Working it through

I have no wish to be considered sexist or anything, but if I deserve it, so be it. Men, it seems to me, have the ability to ‘think things through’ and I don’t. I would love to close my eyes and consider the consequences of every action of my protagonist, or every choice I, as author, make, and half an hour later return to this world with decisions made and a very clear picture of my story.

This is the reality for me. I have the gist – the story that can be told in a couple of lines which, by the time I’m finished, will be reduced to one line of the kind a deep-voiced American can intone to coax you all to the movie. ‘Two men and all that’s left of them is a bronze horse, a gold ring and a nation.’ That’s the back-of-the-envelope bit and I find it easy.

The first draft is sequential tale-telling. This happens, then this happens, then this happens and at the end… Oh phooey, I don’t know what happens at the end. Perhaps I’ll find out on the next draft.

And then it comes, the hard work, the real writing. On the story I’m working on right now, first draft got to Chapter Twenty. It was third person in my usual style. Then I thought, this would be a good story for the young’uns, so why not make it Young Adult? My YA version, in first person, gets to Chapter Fifteen. Then I thought, first person isn’t working, let’s start again. That version gets to Chapter 6. I’ve just started again, fairly settled now with my original idea of third person, usual style!! But I have to do the work to know how it will pan out. No sitting back in an armchair, feet up on a stool, puffing a pipe.

And then there are the step-by-step choices. The slave needs some disfigurement. In the first version, it’s a limp; by the third version, it’s a lump on the neck. All that has to be untangled eventually so that the poor fellow isn’t suffering more afflictions than the story requires.

The real horrors are the subtle choices of characteristics. My hero is a sceptic. My hero is religious. My hero despises rites. My hero consults Oracles. Saying he is a bit confused and doesn’t know his own mind, well, that works in real life but not in story, and these subtle things are harder to spot than lumps and limps. Each time he speaks, which is he, the sceptic or the believer? I have a great deal of sorting out to do (which is why I am here blogging instead of getting on with it) and I truly wish, in this respect, that I was a bloke who can think things through, because my method of groping through fog sure is not a recipe for contentment.

My equivalent to pipe-smoking and pure thought is trance. My current trance music is Ann Heymann’s Queen of Harps (Irish harps use metal strings and Ann’s idea that, in ancient times, these strings might have been silver and gold, has produced stunning results – she makes the harp sound like bells). If I put that on, it relaxes the brain, makes images flow, and when the heroine’s hair, which so far has been black but is now suddenly the colour of sunrise, then, well, I’ll sort that out later (and hire a good editor).

If the music doesn’t work, there’s always the chores. If my windows are looking clean, you know things aren’t going too well at the desk. A fellow author said over the garden fence, as I was weeding, ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Well how do you think?’ I replied tartly. ‘I mean, look at my garden all spick and span!’

Does anyone else have these problems with choices and whether to make them in the head or on the page? Am I right thinking it’s a female thing? I’d be very glad to hear from the boys on this.

The cartoon by Burton, by the way, was sent by a friend and I’ve no idea where it was published.

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The Sound of Elephants Falling

Last year I gave a talk to an academic association in leafy north Oxford. As an honorarium, the £35 they gave me was derisory, but then, apparently, they are ‘poor’ (as any association will be which only charges £2 entry). As a book token, however, £35 seemed a lot to spend. I went today to browse in Oxford’s oldest and most famous bookstore, Blackwells, without quite knowing what I was going to spend it on. Some big art book, perhaps, or a leather-bound antiquity.

The sound hits you as you walk through the door, like there is a party going on. As you go upstairs, however, it begins to sound more like the school refectory. It is, of course, the coffee shop where classics used to be, where once you could sit and browse Loebs on the window seat untroubled by anyone. Now it’s a skinny latte shouting shop. Fine. Bookshops need to diversify, after all, like everybody. But the rearrangements confused and confounded me.

Here I put my hands up and admit I haven’t been in a bookshop for a couple of years. Cripes! Call yourself an author?? Yes, I do, and like most authors desperately broke, so I shop online. The thing is, I am not emotionally attached to bookshops. Too many memories of being rejected by stuffy staff, whether I was trying to get them to stock my books, buy my secondhand books, or consider a talk. Some, I have to say, have been really nice, those at Blackwells amongst them, but the overwhelming majority play authors as cats play mice, seeing how hard you bounce before you die. So I feel as if I don’t care if bookshops go down, although I expect I shall sob with nostalgia in an old folks’ home one day. But as I went through Blackwells today, it came to me that this institution will not – barring accidents – outlive me.

