Category Archives: life

Weeding and the meaning of life

04 Monday Oct 2010

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I was thinking on the weekend, it’s definitely easier to believe in a benevolent world on a sunny spring day. But just a few clouds, an overcast day – well, the world looks different. I get prone to a certain kind of ennui.

I pulled out some weeds on the weekend. This is becoming a more common occurence. I was once very resistant to pulling out weeds. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a 3 acre property, with probably nearly an acre devoted to well-tended gardens that seemed to consume my parents’ entire weekends. I didn’t want to become like that. But now I see houses with no garden and I think they’re ugly, depressing. I have begun to see why people spend time in gardens.

One of the problems was that there seemed to be nothing to do in gardens except gardening. As much as we put out chairs and tables in gardens, very few people just enjoy their garden. I certainly have trouble doing so.  If only I could sit still outside and read a book! But I’m very bad at this; never comfortable.

Another problem was my tendency – starting in childhood – to divide the world and its tasks into ‘meaningful’ and ‘unmeaningful’. Anything which was repetitive, like pulling out weeds which would grow back, tended to be put into the ‘unmeaningful’ basket. Never mind that everything in life really fits that basket. No wonder I had such unrealistic expectations of life I have spent my twenties disabusing myself of.

Kathleen Norris writes incisively of making one’s bed as an act of hospitality to yourself in Acedia and Me.  I now believe this in theory, though I still have trouble doing it. I’ve always had troubles with routines. I think one thing I’m learning to accept in life is routines. I’m learning to see them as usually necessary and sometimes good. Yet they lull me into my my boring self, that’s what I fear.

Because too often in recent years, people see the wrong side of me, or they see something that’s really only a part of me. Me in safe mode, a librarian not wanting to stand out for the wrong reasons. The struggle between standing out and not standing out. (This has something to do with the stalemate between 1 and 4 in my personality on the Enneagram, not that I’ve really looked into it.) I have come to detest in myself and others acts designed to stand out for their own sake, without substance, attempts to get attention. It’s easy to offend, especially if you dull your empathy with the roar of righteous indignation or ambition.  These days, I’ve resolved to only offend or stand out when I really have to.

Fear of offending has made me so careful what I write on my blogs. Oh, the things I used to write on those blogs which a failed server in the USA obliterated! Perhaps they have grown in my memory. But I was fearless, reckless, ready to tell everything to everyone. Perhaps this post marks the return of getting personal, as inoffensively as a gentle truthfulness allows.

[Thursday 3pm #5] Message in a bottle : a letter found in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

30 Thursday Apr 2009

Posted by in found objects, life, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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In 2002, when I borrowed Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being from Murdoch University library (it is in South Wing Level 2, if you wish to borrow it yourself) there was a beautiful postscript to a letter tucked between the pages midway through.

It is unfinished; instead of sending it, the writer cast it out into the world, like a message in a bottle. She thought the next reader of Unbearable Lightness would be the appropriate reader, as I hope the readers of this blog are appropriate readers too. It is written on a postcard size piece of white card in black pen printing, small and crowded. This is what it says.

[front]
Hey again babe, I know I finished the letter (supposedly) but I went looking through my box for rafeta & found all my old letters from my friends – like years + years back & now I’m feeling a little fucked. I lost most of my friends somewhere along the way y’know – there’s so much love in all those letters +I have nothing like that now. I don’t know what happened. It’s kind of like everyone’s made their own life now – like I did, but now mine’s all changed + I need their support but they’re all too busy. And I feel terrible because I know if you were here I’d be fine but you’re not and my friends don’t seem to care about how
lonely I must be. And I am. So lonely. It must really suck for all those people, like thirty years old, who have nothing. Sitting at home watching the Simpsons (like me – I love the Simpsons – they’re the greatest television show I swear – the reason it was invented – fuck ed o’ sullivan its moe + monty burns) but yeah the people who are alone that must bite. At least when I’m alone I can think of my friends & you. At least my biological clocks not ticking (yet, heh heh) oh I just made dinner + grated my finger. again. but with a big shredding grater so it took of this whole layer. And hurts. the bloods soaking through the band-aid but the food’s good.
but back to missing you. I do.. do you miss me? like really? It may just be how I’m feeling at the moment
(actually I know it is) but sometimes I get the

