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.

God versus Science. Result just in...

I’ve said before that Tartarus, vast though it is, is a fairly empty place and gloomy with it. It doesn't produce an atmosphere conducive to discussing issues that are more germane to the world above. Hence most of what I’ve written here has been extremely self-indulgent and solipsistic. Updates are sporadic because I have little to cue me to write, not enough changes in Tartarus to provoke a reaction. Yesterday, however, whilst exploring down one of the many nameless corridors here, I entered a cavernous room that inexplicably contained a strong gale of hot, dry air and thousands of loose sheets of paper. The wind carried the sheets in strange balletic eddies before depositing them in the corners where they piled up like great, towering drifts of snow. More paper seemed to be entering the room by some means all the time so that this process appeared to be endless. The paper piled up. I made my way to one side of the room and found it to filling up with discarded sheets from sacred texts and religious treaties on the nature of God, the formation of the world and the origins of mankind. In the opposite side of the room all the sheets were scientific papers and articles refuting much of what was in the other side and making claims that atheism was thereby a sound position to take.

Whilst glancing through various stray texts, it occurred to me that when people pick up this science versus religion debate, they tend to fail to distinguish the true quiddity of the terms. Science and atheism are not synonymous and religion is not offering, or trying to offer, any scientific proof for the existence of God. It is an apples and oranges argument. Religion offers no proof and science will give no credence to things that are not evidentially provable. As such they are not well made for sensible debate.

Religion attempts to offer us a route to understanding how moral codes are derived from the notion that a God exists. This invariably requires that very human attributes are ascribed to God in order to support some notion of divine providence. It is the lack of rationality of this route from the transcendent that concerns scientists as it cannot be translated into terms that would be acceptable to scientific method.

Science, however, is amoral. It is not focused on the same issues of how we should live our lives but is more concerned with empirical discovery to further our understanding of the universe in which we live in order to, in the main, have more control over our own destiny and provide a platform for further scientific discovery.

Science gets itself into difficulties when it fails to recognise the limits of its methods. We often perceive science to be the epitome of understanding whereas, in fact, it is, in the main, a method for approximating likely outcomes. It is about constructing models that generally seem to reflect empirical experience to an acceptable degree of tolerance. What it does not do, though, is provide an exact understanding of the world as it actually is nor can it answer all questions. If scientists attempt to answer a question that is couched in a way that requires the answer to be derived from inductive reasoning it is already failing to comply with the central tenets (dogma even) for valid scientific discovery. Just because I have only ever seen white swans does not give me the scientific support for saying that all swans are white (even though my personal experience may strongly suggest it). This is why I believe that atheism is not really a scientific position. It is denying the existence of God through induction – “because I have seen no evidence of God, God can’t exist”.

A scientist can of course critique religion and religious dogma for failing to be soundly based. The mistake, though, is to say that because the logic of religion fails to be scientifically convincing that there can be no God because this makes God’s existential status dependent on religion whereas there can be no causal link, logically or chronologically. This is where so many atheists make their mistake by refuting God’s existence by critiquing something that has no causal link to God’s existence. All that these people can do is to dispute the validity of religious dogma not the existence of God.

It is easy for scientific thought to critique religious dogma for failing to operate in an evidential way and it is easy for religious thought to critique science for failing to deliver moral guidance. We’re back to the apples and oranges. Science is amoral so we should not be using religious intuition to critique it and religion is faith based and therefore cannot be critiqued for failings in scientific rigour. The religious should stop trying to intuit scientific propositions derived from religious principles (e.g. the Sun revolves round the Earth, the Earth is only a few thousands years old and so on) and the scientists should stop trying to induct propositions on the nature of God by spouting science (you heard me, Dawkins).

So where does that leave us? God knows. No he doesn’t. Yes he does. No he doesn’t, he can’t. Can so. Can’t. Can….etc.

Sometimes I think I’m the only person who is genuinely solipsistic…

We all like to think we’re special, think we’re something different. I’m by no means a committed blogger, as is clearly evidenced here (and how my soul recoils at the sheer etymological ugliness of the word ‘blogger’ and its kin), but is not this activity of blogging itself an attempt to express this difference, make it more apparent to the world that we are here? We’re not just existing, we have something to say. Or perhaps we’re not all that arrogant. But all the same, we could just watch TV, if we wanted our views to go unheard.

