It’s a quarter to twelve already and I’m in bed and Ali’s in bed, skiving work because work’s gotten too much and life with me’s gotten too much too. Life with me ain’t easy: too self-contained and into my own thing and not given to things like romantic love and togetherness. Thought we were gonna break up on Friday but she’s still here, though not many words this morning ‘cos Monday morning’s my thing and I ain’t gonna sacrifice that just ‘cos lady’s having a skive. And so I finish reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test again – only read it not much more than a year ago – and also some other stuff about the beats and I think – hm, usual thoughts about envying the community and togetherness and excitement and adventure into newness but – wow, it seems sort of sad and lunatic and all just drugs anyway, juvenile adventures and daftness and not the kind of thing anyone should be doing beyond their twenties and – Cassady’s dead, and ended up a loser maniac – but all these things I’ve said before.
And mainly end by thinking, hm, is it really such a good idea to read so many books of California American freedom when whenever I do I dream of flying out to Canada woods and doing my big sneak in plan like Ken Kesey outlaw – all-American forgiven so why not me? – and, you know, whenever I do think of that I get sort of a queasy not nice feeling in my shoulders and chest all fearing arrest and grand fuck-up but oh how I long for it when I read of those Berkeley San Fran in the redwoods Rainbow Gathering California desert mountain Colorado times. Of the road and of big horn honking freight trains slowly rumbling past. Of smiling-eyed hippies and the kindness of strangers as backpack lands on back seat and off we go cruising the sunshine plains of Wyoming and maybe even back through Shelby , Montana
But would I think this way if I didn’t read those books and get those thoughts put in my head? What thoughts would I have without them?
The week, of course, was full of sport once more. Not quite as much, but still plenty. A squash match, seven games of football refereed, and one played. ‘Tis my job: telling that every week is starting to get as interesting as an office man telling his. Not that I dislike it: just that it’s mostly the same, even though excellent and good. But still, there was some variation: I refereed a kids’ game and a women’s game and also a game with an African team and all three games were hilarious. The kids were crazy and shivered in the snow and mud and one boy cried ‘cos I gave him a yellow card and there I am having to console and it ended up like 14-3 and they could have given up at half-time, the poor shivering mites (were under-15s). And the women were insane, unable to kick the ball more than twenty yards, playing in little pockets of the pitch just pinging it around in tiny squares, me a giant towering above them while my giant’s strides took me lolloping past them with ease while they went full pelt. Supposedly grown women at the top of their game probably no better than a bunch of ten-year-old boys. And then the Africans, disputing and carrying on like they were in some Nigerian marketplace, arguing and ready to walk off and playing crazy football again in little pockets and at least half the team called “Mussy” so that all I heard all day long was people shouting “Mussy, Mussy, Mussy” and then weird protestations and their disregard for all the nice orderly things we plain straight white people do like punctuality and stick to formation and wear shoes and follow the rules. Hilarious. I laugh and it’s good to be a laughing ref in a game like that where nobody cares and the white guys are already six goals up anyway so why not just slop around in the puddles and giggle at the mud?
What else? God only knows. Sport, innit: that’s my life. But – oh yeah, I also acted in a play! I forgot to mention that. Been rehearsing the last three weeks and even though I only had eight lines…well, I thought it was a joke at first and that I’d never keep a straight face – despite serious nature of the play (a drama) – but later I got into it – saying to myself, hm, yeah, what would they (my character) be thinking at this moment? and trying to write it large across my face in furrowed brow expression and maybe even feeling the onset of character’s tears. Well, shoddy it was, and the writing not good, but an experience too, and I was glad of it. Better than I thought it would be. Although when play finally performed on Saturday afternoon – literally racing straight from football pitch to stage, the play having started while I was still in shorts and boots en route from reffing, me not on till the very end – very strange feelings when my two minutes was up and all those several weeks of rehearsing and remembering and trying to figure things out and suggesting and getting into character is over and all you’ve got is a little polite applause and then right back to real life – well, the pay off worth the investment? Don’t think so.
Actors huh? Who’d be one? Johnny Depp gets his millions and I say good luck to him, he deserves it. All that standing around and learning lines and then sploshing in water or standing in front of a blue screen talking corn to a pretend robot that’s not even there, week after week, month after month, just slow minutes piling up – take after take – hey, we got thirty seconds today; that’s a good day – and for what? For ninety mediocre minutes of popcorn chewing so that mediocre brains (like mine) can fill a bit of life and pretend, hey, that was worthwhile: t’aint no life for me. Poor old Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and not to mention all the thousands and thousands wishing they were in their shoes, working their way up, very rarely getting there – yeah man, they deserve every penny, I’d much rather live.
Reffin’s a good job. Twenty, twenty-five quid a pop and never feels like work. Deservedly low-paid ‘cos it’s too much fun and satisfaction. Them actors deserve the lot.
Though footballers: oh my, what a job that must be! Just kicking a ball with the boys and laughing and playing and doing the thing that amateurs like me pay good money to do and wish we could do every day. Dream job indeed. ‘Cept then it ends when you’re still a young thirty-two or thirty-six and what do you do then? Existential torment, I guess, and Gary Speed noose or Alan Shearer shit-faced punditry or Gary Lineker Walker’s Crisps or seventies-style pub landlord – and those are just the names we know. What about Joe Schmo who lugged away in Division Two all his days a far cry from the hundred thousand pounds a week the masses pull their hair at and protest? Where him when all is done? Poor old leg-kicking chap now defunct and staring at the screen while aging former trophy wife looks on – but still human, of course, and maybe actually quite far from stereotypical portrait just painted. Hm.
