Beginning Foucault's Pendulum

I wrote the bones of this post three years ago, when I was recovering from a reading slump. For most people, this diagnosis is not worrying - it means your life is full and you don't have time for frivolities. For me, a reading slump has a darker meaning. Reading is how I understand the world, it's how I soothe myself, it's how I gather the strength to continue from one day to the next. Without it, I'm literally body slamming the world without armour, with my eyes closed and my teeth clamped shut. (You may think I'm exaggerating here, and I can see why you'd think this, but no, dear reader, for once, I am not.)

Bear this in mind as you read on. It may also help you to know I never got any further than a couple of pages into Foucault's Pendulum.

I should have known, from the moment I read the word "isochronal" in the second sentence and had no idea what it meant or how it could possibly describe a type of "majesty".

(Devoted readers (yes, devoted) will know that I always read the first paragraph (or the first page if the book was written by Rushdie and measurements like "paragraphs" are relative) of a book before buying it. It is one of the rules I use to avoid becoming a hoarder living in an igloo made of mouldy and slowly decaying books. The other being that I may only buy a book if it is on my to-read list. Or if it should be on my to-read list. Or if I like the author and there is a space on my bookshelf or in the bookshelf that I am forced to buy to accommodate this new book. Or because, like a puppy, the book needs to be adopted. Or - anyway.)

I was standing in the second-hand bookshop (which is conveniently placed to intercept me on my way to my local grocery store). The store always smells like a rancid mixture of old books and liquorice, and I must be honest, is populated by a lot of black spines with red titles or pale spines with swirling fonts. At the risk of being a snob, I have also noticed, over the last eight years, how the contemporary fiction section (sub-labelled the "book group" section) has shrunk to two bookcases, while the romance section has swelled to four. I have never seen a Byatt on its shelves, although Lessing and Meek have made a couple of appearances.

There, at eye level, was Foucault's Pendulum, a book that is definitely on my to-read list. I didn't even bother to read the first paragraph. I slid it from its place and held it to my chest while I pretended to look through the rest of the bookcases. Once home, I placed it on my nightstand, ready to begin reading. But, as you'll remember, I was slumped, so the book sat there for a few weeks, judging me (or at least, reflecting my own self-judgement more clearly than a mirror).

Then, it happened. A sense of agitation that happens when I haven't read for a while. My imagination's withdrawal symptoms when subjected for too long only to movies and TV series. That evening I settled into bed with a cup of hot chocolate and picked up the novel as if it were a valuable relic. I studied the front cover, the back cover; I read the imprint page; I flipped through the pages and smelt them. Then, finally, I began reading the first paragraph.

What was I thinking? To break a summing-summing long sabbatical from reading with Foucault's Pendulum? A book that holds down post-graduate English-literature set-lists like a paperweight? Of all the books to ease my way back into the world where my imagination holds court, without allowing it to start chopping off people's heads.

Looking at the first page now, I see another clue (one that might have avoided this debacle had I thought to read the first paragraph in the bookstore - although, who am I kidding, what difference would that have made?): the epigraph is written in what looks to be Hebrew. Ahhh. It's not me, it's you.

Other clues include the fact that the book was written by Umberto Eco, he of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (which I enjoyed - but mostly because of about two pages where he describes wandering around in a mist-soaked landscape as a young boy trying to avoid Nazis - and which many people did not). Then there's the fact that the third sentence hosts the symbol for pi (yes, the Maths symbol) and ... really, do I need to continue?

The original purpose of this post (I am upgrading from "Point" to "Purpose") was to point out the insanity of breaking my book fast with a book written by a master like Umberto Eco. (And remember that I am no ordinary reader, that books have been for most of my life a prism through which I experience the world, that a reading slump for me means not only boredom but having to face the world alone and without the code to understanding why things happen and how to respond to them.) 

I used to read before falling asleep (and over breakfast and sometimes dinner), but over the last year I have replaced this with series. Which means that many of my dreams (some lucid, which, trust me, is confusing) now feature vampires and zombies, and I get fatally shot semi-regularly. Sometimes more than once. There have also been a surprising number of cameos by bears. Which is actually respite from a recurring nightmare I have had over the last seven or eight years in which one of my favourite and most encouraging teachers in high school tells me how disappointed she is in me and then refuses to acknowledge me, except to tell other people what a disappointment I am. Make of that what you will.

