiosyncratic devising, from people who are specialists in their own way. I saw a specialist in being a little girl, tossing your long blonde hair around to Miley Cyrus; a specialist in adapting the movements of breakdancing to a body twisted by cerebral palsy; a specialist in juddering hands to the beats of techno; a specialist in – possibly my favourite – effervescent hula hooping. (That last performer, a black woman with amazing candy-pink braids, reminded me so much of Hot Brown Honey, the ways in which they are clearly virtuosic but wear that talent so lightly, at the same time scouring off cliches of beauty to present a more complicated feminine identity.) Behind each of these specialists, the rest of the group followed their leader with total commitment, no matter what flailing and floundering it produced. What Gala celebrates is unprofessionalism – or, as another writer online so insightfully put it, the true meaning of amateur, its etymology in the French and Latin for lover.

I love dancing, but I'd never call myself a dancer. I love painting but I've never let myself be a painter. I had a love-hate relationship with playing guitar that petered out and still aches with the pain of unrequitement; I love singing but rarely sing in public, only if I feel camouflaged. Introducing myself to a group of strangers recently, I noted aloud that I write, but always use the verb to describe that: not until I've published something of imaginative scope, of actual invention, of worth in the world, and ideally not as a vanity project but as sanctioned by a third party, could I call myself a writer. So much of my innate sense of failure lives in this lack of professionalism. Politically, I am part of the chorus fighting against this: the blog I kept as part of Fuel's New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood project articulated a lot of that, and I read the most recent blog post on the 64 Million Artists site murmuring over and over, true, true, true. Jo Hunter (I'm assuming it's her) writes:

There is creativity happening everywhere in the UK. Yes there is inequality and poverty in this country when we use the measures of money or formal cultural provision. But there is richness too, in every place – musicians and writers and dreamers and cake bakers. So let’s start by celebrating what’s already there rather than panicking about what’s not. Let’s champion the brass bands and the grime artists and the felters and the am dram and the pumpkin carvers, alongside the professionals and the existing infrastructure.

I can cheer these things in other people. It's what I'm loving so much about the project I'm doing with Unfolding: that, too, is a celebration of unprofessionalism, of playing music “as a gleeful waste of time... towards no particular purpose or end”. I just can't find a way to celebrate or even accept them in myself. My salve this week has been to wonder if anyone can, whether the affirmation that makes it possible for others to work as artists comes not from within but without: from the partners they collaborate with, the community that surrounds them, the organisations that say yes, we want to work with you. In some ways I have those things, but four straight months of no commissioned paid work can very much make it feel otherwise. In that absence, it has been altogether too easy to turn inwards, to pummel myself from within. I've been telling myself since I was a teenager that I don't have anything perceptive to say about the human condition; two decades later that truth is so solid within me it's unbreakable. (Writing about theatre is the only way I've found to evade that, because it's the makers being perceptive, not me, but even that isn't working any more.) And as I mop up the orange gunge oozing from my knee, I wish I could as easily cure the infection in my soul.

Ride, baby, ride

Of Riders and Running Horses is a performance for five female dancers (the marketing copy says six so I don't know what happened to the other one but at this Dance Umbrella showing it was definitely five) and two male musicians.

Of Riders and Running Horses is getting to the club early, before most people have arrived, and the few who are already there are just standing around having drinks, and the DJ plays a song that is a bit slow so it wouldn't work at midnight but it just so happens to be one of your favourites so you dance and the floor is basically empty, smooth but not slippery, not soused in spilled drinks, so you can really travel across it, exult in all that space, and maybe one of your friends joins you and she's dancing different but the same, and every time you catch each other's eyes you sing along and laugh.

Of Riders and Running Horses is that flick of the wrist or that toss of the head or that curve of the body that hits the beat just right, that sink of the knees, that quick step back, that spin, that pause, that jitterbug jump.

It's seeing someone else on the dance floor who somehow has every muscle coordinated just so, stepping with and across the grain of the music so effortlessly, so exquisitely, so unlike anyone else around her, that you spend the rest of the evening – the rest of your life – shaping your body to that memory.

Of Riders and Running Horses is dancing until your knickers and bra are soaked with sweat, dancing until your muscles ache, still dancing because the music is there and it's yours, and even when you pause for a drink, even if you're on the way to the toilet and quite in need of a pee, if the right song comes on, a song that has a rope tied round your heart, then it will yank you back to the dance floor no matter what, and you will dance until you're breathless, because who needs breath when the music is pulsing through you: who needs energy when the song is there to feed you.

And maybe, in its moments of synchronicity that are also individuated, because each of the women do the same moves, but in their own charismatic way, Of Riders and Running Horses is all the best nights I've had with my dance group, not just performing but out for a social, when one of our songs plays and we fall into a routine, and it doesn't matter if we fuck up because we're a gang, we're together, but still inclusive, because on the best nights, the really special nights, the strangers around us catch the pattern of what we're doing and cheerfully join in.

But Of Rider and Running Horses isn't just dancing at dance nights: it's dancing in the kitchen in the midst of washing up, peeling off rubber gloves and whirling around in the space between the counters, however tight, and singing, singing at the top of your voice, not caring how wonky the notes are. It's dancing at the bus stop because the sun is shining and the air is light, a lift of the heel, a tap of the toes, hands drumming a rhythm on your stomach or your thighs.