I blab. I have no more to say. The life I live is sort of stable and nice and satisfying and has foundation. The degree ticks on with more or less no input from me and provides that focal point of university campus to revolve around, always the library or the study room or the occasional class to give the whole thing a hook to hang my coat on while dreaming of adventures future and watching interested as the desire to be a published writer dies and dies more each day. Nothing more to say: words mere primitive utterances that stand for feelings – and how even to do something simple like relate a standard everyday conversation in which three people are talking and stuttering and stumbling and not making any sense and not understanding each other and interrupting and talking at the same time and just saying things for things’ sake and it’s all quite boring anyway – yet nice at the same time – ‘cos all we’re really saying is, I see you, I like you, you’re okay – or not – and none of that’ll ever come across in this weird made-up modern and non-universal thing we’ve got called literature. Hell with it! Let someone else tell my story and I shall console myself with the fun of these sillily typed out blogs that satisfy me and that’s satisfying enough. Rumpulstiltskin, right? Spinning gold weave web and princess’s hair and wondering if that’s even how it goes, some cheap childhood memory of a book and really just typing up an image that suddenly popped into my head because of the thought of a paragraph on ‘stream of consciousness’ (Joyce, Woolf, etc) I read in a book maybe forty minutes ago and wondering what that would look like – Beat book, by Christopher Gair, that sits not more than four feet from me on linen basket as my bladder dances for an upcoming wee and also in the midst of all this typing girlfriend went out the door to walk on Ilkley Moor with an awkward and makeshift goodbye – and not a kiss – and not that I can blame her given that I’ve been silent and reading – and then typing – thinking – or rather, being – perhaps habitually being – in my Monday morning groove which is all and always about me and my thing and the thing I do every Monday morning which is sit with my green tea and gown and read and type and watch and relax and enjoy. The sun streams in the window under the girlfriend-opened blind and now there is a knock at the door –
– and it is a nice postman come all the way around the back to deliver a parcel for Ali from Australia – cost $56.25AUD to post – and after brief chat I go for long wee – already had two poos today – and then stop off to put the last few last night’s roast carrots on an already (last night) buttered slice of Burgen’s bread (the crust) which I eat in between typing these words – for example, after “crust)” – and then I think about these ideas of mine for projects to do with various blah blah things – beats and hippies and the perhaps pointlessness of writing – and I decide to very soon – just about right now – stick up the sketches I made on those subjects which I emailed to my project tutor – thinking that maybe it’ll help progress ‘em and maybe I can just turn my blog into a bit of a forum for me and Eric and maybe some other people to discuss these ideas wherein the shape of the essay’ll get born and also in lieu of anything else to write about other than the usual “life is good and I’m happy in my gown with my tea and I did loads of sport and I’m progressing emotionally and mentally and letting go of wanting to be a published writer and, anyways, mainly what I think about is football and there’s not really anything else to say” so…
Project Sketch #1: Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Whatever became of the hippies and the beats and how come that whole centuries long movement seems to have ended in about 1970 and everyone got dull?
In 1957 Jack Kerouac published On The Road. He wrote it in 1950. It was about stuff he did with Neal Cassady, Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others, between 1947 and 1949. Suddenly, the beat movement leapt into popular consciousness. ‘57 was an important date. But also the reading of Ginsberg’s Howl in San Francisco
When did beat begin? Was it with the debut performance of Howl? The publication of On The Road? Or the day that Alan Ginsberg met Neal Cassady in New York
Cassady spanned the generations: he reappeared in 1964 as the driver of Ken Kesey’s bus Further, as immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He was there at the birth of beat and he was there at the birth of hippy. Acid played its part: Kesey had taken it experimentally while at Stanford and had his mind blown. Other scholars, too, had given it a go, and they too later became prominent names. Timothy Leary. Richard Alpert. Some other people. It all ties in.
The hippy thing ballooned. 1967 was the summer of love. Owsley was feeding everybody free acid. The Grateful Dead played endlessly at Kesey’s Acid Tests. Monterey UK India Mexico
Spirituality. Always spirituality. Ginsberg chanting OM and Kerouac rapping on Buddhism and the Tathagata in the company of Gary Snyder. Connections with D.T. Suzuki and Zen. Alpert/Ram Dass still going strong in Taos , New Mexico
Is this where all the flowers have gone? Did they realise no sense in rebelling and no sense in being crazy and no sense in junkyism and no sense in self-destruction and so they became meditators and peaceful farmers and, for all intents and purposes – externally at least – much like everybody else.
Ginsberg survives until the mid-nineties, still trying to buck the system. Kesey lives out his life on his Oregon
Buddha’s middle path? Combining what had come before – material comfort – with the abandoning of that in order to search for something more, the IT? But what to do when the search is over? When the goal is reached? Inner peace provides peace with the world. No more enemy because everything is one. And love the answer anyways. They say you fight fire with fire – but they’ve obviously never tried it, for it plainly wouldn’t work. Use water. Something cooler and more opposite.
