Am I as much as being seen?

A few months ago I stated that I intended to self-publish within the year. A few stories have been written, and others are in various stages of completion (or non-completion as the case may be). After writing these pieces I’ve tended to read over them retrospectively, and far from feeling shame and wanting to scribble everything out, there are trends I am starting to notice in my own writing. Writing these pieces has helped me quite significantly in understanding the way I write, and my own thought processes in putting pen to paper, so to speak. The majority of things I have written in my life to date have been academic or kind of formal, through school, then more immediately through university, and then through journalism, and so writing creatively requires me to shift the way I think, and try to adapt my tone to suit an audience I haven’t sought to satisfy properly since I was writing stories in pre-school at the age of 6. It seems to me, at times, that I am so used to writing in an academic tone that trying to wring something witty and original out of my poor logic-centred mind can at times be an odious affair. Nonetheless this process is helping me to learn how I write, and with that I am becoming more efficient and disciplined in what I am able to achieve and the pace at which I am able to achieve it.

In my final year at university I took a module which focussed purely on Samuel Beckett in the context of the European avant-garde. Beckett is a character who I have been fascinated with for a long time. In researching for a paper I was to write on Beckett and avant-garde music I read a lot about his own writing process, and the way in which he approached creativity. Firstly, Beckett needed solitude. He claimed that he used to spend hours sat in the dark, and in complete silence, studying his ‘inner voice’ and his ‘inner life’, and that visual sensory deprivation meant that hearing had taken on an increasing importance in his life. One of the other fascinating ways in which Beckett used to write was by spilling out words onto the page, (much as his many loghorraeic characters do), and then creating his wonderfully barren texts by stripping things out – making his work itself a process of erasure, thinning out, impoverishment.

In writing my own fiction I am struck by the fact that my writing process is almost the exact opposite to this. I am able to write, just as I speak, in direct and short sentences. I seem to get to the point quickly without allowing my reader any breathing space, or give my writing (as if it is some sort of bread), to rise with time, and ‘fill out’. My own texts are impoverished by nature, intense, and dense; and it is only the act of revision which ‘fattens them out’ into maturity. It is the relatively recent awareness of my own process of writing, and a relatively long-term awareness of what I personally like to read, which has led me to question my own writing style in this way. I have always been a fan of writings which are direct and minimal – able to resonate in simple language. Not in the tradition of Hemingway or C.S.Lewis with their preaching of straight-forward-ness, but more in a way whereby the language carries some basic inherent ‘power’. I have also been a fan of authors who are able to write speech convincingly, and with flair. The author who is able to write speech competently is able to grant the reader a freedom which the is denied by the one who seeks to interpret via authorial interjection. I want my characters to be able to speak for themselves, and to become agents in a plot, rather than pawns given life via description which enacts a ‘stepping back’ from the plot. I find that Bret Easton Ellis, and Donna Tartt are both skilled at giving the reader this freedom. By reading these authors I have come to learn that I enjoy reading speech much more than long rambling descriptions. Descriptions are static, whereas speech is dynamic.

This is where K-Mart realism comes in. Last year I read a novel by a young 28 year old author called ‘Tao Lin’. Lin is somewhat of an internet enfant terrible, inviting as much harsh criticism as praise. He is the most contemporary writer whom we might brand as a ‘K-Mart realist’. K-Mart realism was at first a derogatory term for authors (such as Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme) who seem overly ‘bleak’ and ‘mundane’ and ‘minimalist’ in their writings. K-mart realism often feels ‘detached’, and ‘existential’, and writers adopting this style often seem to feel a kind of lack of ‘linguistic faith’. This is something I identify with, and far from confirming to a particular school, I am going to try to write a novel, YES A NOVEL, as kind of ‘K-Mart realism’. I think this may be a good place to start for a first novel because it appeals to the way in which I naturally write, without my own editorial intervention, and allows me to capture the paranoia I naturally experience in the process of writing.

