Posts filed under 'Imagination'
It’s meant to be a penny, of course. A single bus ride in Edinburgh costs a pound. Inflation affects even the imagination these days.
Regular readers will know that buses play a fairly large role in my life, and I’ve just written the last entry all about buses, one way or another. But I did realise yesterday how much buses help me get ideas for blog entries.
The last couple of days, I’ve been at home for only short periods of time. I’d been out doing nice things, seeing people I love. But just sitting at home in the evening, thoughts were not really coming for writing the blog.
There seems to be something about bus travel, about glimpses of things, or perhaps the space to be on your own and reflect, that is conducive to writing it down. Just sitting at home may not do it. This is a little concerning for someone who a) wants to write more and b) wants to be at home more.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop me being around home more, but with a few bus rides here and there. Moderation in everything. But just as travel broadens the mind, it also broadens the input of information, stimulates you to make connections.
Trains work too, I have to say. Trains are especially good when they cross spaces where roads don’t run. Crossing fields, working through forests, seeing a house there, a car there, someone on a bike waiting at the train crossing for you to pass…All of these immediately suggest stories, worlds to step into, that can being as soon as pen reaches paper, or hands square up on a laptop.
Funny business, writing. We all do so much, live so much, in our days, that there is plenty to write about. Yet we live in an age where so many aspects of life are recorded more and more. There are plenty of others at the same task - security cameras notwithstanding. Is there a need for us to record?
Blogs suggest there is. The opportunity to record, but also to get others’ feedback, not just on your experience, but also how you write, is something above and beyond what’s been available before.
They say that both introverts and extroverts go to parties. But introverts leave earlier. They need to get away, to process what’s been happening. While the extrovert recharges their batteries through being with others, after a while, the introvert needs to do this by spending time on their own.
I wrote enthusiastically about yesterday’s party - and the party, the company, the chat, were all good in themselves, not just the food or the leftovers…Today, I am full on people, and ready to fill up on being on my own. But I do see that, while I long for time at home during busy working weeks, just being at home will not push the imagination.
I have to do a few things in order to write. Input leads to output. Writing is not so much of my life that I’m at a point of writer’s block. But I now understand the point of “digging ditches”, to requote Erica Jong from a recent post, in order to find the words again.
Even given that, words are elusive at times. Perhaps like being out in a boat, waiting for the fish. My discipline at the moment is to go out fishing each day, or at least most days. But sometimes, a shoal of words, of ideas, or memories, comes past. As this is the third post today, you can guess that I’m keen to keep dragging them into the boat while they’re still around.
December 20th, 2007
Just written another post about how to prepare for Christmas. Grant you, it won’t get the turkey bought, or the crackers pulled. But here’s another option.
Back in my teens, I came across a book called “A Formal Feeling”, by the American author Zibby Oneal. The book tells the story of Anne, coming home for Christmas from boarding school. The home she comes to is not quite home - her mother is dead, and a new stepmother is there. Traditions have changed.
Anne struggles with the changes, not just in the home, but in her father and brother, who seem happy with the new arrangements. Slowly, Anne starts to remember that not every Christmas was perfect…
For some reason, perhaps because of the way the book builds up the details of Christmas - choosing the tree, singing carols in the choir, making the adjustment from being at school to being at home all day - it became part of my preparation for Christmas for many years. Somewhat like an advent calendar, I would read a chapter a day, building up the picture of Christmas, building up the picture of Anne, and her mother.
This year, I’m starting late. 17th already. But having lost five different people this year, friends and family, somehow I hope I can use reading this book to reflect on those I want to remember. In some cases, there are shared memories of Christmases, and times after Christmas and into New Year, together. In others, I don’t know how they spent their time.
Christmas is a time of repetition. We start a way of doing things, and soon build up our own traditions, that are almost easier to keep than to question. But Christmas soon turns to New Year, and new beginnings, even if we don’t want the resolutions that might go with them.
