Life might be meaningless but it still has a purpose.

You can spend your life trying to fathom out the meaning of life and end up just getting hopelessly bogged down in religious dogma, metaphysics, rationalist philosophy or flimsy spiritual eclecticism. Sometimes all of them at the same time. Searching for the meaning of life is a great way of flexing your rhetorical muscle and limbering up your mental faculties but, trust me, it’s a futile pursuit. If the whole history of human discovery has failed to produce a formulation for the meaning of life, don’t expect that you’ll be able to do it merely by bringing your own unique perspective to the task. It's one of the first lessons you learn down here in Tartarus Central - there are many futile pursuits that pose as being more profound and substantial than they really are.

But just because we can’t nail down the meaning of life doesn’t mean that life itself has no purpose. Perhaps the distinction is slight. You could argue that the purpose defines the meaning or, alternatively, that the meaning is implicit in the purpose. But I like to keep a distinction. It avoids any need to get into a wider and subjective metaphysical argument.

So what is the purpose of life? Well in the case of a human, I would posit that it is to strive to become a better human being. It’s that simple. I can’t claim to have come up with this aphorism myself - I heard it first on a radio discussion program. One of the contributors to the discussion, the exact topic of which I cannot now recall, was a nun from some obscure and none too dogmatic branch of Catholicism. She claimed that this was the purpose of life - too become a better human being.

The reason that I like this definition is that it is both simple and practical. It contains within itself a moral reference model that needs no external validation. For every action we take we can ask ourselves, “does this make me a better human-being”? If the answer is yes then we continue, if the answer is no then we either choose again or proceed with the knowledge that this choice is not the best we could make, it does not serve the purpose of our existence. So, we could ask, does sitting in front of television make me a better human being? Does punching this annoying drunk make me a better person? Does going to work make me a better human being? How about taking a walk, writing a book, reading a newspaper or reading a book, playing with your children or playing the piano, creating a blog? Everything you do suddenly has a moral dimension. Making the judgement about what is improving and what is not is also, more often than not, intuitively simple.

Of course we could get into a long discussion about what we mean by a “better human being” and, if it is possible to misjudge what this means, then there could be some unfortunate consequences to following this approach. I mean, for example, that from a physical mechanistic and evolutionary standpoint we may judge the better human being as the one who is selfish, aggressive and asserts its dominance on those around them. However I believe that it would be commonly accepted that humanity’s greatest achievements have not been in the sphere of physical dominance, that this is not the defining characteristic of being human -although, if we’re not careful this line of discussion could lead us into the muddy waters of Cartesian dualism that will also prove ultimately unhelpful.

Instead I like to keep it simple and believe that we can all make the judgment about what is improving and what is not without recourse to classic philosophical discourse. I think that this aphoristic approach is a useful way of proceeding in life. It gives life purpose, even if it has no meaning in a place like Tartarus Central.

I’ve been meaning to write something about procrastination but keep putting it off.

There are a myriad of things to do in any day at any time. You have choices to make at every point and there is always one option that is easier than most of the others and this one option is rarely the best of the bunch. Take me, for instance, I would like to write fiction – nothing Earth-shattering, a few decent short stories are my only ambition at the moment. To do this I need to dedicate some time each day to writing (how long should it take to write a short story, for crying out loud!). This requires solitude and a degree of peace. So if I am not working my day job, cooking, spending time with my family, reading or sleeping, then I should be writing – no questions. That gives me about 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours a day when I should be writing.

So why don’t I write? Writing is what I state that I want to do and I have the time to do it. But I don’t write. I put it off, I discover other things to fill those hours – not things that are more important, but things that are easier to do, like watching TV or trawling through interweb detritus or writing some god awful blog or playing computer games or any of a number of other vacuous, pointless tasks. And the hours just fly by. We have so much choice now that there is always an easy option. Writing, I know, is never going to be an easy task so what can I do to make sure that it is chosen over all the ephemera? - ephemera that is always going to be easier and shinier. Why do I continue to procrastinate and avoid facing the one thing I profess to desire?

Perhaps it is fear. Perhaps I am just your ordinary coward. What I fear is not the discovery that writing demands hard work and dedication, I accept that already. No what I fear is that in working hard and in dedicating my few hours a day to writing, I discover that I was never destined to become a writer. That writing is not something I have in me and never will be. I will come to understand that I may as well sit myself down in front of that TV and let those images and that sound dull the pain as I let my life hurtle by. That those things that I dismiss as ephemeral distractions now become the best that I can hope for as I disappear from view.

Of course the irony is, if I don’t try to write, if I don’t face my fear, then I am damned anyway. I know that it is better to try and to fail than to procrastinate and inherit the failure anyway. Yet, if I procrastinate I will always have that dream that I could be a writer. Perhaps this is the real problem. I can live my banal existence with a dream to cling onto, like a life raft, but to sail this sea with no dreams would be the greatest horror of all.

Tartarus Central can be a gloomy place at times.

What's on your mind?