The majority of my influence for this novel will be IM chats I have recorded and saved over the past year (unfortunately I cannot get anything earlier than this). It struck me recently that whether we consciously think about it or not, we are creating content all of the time. The advent of facebook, twitter, and numerous text based communication tools (including tumblr) means that we are constantly writing. I have come to realise recently that most of my ideas go into IM conversations rather than coherent and isolated writings of my own. I have also come to realise that social media and instant message creations are just as legitimate a form of literature as anything else. What we can consider literature is growing with these new platforms. Take internet phenomenon Steve Roggenbuck as an example. His internet poetry consists of kitsch photoshopped images with jingle-like pieces of internet speech branded across them. And whilst we may not think of this as ‘high culture’, the readership of these ‘poems’ is huge, and people enjoy them immensely. The internet and mobile technology have opened up so many new forms of communication that I plan to exploit these in my process of synthesising something more coherent and substantial.

To help you realise how much is contributed to instant messaging I downloaded two chats yesterday – one stretched back to this time last year, and amounts to 68,494 words, and another stretching back only three months totals 79,031 words. If combined, this amount of text alone would amount to roughly the same as a 350 page novel. I don’t intend to use this chat explicitly, but it helps to show that the little amounts you write here and there eventually amount to something substantial without you realising it. It is going to take me a long time to write, and I don’t have a solid plan yet, but it’s beginning, and I’m hoping that adopting an empty style will make this easier for me, and help me to improve my writing bit by bit. I will continue writing short stories, but I feel like many of these may be born out of the writing of a novel which I hope to complete and publish in the coming years.

When you feel as if a person has made you their raison d’être, it is your duty to cut them off.

Your relationship has been going downhill for months now, and you wonder what changed, but you can’t work it out. She sacrificed too much for you, you got bored, and ultimately this seemed like the most responsible decision. Was that how it went? You remember a quote by Groucho Marx ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member’. Maybe it was the thrill of conquest, with disillusionment hard on its tail?

Do not answer the inevitable phone calls, e-mails and texts you will receive, but make sure you read them all the same. Sometimes she will tell you how much she misses you and plead for you to respond, sometimes she will hurl abuse at you, usually the latter, but often preceded by the former. Decide that it would be a bad idea to reply.

Nonetheless, itch with the temptation to respond. Feel provoked by the ungrounded things she says about you. What they don’t realise is that you did them a favour. The cloud of emotional confusion needs to pass before things become lucid. You know that better than anyone.

Begin to feel guilty and write a three page email apologising and reasoning out your behaviour. Read it over and feel frustrated, realising that everything you’ve written sounds awful and contrived and like it’s from some shitty teen movie. Half-way through re-reading it, delete the whole thing. Continue to itch with the temptation to respond …

Rationalise, and tell yourself that what you did was ‘for the best’, without ever fully believing it. Try to continue as if everything is normal but begin to miss that person. Feel mostly free and liberated, but a little bit empty. Visit friends and go out for drinks. Tell them what happened, and feel inexplicably paranoid. Go to see a movie about a man who builds a model of New York City then lives in it. Wish that you could build a model of New York then live in it.

When you get home, feel confused. Receive another abusive text. Take the battery out of your phone and hide it somewhere in your room. Try to read a book but feel your mind drifting. Ten minutes later retrieve the battery and quickly reassemble your phone. Vow to think of a better hiding place next time.

Drift along for a few days, doubting your decisions, but remaining true to them. Soon the days turn into weeks, and before you know it a month has passed. Fill your month with grand designs and new resolutions, basking in your new-found freedom. Notice odd changes in your behaviour: you are socialising more, and enjoying the company of others. You’ve obtained that valuable outside perspective on a stifling relationship.

Continue with life until you unexpectedly bump into her. You see her with another person and can’t help but feel a pang of hurt. Once the initial hurt passes you warm inside. You see her smiling and giggling at his jokes, and begin to realise that she’s giving herself over again, investing herself in the cycle once more. You ascribe a time period of maybe two or three months before she has to deal with that pain again. Try your hardest to keep a straight face but find yourself smiling uncontrollably. Walk away from them thinking to yourself ‘I’m a real fucking bastard’.

