EPISODE 58: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR THINKS ABOUT WRITING.

Welcome to my blog, even if you are that strange Russian search machine that visits me twice a week to disappoint its readers while boosting my hits to an inexplicable average of ten a week. As nothing of note happened in the last week in my world, apart from being irritated by the noxious jubilee and failing to make any progress on my projects, I have briefly turned my attention to the actual raison d’etre of this journal, my non-career as a writer.

Last year, presumably at this same time, I received an email about the VS Pritchett short-story competition. There were two weeks or so until entry time. I gave it a go. Here we are again. Shall I bother? Have I the time? I suppose the question is already answered because I’ve spent the last two hours playing with ideas and not making much progress. As usual I have made two or three starts to different pieces and then stopped because although I can feel a story unfolding I’m already wondering if it is important enough, or unique enough or metaphysical enough or contemporary enough or funny enough or sad enough to engage someone’s attention. It might work for Murakami but for the rest of us have to use our fifteen minutes of fame to at least make sense. The prize is for stories between 2,000 and 5,000 words. Which ones will do the trick?

Here are what I now see to be 5 starts.

1. Day One

Right now, I feel very lonely. I’m sitting on the bed in the motel room. I asked the guy at the desk if I could smoke and he said yes, if I gave him £5 he’d take the battery out the smoke alarm. I was about to give him the money but he laughed and waved it away. You think we can afford alarms, he asked. Man, we want this place to burn down.

I’ve been here four hours now.

Only one hundred hours to go. And then I’ll know.

There is nothing to see out of the window except a brick wall. It’s not an omen but it feels like one.

I’m scared too. All my fears are speaking in my head. What if my luck runs out here? What if Tim’s blown his part? What if the police come? What if the gang know about it?

Always the same questions.

I will cope. I always have coped.

It’s been close sometimes.

I’m not a brave person, not a risk taker at all.

2. It is very difficult to tell people that you have died, especially when they can see you and touch you and tell you that you haven’t, so nowadays I rarely bother. Marie knows about it of course, so does John, but neither really believes me. They think it’s a stance I’m taking. Sometimes when we’re in bed, Marie takes hold of my penis and says, ‘Doesn’t look dead to me.’ I smile because she loves me, the one we thought I was, and I love her, as I love everyone now. At the beginning, when I thought there was some point, I did try to explain that the body is alive but I am not but I soon learned it was a waste of words.

3. Tomorrow I retire. I’ll put down the tools of my trade and start a new life. I’m so excited that I’ve not slept for a week. This whole year I’ve been putting everything in place. 

4. The little ginger kid sat apart from the others with a scowl on her face and with her skinny arms clutching her desk as she struggled to bottle her fury. The teacher and the whole class watched in fascination and wondered what may happen this time. “Please,” said Ms Jones, not even beginning to sound calm, “Please. Remember last time.”

5. It was always the money for me. Sure, I smoked the stuff but I wasn’t like him, like them, the oldies, always comparing one weed to another and rambling on about the drugs they’d consumed fifty years ago.  Dave wasn’t the worst but he fucking loved his marijuana. So he only had the best and, because he was a believer, at the best prices.

Good business for me.

In fact 1, 3, and 5, are probably the same story which was/is to be about a retiring drugs dealer setting-up his last deal. Number 2 is just a dalliance with the impossible, the putting into words of the wordless. Whenever I run out of books to read in the bath at night, I begin again to ponder Nisarga Datta’s masterpiece, ‘I am That.’ I’ve been studying this on and off for 36 years, rarely being able to feel that I’ve understood what I’m reading but with a sense that some truth  was close to being revealed to me. The essence of his teaching is this:

‘…the sense of being, of ‘I am’ is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the ‘I am’ without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalized but can be experienced. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it; body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions inner and outer etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.’

The thorn in Nisargadatta is his refusal to countenance the person, who is never real, never worth bothering about. What is strange is that for all the studying of this book I have done, when I do think I understand what he is on about it always seem like it is for the first time.  What I have never been able to do, never really attempted to do, is to remain in that sense of ‘I am’ that he talks about. The Avatar exercises have shown me, once again, how compulsive is thinking. It is both an addiction and a defence against emptiness. Feeling is the key.

As these thoughts preoccupy my soul, I find I want to write about them in my stories. Stories, however, are about persons, drama, activity. A good novel fills you with life and relies on your identification with the characters. I’ve written frequently about the aesthetics of Abhinavagupta in which emotion is used to transcend emotion. Nisargadatta would be most unimpressed. He’d stand up in the stalls and shout out, ‘Hey, it is just a play, a story your grandmother told you. Take your attention away and the whole thing dissolves.’

There is one thing Maharaj says that I have used as a plot driver. It comes in a dialogue with a visitor who keeps trying to make sense of his world. Over and over again Nisargadatta tells him that the world he is talking of is imaginary then finally he says:

Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions which you have created is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it by the same way you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are.