Blip (a short story)
Posted on | April 28, 2010 | No Comments
(the first of a series of 1-page shorts on homelessness, destitution, stories that document the homeless experience for our homeless project. Some will be fictional, some factual)
He sits on the sloping stones. He sits at the end of the cycle lane that passes by the University library, on the way into town. It can’t be comfortable on the stone, but he’s got his sleeping bag tucked under him, and it’s a busy path. Hundreds of students pass by every day. Boys in loose pants and Jack Wills with dreams of mauling for England. Girls in Ugg boots and baggy grey t-shirts under fake Top Shop stoles. He’s always frowning. His skin is the colour of a weak cup of tea.
I’ve walked past him at least three times—since I started counting. The first time I didn’t give him any money. I walked past. It was probably early morning—I leave home about 6.30am and go to one of the cafes in town to write for an hour or two before going to work. So, I walked past. There was a robin sitting on the top of the bluntly trimmed oleander bushes that verge the Civic Centre. Robins blip like an electrical circuit. Blip. They flicker so quickly between singing with their chests up and tailing the air. Without any movement between the two positions. It happens too quickly. Blip. Blip. It’s not the improvisation of the blackbird. It’s lucky it’s got its red breast. Above us, the seahorses that turret the Civic Centre look over the city stiff in their marine blue-green crust.
He sits at the narrow neck of the path. There is some protection, some shade from exposure, from an overgrown fern as the path branches off behind the university buildings, down the back of the Civic Centre. I’ve noticed that later in the day he makes eye contact, asks for money. But at 6.30am he never looks up the path. Only down. Never towards those of us walking by to work.
The second time I saw him I walked across and dropped 50p into his cap, one of those round felt mosaic caps from the Middle East. He said thank you, mate, in a strong Scots accent. I didn’t manage to say anything. I never need the microphone when I’m giving a lecture, but here, nothing. Nothing came out, except the money. Not even a blip. The robin makes more of a noise.
The third time I dropped in a pound. He said the same. Thank you mate. I think something came out of me. Some noise. I can’t remember those one or two seconds. I’ve had that other times, of course. Playing football, shimmying, scoring an unexpected goal, and seconds later I can’t remember the detail, the spatial movement, how my feet went one way, the other, passed one defender, another, Geoff shouting, pass it!, and everyone stopping, Geoff running over, Twinkletoes!, bashing chests (it was an American Football thing at the time—bashing chests, a macho congratulation, that we adopted). If it had been a game of football, that lack of recall, I’d call it a champagne moment. He may have supported Dundee United. Before I could ask, I was past him. A champagne moment.
Yesterday I walked down that path into town and he wasn’t there. I began writing a story in my head—the first pass, the second and then a fictional conceit: that I sit down next to him on the sloping stones and that—here’s the twist—I would ask him for money, and by the end of this page he would give me what was in his cap and walk off and never return to that spot again.
But then this morning he is there, and my story is… Gone. Just a blip. As is his wont in the morning, he doesn’t look up the path, only away. I don’t give him any money this morning. On the railings that run along the road a male blackbird pins me with its burning orange ring of an eye. Has anyone else noticed?—it’s the blackbirds next. First came the pigeons, then the seagulls, then the ravens and crows. Fearless. Habituated to our rubbish, our movement, our passing.
Tags: blackbird > Creative Writing > destitution > Down and Out > homeless > homelessness > Newcastle > robin
Andre Brink: A Fork in the Road
Posted on | April 21, 2010 | No Comments
Andre Brink reads from his memoir tomorrow as part of the season of guest speakers at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.
‘It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen,’ writes Andre Brink, the South African novelist, scholar, and opponent of apartheid, of his Francophilia—or more precisely his love affair with Paris—in his new memoir A Fork in the Road. That passion took the young Brink to Paris (the first time as a man, rather than boy) in October 1959, in time for the new academic year of the Sorbonne, arriving in the city ‘like a castaway on a distant beach… curious and intimidated, driven by all kinds of urges and desires to which I could not yet assign a name.’