Small cries, then, in a big world. This is also part of what I believe drives people, myself included of course, to decide to become writers. It is a belief that our views and perspectives, imagination and linguistic brilliance will be of wider interest to all those people out there and with this will come recognition and success. Blogging (do I really need to keep using that term?) is some sort of ersatz form of creative writing, or at least can be, and can easily consume, I would imagine, time that should be put to more constructive use. I say this because an awful lot of people seem to be writers or express an interest in writing and I cannot always tell whether this means anything beyond maintaining a web log itself. We take up writing to validate our unique difference but, on doing a quick search, an expressed interest in writing is shared by another 189,000 people on this site alone. Although there is obviously a degree of rounding there (and the number may be more of an order of magnitude than scientifically accurate), it is also known that there are others here who have not declared their interests and could well add to this figure.

In days prior to the preponderance of user-defined internet content, you could decide to become a writer and find that you alone, amongst your friends and acquaintances, had this ambition. You would feel differentiated and perhaps encouraged by this. But now the internet can demonstrate that you are not unique or special at all, pretty much everyone is at it. Flicking through the blogs of those with an interest in writing (and I have applied no real scientific statistical analysis behind this) I start to develop a sense that many of the women seem also to like cats and many of the men profess accompanying interests in music and playing guitar. I’m guilty of falling into that male stereotype (there’s a pun there if you look hard enough) – although guitar owning probably describes my status better than guitar playing.

Why am I bothering to bang on about this? What has this got to do with anything at all? Well I’m not sure but it would seem that to declare yourself interested in writing is both easy and common place. But these days the poverty of such a declaration is more easily exposed. To be a self-proclaimed writer differentiates you by a fraction of one percent from all other human beings, it is no achievement in itself, even as an ambition. What makes the difference is not the intent but the writing itself. You need to forget your orgulous posturing and the existential aggrandisement that may be your hope from writing and think merely of the words. The words, if written well, will validate you, will determine whether you are indeed a writer or just someone with a vague and misdirected interest. Having the desire to be a great writer has no worth, desiring to write well, and pursuing that desire until you attain it, does – or so it would appear to me.

But Tartarus Central is not really about attaining things, or moving on in any way. It is, as far as I can fathom, more to do with adopting transient aspirations that are never really pursued with any commitment and vigour. Not everyone gets this, for instance Sisyphus continues to make one hell of a racket down here by persistently lugging his boulder around. He should just sit down and reflect on how great it would be to get the boulder up that slope rather than go through the futile activity of trying to actually do it. But he’s always grumpily muttering about “miscarriages of justice” and “I’ll bloody show them” and won’t be discouraged. I’m in half a mind to ask Gyges to confiscate the boulder, I wonder what Sisyphus would do with his time then.

"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." - Camus

“Yeah, right. Have you spoken to him recently?” – me

“No.” - Camus

Techno notice

Last night I found myself, once more, attending the annual dinner of the Dunwich Observatory Academy of Science. This year the dinner was held in the well appointed surroundings of Dunwich Preceptory; the observatory facilities, themselves, being out of action yet again this year.

I think I signed up for some Academy newsletter once when I was at university (as it contained a short piece on Plato’s Music of the Spheres) and have received tickets to the dinner on an annual basis ever since. This is despite several changes of address on my part, of which I’m reasonably sure I’ve never informed the Academy. Even after all these years I still think my invitation is a mistake as I’m not a scientist (I did Classics and Philosophy at University) and have no connection to the Academy in betwixt these annual dinners.

The dinners are the usual thing, long refectory tables, plenty of wine and food (that is for some reason always seafood – which I can’t abide), a few awards and Academy announcements, and a guest speaker (who was this year one of Tolstoy’s descendents who is a senior radio astronomer in California and who’d just published some tract or other after an assignment at Arecibo). Things don’t really relax, however, until the speeches are over and everyone has had enough wine to be less guarded, with their fellow scientists, about exactly what it is they’re working on. If you thought that literary types were a bit defensive and suspicious of plagiarism at every turn, then you’ve never spent time amongst a bunch of scientists who’re all after the same funding.

