Elemental

In writing one can easily spoil the fun by pinning one’s hopes to the idea of harvesting the results. Don’t complain when the fruit is rotten: it’s preparing to launch its seeds. That untidy heap of rubble is the ore of a precious metal. In all my human weakness the germ of fresh strength may be discerned. So let me look upon my failures, and my neighbours’, and the world’s, with indulgent affection. Within us gleams something which only needs to be brought out.

When I let myself fall out of step with the crowd—the crowd of ideas in my head that parrot the world’s chatter—I observe something quite different, and better, than anything I imagined. I can free myself from mental slavery, as Bob Marley advises. I don’t like sitting at a screen, or beating a keyboard tattoo. I want to write with my favourite battered, hand-modified cheap Lamy Safari, with Registrar’s ink, smooth paper (Optik® that doesn’t bleed through, with lines the right distance apart) in a wire-bound notebook that lies perfectly flat and folds back on itself. Unfortunately, my handwriting is almost illegible. Even I can’t decipher all of it. When I’m gone I don’t suppose anyone will try reading it, but the ink will last a long time and is waterproof too. That’s why registrars (of births, marriages and deaths) use it. And I can write daily, whether I've “anything to say” or not.

To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive. (Bhagavad Gita)

. . . and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe. (from Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates)

So I examine my life and prepare calmly for death, an event I’m sure is far away, but I’m one of those who takes an exceptionally long time to get anything done.

We spent a few days in West Wales, in Narberth. We camped in primitive conditions a stone’s throw from the old Town Hall, just behind the building with iron railings at the right of the painting. We shared our paddock with a sheep, a goat and six hens, four of whom were sociable. The other two, with their refined black & white lacy plumage, stayed close together and delicately aloof from everyone. The goat was constantly looking for mischief. The sheep was just glad to be still alive, weary and weak in the legs, but followed the goat around like a devoted fan. His fleece was badly in need of shearing, but was partly shorn by the goat, who nibbled anything, including ivy, newspaper, the sleeves of your cardigan. And yet all the animals were perfectly behaved, gentle, seeking and giving love. Once a little dog found its way in and chased two of the sociable hens, who had a hard time of it, being forced reluctantly into the air, till I drove the dog away and its owner called for it from the other side of the tattered fence. Another time some little neighbouring children brought crusts for the hens but kicked the bold ones out of the way to encourage the shy ones. None of this caused lasting trauma.

I wonder if my conversations with the animals took me to a place beyond human language, for there were times I could just be with them and find in myself no thought at all.
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Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the photo of Narberth High Street, top;
and to Garg-oil for the painting above, and other paintings of Narberth displayed on Flickr

Art is more than life

A Los Angeles journalist befriends a homeless Juilliard-trained musician, while looking for a new article for the paper.

Director: Joe Wright. Writers: Susannah Grant (screenplay), Steve Lopez (book). Stars: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr. and Catherine Keener.(1)

The film is the The Soloist and I’d never heard of it till Arash wrote a review on his blog. (2)

I liked very much what he said, rented the DVD, and loved it. I’d only query one thing: his reiterated suggestion that the film was less “satisfying” than other films about contemporary madness afflicting a creative person—such as A Beautiful Mind, Shine. I said I would write my own thoughts on the film. I spent a couple of days thinking about it, comparing various films, scribbling a profusion of thoughts, trying to wrap them into a relatively coherent piece, which I accidentally published before it was ready. When I read it through I found it too hopeless to be rescued by editing. There was hardly a sentence worth keeping. The thing was bloated,redundant and dead.

I wondered whether I could rescue anything from the ruins. But then, in the moment of that thought, I received encouragement. The movie itself is about the possibility of rescue from ruins: can the journalist Lopez, through friendship and charitable interventions, save the talented musician Ayers from the ruins of his fallen self?

