EPISODE 21: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR REFLECTS ON PROGRESS MADE AND CHALLENGES AHEAD

Welcome to my blog which is posited to be the episodic unfolding of a writer’s life at a crucial time. Crucial to him of course. No-one else really gives a shit whether he finds an audience (and an income) or not. An oddity of a blog is that readers (when they appear) arrive in the middle of things and then can’t be bothered to scroll back to the beginning to find out what’s been going on. For example, how many of you know that in Episode 18, I advertised my novel, BOGGY STARLESS AND THE DRUIDS OF GLASTONBURY (written under a different name) which is available on lulu.com for a mere £9.99? 

Or that the reason this is called a ‘Self-Help Reality Novel’ is because, having decided that age dictates that this is a now and never situation, I thought I needed to utilize all the tools at my disposal, including whatever benefits I’ve accrued from years of psychological experimentation with drugs, meditation, newer age type thinking, Rebirthing, Avatar, The Path of Least Resistance, and various other techniques and advices, to make the best effort I could to produce the results that I want.

Should you have followed the story from the beginning, you might appreciate why today, rather than digress as I am wont to do, and prefer to do, onto tangential matters such as Dean Whitbread’s desire to diminish the power of the word, and concentrate on providing a progress report on the self-help side. When I made this leap of commitment to genuine effort, my plan was to spend May to September preparing the ground and then from now, my first week of self-employment as an ‘Author, Course Teacher and Thanatologist,’ upping the ante with a view to being well-established by the end of next year.

Plans, I can do. Enthusiasm for my plans, I can do. Heigh-ho, let’s get stuck in, I can do. Stick at it and finish it, I can do. At this moment I’m not sure what it is I can’t do because slowly, with years collapsing between paragraphs, work appears, creation happens. Job done. It’s the stage after the creation which seems incomplete because with the exception of a few stories and articles, and now Boggy, nothing has actually turned into a book because in manuscript form it has gone off to agents and publishers where it has been inspected, often commented on, sometimes praised and occasionally almost given a contract, but never actually published.

 Now we don’t need intermediaries to publish, although they could certainly help, to give us permission to be what we want to be. Thanks to lulu.com, any author can cheaply put themselves in print. Believe me, that’s fucking amazing.

Deciding to write this blog once a week, was an act of discipline and a statement of intent not to forget what I was meaning to do and not to find myself in two years’ time finding a list of projects which I never got round to completing. So far writing the blog has been very useful in surprising ways. Until writing tonight, for example, I’d been concentrating on producing and not really noticed that there’s a sort of post-completion step that I seem to be missing.

Before looking at the techniques that I have, or have not employed, I do feel that something’s dawned on me in relation to creating. The title of Harry Palmer’s book, ‘Living Deliberately,’ sums up the Avatar philosophy. In myself I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with the idea of living deliberately, of making choices, of defining, because it appeared to contradict what I believed more deeply, viz. that any self is an illusion and anything it ‘chooses’ is equally illusionary. I still believe that. What’s changed is that I have begun, or think I have, to disentangle my creations from my identity. Robert Fritz is very good on this (cf). Also I realized, and bear with my here, that although I believed I wasn’t really a person, ‘personing’ continued and that person was unable not to create – because creating is in the nature of personing – and would continue to perform the five-fold act of creation either unconsciously, through habit and repetition, or consciously by thinking of something it wanted to create and creating it. Instead of feeling guilty for focusing on particular goals (without undue attachment), I now see creating as an invaluable tool for mental health.

I’m now going to turn you over to Jack Heston, my inner American (cf Episodes 2,3,8,11).

Hi! As usual I’ve been left to clear up the dogends of John’s mind. And only 250 words left to do it in. Here’s my report on the current status of project positivity and focus.

OVERALL SUMMARY.

