Confession: I made it halfway through Nanowrimo...

...but I won't finish.

Silver lining: that's 17 more days than last year and at least as many words as I wrote for my real novel in three years (if I had been writing at the same pace for three years, I would have churned out close to 500 000 words, which is 10 novels - let's factor in redrafting and editing time, at the same rate, and that's five novels, which is four more than I currently have (counting together the two halves of two different novels). This maths looks wrong.

Wait! I was missing a 0. 50 novels! Shoowee.

Anyway, it looks like I'm going to break this brick wall before I break my head - not logically possible, granted, but metaphorically: suspension of disbelief. And physical logic. Maybe I'm Gulliver and the brick wall is really small. But why would I use my head rather than my foot? Or a tractor. Or a bulldozer. Maybe it's a brick wall in my novel, in which case I can just write it broken.

Just go with it.

Brave New World

Writing a review of a book that I finished reading five minutes ago seems like a violation, a desecration, blasphemous (and on and on goes the pseudo-religious rhetoric). But I need to sort my thoughts and I can only do this with words. I have just put down Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I had expected something more shocking, something more like Do Androids Dream... or The Dispossessed, something that twists and turns, and beats you into an interpretation. But some of the power of this book is in its subtlety, the extent to which you buy into this society that buys into itself, its insidiousness. A less shocking consideration of the nature of happiness, and therefore being, and of free will.

Yet, at the same time, it posits two extremes, as all good moral dilemmas do, superficially forcing you into one of the camps. This reminds me of the lasting effect of your relationship with your parents: you either choose to inhabit their values or react against them (there's a private joke in this). As much as you may promise yourself otherwise, you have little psychological free will - you are the manifestation of the small violences of your unconscious.

And I have proof.

To continue, below the superficial manipulations and because of its insidiousness, the novel asks you questions about society in general and (your role as) the individual within it (insert the above again here). It is its own proof (not mine - mine is not imaginary, although on second thought in a sense it is). Who are you? What is your responsibility to yourself? To the collective?

The final scene (without giving anything away - don't worry, I would never deprive you of the joy of your first reading of a good book) is the only possible one. Even had the physical reality been different, emotionally it would have remained the same. Does this undermine the questions of the rest of the novel? Question upon question, some turning in on themselves, others content to bite their own tails. And hear I desperately want to make an allusion to the ending of another book but won't. Just know my lips are quivering with the impulse.

There is a sequel: Brave New World Revisited. Will it set up a 'No trespassing' sign in front of the winding paths of its ancestor (another private joke)? Will it wear away new paths (how?)? Will it stand on the shoulders of this novel to see further or will it cut this giant off at the knees? The blandness of the word tacked on at the end worries me. But is it a red herring? Oh, the drama of being a bibliophile, an aesthete, a navel-gazer.

Before I get to it, I have this overwhelming desire to reread Shakespeare, to immerse myself in its catharsis, to avoid losing myself (and my tenuous grip on the here and now) down those paths.

Describing trauma

Toni Morrison has said that the only way to depict a moment of trauma is not to. Trauma is the absence of words. It is the darkness of terror. She also uses symbols and time - think of Beloved or Song of Solomon. The act of killing one's newborn baby - slitting its throat - rather than allowing her to grow up a slave, tells the reader how traumatic the experience of being a slave must be as words never could.

Trauma, in this sense, is objectively traumatic - not the divorce of one's parents, the loss of one's home and other possessions, a break-up. This is violent trauma, unspeakable trauma. One person exerting power over another. Abuse. The kind of thing that pushes you to your knees, puts a gun in your mouth and explodes a hole in the back of your head.

Other authors choose other ways (and there are as many ways as there are means of trauma - I chose an imaginable terror, death (the true absence) and shock - an amateur tactic).

Czeslaw Milosz (whose book The Seizure of Power instantly took the field when I read it - see archived post) also chose absence - showing the movement of the troops and a brief moment when they crawl through besieged and ravaged Warsaw. He also uses another common tactic: bureaucracy and guilt. This last shook me because, as a regular reader will know, one of the main characters was me - his doubts were mine.

At the moment I am reading Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes. I am less than 50 pages in, but absorbed in the brutality of his prose. From the first pages, he shocks you with violence - violence of words and common, daily, urban traumas. Until you are carried along by them, expect them.

Then comes the musings of one of his characters, a preening fatcat who was once part of the revolutionary movement. The style of this monologue is immediately conspicuous. It begins simply and uses relatively (for Fuentes) subtle descriptions. Then... The things he describes, paragraph after paragraph, are unspeakable.

Yet, he says them.

This monologue is maddening - the nostalgia of this preening, fat, content man, whose brothers gave their lives in the most horrific ways. What is this but another approach to trauma?

I can't imagine what Fuentes has waiting for me next. But, like Milosz, I know my own sense of culpability - guilt and doubt - is about to be exploited until I experience the trauma of standing by while others suffer.

In search of my present

There are two perfect Sundays. One: a beautiful sunny day in view of Table Mountain, sitting outside in my own secluded piece of wilderness, writing, thinking, blogging, reading, considering the nature of being and so on, with two cats, a bunny and birds for company. Two: Taal Monument on a sunny afternoon, as above minus the cats and bunny.