This is what I found. A literature department which could not point me to early Irish literature (but found it in the end under ‘languages’), where the titles I was after were not to be found; which could not understand why I should want a CD of Beowulf spoken in Old English; which had tables stocked with same-old-same-old. I’m not sure if all this reflected on Blackwells or on the University but it seems that studying Eng Lit here must be a very dull affair. I nearly fled at that point but decided to labour up another floor to classics and history. After all, I had £35 to spend. In the classics department I immediately found some titles I wanted to buy, slim books, not much more than pamphlets, in the Osprey series. Picture books, in effect, related to Celts and Romans who are my current area of interest. Fine! Good way to spend £35, even if you don’t get much to show for it. I took five titles from the carousel and went to sit in the window seat (hooray – it still exists, along with the Loebs!) to compare them and see if I wanted all and, if so, how much that was going to tot up to. I began examination…

Two of the five were smart and presentable and passed my ‘Must I Possess You?’ test, but three were just horrible. Cheap productions on cheap paper with muddy print not quite properly aligned on the page. I checked the publication page and found these were ‘print-on-demand’. I can’t see any excuse for p-o-d books to be so nasty. I decided – the gods of the Celestial Library forgive me – to buy the nice ones and come home and buy the others online for, get this, those cheap ‘n’ nasties were priced at £12 and £16 respectively and were both shop-damaged.

If publishing and bookselling are not to fall to the ground like dead elephants, causing the whole land to shake, they need to act quickly. We are a literate, savvy public and can see right past those glossy (or, indeed, matte) covers to the cheap, yellow paper within. If we are going to be diverted from the seductions of the eBook, we need our physical books to be beautiful and affordable (or at least, good value for money). The industry needs to be quick for the poachers are almost upon the herd.

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Humanity in Bronze

Thanks to a beautifully written post on The Idle Woman, I took myself off to the Royal Academy yesterday to see the exhibition ‘Bronze’. On the bus to the station, I was reading Philo the Jew, as you do. Well, no, no one normal does that (more’s the pity), but this was research. Having discussed courage in his book On Virtue, Philo goes on:

We must now proceed in due order to consider that virtue which is more nearly related to piety, being as it were a sister, a twin sister, namely, humanity, which the father of our laws (Moses) loved so much that I know not if any human being was ever more attached to it. (Philo, 1st century AD).

On the train, oh, the pleasures of Kindle, I turned to the newly purchased book by Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, and in one short hour rediscovered my love of literature. Yes, of course, all writers should read, but is it just me or do historical novelists end up reading far more history than fiction? Up to my eyes in Romans and Celts, not to mention Philo, I haven’t got time to read Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf or anything ‘out of period’. But the aptly named Prose is a great writer and soon had me resolving to read completely out of period and get my sentences tuned up. She has many magnificent quotations from modern literature to study and analyse. One of them, from Philip Roth, whom I have never read, was this:

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is every man’s tragedy. (Philip Roth: American Pastoral).

Clearly the theme for the day, established by 11am, was ‘humanity’. Humanity is, after all, what literature has to offer us. All those stories of all those human beings, meeting things we may meet, things we hope never to meet.

And so to the RA. What, people have been asking, can they possibly do to follow the David Hockney exhibition? Here’s the answer – a display of bronzes throughout time and culture. Almost at once I was baffled by the arrangement. Where was the usual tour beginning in misty antiquity, going through the classical world, medieval Europe, Renaissance, the Boring Age to our own denatured times? Everything was muddled up and arranged according to broad categories: Gods, Heads, Objects.

It was like the Pitt Rivers Museum here in Oxford, where you can find Eskimo lace next to Welsh Miner’s whalebone carvings. It’s completely creative to have all your anticipations deconstructed. You are freed to see anew and to spot the preposterous judgements in yourself even as they arise: ‘Good heavens, they could do this in the fourth millennium BC?’ (Naughty RA to succumb to the PC requirement that we rename our eras BCE and CE).

It soon becomes evident that we have been capable of great art since the beginning and, further, that there is almost nothing between ancient and modern. It is all the same brilliance and genius.

There is one difference however. When it comes to contemporary art, such as beer cans or a football in bronze, something changes. It’s as if all the spirit has been sucked out of art. What will they think of us when they look back on our secular materialist age? ‘They will marvel,’ said my companion, Darby Costello, who came up with the phrase ‘secular materialist’, ‘at all we have achieved without gods.’ Anyway such objects, from Remington’s cowboys to Koon’s football, did allow us to pass by and breathe a little, for almost everything else was utterly captivating.

Highlights:

The Chariot of the Sun, Trundholm, Denmark, 4th cent BC

The Greek head of a horse, 400 BC, which spent some of its long life in the garden of Lorenzo de’ Medici (why didn’t I know that?).

