The Spoons That Are My Ears!

Nina Allan has tagged me in the latest literary meme that is going around; and I am pleased because it’s a quirky yet intriguing meme and Nina is an excellent writer with exhilarating ideas and an extremely polished prose style. Indeed she is one of the most accomplished speculative fiction authors to have emerged in recent years and I highly recommend her story collection A Thread of Truth as one of the best books Eibonvale Press has issued.

So here are three things that I don’t write about... Any contradictions noted in anything I say are there because I am full of contradictions and don’t know how not to be. If there are no contradictions despite having said this, that only goes to show how contradictory I am.

Characters
I am sometimes criticised for not putting believable ‘characters’ into my work, for not seeming to care about the people who inhabit my stories. It was said to me a long time ago that my protagonists are only there in order to have things happen to them. This is utterly true. In fact, there are only two real characters in my stories: (a) the author, (b) the reader. And the text itself is a chessboard placed between us. The quasi-characters who appear in the text, the sequences of words on a page that are supposed to be regarded as sentient beings, are chess pieces and the entire reading experience is a game. This is overstating it somewhat, but I feel it is more basically true than any claim that I am trying to penetrate and represent the manifold complex psychological truths of human beings through fiction. I leave such tasks to others. That is not the purpose of my writing. For a start, I have doubts about the validity of the ‘empathy’ that a reader can feel for a fictional character. I have spoken about this elsewhere. I know what I do well and what I do badly. I do conventional characterisation badly and so avoid it. My ‘characters’ are ideas, conceits, connections, whether concrete or abstract, possible or impossible.

Insincerity
The truth is an ideal we are told to strive for, but it is a dark ideal. The truth hurts. Truth is the only tyrant in the service of which no collective guilt need be felt when individuals are disheartened or even destroyed by its workings. The truth is cruel. Thankfully, such remorseless and pitiless telling of the truth is still unacceptable in society. It can’t be tolerated, nor should this devastating weapon ever fall into the wrong hands, and all hands are wrong to wield it. Our hands certainly are not the right ones. That is the truth. But that’s for everyday life. In fiction the situation ought to be different. A writer should be allowed to tell the truth in the arena of the made up story because that is a place where it can’t do total damage and is confined inside the tiered walls of the prose, on which the readers are sat with their thumbs at the ready. The point of fiction is to be rigorously and unapologetically true, to spill the whistle and blow the beans on our motivations, desires, actions, justifications. To tell unpalatable truths. This is why writers like Bataille, Céline and Houellebecq are important. They don’t pretend to be nice; they don’t pretend that we, their readers, are good people. Because, frankly, we aren’t. No human being is good. It simply isn’t possible. We are selfish, acquisitive, aggressive. Unfortunately, too many writers are insincere in this regard. They constantly glance back over their shoulders while they write to see who might be looking, and they tailor their prose in order to flatter that audience. I can’t bring myself to write this way, not even for the sake of greater commercial success.

Love
There are several levels of love and some are pure and others far less so; but taken as a whole, love is the one quality that redeems humankind, our best and only hope in this whirlpool of absurdity called Reality, the only chance we have for justifying our existence in the universe to some hypothetical ultimate judge. Even more than mathematics, it is humanity’s highest achievement, and is common to all of us, at least in potential. Not everyone can solve a quadratic equation and it was never really intended that we should be able to; but the capacity to love is the motor of our shared destiny. The motor breaks down often but it is there. And yet I don’t write about love. Because I can’t do it justice. It is a theme, a miracle, beyond me and possibly beyond most or all writers and artists of any kind. I was once asked by someone I was in love with if I had ever written a love story. My answer was no, I hadn’t, but I treated the question as a challenge and I wrote one for her. Just words, a few pictures, a story; a transient way of calming my inner turmoil by using its energy to create something outside that imperfectly mirrors the inside. The relief it provided was brief, as I knew it would be. I wish it had been a product of unconditional love, the motor that runs forever, a form of perpetual motion. But no such luck. It was category one, erotic love. Oh dear.

