Mid-Month Musings: July - Masking A Mark Mindfully

Today, in a café in Derbyshire, I saw a notice for a local Women’s Group.

        Now, I have nothing against the idea of a group exclusively for women, but I do think the term is open to different interpretations.

        For example, the WI is a traditional Women’s Group, and, from what I understand, they spend their time listening to lectures, baking cakes and posing naked for calendars. 

        If you adopt a flexible age-range for the term ‘women’, the Girl Guides Association is also a women’s group, and, when I used to be a Brownie and later a Guide, we spent our time marching round the local school hall, singing traditional folk songs, learning how to do First Aid and trying unsuccessfully to master morse code and the mysteries of the reef knot [much like the Hitler youth movement, in fact, though I don’t remember being encouraged to dob our parents in to Brown Owl if they expressed any criticism of Baden-Powell].

   

There are also solely female therapy groups, and women-only groups which meet at specific times when men are excluded, such as Ladies-Only swimming sessions, Women’s Aerobics classes, or Ruby Tuesdays.  And there are Feminist groups focused on smashing the glass ceiling, overthrowing The Patriarchy and destroying the toxic phallocentric ideologies that underpin all our institutions. And quilting groups, of course.

        But there is a certain kind of Women’s Group that makes me cringe a little, and I suspect the one I saw advertised earlier was that sort. The clue was that the phrase 'Women's Group' was followed closely by the word ‘mindful’ and the phrases ‘mark making’ and ‘mask-making’.

        The ‘mindfulness’ movement has taken off big-time in the past decade, and I’m not knocking it. I know what the word means. I understand how and why it can help individuals overcome depression and become generally healthier. I just don’t think it’s a cure-all, and I think it’s sometimes preached by untrained enthusiasts who don’t know what they’re talking about. Mindfulness is not an answer to everything. For instance, failing to live in the moment can give people suffering from reactive depression a chance to recover from the initial shock and trauma that precipitated their depression, so that they can later come at their grief incrementally when they’re strong enough to cope.

        Some activities actually require a degree of non-mindfulness – riding a bike, swimming, many artistic activities, even stuff like walking and running. As a guru once probably never said, thinking about what you’re doing trips you up.

        There are also situations where thinking about your shopping list or what you’ve got to do tomorrow before work is actively beneficial, such as when you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair or travelling to an exam or a job interview. In fact, there are three optimum ‘brain states’, in my experience:

1. Being in the moment [when it is something truly pleasurable – having a giggle, having a doughnut, having an orgasm];

2. Being in a daydream [when you’re doing something slightly tedious but mentally untaxing – for example, weeding your flower bed, ironing or driving to work];

3. Being in the ‘zone’ [when, for example, you suddenly start to see your painting coming to life and you know, just for a few minutes, exactly what to do next – or when the story you’re writing suddenly starts writing itself – or when you’re making a curry and you instinctively know precisely which spices to use and how much of each].

There is also some evidence, I believe, that mindfulness can actually be counter-productive or even bad for your mental health. I can imagine that it might stop you doing some of the other necessary mental processing required for your brain to work at its best.

        So, any group that not only says it is aimed just at women, but also at promoting mindfulness, gets me worried. Are they implying that mindfulness is no use for men? That men can’t do mindfulness so why bother? Or that having men in the group will distract the women from their mindfulness [either by being so drop-dead gorgeous that no woman can be in the same room as them without being thoroughly distracted, or maybe they’ll arse about so much that the women won’t be able to concentrate, or they’ll introduce an element of competitiveness that is the antithesis of the mindfulness mindset]? Are they suggesting that only women have the insight or sensitivity to 'do' mindfulness, or that they need specially tailored tuition, or that the only way women can relax is in a truly man-free environment? These things might all be true. I don’t know. I’m just wondering. 

        And what about gay or trans people?

        Anyway, all of this makes me very slightly uneasy. But just as I'm recovering from this unease, the phrase ‘mark making’ hits me. 