The Chimera from Arezzo, composed of a lion, with a gazelle growing out of its back being eaten by the snake which is its tail. I identified this as Romanesque or perhaps Byzantine. It turned out to be Etruscan. (This exhibition destroyed my opinion of myself as being rather good at dating and placing objects of art.)

Bronze cast copy of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa from Florence. Huge and enthralling – even the shadows it casts on the wall are wonderful.

The Shadow of Evening, Etruscan from Volterra. This statuette had inspired a scene on shadows in Volterra in A Tabernacle for the Sun. The day I heard my first novel had been accepted for publication (by Allison and Busby), a friend advised me to go out and buy myself a present. I went to the Ashmolean and what should I find in the gift shop but a little figurine of Shadow. So wonderful to see it in its bronzey flesh again.

Uber Highlight:

Roman Parade Helmet, Cumbria, 1st century. OK, it’s my period, but more than that, it’s familiar, and my poor old memory section in the brain creaks into action and sends up sparks and the smell of burning flies as I try to remember why this is so special. And then I do. I’d seen it on Alice Roberts’s series ‘Digging for Britain’. When it was found – only two years ago – it went on sale at auction and was bought by a private collector. Roberts spoke mournfully to camera about how this precious thing had been lost and would never be seen by the public. Well, wrong. Here it is! (For the story, see Wikipedia)

Uber Uber Highlight:

A father with his three year old son on his shoulders. They are standing in front of il Porcellino, the great bronze boar from il Mercato Vecchio, Florence, its snout rubbed smooth by generations of superstitious hands. It sits – as I had never noticed before – in front of a pool made of a mirror, in a little bronze landscape of grasses and plants filled with creepy crawlies. Father and son were identifying snakes, toads, frogs. From a short distance, I watched the little boy engaging with art and knew I was seeing something truly magnificent that I cannot put into words.

On the way home I saw the headline ‘Now it is a murder hunt’ and my heart plunged like a lift whose cables have been cut in grief for that family suffering what must be so close to unendurable. Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. I got home expecting to hear that little April’s body has been found, but not so, they have just stopped looking for a living five year old and are looking under the earth rather than on top of it.

One of the more uncomfortable exhibits was Bernini’s The Damned Soul which features on the poster. A face contorted by the horror it must endure forever is not easy to look at.

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Our Stiff Upper Lip

Ian Hislop’s programme on The Stiff Upper Lip – An Emotional History of Britain – began last evening and was very disappointing. After a run-through of history of the 18th Century (prior to which, apparently, we were all quite jolly), he finally alighted on the Duke of Wellington as ‘the cause’ of our famous stoicism. It struck me as a very superficial understanding of history and human psychology. No one causes anything.

The Iron Duke – the original stiff upper lip?

Princess Diana didn’t teach me how to cry, or tell me I was free to. The so-called ‘Queen of Hearts’ was completely neutral in the process of this nation learning to express its emotions (if that’s what that episode of mass hysteria was).

In his essay on history which Tolstoy appends to War and Peace, he likens Napoleon to the figurehead on a great ship. The figurehead may have the illusion of being a leader but it is merely being pushed by the ship, the people. To which I would add that the people are being pushed by the wind.

Analyzing national traits in historical personages is to ignore the concept of zeitgeist, the defining spirit or mood of an age. Who knows what it is, whence it bloweth and where it listeth.

I was going up to bed troubled until I remembered an occasion in my own life when I felt part of a mass, if not national, change.

It was 1967 and I was 17 coming on 18. I’d gone to Cornwall with my friend Sue. We were dressed as mods, believed we were mods, and were  in search of a bit of surfing action. One day, up on the rocks above Newquay Beach, we were listening to Radio Caroline on our transistor radio. The beach was full of people listening to trannies tuned to various stations. It was the usual cacophony we suffered before they invented headphones.

On our station came The Beatles and All You Need is Love. ‘All you need is love!’ we sang, ‘Tra la la la laaaa!’ And about 30% of the beach folk were also singing. Within the minute, everyone had retuned to Caroline and 100% were singing, ‘All you need is love! Tra la la la laa! All you need is love! Tra la la la laa. All you need is love, love, love is all you need.’

Everyone, hundreds and hundreds of people in one sandy bay singing the same song, with words so powerful that they did as they said. For that moment of palpable unity, me and Sue, we believed it. This was true. Love is all that is needed for there to be peace and well-being. Tra la la la laa!

We had gone to Cornwall as mods but we went home as hippies. Yes, we bought bells and necklaces to make this conversion obvious to others, but the real conversion had been within. Our feckless youth was behind us, frivolous sports a thing of the past. There was a world beyond Cornwall, beyond Britain, even, and suddenly we belonged to it. Did The Beatles cause the zeitgeist? No, they just put it into words and music.  It came to be called the Summer of Love, but we knew it as such in the moment on that beach at Newquay. I’m sure this is how national change takes place: in the hearts and minds of many, at once, without anyone orchestrating or influencing it.   Hislop, with his National Portrait Gallery view of history, is paddling in the shallows.