It's not walking but running, not for exercise, or to get somewhere faster, running just because, because the wind is blowing through you like you were made of gauze, because the air is charged with the coming of spring, because walking won't answer this rush of blood through your veins, so you run, pounding along the pavement, peeling off into back streets for a clearer path, run to the river so you can stand, breath ragged, gazing at the oily blue of the water and its glimmering lights, and look up into the sky and imagine it full of stars. It's running down hills and almost losing control, and doing cartwheels in the park even though you haven't done a cartwheel in years, and doing them makes you pull a fucking thigh muscle, but who cares, because that surge of elation inside needs this movement to honour it. It's being young, or it's remembering what it was to be young, and doing that in a way that isn't mournful but celebratory, that remembers you don't have to stop being young, or dancing, or running, or behaving with abandon, just because the years are ticking on.

And because it's directed by Dan Canham, Of Riders and Running Horses is also the memory of 30 Cecil Street, and the communities that form around and through dancing, and the charge that those spaces for dancing carry; it has moments of stillness and reflection like that show had, moments when four of the women peel away and a single body remains, contemplative, wondering, gathering resources, and those moments of calm make the return of the group more vibrant, more rapturous and alive.

And because Dan's associate director is Laura Dannequin, Of Riders and Running Horses is watching Action Hero's Hoke's Bluff for the second time, and realising that the tight-lipped person playing the football referee, so sharp with the whistle, hands slicing the air like scythes, was the same person who had performed a solo piece called Hardy Animal, about experiencing chronic back pain, that was so quiet and so beautiful, not a trace of self-pity in it, just a matter-of-fact discussion of what it is to live with pain, and how blundering most people's questions and sympathies and expectations around that are (I winced a lot watching it, remembering occasions when I had blundered the same way), its movements carefully weighted, warm and generous in its manipulations of the spine. And it's watching Hoke's Bluff for the third time, and properly appreciating how taut and precise Dannequin's movements, her referee not quite emotionless but outside the story in a way that allows Gemma and James to embrace wholeheartedly its longing for a better way of living together, a better way of dreaming, a better way of being young.

And because one of the two musicians is Sam Halmarack, Of Riders and Running Horses is those two blissful, heart-bursting nights watching him play with the Miserablites – the absolute fucking wonder of the Miserablites being us, the audience – all making the show together, playing songs together like it's the simplest thing in the world. I love Sam's voice: there's something unearthly about it, a note of such sadness harmonised with a note of such hope. As he sang the first song tonight, there was a bit of my brain back in Edinburgh with Tassos Stevens, singing the inexplicably euphoric chorus to the Miserablites' finale: “Three in the back, two in the front, this is how we drive when we're going to the concert”. And at the end, Of Riders and Running Horses does exactly what Sam does in that show: it invites everyone on to the dance floor, and the release of that is exhilarating.

Of Riders and Running Horses is all of these things and none of them. It's the first time I ever saw a video of people breakdancing, the hours I've spent watching dancers from the 60s on youtube, the dreams I once had of moving to New York. It's X every time I've danced lindy with a partner so brilliant I forgot I can't actually do it. Of Riders and Running Horses is the best fun I've had dancing while not actually dancing. It is nothing that I think it is and everything you think it is. One thing, definitely: it is a thing of total joy. 

[And in case you're wondering, the soundtrack to this post is:

and now I have to make myself go to bed and not dance until dawn.] 

some flotsam, some jetsam

If there were more time, I'd write...

about walking on Christmas day in an outskirt of Oxford, seeing fields flooded with rainwater, lapping with quiet tides, stealthily creeping over the path behind our backs; temporary lakes incongruously demarcated by twisted wire fences and the wooden posts of submerged stiles, across which a couple in a canoe calmly rowed, coaxing along a wooden picnic table that had overturned and floated away...

and seeing Orion through the windscreen of the car, pointing the way back to London; listening to Hadestown, marvelling again at its tenderness and anger; thinking lovingly of Little Bulb and the Orpheus show they're making; now and then catching the snuffling snores of the smallest and looking back to see the biggest gazing out of the window, beginning Motor Vehicle Sundown in her own time...

about seeing Elizabeth Price's The Woolworths Choir of 1979 for the first time knowing nothing about it, with a friend who remembered news of the fire from tiny childhood and my son who protested at the sharp jabs of the soundtrack's clicks and claps, not quite knowing what I was seeing but mesmerised, unable to leave; and returning a few weeks later, for a second watch alone and a third with both children, the kids this time as rapt as me, feeling as though I was inducting them into some mysterious cult, because when I watch those dancing girls (we are chorus, we are trefoil, we are quire – but it could read queer – WE KNOW) I swear they're communicating some dark secret truth about women and sex and the fire at the heart of the earth and the universe...

If I could only figure out how, I'd write about the Two Boroughs Theatre Club at the Young Vic, which I've been collaborating on since September and is my favourite interaction with theatre criticism: the Dialogue dream – of discussion that is accessible, respectful, informative, thorough, which opens up the work in unexpected ways – made real. I was disappointed when the club on The Changeling was cancelled last-minute (too close to Christmas): it was a mixed bag of a production and I was super-excited about thrashing it out with people who go to the theatre for... what? Different reasons, of course: because it's there, being given to them for free, and because they're curious, and because theatre gives them something visceral that the TV doesn't. Deliciously, many of the people I've met there are as addicted to theatre as I am: they're just more restrained when it comes to spouting off about it...

and Dialogue itself, and the weird, intense, brilliant week Jake Orr and I spent at the National Theatre Studio: weird because we were (unexpectedly) paid, and it's the first money we've made with this project, and there was something so pompously noble about doing it altruistically and for free; intense because we worked and talked and thought hard, weeks of activity crammed into five too-short days, interspersed with passionate conversations full of encouragement and enthusiasm for our argument (link coming with a record of all this); brilliant because we finally finished collating everything for the BAC project, which felt long overdue, but that was weird too, because I suddenly realised, with appalling intensity, that the writing I had done for it was somehow all wrong*, tonally all wrong, that I need to find the voice for Dialogue writing the same way I must continually, for each editor, find the voice for the Guardian, X the same way I occasionally find the voice for here...

