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.

‘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.’

However, it was in London, at the Tate Gallery in August 1960, not Paris, where the art of Picasso changed Brink forever—into the author of eighteen novels, two collections of essays, editor of a South African literature reader, and this autobiography, and one of the 20^th century’s most committed writers against racism. The encounter with Picasso’s work was ‘one of the most intense and profound emotional experiences of my life… a spiritual tsunami’. The experience remains for Brink ‘along with only a very small handful of memories, a moment of radical change. I could never write again in the way I’d done before. I could never be again as I’d been before.’

Brink knew that his time in Paris would mark his writing. Or as he says, ‘more than “mark”: it would definitively decide whether I was really going to be a writer as I’d so foolhardily resolved when I was nine, or not at all. And within two months I’d started writing in a different key altogether.’ Back in Paris Brink wrote urgently ‘day and night’ because ‘for the first time I really knew that writers are not made by the stories that they carry within them, their themes or ideas or beliefs or whatever, but by their intimate relationship with language. And this was my exuberant and defiant and adventurous and terribly intimate engagement with the angel of language.’ It is only when this adventure stops, Brink writes, ‘if the adventure were to go flat, then very quietly and very resolutely, like the lover in the wonderful cummings poem, petal by petal my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, and I will cease to be.’

Besides art—or rather, alongside art—violence has been a major provocateur in Brink’s life and writing. The autobiography opens with the chapter ‘Violent Villages’ and bloodshed is spilt at critical forks in the road, where Brink has then chosen his path. It is the juxtaposition of sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens with a copy of Comte’s Philosophie Positive on his lap while his thoughts were far away in South Africa and the Sharpeville massacre that Brink draws on to tell the story of how and when he chose to act against apartheid, to return, to write opposing the injustice. As he says of Sharpeville: ‘Yes. This is it. Of course. This is what we have really been waiting for… Nothing until that disastrous moment, had demonstrated with such conviction, such abandon, such staggering arrogance’ his country’s ‘total commitment to racism’.

But it is also the everyday brutality, the excess, that Brink identifies with his own upbringing in his country: ‘Violent encounters occur in all societies: but in South Africa there almost invariably appears to have been an added edge to it, a fortuitous surplus of violence.’ He retells the story of a friend and a posse of police, searching for cattle rustlers who had wrecked the friend’s father’s farm, who came across a black farm worker who happened to be walking along the street as the posse reached the height of their anger and frustration. ‘He was shot in both legs and fell down. At point blank range he was then given a shot in the back, which shattered his spine. Then came the supplement, as they fell on him and kicked and beat him to a pulp.’ Back at the police cells, the boy was beaten at intermittent intervals. Miraculously, he survived. Brink’s father, the sitting magistrate on the case when it came to court, found the boy not guilty.

From Paris and the protests of 1968 Brink, drawing on thinkers and writer such as Herbert Marcuse and Ortega y Gasset, identifies the impact of Western consumer lifestyle as the pivot around which protest as resistance has now turned; so that it is no longer only generational, but existential—and is coloured by a wilder, convulsive violence: protest not for revolution but protest that is desperate, its opposition everywhere already institutionalised. As Brink writes, ‘the positive creative influence of the individual hardly exists any longer: throughout his university education the student is required to conform; the labourer no longer has any relation with the product he helps to produce.’ For Brink, this danger, ‘already signalled so clearly by Marx, has become a strangling reality.’

Perhaps predictably, but not any less revelatory for it, the relationship between writing and violence, the self, life and death, permeates the book. Personal and intimate violence has played a formative role in the writer Brink has become. His early relationship with the Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker is typical of this: their tempestuous and self-destructive relationship that lasted for two years across his time in South Africa and Paris, finally ending after Ingrid committed suicide in July 1965, by walking into the sea.

‘Ingrid, who could swim like an angelfish…! Her body,’ says Brink, ‘as she had predicted in poems written since before her sixteenth birthday, and reiterated in any recent letters and telephone calls to friends, diary entries, jottings on old scraps of paper, had been found “washed ashore in weeds and grass”.’ Ingrid Jonker was then a heretic in its original sense, or, as Brink quotes the writer Monique Zerder-Chardovoire to articulate the meaning:

Heresy comes from the Greek word meaning choice: for heresy to exist, there should be an ideology, a faith, to which a community adheres, and inside this community there must also be people who distance themselves, no longer accepting the received truths, in order to choose for themselves.

