Lies about Lapwings...

I'm still trying to answer the question about why I decided to become a writer. I have written five attempts already. All of those efforts have been scrapped. They were unnecessary and with every word I typed, I typed a lie. I wonder why that is. Why this topic, this question, is so evasive and prone to throwing up distracting falsehoods. What am I hiding from myself?

Elsewhere in this web log, back in the mists of time when I still fostered some ambition, however uncertain it was, I made a statement about the fear of living without the dream of something better. Perhaps that is what I face now, perhaps that is why my fingers falter, the fear that what I have now is the best I can ever hope for, the epitome of my existence. Perhaps.

So in all the self-searching analysis that has gone on since my last entry here, did I ever come close to understanding why I suddenly decided, a few years ago, to try my hand at writing? Even now I really can’t say with any certainty. I find it difficult to extract the truth from the morass of ephemeral falsity in which it no doubt hides. But let me tell you about my father.

I am the only son of an only son. It is often said, by people who observe us together, that my father and I are very alike and I wonder sometimes, though never ask, whether he can see any of himself in me. Yet I think we are very different, similar metals, perhaps, but forged in different fires. My father was born in the 1930’s in one of those grey colliery towns that clings to the coast of the North East of England. His father was a miner and his mother had spent time as a milliner before becoming a fulltime housewife, as all miners’ wives were in those days. Neither of his parents was well educated. I got the feeling that his father was dismissive of education and the educated. His mother, though, now that was a different matter entirely. If ever there was a story of unfulfilled potential through lack of opportunity it could have been found in that small, gentle and good-humoured woman. And whereas many of her fellow miners’ wives must have been content with their early emancipation from the school house, she was cursed with knowing that she could have thrived if she had been allowed to stay on at school, done a whole lot better for herself, in life and in marriage.

So what hope is there for this boy of theirs, my father? A boy just discovering the world as Europe falls once more into war and the industrial towns and cities of the North become targets for bombing raids. No time for looking forward. Men must fight and die or labour deep underground extracting the fuel to keep the home-fires burning. The future is uncertain, victory is not assured.

Yet the war does come to an end and my father finds himself no longer living in the coastal mining town. His father has given up the grimy toil of the mines to become a publican, an inauspicious career move for a man who likes to drink more than he likes to work. The pub, an architecturally bland building devoid of any flourishes or finesse, sits like a squat box alongside a road that takes traffic north to Newcastle. Inside the floors are all wood and sawdust, spittoons still prevalent and in regular use, this is not a refined drinking spot. The clientele are, like my grandfather, coarse working men with brawny arms and calloused hands. Men from the collieries, and the harbour and the forge.

At night my father tries to sleep upstairs. The noise from the bar comes up through the thin floor, mixed with the stench of cheap cigarette smoke and stale beer. The noise is of men drinking, shouting, laughing, fighting and, for a young boy, it is terrifying. He knows well enough that there is more to fear than just the noise. What does he think of in those long nights? Does he think that this is where his destiny lies or does he dream of escape?

But although the nights are full of terrors, the days are different. Things are changing for this boy. Against the odds he finds himself attending the Grammar school in the city and even in such a conservative educational institution new possibilities are presenting themselves. He finds he even has some talent. Although he doesn’t know it, he will return to this school again some years later as a teacher and later still he will have a son attend there too, although by then it is no longer a Grammar School but has been transformed into a large Comprehensive School (similar metal, different fires).

At the weekends he escapes the dark and drab pub and runs with his dog across the fields. There, where field follows field to an endless horizon, lapwings take to the air and perform their low altitude acrobatics seeming to exhilarate just in their sheer mastery of the element. My father and his dog chase after them, knowing that they can never be caught. And in these fields what does this growing boy think about? As he looks at the clouds scudding across the sky, at the contours of the distant hills in the changing light, at the rainstorm coming in off the valley, and at the hedgerows, the scattered trees, the fields of barley, wheat and grass, is he thinking about what he is discovering in school? In school, it is becoming apparent that he is has a talent, a talent for art.