[*since writing that I've read this in Dreamtigers by Borges, which more precisely articulates that feeling of wrongness:

As I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.

Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.]

If I'd had more time a month ago, I'd have finished writing something I'd started on the Radar Platform on criticism at the Bush, an invigorating event in which Sean Holmes of the Lyric Hammersmith talked inspiringly about a realisation that struck him post-Three Kingdoms: that people are hungry for different theatre, theatre that challenges and surprises and even confuses them, and they don't really care what the reviews say, they will come if it's offered. But they're not being offered it because artistic directors are not being brave. I've thought about his speech a lot in the past few days, although for a disconnected reason: I've been kicking off about the Royal Court again (and, less venomously, the National, because of Curious Incident and The Effect), this time for not being bolder with main-space programming, locking writers of new work into the tiny upstairs space (and thus denying that space to others, with whom they might be taking a genuine risk), fuelling the accusations of elitism hurled at theatre by chasing the buzz of a sold-out show. Mostly I subscribe to the Andy Field argument against bigness, agreeing that the relentless quest for expansion in theatre replicates capitalism's drive for unlimited growth and all the hierarchies implicit in that – but the Court shows none of Andy's passion for or belief in the small, and in fact, with its hotline to the West End, follows precisely the trajectory that Andy rejects. Mostly I understand that some new plays are fragile, and some need time to find their feet, and some benefit from the proximity and concentration of the smaller space – but the Court rarely shows evidence of programming its upstairs room with those things in mind. Instead, it behaves cynically and without courage, and holds a position of such power and influence that it encourages others to do the same.

I'd have written, too, about how much I loved Ramin Gray's speech at the same event, which also lamented theatre's capitalist trajectory, and argued that mainstream (and particularly star-rated) criticism fuels it by writing about plays as commodities, hot news items, disposable entertainments, rather than nourishment for the soul. I'm of an age now, he said, where I'm not afraid to talk about spirituality out loud – and I felt my heart flip, because increasingly I want to talk about the “value” of theatre in spiritual terms but still find myself wary of the word. But it's there when I think about the difference between feeling and understanding a piece of theatre, an intellectual response and an emotional response – thinking sharpened that specific mid-November week by two shows.

One was Ramin's own production of Ivan Viripaev's Illusions, a crafty portrait of two marriages, and everything impossible to know within them, that made a couple of people who saw it the same night as me angry, because (they felt) no attempt had been made to solve the challenge of staging it as theatre. Sure enough, once the icy thrill of the first few pages of text abated, I momentarily wondered why I wasn't listening to Illusions on the radio – but figured that that way crossness lay, and basking in the twisty-turny stomach-churny feeling of it was going to give me more.

The other was Christopher Haydon's production of The Trojan Women, a show I'd invested lots in seeing (in that seeing it meant I never got to see Mike Bartlett's Medea or Stella Duffy's production of Ordinary Darkness, and almost missed out on Sight Is the Sense), but which, for reasons I found hard to fathom, barely moved me. There are all sorts of incidentals I want to blame: my own tiredness and the enormous efforts I had to make simply to stay awake; the woman directly opposite me actually sleeping through much of the show; the audience members to my right who looked bored; the students behind me whispering and rustling throughout – although that did inspire my very favourite moment, Dearbhla Molloy's Hecuba turning to them with finger to lips and twinkle in eye to shush them. But other people there the same night managed to filter those things out. And there was much I felt I couldn't blame: Caroline Bird's frequently clever translation; the incisive comedy; the fierce performances; the complex power politics between the three women and the men attempting to control them; the savage final moments when the baby is torn from the chorus; the video of the gods, which others felt was glib, but to me conveyed the terrible power beneath the gods' grotesque absurdity. At one point I had a thought that always irritates me when I hear it in my head: how differently would I be feeling if a woman had directed this? But that's poor thinking on my part. More useful to wonder if my problem was with the cerebral cool of the production. I left wondering why we do this: why we spend our nights in the theatre, in London a place of some privilege, distantly contemplating war and savagery and patriarchy's crushing of the human spirit, when these things are actually happening in the world and maybe we should be more actively participating to challenge them? Partly that thought came from a sense of guilt: much of that week was spent watching people on twitter raging about violence in Gaza (and, it feels slightly bathetic to add, about proposed cuts to the arts in Newcastle), and feeling pathetic and ineffectual for my failure to do anything, even just join the angry soundbite conversation. But guilt is a waste of emotion. And it wasn't really that: what I apprehended in The Trojan Women was the difference between a contemplation of war and savagery as an intellectual exercise, and feeling that savagery in your heart and bowels – spiritually, in a word. That's how Lucy Ellinson played the Chorus: watching her, I could feel not only the anger of her character but Lucy's own fury, the fury she had been expressing on twitter, about Gaza in particular, the fury of the powerless who know that to speak is to act is to move incrementally towards change. In Lucy's performance I could feel life and theatre and galvanised political action enmeshed. That was what I wanted from all of The Trojan Women. That is why we do this.