‘Critical mass’, that term taken from nuclear physics, in sociology means ‘a threshold value of the number of people needed to trigger a phenomenon by exchange of ideas.’ I find that a useful concept. We all feel the same but it’s mute and unformulated until the number of us is so large that our company includes someone who can speak out – or sing out – for the many. And then the balance tips.

I don’t know where our stiff upper lip came from but it would be far more fruitful to have a look at the Duke of Wellington’s schooling and his relationship to his father than his tomb in Westminster Abbey. Or to look at the social conditions for all classes around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, to find the misery which made us, acting as one, choose to keep calm and carry on.

Hislop’s programme is worth watching, because it’s thought provoking, but it left a nasty aftertaste of history education in the 1950s, which consisted of kings and dukes and a few rebels, as if, between them, they constituted history. They do not.  Who knows what does?

And the big question bothering us at the moment is whether the London Olympics changed the mood of the nation or was just a load of hype dressed up in disturbingly inverted symbolism and some pretty weird numerology. For which see the brilliant article by Richard Ramsbotham in the current issue of New View.

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How to empty your in box.

It was only last year that I discovered that little feature bottom left of Outlook telling me how many emails I had in my in box. I resolved to get it down to 50 (from about 2000), which I did over Christmas. Since then I’ve bounced around the 300 mark and getting back to 50 seemed impossible. And hardly worth the effort since it’s like sweeping snow in a blizzard.

Not that I get junk. All that is caught by Spamarrest, which I’ve been using for years. No, these are bona fide emails requiring at least my attention if not my response.

For my birthday in July, the Boss bought me a pile of books on decluttering (yes, a whole pile). Three were by David Allen and one by Erin Rooney Dolland. Luckily I started with the latter.

Unclutter your Life in One Week -  had it been published in the UK, we’d have probably caught it with the Trades’ Descriptions Act. Because it is NOT POSSIBLE to follow this programme. For instance, Day One. Read the first 56 pages of the book. This takes you through the introduction and through Monday, so obviously you need to know all this before you start. Next, clear out your wardrobe and get the stuff to the charity shop, having somehow managed to buy some useful accessories before the shops are open. And, oh yes, fold up those T-shirts Anthea Turner style. Next, go to work. Yep, it’s now about 8am. At work, before doing any work, completely transform your office space. When you come home in the evening, it’s time to muck out and wash down the lobby.

The author must be very thin.

Intuitively, I’d started reading the opening chapters over a weekend so by the time I hit Monday morning, I was more than ready to go. In fact, I’d had a sleepless night from excitement. This is a very well-written book and she should take up thriller-writing. By 10am I’d realised the title was daft if not actionable, but I decided to put that quibble aside and just follow the programme at my own pace. Voila! My life begins to change.

Somewhere in the book she tackles emails, giving credit to David Allen as her inspiration. I put the method into operation and then the life change became profound. This is the system in a nutshell, but alter it to suit your own situation. The main principle is to keep the inbox empty. Yep, empty.

The following applies to Outlook. If you’re using another email programme, try putting A in front of the categories, e.g. Areadme, Adump etc. This way they’ll all go to the top.

I created five categories to go into the top section of the navigation bar on the left. They are:

Action

Dump

Readme

Fun links (music and jokes people send me)

Pending

Every other category in the navigation bar – think of them as folders in your filing cabinet. In fact, Outlook could match your filing cabinet in the headings (although mine doesn’t).

Action takes everything that requires just that, some action. Review it daily.

Readme takes those emails which need longer than 2 minutes and perhaps need no action at all other than a reply. We used to call this ‘correspondence’. Review weekly.

Dump. I stopped using delete because, having deleted stuff, you then have to delete it again sometime. The Boss says this is easy but I don’t find it so. I delete the Dump folder periodically, the whole folder, then create a new one. It works for me.

Pending is ‘Waiting for’. You’ve replied but want the stuff to hang around for a bit just in case. Review monthly.

So, there you are. Every email will fit into one of those categories and there is no need to have anything in your inbox ever. Every email has one of two ultimate destinations: File or Dump. Of course, success rests on REVIEW. It must be done as a rigorous discipline, or ACTION begins to look like your inbox once did. But this system does remove those lumps that used to clog everything up.

You could organise your entire inbox this way in about half an hour but I chose not to. I wanted to keep ACTION no longer than the screen. So having cleared everything recent from the inbox, I’m now into stuff marked ‘Older’ and I nibble away, about ten at a time, when I feel like it. I’m down to 95.

