Break On Through To The Other Side

Rascal/sage Gurdjieff’s friend Pogossian never stood still; he was always snapping his fingers and swinging his arms, because he said, the organism was naturally lazy and he needed to keep it accustomed to work. I’m sure most of us recognise this; work is a habit that has to be acquired through repetition, not just in writing Fiction Books but even in simply reading them.

How often have I passed over a more challenging tome, letting my fingers grasp instead something that I know will slip down so much more easily? We all get tired, but to return to Gurdjieff, we too easily forget what lies on the other side of tiredness; if we make what he called ‘super effort’, then a second wind arrives and we break through to what seems almost another state of being. This is surely every bit as true of intellectual effort as any other. A little more mental exertion and we taste delights that the shallower waters of literature cannot afford. (A little further exertion and we may even achieve the blessed state of non-mixed metaphorishness…)

Critic Harold Bloom is one of the most outspoken champions of this: ‘all strong poetry is difficult’ he says, and he also proselytises on behalf of Finnegan’s Wake. I have my doubts (see previous Fiction Books post, ‘Versus Verse’) but deep down I know he’s right. Not necessarily, specifically, about the Wake (not for all of us, anyway), but about strength and pleasure. ‘We read to enlarge a solitary existence’ is another of his tenets, and I know without question that the long struggle I had with Shakespeare was more than worthwhile and has greatly enlarged this existence (though perhaps not as fundamentally as the Bloomster might claim). No matter how seductive the superlative comic art of Gene Colan can be, the words it supports will not bear more than the most superficial scrutiny. If we want the rewards, the enrichment of the heart and mind and soul that is almost like being in love (to coin a phrase), we must challenge ourselves.

I wonder if this only follows the pattern of the universe as a whole. Creation, the Advaitic tradition says, is only God hiding from Himself – because without the effort involved in seeing through the illusion of the material world, all that Doing that needs to be done, He cannot really appreciate what it is to simply Be. (Please excuse masculine gender used for simplicity's sake!)It is obviously true that effort makes us appreciate things (except that I would be happier to find £20 floating down the street than to have worked for it – I wonder what that might say about money?); the best literature, the ‘hardest’ literature, may go one better and make us appreciate everything - remind us what it is to be alive.

Now, where did I put that Essential Fantastic Four...?

Make it count

Writing is a luxury. Reading is a luxury. Curious things for a writer to say? Stories may go back to the Palaeolithic campfires, but when they were told then the day’s work was done; any crisis was past. That is no longer the case. A tragedy or a triumph, if it is of sufficient magnitude, is all around the world in minutes. Famine, disease, crime, war: we know, we can see, that these things afflict real living people every moment of every day. And this is without even mentioning that the ecosystem is in a state of potentially disastrous flux. Everywhere there is suffering, every week brings a new crisis.

And we sit and write, we lounge and read. Is there anything we can say to ourselves that justifies such self-indulgence, such apparently wilful negligence of real problems?

I don’t know the answer to that. I have 1700 books in one room, more than I can ever read in the time I have left to live—if I want to actually live as well. Averaging out their value, every single one of those books could provide money to save a human life, somewhere in the world. (Let’s not even go near the DVD box sets…) How can I even hesitate, if I can pick up a collected volume of comics and know that it’s worth four or five human lives?

Stories are part of our human makeup, it could be retorted; literature is a treasury of the human spirit, a repository of inspirational dreams and salutary nightmares. We require myths, ancient and modern, in order to better understand the world and ourselves. We need fiction: even the lightest, most superficial works provide relief from the harpies and furies of the world, giving our hearts and minds essential rest before we plunge back in. And writers need to nourish their work; we need the stories of others to stoke the fires of our own inspiration. Fiction Books

Perhaps this is the crux. I look around at the books I have collected and know that at the time each one seemed essential, served a purpose, if only for some tangential aspect of research. If I am to justify these acquisitions, it must be through the work that they support. In an age when people starve almost literally in front of my eyes, if I can break away from my desk to get a biscuit, I had better be fucking certain that what I write when I come back to that desk (too busy usually to even attend properly to the taste of the food) is worth the effort. Dig deep, mine the very depths of your experience and your imagination, write true, make it good—make it count.

Raymond Chandler said we’re competing for beer money, so we have a duty to make our work gripping, entertaining. If we write with our eye on everything the world is, everything about it that demands our attention, we have a duty to do much, much more.

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