It’s a bit disconcerting when the character described as “monstrous” on the cover of the book you’re reading is also a character with whom you find yourself quite closely identifying. I can never tell you about this book now (which is really very good), just in case you end up agreeing with this assessment.
Two posts in one day, watch out. I just wanted to say, having re-read a few old posts from my old Hanoi blog…when in the seventeen levels of purgatory did I get so damned dull?! So permanently set into self-righteous bleating mode? Gnnnughhh. Will work diligently on extracting head from own behind stat.
Meanwhile, there’s no despair like stock-photo-hamster despair.
So, Neil Gaiman has written about his friend, Sir Terry Pratchett.
Apologies in advance, as with all of these posts, this one is truly self-indulgent, and particularly navel-gazing. Neil Gaiman’s piece got me thinking about my long and continuing relationship with, even dependence, on Terry Pratchett’s writing, and I wanted to reflect a bit on it. Unlike Neil Gaiman, I am not a famous writer (nor a close personal friend of He), and so harbour no delusions about the value these musings contribute. However, it is safe to say that Pratchett’s works have been an absolute mainstay in my life. I, quite literally, almost never venture into the world without a Pratchett book (perma-loaded into the Kindle). It is probably not overstating it to say that it forms the bedrock of my relationship with my sister (nary a conversation goes by that doesn’t make a Pratchett reference in some way). I also nearly always reach for a Pratchett book I’ve read countless times as a very effective sleep-soothing routine (I rarely have trouble falling asleep, but often wake up with nameless anxiety. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and all that right?)
I’ve always held the firm belief that Terry Pratchett is one of the greatest writers of our generation, and that the only reason he isn’t more highly decorated vis a vis the various Serious Book Awards is because he’s hilarious. And hilarious about deadly serious things. Which, in my opinion, is one of the hardest things to do, because I think it probably means you’ve been through the wringer, and have developed enough as a human being to be able to make those things funny. It does seem sometimes that there is a perception that enduring literature can’t be funny, or accessible. I happen to disagree, and thought this piece making the case that honest writing is funny writing was spot on. Someone said (probably in the comments section) that Terry Pratchett is the Dickens of our times. Having only read a handful of Dickenses (and does the illustrated children’s version of A Christmas Carol count?) I’m probably not qualified to comment, much less enthusiastically agree with this analysis. Suffice it to say, people are apparently impervious to real and sometimes profound insights about humanity and the human condition if the vehicle for comment happens to include elves, wizards and trolls. But, I also happen to be allergic to earnestness, and happen to think that parody is one of the greatest art forms around – the more absurd the better – so make of that what you will.
Being his friend, Neil Gaiman probably knows more than we do about Sir Pterry’s state of health, and the fact of him even having penned a tribute is somewhat alarming. I can’t begin to contemplate a world post-Pratchett – it makes me panic in a way that would call for an enormous amount of therapeutic (and therefore extremely mediocre) writing/cups of tea/frantic and furious pool laps. (The pool laps would feel furious, but they would still be exceedingly slow.)
So I won’t. Like Gaiman seems to have found, there is much solace in focusing instead on his work, and on the writings he has inspired. What a wonderful tribute Neil Gaiman has written.
This in particular is a spine-tingling passage:
He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.
Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.
These sentiments expressed come as no surprise. The central, and perfectly imperfect characters of Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax always seem close to vibrating off the page in the elemental rage that drives them, and it makes perfect sense that Sir Pterry channels his own world views through these characters for whom, it seems, he has incredible affection.
Part of the sheer joy of reading Pratchett is how identifiable the Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax (and now that I think of it, the Tiffany Aching) characters are, and how much their triumphs end up mattering to you, in the real world. The other parts of said sheer joy include the fact that it is impossible to not learn something about the “real” world, even unconsciously. It is no accident that The Science of Discworld is a feasible accompanying compendium to the series. And there have been almost too many occasions on which I’ve come across something, and then realised, sometimes years later, “Ohhh! That’s that piece of history/language/science that Pratchett was talking about/understood so well already that he had progressed to sending it up.” But I digress.
Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are painfully aware of their shortcomings, of the “beast” that exists in them, but continue to conduct their lives in a way that holds the beast at bay. I think it is in Night Watch that Vimes is described as a man who cuts a straight line through a world where everyone else is moving in (self-serving) curves. They live authentically, in a way that makes sense to them, to their principles and fundamental sense of justice, often at great cost to themselves.This seems to me to be the most worthy of human struggles. And Pratchett, I think, is a humanist.