The original goals remain in place but there are more of them and they are more specific. There remains, however, a lack of definition about the final objective. Plans are in place but there are gaps in the plan. In terms of ideas, there has been an abundance, which is both good and bad; the bad being a sense of overwhelm and loss of focus as to what the next thing to do is. The various strands of my abilities appear to be coalescing in a way I didn’t expect. Writing 17,000 words of Sad Sam wasn’t in the original plan and took a few weeks of my time away – to what end I don’t know yet. On the other hand, I loved writing it and am certain writing a novel that works for me is the best feeling. Without Chris Wade’s intervention, I suspect Sam would have remained unwritten. Already I’m gagging to write two more novels.

Another surprise is that I now feel I can and want to teach Avatar again.

I suppose I should admit that John is smoking like the veritable chimney. I will work on him. He also keeps complaining about the lack of time. I’ll work on that too. How many minutes are spent rolling cigarettes and emptying ashtrays? I am pleased with his commitment to the job, however, though I can see that his struggles with the technology are a problem to be resolved if his efforts are to be properly productive. All in all, we appear to be on track. And, all being well, they’ll be a time when John creates an opportunity that will require him to face his threshold condition and to step out of his room and of himself to create his creations in the real world. I don’t think he’ll be able to do this. That’s when I’ll take over and establish myself as the proper captain of the good ship Heston.

Be seeing you.

WORDS, BASED ON BOWIE SONGS, WRITTEN FOR THE ELDEST SON, CALLED TOM MAJOR. HE WASN’T IMPRESSED.

This is Major Tom

Calling Daddy John

I’m floating in a tin can

Spaced out on your afghani man

Five years of stardust

‘N Rock ‘n Roll wanderlust

This is Lieutenant Tom

Can you hear me mum?

Everything’s hunky-dory

In this lovers’ story

The boys keep swinging

The boys always work it out

This is ground control to Colonel Tom

Lets dance, put your helmet on

We can be heroes

Though just for the day

We’re absolute beginners on a drive-in Saturday

Junked out on heaven’s highs

Cracked by Crowley’s lies

The lad’s insane

Booze, pills, and cocaine

Ziggy’s sixty-four

And can’t play the guitar any more

This is ground control to General Tom

Time falls wanking to the floor

And time will trace us all

A word on the wind from your dad and mum

They love you Major Tom

They love you Major Tom

By the way, before I forget; David Cameron’s confession that he is a KGB spy is very timely for me because I have the complete low down on Maggie T’s own career as a Russian agent as revealed in my story ‘Sex with Maggie T’, the memorial edition of which will be issued later this year, I hope. (It all depends on the OCR machine.)

EPISODE 18: AT THE END OF WHICH THE AUTHOR REMEMBERS TO ADVERTISE HIS BOOK.

Welcome to my blog. I write 1,000 words a week on themes connected with a writer’s life. In the 18 weeks I’ve been going I’ve achieved 60 hits. If you’re a populist, you are either in the wrong place or in the right place early.

How many hits would make it worthwhile? The answer, I suppose, is that readership is secondary. Or is it? If no-one ever reads a word, can it still be worthwhile?

Writers, especially those with no commissions to fulfil, can spend their days asking themselves pointless questions and their nights answering the questions with obvious replies such as, ‘Worthwhileness is in the eye of the beholder’ and ‘Seeing as time doesn’t exist, how can you waste it?’

A problem with working from home is getting any work done. In a town like Glastonbury, in which many of my peers are unemployed, as I am, it is easy for them to assume that it is absolutely fine for them to drop by and say things like, ‘Are you writing? That’s nice,’ and then not go away again until they’ve had their requisite cups of tea and gossip. Part of the problem is that I don’t know how to look busy. I could do it in factories, spending the days or nights wondering from one place to another with a purposeful expression on my face while actually spotting and enjoying the skiving and smoking places. In those of course, it wasn’t the smoking you were supposed to be ashamed of but the non-working and even that depended on your particular foreman. No overseers for the writer, however, unless you’re lucky enough to have a demanding editor or a vociferous readership. And how can I look busy when my writing life consists mainly of staring at the computer while thinking about everything under the sun except what I’m writing about and walking from room to room in the house suddenly in need of doing the washing up or planning what I may do in the garden sometime hence?