This talent seems to have come out of nowhere, certainly no inheritance from his father, and it fosters within him a creative urge that becomes all consuming. There is talk at the Grammar School that he should be thinking of Art College, that this talent should be encouraged. And what does that sharp-tempered miner, turned drunken landlord, think of his son when he hears of this? This question is at the very heart of the story, upon which all significant meaning rests. But I have never asked, so we must move on unenlightened. His mother, I know, though again I have never asked, is burning with pride when she hears though she contains her exuberance in front of her husband. She is also slightly afraid for her son, worried about all the impossible things he will need to face as he attempts to pursue his dreams. She worries for him still more when, a few years later, he leaves the local Art College and heads down to London, to the prestigious Royal College of Art. Finally he is free. He writes to his mother regularly, from London, humorous, warm-hearted letters about all that he is discovering there interspersed with scruffy cartoon illustrations which often depict him attended watchfully by vultures.

When he returns to the North East it is with his newly found fiancée, a student of medicine who will become a doctor, his wife, my mother. Where does the dream go then, when the children start to arrive? More mouths to feed, more bills to pay. He takes a position at his old school teaching art to give him a reliable, if not particularly large, income. And years pass. Eventually the children too leave school and home and he feels that he can at last give up his teaching post and return to his painting.

Several years later and I’m working in London for a big corporation. I’d never planned it, just sort of fallen into a job because I needed the money. It is December, cold and dark, I leave the office at lunchtime and scurry across Hungerford Bridge into the West End. My father is in town. There is an exhibition of paintings and he has several in the show. We meet for lunch and talk about a few things of little consequence, the weather, work, football before heading over to the gallery. It is the private view, the day before the public get in, so the gallery is mainly full of people with some connection to the gallery or the artists. I can’t stay long, I need to be back at the office even before we walk through the doors of the gallery but I want to see my father’s paintings, I want to be in the gallery even if just for a little while. We’re in there looking around the exhibition and, every now and then, people come up to my father and say hello. He introduces me to them and they always say something like how we look the same, how they can see the family connection. And then they ask me whether I paint too. They all ask this as though it is the most natural thing to ask and I’m embarrassed standing there next to my father and his paintings and telling them that no, no I don’t paint, that I’ve never even tried. They look surprised. I tell them what I do for a job and they seem confused. I realise that none of these people has ever worked for a large corporation, they don’t know what it means when I say what I do. And there, in that gallery, the words I speak seem strange to me too. But my time is up. I say goodbye to my father and head back through the gloomy half-light of day, across the river, and to work..

And somewhere in that story is the reason I decided to try to become a writer or at least some of the reason. Except, of course, it’s all lies. I don’t know whether there is any real truth to it at all. The bit with the lapwings, that’s true. But the rest? The rest I can’t make any guess at how much of that is true. Maybe some, maybe none but the core of the story, its real heart, is missing because I really have never asked my father about it, about his life growing up and discovering an unlikely talent.

Perhaps this has moved my exploration of the question on a bit, in a cursory and oblique way. I still can’t grasp at it, reduce it to a single imperative succinctly expressed in simple terms. Perhaps it also helps me understand that giving up that ambition was also inevitable. There are still many miles of uncharted corridors to explore here in Tartarus Central, though few promises of answers or suggestion that there is ever any way out.

Why did I decide to become a writer?

Why did I think I would like to be a writer in the first place? Perhaps this is not a question that many aspirant writers ask themselves enough. There are those who can say with great confidence that they never made a decision to write, that this was in a sense made for them at an early age. They have been writing since they first learned to scrape crayon against paper – it is part of the essential essence of who they are. Fair enough, I envy you. There are others, like myself, who came to this decision later in life, maybe much later, maybe too late. For us there needs to be some reason why we claim to have discovered this sudden creative urge that has seemingly troubled us little in our lives up until now. There must be a reason why we could sail through our adolescence without stringing more than a couple of words together, a reason why we could move into higher education and beyond by doing just what was expected of us and little more (and writing, by that stage, was certainly not what was expected). Then one day we think that we would rather be writers than insurance salesmen or short-order chefs or cleaners or lawyers or whatever god-awful predicament we’ve found ourselves in. Why is this? Why do we (by which, of course, I mean I) give such idle dreams any more credence than a wish to become an astronaut?