Somehow, I trust that reading this book will help me remember the repetitions, and look for new beginnings too. And, like Anne, that it will help me tease out what I think I remember, and what else was part of those relationships.
Perhaps, one of the best presents is being able to accept life as we and others have lived it, good and bad, cut short or lived longer. The title of the book comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, which ends:
“This is the Hour of Lead-
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the snow-
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go-”
December 17th, 2007
I sat down last night, and had nothing to say. Not often that happens…
The phrase reminded me of a Beatles line “Nothing to say // but it’s OK” - we happened to be listening to the track last night. In some ways, it’s quite nice to think that there’s lots of times when others are stumped for words too. It’s quite reassuring, not to have to fire on all cylinders all the time.
This song, “Good Morning”, is part of the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 2007 saw the 40th anniversary of that ‘radically different’ album. Beatles tracks are so well known, and, like the best songs, continue to speak to us. But what struck me last night was how some of it is also now dated - not just language, but concepts too.
“Good morning” has a line “It’s time for tea and meet the wife”. How many people would now refer to the ‘wife’, let alone have the mechanism of bringing someone home to meet her? And is she at home now, in any case, to be met?
Another of the lines refers to a “bit of skirt”. There’s no lack of put down terms for women nowadays, despite women’s lib - rap music has added its own collection in recent years. But in the days of women, and, increasingly, men, being more varied in what they wear, and when, this phrase seems to belong to a rather different world. It’s funny - the 60s is billed as this time of great sexual liberation, and the Beatles were seen as part of that whole scene. It’s interesting then to catch a more conservative tone in this, their great experimental album.
The song that struck me the most, for attitudes that have almost vanished, is “When I’m 64″. For starters, increased life expectancy, and expectations of an active life for much longer, mean that the age of 64 has less impact than it did at the time of writing. The throw away line about grandchildren’s names has a different ring - “Vera, Chuck and Dave”, where one of our main politicians likes to be known as Dave, and Vera is sure to be recycled as a name, along with Agnes, Ruby, and various others. (Chuck…? Perhaps its time has not yet come as a name.)
But just before this line, there’s another that speaks of an era that has almost gone. Renting ”a cottage on the Isle of Wight” may have gone out with the era of cheap flights, though with eco tourism on the up, it’ll maybe gain favour again. But the truly telling part is “We will scrimp and save.” Governments have enough difficulty encouraging people to save, let alone to scrimp…and other experts still will tell you that we have to keep spending in order to keep the economy afloat.
Scrimping. Maybe, like make do and mend, it’ll come back in the eco backlash. Maybe we will long for simpler times. But I do think that our collective spirits have moved a long long way away from scrimping. We are too used to getting our own way, having it now, and having it bigger and better.
Maybe Dave (Cameron) will save us from ourselves, but perhaps we have to look to Chuck and Vera to help us sort ourselves out.
December 11th, 2007
Book clubs. Another invention for society that has less reason to get together? Or a great way to encourage people to keep thinking, discussing, and so on?
Your choice. Personally I am fairly happy to have opinions about books without needing to consult others on them. But there is something good about seeing what others think - memories of class discussions in English Lit classes. To be honest, if book clubs had been around when I was in 6th form, that would have saved some of my teenage ‘no one understand what’s important in the world!’ grips. (Or maybe not. Teenagers are fairly robust in their assertion that people don’t understand, even if they do.)
It dawned on me recently that I could write book reviews on the blog as well - a kind of book club of one, if you like. Others write their fairly regular film reviews, or reviews of sermons/tapes etc - why not regular books too?
Facebook of course seeks to capture that discussional interest. You can have virtual bookshelves - and film and music collections too - to show off your favoured artistes. I add a few more books most times I go on - some from ages ago, some that I’ve read more recently, but I quite like seeing pictures of the covers come up, and seeing what others are reading.
