Sunday, June 30, 2013
Daydream believer
I’ve had a number of readers kind enough to
compliment the direction of these blogs. Well, that’s not quite exact. There
have been more compliments as the blogs begin to entertain the mysterious and
the uncanny. Read the last few and you will see what I mean. The place of
strange events in our lives gives rise to all sorts of mental hocus pocus. It’s
the same unconscious foundation in our brains that gives rise to religious
faith, fatalism and alien abductions, I’d guess. In some far-off blog which
the researchers among you might be able to weed out I commented on the brain’s
‘god spot’. Put an electrode in there and even Richard Dawkins would be seeing
angels. Another blog, at a different time, at some point in December 2012,
recounts the adventures of yours truly as I extricate a friend from the
belief that he has been sent to this earth to tip the devil back into the
darkest pit for another one thousand years.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m not
really given to beliefs in the paranormal. There have got to be explanations
for these events even as they happen to me but it doesn’t stop me being bemused
and unsettled by them. The most recent has been discovering that I had written
the future, in the early eighties (described in my last little essay here) and
one that has since come to pass. On reflection in bed this morning, allowing
the dawn chorus to permeate my spirit with its songs of the infinite cosmos, I
realized that my life has been punctuated by mysterious events. Given the
interest the last one or two have generated, I’m going to continue in that
vein. First a bit of background.
I was born in India. At four I was
perfectly bi-lingual; Urdu and English. On the sea-going trip to Britain which
lasted a number of months, I lost all Urdu. It probably blighted by academic development.
It’s a well known syndrome. However, my starved bilingualism led to an
inordinate desire to write in the one language remaining. A school inspector
visiting Shadforth C of E junior
school commented that I was going to be a writer. He read out, “King Alfred’s
ships floated in the bay like swans.” Something of that ilk. I was a very
imaginative child. I had the whole school (thirty children) playing jousting
knights with Brussels sprouts stalks for clubs, sticks for lances and dustbin
lids for shields on the school field. Girls sat on a wall watching and we gave our favours (bits of
ribbon) to the Guinivere we loved best, upon a victory. After such a tournament
I wandered off down the steep meadow, to cross the stream to my house. As I
approached a hedge I remembered I’d had a dream of a nest in just such a bush.
It was the shape of a spinning top and had three eggs. I moved excitedly among
the blackthorn and found the place. There it was, exactly as dreamt. I took one
of the three ovals for my collection. But it was with a curious sense of power.
If I could do this, maybe I could use this force at will.
I couldn’t. But I could do it without will.
Over the years whenever I wanted something that might progress my immediate
train of action, it would drop into my lap. Second hand shops were perfect
territory for disgorging valuable pieces of the jigsaw of current life. It proved
a strong version of serendipity. When I got to be a student in a teacher’s
college in Sunderland I always ran out of grant at the end of the term and my father never subbed me
what he was supposed to. I went off with my last ten
shillings to the bookmakers and won what I needed to last until the end of
term.
It’s very low level, this capacity to bend
fate to my will. I haven’t won the lottery, for example.
I know this is all a bit weak and lacking
in force majeure but it’s a start. (Believe it or not I wrote the French just
now and had to check what it meant. Yet another example of writing from the
unconscious tolling the years back to King Alfred or onwards to the eventual creation of The Azimuth Trilogy.)
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
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The
sorcery of scribbling
In a blog, many moons ago, I wrote about
the creation of The Azimuth Trilogy. I was fascinated by the act of writing
myself into knowledge. Since I had placed the novel in ancient times and wasn’t
a historian, everything in the books came from my imagination. When I had
finished the thousand or so pages I became suddenly concerned that the work
would be embarrassing. What if I got my facts wrong so badly that I would be a
laughing stock? So I checked. It was amazing that my sure-footed imagination
had dredged from somewhere a whole world that had truly existed. In incredible
detail. You can search through the early blogs on writing to flesh it out but
the basic tenet is that writers can be conduits to the shared experience of
homo sapiens. Mystics call it channeling but the term may a bit too mystical
for me.
Then, only two or three blogs ago, I wrote
about the mysterious experience of finding myself in Ghana and how some
imperative had drawn me there, despite myself. It consisted of a series of
synchronous events, spread over time, strange in themselves; portents, if you
will.