So, I wanted to restart my bedtime routine and I picked up my book and read the first three pages and realised that, although I was pretty sure those three pages were describing the pendulum and its movement, and I knew that pi is 3.142, that was it. I started again. But by the end of the first three pages, I somehow knew less about the book, as I was no longer sure that the pendulum was physically real or whether it was a metaphor, but the prose was very pretty ... and I fell asleep.

I picked it up the next night, because I don't quit. Not when it comes to literature. Reading it again, those three pages did not seem as cryptic. Even "isochronal" fell to my scrutiny. When I am tutoring and we come upon a word my student doesn't understand (kind of a surprise attack, but I'm not sure who's more surprised: the word or the student), I always encourage her to break the word down into its components. So, taking my own advice, if:

• "iso-" means "equal"
• "-chrono-" refers to time and
• "-al" means that the word is an adjective,

then "isochronal" means that the pendulum swings in equal measures. Which makes me wonder if this really needs to be said, since that's the sole purpose of a pendulum. And if you are talking to someone who doesn't know what a pendulum is or what it does (even though they are reading a book written by a polymath and polyglot and, no doubt, other poly-isms), does it really help you to help that reader by using a word like "isochronal", which apparently you need an English degree and an editing career to translate?

(Yes, I know now that Foucault's pendulum is an invention that demonstrates the Earth's rotation, wise ass, but that's not really the point of this post. What is the point? I'm getting there...)

As I mentioned right at the beginning of this post, back when you were a young tyke and I had such promise, this took place three years ago. What was the point and why, out of all the many, many posts I have started and abandoned, did I choose to revive this one? The glib response is that the moral of this post is that you shouldn't read books written by masters like Eco right before you fall asleep and you should always read the first paragraph before buying a book.

Another lesson is that reading is meant to be fun. True, literature is the web holding my world together, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a hard slog. I don't have to read and understand and enjoy every book because it's canon (otherwise Joseph Conrad and I would have a problem). In most cases, life stretching out behind and before me seems long (no matter what people say), but when measured against all the books on my to-read list, it's way too short, so why waste it reading books that don't pass the first-paragraph test?

Finally, for me writing is understanding, whether I'm doing the writing or I'm transforming the words on the page as the reader. I don't understand concepts (or myself) until I have trapped them in a cage of words. Except the cage is the opposite of a cage: it holds things in, but frees them at the same time (I'm doing an excellent job of illustrating my point here). Maybe Foucault's Pendulum and I just met at the wrong time.

PS. Three years later, I have no idea where my copy of the book is, which is odd, because I know exactly where every other book I own is. Make of that what you will.

Show pigeons are walking existential crises, if you think about it

I am suffering a dry streak, my friends. Dry as all those rivers that were dammed to make dams because some committee wanted a dam and be damned the ecosystem. Dry as the absence of vowels in the word. I can't find anything good to read. And I don't mean 'good' as is literature, but I don't mean cult classic either. I have been abandoned by books I actually want to read.

In the not-too-distant past there has been The Passage and Night Film and Mara and Dann. But search back through these archives (maybe you will find something more interesting back there) and see that they are segregated by months. Years, maybe? Possibly. Probably. Perhaps - no, definitely - I am being melodramatic, but see, this is how I count my days, months and years. This is how I catalogue my memories.

A show pigeon

I don't think: "In February last year, I sat outside on a bench and watched a show pigeon trying to be a dove while I wrote." I think "A hardcover Kurt Vonnegut was on the table and I was listening to Ben Howard. It was windy, a cold wind, but I liked being outside." Before this, I had read Fahrenheit 451, which although I don't talk about it much is one of my favourites. It is a lonely book, as any book set in a policed dystopia must be. I had read it sitting on my bed between naps.