And now it's 2013, a year I saw in on Salisbury Crags, first at midnight, marvelling at the moonlight shadows (and yes, I did have the Mike Oldfield song in my head, certain it was by Fleetwood Mac), shivering with bliss at the sight of Orion and the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia beaming above and fireworks dancing across the horizon; and again later that afternoon, straggling behind the others with my smallest, marvelling at his strength and silliness and charm, not needing anyone else. This is the year he starts school, and I try not to wish away the months, but I'm so impatient, not just for writing or any of the other selfish pursuits (and the less time I spend sewing, the more sorry my wardrobe looks), but the changing-the-world, the small-scale stuff Josie Long challenged us all to do in Romance and Adventure, a bittersweet show with a trenchant heart that I just about caught at BAC, the lo-fi activism, or action, that demands a rethink of how you apportion your time.

Time time time. One of the most appealing conceits in all literature is the time turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that allows Hermione Granger to sit twice as many exams as anyone else. I'd use mine to live multiple lives. I'm no sci-fi reader and my knowledge of physics is less than rudimentary, but the notion of parallel universes has loomed large in my over-romantic imagination for decades. When I interviewed Nick Payne for G2, I wanted to play a game with him, where we told each other of the lives we live in parallel universes. Sitting down opposite this kindly regular guy in a grey suit with glasses, I chickened out: it felt too appallingly personal. I have so many, some more disturbing than others: the one where I'm a fashion designer and the one where I'm a painter and the one where I moved to New York at the age of 22; the one where I never married, the one where the love wasn't unrequited, the one where I'm divorced. The one where the car accident was fatal; the four where I simply gave up.

The basic laws of physics don't have a past and a present. Time is irrelevant at the level of atoms and molecules. It's symmetrical.

We have all the time we've always had.

You'll still have all our time.

There's not going to be any more or less of it.

What I realised watching Constellations for the second time – and it was so much better in the West End, the suicide strand less bludgeoning, the whole thing sharper and more electric – is that in all my parallel universes I do something else, and because of that I am someone else. The genius at the core of Constellations is that the opposite is true: whatever happens between those two characters, they are always the same characters, with the same jobs, the same awkwardnesses, the same bad jokes and propensity to embarrass themselves, fucking up in all the same ways. Payne is entirely unsentimental: there is nowhere perfect. Mistakes and sorrow are everywhere, and every life ends in death. I love him for that.

In the past few weeks I've felt as though I've given myself a magic gift of extra time, simply by abandoning Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea on page 152 (of seemingly millions) and reading other books instead. The Sea, the Sea is clearly brilliant: the writing mimics the sea itself, its inexorability, its inscrutability, its scintillating beauty. But oh god is the book's narrator annoying. A theatre director renowned for his productions of Shakespeare, a former actor, an incorrigible, self-obsessed womaniser, he made me think so acutely of Trevor Nunn (not that I've ever, you know, met Trevor Nunn) that a few pages were enough to make his company feel unbearable and by page 152 I was in despair. So I gave up. To cheer myself up, and because I'd recently come across the Brautigan Book Club, I read my first Richard Brautigan in maybe a decade, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, and it was gorgeous. It's told by a man who works in a library that doesn't lend books but receives them: the labours of love that people scrawl into notebooks and take to him with shyness, gratefulness and the subconscious knowledge that they are idiosyncratically articulating the soul of America. He lives there with Vida, who arrives with a rant against her own voluptuous body, and finds with him the possibility of self-acceptance. At first the book felt oddly written, because it apparently unfolds with all the banality of unedited everyday speech. And what's so brilliant about this is that when Vida realises she's pregnant, and has to travel across the Mexican border to Tijuana for an abortion, you implicitly understand that abortion is banal too, a difficult but necessary physical process, a right that shouldn't be demonised or criminalised. The book feels all the more potently political for its understatement.

After that, my first Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's, which was subtle in different but also brilliant ways. It's a portrait of a marriage slowly dying of compromise, distraction and mutual disappointment, buffeted by the second world war, persisting through the resignation of the wife, a glorious, sparky, irreverent woman who loves the Brontes and refuses to conform to anyone's expectations, least of all her buttoned-up husband's. Her heart cools and she is tempted away but in the end she decides:

I never wanted to be a Madame Bovary. That way for ever – literature teaches us as much, if life doesn't – lies disillusion and destruction. I would rather be a good mother, a fairly good wife, and at peace.

Which seems as good a new year resolution as any. As for Taylor, I want to emulate her precision, her elegance, her emotional acuity, in the stories I keep saying I'll write, when there is more time...

my head's in a haze

You'd think I'd have Shrew out of my system by now, but apparently not. I wrote the last post much too quickly, hurling it out before moving on to the next thing, so it's super-scrappy and missed out whole strands of argument, many of which emerged in the comments on the piece in G2. The one that has particularly bugged me is the idea that Petruchio does Katherine a favour: he shows her that to treat people violently, to thrash out at others not necessarily indiscriminately, but as an externalised expression of your own self-loathing, is unacceptable and merely reinforces your own unhappiness. It's one thing for her to tie up her sister's hands and clout her: that's what siblings are for (spoken like a true older sister). But Kate also smashes a lute over Hortensio's head, is unable to express herself other than rudely, demands respect from her father while showing none. Lisa Dillon was good on this: she thinks what Katherine achieves with Petruchio is “a growth and a maturity. She's disgracefully immature to begin with. Most of the time she deserves what she gets [ie the epithets of shrew and mad], because she's fuelling it all the time. But she finds a place of balance, for the first time ever in her life, because of this man.”

