In the weeks it took us to clear up this misunderstanding, we managed to have a baby, and I can quote the results from a first-hand survey of one. I'd like to make clear before I start that I'm only measuring creativity against my own spectrum, where zero equals "cannot even think of a lie to get shot of Jehovah's Witnesses" and 10 is "not James Joyce or anything, but creative enough to know, for instance, that the pram is a metaphor, and what he actually meant was a baby".
Babies definitely interfere with your free time. They lay waste to it, they can chew up 24 hours with unknowable cunning, spitting it out, much like milk, as a big, undigested mess, leaving you with five minutes. But I don't necessarily think great acres of time are all that good for creativity. You never use it. You just spread into it. Sleep deprivation definitely makes me more stupid. This morning, I spent ages getting the bath to exactly 37 degrees before I realised that it wasn't for T, it was for me (since I have never taken to submergence in water, and he screams all the way through it, we now wash on alternate days. So it sounds less bad if I just say I forgot what day it was). Then we went out, T in the papoose, and when I checked his feet to make sure he'd not lost a sock, I could only find one leg. "The other must be tucked into the sling," was not my first thought. It was my third thought, after i) "I must have left his other leg in the shop," and ii) "Damn, that means I'll have to go back for it.".
I also have a less even temper with the lack of sleep thing, and I'll give you an example - C and I were worrying about room temperature, again, because you're meant to have it really low otherwise babies catch cot death, and yet you can never get it low enough without freezing your ever-exposed tits off , and C said, "What this room needs is a throughput of air", and I thought he said, "a Rupert the Bear", and normally I would think, "Well, I have just misheard my beloved", whereas on this occasion, I thought, "This IDIOT. How would Rupert the Bear help?"
But I think this kind of cognitive fog, where you're slightly unmoored from the rational world, and robbed of the ability to trap saliva inside your mouth, is like having a hangover; a lot of people do their best work on a hangover. I'm not saying I'm easy to live with ... It must be a hormone thing, but I'm still overempathising. Everything reduces me to tears, from the flat monotone of Simon Cowell telling you about cruelty to a fictional dog on the RSPCA advert, to the sight of a garden variety 12-year-old in a shop not having enough money for a Snickers. If you were creating art, and seeking out the universal from the particular, you'd want to be more hard-boiled. If everything struck you as unbearably poignant, you'd just paint a child, crying, on a plate, and try to flog it to the Tate Modern. I can't comment any further, here, never having been engaged in actual art.
None of this is what Connolly meant; he was talking about the dads, and how they couldn't concentrate on their interior lives with these squawking women and children in the background. Frankly, I think the greater enemy to his producing good art was the fact that he didn't have an imagination in the first place, as evinced by the fact that the only memorable thing he produced was a truism that isn't true. Suck on that, dead guy.