Some of my collection of must-I-finishes? includes A Widow for a Year by John Irving, The Luminaries by Elenor Catton and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Even before I finish the first sentence, I am on the tracks of my own stories, the book held in front of me like a disguise - rendered useless by the fact I am alone. Since I am being picky now, the author needs to go big or go home. I want a plot that knocks on my breastbone and yells that he will huff and puff if I don't give him my heart to chow on.

Metaphorically. Of course. Definitely. I mean, who doesn't love the bolschy character who is a bit of a bully but who also has a heart that tells him when to use it?

I had to think for a moment to remember what I am technically theoretically and painfully reading now. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the big bloopers in The Passage was that nothing had decayed much 100 years later. The ragtag team ate dented cans of peaches. Electricity grids still ran, albeit failingly. Did you know that the acid in modern paper actually makes it less durable? Books made of paper from the last century or so will crumble sooner.

Did you also know that in 1000 years, men in habits will be finding receipts and to-do lists hoarded in a time capsule where nothing else has survived time? And - oh this is my favourite - that all of human knowledge will disappear into warring factions of Neanderthals, in which women are once again just wet nurses. And that we will be forced to walk with a silly man in a brown habit who we cannot love even as a baby brother who likes to recite poetry he doesn't understand.

It would make sense if you read it. But don't. Let me finish and tell you at length how awful it is. My version will be a better read.

But this is not a dystopian novel and so there is light. A flickering solar light, maybe, or the slow beam of a long-dead star. I borrowed and started reading The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Not a recommended read, unless you enjoy pirouetting on a pinhead that is an idea with far too many rust spots to be appealing.

You know (yes, you know) that in my roving mind, ideas are important. Critical in fact. Stories of what we might do when the ties of society are loosened are vital, because that is who are, isn't it? How else can we understand ourselves as moral beings? How else can I understand myself? (That is hypothetical, because I don't and I am not sure I believe people who say they do.) Right now, steam is exploding from my nose and ears like a cartoon bull, at the frustration of being and of knowing. These are the kinds of stories I tell myself when I am pretending to read.

Umberto Eco is a true polymath, like Noam Chomsky: he is an expert in so many specialised areas of study that to call him a generalist is also inaccurate. I am in awe and jealous of the man, who by my age had probably already written two books and disproved a host of flawed ideas. I am also embarrassed (as if he were standing in front of me) by how little I have achieved. 

To take another hammer to my street cred, I only read Name of the Rose after my literature degree. Just before this, I had read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

Aside, because now I know I must write a post on translations: Pamuk's writing is beautiful and made more beautiful by the strangeness (in the literal sense) of the culture, history and language. In this book, the culture is the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Marat III and a murder mystery than circles the scribes in his employ.  The novel binds itself around notions of representation and art. For example, is it art if it is mimicry? It posits that a piece of work is a form of immortality - but is it? What about those sculptures sitting in museums that we can't identify? Is that a legacy?

Name of the Rose touches on so many of the same themes, extending my experience of both novels so that they seem sort of magical (and you know I am not one to use these words lightly. Except when I am making fun. Which is often, but not now). The novel is set in a monastery in Italy, about 150 years before My Name is Red, there is also a murder mystery and the monks are also scribes. While the Ottoman scribes are also working in service of their faith, they enjoy beauty and their craft for craft's sake. Both sets of works are decadent, but the Italians are more repressed and conflicted. Probably not as repressed as the British.

In Eco's world, art does not exist for art's sake. In Pamuk's world, art for art's sake is still a form of worship. When I think of the latter, I think of rich reds and blues. When I think of the former, I think of cool golds and greens.

This venture off-the-beaten-track was not meant to be The Point, but is somehow still is The Point. (Despite what people tell you, haphazard meetings are usually more useful than laid-out plans.) The Island of the Day Before reminds me why I love to read. Why I am mostly Reader, some Writer and a fraction of other stuff that I lost years ago and am still looking for. (If you find it, keep it - I clearly don't need it.)