(Andre Brink’s wife, Karina Brink, reading from the book)
It was, in fact, like ‘coming home’—although as he points out, it wasn’t that home ‘was in every respect a happy or a reassuring place’. The Algerian war, a whirlwind marriage to Estelle, and the sensations ‘of living on borrowed time, being strangers in a world that was not-quite-real… turned even moments of almost sublime beauty, discovery or happiness into glimpses of mortality, of absurdity.’ Importantly for Brink the writer, it meant real experience rather than a head stuck in books: ‘I no longer needed to read Camus, or Sartre for that matter… to understand what existentialism was all about: I was living it every waking and sleeping moment of my life.’ Read more
Tags: acting critically > Andre Brink > apartheid > art > literature > NCLA > Newcastle > Picasso > South Africa
Some posts on happiness
Posted on | April 18, 2010 | No Comments
A little bit of a round-up from my reading morning from book blogs and most things I’ve come across, happily, have been on, well, happiness…
- Without Bounds on the dificulty of capturing happiness in literature.
- Lizzie Siddal on two novellas about happiness, and her own take on what constitutes happiness (a blue sky – looking out of the gloomy window here in Newcastle, I’d agree; and a new book; again, agree).
- And then Book Snob, just having a joyful happy day.
- And Simon Quicke’s joy at his son starting reading.
So, it might make me pick up and read a book on my own bookshelf: Matthieu Ricard’s book Happiness. And courtesy of Jujubes and Aspirins from a post just this Friday, a quote from that book:
Is happiness a skill that, once acquired, endures through the ups and downs of life?
…For some people, talking about the search for happiness seems almost in bad taste. Protected by their armor of intellectual complacency, they sneer at it as they would at a sentimental novel.
How did such devaluation come about? Is it a reflection of the artificial happiness offered by the media? Is it a result of the failed efforts we use to find genuine happiness? Are we supposed to come to terms with unhappiness rather than make a genuine and intelligent attempt to untangle happiness from suffering?
ADDED: Definitely something in the air this weekend. Another post, this time a review of A Glimpse at Happiness.
Tags: Blogs > Book Rambler > Book Snob > Emotion > Happiness > Inside Books > literature > Lizzie Siddal > Matthieu Ricard
Writing and the flowering of imagination
Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 5 Comments
How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, do we also feel them?
According to the cognitive psychology drawn upon in Elaine Scarry’s curious (in the best sense) and idiosyncratic work of literary criticism Dreaming by the Book, the neural patterns for imagining something are the same that are fired by actually seeing or experiencing something. So if we imagine a box, that picture we have conjured—the conjuring—is done by the same neural networks as seeing/experiencing the box for real.
Scarry is a Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard, and before leaping into the texts she uses to illustrate her points, she first (and continually) asks the reader to explore how imagination works—to prove through empirical experience that self-directed imagination (e.g. daydreaming) or conjuring up an ideal (the perfect holiday spot) will never have the same vitality or vivacity of the real object (the holiday spot example is mine; I began writing this post while sitting on an idyllic balcony in the south of Turkey with, over the road, overrunning government building works that were meant to have concluded by the Easter weekend). So: imagination lacks vivacity and vitality compared with the real world. (Added: interesting post on the neuroscience of daydreaming and consciousness.) Read more
Tags: Austerlitz > Dreaming by the Book > Elaine Scarry > Emotion > Feeling > Homer > Imagination > Mirror Neurons > Motion > Proust > Rings of Saturn > Seamus Heaney > Sianne Ngai > The Odyssey > Ugly Feelings > W G Sebald > Wuthering Heights
Interregnum: Lessing, emotion and cats
Posted on | April 8, 2010 | No Comments
The cats that crowded around our dining table in Istanbul were not as under-fed as you might expect from feral animals. (In Spain, for example, they are much less like house cats out for the night, as they are here, and more properly wild, desperate and subaltern in their emaciation.) A white, mangy, dirty looking tom that was happy to receive attention, and did, turned and bit out; I pulled back my hand and smacked my fingers on the underside of the table, and something felt broken for a good half hour. But otherwise they have been a tame wild bunch (that, or I have been more careful in waving my fingers around at ankle level). Read more
Tags: cats > Doris Lessing > Emotion > emtional life > Jeffrey Masson > travel
Empathy and our homeless project
Posted on | March 24, 2010 | 2 Comments
I never warmed to Alain de Botton. For a number of reasons: 1) his Essays on Love were, I felt, dressed up as more than they actually were, and I felt I could have done better; and 2) but then he actually did it—wrote the thing—and I had not; 3) everything else that followed was too populist: as people have said, he can be critiqued for not really having much critique.
