On Writing: Happiness

Posted on by
Reply

(Written circa 2011)

I

As happy as a writer.

Not exactly a well-known phrase or saying.

Because be honest writing is a miserable business.

The curse of carving a career out of perpetual observation

appropriating the experiences of others

harvesting them, refining them, processing them in a kind of unholy inverted transubstantiation

as if process if done with sufficient artistry

could reproduce authenticity, could restore spirit

as if from a bowl of sugar you could derive actual cane, roots ‘n’ all

impossible and yet the brain of the unfortunate

works relentlessly at precisely this pointless pursuit, turning over phrases, rejecting, reworking, chiselling at words.

At night, it is a torture, a mental hum, a cognitive tinnitus, an exhausting nessun dorma

lie on my back, lie on my left, lie on my right, the left is more restful for sure, the door most open to sleep, and isn’t it the recovery position? that has to be good but also my spine I know is tired of that side the weight of me there’s a click low down which has to be wrong, and a dull ache, and a distinct laterality in the day which has to be wrong and lying on the right sorts that

that’s definitely better

except the right is not the right side for sleep in my case, something about the hearing in the left, exposed ear, it turns the volume up it revs the mind up it is not the recovery position and maybe for a reason, there’ll be a reason for that to do with circulation or respiration – one could get up, should get up, now maybe while it’s, look up on the internet but then there are many more important ailments to look up, that lump which is not a lump which is nothing which is nothing on my back which has been there a year now maybe two and ought to have been shown to someone – at least two be honest maybe three – then that other swelling which is nearly nether and certainly never to be spoken about and showing it to someone is not something the thinking of which is conducive to sleep, is the thinking of which a well-known phrase or saying? A hernia not that I’m even going to mention the H-word is an eruption of the gut isn’t it? exploding shamefully from its usual confines, nature’s way surely of punishing excess, disgracing the owner of a bloated belly, in medieval times the belly was torn open, the entrails exposed, drawn out before your very eyes, hard to feel proud of yourself in such circs, you’d feel pretty, well, gutted –

the left side then

calmer

and take the ache

tomorrow I will write.

II

Not the unique province, I know, of the pen and paper profession, but a function of the brain that notices at an early age that it notices

stands apart, looks on, is socially possibly probably definitely inept

yet paradoxically that same brain is supposed to spring forth insights

from that brain are supposed to spring forth

– at night, have you noticed that? the grammar goes –

I gave that up long ago, insight, that pressure, that hope of forthspringing or letting spring forth

insight! ha!

and would settle now for security, the capacity to provide, the comfort of wine and knowing, or hoping to know, that there always will be wine

but regardless of the creative/commercial/insight question, the what-it-is-to-do-this question, some writing must be done so

tomorrow I will write.

III

There are people locked-in with their minds who can only wink imagine that imagine that the unspeakable pardon the pun pain of that peculiar prison

but at least the fuckers can wink

the writer’s particular paralysis blocks even that.

A young writer once came into the office and said of my glass walls how can you work in an office like this a public office like a goldfish bowl with your team around you? she said I won’t mention her name I’ll spare her non-existent blushes she said with genuine wonder what if you want to have a wank? how can you write without having a wank? and I was embarrassed for me for her for all of us for the pathetic act the so-called act of creation which is of course just so much wank

but at least she can wank I’m not sure I could with that unmentionable which I did be honest look up and didn’t like what I looked up when I did but then do you remember Dictionary of Symptoms? A headache bloomed after a moment’s read into an Allenesque tumour tumor tumour

winking or wanking sounds to me a luxury compared to compared with

– remember when AM couldn’t decide on the secret to giving up chocolate or the secret of? best just call it Cigarettes and Chocolate mate –

compared with this lifelong lock-in listening to the ego my God

dignifying its puerile pronouncements, attending to its anxieties

could anyone live with a writer? there should be a club a medal distinguished service and that’s nothing on actually being the writer

living inside the head of the writer sharing that shabby space.