Books are my religion. I mean that in a quasi-blasphemy way. Most people believe in the things that they can see and touch, and that they exist, which leads to a comfortable belief that the world exists as a place with meaning. I however am an extra in The Matrix but I am very conscious of all the set pieces. Metaphorically. Where the set pieces form a dangerous a chain of existential corkscrews. Which means the 'I' that is me is usually very confused and a confused animal is an edgy one.

Books are the antidote. A novel is made-up - the story finds a way to exist in a candyland of wirly-girglies without having to touchdown. (That is just how confusing life feels to me.) It is made of words that never promise they are real but can be content in being this in-between thing. Ideas, too, are multi-coloured strands that can be strung out further, tied up and then untied. They make space and time in which to be examined, and don't hassle me to make a decision every time I put a key in my front door to unlock it.

If you are the kind of person who reads the conclusion first, this post is not about a single novel at all. But intention is nine-tenths of meaning, so know that I meant to and then got carried away. By which I mean I meant to do that, but you need not read it. I don't think this post was meant to be read; I just needed to write it.

Nanowrimo: the countdown

What month is it? Yes, November. Yes, a countdown to religious holidays involving fake trees and gold tinsel. I bet you didn't guess correctly! Oh wait, if you didn't guess from the title of this post, please shut down your browser and never come here again. Yes, it's Nanowrimo!

For the (majority of) people who don't know this is an acronym, it is. It stands for: National Novel Writing Month. Because we are all one nation on the internet? No, because we aren't, unless you are a first-world hipster looking at everything through rose-tinted Google Glass. You can keep reading, but only if you take that headset off, because you look less like a sci-fi hero than a real-life dork and not the cool kind.

I am guessing it started as an American campaign and went global. Lack of foresight, but the alliteration works. The campaign encourages people to write by creating communities. Every November, aspiring authors log in to their accounts (most have forgotten their passwords and need to reset - not me, of course. Of course. No, not me) and fill in the details of their project: title, summary, extract and cover.

There are a couple of rules:

1. It has to be a new novel, not one you have already started.
2. You cannot copy and paste ten times to reach the word count (this seems obvious but if not, time to, yes, shut down your browser).
3. You 'win' when you reach 50 000 words. You win, I win, we all win. Like a marathon where we all get medals for finishing, at which point I'm wondering why I am putting myself through this.

We got here sooner than I expected. I signed up in 2010. I lost in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I didn't even try in 2013. I lost because a week into the marathon, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this.

Why? you ask. Why do you writers pretend writing is so difficult? We all write every day: emails, application forms, notes. Yes, you do (and may I point out, from an editor's point of view, that if you didn't have spell and grammar check, your 'writing' would be illegible. And even then people can't tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's'). I am all for you writing 50 000 words of emails. Please don't send it to me, but go ahead.

The Most Difficult Thing about writing is resisting the urge to purge the file or set the pages alight. This urge should take hold of you at about word 14. If as a first-time writer you make it to 4 000 words, I will actually read your (pending) 50 000 word email.

I have been writing, properly, for ten years. I still have to wrestle that urge and chain it under my desk. Like David Copperfield, he will free himself, but it gives me a headstart. I first tracked his movements by writing stream-of-consciousness style for 30 minutes a day. No lifting pen from paper except to turn the page (and unless you print and between words, but you get it). It takes about 20 minutes to start writing fluidly.

Where do you find 30 minutes a day? I don't know, it's your schedule. If you are serious about this, you will quit gym and write instead. And potentially die early of heath problems. Which would make you a bona fide writer. I used to write first-thing in the morning (Jessica Simpson swears by this), but I am not a morning person. Unless you count waking up at 11. So now I write in the evening.

Sylvia Plath (of whom I am such a fan that I hate Ted Hughes with a passion) wrote 1 500 words a day. She started the habit late in high school and published a number of poems and short stories in college. 1 500. That was the length of some of my essays in undergrad.

So ten years of wrestling the monster of writer's block later, I can write about 500 words per half hour, sometimes more if I don't edit. That's an hour to an hour and a half. Sorry, how long did you say it took you to write 4 000 words? Because it just took me two days.