As a boy he’d been accepted into Juilliard, a prestigious school for the performing arts, to study the cello. He could look forward to an orchestral career at least, or even go beyond, like his fellow-student Yo Yo Ma. How did he end up homeless on the street in Los Angeles, bizarrely dressed, getting tunes from a two-stringed violin? Somewhere a fuse must have blown in his head and never got repaired. He hears voices, talks in a logorrhœic stream, has a cleanliness obsession, abhors being shut in, requires boundless personal space and freedom. Many of us have small problems with reality: he has a big problem. If life is a piece of paper, it’s written on two sides. One one is the external world of our senses. On the other, our thoughts and ideas are endlessly scribbled. We all have to reconcile the two sides, whether we’re aware of it or not. But Ayers hears voices, confuses thought with reality. With him, the text of existence bleeds through from one side of the paper to the other, producing an illegible scribble. Thus he finds the world frightening, seeks a niche where he can make sense of it, ends up on the street, a place which offers certain advantages to the mentally fragile. Once there, you’re no longer tormented by the expectations of others; and there’s nowhere further to fall. From all the discomfort, the constant danger of mugging, you can wrest a kind of peace. At any rate, Ayers does.

Along comes Steve Lopez, columnist for the LA Times. The chaos in his life is of a different order. His wife threatens to leave him. He’s injured by a fall from his bicycle. He’s driven by a relentless procession of journalistic deadlines. Encountering Ayers in the street, he scents a human-interest story good for several instalments; pursues him in search of material and a back story. He gets unwillingly sucked into genuine friendship and caring; tempted into clumsy interventions on the poor man’s behalf.

When you watch the DVD, a “making of” feature allows you to compare the actors who play Lopez and Ayers with glimpses of their real-life counterparts. This is where you can see for yourself how art triumphs over everyday life. Actors display personality and emotion where real people veil themselves for privacy. I've seen documentary re-enactments by the actual characters of real-life dramas*. They’re dull affairs in comparison with The Soloist.

Art is more than feeling. It’s a generous sharing. In an interview the director Joe Wright said:

I’d never wanted to make a film in Hollywood, I like making films in Britain about the British experience for British audiences. But, I went over there and met Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers (played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx in the movie), and then the people on skid row, in particular the members of the Lamp Community, and I just fell in love with them.

So, I made it to spend time with them, it wasn’t really a kind of career move.(3)

To produce art takes more than falling in love, but the love must be there. Without love there is nothing but craft, though you could argue that even craft demands love as its magic ingredient. For Lopez, it breathed life into his newspaper articles, spawned a book, inspired his readers, one of whom gave Ayers (still living on the street) a very fine cello. For the actors, it produced performances which change our attitude towards mental illness and homeless people. For Ayers, his love for Beethoven and Lopez sustained his comfortless existence; but hasn’t cured him. The very act of labelling a condition as “illness” implies curability. Perhaps we should say “handicap” in cases like Ayers’, or van Gogh’s, and not mental illness. Handicap can be transmuted to art, and if your life in any way inspires others, that too is art.

Not everyone feels as I do. Says the critic Roger Ebert:

“The Soloist” has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift. The story is compelling, the actors are in place, but I was never sure what the filmmakers wanted me to feel about it. (4)

Says Joe Wright:

I tried to respond to the way the story was guiding me.

I was also aware that I had to be careful about the ending really, what I was saying. I believe in asking more questions than I answer, to leave the audience with questions, and not to suggest there is any simple cure for the situation. (3)

I’m with Joe! Art is more than life. It is a mirror to show us what we cannot see unaided. Without reading, without movies, without life surrounding me doing its thing, without writing, I’d have a poorer idea of who I am. Wilful blindness hides awkward facts from us, but art is the mirror, the candid camera.

Says Michael Foley, referring to Joyce & Proust:

If you write for yourself, it will be relevant to everyone and if you write for everyone it will be relevant to no-one. . . . In exposing their bizarrely singular natures, these two novelists revealed that psychological peculiarity is universal. No one is as odd as Joyce or Proust—except everyone. (5)
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What I dislike most in Hollywood films is their use of cliché as a shorthand to set the scene and present the characters, as if to say, “you know, this kind of person”. It extends to every detail, even the background music, which tells you how and when to feel. It works on me so well that I hate myself, sometimes starting to cry before the opening credits have cleared from the screen, with no element of the plot yet revealed, just a great panorama, say, and an orchestra spinning the first golden threads of joy mixed with doom which will permeate the atmosphere till the bleak yet heartfelt finale.