At a party of civilians if there should be one of our kind there

he or she is easy, poor thing, to spot, glowering, suffering, sneering, carting around a lifetime of rejection, nursed grudges, weighed down, weighted down by a payload of Truly Terrible Ideas which can’t in a party situation even formulate themselves into sentences but the rage can the rage can formulate itself the disbelief of the rejection of the TT,I the story of the rejection, the blow by blow, well-rehearsed now, of the first flush of love, the applause, the gasping admiration the TTI received from those facetious phoney fuckers in this branch of the business or that I’ve given up by the way with films/books/telly/the theatre (take your pick) it stinks –

followed, the story inevitably goes, by the phoney fuckers’ silence their avoidance their oh so gentle let downs,

blending into the bitter rancour of agent and recrimination, letters and lawyers

a tip for you my fellow writer: you don’t have to listen to the story you can scope some surreptitious skirt while you grunt sympathetically because it’s the same end always to the narrative there is only one plot for the TTI just don’t think you’re immune part of the nature of the TTI is you can’t see it, it is the lump you cannot feel for all the energy you expend worrying, for every spot you try to poke, this one is the invisible one it is the one you’ll never find it is the silent killer best accept it now best put your foot down best write round it best accelerate past it that’s my philosophy so

tomorrow I will write.

IV

Up at our friends’ house last night a child clearly had designed and coloured in a poster

Happiness Is A Way Of Life Nurture It

and that’s trite sure but true too so do something not this, not this anything but

this

don’t toss and turn with this fucking life choice

banish thought

the pillow is a place for rest not reflection do you think that stuff Regaine (why does my son call it Rogaine so insistently is it called Rogaine in America?) if it gets on the pillow then you roll to the left it will dampen the eye and the cheek and over time hairs will grow grotesquely on the eyelid the upper cheek not that with these lumps or this chronic cacophonic cerebration anyone is going to rest long enough to live long enough to find out

do writers live long?  Not Ant.  Plater was 70-what?  How can I have forgotten already? But even if you gave me more years than I fear I, even if you averaged out all the scripts all the plays, his body of work, to catch him how many words would I have to set down per day in the remaining years if they are years?  Impossible.

Those of our kind who do do happy, feted at awards or earnestly revered in talks about the writerly self on radio 4 or at scholarly places where people who are not yet writers (who are not yet lost who are still in love with the sound of their own egos their own succulent sentences and think the whole fucking world will kneel before said succulence) pretend to listen

or even, more rarely than you’d imagine, those of our kind who hold archetypical court with wine and bons mots and the bonhomie of entourage oh yes mais oui

they too retire I reckon I bet I know to the same tortured bed and fret over the one side or the other and placate their angry rising souls with night-time promises:

tomorrow I will write.

V

The times when I Nurture It and plant a grin on my face and do do happy I do I almost feel happy I do almost convince myself it is the real thing

like on the bike through Hyde Park more meandering than cycling to the office all the world is here and, with or without Nikon, essentially at play

I smile like a whatever you can call a lunatic these days like a Christian in love with mankind (not that, you can’t say that and anyway isn’t the untroubled smile exactly the goal?)

especially at the girls hard not to smile at beauty the girls who cling to sour-faced ugly men I never understood that if I were a woman I’d choose other women with whom to congregate beautifully, we would stand together in a field, turning as one to the sun

would my breast in that happy scenario of womanhood feel like a breast or just an inconvenient swelling? would my girl-breasts feel like my man-breasts? that would be cruel the definition of cruel irony ironies are always cruel in the writer’s head but even if I can imagine breast-boredom clinging to a man I cannot understand I would not do

men see a flower they have to pluck it, spoil it.

Not the bike then.

Okay there is a place be honest when it feels within grasp

don’t laugh don’t mock don’t groan it’s

in the pool in Italy

the outrageous undeserved revolting luxury

the slice of true heaven decorated by two hilltop villages there’s beauty for ya, pluck that

alone in there I do I feel alive, in the moment, connected to my limbs, the whole kit and cliched caboodle,

free however fleetingly of this side or that side and

if there were one experience I would share with my brother it would be this

swimming alone in my revolting pool

except you can’t share a solo swim

I’d watch him

sometimes, be honest

/what would a therapist make of this?/

I am him

I feel like I am

him

/they’d have a field day whatever a field day is/

swimming alive alive

strange that

this pumping-heart happiness could be

so close so ironically close so yes cruelly ironically close to its antithesis

to separation from the body

face down, arms out, suspended somehow, weightless somehow, motionless somehow

cicadas drowned out, world drowned out

another me a silent Christlike echo of me rippling on the floor beneath

I am in fact above me, miles from me, more perfectly disconnected from me than ever

in film it is the shot I have always hated most: the top shot the God shot the point of view from nowhere

fake, bleak and I have always thought utterly meaningless

but maybe I’ve missed something all along because

if there were to be that sudden loss of corporeal cabin pressure

that what that rushing in the ears

wouldn’t it be

like this?

airless painless weightless surrender

soul lifted up

to the higher place the better place the other place this place

it would be

something like this

like drowning like

watching yourself drown.

