The Great Unread

In a recent tweet I coined a very Omar Khayyam type couplet:

Volcanic Eruptions and Purple Prose

I started a new novella the other day. It began well from a purely eyes down, words per minute point of view. Like most of the prose I write these days (as opposed to academic writing where I used to plan, make a flow chart, look for supportive and critical references, do drafts and finalise in bored exhaustion), what I do is organic. One word leads to the next, decisions are taken at a less than conscious level most of the time and the story is revealed to me much as it will be to the reader. We are always warned by sages (most of whom have never written a fictional sentence even in jest) to beware our purple prose. If by that they mean sudden lurches into ornate, too clever by half, swamped with metaphor, writing, I agree. But most serious writers have those days when they are like the Romantic Poets and, in a purple haze brought about not by laudanum but a sudden transportation to the deepest levels of the imagination, their work explodes on to the page. Hours later they stare in unfeigned amazement at the ten or so alien pages that have appeared on their screens or in their note books.

As I said, I write organically. The story is plucked berry by berry from the thorny brambles of my mind. One thing leads to another and the pie awaits the totality of the picking, washing, cooking and baking. I suspect that the pie has always been there and I am unwrapping it, as if from a delicatessen. In Zen terms the pie is baking me. At the moment I have a story about a man who is given a short time to live. What does he do? It's in the second person singular which I've never utilised before. It's hard. I keep drifting into the third person and I have to go back and amend. But it's curiously direct. Even more so than the 'I' of the first person. Anyway, he has met a drug dealer and a woman who researches the moment of death. All three are about to meet for the first time as a trio. I'm agog.

More Liberty from Insanity



The title is only half in jest. As life imitates art so does an article on the BBC site proclaim that many writers would become mad, save for their art. I've never felt close to mad, even when I worked with mad folks I never felt any contagion. But I did write a blog to that effect and constructed a couple of tweets on the subject. The basic theory is that genius and madness are divided by a cigarette paper and writing keeps such people from falling into the abyss. At a lesser level (I am not claiming great things for my prose) writing keeps me from feeling profoundly angry with my lack of literary output. I don't like sulking and so to have begun another novella leaves me at the end of the day feeling chipper. Here's the beginning. It seems to be called, Easeful Death. I have plagiariswd phrases fom the 19th century romantic poets for a couple of recent titles.

Easeful Death


That's how it starts. How it ends I have no idea but the notion of being told you have six months to live has stimulated the flow of words. Six pages in two days is better than no pages in two months.

Whose Death Is It Anyway?

I was struck by a personal illumination a week or two after returning to Ghana. I had had the long hard summer of the expected operation for a hernia but then was forced to undergo the assault of treatment on my right eye's detached retina. The effects are recounted in the Latest News diary at www.chronometerpublications.me. Now, reading the diary, I see the brave face I was putting on. I managed to do much that was part of my daily disciplines: writing, reading, driving, exercising. But it was in a twilight world where verve and vibrancy had been banished to the margins. I only realise this now. I felt at the time the transiency of life and the speeding up march of death. This, as I have inferred above, changed once I got to Accra and started swimming every morning and luxuriating in a heat that is constant, humid and cosseting. I reconnected with my sense of immortality (entirely spurious I know!).

But it got me thinking. We always assume that the mind (brain) gets to the point when it has had enough of life. "She lost the will to live." "There was nothing left to live for." But supposing it is not like that? I wrote recently that the heart has its own separate brain and it now seems possible that different organs also have neuronal complexities, communicating with the brain but also autonomous at times. I also read that eye conditions often presage an earlier death. So my thesis at this current point in my life is that the body tells the brain to shut down as often as the other way round. It makes sense. The body is in a slow but quickening downward spiral from our early twenties and there may come a point when gradually it turns its lights off.

It suggests that the focus on staying alive (if that's your plan) may need far more concentration on making the body a temple to vibrancy through diet, exercise and social tactility, at least as much as doing crosswords and taking up a new hobby. Then the brain is forced to reassess and do its job, if grudgingly.