I have often wondered about the brain and the mind – how they are linked. The mind is, without doubt, produced by the brain and, in some sense, could just be viewed as an abstract concept used to describe a set of activities within the brain rather than something that has any meaningful existential status itself. Yet you can’t have an abstract concept unless you have some tool to perform the abstraction, which is in this case the conscious mind – which all seems a little tautological. The mind also does not seem to occupy the whole of the brain, but just certain parts of it. It also has layers from conscious process through memory and down into the unfathomable depths of the sub-conscious – or so we’re led to believe. Although I have thought about this I have never actually done much by way of research to understand this area better.

One thing I have heard is that the left and right hemispheres govern or perform different tasks with creative thought being a right-brained activity and more formal learned activity being controlled by the left. This all sounded like academic theorising and was of only passing interest to me. However, this bifurcation became more overtly apparent to me when, towards then end of 2005, I became unwell and whereas I normally perceive my mind as being a single entity, it seemed to me to split into two separate functions running in parallel.

The illness was little more than a cold for the first couple of weeks but then I went into a decline and took to my bed with a fever. It was by no means severe or dangerous, probably some mild influenza, but enough to sap my energy and send me through a cycle of chills and hot sweats. I needed to rest and rest I did.

The strange thing about this was that as I lay there either shivering or sweating, sometimes both, I entered a strange state where I was at the same time both awake and asleep. Even though my eyes were closed, and I couldn’t move at all – like the connection between my mind’s instruction to move and my body’s response had been severed - I was aware of the room around me, the noises in the house of my children, my wife coming into the room to check on me and eventually to come to bed. I was aware of all of this without interruption even though I seemed otherwise to be asleep. All this awareness was located on the left side of my brain – I could feel it being physically there in the way that you can feel where a headache is located. Meanwhile on the right side of my brain all hell was breaking loose. It was uncontrolled streaming thought rushing past me at incredible speed, just like a dream. Sometimes these streams where uninteresting reflections on some aspect of work or mundane life, sometimes they would switch to wild fantasy. At one point the right side of my brain started playing old 1930’s and 40’s dance band music on what sounded vividly like an old 78’ vinyl record player, complete with hiss, crackle and skips. I don’t know anything about such dance band music, I don’t own any recordings of it, vinyl or otherwise, nor do I think I have ever heard much of it in my life (background music in films perhaps). Odd though that particular experience was, it is unimportant.

What was so strange was the sensation of having my mind running simultaneously in two modes. It was a bit like wearing a pair of special glasses with one lens being normal glass whilst, through the other lens, is projected a whole series of curious images at speed.

An unexpected visitor

One of the things I like about Tartarus Central, in fact probably the only thing I like about it, is the fact that there are very few people here. To tell the truth I didn’t expect to find another soul shambling down these murky paths. It’s not that I crave loneliness or anything so morose or that I generally dislike people either, it is just that I quite like being by myself. It’s the only way I can be assured of good company.

So I’m toddling along here and suddenly Roberta pops up from a place called Canada and makes a comment I can’t even start to comprehend - I’m not very bright and am easily startled by unexpected events. But thanks for stopping by, Roberta, and taking the time. I really didn’t know that people read blogs. I mean how do you stumble across a place like this and why would you bother to read it? When I started this I hadn’t anticipated that someone else might read it – someone I don’t even know. I’m glad Roberta popped round and I just hope I haven’t wasted too much of her time.

To prove a point, I once taught myself to draw...I can't draw now.

Tuesday – and the day has started badly. For a start I have to go to work which means that hopes for a holiday lottery win have proved to be somewhat optimistic. It also occurs to me that the one thing that I purport to want to do, namely writing, is being relegated in the face of this new blogging distraction. It is all part of Tartarus, I guess. All part of the reason that I’m in this metaphorical (or should that be metaphysical?) realm.

Today I was musing over the subject of creativity. Is it innate or can it be taught? I once believed that you could be taught anything or even teach yourself with the right instruction manual (Juggling for the Complete Klutz was a particular favourite). As if to prove a point, I once taught myself to draw. Learning to draw is an interesting pursuit. The popular assertion is that people can either draw or they can’t; that some are born with this ability.

Although it may be true that some people are faster on the uptake than others, I thought at the time that it was all a matter of application. You see, if you give someone a pencil and some paper, a person who has not even considered drawing since primary or high school, a person who has never really tried to draw, and ask them to draw a face, most of them will say they can’t and, when pressed, will produce something that looks not unlike a drawing that a primary school child might construct. They use this scrawl as evidence that they can’t draw. However, I would contend, this was just evidence that they hadn’t spent enough time drawing. If they put the hours in and consulted some books they could indeed get to a point that they could draw something more than passable. I put this to the test and taught myself. At some point people around me started saying, when they saw what I was doing, that I was indeed able to draw, they said that they wished that they had my abilities. I even sold a picture. But was this innate talent or just the result of practice? I have no way of telling. I can't draw now. I stopped drawing and now it is no longer something that I do or can do. I find this strange.