Terence J. Crabber famously said that “…if God had desired us to roam this Earth constipated in the gut and spirit, he would not have provided us with the bounty that is figs…” (The Chronicle of Figs, Wernstein & Wernstein (1911). London. Page 343). Fair enough, but what does that have to do with the question in hand? Well there are several commentaries on this section that see a wider message in these fairly prosaic and derivative lines. Many of these interpret the aphorism as “if God had wished us to remain silent he would not have given us mouths” (cf. “The Exegesis of Introductions – the purpose and form of introductory passages in the Chronicle of Figs” – Stephen Jones PhD, Ficus Press (1973). London). In this tradition it is being argued that figs, here, represent man’s unique ability to speak and that this allows us to differentiate ourselves from other fig-eating animals by allowing us to release descriptions of the thoughts (here “spirit”) that form our cognition of the world as we perceive it.

Of course most readers of The Chronicle will know that, contextually, it is more consistent to equate the figs of The Chronicle with the epistemological hypostasis of mind. However, Jones ignores this reading because it makes the interpretation awkward and possibly meaningless (it becomes something like “if God had wanted us to remain silent he would not have given us minds”). However, as Samuel Pygott and Charles Crone point out in their short but excellent biography of Crabber (Extracting The Man of Figs – Discovering TJ Crabber in the Chronicle of Figs, Lodestar Press (1975). Dublin), much of the early sections of The Chronicle were written by Crabber in an inn called The Gut & Spirit where he had temporary lodgings before he moved to Kent on the inheritance he gained through the death of this father. This gives us a much easier reading of the passage which now becomes “…if God had not wanted us to write, he would not have given us minds”. The significance for my current predicament becomes thereby immediately apparent – if the route was somewhat unnecessary and tortuous.

[Of course there is a third tradition that suggests that both interpretations are somewhat misguided but I have no space to go into that now (if you are interested in exploring this viewpoint you could try the highly polemical “Its Just About Bloody Figs, You Idiots!” – Percy Thrower, BBC Publications (1976), London).]

Anyhow, the essence of what Crabber seems to be telling us is that there is some deep connection between our mind and our need, or desire, to write. Not just in the obvious sense that you need a mind before you can write but in the sense that through the act of writing you discover your mind and the true nature of your thoughts. With writing the mind will flourish and grow fruitful like the fig tree. Without writing your mind atrophies, thoughts become stunted and not well rooted.

So there we have Reason One: I decided to become a writer to avoid the mental atrophy that I feared was otherwise the likely outcome of my lifestyle.

Fair enough, I have often stated as much in the past when questioned on such matters (though, more often than not, without going through the whole fig rigmarole as a precursor). I just happen to think that this cannot be true or at least not entirely true or even largely true. It sounds too honourable and intellectual to be sincere. It lacks any visceral and immediate necessity, it is more akin to the reasoning that someone may adopt for taking vitamin supplements or eating more fresh fruit and vegetables. It is all very worthy but doesn’t smack of anything that is truly human. It is the sort of reasoning that casts around our conscious minds masquerading as the truth, to stop us thinking further, to distract us from trying to open some of those heavy, rusted doors that hide away our subconscious mind and the creatures that lurk in dark corners there, shunning the light of enquiry. And it could be that it is these creatures that secretly control everything we do, that spirit up ideas of taking up writing and such like. Perhaps it is with these that I must converse and leave behind the deceptive world of the conscious mind.

So my quest must continue. I must trudge further through this netherworld of Tartarus Central in the hope that I will get closer to the truth. I might try to open a few doors. Maybe I can discover why I decided to try to become a writer. Maybe, in discovering this I will understand better whether there was any sincerity and noble purpose to it or whether it was no more than vanity and self-deception. Maybe I’ll discover a bit more about myself. Now I wonder what’s down this corridor…

Why I quit trying to be a writer...

A New Year, a reminder to us all that time is slipping away and that our futures are contracting at a rate that no amount of pleading can change. Around the world people have been spurred on by this reminder to redouble their efforts to bring new meaning and substance to their lives. This year will be different, a year of new starts to put all other years of new starts in the shade. Gym memberships burgeon, web logs are updated with new fervour and purpose, cigarettes are discarded, booze locked away (made seemingly obsolete by the sudden arrival of fruit juices), high-fat foods are rejected as being so much part of a former life, a life of indulgence and low aspirations, now left firmly behind in 2007. And aspirant writers commit themselves once more to the mantra to “write, write, write”. Success will surely come.