Which is what I’ve been doing for much of today. I’ve been out there, tidying up, but as I don’t which bits need to be pruned and which are to be left alone, the whole exercise becomes frustrating. Then I spent an hour unsuccessfully looking for my saw which, I guess, I must have left under a bush some months ago when I last got fed-up with a buddleia.

Why hasn’t the publisher got back to me? Last time he was as quick as a flash.

This week has been full of family. When people come to visit, it is hard to hide. The house is tiny: you can’t fart without someone hearing you. Yesterday I looked after my younger grandchild for a few hours. Is there anything more delicious than a 16 month old in a good mood smiling up at you in the sheer amusement of life? And in those moments of smiling back you probably do more good than any writer will do, even J.K. Rowling.

Having completed Sad Sam, I’ve lost focus a little. What next? Within the next couple of weeks, I’ll be signing off the dole and becoming a self-employed me. To cushion me from this fall from governmental cradling (as represented my £65 per week and council tax rebate of 100%), I will be applying for Working Tax credit. How long this may take to come through, no-one can tell me. Being on the dole, and for much of the time being told to sign-on weekly, is a discomforting experience – deliberately so – and a surreal one in a time of no jobs. I always had to wait for 20 minutes while watching, in an open plan office, my interviewer filing their nails or chatting to a colleague. This done, I’d be called over, asked a succession of patronising questions about what job searching I’d done in the last week, and then forced to stare at a  computer screen while the interviewer scrolled through lists of totally irrelevant jobs for which I had neither the skills or qualifications nor the slightest chance of getting. Admittedly, calling myself a ‘bereavement counsellor’ totally foxed them for it would appear that never in the history of Job Centres has anyone ever wanted to employ a bereavement counsellor.

There’s a rule that if the job centre assistant prints off a job for you to apply for than you have to apply for it even if, as happened, you find the closing date has past or the post specifically requires experience that you don’t have. So it goes.

18 weeks ago, at the end of April, I began this blog with this very time in mind. Up to now was meant to be the preparation period. Between now and Christmas I have to start earning. To achieve this end, I think I have to turn to non-fiction article writing as the most likely way of receiving a real cheque. Writing fiction is so much more appealing but the pay-offs can be years away. Maybe writing some drama for the BBC could work but again there is no pressure, no deadline, when it is an unfolding idea in the head with endless plot-lines to develop. I’m hoping that somehow if I focus on articles for a few months and ignore the Satan that is the imagination, I may get the hang of it and make some money.

On a more positive note may I declare the imminent availability of my novel ‘BOGGY STARLESS AND THE DRUIDS OF GLASTONBURY’ on lulu.com. For four years I’ve been meaning to press the button that says ‘make available’ and today I did it. I was prompted into action by an article in my local paper extolling a local author for writing a book about a murder on Glastonbury Tor. Blimey, I thought, I’ve done that. So I’m going to write a letter to the editor pointing this out and referring to the availability of mine on lulu.com.

When you get on to lulu.com, you will find that BOGGY STARLESS’s authorship is ascribed to Dominic Quarrell. This is an unfortunate alias that I adopted as the result of a bet and I can’t change it now. It is mine and it is very good. Believe me, I’d know.

Dear Editor,

Re last week’s story of a local author’s Glastonbury Tor murder tale, may I draw your attention to another local author’s book, the Avalonian metaphysical comedy thriller, ‘Boggy Starless and the Druids of Glastonbury’ which also includes a murder on the Tor. This critically acclaimed book is available on lulu.com or via the author on floor39@yahoo.co.uk.

Yours,

John Heston.

EPISODE 15: FROM 21st CENTURY BRIXTON TO 10th CENTURY KASHMIR

Welcome to my blog. It will make you think. What it will make you think, who knows?

