Category: writing

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The Examined Life

Socrates is often quoted as saying: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, but what if you’ve examined your life to the nth degree and realised that it’s STILL not worth living?

Actually, although this reflection has come to me quite independently through my own experience of life, it’s not exactly original. Just this morning I was delighted to find this version from the great Kurt Vonnegut:

‘Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?’

(Notice that he attributes it to Plato, and it variously seems to be attributed to both of them by different people, but given that what we know of Socrates mostly came down to us through Plato, I guess that’s not too surprising).

A similar version which I like is from Ruby Wax, who said: ‘Self knowledge isn’t always happy news’. Well, you could argue that that’s slightly different because it’s about knowledge of the ‘self’ rather than the ‘life’. But I guess self-knowledge is what one hopes to gain through examining life, so in that sense they’re directly comparable. And it’s that sense of an examined life implying an examined self that interests me. Is it the events of life which construct the self, or is it the nature of the self which determines choices and actions and hence the way life works out? A bit of both, probably.

Why am I doing this? When I woke up it seemed like a good idea. But I don’t know. Been wondering for a long time about whether it’s worth trying to write again. In my heart of hearts I know it’s all pretty futile. What else would I rather be doing? Right now? Listening to the radio and crocheting or weaving? Playing freecell or Killer su doku? Walking on the seafront? Eating breakfast? All pretty futile, apart from breakfast. Washing up, hoovering, sorting out washing? Clearly, I don’t want to do any of those, and am an expert at procrastination when it comes to all of them, in fact I carry it to such an extreme that I prefer not to have friends so that no one comes into my house and sees what a shit-hole it is. (Actually there are other reasons why I don’t have friends, but that is quite a significant one.)

So, examining self/examining life. Begs the question of to what extent there is a single ‘self’ to examine. Clearly, the ‘self’ that I know (and hate) is quite different from the person that other people perceive me to be, which is frustrating at times, but on the other hand, is probably the only reason anyone has anything to do with me at all – if they knew the me I know, why would they bother? If I could get away from myself I would – in fact, I have tried in different ways at many different times, but it never works. One of the repeated motifs that has appeared though my examination of my last 60 years of life, the impulse to run away and keep running, which is continually thwarted when I realise that nothing inside has changed, and being in a different place is only superficially preferable to what went before. Now I have reached a place where I really feel I have nowhere else to go – that’s wisdom, I guess. No point in wishing for anything better, looking to the future and hoping for a change. When I moved here I was reminded of the Eagles’ song The Last Resort: ‘There is no more new frontier/We have got to build it here’. I came to the end of the country, with nothing beyond but sea (and the Isle of Wight, of course, let’s not forget that). My last dream, my last throw of the dice, and here I am.

Yesterday I saw my shrink and read her this poem, which I wrote in 2017:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

Afterwards, she said: ‘that last line is quite hopeful. You played your own game.’

Really? I suppose I felt I had to put something positive at the end, but I’m not saying that’s how it was. I didn’t choose to be that way (except maybe in some very deep self-hating, self-punishing way), I’m sure that as a child and teenager I would rather have been accepted by others, liked even. It was just an adaptation to the reality of not being the sort of girl anyone wanted to be with. I did say to her ‘it’s a kind of sour grapes’ and the more I thought about it, the more that seems to be true – ‘Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going down the garden to eat worms’. When you have no one to play with you have to make up your own games or do nothing at all (of course, what I did a lot of the time was the classic lonely-child thing of retreating into books). As I said to myself when I was alone in Paris in February 2012: ‘I’m still the woman nobody wants’, and that is just as true now as it was then and as it was 50 or 60 years ago.

Ah well. The examined life. Maybe I could start a new blog with that as the title. And what am I going to do  with this? Where should I put it? Somewhere where there’s a possibility of it being read? Or where there’s a theoretical possibility, but I know no one will bother?

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Does it matter?

Lately I’ve been having conversations – constantly ongoing inside my head, but occasionally with other people too – about whether to carry on trying to write when I can’t see any prospect of completing anything worth publishing; whether I should write ‘for myself’; and crucially, whether writing ‘makes me happy’ (whatever that means).