Yet we all know from experience that by February, maybe March, things will have slipped a bit, compromises will have been made, excuses given. Our true nature will come through and wipe away the excrescences of our good intentions, intentions that never sat well with who we truly were. The trouble with making these resolutions of self-improvement, you see, is that they tend to be inspired by a picture of how we would like to be, and most particularly how we would like others to see us, rather than pay heed to the quiddity of who we are.

I have a professed wish to be a writer. I tell myself, regularly, that to be a writer is simple all you need to do is write. If you are habitually writing, then you are a writer. If you are not, then you will never be one – it was never part your nascent potential. I am, of course, not making any distinction here between a good writer and a bad one. These are quality judgements that are largely irrelevant in distinguishing the writer from the non-writer. But, as I say, I know what it takes to be a writer and I have this stated aim to be one. What could be simpler, how could I possibly fail?

Well I think the answer to this one lies in the fact that I don’t, by my nature, find writing easy or, if I am to be truthful, very enjoyable. I’m never racing to the keyboard or notebook desperate to get an idea down; I never drag myself unwillingly from my computer realising that, in my artistic fervour, hours have flown by and I’ve forgotten to eat or drink to a degree that borders on the life-threatening. In fact I will do almost anything that will get me out of writing, however banal and vacuous it is (with perhaps the exception of watching television). Even when I can coax my unwilling self into opening the word processor I will spend hours rereading and tweaking old unfinished stories rather than finishing any of them or writing anything fresh. I do not find the process of writing habit-forming and this is why I gave up on the aspiration to become a writer.

To go back to the theme with which I started, for a moment, the theme of resolutions to change and why they commonly flounder. Many of the problems seem to stem from the fact that unless the change results in habit-forming behaviour, we will quickly revert back to our old ways, our old habits – because, to paraphrase Aristotle to make an existential point, we are what we habitually do. The gym may seem to promise increased health (and the annual subscription fee adequate encouragement to keep going) but unless we can reconfigure our subconscious mind (not the conscious mind where we formulate our plans and good intentions) to desire gym attendance in and of itself, we will find ourselves missing sessions with greater regularity and for more trivial reasons, we will write off the sunk expense of the membership fee as yesterday’s pecuniary problem. We never do get any fitter. We give up trying until another year swings round and makes us think about what we would like to be.

Of course we can all think of examples of people (perhaps, god forbid, even ourselves) who have made real changes to their lives, made steps towards being more like the person that they aspire to be (non-smoking, healthy, athletic, intelligent, witty and creative or whatever). I think the point I’m trying to make, in my usual long-winded way, is that those who succeed in this are tapping into something that is part of their nascent potential and it is often founded on something more solid than the whimsical fact that another year has crept up on them. If all your intentions are founded merely on the fact that it is a new year then they will fail. A new year is not, in itself, a compelling enough reason to change – there will, after all, be another one along shortly. There needs to be something more. If someone you have loved dies of lung cancer you may find that to be compelling enough to give up smoking in a way that no New Year will ever be, and you will most likely not give up through fear (you always knew the risks and consequences) but out of the pain of lost love and respect for the departed. Perhaps.

So for me to be a writer I need, it would seem, two things to allow me to “write, write, write”. The first is some way of making the act of writing more habit forming and the second is to have some compelling reason to write rather than do anything else. The former, I theorise, is something that is more a product of my psychological makeup and not something that I can really influence directly. The latter is something that has eluded me from almost the very moment the aspiration to write grabbed me. There is always something different to do. Not something better to do, in fact it is invariably worse, just something that is more me than I care to recognise.

So I decide to concern myself less with the theoretical question of how to become a writer and look to the more practical one which is, why did I think I wanted to be a writer in the first place?

The dank, caliginous corridors of Tartarus Central echo once more to the sound of my footsteps as I try to find some way forward. I begin to question whether there really is anywhere out of here at all. A step in one direction could represent progress or retreat or it could be entirely neutral in that there really is no way forward and there really is no way back, just circles and cycles like the Earth around the Sun.