Ingrid continued to choose for herself, to make her way back to a particular fork in the road which, regardless of all other choices, would continue to exist, would always exist for her, until she, finally, took it. With the detail of Ingrid’s predictions, written in letters, diary entries, jottings on old scraps of paper—wherever she could write her choice for herself—it is clear that Brink’s use of the concept of the fork in the road and the heretic as someone who chooses at that fork, is an architecture which frames the book, not only to aid the reader to think through the relationship between protest and the ideologies of apartheid or capitalism; not only to examine the techniques and life choices of a writer; but also for what Roman Krznaric calls more broadly the ‘art of living’—or in Brink’s words, being: the fork that is taken so that ‘I could never be again as I’d been before’. What Brink’s own story articulates is that against this background of life, living, art, violence, opposition, protest and writing:

…our fork in the road, the traditional either/or is replaced with an incomparably more complex notion of both/and.

Both this life, this death, and… Along all these forks, all these choices, Brink’s life, his writing and his adventure with language, protests strongly against the Western capitalist imposition that our overcrowded world ‘simply no longer has any space left for the individual’ (I wonder what Brink thinks of the book also being released on the Kindle). Through his writing, through the decision to, when faced with a fork in the road, to just ‘take it. What the hell’ Brink has proven himself as both a writer, and an individual.

• 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.

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.)

Except, Scarry argues, in literature, poetry and prose. And prose literature most of all. When we read a novel which invites us to imagine characters, plots, worlds or, as with some of Beckett or Kafka, just boxes, the literature that we remember being moved by will be the literature that is most effective in getting us to imagine things ‘for real’.  That is because, she argues, the imagination is the material with which writers work more so than any other artists. As she says during her reading of Wuthering Heights:

Bronte, and other extraordinary writers, has an unfailingly precise sense of the limits of the compositional powers of the human mind, and by crafting her instructions to match [Scarry refers to the informational composition of literature for the reader to think/feel/imagine ‘this motion, this action’], with strict care, the pictures we can actually make, she achieves, through our trust, the power to carry us beyond them.

How could a painter craft without knowing the powers and limitations of the paint? How could a sculptor not know the attributes of the material to be worked? How could Mozart compose for a musical instrument without knowing what sound that instrument made? Why should it seem odd that literary composition takes into account the nature of the instrument, in this case the imagining mind, on which it will be played: Minuet for the Imaging Mind; Duet for the Mind That Can Do Radiant Ignition Plus Stretching; Sonata in G for a Floral Imaginer (Scarry 2001: 191).

Her argument is that there are certain strategies that a writer employs—such as radiant ignition (using instantly imaginable actions, such as flashes of light or streaks of colour) and floral imagining (using the imagining of flowers or vegetative material as a template for more complex imaginings) and rarity (easily imagined two-dimensional, fragile and feeble images such as mist, fog, ghosts, fabric etc)—because, she argues, they are images in tune with the way mental life already works: that is, in a limited, constrained way, where small, fragile and vague images are most easily imaginable. The most effective writers know this, and draw upon how the mind imagines to first “win our trust” as readers to readily imagine the work’s ‘template’ images; and, having ‘fired us up’, then carries us beyond our own self-directed abilities—as evidenced in our own daydreams, which lack vitality and vivacity—to use these templates to imagine the more complex life of the work.

(And what would Scarry make of the ‘Twilight’ front-covers on new editions of Wuthering Heights?)

Of all the books I took with me on my two-week break (nine books in all; I have a minor panic if I have less than one for every two days–it’s called hyperlexia, and also suffered by people such as blogger A Common Reader, writing and mapping for us, beautifully, among other writers, Flaubert) it was Scarry’s I read first.

Well, actually second, after W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. (And then I read Austerlitz.) Scarry’s is the perfect cheese in the sandwich, so to speak (that ‘so to speak’ is an important tic, by the way, in Austerlitz, which I’ll write about later) for reading Sebald’s works, because he, I believe, is easily added to the writers that Scarry draws upon as extraordinary writers; in fact, is perhaps the writer who pushes Scarry’s arguments to both their toughest test but also their strongest validation.

