Welcome to my blog which is the continuing story of a writer coming to grips with his lack of career and attempting to rectify the situation. For further exposition please refer to previous blogs, although I’d prefer it if you skipped over the poem at the end of the last one which is an embarrassing aberration that I suspect was written on ecstasy back in the days of yore. My old friend Phil Malleson, as pedantic a blank-verser as one could ever hope to meet, will be turning in his grave (which is probably quite tricky after cremation) at the idea of my calling those lines poetry. Phil’s photo is on the shelf above me. We argued about poetry throughout our lives which bearing in mind I hardly read any was a bit silly. I did scribble a few lines when I last visited his derelict flat – a dereliction which he, as ever ruled by principle, conserved by never adding a lick of paint or cleaning the toilet in twenty years. He was dying then, although he didn’t seem to know it. He was cheerful too, he who had never been cheerful in his life. His possessions consisted of a thousand tattered volumes of high literature, a change of clothes, two cups and two plates, a few pictures and some black and white photos which were taken by friends of his, framed and hung carelessly on his peeling walls. One of these photos was of my daughter wearing a hat. I never understood why he liked the picture so much but muse are muse and who knows where they will turn up?
Hopefully here, soon.
I’ve been reading my Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, (nb that £14.99 I’ve invested in myself to add to the £500 for the laptop and printer: can it possibly be worth it?) in which I’m told, ‘Most blogs are rubbish. They aren’t read by anyone and are poorly written.’ What’s more, they shouldn’t be visually boring (i.e. like this one.) All this unmediated plain text stuff is tedious for you. (Have you tried reading Spanish novels?) Apparently you all have special machines that enable you to multitask at all times. You can watch videos, listen to podcasts, dance to music, ‘connect’ with millions of people simultaneously while making choices between an universe of products being offered to you. And you work and you have families.
I’m a bit slower than that.
I hold out hope, however, that help is on the way. One day you’ll be on your machine and it’ll suddenly stop here and you’ll be amazed by the flowering artistic talents of my, presently latent, readership. Photos (of what?), videos, links, music, showgirls and boys, maybe all these things are on the way.
Meanwhile we have words. Let us not underestimate the power of words, of language. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ etc. The Hindu philosopher Bartrhari wrote a work in c600AD called ‘Vakyapadiya’ (Words in a Sentence) and it in said:
‘There is no cognition without the operation of words: all cognition is shot through and through by the word. All knowledge is illumined through the word.’
The RigVeda, one of the oldest texts known to man dating back 3,000 years, writes poetically of the beginnings of language:
‘When they came to establish the first beginning of language, setting up names, what has been hidden in them as their best and purest good became manifest through love.
Where the sages fashioned language with their thought, filtering it like parched grain through a sieve, friends recognised their friendship. Their beauty is marked on the language.
They traced the course of language through ritual; they found it embodied in the seers. They gained access to it and distributed it widely: the seven chanters cheered them.
Many who look do not see language, many who listen do not hear it. It reveals itself like a loving and well-adorned wife to her husband. (!)
Though all the friends have eyes and ears, their mental intuitions are uneven. Some are like shallow ponds, which reach up to the mouth or armpit, others are like ponds which are fit for bathing.
At its best, therefore, the nature and function of language is ‘to manifest or reveal the meanings of things’. And why does it not always do so? …Well that’s a topic for another day.
Okay, I’m digressing. I told you I would. Am I masking total inaction? No. Even as I write this another idea development has popped up in my head. At this moment I can see the whole thing. Well I could. It is quite likely that that was the clearest the vision will ever be. For between 15 and 60 seconds it is as if a jigsaw puzzle is suddenly coming together before your very eyes. Then just as you step back to admire the picture it all breaks up again and you can’t quite remember what it is you saw and how the pieces fitted.
It is possible, I suppose, that some of the structures Jack has put into place are paying off. I’ve remained comparatively focussed and only had one attack of despair in the month I’ve been on the blog. This came about when, spurred on by writing this, I contacted my agent, from whom I hadn’t heard from since the day two years ago when I signed the agency agreement. Obviously I knew nothing had happened but his brusque confirmation of this was a little disheartening. I emailed him a second time to ask if he’d actually done anything at all with my novel but he doesn’t seem to want to tell me.
So it goes. (Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut.)
In fact I’ve had a flurry of possible projects reveal themselves to me this last week. Probably too many. This does happen to me every decade or so, a downpourring of viable suggestions all demanding months of work, few of which I complete because I’ve had to go to bed to cope with the overwhelm. The recent additions to the list for lifetimes are: a TV documentary to sell in America; an in-depth article connected with my studies in death and dying at University which I think I could also sell abroad: a book connected with some travel I did thirty years ago and…well…too many to mention, especially as I’ve just come across lists written in 1999 and 2005, both of which remain 95% undone. And no, at this stage I don’t want to be more concrete in case you steal my ideas. (And why wouldn’t you want to?) I can tell you that assuming the cataract op has gone well (which I think it has except they’ve removed my near vision), I will endeavour to enter short stories into two competitions, those of the Guardian Magazine and the V.S. Pritchett society.
Endeavour? Why do I need to endeavour?
Time’s up.
 | ||||
| PHIL |
Lines written as Phil slept
When the delight is done
And I find myself an old man
Staring in the mirrors of incomprehension
What will I do then?
When the song is sung
And even the tune but a confused memory
And when I’m tired of hobbling from nowhere to nowhere
What will I do then?
And when my body begins its dying
And when my friends are shadows in the past
And my lovers all forgotten
What will I do then?
When the only fields are painted on a picture half-seen
When the only smell is my own decay
When it hurts my heart to smile
What will I do then?
Oh my love, what will we do then?
Extra bit
You may remember an earlier consideration of an East/west split. Klaus Klostermaier in his piece, ‘The Creative Function of the Word’ compares the Western notion of creativity in which the aim is to produce something ‘original’ and ‘new’ with the Indian approach which is quite different. “The great creative geniuses of India take care to explain their thought not as creation but as a retracing of forgotten eternal truth. They compare their activity to the clearing an overgrown ancient path in the jungle, not the making of a new path. The creative effort of the rsi – the composer or author or artist –is not to manufacture something new out of his own imagination, but rather relate ordinary things to their fundamental nature.”
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