Meanwhile, however, I have been back to reading in the bath. Despite my recent posts on the joys of magazine articles, it is not as easy to read them in the bath. Newspapers are a bit big, and likely to disintegrate on contact with water. Books it has to be.
So I picked out “Perfume”, a book made into a film earlier this year. As we’d had a holiday in the south of France this year, not so far from the perfume making centre of Grasse, I wanted to remind myself what it was about.
I read “Perfume” in my teens, I think. I was captivated by the description of how perfume was made, how people worked out what scents were in a particular concoction. It also evokes a particular era in France, and brings to life the teeming masses, the public celebrations, the various occupations that are less well known today (tanners, wet nurses, and so on).
So far, so good. But “Perfume” is also subtitled “The story of a murderer”. Less cheerful. The writer, Patrick Suskind, takes two starting points: a man who has a brilliant ‘nose’ for scent of any kind - and the same man who himself has no personal smell.
Other reviewers have called his work Gothic. You could equally say that he takes these ideas, and pushes them to their logical - and even illogical - conclusions. This is where the book gets its power - there is a Greek tragedy at work in the plot, although one where you also get the sense of choice, of the protagonist having the opportunity to turn back or pursue another course at different stages.
Reading it again this time, I was more aware of the morality around the story. The tale starts with adults’ responses to the character as an infant - their fear of him because of his lack of personal smell, their sense that he is somehow in league with the devil. Easy enough to dismiss, in our more tolerant society. But as those around him perish - and in some cases, Suskind shows how they perish decades later, in a setting they have sought to avoid - there is a growing sense of doom for all who work with him; those who show kindness, those who do not. As this continues through the book, it becomes more and more unsettling.
In other ways, this morality holds sway for the main character, Grenouille, too, even though he does not recognise morality, or at least church jurisdiction. Even when he attains what he sets out to do, it does not give him what he hopes, and the result of this impacts back on him, drives him to a particular end. There is perhaps a more ‘natural’ justice coming out of this macabre tale, despite the way this doesn’t seem the case at the start.
Enough thoughts for now. But perhaps these book reviews will also help in the long slow quest to write more of my own stuff, literature or otherwise. The next question is how brave I feel to share my own creative writing with others. Judging by the place where I’m doing most of it - online - I think I have to answer that with “braver than I have been…”
December 5th, 2007
It’s not quite “I am loved, I am loved…” But a friend who I catch up with on Facebook, and who lives a long way away, told me that she’d been reading my blog. And she liked it!
Hurrah for those little encouragements friends can bring. I’d been tiring a bit of Facebook recently - not much new, too many car races to upgrade my virtual car etc. (It’s much easier to own a car on Facebook. You don’t need refresher lessons for one thing.)
Tonight, I go on, and there’s a lot more to read. Maybe it’s been one of those weeks for others, and having reached the weekend, they’re letting off steam online. Although another has been letting off steam with piles of baking (which is more realistically generating steam, I’m sure), so she’s entitled to a small sit down.
E M Forster was the one with the famous phrase “Only connect”. It came in a fairly dystopian story, if I remember rightly. Our English teacher duly underlined the quote. All this when there were a few computers about the place, but the Internet was in the hands of geeks, and certainly the concept of connecting was much more about face to face, phone call to phone call.
So, online connecting. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be on Facebook otherwise. Or emailing people. Sometimes, I guess, the virtual doesn’t quite satisfy.
But at other times…when would I find the time to email my friends about my little ideas, to encourage them in their own worlds? Particularly when those worlds are further away from my own. As people move away, lives overlap less, even this level of connecting is good.
There’s a verse that has been going around my head recently - coming from the time when I would write a daily diary, and add a quote at the start of each entry. I hope I’ve remembered it correctly:
“Sometimes the writer says
To hell with words
And longs to dig ditches. She writes of this longing,
and you, because you are her friend,
Write back.” [Erica Jong]
Online communication. It helps you know you’re not alone. And sometimes, it helps us to respond to each other, out of very ordinary circumstances, and find a moment of connection. Amen to that.
