July 2007

Some days are like this – nothing really gets done and what does get done is pointless. Then, out comes a poem or a cat, or a flower, or a sunburst, or even a good piece of cheese, and the tilted world rights.

I admit it, I am struggling with my life at the moment – not my work life or my inner life, but the how to manage the incessant ignorant demands of senseless life. The bureaucratic nosy-parker form-filling time-wasting email-crazy, texting nightmare, junk sham of life that technology has locked us into. I seem to have spent all day today talking to Call Centres, arranging paperwork for VAT returns, filing receipts, checking out travel data, and it’s the mental equivalent of stuffing your face with Big Macs.

The more real work I do the less tolerance I have for the unreal world called real life.

Maybe I should take up Yoga.

Maybe I should listen to what the stars have to say. There is a wonderful astrologer working out of New York right now – and you check her out, even if you think it’s all rubbish at www.madalynaslan.com
Whatever, it will make you feel better, guide you, amuse you, and certainly it is better than the Inland Revenue or IRS websites. What is there to lose?

As you can see from the Home Page – TANGLEWRECK, the adventure story for kids, is now out in paperback. I am pleased about this, and intend to write another one, because they are so much fun to do. There is no difference in effort; it isn’t easier to write for kids, but there are limits to what can be said, and how it might be said, and this sets a natural template, which is in itself freeing. Rules are freedom, if you are already at ease with your craft. The limitations of a particular form or subject can easily be turned into challenges and strengths. When I have cut out what I can’t do, I am left with the pleasure of what I can do. The restrictions inherent in writing for kids allow for a different focus, and that is exciting.

I am very tired after finishing The Stone Gods, my new book for adults. Where there are no limits, the first task is to discipline the self into focus. That done, there must be no self-consciousness about what happens next. The thing has to flow freely until the possibility of an edit, which happens in a different part of the brain. Poor writers are either too rigid – like a pre-formed pond liner, or too undisciplined, like a bog. The reader then sinks or hits the sides. The ideal is to allow flow, both for the reader and the writer, but this cannot be taught in a Creative Writing class, which is why they are utterly pointless, except from a sociological or psychological point of view – and maybe an economic point of view, unless you are the one paying.

I’m not being fair – you can turn out perfectly good jobbing writers via the Creative Writing class, but they are not writers I would ever want to read. Life is short – the obvious is, well, obvious; I don’t need to find it in fiction.

I am feeling this way because I have been sent so many ‘product’ books recently. Identical fiction-robots all doing the same thing. Needless to say, they have all been on more programmes than your average alcoholic.

I suppose in a world of no job security and short contracts, finding a continuous narrative is important. Maybe that is why so many people want to write. There has to be some story-line, and the world of work no longer offers it, and perhaps it is not there in peoples’ personal lives either.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from writing, but unlike playing an instrument, people really can’t tell if they are not very good at it. The thing about playing an instrument, however badly, is that it gives you insight into what it takes/means to play well. There is humility involved in the amateur pleasure. I get the most discordant rubbish sent to me, with no sense at all of how bad it is, or why. And people get very very cross if you decide to tell them why.

But never mind. The Internet is democratising publishing. Put it out there and let the world decide.

I have a new cat called Spiky. The great thing is that he understands English, and I know that he is one of my Special Cats, which a writer like me needs, as a familiar, and as something to throw the paperweight at. Before you all have a fit, the paperweight is rubber, and the cat chases it.

Back to serious matters. I recently saw the opera Death in Venice, in a production by Deborah Warner. The production was wonderful but I struggled with the music. And then I saw I again, and still struggled. Then, listening to Radio 3 last Saturday night, as I always do if I am by myself, the opera slot was Death in Venice, so I heard it again. This time, it happened. The music made sense, intellectually and emotionally. `I could hear it. It was wonderful.

This is worth thinking about. I go to the opera frequently and I am familiar with the shapes and the demands of the music. I am intelligent and I concentrate. Nevertheless, it took me 3 times to hear this music. Had I heard it twice I would probably not have found it at all in this life-time.

The point is that sometimes art in whatever form is effortful and we have to keep at it – or if we don’t, we must be very careful not to just dismiss the piece. I would never be rude about Benjamin Britten’s music, I love it, but I thought this opera was too fragmented. It isn’t – something in me was too fragmented to hear the connections , and then, presumably my brain reconfigured and found the line.

It is a problem in a fast-food world, making time for the pace and rhythms of art. It is a problem finding our own pace and rhythm, and then being true to that, and then allowing it to flow with what we find elsewhere.

We’re back where we started, and the rhythms of the inner and the outer. I think I was too jangled, too discordant, to hear the music. It is a difficult piece – my friend the cellist Natalie Clein tells me so, and she is top of the tree. Nevertheless, I failed to reach the music until the third time, and them the music reached me.

It was pouring with rain that night, and I found a landing place.

Perhaps that is all we need.