I find no trace of cliché in The Soloist. I may have fought back the tears at one or two points, but I won the struggle easily. Joe Wright didn’t manipulate me, and I bless him for that. Instead of cliché there was freshness. Everything defined itself in fascinating detail. Everything contributed to the story, and the story was compelling for presenting truths validated by your own inner response.

It’s all too easy to peddle platitudes. But then we skim surfaces and in attempting to portray the common truths, miss truth altogether.

I discover myself more in reading than writing. I don’t mean just reading the written word, but maybe studying the false emotions of an actor, reflected in his face, for they are the mirror to feelings I can never directly acknowledge in myself, the distorting mirror that shows me how I really look. When I sit at my desk trying to tell it how it is, words flee. Only when I look elsewhere, sniff the open air, read the book of Nature, catch the phrase someone utters, aloud or in a book, do I collect clues to define my true state. Like Dirk Gently, the holistic detective, I can’t help believing in the interconnectedness of all things.

And the more I explore through reading and writing, the more fractured I find myself to be, the more handicapped, the more Pessoan, the more human. Pessoa is the Portuguese for person. Let him have the last word here, possibly to shed light on the mind of Nathaniel Ayers:

Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others—not even the hatred of others, since hatred is at least more intermittent than affection ... But hatred as well as love is oppressive; both seek to pursue us, won’t leave us alone.
. . .
Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been realized, belongs to the world and to everyone. If I were to realize a dream I’d be jealous, for it would have betrayed me by allowing itself to be realized.... We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying “Look at me move.”(6)

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1. Summary from IMDB

2. Madness on Celluloid: The Bold Experiment of Joe Wright’s The Soloist

* See additional note in 5th comment below.

3. As interviewed for Sky Movies

4. See Roger Ebert’s review of The Soloist

5. See Embracing the Ordinary: Lessons from the Champions of Everyday Life, by Michael Foley.

6. From The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, fragment 348.

Acknowledgements

Masochistically, I’d planned to spend much time and ink writing a structured essay on literacy; covering texting, graffiti, tweeting, Facebook, Wikipedia, hyperlinking, spellcheck, online thesaurus, apostrophe confusion, grammatical mangling, metaphor insensitivity, the history of books from Gilgamesh to Kindle, the National Novel-Writing Month, the demise of the typewriter, my mania for fountain pens, registrar’s ink, and buying secondhand hardbacks through Amazon for less than the postage cost. It was going to be a tedious essay, but never mind, join the dots if you will and consider it done.

I’d like to thank a few people and things in no particular order.

To Paula for her apostasy. I see it as like the end of Apartheid, on a smaller scale: dramatic but (in my imagination) to be followed in due course by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission worthy of Bishop Desmond Tutu.

To CIngram for pointing out the classes of people to whom the world does not belong, “because it has no need of them”; yet agreeing that nevertheless we all, regardless of class, do absolutely belong to the world.

To Ghetu, for always seeing clearly.

To Bryan, for being reasonable; Davo, for keeping his corner sunny; Rev, for being an industrious bee, making literary honey from an unlikely source—the Department of Corrections, in some corner of the USA; to Rebb, for writing, and influencing me to join a Writers’ Group. To Joanne Rose, for many years of blogging contact.

To Morgan McFinn, for his use of metaphor, and especially for “the barnacles of disappointment”.

To James Lovelock, for writing (in his nineties) The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a final warning.

To Martin Amis, for Lionel Asbo: the state of England, for revealing in satire a universal monster within his Cockney particularity, an atavistic Caliban from that part of London which currently holds the Olympic Stadium; not Shakespeare’s Caliban as evoked in Danny Boyle’s “Isles of Wonder”, but a British archetype all the same.

To my beloved K for much more than is relevant here but for showing me day by day in her own person the genius for living engendered by that small island Jamaica, which celebrates this very day 50 years independence from Britain. Thank God for the mutual respect between our islands. We gave you slavery, you taught us how to live more joyfully—much more than the reggae, curry goat, ackee and saltfish, hurricane survival, the lightning Bolt.

