We are currently working on a new feature for the website which will help map out Lawrence’s travel as well as capture his initial observations on places.
I am often asked, what is creativity? And my answer is simple: creating problems and solving them. Or finding problems and solving them.
Another recurring question is, what is the point of creativity? And, again, my answer is simple: we have to fill our allotted three score years and ten doing something. Time is there to be filled and creativity adds a crackle and spark to the precarious clock hands.
Creativity leads to obsession as the desire to perfect a process becomes inevitable. This is pretty much what has happened with the Locating Lawrence feature in the Memory Theatre. These are a monthly video essay based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence, published one hundred years to the month.
Originally, I was looking for some quotes to use in the D.H. Lawrence bulletin that I edit. This then transformed into a monthly blog. Then it became a video essay on YouTube. The first Locating Lawrence started in April 1922 (published April 2022) and has been running ever since – and will do so until his death in 1930. This means I’ll be making them till 2030 whether you want them or not. It’s quite the commitment but inspired by Frank Delaney’s superb Re:Joyce podcasts which deconstruct Ulysses a sentence or paragraph per podcast!
I mention this as the official date for the start of the Memory Theatre project was 2019 – to mark the centenary since Lawrence began his self-imposed exile and embarked on his savage pilgrimage. Technically, I need to back-date the video essays till then but for now I have completed the 1922 ones. The January, February, and March videos will be published over the next month. This is important as I’ve created a playlist for each year and so they need to be filled.
The downside to this is I love reading Lawrence’s letters each month and published the video essay and blog exactly one hundred years on. Updating messes with the chronology as well as with my head.
Paul and I are now working on a map for the website that takes inspiration from the Indiana Jones films and will include the videos as well as quotes. This will eventually run in real time. My initial idea is to include polaroid type images to mark out the journey, such as the one at the top of this post, but we’ll have to see how this looks.
If you subscribe to this blog or follow our YouTube channel, please don’t think I’ve suddenly lost the plot if random years start appearing in your timeline. Think of it as a spring clean and an attempt to get things back in order, as well as an excuse to create more problems for myself with less time to solve them in…
This post was originally published on The Digital Pilgrimage here.
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