Anyhow, that’s all pretty much by the by. To get to the point at last, I end up sitting opposite this chap with a French sounding name (Carpentier, Chaproniere or something, I didn’t quite catch it) who was in fact an American and working for some AI research lab out in the San Fernando Valley. I suspect that he is one of those most dangerous of scientists, the ones who hoard boxed sets of Star Trek - The Next Generation and other sci-fi shows in their otherwise lonely apartments. Those whose research interests are more guided by the low-rate fiction in which they indulged than by anything more worthy.

Apparently he’d recently done a TV series because he mentioned it with tiresome regularity (“…in episode two I discussed…”, “…one of the major themes of the series was around this exact point…”, “.. I first met Dr. Whoever when we were filming interviews for the show and he believes…”) – he went on like this throughout the evening. I don’t watch television so I’ve no idea whether this series made it over here or not, I certainly didn’t recognise the chap. I think this lack of recognition initially irked him but then he seemed to have seized on my ignorance of his celebrity as a personal mission of conversion and by the end of the evening I probably knew the details of his show better than he knew the names of the bridge crew of the Enterprise.

What got my fellow diner going, wine notwithstanding, was the guest speaker.

“Interesting to see that Tolstoy guy up there, don’t you think?” he said as the speaker sat down and the applause subsided.

“Yes, I never erm … never thought you could …deduce so much from…erm those spectrums-”

“-No I mean how he’s up there doing the whole science bit not trying to bang out a novel.”

“You think writing is some genetic heritage?”

“Not at all. That’s not what I’m driving at. I think he gets it. Gets the idea that the arts are dead.”

“I thought he was just interested in pulsars and their extra-solar planets”, I hadn’t been paying much attention but I was pretty sure that both the word “pulsar” and the term “extra-solar planets” had been used more than once by Dr. Tolstoy but I don’t think my companion was listening to me now, he’d mounted his horse and was going to charge right on through the conversation until he reached the other side no matter what I had to say.

“You must have caught my show. I discussed this idea in the first episode where I explore where humanity is going and the things that we’ll leave behind. One of the first to go is the arts. Did you catch it?”

“I don’t actually watch much television these days.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

And so it goes on. After a brief exchange where I establish that I’m not kidding and he suggests that my life is somehow poorer for its lack of access to popular science shows with high production values he gets to the point of his thesis about the arts being the first against the wall when the techno-revolution happens.

His thesis went like this. Whereas for most of the backend of the Twentieth Century researchers in Artificial Intelligence had been obsessed with computer technology, voice recognition and chess – and had essentially got nowhere beyond the humbling of a few Russian chess grandmasters - the Twenty First Century emphasis was on Synthetic Intelligence (SI, he called it) and this was already taking giant steps forwards. SI is founded on building enhanced capabilities to human intelligence, exploiting the fact that our current brain utilization is low and memory unreliable. If we can improve our ability to think and improve our memory recall we suddenly have a new tool to invent even more ingenious adaptations – and so it goes on. This is all done with a combination of computer chip implants and gene manipulation therapy.

In less than a decade, he says, you’ll be able to have an implant that will act as a precise memory store. You’ll no longer forget things or recall them imprecisely. Couple this with the fact that you’ll also be able to boost the efficiency of both cerebral hemispheres by a combination of hardwiring and neuro-chemical gene enhancements, you'll not only be able to recall more, you'll be able to think more too. It is at this point that he claims the arts die. There are two factors to this, he postulates, the first is that it will be within the capacity of every human, enhanced in this way, to produce a Nobel Prize-winning novel or a painting the equivalent of a Carravagio or suchlike and therefore it becomes a devalued exercise. The other factor is that these people will be more fascinated by the limitless possibilities of advancing their new science to be stirred anymore by art that thrives, not on the perfection of humanity, but on its imperfections.