The Drama of the Mundane

I watched Another Year by director Mike Leigh last night. It is a year in the life of a relatively uncharismatic group of individuals, The script is excruciatingly accurate. Anyone who made an early decision in his or her life to leave the predictable and eventless world of their parents, wishing to become dramatic figures on a different landscape, would feel totally exonerated. The central couple play out their habituated lives with in-jokes, sly smirks and public togetherness, exhibiting an aura of the steadfast rock of the family and with a self-satisfied all-knowingness in their small canvass way. They tolerate the desperately seeking woman who visits regularly at the times they decree, privately amused at her indiscretions, failures and social ineptitude. They are entranced by their dour son's new girlfriend who, in her jolly effervescence, is on their wavelength. The slight change in their behaviour, which only amounts to a brief admonishment to the hapless woman for turning up when she has not been invited, represents the only real dramatic shift in the film. It decimates her. Otherwise everything remains dull but they don't see it that way. For them this is a life of ups and downs but to the viewer they are little more than perturbations on a flat-line graph.

It is billed as a comedy and it has some of the same qualities as The Office in this regard. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha, most of the time. With our toes curling and our horror mounting at the wave of banality swamping us, we are transfixed by the awfulness of it all.

I have my own childhood memories of my council estate family house and its mausoleum of a front room, my father (an undoubtedly clever man, if right wing and gender-discriminating) doing the Telegraph crossword and picking his horses for the day and my mother, loving but generally flattened by the unchanging days and months and years. Remembering this, Another Year brings cold recognition to my bones. Yet this is life. It is somehow horribly authentic and makes me ask whether I view it with the angry snobbery of someone who did flee for a different landscape or, more to the point, whether I can dredge up some empathy for their human capacity to make much of little and be happy with their lot. That's it, actually. The film makes me feel less of a person for my deeply prejudiced view of the family's unflinching humdrum, self-satisfaction.

Purposeful living

I've just returned to Ghana after five months, mostly in France but also in the UK and Spain. During this time I have to say that one or two people have really irritated me by the blithe way they have discovered I am an author and then interjected, "I've been meaning to write a novel", or "When I have some time I'll write a novel". In those simple sentences they effectively diminish your achievement at not only writing novels but completing them! Having sufficient purpose to work at your art in a disciplined way and forcing your path through the brambles and thickets of stubborn and willful characters, cul de sacs in your plots and distractions from outside your fingers and brain is quite a challenge and these would be authors have no notion of it.

In the brain there appears to be some defective mechanism that would stop you doing all this - let's call it fulfilling your destiny. It seems to operate from the simplest of tasks to the most severe. I have just done some gym work before settling down to the keys. It was an effort to go and start. The actual exercise was not unduly hard and was even pleasurable in a sober kind of way. Such an essential part of my daily round may well keep me alive for longer. Certainly I have not succumbed to paunchiness or a multiplicity of chins. Yet even knowing it is good for me both from a vain and physical point of view does not have me go to the gym with a light heart. I go there grumbling. Similarly I have not practised French for three days or picked up the guitar. The retrograde part of my brain resists me doing anything regularly which is for my own good. People admire my productivity but have no notion what an hour by hour battle is involved.

I think that is why I wrote Azimuth. The whole enterprise is about Purpose - probably the one thing that differentiates people into classes, from the spineless sloth to the hyperactive renaissance artist.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Lost times

Sometimes you see something in a documentary and it is so poignant, you wished you had written it in your dialogue as an author. I saw a couple of programmes when I returned to Ghana both on case histories of people with exceptional memories. They were so exceptional we watch flabbergasted at the thought of being able to do it ourselves. There was someone who can do a dozen Rubik cubes within a few minutes and even do three, blindfolded, having only seen the layouts first. There was another who could tell what day of the week it was for any given date and a further couple of individuals who could remember what they were actually doing on any day of their lives post six or seven years old. Memorising a pack of cards instantly, remembering and being able to draw architecture you have seen once or being able to play a complex tune after one hearing are all baffling to those of us who have memories that seem to to be disgorged as fast as they are taken in in and which require diligent techniques to fix them in our brains.

A problem for us is that, though memories are concertinaed in our brains and we cannot immediately retrieve them, when we write we have an unconscious conduit to them so out they pour. Many of them will be rehashed or partially remembered bits and pieces from other authors' work. A bit of every author's work must include unwitting plagiarism. If you are like the cases described above you probably could never write fiction as everything would be lifted from some page or other!

Anyway, back to the poignant line in the documentary. The young man who has a brilliant memory of every day of his life is sitting with his boyfriend. Both at university. His lover says to him sadly that this day, as they sit on a cut lawn sipping white wine and looking into each other's eyes, will fade from his own memory but not that of his boyfriend who will be able to call it up at any instant.

Before seeing this I never really considered how relationships that have long histories also have innate difficulties since those long histories will not be recalled in the same way or to the same degree. For one the glass of history is half full and for the other it is half empty. The conflicts that ensue are the stuff of life and it is messy and awkward.