Taalmonument is 45 minutes from Cape Town Central, on Paarl Mountain. It is dedicated to language (given that South Africa has 11 official languages). But essentially it is dedicated to one language: Afrikaans. Afrikaans speakers take their culture seriously (not as seriously as the French), but, in my experience, value the idea of culture and language (despite the bad press - it's complicated).

Seen from the highway (as I first did), all you see are two elegant spires rising out of foliage. I assumed it was a church. I had been along that highway, in that direction, many times, but this was the first time I had noticed it.

I have to interrupt myself now. The last hour and a half of my drive to (relocate to) Cape Town was an emotional experience for me, as even routine experiences are, for me. The symbol of this is the Huguenot tunnel. A python of concrete with occasional lights, dull so they reminded me of lanterns, cars winding through its belly. You are spewed out to the left of Paarl Mountain, on the same side as the monument.

Desolation. Relief. Ending. Safety. The present.

There are two other spaces (and I mean that in the philosophical sense, distinguished from place) that have brought me safely into the present: Taal Monument and an MRI scan.

The monument is a cold, textured Modernist structure of edges, curves, hollows and solids. You walk up two or three sets of steps, onto a platform that rises in front of you. Columns on each side of you like eunuchs that push you between two walls into a lipped chamber. The roof mirrors the rise of the platform, reaching higher and higher. You hear a rumble that is echo falling on echo falling on echo of a circle of water and a disguised fountain.

The roof still rises, into an elegant cone: a spire. It sits on a quarter of the circle of water. Lean over and look up and be sucked by the echoes into being-less. The flow of the structure pushes you on and out, through a second set of lips into an amphitheatre. The second spire, narrower than the first, stands behind you, an attendant.

The platform of the amphitheatre rises in a ripple, flat to your left and indented in front of you. Orbs sunk into the concrete at the highest point, bubbles in the ripples, a mirror of the rocks that give Paarl its name (pearl). Over the back wall of the space, you can see a hint of a view. So you are lead forward, climbing the rows of seats, to lord over a valley of winelands, fenced in by mountains in a semicircle and the ocean on the facing them.

That is what my present, my always, looks like.

The secret to Nanowrimo

"If you're not making mistakes, it's a mistake." Miles Davis

Who doesn't like a quote that unfolds the mysteries of life for you? Just like SparkNotes. And who doesn't like pithy epigrams, like: You have to fail before you succeed.

Ultimately, these cheat sheets are not helpful. (Prepare yourself for the insightful comment.) As any first-year philosophy lecture on epistemology will tell you, you can know something without understanding it. In other words, knowledge is not enough. (Also, SparkNotes is notoriously unreliable, perhaps to trick you into failing?)

This year is my third year signing up for Nanowrimo - National Novel Writing Month. (The link is in a nifty list somewhere over here <---.) People from around the world sign up and create a profile. From the 1st to the 30th of November, you try to write 50 000 words, in other words (punnage), a novel.

Don't bother to work it out: to finish on time you have to write 1 667 words per day. If you can write 500 words in half an hour (which takes practice), that means one and a half hours out of your day. Most of us can barely find half an hour for lunch, so this hour and a half is mythical.

Except, that depends: how badly do you want to be a writer? If not very or you're still thinking about it, give it a try. The experience is a good way to find out what your priorities are and how to manage your time. But you won't make it more than a week.

If your answer is a fire in your chest, then let me tell you about Years 1 and 2 before I tell you about 3 (although, really, the whole story's over there -----> in two nifty buttons above my reading lists).

In Year 1, I made it a week. By then I was something like 10 000 words below target and I hated the wretched piece of writing and I was so tired I swear my eyeballs were sagging. In Year 2, I made it three days. I started writing something very intelligent about illusion and hope and belief, and ended up with something that sounded like Twilight where the vampire's just some mute emo kid.

Granted, I later wove the first page of the aborted novel into my real novel.

Year 3 and I'm on target! (Ok, that's a bit of a lie: I went out last night instead of writing but plan to - will - make it up today.) I want this. So badly it burns like fire in my chest. I will wake up early, go to sleep late; I will not sleep for the last 72 hours and take leave; I will finish this year and, damn it, I will finish my real novel before my 30th birthday (in three months).

But I could not make it if I had not failed twice. In failing, I learnt how fast your motivation drops as soon as you fall a bit behind, that you cannot achieve something like this (without self-destructing) if you cannot sort out the rest of your life, and that I am first and foremost a writer, not a publisher.

I dreamt of being a writer when I was still a 'lightie' (also a ballerina, marine biologist and archaeologist). After an(other) aborted attempt at becoming a graphic designer, I realised that books were It. So I studied language, media and literature and became an editor, a copywriter and a publisher.

In the last year, almost every dream I have nurtured has unfolded: a home I love, a career, a growing zoo, friends, a sense of calm and perspective. There are two left: buying my home and finishing my novel. And I intend to accomplish the second one first.