Maybe this is the subject: that the flowers didn’t die out – the rebels, the chancers, the beat road-warriors and the hippy long-hairs – they just found a better way that didn’t look so weird. But they also realised that it’s an internal trip anyways. What need to go yahooing drunk mad down streets in staid men’s faces for what does that say about you anyway? It’s all you – as Ram Dass would have realised. As Yogi Bhajan would have taught them, and got them off drugs, and made them productive. The higher path, not Kerouac’s bottle or Cassady’s paranoiac amphetamine rambles or in-your-face juvenile antics. Even the Merry Pranksters did their best not to rub The Man up the wrong way. Stick a flower in his mush, not your fist.
And where too now those flowers? Looking around for yahoos and madmen sweating for jazz and the IT we see nothing – but no need anyway, for they weren’t truly where it’s at. A step in the path. The butterfly struggling to bust out of the cocoon. In America
The original idea, though, was that there was an unbroken lineage stretching right back to the eighteenth century bohemians and that from there many movements were created and sprouted up and branched off and that it perhaps had its ultimate culmination with the hippies of the sixties. Indeed, it has been said that dream died with them. But dreams don’t die, we just wake up from them. In any case, the lineage is there – but is it necessary as far as this essay goes? Or is the idea that the beats and the hippies did what they did and then didn’t die out, just became something we can’t see ‘cos they’re not fighting cops. Though what of modern protesters?
Anyway, the lineage.
Kerouac and Ginsberg directly influenced by Walt Whitman. Ginsberg, in fact, slept with a man who slept with a man who slept with a man who slept with a man who slept with Walt Whitman. And Cassady slept with Ginsberg, and Kerouac slept with Cassady’s wife, and so not just linked by influence and thought, but by actual sexual contact and bodily fluid.
Thoreau, too, a major influence: the love of nature and solitude and simple living and jettisoning society.
And Kerouac and Joyce, the stream of consciousness and Joyce in many ways the master of that, and Kerouac believing in his spontaneous prose and first thought, best thought. Long mad sentences and unorthodox punctuation. Not so much in On The Road, but in other, lesser known works, often denounced, like Joyce, as unreadable.
Joyce wrapped up – I seem to remember – with Ezra Pound. And then thoughts there of Paris and Shakespeare and Company and, of course, Ginsberg and many of the beats who had their own Paris lives – and the Surrealists and various other groups who took delight in being different and poor and running into restaurants shouting boo! at the squares – the bourgeoisie – and that was sort of their prime aim. Don’t remember their names but similar themes to the rambunctiousness of those later American youths and The Pranksters. But, yet again, it feels like a failing, because salvation ain’t found in the pissing off of others, nor in wine or opiates or wherever else they were at. The bohemian ideal of poverty. The despising of a society that shunned their works – and the going against the works that society embraced. Yet no way to win in a situation like that. So just getting weirder and weirder and more pissed off all the time. Stretching minds and what had come before, true – but as Alain de Botton wisely told me, there are a lot of good things that shock, but it don’t necessarily follow that all shocking things are good. Too much of an aim in art and literature to shock thinking it automatically good than to get to the depths of things and understand life and the world.
Short-sighted, that’s what it feels like.
Or maybe a necessary step. Like how babies play with rattles, and children play with dolls, and adolescents play with drugs and each other. Nothing wrong with any of that, in its place. But not the end either. Not wisdom nor ultimate truth nor enlightenment. The man who poisons his body can never claim to be ‘there’. Nor the man who has not found peace (John Lennon in his bed, arguing with reporters).
A whole long movement towards that, embodied in Kerouac and Ginsberg and Cassady, speeding towards their destination but unable to pass the final barrier. Kerouac and Cassady backslide and fall short. Ginsberg makes progress but fails to conquer intoxicants and fighting The Man. The mantle is passed on, and then, perhaps, in Kesey and Alpert and George Harrison and others the breakthrough is made. The answer is peace and is within. Fighting is still fighting, even with a perceived unjust enemy, and fighting is not acceptance nor peace.
The enlightened man. The peaceful man. The monk who carries his water and chops his wood, and everything inside is shining.
The outer doesn’t matter.
And this is where the flowers have gone. They have not died, you just can’t see them. Because they look like everyone else.
Project Sketch #2: Is fiction ultimately pointless? And why don’t enlightened people write books?
Controversial theory time – especially for a writer. But I’d to propose that most reading is done for the purpose of distracting oneself from one’s own thoughts. People read so that for the time they are reading their heads contain words that are not their own. People can’t stand to be in their own company. Our lives are so busy that we’ve never learned to do that. We distract with video games and television. We distract with inane conversations and running around. We distract with our jobs and we distract with our reading. Sitting on trains with nothing to do people pick up newspapers and read words that don’t interest them in order to distract. Celebrity news and stories of killings in far off countries. None of it makes any real difference to their lives. It’s just words, and different words to the words our own heads would speak to us if we gave them a chance.