Last week I went to the Brixton Splash; a street festival organized in part by my son. I lived in Clapham and Brixton for six years between 1977 and 1983 and hence was around during the first riots. In fact as a co-operation between community, police and council, the Splash is a response to those troubled times. Because of the early rain the attendance was initially low but the vibe was good and better when the sun came out. I chatted to my son’s boss and told him how proud I was of my boy and how pleased to feel the changes in Brixton. An hour later my son was locked in a pub while axe carrying marauders ransacked Curry’s.

I have other children living in Bristol and Birmingham, so I feel a little involved and although I know it is all part of the bad news agenda I have discussed previously, I am sucked in to comment.  First must come the acknowledgement that few in power will want to make, i.e. that the rich have the poor’s money. They may justify it through inheritance, through hard work, through their value to society, through their education, through their risk-taking, through their arms dealing etcetera: nevertheless whatever wealth they have is raised from the poor.

In my previous entry I mentioned the Lord’s Club, the spiritual view of society presented in the East in which everyone is theoretical equal, (by virtue of all being one god playing out the different roles) and that the business of life is a bit like a worker’s co-operative where you rotate the jobs on some seasonal basis and all get paid the same. Philosophies like this can be more tenable when you happen to be a fat Brahmin and less so when you’re an Untouchable destined to spend your (much shorter) life with the dirty and the dead. You could just decide that this particular member of the Lord’s club, this spark of divinity, will become a rampaging and murderous one. David Cameron today talked of the tradition in this country of ‘policing by consent’.

Do you consent to poverty while we walk away the all the toys? No? What’s wrong with you? Here’s a lottery ticket, here’s a crap education, here’s £6 an hour, now fuck off and make something of yourself.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate all those obnoxious, foul mouthed, violent, ignorant, and vulgar manifestations of humanity as much as you (if you do) but let us not believe that their petty thieving is anything compared with the murdering, pillaging and exploiting of our leaders and money-makers.

Now, just to show I’m down with the kids, here’s a picture of Abhinavagupta

in an epoch pen-painting in which he is depicted seated in Virasana, surrounded by devoted disciples and family, performing a kind of trance inducing music on the veena while dictating verses of Tantrāloka to one of his attendees - behind him two dūtī (women yogi) waiting on him.

A legend about the moment of his death (placed somewhere between 1015 and 1025 depending on the source), says that he took with him 1200 disciples and marched off to a cave reciting his poem Bhairava-stava, a devotional work. They were never to be seen again, supposedly translating together in the spiritual world.

I will allude to the scene at the beginning of the second Boggy Starless novel in which my hero emerges after a number of years in a cave with an Afghani Sage and Hashish grower.

Among Abhina’s manifold achievements were contributions to the theories of poetics and drama attributed to the Bharata Muni, the 5^th century BC musicologist who laid down the aesthetic rules of drama that still underpin all Indian classical dance and theatre. Muni claimed that when humanity began to suffer from pride and the joyful life became full of suffering, the god Brahma created drama—with its attendants music, poetry, and dance—to uplift humanity morally and spiritually by means of aesthetics (rasa).

Abhina elevated the theory of rasa, (lit. juice, essence, flavour) by equating aesthetic rapture with spiritual exstasis.

The eight basic rasas were identified as Love, Comedy, Sorrow, Anger, Energy, Terror, and Disgust. Astonishment. Later a ninth was acknowledged, shanta-rasa, ‘the specifically religious feeling of peace which arises out of world-weariness’. Abhina likens it to the string of a jewelled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for people, it is the string that allows the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. These rasas, (which of course need not be limited to or defined by these terms), these flavours, are what an artist is intending to evoke in his audience. Why? Why put them through these emotions when already their lives are full of quite real dramas, emotions, comedies and tragedies et cetera? What excuse is there for that?

The answer, according to these sages, is that art is otherworldly or ‘Alaukika’ in its nature and when the right conditions are in place the true aesthetic object does not simply stimulate the senses but also stimulates the imagination of the spectator. Once the imagination is stimulated the spectator aesthete gets transported to a world of his own creation. This emotion deindividualises an individual by freeing him from those elements which constitute individuality such as place, time etc. and raises him to the level of universal. 