Approach the play with this understanding and you can read Petruchio's violence completely differently: as a show, designed to make Katherine rethink her own behaviour. Nichola McAuliffe suggests (and I think she's right, that it's there, if subtly, in the text) that Petruchio's servants are bewildered by his erratic, pugnacious behaviour: he doesn't usually treat them this way, and the point of him doing so is to reflect Katherine back at herself. And it works: Katherine, in standing up for the servants, begins to appreciate the value of respect. She finds in herself calm, and patience, and a kind of gratitude: she realises how much in life she has taken for granted before now. If Petruchio has killed something in her, it's her toxic rage at the world – and only kindness could assuage that. There was something lovely Kathryn Hunter said: Katherine's story is “the journey of a person who's learned how to play again”. To begin with, “she's rebelling against the kind of constraints that are expected of her, to get married and to conform, she's hitting against that and is angry with everyone, to the extent that she's lost her sense of humour. I think something happens in their relationship, it suddenly clicks and she gets it back, and then she's able to love him and say, 'So you want me to play that game? OK, I'll play it.' She finds a freedom within constraints. She finds freedom.” It's the freedom of happiness and security; OK, it's the freedom of a traditionally structured marriage, where Petruchio is her “keeper”, but 400-odd years ago, that was pretty much the best a woman could hope for.

I'm starting to feel like Shrew is an itch that will never sufficiently be scratched. So I'm going to stop – although first, there was something else that came out of the piece that has troubled me a lot. The day it was published I had an email from Tim Crouch, querying the assumptions projected by my throwaway comment that Bailey's production is the third from the RSC in a decade, fourth if you count his adaptation for young people. We had both agreed, while chatting on the phone, that it was really sad that only Dominic Cavendish had reviewed his production, and that this was symptomatic of the lack of value placed on work for children and teenagers. And the way I'd phrased myself, it looked as though I was collaborating in the same devaluation that I usually bemoan. I've been feeling entirely ashamed of myself: I knew I was being glib even as I wrote it, and Tim was absolutely right to call me on it.

Believe it or not, I've been thinking about stuff other than Shrew over the past week. I've been mulling on L'Immediat, which I saw at the Barbican with Lyn Gardner, and probably really annoyed her with all my fidgeting. I found the show exhausting, really draining to watch. The first sequence – Matt Trueman made a point similar to this – is like the entirety of Michael Frayn's Noises Off condensed into 10 minutes of stomach-churning chaos. When one of the performers started scrambling up a tower of cardboard boxes that I hadn't even noticed, despite it reaching up to the lighting rig, I instinctively pushed myself right back into my chair to brace myself against its inevitable collapse. Where I disagree with Matt is in finding the rest of the show a deflation of that first sequence. What follows is quieter, but all the more desperate for it. There is an extraordinary, devastating scene when the cast attempt to re-set the stage, and someone's arm emerges from the rubble. It's as though we're seeing the survivor of an earthquake, or a bomb, reaching out for help, praying to be saved – but instead of pulling the person out, the rest of the cast merely shrug and pile furniture above the trapped body, higher and higher, until what they've created is a pyre (let's burn humanity at the stake!), a tower of landfill (see the detritus of materialism!), a curiously hopeful – because it is secure, this structure, it's architecturally sound – sculpture constructed from the flotsam and jetsam of our lives (not dissimilar to the exhilarating, and themselves farcical, creations of Phyllida Barlow). With newspapers full of images of the Costa Concordia lying on its side in the sea, it was hard to watch the tilting sequence – slowly, deliberately, everything on stage, furniture and bodies and black satin curtains and lights and props, is tilted to the same 30-degree angle – and not think of sinking ships. The agonising, funny in a toe-curling way, sketch of people fighting to reach a plastic bottle, struggling against their own refractory bodies, competing and losing and yet never allowing themselves to be defeated, had the clang of Beckett about it: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” For all its humanity, it's an oddly inhumane piece, furiously demanding of its performers, so precisely choreographed that you're loathe to blink in case you miss a detail, even if that detail exposes the fragility of the timing, the vulnerability of the enterprise. My exhaustion was that of undivided attention; I found it draining because, for all the laughter, it is a relentlessly sorrowful work.

It's been a good week for extracurricular activities, too. I've made an infinitesimally small leap – more of a nudge, really – towards finally fulfilling some sewing projects, with progress on the all-new basic pattern block, designed to fit perfectly my all-new, still surprising, occasionally demoralising, post-childbearing shape. I've tried out another basic, this one from the awe-inspiring Pattern Magic books, and my Mum, who is herself a magician with patterns, from a combination of experience and formidable instinct, gave me a hand with the fitting over Christmas. There is such quick, calm efficiency about her as she folds and creases the paper to shift the darts and eliminate excess fabric; the process is as delicate, transparent, yet mystifying, as origami. On Tuesday I cut out a toile from the edited pattern; if it fits then I'll be all set for the 40s/50s dress-making class that starts next term.