I lived once out in the wilds for 45 days and very quickly thoughts of the outside world disappeared. Anything could be going on out there. Wars and maybe even World War III – but I wouldn’t know. And what I realised is that it doesn’t matter. I could have gone on for years like that and it still wouldn’t matter. Someone could have turned up with an old, out of date newspaper and it wouldn’t make any difference to me. The stories could have been two years old and they would have had as much value as the stories of today. A man does something horrible. There’s fighting in the middle east or some other part of the world. Some people are predicting something bad is going to happen. The economy is doing something or other and this is demonstrated through percentages. A football team has scored some goals. Some people are going to lose their jobs. Some other people are starving to death. The same stories today, and yesterday, and twenty years ago, and a hundred years hence. But none of it means very much.
And yet, we read, because it is preferable to our own stories.
Furthermore, we have agreed to pretend that it matters.
But having taken a step back – typing this, I have to wonder how many people in our world have taken this step – I have seen that it doesn’t.
I go further: I extend this into the realm of fictional literature and books.
Some writing is marvellous. Some writing helps you to see life in a different way. Or does it? Given that life is real, and fiction is made-up, how can the one translate to the other?
Ah, you say, fiction contains kernels of truth, and that’s what we’re picking up on. The real within the made-up, which we can then apply to the real.
But why not, then, just read non-fiction? Read what we know to be based on the real? Sidestepping all sophomoric arguments of what is real anyway and isn’t it all just one man’s perception and there’s no such thing as truth and don’t forget about bias and history is written by the victors, etcetera, etcetera, blah blah blah.
Perhaps a problem is that people see too much reality in fiction. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is one of the best-selling books of all time. It’s also one of the most poorly written, and the truth it professes to contain is a half-baked one at best. And yet people buy into it. And tens of millions of people read it, and one has to wonder why.
Distraction. Lying on sunloungers with a desire to not think, they required some words. Any words will do. Luckily for them, these words they found engrossing and thought provoking – yes! now we have proof that all those horrid church men were phonies after all! – and, above all else, for the hours it took to read the book, until it was forgotten and replaced by another long list of words, entertaining.
But did you know that the French word for ‘entertainment’ is ‘le distraction’?
Telling, huh?
Writers have an elevated position in our society. We think them smart with something to say. We look to them, perhaps, for guidance. And yet we also find that many of those we think of as greats – Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Woolf, Joyce – were alcoholics and junkies and suicides. One has to wonder why we so trumpet those who have not mastered the basic art of not poisoning or destroying their own bodies and minds.
Also, to ask the question, is writing the symptom or the cure?
Thomas Aquinas was a prolific writer who one day received a mystical vision of a reality beyond what Carlos Castaneda called ‘consensus reality’ (that is, everyday life). He immediately dismissed everything he had written as having as much value as straw. It is telling, I think, that those who have progressed the furthest along the path of human evolution are those who have written the least. Buddha and Jesus both spoke plenty, but never saw any reason to write down their words. In Buddha’s case, this may have had more to do with writing not having been invented (?!) but given Jesus’s immersive upbringing among a people whose lives revolved around words that had been recorded and preserved and copied in scrolls, he must have been one who understood the power of the written word. Furthermore, if we presume that he possessed a knowledge of the future, he must also have known that his own words would one day be recorded, and passed down, and mistranslated, and misappropriated, and falsified, and invented, and would eventually come to cause wars and alter the destiny of nations and still, almost two thousand years later, be taken as literal truth by so many millions the world over, for better or for worse. And yet he did nothing about it. Would he not, presuming all the above, not have been tempted to provide his own record of his thoughts and deeds?
Apparently not.
And still it continues into the present day: Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian saint of the last century, never once put pen to paper; Mata Amritanandamayi has had dozens of books of her words published, but has never shown any interest in them herself; Ramakrishna (I don’t know about him, but I don’t think he did either); and even the prolific literature associated with the dubious Osho stems entirely from his talks. All these people, and more, speak much, and write nothing. Their talks are transcribed by others and turned into books, with or without their blessing. They seem indifferent to the whole process. Perhaps, from the viewpoint of infinity, whether their words are preserved for future generations – and whether they are preserved accurately – matters little. They know we are going to do it anyway, so why fight it? They seem to have such little interest in leaving their mark on history – where we mere humans have plenty. There may be a lesson in there somewhere.
Still, some fairly enlightened souls do write. Paramahansa Yogananda’s ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ details the life of a spiritual seeker and, ultimately, realiser, in great depth and intimacy. Similarly, Theresa de Avila penned an autobiography – it is Spain
What they do not write, however, is fiction. But why?
I have posited fiction as mere distraction for the masses. And I have proposed it as the occupation of a lesser mind. The drunk and self-destructive mind. The mind that is not at peace with itself, nor the mind that has understood its own being and the world it inhabits. But does it serve any purpose, other than to distract? There must be something in it, right?
I don’t know. I read fiction, sure – but more and more, I’m starting to think there’s no point. Most of the books I’ve read I forget within days and find myself entirely unmoved. I vividly remember finishing Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and tossing it on the bed and thinking, meh. It meant nothing. The last page was turned and all those hours of investment had come to nothing. Sure, there had been moments when a phrase or a paragraph might provoke enjoyment – no one’s claiming that he doesn’t know how to twist words into poetry and surprise – but ultimately I received nada. And this is the Booker of Bookers. I guess people like it – academics, smart people – because it says something about Indian Independence in a clever and symbolic way. But if I want to learn about Indian Independence I certainly won’t read it via symbolism and magic-realism fiction, I’ll read it in history and in personal, autobiographical accounts. I suppose he’s very clever for taking all that time to turn one thing into another but I just don’t see the point.
