Sticking Spaghetti

courtesy of marcusschaller.wordpress.com

I have spent all week doing a piece of work which will probably lead to nothing. I have also spent all week wondering why I’m doing it and musing on all the many, many things I do in the name of art and career which probably lead to nothing. But I do it all anyway. I call it throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Arts Council England is a place we all love to hate. We love that it’s there but we hate most of the decisions they make. We love the way it harkens back to a time when the government fully supported the arts, when it insisted that poetry, theatre, music and literature were all central to who we are. Ahhh…..those were the days. But I think now most of us believe that an application to the Arts Council is an incredible longshot, certainly  never something to rely on. And yet we still apply.  I’ve just spent the past week trying to contort my need for research-related funding into their form full of 250-word boxes. With every 250 words, I banged my head on my desk in despair. So why did I do it? Well, what if I actually do somehow get a grant? What if all this work really does lead to money? What if this big fat handful of spaghetti actually sticks?

So much of what I (maybe we?) do in pursuit of my (our?) craft (art?) is a crap shoot. You do the work, yes. But you spend just as much time writing letters of inquiry, submitting to magazines, entering competitions,  going to networking lectures and readings, diving into pools of unknown sharks or minnows. It often becomes very hard to tell what is worth trying and what isn’t. In a life where time is very limited, how do you know if you’re wasting it or not?

Believe me, I don’t have an answer to this. I only have the question and the blind faith that the more spaghetti I throw against the wall, the more likely it is that something will stick. Or, as more sports-minded people may say, if you don’t play, you can’t win. So I play and I play. I toss spaghetti until my pitching arm develops tendonitis (to awkwardly meld those metaphors).  And usually, nothing happens. But every once in a while…every once in blue moon…something sticks and then it all seems worthwhile. For a short time at least.