are we hostile to incubation?
Henry Miller writes that “(t)he best thing about writing is not the actual labour of putting word against word, brick upon brick, but the preliminaries, the spade work, which is done in silence, under any circumstances, in dream as well as in the waking state. In short, the period of gestation. […] In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable […] is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig in a torrent”
To be human is to always be incubating something. This, quite irrespective of one’s preoccupations and intentions. Incubating is a primordial activity. It goes on as surely as I am unaware of it: it is the ‘primal flux’, as Henry Miller says. That I can go along, plunged in its tidings, yet hardly aware of them, is the interesting point to me. Incubating’s natural home is my everyday affairs. Its bewitching power expressed in the tiny irruptions into my daily tribulations. The cat sways its tail hypnotically and then disappears into the undergrowth of that looming hedge. But you dare not follow because you are already late for work. The traveller sitting opposite you on the train smiles around alluringly, yearning for the chance of conversation with anyone, extremely interested in how you’ve come to be as you are. But you shush your keenness. Or perhaps her openness to you is peeling you away from managing your little practicalities, which stiffens you. Like this you and I go on in the habitual way, murdering daydreams everywhere. And whereas daydreams pour forth so effortlessly, it is my fidgety ways that leave me quite exhausted come the end of the day. If the everyday is incubation’s home, then it is an inhospitable one.