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Right - first of all - suffering. Somewhere in this world right now, there is a young man walking down a road, dressed entirely in black, the streetlights casting an almost neon glow on the shine of his hood. In fact, it is a woman. It is a tall, slender and high-cheekboned woman. From the window of a composite-cement two-bed, an elderly woman watches, her window open only half a crack, and the tobacco smoke spills out and over the ledge like the tendrils of so many missed opportunities.
What is something I do all the time? Well, I write. And I have to think to myself - what is it about this practice? In the same way that the martial artist contemplates the block of wood, and the constituent elements of her discipline, I do the same with my own. And what are the elements of writing? What are the parts of this slightly strange habit, and to whom do they speak? Well, when I reflect, and I think about anything, the first question I would like to answer is why. Often, I wonder why I am a biological composite, separate from others, devoid of any god, orbiting the most convenient star in the solar system at a speed my nervous system fails entirely to detect. But when contemplating the subject of this brief essay - writing - I come to a fairly basic conclusion. Writers despair. It is a cliché by this point, which most writers attach themselves to like mad dogs. I hesitate here, because I am actually positive. (Hah! You wouldn't have gussed it!) If the only thing you have going is that you despair, then you are like a tree that tries to distinguish itself through its greenness. It is a moot point: you feel some kind of existential tension. This is old news. Unfortunately, this is the sad home of the writer. Anybody who knows me, and knows me well, would think that confining myself to a desk is absolute madness. Let me be the first to tell you that it is. I am a 'people person.' One of my most fervent readers, whom I share some very precious memories with, knows me only because we spent a month together in a CELTA classroom, and I did nothing but make quite terrifically awful jokes from nine o'clock in the morning until five in the evening. To all of you who read this newsletter - this is the kind of person I am. In fact, I will now share with you what is (to my knowledge) one of my original jokes.
What did the Italian baker say to the person he did not want in his shop?
“Get the focaccia!”
Another one of my readers, whom I recently met by chance outside of a café, asked me how I was doing, with a slightly curious sincerity about her. "Most of your stuff, recently, has been... well...yeah..." She is right - it most certainly has been. Full of shameless, self-entertaining despair. We now return to a contemplation of the writer, and the art of writing itself. And here is my main point: if you are the sort of person who, in full posession of your faculties, and in an entirely sane, almost logical frame of mind, decides to plant yourself at a desk in silence and metamorphose the endlessly psychedelic and cosmological fluctuation of this universe into something so neat as a string of letters, then you are a madman. I make no pretences. If you write, you are totally mad. What are you doing it for? This universe is self-explanatory anyway. Condensing it into something so crude as language is to try and capture flowing water in a bottle. A total, complete, irrevocable and - dare I say it - evil - fool's errand, an entirely derelict and dead profession, removed totally from the passing of days and nights and orbits and emotions and the sound of the alarm clock at half-past-six in the morning, before a day spent in a dislikeable job - no matter what anybody may say about it. You are wrong, Tom! Writing helps people! Of course it does. Anybody who thinks I am suggesting it does not is delusional. If I did not think it did, I would not be writing. My point is that people who make words out of existence are not your average types. They are typically obsessed with the two characters I have mentioned - I know that I am. I am deeply curious - beyond curious - about the terrible, terrible fear we all have of, eventually, and at the end of it all, being alone. The young woman walks along the road, breathing out clouds of steam. In the window, the cigarette burns, near the filter. For this reason, my writing is slightly skewed. Unfairly skewed, I would say, towards the more depressing aspects of life: it is rather difficult to discuss the pain of existence without the writing itself appearing painful. Well, it is not. It is actually quite hopeful. It is quite a lovely thing, to be able to put the churning sensation of a solitary existence into words. At that point, the endless tension becomes a little less real, a little less like a cold, Glasgow avenue, a little less like flowing water and more like... an artificial thing... trapped, temporarily, in a bottle. It will always be the case that putting things in to words takes something out of it, and if you can take something out of fear, then - in my mind - you are something like an entirely mad person, fluttering, breathing, and as finely patterned as the wings of a butterfly who does not know that spring is only one of the seasons. Well, I am digressing. Writers are mad, and I surround myself with them. Everyone from Kafka to Sartre to Dovstoyevky is deranged. All of them. Completely mad, and I am nothing like them. I believe life to be the eclectic mix of jazz notes, distant clouds, beautiful peoople, jazz, jazz, and more jazz, and scales and progressions - and even smoke - for when it drapes itself over the windowledge, sickly and blue and hot and turning cool, nobody is arranging it - but watch it closely, watch it closely and you will find, like all of life, that it is dancing. But right - first of all
Lots of thoughts, questions and answers there sir!
Good old jazz and cigarettes! Where would we be without them?! In a pit of unrelenting despair!