I am experiencing much the same again. I
discovered the delights of the OCR recently. This is computer software that
recognizes scans of printed pages and turns them into editable word files. Now,
in my writer’s war chest, I have a number of novels. I always wrote even when
leading a reasonably fulfilling academic career as a research professor. It was a necessary
complement to the less glamorous life I was leading.
When I finished my novel earlier this year
about a super-heroine in a dystopian future Britain, A Woman Who Kills, I turfed out one of these novels. It was typed
and legible enough for the OCR. Three days later I had transcribed it into a word
file. It is called Middle Ages and
deals with the vicissitudes of a group of overweight women and their husbands
in Norwich, England. Middle class angst. A dark comedy of manners. Coming
eventually to a kindle near you. Or a shop. What is completely engrossing is
that I hardly remember writing it, have no idea of the plot and find it a real revelation
of life and mores in the early 1980s. It stands up as a sociological exposé of
those Thatcherian days. But (segwaying back to the beginning of this blog) what
is truly occult is that the names of the characters, chosen at random when I
was writing, have all become key names among my friendships and associations,
developed in the years long after the book was finished. Not only that but all
the issues about being overweight for a woman are headlines in the media.
And, of course, those who are following
these blogs would know that I married someone four years ago, Helen Teague, who
designs clothes for large women and is in partnership with Dawn French the
comedienne and writer. Imagine me, therefore, editing this novel, written by a
former self some thirty years ago and finding in its pages, all sorts of
foretellings of what has since come to pass. Creepy or what?
More of my writing at www.chronometerpublications.me
The Azimuth Trilogy at: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Helen’s and Dawn’s clothing website is: www.sixteen47.com
Saturday, June 22, 2013
I
write therefore I exist – but only if you read
If a
tree falls in the forest and there is no-one around to hear it, does it make a
sound? is a well known philosophical conundrum -
since sound is only a vibration in our ears. Those that write e-books are posed
with a parallel train of thought. If an e-book is written and posted on various
platforms but is never downloaded, did the author ever write it? After all,
text on a screen can only exist once a brain with eyes deciphers it. Even then
the author may be forgiven for believing s/he exists as a book’s progenitor only when a review pops up
on Amazon or elsewhere.
We humans are vulnerable creatures.
Evolution of our central nervous systems has led us to conjecturing whether we are
here at all. Does everything around us merely constitute glorious figments of
overactive imaginations, bound to dissolve into nothingness upon our decease?
If every man and woman is an island then our creative artifacts represent home
made rafts upon which we attempt to cross from isolation to the mainland of human
gregariousness. Writing books bound for e-readers, those electronics clutched
by our customers and whose screens become filled with the outpourings of our
imaginations, are our acts of attempted escape from the unbearable isolation of
being.
So, Dear Reader, if you download avidly,
remember the author cannot exist until you review what it is that you have
read. It is a great responsibility; the existence of the author!
More writing from Jack Sanger aka Eric le
Sange can be found at:
Labels: The #author and existing.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
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Ghana
and Synchronicity
Perhaps you know about Jungian notions of
synchronicity but if so – bear with me a moment as I explain. If events occur
that seem more than mere coincidence then they are synchronous. I begin this
way as a preamble to three such experiences, occurring at different points in
my life which came together in some kind of otherworldy fashion and point to
the extraordinary.
The first of these connective events took place some
forty years ago. A close friend at the time, Vic Clarke (publicly known as
Lindsay Clarke, the writer) and another writer and myself met once a week to
discuss our latest outpourings. Vic published a novel called Sunday Whiteman
which was loosely based upon his experience as a teacher in a village in Ghana.
Some ten years later I was living in a
terraced house in Norwich and came across an old lady who had been a teacher in
Ghana, also writing a book while there, called Ashanti Boy. I wrote a poem after her death
which I am including at the end of this blog.
Then, some twenty years on, my son
Joseph was invited to play keyboards with the reformed Osibesa, a Ghanaian
Afro-pop band that was very big internationally in the 60s. He went over to
Accra and spent time with them playing at weddings and funerals (!) before a
tour of the UK also involving a few days at the Edinburgh Festival.