[back]
feeling you don’t really. or not as much as I want you to. anyway. Am I being foolish trying to push on you something that doesn’t exist? not really anyway. I’ve no doubt you want to love, to love and be loved, you seem so much like you want to be in a long type relationship but do you with me? like honestly? honestly. I need to know. I feel like I’m just reaping the benefits of you wanting to have someone. I fit the bill after all. of being someone.

Why didn’t she finish the postscript? Why didn’t she give it? Did she start again and give him another? What did the first letter say? What’s changed in her life? Is her lover far away?

It starts off calmly. Sadly, but thoughtfully – I think she was writing it slowly. Yet with my knowledge of what is to come, I picture her straining to avoid mentioning the doubts and fears and hurts about her lover that are actually at the forefront of her mind. The first seventeen lines (until the ‘do you miss me?’) scream about what they do not say, rather than what they do say.

Yet from then she drops the pretense. (I’m saying this because this is what I’ve known in my own life – the unexpected phonecall which tries to be polite, which insists it’s about nothing in particular, and then suddenly explodes at some flashpoint; the brooding silence insisting it is not brooding which suddenly turns to accusation; I have done these things and had them done to me.) What had not been said is now said!

And then at this climax, at this point of intensity – it ends! What a poignant line – ‘I fit the bill after all. of being someone.’

I hope, all these years later, you’ve found the right person. I hope you still watch the Simpsons. I’m glad you left the letter in the book. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever found, a window into a stranger’s heart.

Why do I like Paul Auster’s Moon Palace so much?

09 Thursday Apr 2009

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(This is not the eagerly anticipated 3pm weekly post, but something I wrote in January and meant to turn into a long long piece before publishing. Think of it as your pre 3pm entree, but don’t get put off because it probably will mean little unless you’ve read any of Auster.)

The youthful quest for identity and meaning is literalised into the quest for survival and in doing so perhaps it resonates with my own romantic visions of being young and feeling alone in the world. The threat of starvation, living in a cave in Central Park, surviving by selling off secondhand books, the determination to do nothing all to save oneself – all exaggerated literalisations of my own early twenties, of being a student and then being unemployed for a time.

In relying on co-incidences as a major plot device and drawing meaning from parallels and intersections, Moon Palace seems to offer a fresh way of making sense of the world. Every narrative reduces the complexity of the world to a narrative logic of some order and coherence, but it’s the freshness of Auster which shines so brightly in this novel. Life seems full of the leaps and co-incidences and intersections out of which M.S. Fogg makes sense of life.

I love the way M.S. and Effing both give life meaning by setting themselves crazy projects. M.S. reading every book of Uncle Victor’s and in this way paying tribute to Victor’s life. Effing giving away to strangers the stolen money he found decades earlier. M.S. and Sol setting out to find the cave Effing hid in. I think reading this and echoes in other Auster’s works gave me a similar tendency from 2001 onwards.

On turning 28: a ramble

05 Thursday Mar 2009

Posted by in film review, life

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She calls me the Birthday Nazi because I always expect too much of birthdays. I remember when I was seven I thought it so unfair that a girl called Courtney got made to write lines on her birthday. We should be immune from getting into trouble on our birthdays. Our spouses should have unlimited patience. Our bosses should show inexhaustible generosity. The cars on the road should slow down and let us through.

I have a tradition of seeing films on my birthday. I haven’t done it every year and nor can I remember each one. But I can remember most of them. In 1999, it was Shakespeare in Love. In 2000, American Beauty for the second time. (How appropriate, then, that this year I’m going to see Sam Mendes’ latest film.) In 2002, Iris. In 2003, perhaps it was at the Adelaide Nova Cinema, the one about the nurse who believes the comatose patient loves him and he rapes her. Two birthdays in Adelaide – 2008, I was at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival for my birthday and saw (in the absence of much choice) Valley of Elah. 2006, Capote. 2007, anomalously on video at home, Kiss or Kill.