And now three things that I do write about, equally rife with contradictions:

Paradox
I am utterly obsessed with paradoxes. I collect them, think about them, create variations of established ones and even attempt to devise brand new ones. I have loved paradoxes ever since I saw a reproduction of M.C Escher’s ‘Waterfall’ in a children’s book when I was small. I was flabbergasted. At that exact moment, I realised that a purely cerebral object can have a profound emotional impact. I adore paradoxes of all gradations, from free and easy to formal and precise. My stories are full of paradoxical situations and I don’t think I have ever written a work of fiction that doesn’t relate to a paradox in some way. Here is just one example, a story I wrote a couple of months ago. There are hundreds of others. Paradox is the child of Logic, but I am acutely aware that what many people mean when they say ‘logic’ isn’t always quite the same as what it actually is. That’s fine. The everyday meaning of the word is connected with empirical causation, the way things in the real world behave, but logic is actually only the manipulation of symbols and those symbols can stand for anything, so even if they are nonsensical, the logic will still work logically. I frequently use the logic of word association rather than the logic of everyday cause and effect, a method that guarantees the story will veer in unexpected directions. This is especially true of my new book, The Lunar Tickle, which is filled with tightly controlled wordplay in which the entire dynamic dances to the music of the prose and the subsequent logical outcomes are all lateral to each other.

Irony
The art of irony is the art of saying things on more than one level at the same time. All too frequently it is confused with sarcasm, with meaning the opposite of what is said. It is more subtle and useful than that. There are in fact two categories of irony and they are radically different from each other. This is a truth that is often overlooked. Negative irony is exclusive, it appeals only to those few who understand that irony is being employed. The more ironic the treatment in this mode, the more exclusive the result. Eventually such irony succeeds in being so ironic that only the ironist understands that there is any irony at all. It is exclusive to the point of isolation. The final step is to be ironic about irony itself. This is self-negating. The negative ironist vanishes into a singularity. Positive irony, on the other hand, is inclusive. It admits that we are all in the same universe-boat together, that none of us actually has the answer, try though we might to pretend we do, and that we need to help each other in our explorations of Time and Life. One of the best positive ironic tools at the disposal of a writer is metafiction, fiction aware that it is fiction. The rules that govern the way the rules are used; this is something that has long fascinated me. The most characteristic writing of my favourite author, Italo Calvino, was once described as holding a mirror up to life and then writing about the mirror. It is a noble endeavour and I wish to emulate him.

Journeys
To move from here to there, or from there to somewhere else, or even from somewhere else back to here. Journeys. I have written a fair few stories that aren’t journeys, but they tend to be inferior to those that are, at least in my own opinion. I have a fondness for the picaresque style of tale telling that is so deep and abiding that I would give up writing altogether if forbidden to employ it. I am a Don Quixote with a pen instead of a lance and one who tilts at pages in order to mimic the meanderings of that knight, though of course I rarely use a pen these days, but how does one joust with a keyboard? The picaresque means freedom to me, escape from the confines of the narrow walls of despair. With a very few exceptions, my protagonists, such as they exist, which as I suggested earlier is not at all, are variations on, detached shadows of, tributes to Quixote, Candide, Lemuel Pitkin, Cugel the Clever. The weaving of threads, the snaking of rivers, the rising and falling of melodies... Even explaining what a journey is requires a journey, a voyage of words, the growing upwards and outwards of the persuasion that lives in those words in the same way that fully grown trees live inside seeds, as potentials of massive strength. My ultimate dream is to write a very long novel that will be an immense journey through both time and space, a saga spanning seven thousand years generation by generation. This book has a title and a vague outline, has had these for many years, but so far nothing else. It is a long journey to the start of that journey.

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So now... It is time for me to tag the next writers in turn. I have chosen to tag Don Webb, an interesting fellow, half wizard, half absurdist, half darksmith, half visionary; and if these four halves add up to two wholes, and these two holes turn out to be the nostrils of the proboscis of knowledge (the one knows that can’t be blown) then this only serves to highlight the duality of the man. He is his own dark and light twin. Check out his work, if you haven’t already.

And I have tagged Brendan Connell, because I can’t imagine a situation where I wouldn’t tag him. He is eminently taggable in such games of memes. He is in fact nonuntaggable, a word I just coined but which looks like the name of the sort of land Gulliver might have ended up in after Swift ceased to chronicle his adventures (let’s not forget that Karinthy and Szathmári took over this task). To tag Brendan is an essential, an inevitable.

And I have also chosen to tag Ariana Aragão, the beautiful poet from Portugal who creates poems that are delicate but strong, bittersweet and yet uplifting, tinged with melancholy but also life affirming.

And I have also tagged Ruby Madden, who is an author I had never heard of before yesterday. So why have I tagged her? It was done at the suggestion of A.A. Attanasio, one of the nicest, politest and most decent human beings in the speculative fiction business.