November 30th, 2007
Hurrah for Friday night, and some more QI. When you’ve reached the final hurdle of the end of the week, it’s nice to sit down and have some reliably (very) funny oddities of the world to learn about, and laugh about.
QI appeals for those moments when you just need a little bit of unusual (or at time, downright incomprehensible) information. Thing is, I think my need for this is higher than most. This could be why I continue to like reading columnists whose virtue is spotting thngs happening in the world, and commenting on them. It’s a bit of a goldfish mentality, probably, the “ooh what’s that?” followed by “that’s interesting” followed by “ooh what’s that?” etc.
The thing is, I planned to start this by telling you about a series of options on YouTube, whereby you can see sequences of the different sounds for the buzzers on QI (hence “Alan goes…”, as Alan’s buzzer is usually rigged for laughs). It’s probably no worse than much of what’s on YouTube, and certainly better than much. But it certainly fulfils the “ooh what’s that?” objective.
It does tie in to our shorter attention scans, these days. When Andy Warhol coined the phrase of “fifteen minutes of fame”, he wasn’t far off our current patterns, I suspect. 15 minutes is enough to see a bit of a YouTube post, look for the other variants, think you’ve learned something or seen something in full, and go off after something else.
The thing is, I can be fairly happy with a whole series of short inputs of information. It’s why I like short stories, newspaper articles, poems even. But at times, I worry that this butterfly mentality may mean I spend all my time giving you a smorgasbord of enticing, but short lived options, rather than knuckling down and giving some topics some serious attention. Even some editing eh?
Anyway, you can be sure that a Guiness Book of Records will go down well for Christmas…
November 23rd, 2007
Blogs not quite flowing last night. Having had a not bad first week back after holiday, struggling a bit more this week. The Scottish greyness-that-lasts-mightily has set back in, rather than last week’s sunshine.
It’s not quite C S Lewis’ ‘always winter and never Christmas’ but the mood is a little in that direction - though given that we live so close to the coast, I doubt there’ll be any of the Lewis snow etc. of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” sense.
But I did find myself thinking that writing is the point, whether or not it always flows. Good write, bad write, it’s still keeping the discipline going.
Now is the time of year to bury myself in a big book that gives me another country for my mind to hibernate in. Or write one. Or kick around a few ideas, like fallen leaves, and see where they pile up.
Found myself having a linguistics type thought the other day on the bus, re penetrating the ’speech streams’ - linguistics speak for the patterns of sounds we make when having conversations or just talking solo. Rather like a nano-adventure where people are swept round the body or something, maybe there’s some way for characters to ride out the streams of sounds…? Rather more research needed for that, and what can be carried on sound waves, or radio waves.
But still, even if I can capture the thoughts that seem half way interesting, even of the ‘interesting for at least 10 seconds while you mull them over’ kind of thoughts, that’s a start. Reading the ‘Mind Gym’ while on holiday re having idea generating sessions, and ways to do the idea generating before you do the assessing. Similar issue to an author who came into our office one time to do creative writing stuff - talked about imagining your internal critic a bit like a parrot on your shoulder, and knocking it off mentally when it interrupted too much.
Ideas first, shaping later. Good, bad or indifferent write comes later.
In a line of a Larkin poem, there’s the question “Where can we live but days?” I think I’ll try a bit more living in ideas, and see what comes of it.
November 20th, 2007
This weekend was a good one for reading things I could nod along with, or better.
Kate Muir took potshots at modern coffee houses no longer being places for debate and politicking, but being more about a load of hot milk. (I had been thinking of writing something about feeling excluded from seasonal Starbuck products because they all seem to be latte-based. Kate redressed the balance with reference to thick black coffee in the earlier cafes that started the trend for heated beverages being a viable alternative.)
