Welcome to the weekly update, 1,000 words of, my blog about a revitalised writer trying to establish a career in ‘the prime of his life’ (cf Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter).
This week I wrote more of my piece, ‘Old People Are Us’ and as much as I think it is morally wrong to depress people, it is hard to be sanguine about the prospects for many of us in the near future, particular those of us whose living resilience will be rewarded by poverty, chronic illness, Alzheimer’s and a longtime dying – the price we are presently paying for lowering infant mortality rates, clean water and medical advances. I can only assume, and here is the hope, that in the future these diseases of old age will also be cured and death delayed even longer. Quite what happens when we all get to 150, or have the option of living forever, well that’s a topic for another day.
While writing the above, I elevated my mood by scanning in the first 100 pages of an old novel of mine. This is not as simple a process as it sounds, mainly because the scanner is upstairs because there isn’t enough room to house it in my tiny study. This OCR software is quite amazing and for me it is miraculous that I can take something bashed out on a typewriter 20 years ago and, given enough time to cope with my technological slownesses, turn it into a real book without having to retype it and without having to acquire a publisher and agent. I know that it is extremely unlikely that any of my children would have turned my writings into posthumous books but now, as long as I live to finish the project, I should be able to leave at least 3 proper readable novels on a shelf somewhere which it so happens is really all I have ever wanted to do with my life. In the meantime there are a few hundred more runs up the stairs, placings on the scanner (hopefully the right way around), runs back down to the stairs, pressings on the ‘Scan’ ‘Read’ ‘Save’ ‘Save As’ ‘Select All’ ‘Copy’ ‘Paste’ ‘Close’ buttons, satisfying self-congratulatory readings and botherings to put everything back in the right order, to go.
This week someone read my already printed novel and said how much they liked it. It is that easy to become my friend for life. Unlike Chris the publisher, Mr Soon, who still hasn’t got back to me. Don’t these people have sensitive egos? And why say soon if you don’t mean it? What? Me? Well yes, there maybe one of two people out there still wondering why I didn’t turn up when I said I would.
Another of my subjects this week has been the death system (yeah I know, some people have all the fun), and how it works and doesn’t. Last Sunday I witnessed, took part in by being there, Glastonbury’s Remembrance Sunday celebrations and mightily impressed I was. In the days gone by, I paid scant respect to these gatherings, thinking them to be militaristic and jingoistic and indeed have never thought to wear a poppy. Thesedays I see it all quite differently and didn’t even bother grumbling to myself about the young uniformed, the fodder of the future. What I saw was a magickal ceremony, complete with regalia, drums and music, bringing the populace together in a ceremonial act of remembrance of the dead. (Or at least some of the dead.) When we, the crowd, all joined in to promised that ‘we would remember’ the fallen, I felt I was helping honour a contract made with my grandparent’s parents when their country told them, ‘You have to go off and get killed for the benefit of your society. We can’t really do much to protect you but we promise you will not be forgotten.’ It was a profoundly moving moment.
For someone, like myself, who is planning putting on a Day of the Dead this was an excellent exemplar for it had all the right ingredients, not least the participation of the onlookers. I was encouraged.
On the other hand, I have just been rereading de Bernieres ‘Birds Without Wings’ which describes the break-up of the Ottoman Empire before the First World War. (In my opinion this novel is the equal of ‘War and Peace’ and is the best English novel going.) I always loved history at school and no doubt dealt with the collapsing of european empires. I remember being particularly excited by the Russian Revolution. Like Tolstoy, de Bernieres describes both the actual carnage of war and the historical process which is based so much on accidents and individual vainglories. What would have happened if King Alex hadn’t been bitten by a barbary ape or Ataturk had had a slightly different temperament of it Lloyd George hadn’t been a fool? One slight change and millions may have been saved. So it goes. From this prospective, some of the sentiment and nobility of remembrance falls away and all that is left is the usual testament to what happens when we treat each other as different.
And on the subject of the revolution…is it coming? My good friend Butch, older than me by 4 years, has been up to visit the Occupy site at St. Paul’s. Suddenly instead of moaning about the revolution that didn’t happen back in the sixties, he, among others, is looking forward to its actual full-blown arrival following these initial skirmishes. He tells me that many there are aware of what I could call ‘The Ghandian Imperative,’ i.e. to be peaceful, and he himself is keen to push the idea of universality.
Up until now I have paid scant attention to the ‘occupation’, partly because I couldn’t bear the endless succession of clerics on the radio and also because the idea of protesting against corporate greed seems a bit facile because the very nature of corporateness, and the whole caboodle of capitalism, is avaricious. This is a time, however, when the cracks in the system have opened up wide and it is self-imploding, taking with it any confidence in governments or markets to protect us from the fall out. If such is the case, if this is it, does the wise man try to shape the course of events or step back and watch the show like any good film audience, cheering the goodies, jeering the baddies, crying at the sad scenes, laughing at the jokes, moved to the core yet essentially untouched?
As Hamlet said, ‘to do or not to do?’
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