Pitchmarks #105 - “Still Life”

And this still life is all I ever do
But it's still, still life
But it's still, still life
But it's still, still life

“Still Life”, by Suede (from “Dog Man Star”)

Towards the end of last year, on my 50th birthday, I started writing a blog. One that wasn’t about golf - wasn’t really about anything in particular - but one that felt like what I needed to do, somehow. Deeper, more reflective writing. Even more rambling than this, if you can imagine such a thing. As a way to improve, and as a way to notice this strange transition to what feels like the second half of life. Woody Allen once quipped that he wanted “to achieve immortality by not dying”. As a young man, I laughed at that, and at his paranoid obsession with death. Now, as I start to notice people of my era quietly slipping from their perches, I think I know what he meant.

Three years earlier, I’d taken a pause - an intentional break from life’s eternal treadmill - and from somewhere inside, the urge to write stopped prowling and started yelling, and these twin acts of ejecting from the head’s choices and following the heart’s had been both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. I felt a similar surge in intensity in writing this other material. For sixty-six days - the first sixty-six early mornings of this life beyond 50 - I wrote something or other for next to no-one. Only a handful of people opened the links, but that didn’t matter, as I wrote them for me.

Then one of that handful of people - maybe we’ll call him Dylan, to protect the relatively innocent - sent me something precious in the mail. A photograph that seemed mysterious, and soulful - as in full of soul. And Dylan’s thought was that maybe it would be a trigger for some thought or other in me, and that - if I wanted to - I’d write about it. And now - weeks and weeks and weeks later - I’m still thinking about that photo, and the old Hasselblad medium format camera in which its gestation occurred. And thinking about the magical process of immersion in a creative act - be it a still life photo that takes your breath away, or a short story that breaks your heart, or a delicate chip and run that lips out and thereby manages both.

No one but Dylan could know what that landscape said to him at the fleeting moment when the shutter fell, but we can all gaze at beautiful things and draw our own conclusions, and inspirations. The focus caught a ripe apple that I could almost taste through the paper, sat on some ancient slab of rock. For me, it just whispered “Still Life”, as if it were a clue to let that self-imposed daily deadline lapse for a while, and take another pause, and not be in such a damned hurry the whole time.

It sounds morbid, but I have started to notice when I hear the term deadline used, for we seem to imagine them all around us, all the time; yet we act as if the real deadline - the line beyond which nothing more can be said or written or photographed - is a thousand years away. I think you have to be a bit of an optimist to try and write or to play golf in the first place - that and/or an idiot - but at 50 even the most stubborn optimist must start to feel they’re moving beyond the halfway hut in terms of their allotted stretch, and heading into the back nine.

And so this “Still Life” that sits before me on my desk as it has since day 66, only now with a name, serves as a reminder not only to get on with the things I want to do, but also to take the time to pause and work out what those things are. We don’t do enough of this, and will waste precious hours and years climbing ladders that are leaning against the wrong walls. And the sort of presence that “Still Life” seems to radiate sounds like an increasingly urgent call to me.

Dylan turned 50 this week, and I had no idea what to give him, for we all know how hard it is to find gifts for the person with everything. Let alone for the person who wants nothing. We tread a similar path, Dylan and I - leaning increasingly towards the arts, mooching around for meaning. Not really interested in “stuff” anymore, if you discount an obsession with blades (of the golfing variety). So I’ll opt for a gift that might bring another little pause our way, another dose of the good life, sauntering between the bunkers and the gorse bushes. Looking for small wins lurking in the big whins. With the breeze and the birds for company. I’ll offer up some dates for golf.

Taking another dose of the “Still Life” while we can. “To the Linksland”, indeed.