However, I read Scarry as my first critical work on my holiday because of a conversation with my friend K, over dominoes and red wine, just before heading off for Turkey, about the impact of everyday use of language on the writer’s work. That is, words are our materials for both writing and living, in a way that the sculptor’s marble or the musicians instruments are not. My suggestion was (did I mention it was two bottles of red wine, and quite a competitive game of dominoes?) that because as writers we have to engage with our material at all times in life simply to navigate life, the work of writing is the hardest art of all. There is no respite from the dealings of life as lived by a writer, which is perhaps why, I’m proposing, that while creative artists are eight times more likely to suffer from mental illness than the general public (see Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease or anything by Redfield Jamieson), I bet it is writers such as Sebald, and the writers he writes about, who are most are afflicted by depression, melancholy and despair: in fact, Sebald’s ‘character’ Austerlitz specifically has a breakdown within and around language because of this very fact. More on that later.

Back to Scarry. Scarry then leads her reader through the close analysis of several passages from The Iliad, Wuthering Heights, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, of course Proust, and also Uncle Tom’s Cabin to propose what is, in some respects, a startling assertion, and in other ways a development of Aristotle’s argument for rarity, and more recently, Jonah Lehrer’s argument for reading difficult novels to exercise selective attention in the development of intelligence: that is, great writers such as Homer and Emily Bronte understand how to get their reader to fully stretch the limits of their imagining powers, and as such, most fully ‘experience’ the literature they are reading. In Scarry’s words:

Homer or Tolstoy is giving us a transcription, in verbal form, of the images as they come full-blown into the mind, and in doing so, each encodes the formal properties of those envisioned pictures on the page so that we can reconstruct those pictures. In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication (Scarry 2001: 244).

Scarry’s key vehicle for explaining how these writers do what they do in getting us, the reader, to imagine the life of the work, is motion: how do these writers get us, in our minds, to imagine movement ‘for real’? So, she draws upon Achilles’ chasing Hector three times around the besieged city of Troy (which was not so far away from where I was reading the book: while in Canakkale I stood under the wooden horse used in the 2004 film Troy; although I didn’t visit, opting instead for Ephesus) and on the movement of Cathy and Nellie across the heath in Wuthering Heights. All of these moments in the great works are told with floral imagining, drawing on circles and wheeling (according to cognitive psychology, the most easily imagined of shapes), the handle-ability of objects (the part of the brain that deals with hand-made objects is also the part that deals with motion), rarity (misty moors etc) and radiant ignition (the gleaming shield of Achilles).

And so the interesting question for my research: what step from motion to e-motion in the mental imaginings of a work? It has been posited that it is the same part of the mind used for feeling affect and emotion as it is for when we are prompted to imagine feeling affect and emotion. The same part of the brain is at work when we both feel fear and imagine fear. (This is not my area of expertise at all, and I know it has been debated at length: here’s an intro to literature, feeling and mirror neurons.)

And so, if it is our imagination at work when reading works that ask us—demand of us—to be moved, what role do these templates—flowers, streaks of light, and perhaps most of all, rarity—play in preparing the mind to be moved: that is, to feel the emotion that we are asked to imagine.

My assumption is that, if Scarry is right—or perhaps not ‘right’, but a responsible reader—then these strategies for imagining are central to the ways in which writers and writing—words—get us to feel. That is, they are central to writing emotion. And, for the emotions of uncertainty, indecision, and the feeling of not knowing one’s own feelings, there is something particularly relevant, and worked at in Sebald, regarding these limitations and constraints on imagination that are best overcome through literature that draws on rarity, the vegetative, and radiance.

That is: we imagine the feelings of uncertainty (and the difficult sense of being uncertain even about that uncertainty: a condition perhaps related to alexithymia – take the test here) through an overabundance of these templates and their appearance in the literary work. As Sianne Ngai argues in her book Ugly Feelings, the overwhelming amplification of tone in Melville’s novel The Confidence Man _is_ the means by which tone is defeated; so in Sebald, I argue, the feeling of uncertainty is realised in the reader through the text by the overwhelming ‘rarity’ and compostable, disintegrating nature of the things we are first asked to imagine before being asked to imagine the emotions of uncertainty and indecision. I’ve just picked up John Wylie’s essay ‘The Spectral Geographies of W G Sebald’ which I’ll write about soon.