To this day so fresh, the rain which hasn’t spoilt the Games, though it hasn’t stopped sending flash floods to parts of these islands; and has allowed me to hang out washing for a while before the threatened thunderstorm.

To this pocket-handkerchief-sized backyard, scene of clothes-peg epiphanies for five years, shared with the slugs and clouds and stray cats and rats and pigeons and overhead seagulls and kites.

To the morning blackbird which stands on the acacia tree in the children’s playground beyond the backyard fence, and outsings Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

To space, for granting distance and solitude. To technology, for jumping across space.

To time, for granting room to take birth, grow and die.

To memory, for preserving selected traces, after Time, the great declutterer, has swept and garnished.

To history, for letting us glimpse beyond memory’s horizon.

To writing, for bridging gaps made by time and space, and making civilization possible.

To oral cultures which have survived the ravages of civilization to show us we can lower our bucket into the well of inner knowledge.

To Fernando Pessoa.

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Notes

Paula’s House of Toast: blog, especially her series of posts starting June 18th, 2012.

CIngram: blog, especially this post.

Morgan McFinn: the blog of an expatriate from Chicago living on a Siamese island. Joanne Rose had posted a photo of a scallop-shell with other shells attached. I couldn’t remember what they were called so I googled “hull encrusted with”, so as to recall the word “barnacles”. For the barnacles of disappointment, see his post here. Surprisingly the epithet is not original, as you will see from Google. Perhaps on his desert island, McFinn had been reading Day by Day with Charles Swindoll.

James Lovelock: see also my post of 31st March 2010.

Ghetu: via friendship, stories, and comment on my last post.

Bach, blackbirds: see also this post.

Swept and garnished: “Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.” Matthew 12:44. Also title of a short story about dying, by Rudyard Kipling.

Writing and oral cultures: The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, David Abram, 1996.

Other bloggers mentioned above: see links below.

Live by the pen, die by the pen

In the early years of this blog, I would dash off new posts with ease. I wasn’t setting out to be a writer, only to express the simple sweetness of life as I felt it in the moment, with a little speculative reflection thrown in. I was embarrassed to confess my joy openly, to avoid setting a barrier against my reader. It had a fourfold cause: the sudden discovery of good health, love, material sufficiency, and freedom from care. That was seven years ago. Sometimes I’m in low spirits these days, under the weather as in my last, following a whole month of rain.

My immediate neighbourhood is not immune to the suffering in the world, as I said then. We’re all in this together. But I’ve wanted to rise above it in my writing, paint only the silver linings, never the black clouds. I should take a lesson from Fernando Pessoa. The very title of his main prose work The Book of Disquiet shows the source of his own inspiration. Here’s an example of what I mean:

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me—this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I always will be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry. But my mind quickly puts me in my place… I remember that I’m on the fourth floor of the Rua dos Souradores, and I take a drowsy look at myself. I glance up from this half-written page at life, futile and without beauty, and at the cheap cigarette I’m about to extinguish in the ashtray beyond the fraying blotter. Me in this fourth-floor room, interrogating life!, saying what souls feel!, writing prose like a genius or a famous author! Me, here, a genius!...

I should add, in case you are not familiar with Pessoa, that his narrator is semi-fictional, the book is sub-titled A Factless Autobiography, and was merely a set of manuscripts in a trunk till posthumously edited and (brilliantly) translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith. The above extract is fragment no. 6 in the Penguin edition. His entire theme is the wresting of a peculiar kind of joy from a vast realm of irksomeness, by means of a flight from the world into imagination. I have always found him a joy to read no matter what his theme; and I have wished like him to be able to write fluently from the depths of any kind of mood.