At a personal level, this resonates with me, thrums and hums at a hind brain level. A lot of what I do is driven by a semi-permanent rage that there are so many things that are basically unfair in this world, mostly dictated by accident of birth. And you can flail at the world, crying about how unfair it is, or you can use that energy (which requires a certain amount of sacrifice) to try and beat the bits of the world accessible to you into a somewhat better, more equitable shape. I generally believe that human beings, if they have capacity, have the agency and therefore responsibility to lead ethical, principled lives. I have wondered whether being such a Pratchett devotee for a large and highly impressionable portion of my life has resulted in this state of being, or whether I was attracted to his work because it made sense to me in that way. Probably a bit of both. But then again, his work is so multi-layered and varied that I’m sure everyone gets something different out of it.
The other thing I’ve thought about my relationship with Pratchett’s work, is a bit of a funny thing. I suppose a lens for analysis I fall back on quite a lot is that of colonialism (refer to aforesaid rage about inequity). However, it has occurred to me that a real part of what I love about Pratchett’s writing is his voice, which is as Gaiman describes, “genial, informed, sensible, drily amused.” This strikes me as a particularly English sensibility, and Pratchett’s work is unapologetically English. But I am almost, indirectly, a professional railer-against-colonialisation! A fair chunk of my work has to do with picking up the pieces of brutal (British) colonial practices in relation to Indigenous peoples, and as a result of that, it is tempting to write off colonialisation, and the settler state, as a Horrible Thing We Would Have Been Better Off Without.
And yet, I am a product of colonialisation. I’ve spent all of my life living in one colony or another, all outposts and remnants of the Great British Empire, and grew up in the shadow of a grandfather and therefore mother, who were, not to put too fine a point on it, Anglophiles. Some of the artefacts of colonialisation I still struggle with. The obvious ones include a systemically racialist society where outcomes for people are indirectly but often shaped by these ancient and continuing exercises of power. The less obvious include the colonisation of my own mind. For instance, I think I will probably spend the rest of my life having to constantly challenge my own biases in relation to “white” superiority, that idea having sneakily crawled into my brain when I was too small and stupid (babies aren’t famous for being cognisant) to do anything about it, where it seems to still lurk. But then, I think about my relationship with Pratchett’s works, with the things I love about them, with the way I write, with the things I find funny, with the characteristics that I value in other people (geniality, informedness, sensibility, dry amusement), the vast canon of literature I am still slowly making my way through, and I am unable to say that there is nothing to gain from the whole bloody enterprise.
I guess that’s the genius of his work. He never lets you forget that life is messy and complicated, and if there seems to be a neat and simple answer to something, well, it probably hasn’t been thought through all that well.
Writing didn’t used to be something that I had to think about. (It is important to note here that by talking about “writing”, I am not making any claims to quality, merely to the mechanics and the state of mind that allows for flow.)
The concept of “working” at writing had always seemed unfathomable, like a sentence where you know each word, but have absolutely no idea why it’s in that order: Her talk why him for no hamburger? If anything, the overflow of writing was an almost embarrassing thing I had to cope with. I wrote all the time, on scraps of paper, backs of napkins, in journals and once on my hand – it was that urgent. It was like having a runny nose and nothing to blow (or surreptitiously wipe) on. I wrote when I was euphoric, when I was travelling, in lieu of eating. I wrote prolifically when I was in love, and more desperately when those things ended. Writing has brought me comfort, sustained my ego, allowed me to stave off any number of Great and Little Oblivions, (waving a small twig at a tiger) by letting me dissect it, quantify it, and even mock it.
And then, like getting out of bed in the mornings, it got harder. I developed something like a primal fear of losing the ability to write. Worse: losing the urge. And without noticing it, the words gradually slowed, first to a trickle, then to nothing at all. Instead of being a sentient person, someone who thought things, then tried to think about it some more by scribbling stuff down (and then having to avoid washing my hand until I found a less temperamental surface), I turned into the worst thing of all: a consumer. A passive tuber, an insatiable one-way content zombie. The 24 hour news cycle is one thing. To a word junkie who can’t seem to tap into truths anymore, the 15 minute news website refresh is like meth to a heroin addict. It’s not good enough, it makes you feel dirty and ever hungrier, but you’ll take it in the absence of what you really need.
