So be the light and write!

The further away from home we look, the uglier the world we’ve built appears. More, our technology gives us a window on every corner of it, so we can top up each moment with the sheer misery of our collective suffering. It’s hard to avoid it.

It presents a dilemma for the writer. Do we tell it like we see it? Do we offer up the mess of the world for all to shudder at? Do we write stories in which our characters suffer and then die? Or do we look for the goodness, for the beauty? Do we write stories of cheerful outcome for our readers to escape into? Do we fashion for them fictional plots where everyone strives for happiness and everything works out fine?

By describing the suffering, do we help perpetuate it? By providing a pleasing escape, do we mislead our readers into underestimating the power of the forces of darkness? As self conscious individuals it’s hard to see how we can have any effect at all, but I’m beginning to think we are more influential than we know. I don’t mean as lone writers in isolation – that would be egotistical – but more together, collectively. So pick your side: light or dark, and write.

The Internet provides a voice for many an otherwise unknown scribe, like me for instance. Through blogging, and posting our stories online we find a readership and that has to be a good thing, but the Internet reveals also a darker side to us. We’re all shocked at how vicious it is, and the lesson of the last decade has been how influential it is as well. People take their lives because of the vile stuff that’s written on here. In the bear-pit of politics, elections are won and lost. Lies are spun into truths, truths smeared into lies. Entire groups are labelled as “undesirable” and showered with hate. But if the dark side can use this weird medium to such a powerfully nefarious effect, why can’t the light effect an opposite change in the Zeitgeist?

Darkness feeds off the suffering of others. That’s what sustains it. It’s what directs the darkness to inflict ever more suffering. The light is different. It doesn’t want to hurt anyone. It gains its energy from nowhere but the goodness of the heart, but is itself vulnerable to damage. In writing of the darkness then the light must take care not to be dimmed by it, and we must always offer the reader a way out.

I look at the comments on You Tube and, even though they are not aimed at me, I am deeply hurt by their depravity. This is the darkness breaking through, and all the fell creatures that dwell within us come out to create suffering, then feast on it. There seems little point countering such darkness by blogging cheerful poems about daffodils. Or bunny rabbits. Or the joys of spring. But if that’s what we of the light want to write then we should, because we’re all the light has got. Each of us with our own little lantern, we are the stars bringing light to an otherwise impenetrable firmament. We are the only thing making it worth while anyone lifting their eyes from the sorry earth at all.

I know, hate and fear-mongering go viral every day, while the light languishes unnoticed, but put pen to paper anyway. After all, it’s not like you have a choice, is it? And remember if you are not of the dark, then you are of the light. So be the light, and write.

May you stay safe, and healthy,

Graeme out.

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Not a nice word

I was reminiscing, thinking back on a particularly difficult week at the day-job that had left me feeling exhausted and resentful. So, I’d taken myself off over the moors, sat down on a hilltop and there I was revived by the sound of a skylark. It was a recovery of spirit only momentarily punctured by the nagging ping of my mobile phone, before I switched the damned thing off and tranquillity was restored.

I completed this cathartic experience some time later with a blog piece called Pandora’s little box of the absurd. It garnered a few likes, and kind comments from regular readers, and then, as is the way with these things, it sank into the sedimentary layers, I presumed never to be heard of again. More recently though, and quite unexpectedly, I picked up another comment which read – and I quote: what a load of bollocks.

Now, compared with some of the anonymous abuse that’s dished out elsewhere online, this was rather tame, and not a little ironic given the context of the piece. I hardly get anything of so blunt a nature, since I presume my little domain is rather an inoffensive backwater, and hardly to be considered “influential”. Moreover, since “what a load of bollocks” offered nothing constructive by way of explanation as to why that piece had so offended the sensibilities of the querent, I deleted it – the comment, not the piece. I have, however, been thinking about it in the larger context of abuse in general, and the increasing entrenchment of all manner of opinion, for which there seems little remedy other than for it all to play out to its own troubling and as yet entirely unpredictable, though possibly violent, conclusion.

To be sure, we live in increasingly polarised times, times when patience and tolerance are fast dissolving, when ambiguity and diversity are looked upon as untidy concepts we’d sooner be shut of, and we hark back to times when we imagine things were simpler, therefore easier to understand. Thus we read a piece of self reflective prose and, under cover of anonymity, we tell the writer it’s bollocks.

The implication is that our view of things is superior, and it may well be, but we cannot be bothered to say how or why. Yet in all cases the “how” and the “why” are of vital interest to anyone engaged in the field of existential enquiry.

I think this is bollocks because,… now, that is an opinion backed up by reasoning and experience, and we might all learn something from it, even if it is only to respectfully disagree. But mostly, we don’t know why we hold the views we do, we can’t be bothered self analysing, so we just say bollocks instead.

It’s not a nice word, though how the male testes became synonymous with a thing considered beneath contempt I don’t know, while the dog’s on the other hand,.. well, they’re considered rather fine, while a dog’s breakfast is something of a mess. And it’s doubly odd, since the male testes are, after all, not unimportant, located as they are at very foundation of the fountain of creativity, so to speak. Moreover, when brought into an harmonious coupling with certain other receptive factors – factors incidentally also used freely in derogatory speech – they further the human species immeasurably, to say nothing of giving great joy to life – at least if memory serves me correctly.

But that’s complicated – to think metaphorically, to think deeply about complex issues. It’s much easier to retreat into profanity and partisanship because then no explanation is necessary. We simply take our cue from others of our tribe, seek confirmation of our superiority in the amount of hurt we can cause, take also our reward from the cheers of approval from our fellow warriors.

We believe that by silencing argument, we win it – whether we silence it with profanity, or violence, it matters not. We don’t actually win, of course, but it can take the letting of a awful lot of blood before we realise it, before we look back, exhausted by the effort and the carnage and are totally ashamed of ourselves to the bottom of our souls.

It’s just a little world, “bollocks”, and, though offensive, it’s sanctioned as regular speech now. Placards proclaim it on the TV news every night, and certain of our politicians use it freely in their dismissal of important affairs of state – little wonder then it has found its way into my humble backwater. But if I can for a moment inflate myself, all be it delusionally, to that most modern of high offices, “the online influencer”, let me caution us all, we plucky Brits: go easy on the profanity, and if we think something is beneath contempt, then try at least to explain why we think it, in case we are asked, then we might be counted as part of the solution, rather than merely contributing to the problem.

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