This is too good.

This is one of the most technically accomplished films I’ve seen in the past three years.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

It appears, then, that I need to spend a lot more time loitering on street corners and dizzying myself in revolving doors. Spending this weekend having a think about where I stand from a personal and professional point of view has put a lot of things into perspective. It has made me motivated, and determined to achieve outside of work those things which the day-job fundamentally supresses, namely: creativity and freedom of thought.

The problem with these bursts of motivation and creativity is that firstly they are difficult to sustain, and secondly, when I get them I make so many grand designs that I inevitably disappoint myself, lacking the time and skill to be able to execute them all. My main goal for the moment, however, is to self-publish before the year is out. I’ve set the bar high. I’m not even sure that I’m able to achieve this, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Initially I played with the notion of writing a novel: but I’m not a good enough writer yet. I’m not confident enough with my own words, and my ideas are not large or deep enough to fill the space which a novel requires. So for now the idea is to try and find my voice by testing the with water with a collection of short stories. I have a couple already written, and hope to create enough quality pieces of work that I am able to publish something which I feel is worthy to meet the eyes of my friends, family, and most importantly, the public. 

Now that I’ve said it in the public domain I have to do it … wish me luck!

An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict.

This is surprisingly disturbing.

What does it even mean to be ‘existentially aware’? This is the question I have come to ask myself at increasingly frequent intervals over the last month. The advent of a working life, and a sense of ‘existential awareness’ have come together for me within only a year or so of each other, and perhaps as a consequence of my naivety, this has caused me a few problems.

Not least the problem of routine, which Camus raises in The Myth of Sisyphus. A problem which finally has a context I can immediately relate to:

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm - this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins with that weariness tinged with amazement […] at the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.

I remember the first time I read the passage, sitting in a class of 20 or so Camus students; not consciously thinking ‘that will never be me’, but certainly believing it. Now, somehow, it is me: and how do I feel? I’m confused. How did this happen, and was there an alternative? Would the alternative have been preferable, or would it have been worse? Would it have resulted in more pain, more gain? Who can tell? What concerns me is the itching feeling that I’ve somehow betrayed myself. I’ve been so incredibly sensible. How could I have been so reasonable about everything?

I’m surprised by the ease with which I am able to somehow become detached from my own life - to feel like my agency over my own life, and the decisions I commit to won’t actually affect me somehow? It’s absurd. Humankind’s wonderful capacity for abstraction and disavowal continues to seem, from my experiences, one of life’s biggest problems. Unfortunately it is one of those problems which is difficult to mitigate, or go any way towards solving, and one which is fundamentally unavoidable in any decision-making process, without the benefit of hindsight.

The more I live, the less I feel as if any of us can really make life decisions in the context of death. I believe more and more that this phrase ‘existential awareness’ means very little. It is no surprise to me that two of the founders of existential thought both had near death experiences in their early years. Nietzsche who brushed with death on more than one occassion, and Camus who battled with tuberculosis, having numerous blackouts in which he felt as if he had died. It makes sense that those who have come closest to death can affirm their existence more strongly than the rest of us.

None of us is capable of understanding that one day we will die, unless we are faced with it head on, like Nietzsche and Camus. Headstrong humans we are, we think that this is fully within our capacity, but we fail to realise that within life we cannot imagine that which negates it, and find ourselves redressing our poorly grounded assumptions.

So, if I’d brushed with death perhaps I’d be ‘making the most of life’ - taking a higher risk attitude in everything I do. Then again, with my limited awareness of mortality, I have made the decisions which have led me to my current position. Decisions which ensure that I am earning enough to live, tackling the challenges I am presented with, and learning to find my feet, even if I am an outsider.

Does that make me ‘existentially aware’? I don’t know.