Now that I’m reading David Allen himself, I find this system also applies to the desk and study. I’ve spent the weekend in a fever of filing and dumping. About that, more anon.

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The Gist and the Holy Grail

It seemed a mad thing, to go all the way to deepest Devon and back in a day. But not to go – well, that would be like not visiting the Fisher King because it seems a bit of an effort.

Symbolizing the goal of the quest? The standing stone in the maze  at Totleigh Barton.

The occasion was so special. After John Moat was diagnosed with cancer at the end of last year, his great friend, Lindsay Clarke, conceived the idea of putting a book together, an anthology of the Imagination, in John’s honour. It was supposed to be a surprise, but not a few kittens were let out of little bags by excited and enthusiastic contributors. But John’s a gentleman and would say things like, ‘I’m not sure what Lindsay’s up to but…’

John (left) and Lindsay – the kind of friends poems are made of.

Lindsay and his contributors laboured hard to get the book together by March. Once it was completed, he presented it to John, who read it at proof stage. ‘Plotinus in a gym slip,’ he pronounced on reading my contribution. I’m still working out whether that was a compliment. I’ve been told to presume it was.

Then the next thing was the launch party, to be held on St Swithun’s Day at Totleigh Barton, the home of the Arvon Foundation which John founded with John Fairfax. Three hours by train from Oxford to Exeter was easy enough, but getting from Exeter station to Totleigh seemed  impossible. On the map it’s a mess of wiggly lines, in Parzival’s quest, the equivalent of  the foggy marsh. Really, this journey was a silly dream and inconceivable. John said so himself: ‘Don’t come! It would be mad!’ But then, from being an editor, Lindsay shape-shifted into a travel agent and the next thing I knew, an itinerary from trainline.com arrived. It all began to look feasible.

When I discovered that Jules Cashford was in Oxford for the weekend, and that we could go together to Totleigh, that was the clincher. We’ve never had the time for an extended talk and this journey would give us three hours (predictably, it was not enough).

Briony Lawson, sculptor, with Alice Oswald and Jules Cashford

At Exeter we found other guests from the same train, Maggie Gee and Satish Kumar’s wife, June. (That tireless pilgrim, Satish, having lectured in Oxfordshire on Saturday evening, was giving a talk in London on Sunday morning and didn’t catch up with his wife at Totleigh until about 4pm). We piled into the taxi John had sent to collect ‘the Four Graces’ and I took the front seat. While those in the back had what sounded like a fascinating conversation about writing and publishing, I talked to the taxi driver.

He lives in Okehampton and hates it. Why? Because it has no restaurants and night life. Given that I was on a quest to see the Fisher King, I repressed my distaste at his idea of the good life and our conversation went pretty deep. I heard about his Thai wife and her cooking. We spent the really curvy part of the journey, through countryside of voluptuous hills and dales I would dearly loved to have gazed at in silence, talking about his skills in marketing and all the gambling games and lotteries he makes up. He is a very clever guy. I dropped in a suggestion that he quit taxi driving and open a Thai restaurant in Okehampton, perhaps embedding it in a pub, which seems to be happening more and more these days. I left him quivering with thoughts, ideas and anticipations. I could do no less – he was a nice guy and I wish him well in his endeavours, even though I will not be going within a hundred miles of them.

And so, finally, we turned up the drive to what must be one of the most beautiful spots in all England, a thatched house set in wild gardens that hosts and has hosted over the years so many aspiring writers and their tutors.

One of Totleigh’s many wild corners

About thirty people had gathered to pay tribute to John. Now. there are some luminaries amongst the contributors, like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. Even Ted Hughes contributed, but with a piece written presumably when he was still alive. The contributors, however, were not chosen for their fame as much as for their relevance to John and some of us, including John himself,  have not been blessed with fame or awards. John Moat is almost like the god of the unsung poet and, as he said in his short address, what do gongs count against this, a gathering of such fine minds and loving hearts?

A musician, a child and a sculptor form a uke band to entertain us. Child steals the show.

In this summer of almost ceaseless rain, on this, St Swithun’s Day, it did not rain. The sun shone. Why is it, when the sun shines, that the rain is so quickly forgotten? It seems as if a fine day is, somewhere deep in the soul, considered normal, the standard against which all other days are judged. Yesterday was an Ideal Day, a Perfect Day, which embraced what for many of us was a crowd of strangers in a happy unity.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Except we were not fighting of course, but eating chocolate mousse cake with great blobs of clotted cream.

The snapper snapped. Photographer Andrew Lawson caught working.