In general, here in Turkey—in Istanbul; in Cannakale, on the other side of the Dardanelles from the memoriam of Gallipoli; in Selcuk, outside the Roman ruins of Ephesus; and here in Kalkan, on the Western Mediterranean—they have smooth coats. They are ginger, tabby, tortoise shell and mottled. One is black. There are kittens. I bought a pack of cat biscuits to feed the cats around the table in Selcuk, and left some for two tiny ginger kittens; a local, a man perhaps in his late 50s, said in good English: ‘thank you very much’. I asked the waiter, a beefy looking Turk with a tattoo down his left arm and wearing a Fernerbache (‘established 1907’) signet ring, do people like cats here? He said yes. Some inside the house; some outside. They are nervous of humans (the cats, not waiters—not this one, anyway); they are not so desperate; they do not act like Seagulls in St Ives, swooping down on you for your fish and chips. At the apartment where I am staying, a man comes with a large plastic jar full of biscuits that he shakes and rattles, and the cats follow him, out of the gate at the top of the resort complex, and into the scrub just below the road that runs between Kalkan and Kas, 27km further along the coast, and a much larger, more lively resort, with perhaps a moderate number of its own waifs and strays.

That has not stopped the cleverer few, or the cats most longing for attention (not always the one and the same) waiting outside my apartment for their breakfast. At first they watched the steps for life. Then they began to congregate. Then follow. And now, leaving the apartment, they are noble and grumpy at the same time, registering their displeasure at my departure…

The mornings here are quiet. Kalkan is, out of season, quiet (apart from the overrunning government road building works, where the plan seems to be to build roads for the diggers only). There are no water taxis between the resort and the harbour, meaning a walk alongside the road works. There are signs around the resort that look, on first glance, and without any translation problems to confuse the matter further, to suggest ‘Do not run over the cats’. Earlier in the week there was a fundraiser in a local bar for the Kalkan Stray Animals Society (which has its own website, www.kapsa.co.uk – note the .uk denomination, suggesting that this requirement for organised and public charity is a particularly British phenomenon organised by the ex-pats—the Turks don’t need such organisation; they just feed the cats and let them live their streetly lives).

One friend has been sharing with me the wonderful writing of Doris Lessing on cats, which I in turn have been sharing with other cat lovers and owners (one of whom, like myself, has left a cat at home in the capable hands of Furry Friends, our shared pet sitter). We have both expressed guilt at this abandonment. Guilt, and a sense of momentary loss. As Doris says:

A cat gives back what you put into it, returning affection and attention, but withdrawing in dignified silence if ignored. No creature is more sensitive to slights and taunts and even teasing. Too much, and they will take themselves off in search of a more sympathetic home. And yet one may not generalise: people who have had more than one child know that every baby is born different, and similarly, in a litter of kittens each one will be an individual. Like humans they are coarse-grained and sensitive, stupid and clever, clinging and standoffish. They may be talkative and silent, show-offs and modest introverts.

This is, perhaps, why seeing stray cats, and so many of them, and not quite wild enough to fear, is something distressing. Back in Istanbul, and the cats are, or at least it appears, able to look after themselves. (But then one, haggard, limping, half-dead, bruised and cut… I can still see its lingering, antipathetic look at me as I ate a vegetarian lunch: nothing to give him.) Those who observe cats, and, as Lessing says, do not just rely on ‘received wisdom’, know that cats are intelligent, emotional, sentient creatures who feel, and not only feel, but feel in the same way we do.

I have often said that the only difference between ourselves and cats is that the initial affective appraisals of stimuli (the world around us as it is happening now; or as perceived from the past or future) is then, in humans, rationalised through the cognitive appraisal of the cerebral cortex, which we have, and which cats do not: or at least not in the same developed way we do. So although we may speak different languages, I recognise in my cat (and previous cats) the same fears, the same curiosities, the same desire for attention, the same embarrassment at trying and failing (for Simon (the cat), jumping and missing the sofa; for Misha, leaving a ‘present’ in the bath when she feels lonely). I’ve said it, but Lessing says it better (and I’m not the only one to think so):

We share our emotional apparatus with them, though there are those who angrily deny it: but some people like to inflate themselves with superior feelings about other species. Observing cats you see the whole gamut of human emotions – love, affection, antipathies as apparently irrational as some of ours; you see hurt feelings, and jealousy, and that is very strong in cats, they like to come first.