The aesthetic experience is the manifestation of the innate dispositions of the self, such as love and sorrow, by the self. It is characterised by the contemplation of the bliss of the self by the connoisseur. It is akin to the spiritual experience as one transcends the limitations of one's limited self because of the process of universalization taking place during the aesthetic contemplation of characters depicted in the work of art. Abhinavagupta maintains that this rasa (literally, taste or essence) is the summum bonum of all literature and art.

The significant word here is ‘transcend’. Why would a philosopher-concern himself with the theatre and the arts? Why, when all your teaching is about spiritual union with Universal Consciousness, would you involve yourself with the fakery of the stage? Answer? Because although the drama is pretence, it has the ability through the rasa, through the aesthetic experience, to take the ‘sensitive spectator with positive taste and mind’ to a higher state of awareness in which they transcend the emotions and experience bliss.

For a moment there, I almost had it, but something slipped away.

Rasa, according to Abhina, ‘Is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman coloured by the emotional tone of a drama,’ and, ‘the developed relishable state of a permanent mood.’ Rasa is characterized by a peculiar state of awareness that simultaneously ‘transcends’ (lokottara) the ‘objective’ configuration and the corresponding ’subjective’ emotion, but is nevertheless, unlike the introversion of a yogin, both receptive to and intent on enjoying the sensory impressions.

I mentioned earlier the love of creation that pervades Shaivism and talks of the world, of which we are part, as Shiva’s garden. Tantra particularly embraces sensuous pleasure as a spiritual path with the idea of transcending an experience at its most intense moment of manifestation. Abhina, perhaps an exemplar Tantric Master, applies the same approach to the arts and hence can conclude that the pleasure one derives out of a real work of art is no less than divine pleasure.

In opening Episode 14 I outlined a number of issues about story-telling that I have been mulling. What have I learned at the feet of the Guptas? Not enough of course: that the creative process is spontaneous, natural and divine; that the aim of a work of art, of kavya, is to give pleasure ‘but this pleasure must not bind the soul to the body’: that the senses are the spectators: that wise spectators, connoisseurs, can experience an aesthetic rapture identical to spiritual bliss.

I know I’m close but not quite there but my feeling about the value of writing is strengthened.

For wiser words on Abhina and Rasa cf //www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/Sunthar-integral/index.php

 

Ps for my audience: In order to appreciate and to enjoy anything beautiful or wonderful one must have taste and approach with a sense of aesthetic appreciation, responsive imagination, the capacity to identify with aesthetic objects, and intuition. (Abhinavagupta).

So sharpen up please.

EPISODE ONE: IN WHICH WE LEARN THE TRUE TITLE AND PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG

Welcome to my blog. Thank you for visiting. I hope your stay will be a pleasant one. According to my trusty writer’s guide you have a short attention span and if I don’t quickly get down to the meat of the matter or promptly dazzle you with my song and dance, then you’ll be off, taking with you your precious reality-making attention particles, without which this project will wither and die. Oh, and it told me to keep my sentences short in case you get distracted between lines.

Now if we were to meet in our embodied states maybe you would call by for a cuppa and we’d get to know each other in the English way. I could you show you around parts of my world. We’d establish a rapport, build a relationship, then later in the evening (a glass of wine perhaps? a smoke?), defences lowered, barriers negotiated, we’d reveal ourselves.

So, think Big Brother rather than X-Factor; fingers off the buzzer, please. You can vote me off as many times as you like but I’ll still be here. The weekly episodes will be relative short, say 1,000 words. I’ve made a deal with myself to continue broadcasting this literary reality show until the end of next year, so if you’re not into introductory stuff come back later in the series. Don’t miss the opportunities, however, to be gifted the occasional free short story or interesting article.