In other words, writing is a discipline. Write the same amount of words at the same time in the same place. Be prepared to do this for years and years. Train yourself to wrestle that monster. In addition, you will need to do research and be prepared to burrow into the bits of yourself you wouldn't stare down in a lit room. Or maybe you get it right first time. It happens. I hate you.

We have bumped into Nanowrimo again. It is November, after all. One of the functions of Nano (apart from creating a community) is to train you to do all of those things above (I don't need to recap do I?). I have gone through periods of writing religiously (I mean that word seriously - if I had a single belief, it would be in words) and of letting the words build up until I am a little volcano. So Nano is definitely worthwhile.

But a week has always been my limit. If you do the maths, you need to write about 1 600 words a day to finish on time. Remember: an hour and a half. I used to work a lot. For various reasons that even therapy won't fully explain. Identity, self-worth, self-destruction. That is a bleak path, dear reader. Now I know better, although knowing isn't always understanding. So finding that hour and a half when you work at least 10 hours a day and don't eat lunch is difficult.

So my strategy had two parts:

1. Start strong: write as much as you can in the first week.
2. Continue strong on the weekends, when you have time.

I mentioned I never made it past number 1? Except for 2012, when I wrote 28 000 words, which is about 17 days. It sounds like the home stretch, but it isn't, it really isn't.

You can see this coming, can't you? Or you've already checked my profile. Eight days in and I average close to 2 000 words per day. A fist bump and a happy dance. That is more than 15 000 words. In one week. One week, my friends, just over an hour a day. One hour.

What did writing replace? Not gym. I don't do gym. I just make promises I haven't kept yet. Well, I went out on my own, business-wise, and am planning a little sum'ing sum'ing. Stay tuned for me crowdsourcing your wallet. Technically, writing counts as part of my work day. Since my work day is 10 hours, I am just retrieving a couple of them.

While I work, that monster has a seat next to me, but he is on the edge of it, watching the words spill on to the electronic page. Sometimes he helps me find a synonym. He also reminds me to eat lunch.

I think this is the year I am going to win Nanowrimo. I have no illusions that this novel is publishable. The story is going nowhere and comprised mostly of dialogue. I can't think of names for most of the characters and unravelling the pronouns would be a full-time job. But it is giving me more insight into my first (and real) novel. (Which is, oddly, the premise of that novel.) The novel will have six dedications and Sylvia Plath is the first and Nano the last.

Humpty Dumpty was a nihilist

Humpty Dumpty - WW Denslow

Go into your kitchen and break a glass. (You sense a moral here, but do it anyway.) Now, what do we (note: this does not imply I am in any way responsible for your decision to obey my imperative) have to hand to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? A plaster, superglue, paper mache, a welding iron? You get the point. You do, right?

What doesn't kill you does not make you stronger. Oh, it's just a saying? Well then write it on a piece of paper instead of saying it to someone in a bind. Because you may be scratching at a hairline crack or chip in the rim. I have seen people smash a glass or mug that is chipped and apparently harbouring all sorts of bacteria. This is a great metaphor, right?

People are not only flawed but damaged. Yes, even you. We're all wandering around hiding hairline cracks so that no one smashes us. To kill the bacteria or stop you from infecting everyone. Or something. This is still a good metaphor, because some people seek out other damaged people and smash them, on purpose but not consciously.

Even a saintly person, who takes in more orphans than she has resources for, may be operating from a desire to give herself up like a sacrifice, drown in other peoples' traumas or withhold luxury from herself and even the orphans. This isn't to say she's not a good person or altruistic, but she's still human.

By nature humans have to be selfish. Each one of us is glued to one spot in a fleshy box. You can't even explore the box, unless you have been breathing in fumes, but even then you just think you're exploring the box. Apart from the fact that any living creature defends its own territory, and especially when as far as we're concerned going beyond your room in the box is walking into a sci-fi movie (which rarely ends well), we may also have Stockholm Syndrome.

(That last bit may be facetious, I don't know. Part of me believes it.)

This was definitely not My Point. My Point is a) never use sayings like that in real life because you are asking for me to smash something and b) don't cast the first stone unless you are sure it doesn't have a log in it, which is unlikely because this box is made of wood. Or something.