Likewise, a whole list of supposed classics that have left me flat. A Thousand Years of Solitude basically nothing but a confusing list of names repeated over and over and over. The Catcher In The Rye merely a young man saying that everything is phoney. The Great Gatsby unmemorable. James Joyce’s Ulysses unreadable, the product of an opium-addled brain (true?). I find it hard to conjure up the name of a fictional novel that has made any difference to my life and done more than fill up time or provide a little bit of entertainment, even though there were several that I know I loved.
David Copperfield, for one. Marvelling at Dickens’s invention of character and the vividness of young David’s life. Though, given the autobiographical aspects of this book, that is perhaps to be expected.
To Kill A Mockingbird was wonderful. Though I don’t remember a thing about it.
Kurt Vonnegut’s writing I have always enjoyed, and Slaughterhouse 5 I have read several times. Although, again, it all seems rather inconsequential thinking about it now.
Anything else? Nothing that comes to mind here. Seems like a rather sorry state of affairs for a writer to be in. If, of course, writing fiction was something that was important to me.
Entertainment. Distraction. The flexing and showing off of intellectual muscles. Masturbating in front of a cooing, academic crowd. Providing food for thought for egg-head professors to lose themselves in analysis of things that don’t really matter, finding symbols for castration where there are none, misunderstanding the writing process because they’ve never done it themselves. Academic speak as ultimately empty and vacuous as management speak, yet strangely not as yet vilified and mocked and dismissed, though perhaps one day soon. Surviving, maybe, because of the insularity and self-validation. Because the people are smart and can twist words in ways that make everything seem justifiable. No place, then, for a young man staring at a naked emperor pointing a finger and saying, even his goddamn castle and his kingdom are invisible.
But here young man is.
Why me? Why me feel this way when it seems like everyone else feels the opposite? One possible answer: because I’m wrong, and wading in the shallows, and haven’t the depth of understanding to appreciate wine-swilling Salman Rushdie schmoozing at cocktail parties, his infinite brain able to swallow mine in one gulp. Possible, yes. And ready to believe, should happy, peaceful, enlightened, sober, clean-living, loving, non-dependent, non-addicted, understanding, mystically-experienced soul show me otherwise.
Then believe, no problem.
But why so many writers alcoholics and junkies? Nothing there to admire or emulate. No matter the strength of beauty of his words a man’s soul is where it’s at, the point and purpose of life. What to admire in a man who hasn’t touched that?
I’m different, I guess. While my peers were drinking in pubs and chasing women and watching TV I was studying at the feet of shamans and saints meditating my ass off and sitting up mountains on 28-day wilderness solos having visions of Christ and sloughing off the layers of false personality and ego and emotion. Going beyond distraction and boredom – for what is there when you go to the limit of it? There must be something, right? Seat a man in a roomful of women’s magazines and see how long he lasts before he picks one up. Lock him in there a whole day and see how much time he spends not reading. We don’t care about the content of the words, we just want something to stop us from thinking – and to stop us, ultimately, from venturing into our own beings.
Would, I wonder, that man still read if those magazines instead contained page upon page of randomly printed out words, absolute and sheer gobbledygook? Would he prefer that to the contemplation of his own nature?
Positing fiction and newspapers as pointless is perhaps a strange and fruitless thing to do in the society we live in, where so few will have ventured to go beyond that. But to a man who has sat alone on a mountain and seen what happens when one allows oneself to go that hour, that day, that week, that month (assuming the month to be February) without any sort of distraction whatsoever, the world is forever changed – and when he comes back into the world he sees everything with new eyes. Some of the things he once did are no longer palatable – and many of the things done by others are understood anew. The man on the train who picks up last weeks trod-upon Metro isn’t reading about Beyoncé because he cares about Beyoncé, he’s looking for words to repeat in his brain so he doesn’t have to listen to his own. IPods too. And a thousand other things besides – including Dan Brown, and including Maeve Binchy, and including, perhaps, Salman Rushdie. The academic is the king distractor – his world is all theory, whereas life is experiential. His theories are as substantial as air. But he doesn’t want to hear this.
Although that could just be the narrow-thinking of a young man whose theories are, likewise, devoid of weight.
No doubt the academic, and the news-lover, and the fiction buff thinks so.
But to those people I say, okay, go up the mountain – find out what Thomas Aquinas meant when he compared his writing to straw – or answer the question as to why enlightened people don’t write fiction – and so many of our great writers were self-destructive drunks – and then see how you feel about the windblown Metro and the infinitely endless churning out of fiction.
Interesting questions for a would-be writer, of course. To dismiss fictional writing in one foul swoop – for where does that leave him? Not writing fiction, I guess – and what point anyway? Does the world need another short story? Does the world need another cleverly constructed novel full of interesting characters and zippy dialogue and conundrums and such? Any real need for a scenario that asks the questions ‘how will they get out of this?’ and ‘what’s gonna happen next?’ Can’t see it myself – although one understands, of course, that the writer doesn’t write what the world needs but what he needs for himself. Writing for the world has no point, because everything has already been writ, and writ a thousand times still. But writing for oneself, and for one’s own joy, is always fresh. In this the writer finds his salvation.
