A rare feeling this morning, in front of the blank page. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way, completely stuck. No inspiration, no idea of how to move forward. Just stuck.
I reach into the electronic note where I store prompts, using this place to record certain ideas as they occur to me, revealing themselves in the midst of the rest of life.
I glance through this list of odd words, and try again, and twice abandon efforts after only a few paragraphs, as the words will not flow today. The feeling is of helplessness, and I revert to instead making notes on another little project, looking for something - anything - to ensure this is not a total waste of time.
My last resort is Alistair Cooke’s “The Magnificent Mania”, a series of essays on golf that my late father gave me one Christmas, decades ago. Cooke’s voice on Letter from America was, along with that of Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs, one of the sacred sounds of my childhood, emerging from the ancient Roberts radios my parents lived with. Even now, I can’t read his glorious prose in anything other than his voice, and after one sentence - the first one in the book - I am in an even worse state than before.
“They have been playing golf for eight hundred years, and nobody has satisfactorily said why” begins Chapter One, and if I was feeling helpless before, now I am utterly hopeless. I have no idea what I am trying to write, or why, but this hero of mine has now cut off any likelihood of today’s doomed writing session going well. Not only has he pointed out that, after centuries, there is unlikely to be anything new worth saying, but he has done it with such a degree of effortless style that it feels futile to even try.
I wonder if this experience of seeing Cooke’s mastery in front of me is what it would feel like to play with Sandy, or perhaps Couples, and watch them flush it with such grace, while I rely on the heel and the toe for any contact at all, and perhaps, on a morning like this, whiff it altogether, or contract the yips. I must cut a pitiful silhouette, hunched over my desk while the world is asleep.
It’s a strange vibe, this awkward, frozen state. Robert Pirsig coined the phrase “gumption trap” for the equivalent situation in the context of mechanical work, and talked about how, when it strikes, you’d better stop trying, move on to something else. So I do, but not before I realise that it feels much like that state which manifests over the golf ball now and then, when there is a challenging drive to hit, and the club feels alien in your hands, much like the pen does now.
On the golf course, when this hits, I will have no idea what my swing will do, but I know it won’t go well. Writing this I realise that I’d never before thought of golf as an art form, as we tend to think in a more mechanical way about the process of hitting the ball, worrying about technique instead of letting the swing flow, like the ink does on days other than this one. I make a note of this thought, and imagine myself later, struggling to remember what exactly “art form” was recorded in relation to.
The dog is pleasantly surprised at the jangling noise of her lead, as it will remain dark for sometime yet, and it is again very cold outside, but I need to get away from this feeling and fast, so we head for the canal. We walk on the towpath, as deserted as it was in the daylight hours a year ago, as lockdown prevailed, and I slip in some headphones, and start to listen to the latest edition of The Golfers Journal podcast.
Episode 99 is a discussion between the host Tom Coyne and the guest, a university lecturer named Matt Chominski, about the application of philosophy in our golfing attitudes, and the topic and their dialogue might have been chosen for me, so closely does it run with my mindset around this game. In the bleakness of this blocked state I came out to escape from, it occurs to me that another idea for a book has been rendered pointless, as these two have beaten me to it, with a great deal more panache to boot.
But the conversation is enjoyable, and I start to perk up a bit, and then Chominski says something about the type of friendships that golf involves, and his wife asking him, after four hours in the company of his dad on the course, “how’s he doing?”, a question to which he has no answer, apart from “I don’t know, I’ve no idea…he shot like an 86, he’s doing great”. And with this snippet, some part of this mysterious lump of grey matter between my ears awakens, and suddenly I am firing again, desperate to both get back to my trusty notepad, and perhaps later to that familiar position above the ball.
For the stuck feeling has gone, for now, and in the faint light of this chilly winter’s morning, the colours in the local graffiti suddenly seem vibrant, and I feel no longer inhabited by self-doubt or confusion. I am alive with possibility again, sending myself more notes so these thoughts don’t get forgotten. I notice a strange clay dragon at the top of the peaked roof of a house I’ve walked past and missed a million times, and see crusty patterns in the footprints on the path where five minutes ago there seemed to be none; it was just mud.
Back home, I fill and put on the kettle, thinking of Pirsig again, as a pot of coffee was always his first point of call when standing baffled in front of an engine assembly, and it occurs to me how he’d have appreciated the podcast I will wait until later to finish. I don’t think he golfed, but he was coming at the same sort of themes from different angles.
I check my note file, and the word “Bubble” sits there, a repeat thought from a few days earlier, but one which until this morning had nothing to go with it, no meat on the bone. But the podcast has struck a chord for me here, for while I get to play golf with different people, from varied walks of life, there are some with whom I will never get into the finer detail of the rest of their life, nor they mine. Not on purpose, and not out of ignorance or a lack of interest, but because we are golfing instead, and this is time out from the rest of our days, and our responsibilities. Like we’re too busy living an important part of the life we want in those few hours to waste time talking about the rest of it.
This addiction, golf, is our bubble, and it serves the same purpose for me, this time on the course, as the bubbles we form to limit the spread of Covid, which is what I think I was getting at the first time I recorded a note of the word without further explanation. The game keeps me in line, content, temporarily withdrawn from the chaos of the rest of it. Golf is a happy place, a safe place, and unless that frozen feeling strikes there also, I always come back feeling better from the time I spend there. Like those people who leap into the freezing sea every morning, I return from golf a better person, regardless of how I played.
So I carry on with the day, and wonder if I can indeed tweak the afternoon’s plans to include a little golf, just so I can feel as happy as the dog seems to be with both her early walk, and with my suddenly excellent mood. And lest I take myself too seriously in all this reflection, Chominski casually discusses which philosophers might make good golfers, and that playing alongside Kierkegaard - perhaps the main reason I dropped philosophy at University, the miserable soul - would make for a slow round.
The family are starting to move upstairs, and the day will start all over again shortly, but I have by this point been through the gamut of emotion, and have already forgotten and then remembered so much about what gets me out of bed in the morning. Golf and writing; writing and golf. It’s going to be another good day…
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