Here’s insight for ya, tap this out in winks:

the place where we are most alive

the place of which we dream, for which we strive

all about the getting there

all about the attainment of wholeness

is also the place from which it is easiest to imagine release

all about the leaving

all about the consecration of separation

body from soul.  Arrival permits departure

and we call both station and destination

heaven.

Is it wrong then to indulge to contemplate even for a moment

to relish, even

what seems be honest in that pure baptismal moment to be the possibility of succumbing, just letting go?

To relish the sweet ascension

the uncoupling from weight, from self

to relish the release

from the nagging jarring noise of self

from the waste the shame the pain of self

from the self lying there with the lie

tomorrow I will write?

If Not You Pay

Posted on by

UMBRIA

Climbing the steep via della Reppublica to our place at the top of Amelia,
an ancient town in which I hope to grow old,
I find a lady breathless with bags
Or rather, she detects me, and, with cunning timing a beat before I pass,
turns and asks me where am I going? All the way to the top?

LONDON

In our street in London, smug with community (and I am the most guilty)
We nevertheless cross, if we are honest, to avoid the inevitable delay of (let’s call her) Louisa
(My granny, Louisa, was in some ways such a lady)
Who, despite your hasty breezy passing-by Morning! How are you!?
Which requires in return a hasty breezy All right thanks and you!?
Will stop you instead with a shake of the head and a sad look down and say
Not very good. No.
And then it’ll be her leg or her cat or something with the council and a brushed-away tear
And at minimum it’s minutes, and a train missed, of miseries itemised, woes forlornly bewailed.

She is sprightly, this lady with the bags. I’d say she’s eighty, and fit from living at the top
And she looks at me, carrying my own bag and the larger of hers and says
Can I feel that bag you’re carrying, to see if it’s heavier than this one?
And I say, Signora, give me the other bag too, as she calculates I will,
and, considerably feebler than her,
I feel my heart telegraphing its tribulations as we pass under the two-thousand year old Porta Cubica arch into the once-important oblong of Piazza Marconi

Piazza Marconi (formerly Emanuele) – AMELIA

Something about the understanding of time
When an arch is that old
(And not even that old, compared to the town itself –
I saw it described in a guide as “much more recent”.)
The relationship with it, and therefore with others.
Something about who it makes us want to be

Wide as an arch, and encumbered by a walker and the permanent paraphernalia of shopping
Louisa, as we’re calling her, has never seemed young but her voice is brittle; she makes me think of a little girl.
She is, I think, the caller of the ambulances. There was a summer when they would flash by most Thursdays or Fridays and stop down that end
And you’d wonder at it – why she called, and why they came.

These days if she sees you across the road she’ll call out – she’s not a fool, she’s probably reading this – and draw you over, into her world of need.
One day, Sarah, snagged, asks her if there’s anything she can do to help
And she says yes, could you keep me company in the evenings?

How old would you say I am? asks the sprightly signora. How many years would you put on me?
I protest but she insists so I say Perhaps your sixties? and she beams
Eighty! she declares. Almost eighty! Do you know my secret?
I keep the heating on. In these cold days, all night!
Very wise, I say. Eighty!? It obviously works!
Do you know what I say? I say if you don’t pay at the gas company, you pay at the pharmacy!
Very wise, I say. I like heating too. I have to be warm too.
If not, you pay at the pharmacy, she says.
And there is a gleam in her eye.

She’s taken recently to calling across the street, Louisa
I know you crossed
I know you crossed the road when you saw me.
I know you’re avoiding me.

Half way up via del Duomo, at my turn, she challenges me to give back her bags and let her tackle the last few yards to the top alone
And I refuse of course, as she calculates I will.
She says I could see her place
How warm it is
And I say that’s very kind but
And she says she has coffee
And I say maybe next time
And, now we’re there, at the top, and she takes her bags and says
You would like my coffee. I’ve got Lavazza
– and there’s that gleam again –
Lavazza Gold.