Ever heard the claim that abused children often grow up to be abusers? Trauma begets trauma. Cracks breed more cracks, which is the real reason why people smash the glasses and mugs. This is my contribution to the Tree of the Human Condition. That people seek out other people to crack and smash, because what salves a weakness like shattering someone else's? Even the saint harbours a grudge against society or wealth or whatever.

This isn't some devilish spell; it's just unfortunate, like the flaws of our poor hero Hamlet, who is fated by the thoughts that he acts on, on purpose but unconsciously.

Ha! There is a third point! Now that I have completely depressed you (thereby perhaps fulfilling my destiny to seek out other people's chi) I am going to uplift you with the unexpected joy of the Nihilist. No, not really. That's ludicrous. But I still think I am more idealistic, even realistic, than most.

c) If most of the terrible offshoots of humanity, like poverty, McDonalds and the Vikings, are beaten into us, there is still space for us to be inherently... good is not the right word. None of us deserve haloes, my friend. Deserving of respect. Having integrity.

In my experience, treating people with respect is an investment. Even though they may be wary at first, most come around. It's a selfish ploy, really: you catch more flies with honey (disclaimer: as yet untested, because flies also like garbage) and what I want is more honey. But it's a principle I believe in (probably having wedged it into a crack), in the innate sense of belief (not the kind where you expect a deity to shower you with cash, upon which you visit said deity regularly in case they have more to spare).

The rewards have been like sunlight versus a flashlight of attempts to smash me. (Well, until now, but I also believe I will survive, even if a little less steady.)

For my belief to remain intact-ish, it's not necessary that the person reciprocate (although it is preferable because honey is expensive). Respecting other people is like respecting my image in a mirror. I am witnessing my own sense of integrity in action. If people respond they can see it too.

If that arrow didn't kill me... I'd be a warrior princess.

People usually don't call me idealistic, especially not realistic - they call me naive. How I hate that word. I see the world, and folks, it's not pretty. I cannot accept that half of the world's population is starving, and that isn't even an accurate representation because a subsistence farmer is not in my mind starving. But that a single child starves tonight disgusts me and that we (including me) don't rage in the streets to save that child disgusts me.

Is it naive to believe that child, as a human being, has a fundamental right to respect? To know that she is starving because we're all chipped and afraid of the box we are confined to? To know she is starving on purpose if not consciously? And to know there is nothing I can do to save her or her siblings?

Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realise this desire to be Superwoman to the world represents my own need to be cared for. Perhaps even my belief in our innate right to respect and power of integrity. But of all the kinds of chips, I'm okay with this one.

Lately I have been called naive for taking all the motivational speeches and books and blah blah at face value. People have integrity, I yelled, jumping into the fray. But apparently I overlooked the disclaimer: except within the walls of capitalism, upon which they become automatons concerned only with their own survival and that of the structure around them. Right. This is just the way it is, they tell me. Another tried and tested saying. Because life is not filled with surprises. Everything is as it appears. Right.

'The way it is' is this: a society is made up of people. Some people have more and some people have less power. But every single event that happens is related to people. Made up of persons. We have integrity, but we also have cracks that sometimes obscure our integrity. These things, together with a host of creepy crawlies hitherto unmentioned, affect how we interact with the world.

You may feel you have no power; but you have the power to assert your integrity, which (in my experience) usually reflects back from your environment.

My brand of naive nihilism says that (and this is crude and chauvinist) you need to grow some balls and man up. That you respect yourself and the people around you, and you don't let people tell you that you (and they) are worth less than that. You jump into the fray, yelling 'Integrity', but you also pack steel, because some people are looking for a crack to widen. Or something. That when you see someone on the ground you lob them over your shoulder, because when you lay him down, you'll see he has your face.

I can't promise you that you will always win. I can't promise wealth, glory or a picket fence. But I can promise you that if you call me naive or try to patronise me, I will smash your face.

[Insert your name here] is a...