Some fifteen years later I
communicated via chance circumstances with a woman in Accra, the business
partner of Dawn French in a clothing venture – fashion for the larger woman. We
met up – and became married.
The point is, prior to my meeting with Vic, I knew
nothing about Africa. I am sure the idea of going there was beyond any desire
or fantasy. India (where I was born) filled that particular niche in my psyche.
Now I have lived in Accra for four years, sharing it with France. But it’s a
strong case for synchronicity, don’t you think? I was drawn to Ghana whether I wanted to be or not though the pull did not become a conscious force until the very end.
Here’s the poem:
Nocky
She
carried, deep within her, an unwritten past in Africa
and
held it smouldering in a bricked kiln of stern pride
through
whose vents the Norfolk winds whistled up the shapes of things gone by
in
sudden snurts of flame.
Halfway
through her second book, Nockv died,
Africa
gripped by a final writer’s block.
She'd
walked this grey brick Norwich street beneath the gathering charge of swallows
pulling
shopping, her grey hair awry, like any other of our heavy ankled folk
stumping
out of life.
Yet
behind her slightly batty eyes no dementia hid or interminable
list
of trivia; but Africa dipped in pen and pressed
against
each page, dark and bleeding still,
Africa
behind the still net curtains and heavy-bolted blankness of her house,
Africa
silent in the eyes of her cat
stiffly
waiting at the window.
So
when the police broke in with their neat removal of a backdoor pane
to
find her fallen open like a dried flower,
the
curtains shook and the cat stretched and Africa was at last let out
in
time to seek a home-going on the black dispatch of
attendant
swallows' backs.
More
writing at www.chronometerpublications.me
including 3 free novellas to download.
My
wife’s company with Dawn is: www.sixteen47.com
The
book of mine I’d like you to read, in particular is at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Labels: #Ghana and #synchronicity #Jung
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Sex
with her indoors 16th century style
Apologies for the non-PC heading but it
serves a purpose. Well, two. The first is to garner some attention and the
second is to point to the fact that times haven’t changed much since Montaigne
wrote the essays for which he is now remembered. I am basing this on Sarah
Bakewell’s excellent book: How to Live which
is a sort of discursive biography of the man.
Though he apparently loved his wife (more
as time went on) the very idea of having raunchy sex with her was not on the
ticket. He would have been sick at the thought. In France in the 16th
century it was a cultural no-no. The belief was that if you decided to try the
various positions one might find in the Kama Sutra you could easily turn your
wife into a nymphomaniac. Sex had to be sober and a duty rather than a
pleasure. If you wanted a bit (well, a lot) on the side you should find it
elsewhere in affaires or pleasure houses.
Montaigne liked sex very much, even if
beset by the small problem of his diminutive penis. Nevertheless,
amusingly, he had much to say
about female ardour. If a woman’s heart is not in it he says that she ‘goes at it with only one buttock’. In similar vein he addresses the lover
whose mind is not on the job but is fantasizing about another man altogether; ‘What if she eats your bread with the sauce
of a more agreeable imagination?’ He points out that the graffiti daubing the walls of stately homes,
which show male appendages at three times life size, have the dual effect of
raising unrealistic hopes on the part of passing women while making men cower
in low self-esteem.
The realization for any sociologically
minded person in the 21st century that the place of sex in society
is largely determined by convention rather than the result of some universal
verity, should be enlightening and lead to more challenge of what is regarded
as the norm. The assumption of what is unacceptable is rarely universal.
Religions reveal their shaky foundations as they try to proscribe certain
sexual acts. Governments likewise. Travel round the globe and cross not just
national boundaries but sexual ones too. Or dip into history.
For
various depictions of sex, from the unvarnished to the highly embroidered, you
could try my various books, some of them free at: www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: #Sex, Bakewell, convention., Montaigne
Sunday, June 09, 2013
Big
is beautiful
Watching a Sky Arts panel discussion chaired by Mariella Frostrup at the Hay
Festival, I was struck by an author I did not know called Lionel Shriver. She
(she had assumed the male first name by choice when young) has just brought out
a new novel, Big Brother, which
echoes her personal tragedy of losing a middle aged brother to obesity. It is
not the book that has prompted this short essay but what she said in response
to Frostrup’s remark that she might have problems of her own regarding food.
