Ramadhan - Creativity Six

Six Day

Today's piece of creativity got lost. A friend of mine is leaving Brighton tomorrow for South America, with her male counterpart, to travel down and along the continent for six months. "Six months!" I said to her in a way that would definitely have required an exclamation mark if I had typed it up. "That's a long time!" I had made her a mix-cd of music especially for the purposes of listening to whilst travelling, knowing as I do how welcome music can sometimes be in strange environments. I forgot to write down the track-listing for the CD, but now that I think about it, a track-listing of songs would be a pretty awful update for today. I think it would be even more interesting if I describe some background, and I'll see where that takes me.

This very small girl is one of two friends I met working as a waiter in the Hilton Metropole Hotel in Brighton a few years ago. I was the only non-foreign worker there. I worked there twice, Christmas '03 and then Christmas '04. The second time I went back, with the same awful pay-rate as the previous year, was partially for the experience of seeing what many of the immigrants (most of them fairly young) do in Brighton do to earn their living. I wanted to be with them and exist with them. I waited on tables for various Brighton companies who were holding their Christmas parties. I once served one of my best friends, whose company had a Christmas party there. It was all quite fun, running around with chickens and potatoes on very hot plates, serving coffee, spilling coffee on one snobby man (and being happy that I did it) the general pressure of the job, which made the releases all the more explosive, like getting lost in the nether regions of the hotel, or being allowed permission to eat some of the exquisitely prepared cheesecake that was going to go to waste.

It was all very stressful on the whole, objectively speaking, but any experience is as fun as you choose to make it. It's just up to you to be creative with how you look at it. Since then I have worked in an even more hellish environment, an American coffee shop. A friend who worked there with me, Kate, once told me, as the never-ending queue of customers finally died down one day "I think of it like a game". All the customers coming, shouting out orders, having to keep up, it was all like a game to her, a challenge. She had her own little marker pens all with different colours (one of which she gave me as a present when I left) and all these other ways of making it 'fun'. What a creative way of dealing with it, I was full of admiration, and we had plenty of fun making coffees there. What a better way to look at it than having a chip on your shoulder and giving in to the stress?

Anyway, as for the job at the hotel, it turns out that I'd never have met these two friends had I not worked there. Had I not taken that job, and carried very hot plates of soup and Christmas puddings, I would never have had the opportunity of walking into the house of a 50-something man who lived halfway up a mountain in Southern Spain. Who gave me grapes from his garden, and bread from his own bakery, and olive oil from his own olives. It's funny how things connect, it's very, very funny.

The city of Brighton will be one person less, and the continent of South America will be one person more. I apologised to my friend for not having seen her for such a long time, and for once (this rarely happens) my hermit lifestyle almost made me feel bad. But as I explained to her, I had imposed this silence and quietness upon myself so that I could not only deal with my next bunch of musical and literary projects, but also because I needed to be away from people generally. And I did, and I still do. I've found that it's tied up with my creative and spiritual urges, an artist of life and an artist of art will often find themselves alone, whether through necessity or circumstance. Personally speaking I have no objections to this alone-time (indeed, it's more often than not self-imposed), despite the misery it can cause on the surface and in the beginning. I have no objections because it is the truth, and how can you object to the truth? We are indeed alone, and this life is to be faced, essentially, alone- with ourselves as our primary motivators for getting through it. Everything else is just lovely decoration, if we're lucky enough to get it, and be showered with it. Just don't get too carried away with it, that's what I've learnt.

And so, here's a song:

I walk and don't talk,
I sing a song,
Everybody's-got-white-headphones-on.

I daily dare,
I sit and stare.
Living on the window sill, out there.

When you come,
Close to me,
The sun shines bright on the Arabic pages.

Even if,
It's overcast,
The sun pays a visit to the sick on Friday.

-

[The truth bestows a visit on the lonely seeker. So he's not lonely no more.]

As I read a book containing the words of Sheikh Darqawi today, after returning home from the Friday prayer, the miserable weather suddenly changed, and the sun began flashing in and out onto the pages. I was sitting by a window. I knew it was clouds thinning out and the sun, always there, shining down, but I didn't want to turn around and see it all. I just kept on reading, in full knowledge that the reading of such words was obviously something that the sun shined on. The sun approved of. And the sun is like a puppet, and it is made to shine on certain things in certain ways, just like a puppet is made to look left or right.

So who controls the sun then?

Peace,

Y.Misdaq, Ramadhan 06, 1427