All I can say is that when it goes right it’s the greatest joy imaginable, but those times are so rare, is it really worth churning out sentence after sentence knowing that most of them are of no interest to anyone, not even me?  I know the argument that if you don’t go through all the grunt work, you’ll never have a chance of finding the treasure, but on any given Monday morning, the pleasures of walking by the sea, listening to the radio, reading, crocheting, killer su doku-ing in a friendly café and untangling yarn (which I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks) are so much more immediate, accessible and reliable, why bother spending time and nervous energy on anything so risky and massively unproductive as writing?

I’ve been vaguely wondering about how many words I’ve written in my lifetime – starting with the years 2008 and 2009 where I wrote (and blogged) a minimum of 500 words every day – so for those two years I churned out over 365,000 words – I’m not sure how long I continued with that discipline of blogging, but I think it was consistent for at least another couple of years, and then there were the years 2000-2007 where I wrote a journal every day even if I wasn’t blogging, so when you add in the 200,000 words of the first draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, that will easily get us past the million word mark from 2000 to 2012 (ignoring anything I’ve written before or since then, including the 50,000 words of last year’s NaNoWriMo marathon).

Speaking of which, the one thing that demonstrated is that it’s perfectly possible to keep on churning out those words without ever generating a spark of anything which can be turned into the germ of a novel or short story or anything of interest. Does that matter? This is the question I started with, after all. Writing like this is the easiest thing in the world, but does it bring me joy or contentment for its own sake? When it comes to crochet or knitting or lino-printing or weaving or any other craft, I guess I’m happy to just keep doing it and shoving the results into cupboards and drawers and forgetting about them. I guess that my writing is the same. At some point I’ll be gone and all these files on my computer will be deleted too and no one will know or care what I wrote or thought or felt. And if I don’t write the words out, what then? They get reabsorbed into my head and maybe the underlying thoughts will come out another time in another form or maybe not. And really, what does it matter? Why should anyone care?

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Chasing Happiness

Saturday, 05 January 2019   2:30 AM

Already this year I am feeling besieged by the happiness gurus. For example, yesterday I read this:

‘If it doesn’t make you happy, something needs to change.’

Why? What? What needs to change? How can you predict what is going to ‘make you happy’?  And how are you supposed to change it? What to? How can you ever predict the consequences of what you do (long term, in their entirety)?

Why does everything have to ‘make you happy’ anyway? How does that work? Never do anything that stretches you, or scares you, or that might take you somewhere you weren’t expecting? What sort of life is that? Life is full of risk – you either jump into it or you don’t. And if you don’t want to right now – well, that can be okay too, but not necessarily forever.

Happiness is a chimera – in both senses. It is both an impossible quarry and a composite, an impossible composite of disparate elements that really shouldn’t (oh dear, we don’t say ‘should’ and ‘shoudn’t’ do we?) be together – that don’t make sense together. And what about the word ‘disparate’? I’ve been picked on in the past for using it, but fuck that, I’m writing this and it’s absolutely the word I want to use right there – if you don’t like it, go and get a fucking dictionary. Pretentious, moi??? I’m not using it to impress or intimidate you but because it says what I want to say better than any other word I can think of.

And in the end, that’s the point, isn’t it? Who’s writing this anyway? Maybe what makes me ‘happy’ is using the exact words I want to use, and I know what I’m saying and how I want to say it, so why the fuck not?

Probably I should take some of the ‘fucks’ out of this – probably I will, whether I ‘should’ or not. Everyone plays around with words in their own way. Why shouldn’t I?

That word ‘quarry’, for example – it also has two meanings – both the thing being pursued (the chimera of happiness, in this case) and a source, a place from which things are extracted. What am I extracting here? (Apart from the Michael – or the urine). Meaning, of course. I’m digging in the quarry of the English language to pull out meaning, and that is my raison d’être’ (maybe bits of other languages too). It’s what I do, and though I say it as shouldn’t (oh, there go the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ again!), may I say I do it brilliantly. I do it in the only way I can, and as only I can, and it would be very gratifying if someone (anyone) would read this and say: ‘that’s amazing, that’s fabulous, I just love the way you play with words’. But even though I know that’s a pretty hopeless quest (and a hopeless quarry) I will continue to do it even if I’m the only one who reads it, because it is the process of doing so that MAKES ME HAPPY! and…

What was the question again?


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Madwoman in the Attic

If I was going to write, how would I start?

I had the beginning of a poem earlier when I was watering the plants, if I can remember what it was:

If you could see me as I am…? Something like that.

But it’s gone now. Bugger.