I have been very lackadaisical at updating my blog recently. I have so many things to do and I haven't been doing them. These things-to-be-done generally have deadlines and I know about them long in advance. It's nice, however, when something that isn't expected happens, something spontaneous that gives one the impression of taking a sudden detour and passing a few unplanned hours in new and invigorating surroundings before the detour joins up again with the intended path and the schematicized trudge of normality is resumed.

Amy Sharrocks is an artist and film maker. I had never heard of her before last week: now I am a fan. I had a phone call from a friend, "Would you like to fall fully clothed into the sea as part of an art project?" Yes, that seemed like a good idea on a sunny day. I hurried down to the rendezvous location. The random group who had volunteered for this quirky baptism were already mostly gathered. Together we went down to the beach and walked into the sea holding hands. But this is Wales: disorganization is an essential part of our function. The line refused to be straight but wriggled like a sidewinder snake towards the surf.

The phrase 'thin red line' comes from an incident in the Crimean War, when the 93rd Highland Regiment held back the Russian cavalry at the Battle of Balaklava. The line of scarlet jacketed soldiers refused to break or bend. In truth it was two men deep. Our own line wasn't at all like that; the taste of fear was considerably less, but it was indisputably there. I am a weak swimmer and for this project we were all required to fall into the sea. Not jump or dive, but do a flat-as-an-ironing-board collapse in the style of the silent slapstick comedians.

As it happened, Amy went first and set the standard, the tension broke, and the plunge turned out to be delightful.I was asked afterwards what "falling" means to me. I know that the idea is to embrace the concept of letting go, to relinquish control, to abandon temporarily the petty human illusion that we can influence the bigger picture of our lives by exerting detailed dominance over the small things. It is a Zen ideal at odds with the way most of us actually exist and operate on planet Earth. I keep my collection of books in chronological order. Therefore the world outside will be a little more ordered and comprehensible for me. That is the fallacy of sympathetic magic.

But I am a climber, so falling is something I try my hardest to avoid and something I regard with dread. I can't abandon control in this regard so easily. It's too catastrophic a concept. There are, of course, less literal and more desirable ways we can fall: we speak of falling in love, for instance, with the implication that there is no choice available in the matter. It's a curious fact that most of the great peaks of the world were first climbed by mountaineers who had recently come painfully out of relationships. Having fallen in love and landed with a big emotional splat they now had learned successfully not to fall again.

(All photos courtesy of Swansea Museum)

These days I don't talk about politics much on my blog, or religion, or even mention much about my personal life. It's nearly all books, books and more books. However, in less than one week, the European Elections are taking place, an event that usually slips past the awareness of most people (including myself) like a Teflon-hoofed centaur on a very steep slide made slick with extra virgin olive oil. These European Elections aren't going to be like others. They are a test to see how xenophobic our country has become.

Anyway... Some reasons why I won't be voting UKIP:

(1) Disengaging from the EU will ruin our economy,
(2) Their environmental policy is wrong,
(3) They have no experience and are not a real party,
(4) They are in close alliance with numerous distasteful extremist parties in other European countries. I'm not saying you can always judge a person or set of people by the company they keep... but it's a fair guide,
(5) It has been infiltrated by BNP members and other nutters,
(6) UKIP councillors and spokespeople seem bizarrely thin-skinned, almost to the point of pansy-ism and this doesn't augur well for the future,
(7) Some of my best friends are foreign, so I certainly have little time for a party that wants to remove these people from my life. In fact the mere suggestion makes me very aggressively defensive and I don't like feeling that way,
(8) The very very very very very very annoying dismal hack Tony Parsons intends to vote UKIP. Does he regard Farage as a replacement for his lost love, the helium-voiced designer-lesbian Julie Burchill? What Parsons does, I can't possibly consider doing. All his opinions about everything have always been erroneous.

All these reasons are important to me, but #7 is the main one because it's personal.

The strictly limited and uniquely personalised copies of The Lunar Tickle have now mostly been made and are on their way to the people who ordered them. This one belongs to Jason E. Rolfe, who also happens to be a character in my forthcoming novel Captains Stupendous... There is exactly one place left if anyone else is interested in becoming the main character of this book.

Talking about moons, here is a flash fiction on the particular theme that one can find, if one so wishes, in my Flash in the Pantheon book... It is called 'Geronimo'. Ready? "Three college girls were baring their behinds out of the dormitory window on the night my parachute jump went wrong. And they say the moon landings were faked?"