Calling a thing a thing

Posted on by

Apparently it is “unhelpful” to “go around branding people as fascists”. Whenever I have used the F-word recently (which is a lot) I have been picked up on it, even by otherwise like-minded friends. The suggestion is that writers, especially, have a duty of care when deploying inflammatory language, and a concomitant responsibility to exercise caution. I suppose the complaint is that the people currently being called out as fascists, or near-fascists, are not, in fact, fascists. (Though of course this complaint rides the line between accepting that they might be, and asserting that they aren’t. It’s a kind of, “Even if they were fascists – but who are you to say such a thing? – it wouldn’t be helpful in the general discourse to call them fascists.”)

Perhaps the concern is that there may be real, actual fascists out there, who should be being targetted for criticism, but they’re being ignored because people are focussing their ire on those innocent near-fascists.

All I know is that citing fascism has become a faux-pas in contemporary political discourse. Clearly nobody is actually a fascist and it would be wholly wrong to brand someone in that way. (Just as nobody is actually a racist — they may merely “have concerns” about immigration.)

So if you think someone’s a fascist, you have to be coy about it. (An American Democrat friend recently mentioned Trump’s “alleged” corruption over lunch — she felt the need to qualify it, even though she herself was in no doubt about his corruption. When I asked her why she used the word “alleged” — after all, we were at the dining table, not in court — she didn’t know. It feels like a similar reluctance to call a thing a thing.)

But what, as our 10-year-old asked in the car this week, actually is fascism? I admit I struggled to give a simple answer.

So I had a read up. It’s hard to define. It’s a collection of unpleasantness. Here’s the first of Wikipedia’s “scholars’ definitions” — from Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Eternal Fascism”, listing fourteen characteristics of fascist ideology.  

  1. “The Cult of Tradition” — a fancy way of asserting it was all better in the good old days.
  2. “The Rejection of modernism“, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture as a descent into depravity. A fancy way of asserting it was all better in the good old days.
  3. “The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. Remind You Of Anything? Who needs experts?
  4. “Disagreement Is Treason”. Remind You Of Anything? Pretty much everyone has been denounced as a traitor since 2016 – judges, civil servants, lawyers, journalists, MPs, peers, campaigners, businesses…. If you haven’t been called a traitor, you’re probably not opening your mouth.
  5. “Fear of Difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants. Remind You Of Anything? You don’t need me to give you examples.
  6. “Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups. The “just managing”?
  7. “Obsession with a Plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite’s ‘fear’ of the 1930s Jewish populace’s businesses and well-doings; see also anti-Semitism). Remind You Of Anything? The dastardly Treaty of Lisbon, anyone? The EU Army?
  8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.” On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will. RYOA? For example, the EU is claimed to be mired in bureaucracy, and ineffective… but simultaneously cunning and exploitative of its upper hand over us in negotiations. They’re either brilliant or useless, depending on which conviction suits the sentence. And sometimes even in the same sentence.
  9. “Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy” because “Life is Permanent Warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Time to “don khaki and take up arms,” anyone?
  10. “Contempt for the Weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group.
  11. “Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero”.
Yours to buy on Amazon!
(Probably not Eco’s point, but I couldn’t resist)

12. “Machismo”, in which Fascists hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” Sounds like a world-view in which there are women you “wouldn’t even rape.”
13. “Selective Populism” – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People.” RYOA?
14. “Newspeak” – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning. “Brexit means Brexit”? “Fuck Business”?

Don’t know about you, but if that’s fascism, it seems there’s a lot of it about. Fascism may be a nebulous concept, with characteristics and traits, but with few — and possibly no — necessary conditions. But we know it when we smell it.

No one (yet) is going to put up their hands and call themselves a fascist. And often, an individual will hold only some of these positions.

But taken together, the discourse of today undoubtedly has this toxic odour, and it is up to us to shout whenever we detect it. Every single time. Without fear of causing offence. Without fear of being “unhelpful”. History teaches us that this is one arena in which a strategy of timidity may prove catastrophic.

If it helps, don’t brand anyone anything. Brand ideas instead. If ideas look like fascism, sound like fascism, smell like fascism, you are free to say so. You must say so.

If a thing’s a thing, call it a thing.

UPDATE, 29 August 2020: The British Union of Fascists openly displaying their flag in Trafalgar Square.

British Union of Fascists’ flag, Trafalgar Square, 29 August, 2020

Post Views: 4,781