Ambiguity and writing

It's a fairly obvious thing to say, but no one is ever 100% in the right, any more than anyone else is every 100% in the wrong. It's a fairly obvious thing to say - but, like many obvious things, one which most people try to ignore. In arguments, as in wars, there has never been a moment in human relationships where right has been 100% with one side. Often, individual sides manage to undermine their own legitimacy or "high ground" without any input from the other side at all. (I wonder what I'm thinking of at the moment in global politics? - answers on a postcard, addressed to Guantanamo Bay ...).

It's in most people's interests - and particularly governments' - to ignore this uncomfortable ambiguity in human relations. Most nationalisms are founded on the culpability of "the other side": Greek and Turkish nationalisms, for example, couldn't survive in their current forms without their beliefs in the absolute guilt of the other side. And closer to home, there are even more obvious examples. Similarly, most playground arguments are based on "It was his fault," "No, it was his fault," "No, he started it," "No, he started it," "He did this to me," "But he did this first," "But he did this before that," and so on and so forth. In playground microcosm, we have the history of nationalisms.

One of the jobs of the writer, I think, is to recover the ambiguity behind human relations, and show that arguments are always more complicated than 100% right vs. 100% wrong. Novels in which feature a good side versus an evil side are rare, and generally not very good. And that includes the Bible, where right and wrong are often very ambivalent (cf. King David). Writers have to be alive to moral dubiousness, to everyday compromises, to moral ambiguity, to the sheer complexity of one person relating to one other person (let alone relations on a larger scale). On a moment to moment basis, relationships change in minor and major ways. Relationships are never simple, always infinitely complex mixtures of emotions, histories, conversations, interactions, body languages, power, politics, and so on. In our society, it's in very few people's interests to recognise this - but the job of the writer is to remind everyone that this is the case.

Terms of abuse

I've been lecturing this week on the basics of prose writing, and the importance of things like grammar, and so on. This has led me to think on the uses and abuses of certain words. At different times in history, words are abused in different ways, and some of these abuses (of course) get absorbed into common usage and eventually the dictionary. Some of the abuses, though, are quite pernicious - as both Orwell and, more recently, George Steiner have recognised, the lazy abuse of words and metaphors can be dangerous (politically, economically, socially, racially and so on). Flaubert also understood the casual misuse of words - see his "Dictionary of Received Ideas."

For what it's worth, here is my list of the top ten most abused words at the present time. I'd love to hear more suggestions too:

10. Globalisation - a strange, protean term which can be used by one person as a terrible criticism, by another as a term of endearment.
9. Devastated, devastation - how often do you hear a news broadcast which doesn't use one of these words?
8. Inclusion, inclusive, inclusiveness - often used by government bodies or arts organisations to describe activities, organisations or structures which exclude as many people as possible.
7. Racist - the core meaning - which is specific and powerful - has almost totally evaporated from the word, and it is now used as a catch-all pejorative by anyone looking for a catch-all pejorative (I have heard it used by far right-wingers, for goodness sake).
6. Terrorist - anyone whose opinions conflict with those in power, particularly if those in power have all the big guns.
5. Sex - again, a word which has been so over-used that no one's sure what it is any more.
4. Snob, elitist - nowadays, anyone who is more interested in art, music, literature than inclusivity for its own sake (i.e. anyone who is interested in art, music, literature which is "inclusive" because of quality rather than because of government diktat).
3. Forwards - everyone these days is always moving forwards, never sideways, in zig-zags, or complex fractals. God, it's boring.
2. Teams - always say in a job interview "I can work well as part of a team." No one's quite sure what working well as part of a team is. It can mean either something as uncommon as common courtesy, or, conversely, being willing to kill your colleagues whilst they're not looking - it all depends on your management style and definition of the word "team."
1. Evil - always no.1 abused term throughout history.

Jonathan's New Year's Resolutions

A Hery Vappy Yew Near to everyone. Generally speaking, I don't go in for New Year's Resolutions, Revelations, Revolutions, Ridiculations, Recitations or Recantations. After all, most people's New Year's Resolutions are (a) eminently predictable, and (b) identical, year in and out, and therefore rather depressing. Resolutions are proof, if any were needed, that history is as circular as it is linear: every year we promise the same things, just as (on a very different scale) every war is meant to be the war that ends all wars, and every revolution promises the millennium and ends up delivering tyranny.

