It’s four in the morning and I’m on the night shift. Things
are quiet; the five children who are my charges are all sleeping peacefully. I’ve
just been outside for a cigarette, leaving the door slightly open so that I can
hear the signal, should any of the monitors to which they are all attached give
alarm.
Though our little group is housed in the middle of the
city, it is quiet outside. The night is slightly misty, the temperature three or four degrees above freezing point. There is plenty of light; street lamps, the
neon signs on the big shopping mall next door, the illumination of the city theatre
across the way. Between our little garden and the theatre is a small
playground. Looking across just now, I spotted a what looked like a fat rabbit
grazing on the grass between the swings and the climbing-frame. From time to
time he raises his head, his ears twitching. Has he registered my presence? I
move towards the fence, the distance between us finally around five metres. Now
he has seen me. He raises his head head once more, looks briefly towards me,
then hops slowly away. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned. Caught for a
moment in the stronger light of a street lamp, I can see him even more clearly.
Now I realise that my initial judgement was mistaken – from his greater size
and the shape of his tail, I can see that my night-time acquaintance is, in
fact, a hare.
An old acquaintance, then. I have seen him before, in
the dawn light of April. Then he was much livelier, gambolling on the grass, as
they are wont to do in spring. Now, as winter approaches, his life is quieter,
its most dominant aspect being the need to silflay as much as possible before the dark,
hard, hungry season gets into its stride.
Posts on
this blog have become a bit more seldom of late. Exactly why, I am not sure. I
have been playing around with a couple of ideas in my head, have even started
writing about a few before giving up on them. Bored with my own ideas before I
have even worked them through? Perhaps.
I feel an
urge to create something special, something beautiful. Some kind of instinct to
make a leap forward, move to another level, without being clear about how to go
about this. Writer’s block, creative logjam, perhaps a slight attack of plain
old laziness? Maybe a combination of all this, along with a significant amount
of something else, some kind of factor x.
If I actually knew what it was, then I might be able to do something about it.
I feel two
conflicting instincts with regard to dealing with this. The first is the
generally excellent piece of advice; If
you’ve got nothing to say, don’t say it. Surfing the web recently I’ve been
struck by a sense of how much useless, superfluous bullshit is out there. Maybe
it’s just a side effect of the US
presidential campaign. Although I am an Irishman, happily living in Europe, I
have the feeling that, all around the globe, you’d have had to be blind, deaf
and terminally stupid not to realise that the USA was choosing a new (actually
re-electing the old) boss. A cacophony of shrill attempts at persuasion – of
whom? A few hundred thousand voters in a couple of swing states who finally decided the election? Was all
the rest of it then just the convinced preaching to the converted, modern
versions of the indignation, shrieking and threatening gestures between two
rival groups of monkeys meeting in a disputed forest clearing. Ritualised
hind-brain aggression, formally channelled to let dangerous instinctive
feelings bleed off without anyone getting the shit beaten out of him, or even
killed. And in the course of this, the two tribes involved spent up to six
billion dollars. Not to mention the millions of words churned out in blogs,
Facebook posts and tweets. What a way to run the world! And why on earth should
I add anything more to this strange
circus?
The other
instinct is to just start writing without any clear idea about where it’s going
to go. Just type away, immersing myself into the stream of ideas swirling in my
head, reflecting my own subjective perception of all the concepts and impulses
and stimuli churning around in my own particular personal and cultural
environment and see where it takes me. Which is, more or less, what I am
actually doing now. Some kind of intuition that I generally do have something to say; one of the
basic purposes of this blog being the ongoing attempt to work on how I say it – learning by doing, honing
whatever kind of ability I have to create something (however modestly)
worthwhile, combining form and content, media and message, into that flexible
and somewhat amorphous literary category known as “the essay.”
Writing,
formulating my thoughts and ideas, just doesn’t flow easily for me at the moment. That … hesitancy … I mentioned at
the beginning of this piece is still there, a feeling that that I’m trying to
carve this out of hard wood, with tools that aren’t sharp enough. I’ve been
writing this on and off (more off than on) for more than a week now, finding
myself taking directions which I then subsequently revise and ultimately
reject. They don’t quite fit, though (thanks to the possibilities offered by
writing with a computer) I can save these rejected fragments to perhaps revisit
and use later.
One of the
memes which seems to be flashing about at the moment is that of stories. Narratives. Even President Obama
took it up in his victory/acceptance speech the other evening. We structure the
world in which we live by creating narratives, telling stories. Crises occur in
societies when narratives no longer work, when the shared collective stories
become unbelievable, incapable of providing a coherent explanation of past,
present and future – from families all the way up to nations.
Since 2008
the global economic story has been in fundamental crisis, a crisis much deeper
than the “crash” itself. The general consensus on an economic meta-narrative,
told in the language of markets, the belief in the story of the Invisible Hand guiding all to the best
of all possible prosperity through free, unregulated markets, is breaking down,
along with many of its themes, such as Trickle
Down or Unlimited Growth. In the
midst of all the doom and gloom there may just be a small hope that we can
build better stories; new narratives, based perhaps on values other than those
of economic worth, such as decency, morality, solidarity.
I know, I
have a strong personal tendency to (unjustifiable?) optimism. Or maybe just
hope.
Personally,
I have also reached a stage in which I am increasingly examining my own
narratives. One result of the Burnout
I went through a year and a half ago was a decision to go into psychoanalysis. Currently
in the middle of this process, I find myself at a point where I feel the urge
to say less and listen more – to others and to myself. I have no intention of
going deeper into details here – it is a process which I consider to be intensely
private – but there is one realisation which I am prepared to mention. I have a
tendency in many areas in my life to turn “can”
and “want to” into “must” and “have to”. It is a personal characteristic I don’t particularly
enjoy and one I hope to be able to give less power to in the future. Writing
here is something I do because I enjoy it, because I want to do it; I will not allow it to become something I feel I am
doing out of some kind of obligation.
There are
themes I have briefly mentioned here which I intend to come back to;
particularly that of narrative. But
for now, in common with my long-eared friend, the meeting with whom I described
at the beginning of this, I feel the need to listen more and, perhaps, say less. So there may be fewer posts
here in the next while. But those that I do publish (and I have no intention of
abandoning this project) will appear because I wanted to write them, not out of any sense that I had to publish something.
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