What will you find in this blog which was called, before space limited, "I'S NOVEL ABOUT HOW THE WORLD'S YOUNGEST BEST-SELLING AUTHOR (FAILED) ACHIEVED REDEMPTION AND MODERATE SUCCESS AT THE AGE OF 60 - HE BLOODY HOPES"!

Without wishing to totally undermine the whole project by beginning with my doubts I have to admit I can pitch this in two ways:

a. As the title boldly disclaims, an inspiring blow by blow blogged account of how a man turned his life around at the last moment and amazingly achieved his childhood ambition to be a well-known and wealthy enough author - A Reality self-help novel set over the turnabout 18 month period. A Reality Self-Help novel, what do you think? More still, you will have first access to much of the work of this author.

b. A diversionary collection of tales concerning procrastination, self-delusion, misplaced ambition, good intentions blighted by character defect, untruths, gossip and whingeing,

 disguised as

autobiography, eastern and western metaphysics, valid and important information, humour, indirect social and spiritual activism, opinions on life, death, dying, writing, Glastonbury and the ‘alternative life’, new age teachings, children, grandchildren, gurus, relationships, drugs, politics, nature, the body-minded brain, the state of this body, Boggy Starless …and anything and everything it takes to sabotage the goal I have set to free myself, namely, completing the aforesaid project while freeing myself from a limited situation in life (i.e. unemployment, lack of money to do what I want to do) by the power of my writing.

Elucidation & Context

I moved house recently and in the process came across two boxes of my writings - novels, short stories, essays, film and TV scripts, poems, etc. produced slowly and intermittently over a lifetime. As I put these mostly unpublished and unseen works into storage, I recalled how at the age of 13, having just read Tolstoy, I conceived the ambition to become the world’s youngest best-selling author.

Doesn’t all disappointment leave a mark?

While struggling with the lock of my unit, ultimately only pretending to secure it, my mind conjured up the heartening story of a man, aged 58, in ill-health and despond, suddenly deciding that despite previous failures he’d make one last attempt to realize his childhood dream to earn his living doing what he loved most, writing.

Now I love stories, novels especially, reading and creating them, nevertheless I still become disconcerted when I remember they are not real, they are made-up. It’s all very well becoming enthused up and inspired but if what’s uplifting us is fabrication, lies in other words, aren’t we being slightly fooled?

Undoubtedly we, humans, have found the need to use myths to understand, to explain and to function in our world. Maybe it is these myths that have got into the shit we’re in. We’re now in an age that is uniquely global and unmediated in its communication. Are we going to spend the time fibbing, fantasizing, theorising and mythologizing or are we going to report the facts as we perceive them to be?

Anyway my point is that I decided I didn’t want to spend my time pursuing that particular story idea. During an unintended period of contemplation about the plot of the novel I wasn’t going to write, I mislaid the key to the storage yard and became trapped in there because I couldn’t open the gates. Over in their office the staff watched on their CCTV cameras for twenty minutes and then came to rescue both me and the key which, the camera showed, I had tossed into a skip along with some rubbish.

“Thank God for reality TV,” said the manager as I left.

So there we have it. Wouldn’t it be better, I thought, to tell a true story? A story of ‘Reality’ –using ‘Reality’ in the TV Reality Show sense – complete with both the over intimate details, and the subtext that we are witnessing the transformational journey of a fellow human being (though admittedly there is the further subtext, i.e. the losers, the majority, are on a journey from nowhere in particular to nowhere. That’s life, that’s drama). 

Reality, therefore, is my genre. And thus the plotter of my story.

All I needed was a 58 year old unemployed man who was on the brink of half-heartedly, disbelievingly, reluctantly, goading himself into attempting to cure his financial malaise while simultaneously abandoning inertia, disappointment, and possibly sense, in favour of making one last effort to create the identity and production of a ‘successful’ author. For him would come the unremitting gaze of the witnesses - first me, then you through the lens of my weekly edited updates – who are not impartial and may often be malicious.

Where would I find such a man?

Oh look, we’re out of time already, my 1,000 words have gone. The closing credits have