Celsius 233.77… Bonfire of the Vanities*
A dowdy cloudy pleasant Devon day, birds tweetle twerping in the trees above, with anticipation of the spring, so i got on with the hugely satisfying task of burning ALL of my old Morning Pages
Thats about 7 or 8 years worth, written in long hand, with an ink pen, usually florid but scratchy purple ink…
I don’t do them every day, that’d be daft(!), i mean i have far too many healthy / time consuming morning practices, but still its usually about once or twice a week… burnt them all the way right up to todays squib. hurrah!!
i was thinking have i only completed 12 volumes? but still at heart being a geek boy i did the maths:
80 pages each book is 160 sides x 12… 1920 sides, 3 a day so thats 640 days worth… 1 day takes me about 20 mins, so 213.333 hours of writing = 8.88888 F***ing days!!
So if i started now and wrote for 8.88888 days non stop, well my ink splotted finger would ache…but THAT is how much deeply engrained almost etched effort i burnt, ha!
and gosh it sounds like a hugely fortuitous number, presume it would be popular in china?… also think i might well apply to join the KLF? they done burn stuff good!
Oh just to clarify Morning Pages aren’t anything exciting like sordid gossip strewn diaries, sadly not, they’re a practice from the Artists Way
just write any old crap, splurge, get it out, get it out the way, loosen up, Art is process… let it flow!
mine are usually a pastiche of Morissey and Alan Bennet, but, yeah, blander!…
‘Why does nobody love me, forlorn, forsooth, my tea cup rattleth, why do i love nobody, is that the postman delivering letters to next door?… but never to me’ … etc for 8.888 days
Aw in truth away from the absurd lurid-o-delic falsehood world of facebook:
better i burn them than leave them for the kids to do so one day… i did do a small serious ritual to the elements, let things go, eh, gotta be good x
………….
hmm not often you get footnotes in a facebook post! bonus
*fahrenheit 451 (obvs!)
** Savonarola! i’m thinking Apocalyptic Medici Florence … not Tom Wolfe… far too much of an intellectual snob, tho i did love Elctric Kool Aid Acid Test when a youthful hippy!
hey mr influencer… profound apols couldn’t resist creating this monstrosity… when alan partridge meets the kardashians x
them be all the notebooks i burnt, beautiful gaudiness… aw i don’t know how to change my profile pic x
oh and just from genuine curiosity, if anyone who does morning pages ever meanders past here… what do you do with your old volumes?
burning would seem to be the most poetic response?