Tap class, which started three weeks ago, is unspeakably brilliant. I spend the entire time there giddy and grinning and glowing fuchsia-pink, partly because it's bloody hard and I'm always getting the steps wrong (I have no instant aptitude for intricate, particularly repetitive, body movements; I had the same problem trying to play guitar when I was a teenager, although back then I had no patience for practice, either: at least I've now acquired that), partly because it's surprisingly good exercise. My route home takes me past Crazy for You, which I saw in December: it was so adorable, cheerful and spirited and depression-defying (the narrative itself is, plus I had only just left the Actionettes), that I left feeling almost effervescent and started looking for tap classes the next day. Somewhat unfortunately, the route also takes me past the Delauney; I sidled in yesterday and am relieved to report that the coconut and pineapple dacquoise didn't taste quite as good as it looked: the pineapple puree was too sweet, and made the bottom layer of coconut macaroon soggy where it should have been crisp. There's still the cheesecake and the sachertorte to try before I dismiss the place outright, but chances are moderate that it won't become a weekly compulsion, which would be ruinous in more ways than one. It's bad enough that I can't go within 200 paces of Maison Bertaux without popping in for a macaroon. I did, however, exceedingly enjoy eating the dacquoise while waiting for the bus, licking every smudge of cream from my fingers, standing outside Boots, directly in front of a large advertisement for half-price weight-watching products. It's the little things in life …

Lots of musical activity this week, too. I finally listened to the new Andrew Bird and it's exquisite, so here's a song from that:

and the Laura Gibson album, La Grande: she's not someone I've paid much attention to before, but this song is brilliant, all shooting stars and Amazon queens and wild animals prowling through the undergrowth:

After a lot of avoiding him, because on first listen (several months ago) he honestly just seemed scary, I suddenly clicked with DM Stith, and had an especially heady moment with Fire of Birds, so here's that:

A breakthrough, too, with Wilco's The Whole Love, which I'd shaken hands with a couple of times last year, but hadn't taken the time to chat to: I don't think it will ever be a close friend like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Summerteeth, but we'll keep in touch.

Honestly, no wonder I was accused this week of knowing nothing about Motown. It's in the comments below my review of Martha Reeves, a show I really tried to be positive about, but failed. I suspected disaster might be afoot when I went to the toilets before the show began and there were leopard-print tiles on the walls. One unexpected consequence of reading How To Be a Woman is that I now have a disquieting desire for a leopard-print coat (page 215, number one on the list of fashion rules: Leopardskin is a neutral. Oh, the power of suggestion). I thought it was a vague fancy that could be easily silenced, but then I met up with the magical Betty Clarke and wore hers (vintage, an ebay buy, calf-length, very luxurious, but the fur was the softest, palest grey colour – I'd ruin it within minutes) and the desire became all-consuming. Of course, when a thought like that enters your brain, you become weirdly possessed (OK, maybe it's just me): now it seems everywhere I go I spot another one. Mostly they are too short, too straight, too modern-looking, so clearly I'm going to have to make my own. The picture I have in my mind is knee-length, fitted to the waist but flaring out, with a big, sweeping collar. I've sewn with leopard-print fake fur before, making a cave-woman frock for an Actionettes show in Benidorm (a multitude of don't asks), and it's blessedly easy, primarily because it doesn't fray. Knowing me, the coat will be ready just in time for summer in 2016.

Anyway, it was fine seeing leopard-print coats everywhere, but the minute I saw these leopard-print tiles I remembered that hilarious, terrifying riff in Mark O'Rowe's coruscating Howie the Rookie, about the – was it American Indian? South American? - people who believe that your death will be presaged by some vision that will inexorably present itself to you once, twice, thrice, its import unknown until death deals its fatal blow. Like I say, I'm susceptible – and the leopard-print tiles made me pause, and shiver, just slightly.

I won't repeat what I thought of Martha's singing, there's no need. Still, one good thing did come of that show. When she played Heatwave, it was all I could do to stop myself leaping out of my chair and doing what's affectionately known in the Actionettes' camp as the Brucie; when she started demonstrating the pony and the swim and the mashed potato and the funky chicken, my heart began to ache and wouldn't stop. The truth is, the past two months of not being an Actionette have been miserable, and they haven't even been doing that much. So, I've rejoined. Yay! In celebration, here is a completely ridiculous video of go-go girls: it's from a Greek film, whose name translates, splendidly, as Ah That's My Wife.

goodbye to the dancing queens

I've been thinking about leaving the Actionettes for a while now, and in my drama-queen way it's always felt like contemplating sawing off one of my own limbs using a rusty bread knife. Apart from anything else, performing with them has long been my single atonement for the sins of criticism, my meagre attempt to give something back to the world. But last week it finally happened. For a few days afterwards I felt a bit like I did after a big car accident several years ago: fine, perhaps relieved, quite possibly numb with shock, replaying the events over and over in my head as though to confirm their reality. I still remember the song I was singing to myself when I had the accident: Nosferatu Man by Slint (how's that for ridiculous melodrama?). The song that came up on my mp3 player, moments before I realised I had finally decided to say goodbye, scouring my mind to clarity, was this one:

“You won't find it by yourself, you're gonna need some help, and you won't fail with me around, come on let's go.” Oh, Trish Keenan. I've idolised her for so long; I'm still mourning her death earlier this year. Based on nothing more than listening to her songs, I always felt there was something brave and uncompromising about her: she lived by her own truth, and made/makes me want to live by mine.

So there was that in my head that fateful (drama queen!!) Thursday morning, and there was this: a shard of Hal Hartley's 1991 short Ambition.

Dwell on uncomplicated beauty: the landscape, the sun on your face. Nothing touches you. Keep the image of your death cheerfully before you at all times. Gain perspective. Seek to clarify and comfort, not to obscure or mystify. Your aspirations are pointless; your ambitions come to nothing.