In a separate article, Lessing makes the point further, by drawing on the book by Jeffrey Masson, The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats. As Lessing says,

Masson is reacting against an academic statement that cats are not emotional. The nine chapters are ‘Narcissism’, ‘Love’, ‘Contentment’, ‘Attachment’, ‘Jealousy’, ‘Fear’, ‘Anger’, ‘Curiosity’ and ‘Playfulness’. He is not sentimental: one cat, taken from a refuge, was emotionally damaged by early mishandling and never recovered. One may cavil at the length of his experiment: a year. It may take four years, more, or never for an ill-treated cat to learn trust.

Reading about these animals’ happiness it is hard to think of cats locked out of their homes all day and half the night without food or water ‘because cats like their freedom’: cats locked out all night ‘because cats are night creatures’: cats left locked up all day by people at work; cats lonely, neglected, sad. The cats in this tale are in a different world from your average London mog or any suburban cat: cats in luck, cats de luxe.

I wonder what type of cats the Kalkan strays outside the apartment are—what a feral, wandering life does to such emotional creatures? Or perhaps more precisely, what chastisements they would mete out on those of us who ask such questions; if they would take a well-aimed swipe at me for wasting perfectly good sunny afternoons as this (today – 28 degrees) by sitting inside at a laptop and hammering away at the keyboard about the private life of cats. That in itself is a rather ignominious generalisation on my behalf. It’s a pointless wondering. So I’ll leave the close to Lessing (who has a cat named after her)  who so ably puts it:

My cat Butchkin, otherwise El Magnifico, came up to where I was reading in bed at the top of the house and yowled, and went to the door, came back and yowled, until I followed him down and found a forgotten gas flame beginning to flare on the cooker. Some cats are like this. Some are not.

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.

My part in the project at the moment is to help build the confidence of writers, who may never have worked as journalists, in approaching, engaging with and interviewing/recording the stories of homeless people, or of victims of torture. It’s for a project that will, loosely, be inspired by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which Krznaric in his essay as one of his the examples, along with Gandhi’s autobiography, of a way to learn and experience empathy with the other. Krznaric’s involvement in the Oxford Muse Project also has interesting things to offer this project.

Although I agree with a friend who says Krznaric’s article can read a bit like a mechanic’s guide to empathy, I enjoyed reading this piece and thought I could take some lessons from it. Krznaric writes about his time spent with a homeless/destitute man called Alan Human, who graduated from Oxford and has a background and an academic before his mental health led him to his current situation. The approach Krznaric took with Alan, in preparing a piece for the Oxford Muse Project, took a couple of interesting guidelines I thought I might adopt for my session:

• The conversation was not a one-way interrogation, but a ‘mutual sharing of our approaches to the art of living’
• Transcripts were edited into a portrait of Alan talking about his own life in his own words
• The author Krznaric asked Alan to agree the text before it was finalised

In another section of the article, at dinner parties Krznaric talks about cutting headlines out of papers and putting them in a bowl and then asking people to relate them to an aspect of their life, which gets past the superficial or the need to ‘warm up’ to talking.

So, I thought I would do a couple of things.

1. Get people in pairs to pick a couple of headlines and take the approach of talking about them, relating them to an aspect of their lives – perhaps about destitution, perhaps not, which the other person has to listen to, share, converse with, but ultimately record, write up, and then have the other person edit/agree to the final version, as an exercise in really listening and trying to write from that person’s perspective. This may take about an hour.
2. Get back together as a group to talk about the experience: good learning, things to work on. Take about 20 mins.
3. Work through a couple of tips and techniques for practical interviewing/recording that would then add to the group’s own experiential learning from the exercise about, and hopefully add to their confidence. Take about 20 mins.
4. Set people a challenge they could follow up on: to do the exercise with someone they didn’t know: perhaps someone in a homeless or destitute state; or perhaps someone not in that state, but talking to that person about their views on homelessness and destitution, if that’s an easier step to take for some

I’m hoping to get some feedback on the ideas (any?) but am excited to see how this exercise in journalism and empathy might go forward. Thanks to Roman Krznaric and Alain de Botton for some inspiration and guidance, as well as my friends N for the book, and K and E for helping me shape these ideas.