Even better though was the article on duty versus pleasure. Now I can see you rolling your eyes already at this. But in terms of ’someone’s thinking like me’, it was a good one to read.
Basic concept: previous philosophers have suggested that we have to choose between duty and pleasure. Various others, church fathers included, have rushed in after to agree that we must choose. In fact, let us say, many say there isn’t even a choice, becasue we know what we should do.
The struggle is that duty alone gets wearing. We know that ‘all work and no play…’ but it gets harder to hold to that when work moves ever faster.
The church has also had something of a struggle with pleasure as a concept, certainly in its early days. ‘The devil finds tasks for idle hands’ will certainly keep you in homemade socks, if you take its precept literally while at home of an evening. In fact, I’m sure I can claim I got the laptop in order to keep my hands busy while watching television, but that does stray dangerously close to pleasure too…
Anyway, thankfully the writer, philosopher A C Grayling, confirms that the best option for us all is a mix of the two. Which sounds very simple and obvious, I know. But as someone who’s felt that following duty is the way to please people, and God, it’s a newer prospect to stray towards little things like going home on time - or early.
Thing is, when you start looking out for pleasure, you find that God’s provided plenty of that too. You know that I can rhapsodise for ages on the delights of food alone. Add in sunsets, birdsong, smiles of friends, those kind of things, there are lots of gentle pleasures tucked away behind all that duty. They even allow you to enter work with a smile on your face. And duty gets a lot better when you enjoy it too…
November 19th, 2007
Everyone likes a good rainbow eh? Double ones good value too and all that.
Coming back from our recent holiday, we had a new sight - a rainbow from above. You are basically talking a stripy donut shape, but it’s still exciting. Even better - we got to see two different ones, about half an hour apart.
Maybe this is God’s view of rainbows? I guess you’d have to be a fairly high flying bird to get that view too often.
I know the thing is meant to be the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, if you can ever work out which end it’s at. But all the same, the treat was seeing something you are used to, but from a completely different angle.
Admittedly, there’s less time to go through the whole ‘red and yellow and pink and green…’ shtick when you’re flying over. Which is just as well for the other passengers.
But it’s probably a good example of some of what I treasure in life - getting to see, or think about, or hear, something in a completely new way. Second in line is finding out someone else has seen that, heard that, thought that too. More on that next post.
November 19th, 2007
Here I am, chugging away at the blog, and all of a sudden, there’s two comments in a couple of days. Someone, nay, two somebodies, are reading what I’ve written!
Now I know this is part of the point of a blog. You can have lovely conversations about the same things - or violently disagree - or deploy increasing amounts of punctuation to form faces, smiles, beards, polar ice caps, that kind of thing.
Probably there’s a sneaking concern about people reading what I write. Yes, this blog is probably meant to read a bit like a newspaper columnist, but really it’s a bit of a diary too. And who wants to have someone reading their diary?
I still have my teenage diaries, and I have to work out whether to keep them for historical purposes (what were people watching on TV 20 years ago?), counselling ones (can this help us work out how our kids might be feeling in the future?), or burn them before those same teenagers find out how much time I spent worrying about boys.
In the case of these two comments, the trick seems to be to write about someone important to the commenter. The only difficulty is, this could get complicated. My reasons for writing about the people in question were personal, spur of the moment celebration of them. To go round the houses, writing about people you know - yes you, person reading this! - is unlikely to keep working. I may get completely the wrong take on your auntie you’ve mentioned, your brother I met once, and so on. And having just captured you as a reader, I’m hardly going to want to let you go, let along have you run headlong from these pages.
But write a reply…go on. Even to the naff puns about Wispas. It allows me to keep my little dream that maybe, somehow, one day, someone might even pay to read what I write. And the longer you indulge me in that dream, the cheaper it remains for you, eh?
Alternatively, post your latest photos on Facebook, and I’ll be over there like a shot.
November 16th, 2007
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