If we lie enough

As I continue to work my way through “Winter on the Hill“, the same questions arise as with all my novels: for whom do I write?

I know I have a small readership, because you have written to me and said so, and I am indeed grateful for your company. But in the main, I am writing for myself, and since you’ve not paid any money for that novel, you must forgive my self-centred priorities as I filter what is essentially a personal reality, through the art of my fiction.

Since I began the novel, in December, all our lives have changed, yet many of the themes I thought I was exploring – things like freedom and it’s curtailment by powerful forces, also the nature and importance of “truth”, have all come into sharper focus in recent months, though for none of the reasons I originally imagined.

Our isolation, the mothballing of work, the closure of shops, pubs, restaurants, the mere fact we could no longer travel to the countryside, indeed everything Western materialist culture is based upon – all these things have been called into question, and with them the very meaning of our lives. This has had me turning to philosophy, to the great gabblers of “meaning”, at least from a secular perspective. Also, since philosophers speak a difficult language, I have turned to those who can best translate them into English for the rest of us.

My characters enable me to explore my actual life, through their fictional existence. The storm of my thoughts is filtered back to a calmer essence through their thoughts and their dialogues. Thus, their stories explain my self back to me. This is a long way from “writing for the market”, like the glib writing coaches used to tell us. But since I never could grasp “the market”, and no longer have a use for it, it matters not.

It’s a strange way of going about things, I know. My first novels, written when I was a lad, were of the usual kind. They were a hundred thousand words penned in the naive belief a publisher would fall over themselves to publish me. Then I would be able to show my mum my books on the shelves at WH Smith. That would have been a very fine thing indeed! But, but alas, not to be.

Publishing’s not the game I thought it was, which is difficult for a writer to come to terms with, especially one that can’t stop writing. Needless to say, there’s been a lot of growing up since then.

A novel is a big undertaking. The shorter ones are a year in the writing, the longer ones two or three. To inhabit the world of the story for so long is a very pleasurable and transformative thing. It is meaningful, but not in the same sense as the work can ever mean to anyone else. Others must take from my stories what they can, which is the by-product of fiction. The author is always king of his own domain.

Blogging is another important voice for a writer. Again, I know some of you do read me here because you write to tell me so, and again I am grateful for that. I note however that, although my number of “followers” is inching its way up, the actual reach of the blog – the hits – is declining in line with the general decline of blogging anyway. I calculate I am back now to where I was in 2012, which highlights the essentially personal nature of blogging. You don’t do it to become rich, or famous. You do it because not to do it leaves you bloated with words unspoken.

Writers then are merely channels for thought. We open ourselves, and our thoughts pour through us onto the page. Some of us have millions hanging on our words, others a few dozen, some none at all. It doesn’t really matter. “Reach”, “penetration”, these are words for the sellers of things, not writers.

But back to “Winter on the Hill”. It seems to have led me on a journey through the mass-trespasses and the working class movements of the 1930s, to the songs of Ewan McColl, to the apparent rout of resurgent leftist, collectivist politics in more recent times, to say nothing of that most startling of neo-con inventions: the post-truth world.

For explanations and solutions the novel has led me to the existentialist philosophers. I’m not enamoured of them ordinarily, but it’s hard to avoid their conclusions, and for which I quote Jordan Peterson, speaking towards the close of a lecture, delivered at the university of Toronto in 2016:

“If you lie you corrupt the system. If you lie enough, the system becomes so corrupt, it turns on you and becomes murderous. So, the price of freedom, as far as the existentialists are concerned – and this is buttressed by historical knowledge that they garnered during the 20th century – was that you have a moral obligation to speak the truth, to maintain the integrity of the state, as well as fostering your own psychological integration.”

So that’s what we do when we write; we tell the truth, at least in so far as we see it, as well as define the truth to our own satisfaction, as best we can. Others may not agree with our version of the truth, but if we can avoid deliberately lying, to ourselves and to others, it provides at least an honest starting point for debate. And if we are sincere in what we say, it contrasts sharply with the blizzard of deceit that now underpins the world of contemporary affairs that would deliberately deceive us as to the way things really are. As an individual voice it might not make much difference to the corruption of our futures. But such as the effort goes, and in my own small way, I lend my voice to it. If you write, and you’re sincere in what you say, you do the same.

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How do we know what’s true?

When you’re not writing for publication there’s a lot you don’t have to worry about, like mainly the expectations and the tastes of others, and the need to always be better than your last novel. Because you’re just bound to fail eventually, aren’t you? Plus, since it’s as likely my work will be forgotten a hundred years from now as that of any other non-A list author, it’s really not worth putting yourself through it, is it?

WordPress will have been bought out by then, transformed and subsumed into whatever passes for the Internet in 2120, and the self-conscious writings of millions of bloggers will have rotted into the sedimentary layers of obsolescence. Ditto Smashwords and that veritable sea of self-published novels that were all going to make their authors a mint, but never did.