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.”

So, the cherry. (There is in fact a charity, or campaign, CherryAid, to save the British cherry. Anita Pati wrote about the cherry campaign back in 2008 for the Guardian. There is even a national cherry day, on Saturday July 17th this year.)

This may be something to do with my preoccupations this morning. On another day I could easily consider the key deficit in the modern British lifestyle to be addressed elsewhere in this wide-ranging collection that spans the last two decades. It is almost remiss to think about cherries when there is Jack’s detailed and forceful investigation into the Hatfield train crash and the 1993 Railways Act, essential reading for anyone voting in the next general election.

Why should I here lament the disappearance of the English Black variety when I should be scouring the Internet for a recording of the 1940s contralto Kathleen Ferrier, who I had known nothing about before reading Jack, but who was (perhaps—Jack is never dogmatic) Britain’s greatest ever voice, who came from a coal-town near Blackburn to sing Orpheus in Covent Garden, and who died of cancer at the age of 41? I feel less unsure of myself for wanting nothing more than to loosen the stone from a mottled white cherry (a Nap – ‘Napoleon’) and spit it out, rather than turn to Jack’s shorter and wittier pass de deux on The Little Book of Chavs, for example, or the index of his father’s bookshelf, in which it feels that Jack is less writing an essay than talking you through the family china.

And more: not least his history of The Titanic. This morning, however, it is about Kentish cherries explored through the question, emphasized by the touching stories of fun-had and decisions-made with his children, of “what did I feel that you will not?” What did it feel like, as Jack says, to buy “a pound of them in a brown paper bag, smudged purple with juice at the bottom” and to “eat and eat, and at around lunchtime feel foreboding”?

I have written a little untruthfully here. Jack wrote the above in the past tense: bought, ate, felt. And yet all I have (un)done is Jack’s own sleight: “I write this in the past tense, slightly untruthfully because you can still buy English cherries if you look hard enough, but truthfully enough in the sense that they are rarely available in the places where people buy most food: supermarkets.”

I do not think Jack would be pleased. “The worst tense used in print journalism, in my view, is the present.” He should know, having worked as the most precise of journalists—the sub-editor—on the Sunday Times, and from there a reporter filing copy from India and Sri Lanka (many of the essays are based in the Indian sub-continent, and written with both affection and awe) to editorships at the Independent on Sunday and Granta magazine. Jack’s prose is always truthful, and has the proper journalist’s obsession with observation and accuracy. As he says in an essay on the way his daughter talks in this vivid present: “The past tense is simply the more truthful tense, and in this way it conveys a precision and conviction that the present tense lacks.”

And so this is it, for me, on this morning when we finally see some Spring sun. Of the essays in Jack’s collection, for his discipline in his part-historical study, part-journalistic investigation, part-memoir: of British cinema and his dead brother (‘The Best Picture He Ever Saw’); of the cotton mills and the working class (‘See, the Workers Move!’); or the July 7^th bombings (‘Blitz Spirit’); it is in the essay on the Van, Colney, Sunburst and Lapin (‘Cherries’) where Jack – a Stoic reporter of the contemporary history of Britain – becomes impatient, and changes the present into the past (“the worst tense in journalism”) because that I am putting a world’s food on my porridge instead of eating it plain and waiting for the summer is the best evidence we have of our “troubled nationhood”. Or, to misappropriate Jack’s question about the demise of Kent’s cherry orchards: “What happened?”

What happened, perhaps, is that we British became after the Hatfield crash, like the train under Cary Grant as he kissed Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, a little “unsteady”. The results of Thatcherism were “uneven” leaving many parts of Britain “an unsound country.” The impact of the ‘War on Terror’ when it felled London on July 7^th left Jack and others “unhinged”. And we have become, like the billion feet of film in the British Film Institute’s archive, “inherently unstable.” It, and we, decompose.