Then again, perhaps we are soldiers, each faced with the common enemy of self-criticism, judging and measuring ourselves against others. So, Olympics and Jubilees aside, given that 2012 is the Year of Shakespeare, let’s hear from the master on self worth:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I was lucky enough to have several conversations alone with John but in the one where I finally approached the sacred question, ‘What ails thee, Uncle?’ (or, in our terms, ‘What do you suffer having chemo?’) we were interrupted, so there was no luminous moment when I beheld the Grail.

But it was there, shining its light on the day and the company, the Grail, the greatest gong of all: Love.

According to all common measures my writing has failed. I have not achieved fame or wealth and certainly no gong will ever come my way. But because of my writing, because it is loved by John Moat, I was one of the blessed company yesterday, and that is the kind of wealth that really counts.

John and Jules

‘The Gist’ is available now for pre-order on Amazon and promises to be a terrific read. It’s suggested that all attending Arvon courses should read it before going. I suggest that all writers, aspiring or otherwise, read it now. Because the Gist is the gist, the very kernel of the imaginative process. John Moat is now in his ‘most creative period’ and has realised that the Imagination he has worked with all his life is responsible for who he is. The Imagination is the maker, the writer but its tool.

Arvon Foundation Writing Courses

Parzival by Lindsay Clarke

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The Monster of No Summer

As everyone knows, we Brits have the weather as our number one topic of conversation, so the fact that this year we are hardly mentioning it signals something really bad is going on. We say nothing but may pull a face when we meet. The shoulders of fellow gardeners slump when you dare to ask, ‘How’s it going?’ We watch the spuds for the blight which must come, we lift rotting onions and consign all leafy things to the slugs in a very un-British act of hopeless surrender. Why fight? There’s always the supermarket.

Seedlings long overdue for planting out are kept up high in the vain hope of evading slugs.

In 1816 there were no supermarkets. Everything was local. There was no news broadcasting. So when the summer disappeared in endless rain, darkness and cold, and the food prices began to rise, not knowing about cause and effect the British did what they do so well in a state of ignorance – they rioted. Starvation was widespread: it was one of the worst famines on record. The cause? Not the jet stream but a huge volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora combined with a period of unusually low solar activity.

As a gardener, I despair. This is 2007 all over again, the year when I began blogging because we were marooned. The floods separated us from the allotments and we couldn’t reach them except by kayak for ten days. When we did… Well, that was the year I saw grown men crying. I felt like giving up but, hey, we’re British and we took the opportunity to build some raised beds.

In 2007 I had tried biodynamic gardening for the first time. It took five years to pluck up the courage to try it again. And, yup, here we are, torrential rain wiping out all that pernickety moon planting. Surely the weather isn’t subject to what Linda is doing in her garden? So it’s a coincidence, that’s all, but forgive me if I now abandon biodynamic gardening forever. Call me superstitious…

As a writer, I love the sound of rain. It keeps me indoors. It keeps me working at the desk. I usually contain writing between autumn and spring equinoxes, but this year Persephone remains in hell for the summer. Whoopie!

In 1816, some friends were on a walking holiday at Lake Geneva but in the Year of No Summer they were forced to stay indoors. They challenged each other to come up with a horror story. They were Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover, young Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron. Mary won the challenge when the gloom of that summer’s days, combined with conversations about galvanism, caused her to have a dream of a scientist inadvertently creating a monster.

Dark days, deep imagination, and a metaphor for modern life.

So I relinquish my lettuces to slugs, hang up my hoe and retreat into the Hades of the creative imagination, hoping for a Frankenstein – story idea, that is, not a monster!

The Year Without a Summer

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The Year of Heavenly Harmony

This year of 2012 is stuffed with anniversaries: Dickens, Shakespeare, Titanic, accession of Queen Elizabeth II. And then we (i.e. London) has the Olympics. Predictions of the end of the world and stunning planetary line-ups add to the drama, especially when day after day on the news it does look like the end of Europe. Ecocide everywhere, even on my doorstep, and the story of Fukishima not over yet.

Life, of course, carries on as usual, if you call it usual to go to the supermarket and see the Union flag everywhere, even on the toilet rolls and ryvitas. Everyone is gearing up for the weekend after next, including the planet Venus who will end the Jubilee by transiting the sun and completing a five-petalled rose in the sky that took eight years to draw.

That the orbits of Venus and Earth round the sun involve the numbers 5, 8 and 1.6 is shown in this lovely video from transitofvenus.org

It is completely scientific; only geometers will thrill to the significance of 1.6 and phi relationships. (See John Martineau’s ‘Little Book of Coincidence’.) Let’s just say it’s auspicious for world harmony. The transit is visible in the States at sunset June 5th and in the UK at sunrise June 6th. It will not happen again until 2117.