Anyway, no one sees me as I am. That’s the point. The old chestnut.

If I keep picking and picking and picking away at this, will it ever lead on to something else, some kind of breakthrough or revelation?

Wish I could remember that effing poem. It’s gone now. It had a good rhythm to it, and some internal rhymes. Something about: ‘…where the broken rivers run…’ I remember thinking – how can a river break? But it didn’t matter because it fitted. Bloody obscurity for its own sake, that’s what it was. And ‘through the cracks between the pavement…’

About the real me who is inescapable and always torments me but no one can ever see it/her.

You see, the myth is that when you find your True Self, everything will make sense and you’ll find peace. Except my True Self is a bitch. The more I get to know her the worse it all gets. She’s the one who makes me cry in the night with despair, but I can’t stop her or ignore her or get away from her because she’s me.

And if I say: ‘I will accept myself as I am’ that means accepting her. If I can’t root her out I can never find peace. But the more I dig away at her, the deeper the wound she leaves. So what does it mean to accept her?

Accepting loneliness. Accepting anger. Letting go of the dream of ‘love’, but without resentment.

The path of acceptance feels like the path of papering over the cracks. Or perhaps a better metaphor, filling in the cracks in the pavement with wet mud, which dries out and crumbles or washes away in the rain. I remember doing that as a child, over and over again. It never worked, but I kept on playing at it. Till I got bored and gave up. Which, of course, is what I always do.

Can I escape into meditation? How deep into that despair do you have to go to find a place where you can rest in emptiness?

The woman who cries in the night is trapped – labyrinth, hall of mirrors, which is the correct metaphor? Or that one from the Cat Stevens song when you end up back where you started?

Whatever, she is in a trap: she cries for love, but when she cries no one can love her. So she cries for the knowledge that she will never find the love she craves. Because love is always partial and conditional: ‘We will love you on condition that you stay happy and don’t give in to despair.’

So the despair has to be hidden away. The Madwoman in the Attic. She’s still there.

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Sunday, 03 June 2018

I don’t know how to start, what to think, what to say, what to do.

Sometimes I face the world and it all seems like such a mess. If I list all the things: my cat is sick; I don’t know if I can go away and leave her; my camper van needs a lot of work; I have to prepare a talk for the book fair; I said I would edit this book but I’ve done nothing and I don’t feel like doing anything; I’ve lost my memory stick; I have tendonitis in my wrist; I am sad, I am afraid, I am lonely, I get angry a lot of the time, mainly at myself; I don’t cook properly for myself; I am bad at doing housework; I am not writing; there are so many things I need to sort out.

I make a list like that and then what? Oh and my typing has got really bad. I keep looking at the keyboard and don’t notice all the stupid mistakes I’m making.

Perhaps, that’s a metaphor, I am looking at the keyboard and don’t look at the results of what I’m doing. Trying to observe. I’m not using the little fingers very often, I don’t know if that’s an issue. Little finger (right side) should be apostrophe and @ sign and question mark I guess from looking at the keyboard, and ‘enter’ too, I don’t know which digit I naturally use for enter. And shift for any keys which are to the left of the keyboard. That should be ‘on’ the left, because ‘to’ the left implies they are not actually on the keyboard. And I keep pressing additional keys without realising it, particularly number keys.

I just did ‘enter’ and my natural response was to use the right index finger, which is odd because that is the furthest left of that hand.

So that time I made a point of using the little finger.

(But I still got it wrong and hit ‘#’ at the first attempt.)

This is crazy, I got up at 6.00 to write and this is what I’m writing. I am not writing anything worthwhile, just drivel, but what does it matter if all I write is drivel? It could be the greatest prose in the world and still no one would read it.

I have a pain in my side. I think it’s because I’m trying to sit up straight and look at the screen instead of the keyboard while I’m typing. I’m used to slouching. And what does any of it matter? It doesn’t, of course. But this is how I write. I write in well-formed, well-structured sentences, and I spell correctly, because that is how I think, that is how it comes into my head. If I wanted to write ‘badly’ it would be an effort, I would have to work at it and it would be false. That’s not what I do. I write what comes into my head.

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Why I’ll never make it as a writer (or anything else for that matter)

I really don’t like Oscar Cainer. He writes this twaddle that really doesn’t mean anything, it’s so mealy-mouthed. Not a patch on his late Uncle Jonathan.