I've carried these words in my head for half my life: they were a teenage mantra, although I realise now my fallible memory conveniently let slip that final, trenchant line. And I know, I know: written out plain, in this context, the words clang with hyperbole. No wonder the adolescent me clung to them. But within the film itself – which, by the glorious power of youtube, I've just watched for the first time in maybe a decade, revelling in its note-perfect oddity, the violence of its choreography, its concision and starkness of expression – these words radiate a kind of hope. Instead of the selfish pursuit of personal aggrandizement, choose friendship, kindness, humanity. Instead of money or fame, seek truth and beauty. As a teenager, I felt there were words of warning here; as a thirtysomething – and this film is so the work of someone starting out on their 30s, shaking off the gung-ho confidence of their 20s (a confidence you don't even know you have) and struggling to figure out what meaning can be achieved – I find solace. I know I'm being laughed at a little bit, but I can hear Hartley laughing at himself, too. He asks the same questions I ask, and to hear him do so both pains and assuages me. I'm pretty sure I'll never gain perspective – but, in a funny way, leaving the Actionettes has been one way of trying to.

time for you to put yourself on

I've spent an unusual amount of time this past month at Sadler's Wells, which is a bit dangerous with an Actionettes show coming up (Night of the Shimmying Dead, October 29 at the Buffalo Bar – come!): I'm prone to feel frustrated by our myriad shortcomings as an amateur group anyway, and watching dance fills me with a painful yearning to over-reach my meagre capacities and push my body to do the unexpected and transcendent. I interviewed Emily Browning recently and tattooed under her arm are some words by Martha Graham, “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching”, culled from this stern yet tremblingly beautiful letter to Agnes de Mille. I'd never encountered the letter before, but oh God do I recognise the unrest, and I don't usually find it that blessed, either.

One of my favourite things about watching dance is trying to figure out what emotion or story is being communicated: I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy programmes, and maybe I prefer the thrill of the interpretative chase. At Tezuka, the impossibly sweet new piece by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, all the exposition you'd find in a programme was delivered from the stage: potted histories of Japan and the atomic fallout, of Osamu Tezuka's youth and politics, of the radicalism of manga and the philosophical import of his characters. For reviewers, most of whom were a bit sniffy about the show, this was one of its umpteen drawbacks, but I loved the earnest, burbling quality of these verbal interpolations, the fanboy flood of information. I loved, too, the way it shifted constantly: one moment it was childish, showing us a boy rolling around with excitement reading his manga book, or a paper robot-monster stomping up the stage; then darkly, erotically adult, especially in the grappling duet between a priest and a half-naked gamin; or serenely abstract, with groups of dancers weaving and curling in exquisite physicalisations of the Japanese script.

If Tezuka was all about inviting you to share an obsession, the Sylvie Guillem show 6000 Miles Away kept its audience somewhat at a distance. Or maybe I just needed to read the programme to understand the thinking behind the knife-sharp, cracklingly tense moves of the first piece, Rearray: without it, the duet felt impressive technically but emotionally cold. I preferred the other piece, Bye, which has Guillem bursting through a white doorway dressed like a frowzy 1950s librarian (one of my favourite looks), escaping to dance and enjoy herself while members of the family arrive one by one to peer at her quizzically. If I'd grasped that the piece is about the daily tug-of-war between self-fulfilment and social responsibility, between art and family commitments, I probably would have watched it through a blur of tears. As is was, I was more gently amused and moved.

The same struggle is explored in Quarantine's Entitled, an absorbingly odd show, playful yet painful. What it deals with, as Lyn points out in her brilliant review, is the chasm between what we think we want out of life and how we feel about what we have. We watch technicians set the stage up and dismantle it again without the “show” ever really happening. Because what is the show? What is it that makes all the humdrum architectural, organisational activity that life requires – the endless cooking of meals and washing of dishes, brushing of teeth and buttoning of coats, paying of bills and dealing with emails – feel worthwhile? There is an extraordinary moment when one of the dancers, Fiona Wright, steps forward and asks us directly: if I haven't had children, is my life worthwhile? I wanted to tell her that “children” are not a simplistic solution to doubt and anxiety and confusion, but a terrifyingly complicated amplification of that doubt and anxiety and confusion. But someone's mobile phone went off and broke the spell. And anyway, I had already done my bit of participation: I'd jumped on stage and tried to learn Sonia Hughes' brilliant routine to Jump to the Beat so I could teach it to the Ettes, once again failing to realise that what my mind wants and what my body can do are not the same thing.

For me, the answer to that worth question is making stuff, although I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to settle on what to make. In that sense, I felt a wistful twinge of jealousy of Akram Khan: if I could devote myself to one thing long enough to make something even a fraction as beautiful as Desh I'd be ecstatic. The piece deals with ethnicity, how we come to terms with who we are and what made us. In an early scene, Khan itches and quivers across the stage, tearing at his skin, trying to remove something embedded there. This is probably a misinterpretation – judging by reviews, he's attempting to negotiate the hustle and bustle of Dhaka – but it looked to me as though Khan was buffeted by and struggling against the Bangladesh that's lodged in his own body. We don't want our parents' country (in my case, Cyprus) itching at our bones; we don't want to deal with this other culture and language and folklore and national pride, all of which seem so alien to us. But that other homeland has been given to us in our genes and one day or another it will assert itself, seeping through our blood to erupt from our mouths and claim our fingers.