For years now I’ve felt so old. I guess I am pessimistic about the chances of my thirties being nearly as fun as my twenties. So much responsibility. How can I embrace responsibility? What are its rewards? I thought responsibility would make me feel authentic. It does not. (And I fear responsibility is a code word for compromise with the world. Perhaps the real problem is I still have the values of a 22 year old dissident while living the life of an old married man.)

Death used to be so far away, such a remote possibility. But the last few years it’s come to live in my soul, something near, whispering its certainty all day. I cultivate it, I was checking the recent deaths page on Wikipedia every day for a while. I’ve stopped doing that. I only check it a couple of times a month now.

The real skull

28 Friday Nov 2008

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I was disturbed  after reading how musician Andre Tchaikowsky’s skull was used in the latest production of Hamlet. Perhaps more than anything it is seeing a photo of the skull as well as a photo of Andre himself on his website. And pondering the terrible process whereby one becomes the other. Remembering what lies ahead for all of us. The terrible fact, the terrible remainder of bones. And what did they do with his head as they waited for it to become just a skull? One shouldn’t ponder these things.

Don’t be like Donna Tartt

23 Thursday Oct 2008

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In 2004 when my first novel was published, a librarian I worked with said, “Just don’t be like Donna Tartt who took ten years to write her second.”

Donna Tartt, the New York author, who debuted with the brilliant The Secret History in 1992 and didn’t publish The Little Friend until 2002.

I might have laughed at the time, but this has been a fear which has animated me ever since. The fear that I could become one of those writers who just did not follow through.

Fear is a terrible motivation for a writer. And a little fame is a terrible thing too. It’s so easy to become sidetracked from the noble reasons to write and covet the spotlight, the spotlight which shifts away so suddenly. (I had attention for about fifteen months after The Fur, and then very little.)

So that is some of the backstory for the six years I’ve wrestled with my second novel. (I started in 2002 before The Fur was published.) House of Zealots has gone on and on and on through nine rewrites. (My poor long suffering wife.)

But this week I sent it off. It’s highly possible it will come back again, but for the moment, it’s in the publisher’s court. And despite all the sidetracks and times of wrong motivation and stress about not getting enough time to write, I think it’s finally come out okay. I’m just embarrassed I was showing people the first draft four years ago, when it wasn’t okay. 😦

Forgive them for they do not know what literary fiction is

21 Tuesday Oct 2008

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A common question people ask when I tell them I write novels is, ‘What genre?’. Okay, so maybe they don’t use the word genre, but that’s often the gist of the second question. (Sometimes people ask what a novel is, but not every time, or even half the time. But way too many times.)

I usually tell them ‘literary fiction’, but I’m beginning to think that hardly anyone knows what I mean. ‘Like fantasy?’ someone said today.

I don’t mind calling literary fiction a genre. When I was a science fiction nut at sixteen and seventeen, I remember reading an impassioned article in Aurealis, perhaps by Van Ikin, about how literary fiction is just as generic as science fiction. The literary stories he analysed had a number of common features – a journey, introspection, the suggestion of illicit sex and some other things I can’t remember. Maybe not true of everything published as ‘literary fiction’, but the argument has validity.

What I can’t do is explain easily to people what literary fiction is without sounding elitist.

‘It’s a type of fiction which pushes boundaries… it could be about anything… but it explores the experience and meaning of life… often… sometimes… it’s read by highbrow people with English degrees… or just people with better taste… oh dear, I didn’t actually mean that…’

Because let’s face it, us literary fiction readers do look down on the rest of you. At least a little. Sorry.