"Camilla is a hag." (For those of you with limited memory, that is my name - or my assumed name. Psych.) Followed by "Camilla is a commoner". The self-inflicted cruelty of asking Google who I am was sparked by Facebook. If Facebook says to do something, you do it. Or don't it, depending on your stance towards social media. In which case this cruelty is news to you. I didn't do it, not for any political reason, but because who has never Googled their name before? Apart from that new village of pygmies that discovered us recently. Or more accurately, discovered a race of helicopters.

Which makes me wonder about the helicopter maker. Upon discovering the helicopter hovering above them like she was going to lay ginormous eggs, did the men defiantly waving spears at her guess the object is human-made? Or would they have to take a closer look to pull apart wires and empty fuel tanks? Or would they assume the forest (being the source of all and named Djengi) created this really big dragonfly, like the Khoisan men in The Gods Must be Crazy who only showed up everyone's lack of sophistication.

They may have Googled their names having discovered us, because no doubt they are now clothed in Hawaiian shirts and begging poverty, while the forest is being cut down at a rate of one football field a day (I assume this is big, being (still awaiting its status as a standard unit) untranslated into soccer fields).

The Camilla referred to is Parker-Bowles. Even as a child, people used to tease me with that and think they were the first ones. To adults, I laughed and made a face. To people I didn't have to be respectful to, I asked if they thought I looked like a horse. So if I were Googling her name, that would be my contribution. How terrible, I know, but I don't know her and I was scarred by the whole Charles-love-letter thing as a child so I feel justified.

It's a silly game meant to point out the silly things people ask Google, as if Google were Djeni, the creator of the helicopter. I hope. But also we're saying who we're not and (in those cases where the result is blush-worthy) who we are, in our lifelong search to chisel out our identities. (No, I'm not saying you're Michelangelo. Or a sculpture.) Just to clarify, I am not a hag. Yet. I may be a commoner, but I think Marx and Engels had a point, before they wandered down the illogically violent path of Robespierre.

Most people know what their name means, even if it is so old we no longer use the name to mean what it means in normal (or in my case any) conversation. I am neither Russian nor more than one half (going back three generations, so ok, some fraction on either side) British. My name means 'attendant at a sacrifice', suggesting it's really old, because we don't sacrifice anything except our integrities these days. I could have done worse - I'm just there holding the sacrifice down and mopping up the blood.

Although, two things occur to me: I am more disturbed by the thought of sacrificing a sheep or something, and as with Robespierre, attending these things usually puts you on list to be sacrificed. When the winds change, they don't only bring the stench of the things you have done.

At this point I must remind myself (and you, you) that I have never participated in or sanctioned blood sacrifice (except of integrity). This chisel is faulty.

My name is not a common one (score). So there is only one other cultural reference to my name, but it is (mostly) worthy of one's pride in the character of someone who isn't you. Chisel-stuff.

This Camilla is a warrior princess favoured by the gods. One of them at least. She only takes up a few lines in Virgil's Aeneid, but she is almost totally who I wish I were. Kind of. If I could stay me and be those bits of her. Without any sacrifices. Because, as I think about it, there is at least one in this part of the epic poem. To clarify, deity of the helicopter, before you award me what I wish for and whisper be careful underneath your breath, I would like to still be me, as I am now, with additional qualities from the warrior-princess, as enumerated below, in a context-appropriate way (I don't own a bow or a horse), without sacrifices, except ones of integrity, but only if sacrifices are part of the deal, which I don't want them to be.

"Woodcut illustration of Camilla and Metabus escaping into exile - Penn Provenance Project" by kladcat - Woodcut illustration of Camilla and Metabus escaping into exile

She is a tot in swaddling blankets when the commoners run her father, a king, out of town for being a tyrant. He runs like a bat out of hell with his daughter until he comes to a river that he can't cross with the little one in his arms. Instead of looking for a more rational mode of transport, he appeals to the goddess Diana, promising her his daughter if she arrives safely on the other side. Well, lands safely, because (yip) he throws her across, tied to a spear, and then follows doing doggy paddle.

She lives. (Don't try that at home; this is mythology.)

