Welcome to my blog which continues to accurately express the success of an endeavour that began nearly a year ago. Unfortunately the accuracy of the expression is also reflected in my income (zero from writing) and my log stats (readership nil). Before I started today I asked myself, 'Why bother?' No one reads it, no one cares, no one will know if I stop. I have in fact other things I could be doing. For example I've been told to write two articles for an online yoga magazine in support of my idea for Days of the Dead. I won't be paid for these articles, nor are they commissioned on the quality of my writing. They are there as PR for an event that, even if it works, is not designed to make me money.
So why go on? Because I said I would, because I believed myself to lack discipline and this was to be my proof that I could set myself a task and complete it. Of course I didn't expect it so be so spectacularly unread because whatever one says at the back of the mind there is the candle of hope that won't quite go out.
While not achieving my stated goal, which was to sit in my room and write myself to a living, I have instead got myself involved in a different type of creation altogether, a town party celebrating the Day of the Dead. Why I have done this, I don't know. I can tell myself that it might be ultimately useful to me but that certainly isn't my motivation, nor am I passionate about the cause, yet having got this far, however far this is, my fear of half-heartedness and failure will drive me on. I am thinking about it most of the time because this is my public creation and I want it to look good.
If I thought this hard about getting my novels in a state that you could read them, the job would be done and dusted. I’m feeling conflicted about this and need to unconflict myself by bringing the various desires together with some variation of an affirmation such as; ‘the more effort I make with the day of the dead, the more successful my writing career will be.’ Or something like that. Another thing I should do is consult my guides in this venture, Robert Fritz and Harry Palmer.
Both would have me address current reality – which I think I’m doing on a daily basis. Since November I have known that the websites would be important and I have struggled to put these together. This week my eldest son agreed to help and to employ a designer he knows. Consequently I have spent most of this week working on the copy for each page. It is a laborious and slow process, and far from finished, but already better. I’ve also had to move stuff from one site to another because the Day of the Dead site has gone from being a begging (for help) letter to an advertisement for mostly imaginary events.
This Day is already changing my life and my experience of living here, where I have been for the best part of twenty years. When I came back here last year, I found Glastonbury physically depressing, drab, and uninteresting. For the previous six years in Bath I had, more or less, kept myself to myself and thus hardly knew anyone when I walked the streets. I came here with the same attitude but since starting this project, I have become more aware of my environment and more connected to it. Places which I’ve ignored, I’ve taken the trouble of visit and, of course, I’ve had to be more aware of myself because I’m never quite sure when I might be approached by someone to do with this.
For example, today I was walking past the Assembly Rooms when I saw a sign advertising a Mystic Fayre. Having seen a Mystic Meeting already this week, that itself a first, I was disinclined to go in but then I realized I needed to know what the Hall looked like with tables and chairs laid out for ‘stalls’ so in I went. It turned out to be a useful visit because I saw how small the room was with furniture in. This was both good and bad news because I had been conceiving of it as massive and was worrying about how to decorate it. On the other hand, it is so small I’m not sure how much we can fit in there.
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Three decades or so ago, I was persuaded to look at ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ by John Allegro. I wasn’t impressed, not because I read it properly but because the general idea that early christians were some sort of mushroom cult seemed so evidently a hippy version of an urban myth that I never read the book. I was equally disinclined yesterday when my friend Barney foisted it upon me. In fact it is quite brilliant and far more likely to be true than what is actually believed. Of course I have no means to judge the scholarship and the philological arguments but the reading of it expanded my mind both in terms of how I now understand the development of written language and also of my feeling for the connectedness and brevity of human history. One of the most attractive parts of Allegro’s understanding is his description of the cosmic myth of the god in the sky ejaculating fertility onto the womb that is earth. Through this I have also had another understanding as to the relationship within Shiva-Shakti. ‘Fertility’ rites have always seemed so boring and rural to my mind that I’ve not previously grasped either the importance of fertility to survival or its correspondence to cosmic and individual creativity.
And now I have. So it goes. See you next week.
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