This particular writer, as has perhaps been implicitly stated, favours autobiography. If creative writing is to have any purpose – having dismissed fiction as mere entertainment and time-filling – it is to outline the possibilities of life and to inspire others. Kerouac’s On The Road inspired others to take to the road and live the life they wanted to live, to hell with the rest – but it didn’t do so because it was ‘made-up’, it did so because he actually lived it. He said, this is what’s possible, I did it, and so can you. Likewise, Yogananda, Likewise, Theresa de Avila. Likewise, everyone else who has ever achieved something different and lived to tell the tale.
That’s what I want to do: to live an interesting life and demonstrate it to others in an interesting way.
Or, at least, that’s what I want to do today: there is always the possibility that even this may appear as worthless as straw. One must always be open to that.
It is the life that comes first, and the growth of the human. A man who refuses to conquer his own demons, or go beyond his limitations, for fear of losing what he currently has, is not a man worth following. Some writers do go beyond their addictions – Stephen King and Raymond Carver are two that spring to mind – and they testify that their lives are better for it. Nor do they find that they have lost the creative spirit by turning their backs on the thing they felt gave them comfort. A lesson to be learned in that.
Anyways, we’ll say that’s the end and propose the direction this could go in: one, it could be as it is, an investigation of the theory that fiction is ultimately nothing more than a cultural technique for distraction; two, a look at the role of addiction and alcohol and suicide in the lives of writers, and a denunciation of that, proposing that a successful life is measured by a being’s inner-state and not their worldly achievements; three, asking the question ‘what is the point of writing?’ and seeking to find an answer (settling on, perhaps, inspiration and self-fulfilment and expression, and maybe even cutting the masses some slack and deciding that ‘mere entertainment’ is quite okay); four, the musing on why enlightened people don’t write, although I guess that mostly ties in with the first two; or five, I don’t know what, maybe a more personal look at the point of writing and what style I want to write and why I think autobiographical memoirs of an interesting life worthwhile and fiction not (thinking, anyways, fiction has had its fulfilment in the works of cleverer people than me).
I think that’s all.
<(O_o)>
Thoughts a few days later: Hm, I’m not sure that holds up. There’s something in it, I’m certain of that, but not enough. Too general, too judgmental and narrow-minded. Some people are born to write, I can’t get away from that. And just because enlightened people don’t do it it doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. Enlightened people don’t play guitar or football or have children or buy houses – many of the things common to the human experience and we could hardly stop doing them. Also, focussing on writers that are alcoholics or kill themselves – again, they’re just the headline makers, the noisy few standing out from the quiet masses. Same as anything really. And what of Carver and King, who still wrote even once they found sobriety and happiness? So writing not necessarily the cause or the symptom, but something more. Too big a question, a subject; too complex. Something in it, yes – entertainment as distraction, time-filler, nothing deeper or more useful than straw or fluff – but not all-encompassing. And perhaps even The Sun, Eastenders, My Family has some purpose, some value. Hard to see what it is, but it may be there.
Discounted.
+++
And then I also remembered that I'd been getting into some Zappa listening a few weeks back – been a long time fan of “Freak Out”, since about sixteen – and that led me on to some youtube videos and reading and figuring that he too came out of that beatnik/hippy thing and with his whole fixation on the ‘plastic people’ was a proper bohemian. Interesting that he thought about running for president. So that whole social angle too. Proper creative musical genius guy by the looks of things. Although I can’t say I like much else he did, a bit far out for me (avant garde?) and perhaps powered by something or other. But a strand that led on from that era for several decades and constantly evolved and influenced and I shall have to look into that.
He never got beyond smoking though and you know how I am with the whole poisoning the body thing. ;-) Basic requisite for being a hero worth following.
Also, the point about how things are all mixed up now and there’s not really very much to rebel against and everything’s pretty out there and open. Gays and freaks and goths and hippies and you can pretty much smoke pot wherever you want in our part of the world. It made me think of when I looked up what the current generation was called and it’s apparently ‘Generation M’ – which is partly defined by that lack of having anything to rebel against cos their parents are all dressed funky and young and basically listening to the same music anyway. I mean, music hasn’t really changed that much in 45 years and stuff that was groovy then is groovy now and it’s still mainly some guys with guitars and drums and amps – last big technological breakthrough was probably synthesisers and then the electronic thing of dance of samplers and sequencers, but that was nothing compared to what electric guitars and big loud amps and distortion pedals did when Buddy Holly and rock n roll and Hendrix and The Beatles and then hard rock rocked onto the scene. So they don’t oppose and everything’s grand. But it’s interesting, though, that there’s such an interest again now in Beatnik times – or, at least, that Hollywood are releasing beatnik movies left right and centre (Howl, On The Road, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). I don’t know if there’s real interest but perhaps that’ll open a few minds. Young people here seem so samey and straight and dull right now, just into beer and iPods and things like that. But then they’re dressing very eighties so maybe it’s the eighties all over again in certain ways, which we don’t compare so favourably with the sixties when it comes to culture and extravagance. Actually, I remember the nineties being compared favourably with the sixties and maybe there was something in that. Generation X and dissatisfaction and lostness and searching; I dunno. I guess most things got tried though – and one thing that occurs to me about back then was that not only was music new and exciting but that drugs sort of were too – LSD especially – whereas now it’s kind of looked down on. Kerouac and Cassady were romanticised – but really they just ended up as alcoholics and speed-freaks and it really weren’t no glorious end. And all that Ken Kesey-fuelled acid stuff, although it seems kind of fun, well hell’s bells I wouldn’t wanna be on the inside of it, sounds like a bunch of annoying lunatics mainly just talking shite. And we don’t look up to that kind of thing anymore – seems kind of sad – likewise coke and LSD – and I guess there’s an understanding that drugs ain’t really where it’s at, that they’re a toy that many of us use when we’re young and then one day we progress and it’s okay at the time but it certainly ain’t nothing to aspire to. I think back then perhaps there was a sense that it was something to aspire to, and that it could do some real good in the world. How exciting! Peace and love and all that crap. But what now? Just be materially comfortable and try and maintain some kind of sanity. Fuck: I really don’t know what people my age want. Like, cool people. Creativity. Good people around them. Not to feel mental. Or is that just me describing me? Most of the people I went to school with seem to live their lives for telly and beer and holidays to Spain
But there was something else I wanted to say...what was it?