By then historians will be researching the great pandemic of 2020 using as source material the archives of a fawning press, and the evasive, rose-tinted, self-aggrandising memoirs of politicians. Meanwhile, the truth is buried here, at least as people genuinely saw it, along with – and indistinguishable of course – from all the lies, and the spin and the barking madness.

So how do we know what’s true?

When you write as I do, you’re writing primarily for yourself. It is both a cathartic experience, and an exploration of how and why we think the way we do. Our opus is then a map of personal development, charting our footsteps through a world of ideas, in search of originality. It’s about reaching that stage when we can write something genuine from our experience of life, and believe in it. That doesn’t make it important of course, or even universally true. It is only the truth, as we see it, but “as we see it”, is the best any of us have to go on.

I hit my messianic years early, woke up from childhood as an angry young man to a world that seemed bent out of shape. I wanted to straighten it more into an image of my own liking. I think we all go through this phase. The rest of life is about coming to terms with the fact it doesn’t matter how much we shake our fist at it, the world is what it is. And what it is is a mish-mash of events that seem out of control. More than that, the world makes demands upon us that are inconvenient to say the least. We’d much sooner avoid all of that and just do whatever the hell we want.

Thereafter, sanity rests in attaining the mid-point between one’s sense of self-importance and all the inconvenient evidence to contrary. It’s about having the courage to take on the world as we find it, and find a place in it that’s the least uncomfortable for ourselves. There, in the gaps between sleeping and doing stuff we don’t want to do, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find sufficient serenity to know it doesn’t matter much either way. That is, except to say, every moment of adversity is a test of emotional resilience, that progress in life, and truth, is measured by how far you’ve left that angry young man behind.

There’s a lot we could be angry about right now. Indeed, that young man in me is in danger of getting lost in the red-mist again, so we have to maintain some perspective, scan the paragraphs for ire, and root them out, because the truth is never angry.

So we come to my work in progress, “Winter on the hill”, and the lesson that it’s dangerous to write in turbulent times, and with the expectation current affairs can be used as a passive backdrop against which our characters act out their dramas. Because these days current affairs can turn our lives on their heads. Thus, my characters suddenly find themselves scattered and social-distancing, their lives on hold and reduced to emailed dialogue, and no action. It’s inconvenient, but I have to work with it.

It’s odd how the story began with themes of fundamental freedoms, the right to roam, the rout of Leftist politics, being spied on by drones, and the dangers of authoritarianism by stealth. Then, suddenly here we are, confined to our homes, spied on by drones, policemen enquiring into our shopping habits and the necessity of our journeys. There’s also no exit strategy and the population is so terrified of dying from this bug, they don’t care. Subcutaneous RFID tagging from birth? Sure, bring it on, so long as it keeps us safe. You see the problem here? And maybe that’s where my story’s going, but I’m not sure I want to follow it because that’s a dark place. That’s a place so far from the truth it’s almost a figment of the imagination.

In the mean-time I tickle back and forth through the narrative to date, checking the characters are saying what they mean and what that means about the journey of my life. Am I looking like I’m on course for something? Am I still in the flow, or am I straining too hard in a direction that’s going to fetch me up on the rocks.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if I write or not, if I finish or not, if it means anything or not. The only one who needs to find out if there’s anything worth a damn in any of this, is me. In uncertain times, turbulent times, it highlights the fact you’ve really only yourself as a reliable reference point. So be true to yourself, and protect those around you as best you can. But watch out too for that angry young man and don’t let him catch up with you, because he’s a real trouble-maker and for all of his reforming zeal, he wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.

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The Cappuccino Socialist

Even a casual observer of current affairs cannot fail to be impressed by the spectacular tragedy that was 2016. The year was a litany of violence, hatred and political upheaval, proudly presented across all media as infotainment – this in formerly stable, western democracies. Coupled with these calamitous events there is the growing realisation that even though Capitalism has been hanging on by its fingernails since 2008, it’s essentially dead. However, since no one has a clue what to replace it with, there’s a fear we’ll be suffering the stench of its rotting corpse for a long time.

Indeed the times do little to reassure me we’re tending towards a more peaceful and prosperous co-existence – quite the opposite. The impression is one of a world totally out of control, one in which destructive archetypal daemons have breached in force the liminal defences of reasonable thinking, and are now wreaking havoc on several fronts, ushering in a zeitgeist that wears a face permanently distorted by a snarling hatred of all things “other”.

The response from that more compassionate brand of politics, the politics of the progressive (i.e. old) left, seems muted, as if they’ve been so long in the shadows the daylight burns their skin. I’m more pessimistic now than I was in the Summer about their chances of making a difference. All the forces of evil, news-media, and even public opinion are arrayed against them, while the alt-right seeps unmolested into the cracks. The prospect therefore of passing the remains of this century tossed by an ever escalating reign of chaos does not sound implausible.