Then I was bought his Heathrow Book (A Week at the Airport) for Christmas, and I rather liked it. He was brave. He went and talked to people. He was perceptive, clever, and thoughtful (and yes in pay to BAA, but fine, we have to live). That is, he worked like a literary journalist. So, I realised, I was just jealous all along. (I loved this review/muse on the book and the airport from CitySound.)
And so I thought, perhaps I should review the writing of other people I’ve been wrong about. The first place I turned, then, was to some of de Botton’s colleagues at the School of Life, the London-based philosophical approach to evening classes for the new millennium.
One of these people is Roman Krznaric, whose major research and writing is around work and the extreme sport of empathy. And so I downloaded his Empathy and the Art of Living, not least because I thought—well, maybe I could learn something—and because my own research is into emotion. I also felt it would be useful for me in terms of a project I am working on with some other writers here in the North East. Read more
Tags: A week at the airport > Alain de Botton > destitution > empathy > George Orwell > homelessness > Roman Krznaric > School of Life
Ian Jack on tense and cherries
Posted on | March 3, 2010 | No Comments
I have just had porridge for breakfast. I mixed it with a banana (Dominican Republic), a Clementine (Spain), some organic raisins (Kenya) and some almonds (also Spain). I sprinkled on some linseed (Canada) and some cinnamon (unspecified within the EU). I have no way of knowing where the oats came from, but as the bag claims it was packed in the UK I am assuming some guilt by omission. The water was from a British tap – but rain is from the global commons, and after being drawn through my Brita water filter (Poland), who knows what nationality it could claim.
It is then the absence of English cherries from the seasonal shopping basket that strikes me as the worst of the losses catalogued in Ian Jack’s collection of writings, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. Much of his work begins with contemporary issues and from there turns through his preoccupation with the question “What was it like before?” into a study of things lost. The Kent cherry is just one of those things that has given Jack the task of, “always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.” Read more
Tags: Book Reviews > books > Britishness > granta magazine > Hatfield train crash > Ian Jack > Kathleen Ferrier > Newcastle
Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?
Posted on | February 28, 2010 | No Comments
Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?
That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression are strategies the mind uses to figure things out, learn, and make better decisions.
I won’t repeat the research here, but the key point is that emotional pain is for a reason. The pain is used, for example, so we withdraw from the world to avoid further pain; so we focus solely on the causes of the pain; to understand. To medicate the pain away (or f*ck, as Pink and her fans put it, in often beautiful and creative ways) can be to negate the positive effects of the pain.
What interested me is when Lehrer goes on to discuss this in relation to writing. The psychiatrist Andrews goes on to talk about ‘expressive writing’ (asking depressed subjects to write about their feelings: interesting link to academic vs expressive writing) and how this led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. “The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities.” I’m writing this quite soon after a relationship break up. What does that say about this piece of writing, or the need to write? Read more
Tags: anxiety > Curious > depression > Emotion > Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick > Henry James > Jonah Lehrer > negative emotions > neurology > neuroscience > Roseanne Bane > sadness > Todd Kashdan > writing