Scenes in which Khan argued with his father (whom Khan embodies, adorably, by painting eyes and mouth on to his own bald pate and balancing his forehead on his arm as a chin), then struggled to interest his own daughter in her heritage, felt so familiar to me. As a child I refused to learn Greek; since having children, I hear Greek words spilling out of me – far more with my son than with my daughter, which is frightening, as Cypriot women are dangerously soppy about their sons. Like my parents before me, I want my children to feel this foreignness inside them. I want to fill their heads with other words, with stories of Persephone and Demeter, Orpheus and Narcissus, Aphrodite and Arachne. There is an unspeakably beautiful sequence in Desh in which Khan, narrating a folk tale to his daughter, begins to inhabit it, digital images surrounding him with a forest of bristling trees and fluttering fireflies. If we have to turn into our parents, at least let's do it in a way that feels magical.

Most of the making I do, inevitably, happens in the kitchen, and it's here, too, that I connect most with my heritage. I can't communicate with my grandmother but I can cook like her: fasoulia, koubebkia, magarounia, kofte. A few years ago at my auntie's house in Greece, I tasted her home-made baklava for the first time and it was a revelation: crunchy, sticky, sweet but not sickly. I finally prised the recipe out of her and the two times I've made it myself it's been a small triumph. So here's my auntie Era's recipe, with a few wee tweaks of my own.

Auntie Era's baklava

I use a Pyrex dish, 30x22x5, for this: you take a knife to it, which is why I don't use a metal tin. Pre-heat the oven to 160 or thereabouts – it wants an hour in the oven to become golden, so use whatever temperature will allow it that length of cooking time

filo pastry – I use Jus-Rol, because it's all I can find in Sainsbury's and I'm not yet insane enough to make my own, and need about a packet and a half

butter – roughly 50g – melted

400g nuts – I use 200g pistachios and 200g almonds – roughly chopped

to which you add: 1tsp ground cinnamon; half tsp ground cloves; 2 level tbsp sugar; 1 tbsp dry breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs (I crush up two cream crackers, which seems to do the trick)

Brush some melted butter over the tin, then start layering the filo, brushing butter between each layer – I use about six sheets here. Sprinkle over half of the nuts mixture, then do another four filo-butter layers, sprinkle over the other half of the nuts mixture, then do another six or so filo-butter layers.

Now you have to cut the baklava diagonally, first in one direction, then the other, to make bite-sized diamond-shaped pieces – make sure the knife goes all the way to the bottom of the tin. Push a whole clove into each piece to hold the pastry in place. Sprinkle it all over with water, then bake it for an hour until golden brown.

15 minutes before it comes out of the oven, make the syrup: you need a glass (approx 250ml) of water, and the same glass of sugar, which you put in a saucepan with a stick of cinnamon, three cloves, the rind of half a lemon and a squeeze of lemon juice. Put it on a medium heat, stir it to dissolve the sugar then boil for at least five but more like 10 minutes.

The very second you pull the baklava out of the oven, pour the syrup over and listen to it sizzle. Leave the syrup to soak in for at least half an hour before tucking in. It will keep for a few days just with a tea-towel to cover it.

Incidentally, as long as you have suitable breadcrumbs/crackers, you can make this vegan by substituting the butter for Stork margarine – I've tried it and couldn't tell the difference.

excuses, excuses

My head is swimming with stuff I want to write about here: X the Hofesh Shechter show I saw at Sadlers on Saturday night; the lemon/rosemary/olive oil cake recipe I'm tinkering with; my slow surrender to Deerhunter (Halcyon Digest plays as I write). X I feel rather guilty for not buckling down, but all available time, and even a lot of unavailable time, has been consumed for the past few weeks by two things: preparing for the Actionettes' gig at Vintage on Saturday 30th July and the art course I've been doing at Morley.

Actionettes first: we're making new frocks for the occasion and so far mine is going disastrously. Tonight I cut out my third attempt at the lining: thank the stars I didn't go straight in with the actual fabric (spangly black paisley – looks better than it sounds) because I'd have run out by now. I just can't seem to get a bodice pattern right any more; or, as my husband gently pointed out, I've simply become fussier about fit since doing a pattern-cutting course earlier this year. We're also learning a new dance, the brilliant work of Miss Silhouette, to this song:

So that's all busy busy. And then there's Morley. I've been aching to start painting again for years and finally hit a point of such agonised frustration that I signed up for their pre-foundation in art course. Essentially it's a portfolio builder/introduction to the basic disciplines: I went thinking I might get stuck back in with oil paints, but instead have been wrestling with chicken wire and discovering what effects you can achieve by mixing charcoal with PVA. It's been exhilarating, infuriating, challenging and absorbing; I haven't much liked anything I've made, but it hasn't mattered because – cliche alert – I've loved the process, passionately.

The final two weeks of the course are going to be spent preparing for and mounting our debut exhibition, open from July 29-August 4, in Morley's Landing Gallery, which sounds almost grand until you visit the space itself: two corridors separated by a flight of stairs, in the characterless depths of the building, with no space for 3D work and a sterile glare to the lighting. Still, we all have to start somewhere. Not that I know what I'm starting, or where I'm going. Until my smallest small person is a bit less small, I don't feel I can carry on with the studying; I have grand plans to continue making work at home, but fear that without the imposition of structured deadlines it might fall by the wayside. Ot maybe it's the validation that the course provides that I need. One thing I do know is that I don't want to feel that agonized itching in my heart any more. Starting to write here calmed it a little; Morley has soothed it a little more.

Before I go, here's something lovely from Deerhunter: