Love and Roses

14th February 2019

In Scotland, as in the rest of Great Britain, Valentine's Day is the celebration of romantic love.  In USA, in true American homogenizing fashion, everyone is supposed to be included. Grandmas and mothers receive Valentine's cards alike. Every Valentine's Day of my youth was spent in expectant desperation, checking the mail, checking my desk at school, just in case some boy had slipped in a card when I wasn't looking. It was all quite depressing, because my notion of what my life would be was not characterised by chastity or loneliness of any kind. To those boys who actually did fancy me (and there were some, I later learned), I spit on your timidity. I would have rejected you, of course, but you should have given me the chance!

But then that lack of substance is one of the many problems with the notion of romantic love we have fostered in our culture. "Love is not love that alters where alteration finds," saith the Bard. But what is love? One thing I am fairly sure it is not is anything connected to red roses and heart bleeds. I spent much of my youth swooning (for years at a time in some instances) over one male person or another. Often, I had very little contact with that person, so I have to think whatever I was feeling (to point of death, it seemed  - I was a very dramatic girl!) it had more to do with me than them.

Because romantic love is something of a fabrication, it is by nature insecure and requires constant reminders that it exists. It's all a bit neurotic and needy, and yet this is what the film and music industry,  together with the industry of Romance books, perpetuates.

I think love is a conundrum and may have almost nothing to do with how we feel. As the modern bard Paul Simon sings, "Love is not a game, love is not a toy, love's no romance." There's an old saying that love is not two people staring into one another's eyes, but two people staring in the same direction. So, maybe that's why I don't celebrate this day, Valentine's Day. I wish I had realised earlier in my life that love might just be the equilibrium between two egos, not an Egoism a Deux (Fromm)

For Writers

February 1st 2019

I am nearing the end of the re-write of my current book set in Israel. I sent out the first draft to a few friends and got very mixed results back. What became clear, though, was that I had committed my usual sin of starting off a novel trying to pack in pages and pages of backstory.  In this particular case, I thought I was justified. But it should be clear to me by now that, as a teacher once told me, you have  to "stay in the room," not just once the story gets going, but from the very first sentence.  You have asked that reader to step into your office and you need to keep him or her there by showing them a few pictures.  "Let me show you my etchings," used to be an old funny pick-up line, but it really is how you keep a reader engaged.  I know that. But I always forget it.

So, I got depressed. There were about fifty or so pages I would have to completely redo. Throw the old ones out the window and start from scratch.
I kept procrastinating. I'd written the damn book, and I didn't want to re-write a whole new section. You'd think I would have picked up along the way (I did, but I forgot) that, as the adage goes, "Writing is Re-writing."  Don't you just hate that?
Eventually I pulled myself back into my desk chair. I opened my computer, and lo and behold, it wasn't that hard. I knew it wouldn't be. I just forgot. Instead of simply "telling" my story, as another old adage goes, I began "showing" the reader who these characters were.
The great thing is, if you do that, you begin to draw yourself in, too. By the time I had reached a crucial plot point in my story, I was in tears - which hadn't happened before when I was telling and not showing.

I guess what I am trying to tell you writers, is not to be discouraged.  Okay, be discouraged. There is nothing that stings as much as a rejected manuscript. You want to cry out, "But I wrote every word in my own blood."  Okay, but that has to show on every page, and if the reader ain't smelling it, you need to go back and bleed a bit more.

Lovely thing, this writing life....

The Ghost In The Machine

18th January 2019

Recently, I got into an argument about the nature of reality, one of those small topics. It keeps coming up, because I am given books and articles by talking heads who wax lyrical on this, and every so often I get proper ticked off. There was also the exchange I had on Twitter with some guy who obviously thought he was talking to an evangelical Christian and was making the tired argument that belief in God is as patently stupid as belief in green goblins.
Well, I'm not an evangelical Christian, but I do like to take the bait when someone is pushing "the scientific" view that "verifiable" truths are the only kind of reality to be taken seriously.  I pointed out to my Twitter friend that only 4% of the known universe is in fact knowable, the rest of it being either what we have deemed to be "dark energy" or "dark matter." (We have deemed it "dark" because it won't let us in, but it may in fact be brilliant.) I noted to him that the science that has set up this bar of "verifiability" has to date no account of what gravity might be, although it can record its effect on things we are allowed to say are "real."

The problem with materialism is that it isn't really science at all, unless by science we mean Newtonian physics. But we have been in the realm of Quantum physics now since Einstein (and even he didn't like all the implications of his theories.) The most you can say about reality is that there is Energy.  Energy and fluxuations of energy.
The problem with using the little ruler and methodology of the 4% and trying to make broad judgements about the nature of reality is that, well, it leaves 96% of reality unaccounted for.  Religion leaves a whole lot unaccounted for, too. So does atheism. So does any "ism."
We tell stories. That's what we do as humans. From the very beginning of sentences we have been making these stabs in the dark. Science continues to look down its nose at this, even though theoretical physics is spilling out into this nebulous territory itself.

It's that ghost in the machine they need to prove isn't there. We live in a mechanistic universe, they say, and maybe they are right. But, who knows, maybe the ghost is really there. Maybe it's part of that 96% that cannot be known. Personally, I lean on Pascal's wager and propse that we might as well think of this energy as intelligent. No God, no Jesus, No Buddha, No Mohammad. Just energy fluctuating around an organising principle.
Perhaps this era in human thinking is what it means, as Eliot wrote, to arrive at the place we first began and see that place for the first time.

A Good Year

5th January 2019

We're only in a year for a year, but every year around this time, we are struggling to get our minds around a new one. This year does seem different - to use a Biblical metaphor, we seem at the outset of 2019 to be straining on tiptoe to see what promises to be the unfolding of a whole new era in this global hemisphere. I have to admit that I am something of an optimist - I always think the best is yet to come and can never get my mind around people who look backwards to the best times of their lives. I hear Margaret Atwood, and I take seriously dystopias projected both in the political arena and in literature. The female sex turned into Handmaids or any other sector of society subjugated at the hands of the greedy few, is of course not unimaginable. In part, we are already living through such a scenario.

But there is something in me that does not love a wall. There is always the belief that the wall can be peered through or climbed over.  I don't have a whole lot of faith in mankind, and only because look where it has brought us! I have more faith in womankind, because this 51% of the population is less likely to miss the forest for the trees. Laying waste to the environment and widening the gap between the haves and have-nots is a particularly short-sighted male perspective (NB. Not all males!) It compartmentalises the vast plight of humanity and refuses to to see beyond the wall of its own construction.  Trump and his administration are a startling manifestation of this. I venture they are the last hoorah of this thrashing dragon.

So 2019. A good year, I think. I note a small chain around the foot of said dragon.  I see the heart going out of his thrashing. We don't need to kill the monster, but we do need to contain it, and perhaps this year, such a strategy will begin to feel like a realistic possibility. In the words of a Christian saint, and far from anything I normally would appeal to, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

Ho Ho Ho

14th December 2018

To an already fatigued population this year, Christmas might seem like just another demand.  When some of my friends grumble about the whole Christmas season, I empathise to a degree. But I have to remind myself and them, that in this crazy world of self-importance and serial abuse of one kind or another, isn't it fitting just to take a day out and think of others? Even if your relative sends you another pair of socks or another necklace you would never wear, some substantial part of the planet for a brief moment every year turns its gaze outward and thinks of someone else.

Christmas, for me, and for many others, is not a sentimental story of how a baby Christ came in a manger to save a sinful "Wretch like me." It is, as Scrooge learned during his night visits from Christmas ghosts, a liberating truce in the mind-warping, grabbing and self-serving that has become our world.

It allows us, however fleetingly, a sense of magic.  Children get this, because children are more in touch with where they came from - their hearts are naturally open (at least until we, often unwittingly, close them.) We would be much better humans, our planet would be much better off, if, instead of scoffing, we rekindled the natural wonder we had as children.

Let Christmas alone, I say. There is much that is very good in it. Yuletide was, of course, before it had anything to do with Christianity, a celebration of the Winter Solstice, when the dark night of winter started to turn back towards the light. If we weren't coddled in our central heating, and kept awake at all hours by electric light, we would appreciate that much more. This planet still has a lot of turning towards the light to do. We are living through a very dark period in human history. So, let's put up our Christmas trees in wonder, with our eyes wide open for that pale thin ray of hope on the horizon.

Writing Wings

30th November 2018

I have written a novel about Jesus, or Yeshua as he was known in his native Aramaic.  I wrote it, I suppose, to answer a question in my own mind about what this man meant within his own particular historical circumstances and what he might have thought if he could have looked forward into the way Christianity would leave its mark on history. On the whole, it is an inglorious past. That's my opinion, and not one I am expecting all that much support for, especially in the USA, with its 70% of church goers. In my native country and in England, people will not care about that. Only 14% of its inhabitants identify as practicing Christians. As former Arch Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said four years ago, the countries that go to make up the United Kingdom are part of a "post-Christian society."

Now I have sent my novel out  to a first round of readers and must wait. This is a very difficult time for any author. In her hopes and dreams, everyone who reads the first page is going to stay up all night until they close the book on its last. Everyone is going to be bowled over, and publishing offers are going to start swirling down out of the ether. Her name will be submitted for the Noble Prize. Authors are very good on this imaginative front, which is why they are authors in the first place.

The reality is that some readers will like that first draft, some of them even a lot, but some won't seem all that enthusiastic. Nothing lives up to expectations, and while the comments come trickling back in, the author is plunged into a no-man's land, unable at this point to work on the revision, and sinking deeper into the quicksand of that glorious imagination slowly turning against him. These months of slog, these flights of optimism, have all been for nothing, he says to himself. He brought the best of what he had to the forum and now he is being pushed to the back of the crowd.

But there's another quality authors have, and its called buoyancy. Without this guilelesssness, a certain floatability, the daunting journey of writing a book would never have been completed in the first place. People who keep going despite all odds, especially in the arts, aren't subject to the same specific gravity. So they don't stay out on that limb for very long. They stand up,  check their parachutes and take another leap.

Composting in the Era of Trump

9th November 2018

It was my birthday the day after the election, and I figured I had won a pretty nice present in the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives, so I was planning a day of smug relaxation. History had other plans, because Donald Trump started another snowball rolling that day by firing his Attorney General Jeff Sessions who was standing in the way of him controlling the scope of the Special Council's investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. As it turned out, my birthday celebrations gave way to the slow background roll of a Saturday Night massacre. Even over a dinner of sumptuous liver in my favourite French restaurant, I was checking in with the news to see whose head would be next on the chopping block. History was being made, and I couldn't pull myself away.

Mark Twain famously quipped that while history doesn't repeat itself, it very often rhymes. Another historian yesterday announced that the Tump scandal is ten times worse than the Nixon one. Here you have a sleazy actor not only trying to eliminate his tracks, but actually conspiring with a hostile foreign government in a coup against America. And now we have a president in a panic, shooting from the hip, backing off into the bar and hiding behind the piano.

American politics at very best is a crazy arena.  Once it opened the door to big money, how could it go any other route than down the sinkhole of corruption? The antics of American politics goes largely unchecked, hence we have gerrymandering in plain sight, and voter surpression, two of the strategies that the Republican party has come to depend upon. Their aging voters cannot any more deliver victory for this backward-looking, nay backward in and of itself, political agenda.

Young people in America, like young people in Scotland, and actually all over the world, who have education and a web-wide global community at their fingertips, will not support the politics of old white guys. Their day is done, and in the future, not even their corrupt tactics will be able to hold off the tidal wave of progression (I don't say progressives on purpose because even they themselves can exhibit prejudice and blinkered optics.)
The wave that is coming will change our world, and it is neither blue nor red, but simply fresh. I have hope that the young will turn the world around, and when they do, these players we have to suffer through now will be rotting on the garbage heap of history. The Mitch McConnells and the Donald Trumps and the Lindsay Grahams and the Paul Ryans are going to create such a stink, but in the long run, some pretty impressive fertiliser.