Sometimes the world does not want the writing to happen.
Deadlines squeeze like a too-tight t-shirt.
Family life is a box of ping-pong balls bouncing off the table into the corner, under the chair, before starting to tick as the cat bats them around. The explosion could be confetti, it could be glitter, it could be something messier.
The news sucks the last ideas from your head, leaving husks, dust, tumbleweed.
Then some momentum carries you forward into trying something different. (The usual will return in due course.)
You find yourself thinking about the rabbit-duck illusion. You never struggled, as some do, to acknowledge that a picture, like the world, can become more than one single thing. You have grown skilled at seeing the one you need. The switching of image is what stops you from twitching.
For whole weeks, all you can see are opportunities and achievements: the rabbit escaping from your allotment with a carrot between its teeth. Natural, alert, wilful.
Other times, moments that build into hours, the duck stares back ready to bite, its legs paddling furiously beneath the water. You know you should not feed it, but you do. You have done nothing that will last. What you have done evaporates. This is not true but the duck does not vanish.
The duck and rabbit are present right now in many conversations about culture and potential political change.
The rabbit says devolution has great potential for culture. The duck quacks about hero-figure mayors with feet of clay shrouded in smoke and mirrors. The duck and rabbit laugh together at the idea that mayors can help Arts Council England “raise governance standards and decision-making at local level”, suggested in Labour’s otherwise generally sensible plans for the creative industries.
The rabbit thrills to a future government committed to arts education. The duck quacks of a pendulum swing to the “the needs of nationally and internationally significant organisations” as hinted at in that same Labour document. Away from what, at what cost?
The rabbit excites, then calms as it holds fast to the earth. The duck unnerves before taking to the air.
To choose one, though - to not acknowledge both the rabbit and the duck - is to refuse the naked lunch as defined by William Burroughs: “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”.
The only thing you can do with the picture of the duck-rabbit is to play with it, to train yourself with it. To bring them together in a kind of dance. Until they are one, dancing, showing you something to remember.
You close resolved to look both in the eye when they turn to you.
Just a reminder…
You can still buy The Infinite Town, my recently-published book of poems from Smokestack Books. Feel free to leave a review on Amazon, but buy it direct if you can. Smokestack’s new anthology of Palestinian poets Out of Gaza is also essential reading.
And you can still buy Tactics for the Tightrope, my manifesto-cum-toolkit, from Future Arts Centres or download it for free here.
No ducks or rabbits were hurt in the writing of this newsletter.