We have no idea what we shall be doing on Jubilee weekend and the mood here, as ever on Big Occasions, is to ignore it all as best we can – and then get sucked in at the last moment and end up all teary with wobbly chins at the absolute glory of a royal pageant. (In case we sound like two anti-social grumpies, I must add that our own anniversaries are similarly ignored – we passed our 10th without a murmur – we like to think of it as Stoicism but it’s really just forgetfulness.)

I was two and eleven twelfths at the Coronation. My parents went to the event and had seats at Pall Mall – I was left with my grandparents and their brand new television set. I watched the Coronation as a moving black and white picture on a tiny screen set in a great wooden cabinet and I very much suppose that my jaw hung open. I remember the atmosphere in the room more than the images, a palpable sense of occasion, a frisson in the family: history in the making. My Victorian grandparents, with their velvet drapes and Venetian glass, their war-weary children, their unruly grandchildren who could only sit still for an hour at a time: between us, we were to span an epoch called the twentieth century.

Big Ted watched the Coronation with me, and he was taller than me at the time. He’s 61 this year.

Queen Elizabeth has looked after me ever since, embracing my life, always there, sometimes like a frosty aunt who has to be visited every now and again so that she can lay down the law, sometimes like a stern but kind mother; often like my mother, who wasn’t stern. I was born after Charles and before Anne and grew up with them. Charles has always been the voice for everything I have believed and still do believe. His recent book Harmony captures all my apparently irreconcilable facets and makes them a whole, so that as a lover of Botticelli it is only natural that I love Mozart, hate modern architecture, practice geometry and garden biodynamically. We were children of the same time.

There is a look to the Queen, have you noticed? – a tightness around the eyes as if she is in pain, as if she looks out through pain. Charles has it, so does Anne. It says to me that here is someone with a sense of duty in an ungrateful world; here is a monarch that was only an ideal before but in the Windsors is an actuality, one who serves.

Interestingly, Prince Andrew does not have ‘the look’ – he hobnobs with the King of Bahrain with no sense of duty at all. I wonder how he and Charles get on at family do’s? I can’t imagine they have much in common. A sense of the sacred and a love of Dubai seem incompatible.

When I was writing Consider England I applied to visit Charles’s home at Highgrove to see the garden and permission was duly and courteously given. HRH was not at home on the day, but we were greeted by the head gardener and served tea by a uniformed butler. When the butler stooped to pour the tea, a crown of golden thread embroidered on his jacket passed close by my nose. My legs went weak and my head swam. For a moment I was two again, only in this particular moment Royalty was not on television, it was serving me tea. Crowns, coaches, orbs and sceptres, these symbols were branded on my soul by a hot television at a very early age.

So here’s to you, Ma’am, and your Big Day. I’ll think of something to do to celebrate, other than eat ryvitas and go to the toilet. England expects, you know; England expects not only that you do your duty but that the pageant will be utterly stunning, reducing the Olympics to a mild aftershock. Here’s to many more years for you, and for the world.

Just in case you didn’t believe me.

Having written that in the early hours, I turned on the TV at 7am, the very moment when the Olympic torch touched down in a helicopter at Land’s End. The origin of the sacred flame of Olympia began in ancient Greece: while it was alight, all warring factions put down their arms to allow the athletes their sport. For the next 70 days it will be jogged, walked, wheeled and waddled by 8000 torch bearers up and down England. Judging by the first hour, this will not be gripping television, but the symbolism is the same: peace on earth and goodwill to all men.

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The Dying Art of Browsing

The tool which allows us to consult the world wide web is called a browser, but it is a misnomer. Looking for things via keywords and search engines is not proper browsing, it is superficial research on a par with using a telephone directory. Quite often it leads to exactly what we need and want – but that is all it leads to. The proper art of browsing is being led to things we did not know were there. The proper art of browsing, you see, is a form of magic called serendipity.

The word ‘serendipity’ has derived from a tale by Horace Walpole called The Three Princes of Serendip (1754) in which the heroes were always making fortunate discoveries. Fortunate discoveries. Most of the world’s great inventions fall under that heading.

My beloved career until new technology robbed it of its skills was picture research. In the good old days I would go to a picture library armed with a list of wants to illustrate a book. Sometimes the requirements were very specific – portraits of Winston Churchill, for instance, his family, his homes, events in his life. Sometimes they were fairly broad: the history of Russian culture. A picture library ranged from a room in a private house stuffed with a personal collection of old photographs to a unit in a business park lined with filing cabinets holding full and half-plate colour transparencies of fine art. Stephen Poliakoff caught the spirit of the old time picture library in his elegiac Shooting the Past.

