Simplicity is something I value more and more despite my propensity to be the exact opposite. I try to do and be simple, and live simply in the face of a complicated and messy world and with myself, aka the Little Red Hen, aka Moi being a tad complicated and messy. Ohhhh for a non complicated self, a more non complicated mind and workspace!
As some kind of creative, I usually find within ‘simple’ is where I create the best. Ultimately ‘simple’ ends up being in the mind while designing and with the finished artifact, be it metal, a paper negative or words like these. The act of creating for me at least, it can look and be anything but ‘simple’. The journey in making is messy, usually, as hard as I try for it not to be.
Simplicity
more than just a pattern
Many won’t get this title, unless maybe they remember their Mum’s sewing in another life, with packets of patterns and pattern tracing paper as thin and whispy as the clouds on a summer day floating around on the carpet, or pinned to material before the cutting begins. Pattern pieces that when finished with would take a university degree to fold and slide back into the envelope nicely, as though they had never left. That pattern brand is called Simplicity.
As a Spotlight VIP shopper, here’s the proof! ie. Proof about the pattern company, not me shopping at Spotlight, LOL.
Some memory joggers for you.
To a younger version of myself, back in the day, they looked more like this. (below) And like the Womens Weekly my Mum left around the house as part of my sex education, I remember those sketches of long willowy curved looking women on the pattern packets. ( not curvaceous, but long lined curved, they were always Twiggyish and tall like Princess Diana, before she was even on the scene), they informed me somehow, they represented human kind. Looking back, they seem very very unreal, unrelatable even, and unless you were a movie star, I didn’t have any friends that ever looked like that! Tho strangely, now people can do real shizzle to look like exactly like that! Or fake it with their phones.
And men, some men could look like this back then, wearing the vestiges of a colonial hangover, holding a smoke even, back when cigarette packets told lies and were cool, until the contents killed you.
Today, they look more like this (below). Personally, as an aside, I can’t remember the last time I tucked a shirt in or was able too. Soooo uncool, and I find myself looking a tad mystified on encountering tucked in man stylz. (why would you do that!) I cock my head sideways with a quizical dog pondering look to check reality, like, am I seeing right? I know that’s bad of me, and I apologise if you tuck your shirt in. I have people I love who do that, it’s a generational thang!
But simplicity could be….
or…….universe have mercy,
or,
Simplicity. Maybe you can remember something around this, a sewing mum, or the pictures that shaped you as a kid and still lie dormant in the greymatter somewhere, and you know you will never maybe look like that, or most humans just don’t look like that.
I was reminded of simplicity being a wonderful thing at the supermarket the other day when out on a hunter gatherer mission to get food for the house. A house where the predominant grocery getter gatherer was down and out with a serious bout of the flu. She needed food. We all needed food! Things were hangry serious!
After parking the ‘car’ love of my life, the car for men comfortable in their own skin, when the only size you worry about is at the waistline and the size of ya undies……..or wheel rims, (Ractis rim size make tyres more expensive)…. I emerged from my Toyota Ractis in the rain and was immediately transfixed by the rain drops on the bonnet of the nearly red car parked next to me.
While it was not the exact wheelbarrow in my mind kinda red, I instantly, as you do, shared the poem that came to mind with the car’s occupants, who had the window down. (a mother and her daughter) Nice people they were too, they were actually interested in my little recital of the only poem I know by heart. Thankfully it was very short. I had asked them if I could take a photo of the raindrops on the bonnet and explained why.
They didn’t mind, which was nice. A person like me who is happy dispositionally and will talk to anything that moves, (and not insensitively or without boundaries) sometimes I can get looks and reactions to my happiness and open bookness that could tempt me to think negatively about moiself and my open heart of sleeve stylz, like it was a curse more than a blessing. I am ok being me.
After reciting the poem, and them both smiling and giving me a thumbs up, suddenly it seemed the world was less unfriendly, and maybe the election and the morons voting for trump didn’t control the universe after all, or the c u next Tuesday government in NZ. Maybe it will all be ok, maybe….I was OK after all!
They asked with smiles, ‘Who wrote that?’ ‘We will look it up’.
‘William Carlos Williams’, I replied, and then we parted company, most likely never ever to meet again, but both changed perhaps by a simple 3 minute encounter.
Here’s the car bonnet on that day.
Here’s the poem,
and apart from the ‘I must go down to the sea again…….to the lonely sea and the sky,’ kinda ditties, this is the only really serious poem I can recite completely, and one that I love dearly for it’s vivid colour and simplicity. It entered my life during the 1st year of my illustrious university career in 1976 while taking a 20th Century English Lit. paper with Roger Horrocks.
William Carlos Williams, the name always fascinated me. I learned other names that year, ones I love to this day, like Robert Frost, DH Lawrence and William Faulkner.
The Red WheelBarrow
So much depends upon
a red wheelbarrow
Glazed with rainwater
Beside the white chickens.
William Carlos Williams
You can listen to it here or here
or listen to him reading it here (and maybe the same voice as the 1st link)
A doco on him here.
A possible explanation if you need it, here.
I have a serious visual response to this poem. I see it vividly. Sometimes it’s nice to treasure your own unique response, and that’s why reading and listening is way more creative as a process comparative to having it spelled out visually for you.
So good people.
Simplicity can be ellusive, but it is all around us if we have eyes to see, and ears to hear. And maybe, when we least expect it and often, found in the smallest of things. Not on the phone screen, or whatever people are staring at as they walk, wait for buses, stop at traffic lights, or sit with others at the cafe or in their home lounge chairs……….but out there, in the real, and perhaps the less complicated real world, where what you see is what it really is. Where what you see is what you get, where, it simply is what it is.
Again as always, thanks for reading.
Namaste,
Graham
Love the photos of the car bonnet and yes I remember those simplicity patterns well.
Ha - I just looked at The Red Wheelbarrow with students the other day ... the lesson far simpler than even the poem. Can't say I could add any value to their understanding of it, but they caught my enthusiasm. And now I am the richer for their creative writing efforts.
Me and Glenn Colquhoun, to whom we sent a couple of student illustrations of his poem 'The First Lesson', which he loves.
The reward of teaching for me has never been the money, working 9-3 and the long holidays.