Each step in SI will open up new horizons of invention. It becomes not just self-perpetuating but self-accelerating. The greatest thinkers of today will seem like simple children to tomorrow’s citizens. We will no longer need art or artists as we will be fascinated in ourselves. Happiness becomes a setting and not a mood reaction. We can banish sadness forever at the flick of a nano-switch. And so he went on.

Of course, he predicts, not everyone will be so lucky. It’s going to cost a lot of money to get the enhancements. Soon there’ll be a divide between the enhanced humans and the “organic variety” as he so blithely put it. “This is one revolution that you don’t want to be on the outside of”, was his parting shot as he got up to find, no doubt, another victim for his evangelism.

I think the upside of his forecast for humanity is that, in this new world order of his, there’ll be no call to give him another series on TV. Sometimes even Tartarus Central starts to look sane….

Speaking figuratively...

Terence J Crabber’s The Chronicle of Figs. You may not have read it, not many people have. It is a large tome that never made it into a popularising paperback edition. Anyhow if you do get hold of a copy I recommend that you spend some time leafing through it as Crabber has a lot to say. Admittedly most of it is quite closely related to figs, the history of their cultivation and their wide culinary and medicinal application but if you can read between the lines it is possible to pick out some essence of Crabber’s philosophy of life and that, I think, can be more widely applied.

What drove Crabber to invest thirty four years of his life to the painstaking construction of The Chronicle is not well established. He died at the age of sixty seven from the dehydrating effects of a prolonged bout of diarrhoea. At that point he was pretty much a recluse spending his days in even measure between his glasshouses in Kent and his study in the adjoining house. Even his research trips to the British Museum Reading Rooms that, along with his excursions to selected locations of the Mediterranean, the Levant and North Africa, had been such a characteristic feature of his early studies had declined to nothing in his last five or six years of life.

The fact that he died with no family or close friends and left neither diaries nor any obvious autobiographical texts means that most of what we know of Crabber has been gleaned from the text of The Chronicle itself, a work that Crabber finally completed, in sporadic bursts, in those final days. Over and above the fascinating biographical details that can be teased from the text, the overwhelming sense one gets from reading The Chronicle is that Crabber, through his single-minded pursuit of figs and all things figgy, had in fact stumbled across both a consistent epistemological framework for metaphysical analysis and a rather fine variant on the date and walnut cake (where it is the walnuts, and not the dates, that are replaced with figs).

When I was at University, too many years ago to mention now, there was a miniature underground academic industry of people writing exegeses and commentaries on sections of The Chronicle. No one was doing this as part of their main course of study, no department would countenance such a thing, but instead it was all done in spare moments, the papers and pamphlets circulated amongst the clique of initiates. Some of the more bawdy or anarchistic commentaries were occasionally left, mischievously, in department coffee areas or slipped under the study doors of the more staid professors and lecturers. These always created quite a stir and, for a time, the college library’s edition of The Chronicle of Figs was removed from the stacks to try to put an end to such things. It was eventually returned after accusations of censorship and illiberalism were levelled at the college administrators, forcing them to relent. Within days new commentaries were doing the rounds. In fact I would guess that most people who have come across Crabber and his Chronicle would have done so through these, or similar, commentaries rather than through actually reading The Chronicle itself.

Anyhow, I’m straying from the point, what I am really trying to say here is that just because a book is called The Chronicle of Figs doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain great philosophical insight and, conversely, just because a book purports to be of great philosophical importance doesn’t mean that it contains a fig of truth.

Now I wonder whether there is a library anywhere down here in Tartarus Central…

What's behind this door? Oh...

This is most peculiar. I seem to have found myself back where I started, back in Tartarus Central. Nearly two years have passed and I’m back here in these gloomy halls. I have gained an extra daughter but apart from that nothing has changed in all this time. I’m no nearer to becoming a writer than I am to becoming a giraffe (mind you these shirts are getting tight around the collar, so that might not be entirely accurate).

What the hell have I been doing with all these days? That path paved with good intentions was a complete dud. It looked so good to start with but just brings me back here again.

I could just sit here and sulk...

Or I could give it another go...

May be with fewer pretensions and less pretentiousness

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.