Zappa? Interview with him wherein he says that old guys at record companies who didn’t know anything were actually better for whacked out music than hip young hippy guys?
Nope. Can’t remember.
+++
And now this is where we’re at today: another interminable one – though, as ever, served its purpose as far as I’m concerned and given me joy and happiness and made me feel that sitting in bed in my gown typing is actually a worthwhile use of time. Funny how it has that effect, even though so patently useless in the grand scheme of things; well, it’s my trip, I guess, my dream, and even though you’re in it you’ll only POP! when I wake up anyways.
What am I saying? Ah yes: nothing so high and mighty as that – just that all I’m doing is my thing ‘cos it works for me and that’s reason and justification and meaning and purpose and point enough; is that okay?
Yep. Yes it is.
Hallelujah! Tee hee.
===========
And now it’s a quarter to one. I feel like…a little sadness. Life and the world is too big. Contemplating essays I have to write and the way it all has to be squeezed into form and word count – all those people and histories and lives lived and ideas and – it’s all too impossible, no way to generalise such things, call them movements and evolutions and lineages that can be easily followed and figures that can be judged and summed up and made to fit in nice little neat academic boxes where everything makes sense and there are conclusions – for what conclusion could there be except that the whole thing is massive and complex and irrational and diverse and non-linear and can’t be put into words anyway? How do people judge? Pah! I spit on the whole thing. I wonder if I’ll even make it to the end of this degree – or whether I’ll just stall at that next pathetic mere six thousand word essay deadline and fail to move beyond the knowledge that it’s all just make-believe impossibly oversimplified reductionist pap. Unless I gonzo the whole thing and lumber and stumble through the steps taken from starting out with premise, to attempting premise, to the knot and the tangle of intricate web of life weaved and then real-world conclusion of a boy seeing finally that simple typed shapes and neat formulaic essays are really saying nothing – or saying nothing that isn’t a lie: the lie being that life and history and people and ideas and experiences and things actually lived can be put into a box and grinned satisfied over and said, yeah, that makes sense, ain’t I smart mum? But it don’t make sense: life is weird. All the times I’ve thought I had it – romantic life, I’m thinking – and all it really is is making it up one step at a time, and bubbles popping as the bubbles once thought of as reality are seen for what they are: bubbles. The idea that this is it, this thing, this’ll be the one – bubbles. Or this person. Or this relationship. Or this fad. Or this job. Bubbles bubbles bubbles. Looking for the end when there ain’t no end, not now, not ever. Reaching the end and seeing the end goes on – that what you thought was the top of the mountain is really just the point that reveals the mountain to come – and on and on and on. Infinite mountain. Settling into a life or a person – but what is there that could satisfy except not settling? And waffling again. And maybe even that just an old idea. None of this matters. I’ll still wake up tomorrow in Leeds and take a shit and ref my games and chase my ball and type my words until one day I realise finally and full well that it’s time for something new – and then that new thing will come. Breaking into America
Ah shit. Who cares? What saying now anyway? Time to stop.
But first…talk about something real, to not leave it on mad waffling rambling stupid beat ending all influenced once again by Tom Wolfe’s own interminable text which sort of promises so much and in the end delivers so little, which is pretty much what happened in Ken Kesey’s own deflated balloon prankster world once they all fell apart – or grew up – and Cassady died – and acid got old – didn’t save the world – was just mad gibbering baboonish nonsense like the type I play on my guitar sometimes for self-amusement – like avant garde – like too far-out jazz – like masturbation – all the product of a non-enlightened mind – and a diseased mind when taken seriously as something with meaning and depth and where it’s at. Just fluff – kid’s stuff – a bit of fun. Scream, baboon, gurgle gurgle – and then back to life.
But where’s that real thing I was gonna talk about?
HE WRACKS BRAIN FOR A MOMENT AND SEARCHES FOR IT.
…
STILL SEARCHING.