What has happened the last few days and what is my excuse for not writing? Today… slept in late, did my half hour of yoga and meditation, had breakfast… now it’s lunchtime and I’ve done bugger all. Every day the same.

It’s a nice day too. A friend came round to mow my lawn for me yesterday afternoon, and I thought: the garden’s a mess, now the fence is up I should get on with it and sort it out, but oh well… take the laptop and go to the Coffee Cup? That was sort of the plan. I really should go to the sea this afternoon instead of sitting around here, or if I’m going to stay in I should get on with some jobs.

You see, they say: ‘…don’t get caught up with all the “shoulds”…’, but seriously, if you keep on ignoring the ‘shoulds’ then everything goes to pot. Well, what would make me happy? Should (there I go again) I do something that will make me ‘happy’, and if so, what? I do neither. I sit here ruminating (that’s a good word. My therapist used it a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to describe these thinking patterns, and I thought: yes that’s it! Of course I’ve heard it before, but not used it lately, and now I’ve sort of latched on to it).

I rang the lady who does the kundalini yoga and meditation at the community centre – it’s literally just round the corner – been going to check it out for months and putting it off. She sounded really friendly and happy that I was interested. It might turn out to be a bit new-age and hippy-dippy, how do I feel about that? Well, I’m conflicted, aren’t I?

This came up with the therapist. When I was looking after the dogs, I went to see her in Guildford, where she works some of the time. I was sitting where I could see out of the window and I kept seeing magpies, so then I had to explain about why I say ‘Good morning sir, how’s your wife?’ when I see them. She was intrigued by this, and at the end of the session (and again since) she commented that I seem to be almost desperate to find something to believe in. Which is a not-unreasonable observation. But… and there I go, reading my horoscope every day and having tarot readings, while simultaneously thinking: ‘this is all such a load of bollocks!!!’

Yesterday I had reading group in the morning, that’s why I didn’t write then, I ran out of time. Haven’t even been posting my daily haiku, but that’s partly because the memory stick is in the laptop which is downstairs and I’m up here in the study. Sorry, just realised I wrote: ‘reading’ group, not ‘writing’ group, that’s really strange, I wonder why? But yesterday afternoon, after getting home and before Richard came to cut the grass, I set up a Twitter account for the group (and Instagram, though no idea what I’m going to do with that), and did a few things to the Facebook page, but now that has died a death again, I mean, I can’t get any enthusiasm for doing it.

I followed something from Twitter about ‘Nine Daily Habits You Should Get Rid of to Become a Better Writer’ and of course  I do them all – well, maybe not all (I don’t do 6), but 1, 2, 4, 8 and 9 are pretty much intrinsic to my personality and lifestyle – so clearly there is no hope for me.

1.       Not sticking to the writing plan – PLAN??? Moi? You must be joking.

2.       Giving in to procrastination and self-criticism – Ermmm… enough said.

3.      Thinking over some paragraphs or dialogues when you are not writing –  when they come to me I can’t always wait, I sort them out in my head and write later;

4.     Writing without enough sleep – definitely – it’s unavoidable, that’s how I live;

5.    Giving someone to read your unfinished book – I did that once and it set me back 4 years – these days I read bits out at group but I think that’s helpful;

6.    Limiting yourself with one place for writing – no, I do vary that;

7.    Dividing your time to 2 or more storylines at once – oh god, yes – currently there’s sorting out the sequel to ‘Single To Sirkeci’; maybe doing something about Prague; trying (not very hard) to think of stories for the two groups; and the great novel which is still on the back burner, where it’s been for about twelve years (or arguably twenty five);

8.    Isolating yourself from family and friends- ditto 4;

9.    Having bad nutrition and drinking too much coffee or energy drinks – also ditto 4.

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Wet Sunday

No blogging this morning. I am now at Simon’s, ready for our narrow boat adventure tomorrow. It was a rainy, nasty drive, with road works on theA3 – or rather, no evidence of any actual work going on today, but one lane was closed either side of the roundabout that goes to Selbourne, and that was enough to mess the traffic up.

Southsea Soup meeting this morning, a new lady called Claire who seems to know a lot about marketing and is full of ideas, like giving people money to buy copies and then getting them to write reviews on Amazon. To me it seems that the flaw is that we have bought the books ourselves, but I kind of see what she’s getting at about the reviews.

It feels like it’s been quite a long day already – well, admittedly it is five thirty – almost dinner time.