        'Mark making' is a term used by some artists to refer literally to the marks artists make on the page – with pen, pencil, brush, chisel, knife, etc. These marks could be dots, slashes, circles, spirals, swirls, nicks, lines, brush-strokes, whatever.  The phrase seems to me to have connotations of something more metaphorical too. It makes me think of Australian Aborigines making marks on Uluru, or Paleolithic drawings of bulls in the caves at Lascaux. ‘Mark making’ sounds somehow more profound and grown-up than  just saying ‘drawing’ or ‘painting’ or ‘colouring’.  It has resonance, something ill-defined but somehow significant.

           Several websites suggest that 'mark making' is 

a kind of visual language that enables some sort of 

communication to pass between artist and viewer. 

I don't know about you but this all sounds a bit emperor's-new-clothes-ish to me, but I freely admit that I was born in South Yorkshire, in the 1960s, so I find it difficult to take such claims seriously. I'm such a Philistine, I don't actually know what a 'Philistine' is without looking it up. To me, the idea of mark making being a kind of artistic 'language' seems a tad ridiculous - might I even say ….pretentious? It's that kind of language you find in art galleries on those little cards stuck to the wall beside pictures - you read them eagerly, hoping to discover some useful insight about the work, but instead you get a lot of gobbledegook, an artistic version of the pseudo-science you get on sci fi films. 

        I mean, if every mark functions as a kind of visual alphabet through which artists communicate with their viewers, then you should all know what I mean by the following:

Yes, you’re absolutely right.  As you so cleverly deduced, I meant: ‘After working on my main project all afternoon, I’ve got a lot of paint left on my palette and I don’t want to waste it, so I thought I’d try throwing it around the canvas and see what it looks like’.

        If you didn’t understand that, you obviously don’t speak my language. But then I was always terrible at languages, unable to express myself in any way other than through boring old English.

        So, a woman’s group which teaches mindfulness and encourages its members to ‘make marks’ made my heart sink. My mind immediately conjured up a room with floor-length white organza curtain panels gently rippling in the breeze from the open window, whale music playing in the background (because there are few things more conducive to living in the moment than listening to distressed cetaceans calling to each other across the oceans), skinny long-haired bare-foot women with posh accents, wearing clothes made out of hand-dyed cheesecloth, sitting in a circle on yoga mats, holding various implements in their hands with which they intend to do a bit of mark making on the wooden floorboards. 

        This might not be in any way the reality of this group, but it's the image that flashes into my mind.

        And then – Oh, goodness! – the poster adds ‘mask-making’ to their list of activities. The organisers of the group obviously like the alliterative 'm' and I'm surprised they haven't squeezed in references to Mother Nature, male-mocking [bitching about our husbands], or mole-miking [underground karaoke], But it's bad enough. Not only are these women going to make marks, they're also going to make masks.

        My first thought is of those Halloween Masks – the distorted faces of ex-US Presidents a la that Heath-Leger-as-the-Joker Batman film, Michael Myers, Ghostface from Scream. Maybe they're aiming for the the catharsis of a damn good scare?

        Then my mind flits to the jewelled masks of Sixteenth Century masked balls. But I don't think they have a lot of masked balls in places like Glossop or Matlock. Or perhaps they're seeking inspiration from those primitive African masks my old landlady used to have hanging on her bedroom wall to freak out anyone walking along the landing on the way to the bathroom. 

        Perhaps the women are making super-hero costumes? Or masks to hide hideous deformities so they can start living a life in the bowels of an opera house in order to clandestinely train an opera singer? Or maybe they're stockpiling home-made hospital masks ready for the next pandemic. 

        For all I know, maybe the 'mindful-mark-and-mask-making' is just a front to throw men off the scent. Maybe the women's group is simply a group of insanely bored mums who want to get together for a gossip over a bottle of flavoured gin and a Marks and Spencers black forest gateau. Or perhaps they're a coven of witches. Or a cadre of anti-Starmer agitators. A 'Mrs Maisel' fanclub.  Foreign agents plotting their next assassination from a secret lair beneath Peverill Castle.

        I keep reminding myself not to let my imagination run away with me - but also never to take anything at face value.

        I've talked myself into really wanting to join that Women's Group now...