I thought a little about why I couldn’t write anymore, but I couldn’t seem to think clearly, to perceive, to come to any insights. It felt like I was peering Through the Looking Glass, but through another looking glass that was made out of smoked cheese. Maybe it was my job I thought: it has been too easy to blame the 9 to 5, or 6 or 8 grind. What is more joy-thieving, less transcendence-inducing than a procession of dark suits, files bound with red tape (literally, red tape), a coffee at 10.30, then the long dry desert until tea and a biscuit at 3? Then holding it together until I could get home and immediately into pyjamas, past the “see you tomorrow ava good night” platitudes, through the home commute and whatsfordinnerdothedisheseverythinginitsrightplace. And then, doing it all again. I’d come to think of it as The Survival Guide to Faint-Hearted Living. To be fair, I struggle a little with whether this life gone mild is in fact faint-hearted living. Some days, especially when it’s a small-talk heavy day, it seems like the greatest endurance sport of all. But, listen to me moan about peacetimes, about the absence of strife. What a trial. It isn’t a trial. But that’s the rub isn’t it.
Anais Nin said, “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
This is no great revelation. It was echoed, loudly reverberated, in Dept. of Speculation, a book I devoured last weekend in what seemed like a matter of minutes, smashed to pieces, messily and without cutlery. This passage hit me in the feeble chest, punched awake some sleeping seeds:
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabakov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
How did I get here? Me, who has spent my whole life escaping? Dodging, and jinking, forestalling the things that other people seem to come around to earlier, even desire, all in the name of pure experience? This life of mundane domesticity, saving for adult things (like retirement), planning, (and the consequent death of spontaneity, of meandering), the purposeful eradication of discomfort, of making mistakes, of insecurity, of the profane, of pilgrimage and, most importantly, of solitude: this is why I can’t write. To aid to the travails, Maria tells me all writers write for a Reader, whether real or imagined. I don’t think I’ve had one in ten years.
But, I can’t wait for these things. Who knows how long it will take for a new reader to present him/herself? And, how long does it usually take for a stamp-licker to materialise?
So, I need to just write. Surely this state of existential fallow is an excess that needs balancing out. And I’m going to do it more here. I have a feeling the writing that I hope will start appearing on this blog will be letters in this rather lazy style of stream of consciousness. They’re probably going to be tripe. Trite. Practice and puff. They will be letters, emails really, to anyone who bothers with them, odes maybe, to the tropical birds that scream me awake in the morning, to the half-finished knitting projects; strangers on the train and to the dour lunch hour salads I sometimes force down without breathing. I’ve started again with the bits of paper, the florid journalling. I might never be a fullblown art monster, capable of writing about this world because of being wholly outside of it. I have more chance of channeling Wallace Stevens perhaps: legal insurance executive by day, caped demon of compact whimsical precision by night. Maybe without the insurance executive part, and definitely without the extreme intellect and fierce facility with words and form. More chance I said. In fact, forget I said that at all, and just read Wallace Stevens for your own pleasure and edification.
To get myself started, I’m going to immediately cheat, and revisit something I wrote a long time ago, in more torrid times. As I read this over, I realise I’ve a long way to go to becoming a good writer. For the moment, just writing again is good enough for me.
This year for Valentine’s
I want hugs, drinking bird kises
the knowledge that you panic too
at the thought of the end of us.
‘Put on your dancing shoes
I got gasoline for two.’
I want your morning shuffle
soft shoes in a house bus.
I want your evening songs
wind and Dylan in your hair
as we sit quiet as rocks
on a sighing south coast beach.
But you live sideways now
inside a crack
at the bottom of a canyon.
And you keep your headphones on.
(Sometimes, I leave food out
and wait to see
If I can catch a glimpse of you
and of how things could be)
Two yellowing trinkets, encased in plastic balls
suspended in a bubblegum machine.
We are not ‘we’:
you will stay you, quite separate from me.
So why the panic? There’s already no us
Turn around this musty bus!
They’re out of fish and chips here
(just disappointed salt and stranded vinegar).
—————————————————
With hope, onwards and upwards, chop chop, mind the umbrella, some complete bastard’s failed to fold it.
Microwave Minutes 