I have long wondered if I should take a more direct approach to this collective existential emergency, and become more politically active myself. The feeling came to a head recently, after giving the meat and potato pasty I’d just bought, and was rather looking forward to, to a homeless guy. I was embarrassed, didn’t quite know what the etiquette was, only that he wore the thousand yard stare of extreme misfortune, and everyone else was ignoring him like he was a drunk, or a dope-head, or it was somehow his fault he was sitting in the cold and the wet with a blanket around his shoulders. My companion even commented, somewhat cynically that he probably drives a jaguar and lives in a docklands penthouse. But anyway, I gave the poor guy the pasty, and he was grateful for it.

We’re used to seeing down and outs in our cities, and that’s troubling enough to someone visiting from the sticks, but this was a provincial market town in the North, my town, my North, so okay: I was going to get political. I was going to kick this spectre of eternal decline right in the balls. Boy, was this Cappuccino Socialist going to whip up a storm!

However,…

Instead, I tried to join the Labour Party. It’s currently revitalising its atrophied radical roots and I thought I’d fit right in with my newly radicalised self, but my enquiries thus far have not exactly been welcomed with open arms. Indeed my online applications are repeatedly lost in cyberspace. I don’t know why this is, and I’m not going to speculate beyond saying it’s probably more a case of administrative overload than I am suspected, by dint of an all blue post-code, of being a sneaking Tory saboteur. I admit the thought of the latter does amuse me.

So,… I’m taking this rejection by the Socialist brethren in good part, and in a more transcendentally meaningful sense, that is to say the Universe is obviously telling me my contribution to the cause of a global Shang-ri-La isn’t meant to be political. I’d be rubbish at it anyway. Take me away from the keyboard and I’m tongue-tied by a log-jam of incoherent thoughts. So I’m back to chronicling the times as I see them, sipping my Cappucino between repeated rewrites, the best I can do being to urge a positive frame of mind in spite of everything that’s telling us to be afraid and to restock our millennium cupboards.

I’m writing this on January 3rd, the worst day of the year, the first day back at work after a long festive break. It is my morning of a thousand emails, evidence enough of a world drowning in obfuscating bullshit. Like those emails it has mostly to be deleted before we can get at the real issues, the things that actually need doing. Nor does it help that my holiday reading consisted of Hans Fallada’s novel, Alone in Berlin, a chilling tale that in part describes the ways and means the barking mad alt-right of Nazi Germany infiltrated every institution of state, efficiently reducing the German people to a subservience based on a blend of patriotism and fear.

In Nazi Germany the penalties for dissent were extraordinarily harsh, as with all oppressive regimes, the slightest hint resulting in torture and death. It’s not something we hear much about, how the Nazis were as cruel to their own people as to the nations they invaded. It’s an important novel and, sadly, as relevant now as it was when it was written. If we think it cannot happen in a modern western democracy any more, it does not mean it cannot happen, only that we lack the power to imagine it, and have not learned the lesson of history.

Of course things are not so bad now as in Fallada’s wartime Berlin. I can still type freely online without undue fear of my IP address leading the tech-savvy Gestapo to my door. Sure Google knows where I live, but they just want to sell me stuff. The point is we should remain mindful of the freedoms we still have, freedoms we might yet lose, and the ease with which they can indeed be lost, once the goose-stepping alt-right shadow-monsters are manifested in the crowded rally, whipping us all to hysteria, making us do cruel and degrading things to others in the name of nationalism, and security.

Yet, it’s puzzling, the vast majority of people have good hearts. This is my experience. The natural state of the human being is compassion, a desire for mutual respect and peaceful co-existence. Cruelty and criminality – things that underpin the oppressive regime – are aberrations, and the rest of us must not be afraid to point them out, for our collective weakness is as ever the ease with which we can be led, either by the wiles of the charismatic populist, or in fear of the shouty man. That we so often allow ourselves to fall into the hands of vile impostors is testament enough, also a warning, for in their hands we might be condemned to languish, helpless, for generations.

But all is not lost. It’s not for everyone to stride boldly upon the world’s stage, to influence the masses with one’s wit and common sense back to a reasonable way of thinking. We cannot all write a novel like “Alone in Berlin”. We cannot all, apparently, join the Labour Party. For most of us the best we can do is sip our Cappuccinos thoughtfully, remember the difference between right and wrong and, in holding to that simplest of things, preserve our dignity. By doing so we hold a mirror to the shadow whipped crowd so it can see its own face, see how ugly it’s become of late, and maybe think twice before dragging us any further into peril.

Stay Safe, and be of good heart.

Oh, and a Happy New Year!

Graeme out.

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