…
No, I can’t find it. Sport and acting thing: check. Troubles with the girlfriend: check (or at least hinted at, thinking to avoid Eve’s crazy gleeful dribbling rubbing fingers, all crazy and mad). But other things? There are no other things – except for the continued search for mystery New Mexico girl whose perhaps sister I facebooked on Thursday and I think that’s pretty much the end of that particular trail. I guess she doesn’t want contact. Or maybe she’s dead. I tried what I think is her mum’s number a few times and all I got was a rude Frenchman who said call back later but seemed to hint in his tone that I shouldn’t call back at all, which was weird. The bloody French! And the whole thing is of course crazy – but no stone unturned, right? And no turn unstoned – which is a line from silly old Wolfe’s book.
Ah, the way things leak and leech into my brain! You can accuse me of theft if you want – but it ain’t that, I swear: I’s just a very easily influenced sponge and it takes a while to get squeezed out.
But where voice my own?
No: no need to ask that – for voice my own plain as day in all those very early journal entries writ before I even read owt else and voice was pretty much the same as today’s voice would be seven days without a book (ie, when sponge done drain).
Leak! Leech! That’s what I’m talking about: ah, those glorious billion-word emails I wrote full of semi-colons and two hundred word sentences when I was reading Jane Eyre and all that Victorian Gothic melodrama shite all them years ago (not shite: I loved it). Heehee.
Real thing? Yes: the chasing of ghostly myth of mystery girl just to complete that and have the whole thing done and slap my palms and say I travelled every road. What mystery! And what answers! But if only she’d reply. What fun we’d have reminiscing on insane times past as she fills in the blanks and I understand once and for all the weirdness of those times. No more romantic dreams, I swear – well, few – ‘cos practicalities of persona non grata (?) in good old USA
The answer to all your questions is yes.
Insanity.
It makes a little bit the very first traces of tears behind eyes – though no possibility of falling – to type it.
The disappointment of a life slipped by. But like Bretton Hall, no doubt I’ll get over it.
Ah yes, but Bretton Hall you got over, finally, ‘cos you got right back there anyway (where you are now).
True, true…but – ah, don’t tease! Foul creature! Life too far gone and Rory far too old for silly things like that – though, not really. Foul creature – release is what I want, one way or the other. Like this blesséd release from writing thou hast given me – not in fulfilment, but in letting go. But – oh! – what if I went blind, like poor old PC Rathband? Then what would I do? Or if someone shot off the top of my head, like dear sweet JFK, all dipping his nib in saucy blondes such as Marilyn Monroe? I bet you I’d be sad then.
Must learn to type with eyes closed, just in case.
In case of what>
In case someone chot off the top of my head or poked out my eyes p then I suppose I could type like this, with eyes closed, and helpful toung secretary ILeah>) would come and fic it later, still tping kust as fast, jusy a little bit more messy.
A special ketboard, that’s what I’d need.
Eyes open!
Eyes are open now – eyes were closed for the line above – and I’m smartly pleased with the results of my little blindman experiment – which is not even on specially adapted keyboard. So…
But, man, I really don’t want to go blind! Though deaf, I think I could handle – a bit of peace and quiet at last…
Real world? Damn! What fantasy/mystery girl would want to occupy herself with a loon like me in any case! All Leeds basement satisfaction in gown and egg sandwiches a long way from that gleeful gay Colorado
I hear they want football referees and coaches in the States. Only eight more years until I’m no longer banned…
And then I’ll be 44, and getting ready for retirement – or jump in the volcano – or, most likely, almost exactly the same as today except – Christ! Getting on for fifty! Fuck’s sake – I’m nearly fifty! And yet…a change of perception – to get out of that Davy Jones now dead mindset that recoils in horror thinking him “only sixty-six and I’ll be sixty-six soon” – which is of course an absolutely mad thing to think, and yet real to this head. Like slowly shuffling old men and women bowed in town doing their shopping and recoiling at that too, like mythical Buddha, seeing the horror of where this bodily life will ultimately lead and, shit, no wonder he ran screaming into the forest desperate to get away from it. No sacrifice leaving behind kingdom nor wife nor child when faced with that! We watched There’s Something About Kevin (I always go to call it that, before realising my mistake) and what I thought was, fuck me, I sure don’t want no children. And then: that’s sad, because there goes fiction again, doing weird and pointless things for no real benefit, scaring parents and would-be parents and not really reflecting reality, and for why? Violence on our screens and violence in our heads and still we deny the link – meanwhile spending billions on advertising whose companies work entirely on the premise that screens and head are linked. So, yeah, no kids for me – ‘cos even if they’re good ones…man, all that shit! All that wailing and fannying around after them and waiting waiting years and years till any little sensible thing comes out of their mouths – another mouth to add to the billions of already mouths, when patently no need. Enough mouths already. Enough shit and nappies and screams. Let others deal with that. I got woods to run off to. Basement flats to dwell in. Balls to kick and chase and die good-looking and happy and young looking back and saying, wow, yeah, you know I did pretty much everything I ever wanted to do and it sure weren’t no humdrum, insurance salesman life. Fuck, I typed a lot – and I loved it too! But here now lying in this bed with pink gown and needing yet another pee – ah! remember those days when the body seemed like such a heavy useless thing that had to be dragged around and how annoying it was the frequency with which it needed peeing or shitting or feeding, the stupid bag of bones and muscles just a weight that unnecessarily anchored the balloon of my soaring soul – but those days are long gone, old soul-filled Rory, and may never return.
Funny old days, huh?
All days are funny old days
So spaketh the bee.
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