Think I did okay with the packing, the only thing I’ve thought of (so far) that I haven’t brought is the Destination Portsmouth game. I even charged up the mini-wifi and found the card with the password on it. I got a sales call from Virgin yesterday asking if I wanted to buy one, and when I said I’d already got one she asked how much I was paying and I said £10.99 per month, she gave up and sounded quite sad because evidently she couldn’t compete with that. The stupid thing of course is that I’ve been paying that for almost three years and I never use it. So I thought, this would be an ideal opportunity. Even if we run out of data and have to pay more, well, I’ve been paying all that time for nothing, so it seems like I might as well use it.

I didn’t really think I was going to be able to find the password, I’d convinced myself it was a lost cause, but there was the box with the card in on the unit in the study, and I tested it and confirmed it worked.

I didn’t do much packing and preparation till the last minute again, I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get started on this top-down crochet jumper (third attempt). I will crack that eventually. But as I found last week, it seems that leaving things to the last minute is actually less stressful than spreading the stress over several days – which is not what I would have predicted.

Reading the Why Buddhism Works book, this morning (when I couldn’t sleep) there was something really interesting about the relationship between feelings and thought. I will have to read that further.

I came up with a haiku before leaving home as well. I’ve actually got a few in hand now – two or three, anyway. One is quite dark so not sure whether I am going to share that one.

I mentioned at the Soup meeting about putting more on the Facebook page, like the idea I stole of getting people to add lines to a limerick. Trevor was quite scathing and said that no one had responded much to things he and Steve had put on there. I said that’s why we need to get some traffic, and he said, but nobody responds so there’s no point, and at least Claire and Freya backed me up. I mentioned about opening a twitter account and again he wasn’t enthusiastic but Freya was and she said Instagram as well, so as she uses Instagram a lot (being an artist, unlike me) I’ll do that as well. See if we can get some social media buzz going. And write some more stories as well, of course. That’s another matter.

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Killing time

Good title. Could even be a title for this blog.

I seem to have spent most of today faffing about setting up this blog. I’m sure it was never that difficult in the old days. Either I’m getting more stupid (quite likely) or creating blogs has got a lot more complicated (ditto).

Not sure what (if anything) I want to say here, now. But I’ve already broken my first rule of blogging by typing this straight onto the page and not into a Word document which can be kept, checked, edited etc etc.

Whenever I restart blogging it’s customary for me to say, well, I used to blog every day, but got out of the habit, so this is me starting again, blah, blah, blah, let’s see how long it lasts.

I wonder?

I used to write 500 words a day, you know. Just thought I’d point that out.

My therapist (yes, I’ve got one of those, of the psycho and not physio or any other-o variety), whom I saw yesterday, thinks it will be good for me to write again. Or keep writing. Or whatever. Despite the fact that I’ve given up because, well… I always give up. That’s just something about me. As that American humourist who’s really really famous but my mind has just gone blank – aha, yes, Mark Twain, that’s the fella – as he allegedly said about smoking, giving up is easy, I’ve done it dozens of times. Starting again seems to be getting progressively harder, however.

It’s been a funny old day. I skipped writers group this morning with the excuse that, well, they were doing a competition today and I haven’t written anything for it and I thought I could find better uses of my time than trekking over there and listening to everyone else reading out their contributions, but really it’s just because I’m lazy and couldn’t be arsed, and indeed I didn’t find a better use of my time. But the blog is here now and I’m two-thirds of the way towards that 500 words.

In fact I wrote 500 words this morning before I even started on this crazy let’s-start-another-blog thing, and I haven’t used any of them, or rather, I’ve almost certainly used at least some of them, but not in the same order, if you see what I mean.

Some days just get you like that. I haven’t even been for my customary go-and-sit-in-a-cafe-somewhere-and-drink-tea excursion to bump up the total on my step-counter (which is a whole other can of womrs which I’ll probably get back to some time).

Choir this evening. I haven’t been for a month. I ducked out of the last concert and the last two preparatory rehearsals. I really ought to go. I’ll enjoy it when I get there.

Somehow I’ve managed to miss lunch altogether. Cafe time? It’ll be dinner time in a couple of hours and I really should have some dinner, cook something, I mean. Yesterday I went out and had fish and chips at the beach cafe. Yum

I’m sure I’ll have something more exciting to write about tomorrow.