But, for what they're worth, here goes:

1. Learn to drive (same resolution as last year).
2. Drink less (same resolution as last year, though since I actually ended up drinking more last year, this should be achieveable).
3. Write more (easy, since I wrote so little last year) and better (not so easy).
4. Learn how to shave properly, after 19 years of cutting myself and not the stubble.
5. Stop shouting at the News on TV. After all, it never seems to listen, rude machine that it is.

Less of this in 2008 ....

Writing as catharsis

"Storytelling is always after the fact, and is always constructed over a loss."

(J. Hillis Miller)

Every time I do a reading or an interview about my memoir, Take Me Home, people ask: "Was it therapeutic writing the book?" Given the subject-matter - my father's Parkinson's disease, dementia and my (part-time) experience of caring for him - the question is an obvious one, and one which I often asked myself whilst I was writing it: "Is this making me feel any better?"

To be honest, I have no idea what the answer is. Probably, it was cathartic writing the book, insofar as I often burst into tears whilst doing it - although that made me want to give up. Suddenly, it'd dawn on me the magnitude of what I was doing, and all the old, nagging ethical questions would raise their gorgon heads and stare my writing self to stone. Even when I was three-quarters of the way through the first draft, I almost gave the whole thing up, because there was a bit too much "catharsis" so-called.

But that's obviously not the same as making me feel better. I think it'd be rather selfish, rather egocentric if all I was doing in writing the book was making myself feel better about my father's illness. Now, if writing could have made my father better, that would be a different matter. Then writing the memoir would be properly "therapeutic," and writing itself a more crucial enterprise.

But no, writing can't do that. It can only pretend to bring someone back to life, make things better. And it does that by reconstructing a past, reimagining it, turning it into a story, a narrative, with a form and direction, beginning, middle and end. It's in that sense that writing is "therapeutic": it reshapes the past and imbues it with sense, logic, meaning, narrative. Whilst the present is always chaotic and stupid and confused and there and gone, the past can be reshaped into something meaningful - and that's what writing does. Of course, it means that writing is at heart nothing but a pack of lies or, at best, half-truths. But they're the only half-truths available in a world where the present is ungraspable, been and gone before you can say "Parkinson's disease."

Anti-technology

'Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills?'

(Charles Lamb, ‘The Superannuated Man’)

I don't know why I'm keeping a blog. After all, I'm hardly what you'd call a technocrat. Deep down, I believe it is every writer's job to be - at the very least - suspicious of technology. Ever since Romantics like Charles Lamb, it has been every writer's job to resist industry, technology, so-called 'progress;' and the internet should be no exception.


It seems fairly obvious to me that all technology of whatever kind is, at base, a matter of either sex or death. I'm not being Freudian here - or not just. I'm not just saying that all technology is propelled forwards by repressed impulses from the unconscious, from the twin Gods 'Eros' and 'Thanatos.' I'm not saying that precisely because these impulses aren't repressed, or concealed when it comes to technology. They're open secrets. Everyone knows (and knows consciously) that DVD technology, for example, was introduced for the porn industry, so people could cut quickly to the (ahem) good bits; everyone knows that the internet is 95% pornography, and the other 5%, consisting as it does of social networking sites and Friends Reunited, is basically an electronic knocking shop. On the other hand, everyone knows (and knows consciously) too that technology is propelled forwards most rapidly during times of war (which is to say all times) by the armaments industry.


So everyone knows, whether they admit it or not, that technology is ruled by Eros and Thanatos. And perhaps, at base (and here I am going to sound like Freud), Eros and Thanatos are the same thing when it comes to technology. Sex and death, love and death, pornography and war - they combine in all sorts of ways (American newscasters, after all, often pedal pornography-as-war).


So there you are. That's why writing a blog is a bit of an ambivalent experience for me. And I've yet to decide whether this blog is more about sex or about death, or if it combines the two.

P.S. there's stuff about technology here too:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1865942,00.html