Picture libraries, whether old and quaint or slick and new, were the very stuff of Serendip. As you riffled through a filing cabinet after Tsar Nicholas, you might come upon the corpse of Rasputin, which the author or editor had not thought to put on the list because a) they did not know it existed and therefore b) had not mentioned it in the text. Time after time you would find the exciting image in the same folder as the picture you were officially seeking, would take it back to the office with an air of mission accomplished and produce it at the next editorial meeting to be greeted by one word – Wow! I tell you, the high point of a picture researcher’s career was when you caused authors to rewrite the text to accommodate your illustrations.

Try doing that by computer.

By the year 2000 we had begun to ‘browse’ by keyword. A screen full of thumbnails resulted, and you had to view pictures not by the old magnifying lens but by squinting. Yes, I know about the zoom function but really. . .  Let’s not go down that route of complaining about everything. Let’s keep the complaint simple: calling up images by keywords is not browsing because it has nothing to do with Serendip. It is mechanical. Anyone can do it. Since the millennium, I would suggest, m’lud, illustrations in books have become dull, and no amount of colour-enhancing or image manipulation will make up for it. The day I spent ‘burning’ a CD with ‘files’ – each a six-figure number denoting an image – with no visual sense at all of what those files contained was the day I resigned from my beloved career. The true art of browsing was dead.

You can find just about anything you want and need via your browser. What you will never find is what was on the next page of that magazine or journal – the thing you hadn’t thought to ask for because you didn’t know it existed, the thing which might have caused you to rewrite your text if not your life. Serendip is the land where elemental spirits flit past, visible only from the corner of your eye or as the shadows of dreams as you sleep; it is the land of faerie; the land of fortunate discoveries.

When an animal – a ruminant – browses, it finds the clover amongst the grass. The computer browser is the equivalent of industrially produced animal feed emptied into a trough by a machine.

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The Brighter Picture

It was a grey day, spent largely talking with other (grey-haired) authors about Kindles (which are grey) and how Amazon is about to destroy our world. Apart from a jolly lunch with Helen Hollick, it was all hard work, this Society of Authors seminar, held to tell elderly quill-pushers how to blog, tweet and be free of our mainstream publishers.

I staggered out at 5pm to a bistre evening, monochrome, damp, Piccadilly as painted by Edward Hopper. I met an author called Kate on the way up St James and we discussed the day. We both had an hour to spare; I had my eye on the Patisserie Valerie, if only for old time’s sake, and was about to suggest tea and a slice of cheesecake when Kate said she was a member of the Royal Academy. Would I fancy seeing the David Hockney exhibition?

WOULD I??? I don’t like big blockbuster exhibitions full of shuffling people and avoided going to Leonardo recently, but when you’re outside a place, have an hour to kill and someone is offering to take you in for nothing. Well. Hold me back.

From the charcoal evening I walked into an explosion of colour. The naughty boy who gave up proper art to do weird stuff in the 60s, then went to the States and sent back the occasional swimming pool or canyon, has come home – in every respect. The Yorkshire lad has rediscovered Yorkshire and reconnected with nature. The results are absolutely staggering. You reel backwards from pictures of England like you’ve never seen her before: green, watercolour England in Tahiti colours, flamboyant, rich and not inaccurate. I have seen the countryside that golden, that red, that blue – maybe not that cerise or turquoise, but Hockney’s the artist and if that’s what he sees, that’s fine. I must look again.

There are an awful lot of pictures of one wood in East Yorkshire in all seasons. Apparently most of the pictures were painted specifically not only for the exhibition but for the walls of the RA, which explains the striking unity between the giant pictures and the space containing them. Hockney often chooses a low viewpoint; in one room in particular, you walk in and gasp, like everyone around you, because suddenly you are on a path into a beech wood, feeling like a Startright kid walking into the sunset. Strangers begin talking in front of this work.

Hockney is a dauber on speed. These giant pictures, made up of rows of separate canvases, have been given dates like 21-22 March. Two days work to cover one Academy wall. But his mastery is the sense of space (you could hug those deep woods) and colour. An hour in this exhibition is like an hour in a spice market in New Delhi.

It’s still too big, of course, and grown people start to whimper, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ in room 5 (answer, ‘yes’).

You think you’re going to go out on your hands and knees, colour-saturated and weak, but Hockney has a last surprise. A room of pictures he did while the exhibition was being installed. Misty places – can’t remember where – my eyes were losing focus. But they were drawn on an i-Pad!

I didn’t have time for the video show. I think I need to go back when I’m fresh and haven’t spent the day considering tweets, blogs and kindles.

For a little taster, go to http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/

And for a very interesting view on Amazon which I don’t disagree with, see ‘Amazon will destroy you’ on http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/02/amazon-will-destroy-you.html

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