But why go on about drawing? What has this to do with anything important? Well there is an interesting comparison with writing. If you speak to someone who has decided, like myself, that they would like to be a writer you do not get any of that daunted reticence you get with drawing. They never question the fact that they can write, that they have the ability.

I think that this is largely due to a confusion in terms. The verb ‘To Write’ is used to imply different tasks. We can all write, in the sense that we left school with a grasp of grammar and construction and a vocabulary sufficiently large to allow us to get by in life. The physical task of writing presents no challenge. The trouble is that people confuse this meaning of the verb with another meaning which is about creative construction. This latter meaning has only a passing association with the physical production of words on screen or page; is only loosely tied to grammatical construction. But we use the same verb so people believe they can write, when in fact they can do little more than scribe – their efforts are no more advanced than that first attempt to draw a face. The difference is that it is easy for someone to see how bad their first drawing is (and this is the main reason that they give up so quickly) but they are seemingly blind to the quality of their writing.

So on that evidence I should be confident that with some work and concentrated effort I should be able to learn to produce creative writing, I just need to accept that, like drawing, it will take time. But I have grown to doubt this. I have started to believe that there may be a very real, physical barrier to creativity and its written expression. What if creativity is actually a manifestation of the way in which our brains are configured? Then, perhaps, there is nothing to learn. No hope of learning. At least not from a creative perspective. My drawing was never art, and I doubt it would have attained that status. Is this also the inevitable conclusion that I will reach with my prose? Will I ever find a way out of Tartarus Central?

I taught myself to spell "Autodidacticism" but don't know what it means

Good intentions make a really good road surface - sort of springy underfoot, so you don't feel like you are going to hurt yourself if you trip. I have a whole bunch of perceived problems that I have always had good intentions to overcome. For example, I have become increasingly obsessed with the idea that:

a) I am using my brain to its full potential and I am, therefore, a half-wit at best,

b) I am only using a small fraction of my brain’s potential and need to discover a way to actualise my full potential,

or

c) Someone has swapped out my brain for a thick piece of raw steak and I am having to use that to think with – which might explain a lot.

Anyway I look at it I feel that things aren’t all that I could’ve hoped for in the cerebral department. I’m increasingly of the opinion that modern life – and particularly corporate life – actually rewires the neural paths in your brain in such a way as to make creative thinking far more challenging and, ultimately, impossible. I can feel the darkness creeping in.

Last year I came up with the idea that one of my problems is the fact that I just hadn’t read enough or widely enough. I can trace the reason for this back to my family, my education, my innate laziness and stubborn refusal to listen to the sagacity of others. At school, very early on, I had struggled with reading and writing and this created a sort of negative reinforcement loop that meant I was never regarded as much more than average and I avoided situations that would require me to read or write. What no one told me then is that reading and writing are the core way by which we communicate. Sure we speak to one another, but it is only when you sit down and write, write to be understood and to understand, that we really hone our communicative powers. So shunning these areas is always going to lead to problems. Problems wider and deeper than school grades.

So anyway, I decide that I had some catching up to do but I still have this problem of being a slow reader. I was never going to be able to broaden my reading substantially with my reading speed even if I ignored the enormous amounts of dross that fills bookshops these days posing as literature. I came up with a plan to address this and support my good intention to become better read. I bought a Teach-Yourself book on speed reading – it had great anecdotes of people who could read whole pages at a glance – just what I needed.

The trouble is, I am such a slow reader I still haven’t finished the book.

I wouldn't start from here

The trouble with Tartarus in general, and Tartarus Central in particular, is that it never had any overarching design. No one really owned it as a project, decided what it should be, or even what it was for. As such there are no maps, or none that you would rely on, the signage is terrible and the lighting rarely lifts the place out of a murky gloom. On top of that the style ranges wildly from a sort of primitive crumbling, chunkiness that looks like a failed Neolithic DIY project right through to vast chambers of high baroque as well as modern brutalist towers – all styles blindly abutting on one another.

Suffice it to say that getting out of here is no simple process. I mean standing right where I am now I have a choice of paths leading out of Tartarus Central. To my left there are paths of polished granite, one of red marble and another of concrete; to my right the paths are concrete, turf, mud and one unevenly paved with slabs of some sort of pale stone. I’ve no idea where any of these paths might lead, whether a step down one of them represents a step of progress or regression, whether it will take me out of this place or just lead me back here in ten years time. Ahead of me there is a path made of rocks, one paved in iron and another, just off to the right, paved with good intentions. I take this path mainly because, of all the routes, this one has a comforting look of familiarity about it – who knows where it will lead.

"There's no time like the present" - I say this every year.

January 1 - Welcome to the dark halls of Tartarus Central.

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions. I haven't committed to give up the booze or take up smoking. I haven't joined a gym or reassessed my diet. But it is January 1 all the same and it makes me think that I've seen a few too many of these slip by without having much to show for it or having learned much along the way - apart from, perhaps, an increased awareness of the relentless progress of time.

Yet you have to start sometime and you have to start somewhere. I just feel that the time was probably a couple of decades back and, however you look at it, it's a long haul back from Tartarus just to get to the break-even point.