I do not want the unstable. I want the solid: the cherry. If I am off to the supermarket farm-store, what should I look for? “The best, not too ripe, had what is now known in the food industry as ‘mouth feel’; a skin firm enough to offer a slight resistance to the bite, then a spurt of juice from the flesh.” A slight resistance, then a spurt of juice from the flesh. None of that in my porridge this morning, but perhaps a good way to think about what it means to be today, after Thatcher, British.

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?

Evidence of the relationship between sadness/depression and creative practice is nothing new. For example, Lehrer also looks at the research of the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, who interviewed 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history.

This is worth quoting at length:

Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

There was something here that chimed with my relationship break-up.  The person was loving, active, tactile, giving, open and honest. But for me there was, amongst the complex of lack and unsteadiness, something going on about her deprecation of sadness, of the dark places, of rumination and thinking, that was not compatible for us. Even as I’m writing this, I know it’s selfish and mawkish. I’m also aware that if writing is a form of thinking, some thoughts are not true; some thoughts are incorrect thoughts. And I’m a little raw and confused. Embarrassed.

But back to the question then: do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?

According to Lehrer quoting Joe Forgas, yes, in at least one sense. Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has “repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations.” And again, to quote:

Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

And writing is a problem. Every day. Creative practice is a problem. Every day. As Lehrer begins his argument, Darwin lost “one day in every three” to depression. In yesterday’s Guardian, an article on the composer Wolfgang Rihm is explicit about this: “Every day I go through the same crisis,” says Rihm. “I sit there and nothing comes. But I win the struggle, because every day, I write. And this crisis refreshes me. But it can be terrible too — I become depressed if no ideas are there. It’s always difficult at the beginning of a piece, where nothing is there, and at the end, when I don’t know how to finish.”

Although this from one of classical music’s most prolific composers. Over 400 pieces. I would be very interested to know how Rihm overcomes these moments of crises. How he makes that first step to overcome resistance.

Creativity coach and writing instructor Roseanne Bane at the University of St Thomas, Minnesota, has also, like Lehrer, turned to neuroscience as a way to understand resistance to the creative writing process, and for tools to overcome those resistances (such as writer’s block and the faces of the saboteur).

Her latest piece, published in the Creative Writing Teaching online journal, argues that understanding the neurology of students in a writing class can aid teaching, and instructors should work on flipping the Reticular Activating System, so that it moves the individual from being controlled by the limbic system (freeze, fight or flight: all manifesting themselves in resistance to writing) to the cerebral cortex, the “learning brain”, which “gives us the ability to solve problems, use language and numbers, create, anticipate the future, motivate ourselves, and reflect on our body and modify our behavior” (Bane quoting Howard Pierce, The Owners Manual for the Brain).

These approaches don’t contradict each other. Freeze/fight/flight resistances aren’t the same as sadness in response to pain or trauma, or more serious depression. But they are interesting to think through ‘beside’ each other, as the sadly missed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests in her book Touching Feeling. Looking at things beside each other eliminates the position of duality or hierarchy, a way of understanding human desire “that might be quite to the side of prohibition and repression, that might hence be structured quite differently from the heroic, ‘liberatory’, inescapably dualistic righteousness of hunting down and attacking prohibition/repression in all its chameleonic guises.” (TF, 10).

In the first essay in Touching Feeling, Kosofsky Sedgwick looks at Henry James, and specifically at the shame-interest (or, as Todd Kashdan might put it, the shame-curiosity) relation. She looks at how the affect of shame and the mode of depression plays a role James’ writing of his novels in a prodigious phase:

To consider interest itself a distinct affect and to posit an association between shame and (the [incomplete] inhibition of) interest makes sense phenomenologically, I think, about depression, and specifically about the depressions out of which James had emerged to write his ‘major novels’–novels that do, indeed, seem to show the effects of a complicated history of disruption and prodigal remediations in the ability to take an interest. (TF, 39-40)

And so what Kosofsky Sedgwick draws our attention to is perhaps the ways in which these theories, ideas and suggestions can perhaps work together in creative practice. The sadness and depression lets James reflect in a focused and critical way upon his writing. And the ability to take an interest again–to turn up the dial, as it were, on curiosity, on interest in his words, his world–that is, to flip, perhaps, from the limbic to the cerebral cortex systems–brought about a prodigious writing period.