Anyway, I feel this gulf between me and people who have no clue what literary fiction is. I guess it’s the problem everyone faces who has gone deeper into their field. I mean, I’m not going to appreciate the finer points of distinction between different types of motorbike racing or knitting, am I?

The reckless pessimism of youth

08 Wednesday Oct 2008

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Two quotes I’ve come across in recent weeks sum up something I’ve been trying to capture about youth in House of Zealots. It’s a particular sense of aliveness I thought all of life would have, but which I now fear dries up. I was writing about something I was experiencing when I started the book in 2002, but now I have to look back and write about it from a distance. Ian McEwan said this in an interview on the Book Show regarding the difference between his early writing and mature writing:

I was young, reckless, I had a kind of reckless pessimism which I think you can afford first of all when you’re young and before you’ve had children. You don’t care what happens to the world, you just want to stir it up. You don’t mind a revolution. I wouldn’t even have minded much a nuclear war. I really wanted things to shake up.

He’s exactly right; it’s how I felt for a time. Anything to make a dent in the world. It’s what Leo in House of Zealots wants to do.

And there’s a slightly different mood, but a related one, that Don DeLillo beautifully describes at the end of Underworld:

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did thing slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Nick, the character talking, becomes a middle-class, middle-aged man with sadness in his heart, but none of the anger, the readiness and the danger. In a sense the novel is an archaeological dig, taking us back from his present self to the youth that lay behind, as the chapters go circuitously backward in time. How did the boy who shot a man become a manager of a waste disposal company? How do any of us who once were young become what we are now?

Slow stories: the discipline of writing for print journals

29 Tuesday Jul 2008

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For the first time in six years, I’ve had a short story accepted for publication. It’s called ‘A week in the Library of Babel’ and will appear in Studio: a journal of christians writing sometime next year.

When I started concentrating on novels, I stopped writing short stories and stopped submitting them. But there was something sustaining about the constant submissions, the rejects and the occasional thrill of an acceptance. It’s a long process, but still a much shorter cycle than spending several years on a novel and then casting it out on the waters.

The other factor in the decline of submitting shorter work was that I started blogging in 2003. Suddenly I could get fifty visitors a day and instant feedback. (It’s less common to get feedback from a piece in a journal; it goes out and you might never know what it does to people, which is really what happens for most writing.)

But perfecting a piece for print publication is a good discipline, further removed from the demands of right now which blogging often puts on me.

I think I might be doing some more submitting and focus some more on shorter pieces. But I have to finish with the confession that ‘A week in the Library of Babel’ is but a self-contained piece from a novel I started last year. (And for the record, the last story I had accepted was ‘Across the River’, an extract from The Fur, for Voiceworks in 2002!)

A penchant for dissatisfaction and Lionel Shriver’s brilliance

01 Tuesday Jul 2008

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I will need to elaborate on Lionel Shriver’s brilliance at some time. She’s about the most quotable writer I’ve ever read. After being very impressed by We need to talk about Kevin, Post-birthday world has lines on almost every page that I feel like writing down. She has this acute insight into the details of life, and it’s this which can truly set a writer apart.

Not just the details either – an ability to observe and describe emotional states. To see what we all experience but don’t realise.

A couple of weeks ago she wrote an excellent column about her father for the Guardian where she talks of their mutual penchant for dissatisfaction – ‘great when you’re young; at 80, it’s self-destructive’. How true. How disturbing. (Maybe it’s half my problem. I need to get over the dissatisfaction that drove me through my teens and early twenties. Because IT DOESN’T WORK when you hit late twenties.)

I wonder how her father feels about her writing so candidly about him while he’s still alive. Ten years ago I would have written with this openness. Maybe even five years ago. But I’ve become much more guarded the last few years.

I don’t think she’s candid out of naivety, like I was. I genuinely thought that if I was open and honest to the world, they’d repay me with my kindness. Then I met some formidable people who taught me otherwise.

I’m fascinated by Lionel Shriver’s father because he’s a theology scholar. One of these few places where my polarity of interests – theology and literature – meet, besides in me.