As I see it, the task of the writer is to be generous to the reader. I have joined a new writers’ group, here in my home town. It’s a wonderful thing, I may talk more about it later, but it has made me realize many things, whether or not they were raised in the two meetings we’ve had so far. We all joined, I guess, because we wanted to share our difficulties and help one another. It’s only a couple of months since I sneered at the idea. The others are more into fiction, but I think it makes no difference in the end. One writes to provide fodder, to enrich the reader’s life, if only for the time it takes to absorb the words. Even the simplest entertainment is a gift from the performer to the audience. I could digress with many examples but—restricting ourselves to literature—consider P G Wodehouse, the polar opposite to Pessoa. What could be more comforting than his “cloudlessness”, as Martin Amis calls it? In a review of a new edition of Sunset at Blandings, Amis continues:

The only moment of anomie I can recall in his fiction occurs in an early short story, when Jeeves, prompt as ever, brings Bertie Wooster his usual whisky-and-soda at six o'clock. ‘It’s the bally monotony of it all,’ complains the alienated Bertie, ‘that makes everything seem so perfectly bally.’ Bally, by the way, is a public-school diminutive of ‘bloody’. Even here, you see, things aren’t that desperate.

Right now, I’m having to force myself to write. My soul is undergoing some kind of botheration; is trying to tell mind, but mind fails to understand. I should say that it’s the body which gives voice to soul, if only we know how to listen. Body carries messages from soul to mind, through feelings, emotions, physical symptoms. Symptoms make us go to the dentist, doctor or priest—or in any event, to take the wisest action we know. Our primitive ancestors, and the other animals, have been equipped with instincts for self-healing. We are far from that simplicity. Our body prompts us to take needful action and can do no more till mind listens, and when we surrender ourself to the wisest remedy we know, it stops sending symptoms. We feel no more pain. This is the Placebo Effect, but if it isn’t enough to meet the soul’s demand, the effect is only temporary.

My doctor doesn’t believe the above, of course. It occurred to me yesterday that something has been clouding my perception of the simple sweetness of life that used to provide my daily inspiration; and it’s been going on for months. On a whim, I checked the “live-longer” prescriptions I’ve been taking daily against various cardio-vascular contingencies the doctor thinks I’m increasingly prone to at my age: to look at their side-effects. If some of those hit you, you wouldn’t want to live longer. I thought my body might be complaining against these powerful drugs, and decided to give them a break. Within two hours, I felt back to my old self. Ha! The placebo effect works in reverse. Time will tell.

The body and soul, as opposed to the shifty and makeshift mind, never ask for immortality. It’s governments and doctors who take competitive pride in increasing longevity; recklessly ignoring the problems it causes at every level. Nature in its wisdom favours the cull. Man in his stupidity puts a spanner in Nature’s works.

Yesterday I heard on the radio about a study which has proved that people with chronic depression and anxiety live shorter lives. That seems a blessing to those involved. I’m sure some of them don’t find life worth living unless aided by known killers such as alcohol, tobacco, recreational drugs, risky sex and poor dietary choices; or suicide. Who am I to disparage their choice?

Lead author Dr Tom Russ said: “The fact that an increased risk of mortality was evident, even at low levels of psychological distress, should prompt research into whether treatment of these very common, minor symptoms can modify this increased risk of death.”

A “low level of psychological distress” is plain ordinary unhappiness, but they diagnose it as anxiety and depression of course, and say it’s an illness, which they can treat with anti-depressants. Another spokesperson at the same organization, the Wellcome Trust (funded by a drug company) says:

This study highlights the need to ensure they have access to appropriate health care and advice so that they can take steps to improve the outcome of their illness.

Why? Not to alleviate unhappiness, but to make them live longer. And the methods prescribed to make them live longer would be “lifestyle changes” (stop drinking smoking, recreational drugs and all the other deadly things) and take the prescribed antidepressants so as to stay unhappy and live longer. You might think my logic is at fault there. Aren’t antidepressants known as “happy pills”? That’s just humorous sarcasm. Another press release issued today on the same radio programme claims that: “Antidepressants save lives”. Yes but another survey, quoted on the same news item, has found that the town of Blackpool in Lancashire has England’s lowest happiness rating as well as the highest use of antidepressants. I’m not suggesting the correlation proves that antidepressants cause unhappiness, only that they do not ameliorate it.

Beware doctors and lawyers! They have their own ambitions and agendas, like politicians, financiers and marketeers. May you and I, through writing and reading, maintain soul-to-soul exchange, reaching across space and time. I pray we keep our integrity, resist the corruption of truth for short-term ends, paint the bigger picture, stay fearlessly close to all-wise Nature, whose children and heirs we are.

Let writing be my drug, both medicinal and recreational.