Monkeys seen
You won't get a novel out of me (or this). I did try. It was a long time ago - long enough for me to have been using a steampunk contraption called an "Amstrad PCW", with a two-tone screen, no hard disk, and 64K of memory - and I had this eccentric idea that to write a novel, you just sat down and hammered out at least 200 pages of facetiousness, packed with as many terrible puns as you could think of, all tenuously justified by a half-baked attempt at autobiography, in which the few real people you had actually known during the chosen period of your life were impatiently replaced with lifeless allegorical figures, whom you moved like chess pieces towards a contrived conclusion. It was an unlikeable abortion, as I realised almost as soon as I had typed the final full stop. I don't know if anyone other than me managed to read beyond the first two pages, but if they did, they must have wondered what the point of it was, and concluded that I was hard up, which I was, and yes, that was the point. All the same, I could have made some excuses to myself and tried again, but the more I reflected on my experience, the more I realized that it is simply not true that everyone has at least one good novel in them, any more than it is true that everyone has at least one good 50s Hollywood musical. They don't. And this is at least in part because to write a novel, you have to have a special interest in people, the sort that manifests itself in a fascination with relationships, with degrees of affective as well as genealogical closeness, with how people carry around the sedimented strata of their bouncings off of others, and unconsciously express this history even in the way they brush their teeth. The novel, I suspect, is the vehicle of an ideology, or at least, of a temperament, that not everyone shares. A good novel forces us to accept that every individual is a world, to be sympathetically explored rather than evaluated, and it achieves this worthy goal through the novelist's gift for imaginatively becoming other people and tracing through the Darwinian evolution of their personality, predicaments and obsessions. The novel is a course of isometrics for the empathy-puny: and if it is this, then the novelist had better be an empathetic Charles Atlas, or your money back.
I am so not one of those, it's actually embarrassing. I may be less narcissistic (in the technical sense) now than I was as a young man: able, at least, to grasp that other people are not flawed, half-finished versions of an abstracted and idealised me, and that I'm not one tenth as good at reading people as I think I am. But understanding, in the abstract, that people are way more different (each from each, and all from me) than I can grok is no substitute for actually grokking them, which you can only do if you are able to sidestep, somehow, the cognitive filters that mediate between yourself and others. Obviously, as part of this you have to renounce the disgusting habit of judging people: novelists can't be moralists, or at least not without some schizoid multitasking. But it's not just that: you actually have to find other people's foibles interesting in a way that goes beyond aesthetics and somehow involves the heart. And I think my problem is that, at heart, I'm a mere aesthete, or hedonist. I can get a feeling for what others find funny or beautiful -. always been fair at that, at least - but can't become those other people, or speak their language fluently. I can't step outside or get beyond my own limitations. I will die being me, and no more than me: an indigestible sterility, as Larkin puts it.
"Well at least I'm on the side of the angels. Useless as I am, at least I approve of what ought to be approved of. I can't be dispassionately interested in people, but at least I can recommend those who are". - This is pathetic.
Unable to write a novel as I am, I do have those odd moments of wanting to, as presumably most people do. One such came this morning, for a few seconds, in a cloud of tobacco smoke between some potted plants round the back of this building. I suddenly found I had a title ("Pornutopia") and a tagline ("A heartwarming tale of love between a lonely middle-aged man and his penis") and a sales pitch ("How many other novels not by Melville have you read in which a dick is one of the main characters?"). All of which couldn't quite disguise from me the fact that such a notion implies a tacit acceptance that at my age, people, actual people as opposed to yearned-after simplifications and archetypes of same, are not just beyond me but terminally beyond me, and getting beyonder by the hour. Any novel I wrote, from now on, would have to be about a body part, or a buttonhole. A complete person, let's be honest, even one, if not a bald copy of me, would be overreach.
More interestingly: why would a doddery old geezer, of all people, write about a penis? Well, that's the thing. I have said several dozen times in this blog that I believe 'appiness (more technically, Jewish Aunts) is about losing rather than acquiring. This belief is not just because I chewed Catholic mystics like bubblegum all through my teens, but also because it happens to be true, leastways for me. It's one of those things you discover with age. When I was young, I assumed I needed to get something (or meet someone) in order to be happy. The older I got, however, the more I began to notice that I was never happier than when I'd just lost something (or someone). Something like what? Well, usually a piece of mental furniture that I was so used to I was unable to actually see, until one day I was astounded by its glorious absence. A quietly oppressive belief or assumption, maybe, an intrusive, unappealing cartography. Happiness is the default state of the mind, which only education, prejudice and fear (aka "reality") contrive to interrupt: dérèglement de tous les sens (in all senses of "sens", Rimbaud and Byrne) being thus a smart counter-tactic. So, well, by tortuous analogy I also think you have to stop wanting things in order to see them properly. That's where penises come in.
A young man's penis, let's face it, is a wantin' thing. It spends its entire existence either asleep or wanting what it can't have. And what I remember from my youth is that the migraine of lust which is its native language tends to overshadow, if not crowd out completely, any capacity for careful, sympathetic, reasonably objective examination, either of the object of lust or, perhaps surprisingly, the subject. Pace Sue Townsend, young men do not spend their time "measuring" their "thing", or even looking at it, really. It's just there, like a massive credit card debt, like global warming, something whose refusal to just go away, and whose baneful future impact on your life, are too depressing to want to be pondered over more than strictly necessary.
When you get to my age, however, a penis is more like a worthless old coin collection you inherited in the will of an eccentric uncle. It doesn't presume to impose on your attention. You can keep it in a drawer, gathering dust, and no one will care. You can give it away if you want. Or you can decide to take up numismatics in the autumn of your years, and get quite interested in the thing (on the understanding that no one in your immediate circle of acquaintance is likely to share or indulge such an eccentric passion). You can take it out and pore over it at night. You can go to great lengths (non sic) to decipher what's written there, in an ancient tongue no one seems to have heard of. Point is, for the first time, you actually notice it and its foibles, and clean up after it with affectionate indulgence rather than furious impatience. Almost as if you and it were an old married couple, resigned to one another's creaky, crotchety, ...company.
"All that stands between us and the splendours of the world we inhabit are the fetters we clamp on ourselves and on each other" (Kelly Grovier on the BBC web site)
I thought this summed things up quite nicely, given the context (actual fetters, in a painting of two monkeys, not just a tired reach-me-down metaphor). Surprisingly, this is the same Grovier who also perpetrated, on the BBC site not too long ago, "Heraclitus was famously forlorn by his focus on the fleetingness of things", in an article so overladen with alliterative préciosité I couldn't for the life of me see why the BBC editor stetted it, but well, anyone can have an off day I suppose. Point is, I agree with Grovier on what the painting wants to represent, to someone like me, even assuming it wasn't meant to represent this; I agree that monkeys are a good metaphor for what's simian about us, and that it's the sneering, envying, fearfully calculating, simian side of us that causes most of the trouble. Which train of thought, this morning, took me along the already familiar path to "art is at least partly about making something that people can read stuff into, up to the hilt of their own depth or shallowness". Alternatively, "the rules are too complex for an individual mind to get, and hence still haven't been codified, but you can't afford to break them, so you better start cautiously experimenting within the proven and tested, if you're going to get something worthwhile done within a single lifetime".
I am so not one of those, it's actually embarrassing. I may be less narcissistic (in the technical sense) now than I was as a young man: able, at least, to grasp that other people are not flawed, half-finished versions of an abstracted and idealised me, and that I'm not one tenth as good at reading people as I think I am. But understanding, in the abstract, that people are way more different (each from each, and all from me) than I can grok is no substitute for actually grokking them, which you can only do if you are able to sidestep, somehow, the cognitive filters that mediate between yourself and others. Obviously, as part of this you have to renounce the disgusting habit of judging people: novelists can't be moralists, or at least not without some schizoid multitasking. But it's not just that: you actually have to find other people's foibles interesting in a way that goes beyond aesthetics and somehow involves the heart. And I think my problem is that, at heart, I'm a mere aesthete, or hedonist. I can get a feeling for what others find funny or beautiful -. always been fair at that, at least - but can't become those other people, or speak their language fluently. I can't step outside or get beyond my own limitations. I will die being me, and no more than me: an indigestible sterility, as Larkin puts it.
"Well at least I'm on the side of the angels. Useless as I am, at least I approve of what ought to be approved of. I can't be dispassionately interested in people, but at least I can recommend those who are". - This is pathetic.
Unable to write a novel as I am, I do have those odd moments of wanting to, as presumably most people do. One such came this morning, for a few seconds, in a cloud of tobacco smoke between some potted plants round the back of this building. I suddenly found I had a title ("Pornutopia") and a tagline ("A heartwarming tale of love between a lonely middle-aged man and his penis") and a sales pitch ("How many other novels not by Melville have you read in which a dick is one of the main characters?"). All of which couldn't quite disguise from me the fact that such a notion implies a tacit acceptance that at my age, people, actual people as opposed to yearned-after simplifications and archetypes of same, are not just beyond me but terminally beyond me, and getting beyonder by the hour. Any novel I wrote, from now on, would have to be about a body part, or a buttonhole. A complete person, let's be honest, even one, if not a bald copy of me, would be overreach.
More interestingly: why would a doddery old geezer, of all people, write about a penis? Well, that's the thing. I have said several dozen times in this blog that I believe 'appiness (more technically, Jewish Aunts) is about losing rather than acquiring. This belief is not just because I chewed Catholic mystics like bubblegum all through my teens, but also because it happens to be true, leastways for me. It's one of those things you discover with age. When I was young, I assumed I needed to get something (or meet someone) in order to be happy. The older I got, however, the more I began to notice that I was never happier than when I'd just lost something (or someone). Something like what? Well, usually a piece of mental furniture that I was so used to I was unable to actually see, until one day I was astounded by its glorious absence. A quietly oppressive belief or assumption, maybe, an intrusive, unappealing cartography. Happiness is the default state of the mind, which only education, prejudice and fear (aka "reality") contrive to interrupt: dérèglement de tous les sens (in all senses of "sens", Rimbaud and Byrne) being thus a smart counter-tactic. So, well, by tortuous analogy I also think you have to stop wanting things in order to see them properly. That's where penises come in.
A young man's penis, let's face it, is a wantin' thing. It spends its entire existence either asleep or wanting what it can't have. And what I remember from my youth is that the migraine of lust which is its native language tends to overshadow, if not crowd out completely, any capacity for careful, sympathetic, reasonably objective examination, either of the object of lust or, perhaps surprisingly, the subject. Pace Sue Townsend, young men do not spend their time "measuring" their "thing", or even looking at it, really. It's just there, like a massive credit card debt, like global warming, something whose refusal to just go away, and whose baneful future impact on your life, are too depressing to want to be pondered over more than strictly necessary.
When you get to my age, however, a penis is more like a worthless old coin collection you inherited in the will of an eccentric uncle. It doesn't presume to impose on your attention. You can keep it in a drawer, gathering dust, and no one will care. You can give it away if you want. Or you can decide to take up numismatics in the autumn of your years, and get quite interested in the thing (on the understanding that no one in your immediate circle of acquaintance is likely to share or indulge such an eccentric passion). You can take it out and pore over it at night. You can go to great lengths (non sic) to decipher what's written there, in an ancient tongue no one seems to have heard of. Point is, for the first time, you actually notice it and its foibles, and clean up after it with affectionate indulgence rather than furious impatience. Almost as if you and it were an old married couple, resigned to one another's creaky, crotchety, ...company.
"All that stands between us and the splendours of the world we inhabit are the fetters we clamp on ourselves and on each other" (Kelly Grovier on the BBC web site)
I thought this summed things up quite nicely, given the context (actual fetters, in a painting of two monkeys, not just a tired reach-me-down metaphor). Surprisingly, this is the same Grovier who also perpetrated, on the BBC site not too long ago, "Heraclitus was famously forlorn by his focus on the fleetingness of things", in an article so overladen with alliterative préciosité I couldn't for the life of me see why the BBC editor stetted it, but well, anyone can have an off day I suppose. Point is, I agree with Grovier on what the painting wants to represent, to someone like me, even assuming it wasn't meant to represent this; I agree that monkeys are a good metaphor for what's simian about us, and that it's the sneering, envying, fearfully calculating, simian side of us that causes most of the trouble. Which train of thought, this morning, took me along the already familiar path to "art is at least partly about making something that people can read stuff into, up to the hilt of their own depth or shallowness". Alternatively, "the rules are too complex for an individual mind to get, and hence still haven't been codified, but you can't afford to break them, so you better start cautiously experimenting within the proven and tested, if you're going to get something worthwhile done within a single lifetime".
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