James was in Kosofsky Sedgwick’s phrase “reissuing” the collected volumes of his work, which were to receive no praise. Periods of depression did indeed, as Lehrer puts it above, “produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by [his] angst.” but the next sentence in Touching Feeling is a warning: “Into such depressions as well, however, he was again to be plunged.” Every day, the same crisis.

Where does that leave me?

I had thought, originally, that this was a useful concept for my characters, in the novel. That it would be out of times of crisis, times of pain and depression, that the most useful or better decisions in the narrative are made. But what about my practice as a writer? Do I maintain a healthy sadness, do I embrace the crisis? Is it leaving me refreshed every day?

Recently K did my horoscope chart. Uranus conjunct with everything in my 4th house, the place of home. It’s a tricksy energy, Uranus. But she did say she had never seen a chart that shouted so loudly, ‘this person is a writer’. That was some comfort for the equally loud cry–my interpretation, probably somewhat skewed by present events–that ‘this person is not a partner’. The composer Rihm lives in a separate house from his family set-up. I suppose we all need to find what works for us in life. I would like to find this out before the hurt sets in again.

Maybe they are my words peeking in and amplifying their announcements: the way that you notice more peugeots on the road the few weeks after buying one. That is: I am currently unhinged, a little unstable, recognising the ‘unsteadiness’ with which Jack characterises the British.

Anyway, a couple of reviews for me to return to — Jennie Blake’s at BookGeeks, and the Guardian’s own Giles Foden.

And today, a quick google, and Jack is in the Guardian writing about the Falklands — another challenge to understand what we mean when we say the British.

As a writer, Ian Jack is highly recommended. Come and hear him talk, as well, if you can. Weds 10th March in Newcastle at the Centre for the Literary Arts.

How do you write destitution? What approaches can be taken?

1. The personal
My father went missing — from us, perhaps from the rest of the word — about two years ago, following a break-up with his wife, my step-mother, after a final failed bid to kick alcoholism. The interest for me to get involved in the project is somewhere between the impetus to write, and the desire to understand, or even find, the motivations or situations that lead to people being destititute.

2. The thematic
I went into the first meeting of the group thinking about what I could contribute, and what I wanted to write about. I wrote a list, something along the lines of “destitution AND’ (trust/emotion/home/pointing/writing/words). I came out of the meeting thinking that destititution was not my story, and was not – as others in the group also expressed – not something that can be writtena about lightly.

Our group leader, Alan, was adamant on this: it is vital we are careful with people’s stories. Including our own.

3. The journalistic
One woman in the group had worked in a crisis centre in Indonesia for four years, but the stories she heard from some of the project facilitators from partner organisations were too much for her–and her questions was ‘how can we prepare for the stories we are going to hear?’ It was a fair question, and one I wanted to ask the guy from the charity that works with torture victims – how do you prepare for and work with those stories?

One idea is that creative writers could benefit from some journalistic training. Not that journalists are more emotionally balanced–far from it–but that having confidence in the practice of interviewing people can offer some balance in maintaining an emotional grip in those situations.

4. The philosophical
Destitution — to set away from, in etymological terms.There are incredibly complex and broad questions to ask about the nature of destitution–how we recognise the destitute, how we react to them; what we see of the destitute in ourselves. Do we think of the destititute as poets? Or do we see them as geographical markers only — street signatures for the cities we live in (that busker spot, that Big Issue seller). Do we only see the destititute when we want to see the gap between ourselves and that which we set away?

5. The historical
When did we begin to see the homeless as inhuman?

6. The advocating
Part of the project is to respond to and raise awareness of the UK’s asylum processes. Oxfam have a good summary of the difficulties asylum seekers face on arrival in the UK.

How do I want to write about destitution? How can I write about this — can I imagine the numbness at the bottom? ONe member of the group suggested a left/right page split written on the left by the writer and then on the other side by the homeless, destitute or the victim of torture – and yes, what interesting differences there would be.

Rather, then, the question is: what can I offer to the destitute through my writing?