She denied the problematic nature of her eating habits but defended them from a
quite novel perspective.
She has coffee at 11.00 am and eats at
11.00 pm. Why? So that she can regain the lost innocence of childhood where
eating was unconditional until you felt full. No thoughts to health or fashion,
just a response to the body’s immediate needs. Shriver said that she eats as
much as she wants until replenished. She also said that by eating this way she
has a closer intimacy with food. Her experience of what she eats is greatly
accentuated.
The idea of a lost innocence or at least a
lost world of natural eating, seems
insightful. She went on to say that nearly everyone has some kind of neurotic
relationship with food. Eating habits are the consequence of cultural imperatives. At the furthest extremes of
anorexia or obesity they are profoundly self-evident and become visual markers worn on the sleeves of the sufferers,
social taboos that are not confronted person to person but are nevertheless discussed
without any sense of empathy, behind the individuals’ backs. For Shriver this
is a profound injustice. Not only do people have to manage their organic,
physiological debilitation but they have to navigate public denigration,
mostly, she feels, resulting from a fearful projection on the part of critical
onlookers that they, too, may one day succumb. They are somehow blamed for what
they have become and are lesser human beings as a consequence.
My wife designs fasionable clothing for the
larger woman and receives, daily, tributes to her Company’s wares because they
enhance customers’ body shapes in the same way any fashion house’s products only do for those of slim
proportions. Customers feel valued and respected and no longer the outcasts of a
society dominated by a narrow view of so-called normality.
See the clothing at: www.sixteen47.com
Literary works by Jack Sanger aka Eric le
Sange, including 3 FREE novellas at www.chronometerpublications.me
Saturday, June 01, 2013
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Living
with Montaigne in the mountains
I was reading Sarah Bakewell’s excellent
book, How to Live, on the writings of Montaigne,
today. You can imagine it; me laid out on my French terrace, blue skies,
rearing mountain cliffs behind me, spring blossom from the Wisteria above, the
ratcheting croaks of carrion crows in the woods and a particularly tuneful
blackbird mimic on the very top of the pear tree. I suppose being only three
hours from where Montaigne lived adds a certain piquancy to reading about him.
He was extraordinary. Possibly the first blogger – because that is how we might
view the ‘common place diary’, today – he wrote about what was happening about
him and wanted to know why. Why do we feel the things we feel, what is life,
how do we know the experience of another person? How do you live a good life? I find it riveting and a little
chastening that what he has said and inscribed is as pertinent at this moment
as it was then. Apparently, it is the experience of most of his readers over
the last few hundred years, from the finest philosophical minds to the
every day person keen to extend his/her view of existence, that we all feel
we could have written exactly what Montaigne wrote. He plumbs the business of
being human.
One vignette jumped off the page as I was
indulging in this sun and silence. He talks of a historical event. A man is found guilty in court and is
due to be hung. Just before the execution another man confesses but the justice
of the time ignores the new evidence. They go on with the hanging because they
don’t want the the judge’s verdict to be brought into disrepute.
As I was saying, the relevance to today is
striking. In every western, so-called developed society, police and judicial
criminality is regularly covered up in the interests of ‘trust in the law’
or ‘the national interest’. Meanwhile, politicians of all persuasions,
judges, senior police officers and the rest are outed and held to account by bloggers or the media
(when it suits them) with appalling frequency.
In A
Woman Who Kills, my new book to be published later this year and set in a
dystopian future Britain, corruption is everywhere. Rather than have my
characters fight a holier than thou war against the pervasiveness of their
cancerous culture, I found them refusing to seek insurrection. Instead, they choose
to chip away at the rottenness and not risk a complete breakdown of stability.
Better the semblance of justice than none at all.
While I absolutely hate it as a notion,
this is the way that societies exist and flourish. Something in me as a writer
was rather pleased to be in accord with old Montaigne. It’s murky out there.
Murkiness is part and parcel of our lives. We know this even as we strive to
bring clarity, tolerance and harmony to our societies.
Labels: Dirty justice., Montaogne, Sarah Bakewell