Diana was one of those multi-tasking goddesses: she liked to hunt and could talk to animals, as well as being obsessed with the moon. Camilla grew up wild and hunted a lot, so she looked impressive when she rolled into the town of Ardea to fight the Trojans: "her hair/Bound in a coronal of clasping gold/Her Lycian quiver, and her pastoral spear... and her, the maid, how fair!"

Camilla and her band of merry hunters ride into battle without fear (a healthy emotion) and she proves why: she lays half a horde of men low with bow and arrow, and then ducks back when she sees the other half are intent on revenge. She is so effective in battle that the narrator asks: "Whom first, dread maiden, did thy javelin quell?/Whom last? how many in the dust lay low?" Then he enumerates them and their bloody deaths. Let's skip the sacrifices.

Then she forgets herself. She sees a man who looks like one of the Clegan brothers from Game of Thrones and gets greedy. She spears him and taunts him as he dies. "Yet take this glory to the grave, and say/Twas I, the great Camilla, made thee die." The blood-lust has her and the taunt becomes a battlecry. Instead of striking and then retreating, she chases her prey, yelling: "Fie! shall a woman scatter you in flight?/O, slack! O, never to be stung to shame!" Granted, the horde of dead men is piling up.

One of the Trojans who escaped her spear, stalks her and stakes her. These guys were more talented than modern mafia henchmen and zombie killers, because every soldier dies on first hit. She dies and Diana despairs. Because a goddess is involved, the story doesn't end (the epic is an epic for a reason, but this sub-plot too). Diana dispatches one of her nymphs to revenge the man who killed her (for all intents and purposes) daughter. Complaining about the waste of an arrow on such a cretin, the nymph kills him. He dies quickly, because we're distracted bemoaning Camilla's fate.

This goes on for a while, so I'm making an executive decision to end the story here.

Camilla is all the things a warrior should be, with all the merits of a princess. I'll take that thanks: speed, determination, bravery, strategic skills, beauty, poise, with the patronage of a goddess. But in the midst of battle, she becomes greedy and cocky. She yells taunts that are beneath her - what does she need to prove? And why?

There's something I haven't told you yet. Why are they fighting if Camilla's father lost their kingdom yonks ago? Who are they fighting for? Camilla and her soldiers needn't have marched into battle. Ostensibly, the king of the Rutuli is a good friend of hers (platonic, if you know anything about Diana), so they are marching to his aid. He has a kazillion soldiers of his own with those of other kingdoms - she and her crew are not a host, even if you squint, even if Camilla is pretty terrifying.

She goes to battle partly because she wants to prove something but also because she has fallen in love with the bloody end of the hunt. She wants to experience the power of taking the life of a man equipped to take your own. She imagines that, as a woman, she is underestimated and proving each man otherwise is part of the thrill. And remember that she survived being thrown over a river on the back of a spear. Who wouldn't feel immortal?

Trust me, I know this all because I share her name. I signed the contract assuming her identity (but I didn't check the clause about the sacrifice). Really, I did some reading, and some of it is just me and my chisel hacking away. The line between the two is made of salt and it just started raining. I don't feel guilty for misinforming you, because isn't that what reading is about? Making something out of clues? Carving yourself out of marble? Or making a helicopter?

For years, I disliked my name, because I thought it was out-modish and staid. Learning the meaning of my name cast it in a different light: a bit mystical - for ages, I struggled to understand what 'attendant' meant: someone who simply attended, was part of the crowd, or someone who participated but was not the ringleader or the actual sacrifice. I still don't know, really. That in itself is revealing, right? But would you rather be the one watching or the one doing something? There may be a strain of Camilla in me yet - be careful what you wish for.

PS. The Aeneid is an Epic Poem, in the sense that it is part of a genre and in the sense that it is Very Long. It ranks up there in the ratio between efforts and results with Chaucer. Or Franzen's The Corrections. Choose wisely.

Synecdoche Ulysses

"A book lover should never go into publishing." I have written on this theme before. Many times before. This blog is aweary of this theme, I imagine, cracking like the spine of a paperback. (I stole that quote from Italo Calvino and paraphrased the grandeur out of it.) Well, glue that spine straight, set it in a cast, cover up the cracks with a nail file and a marker... Because that book needs to carry some extra weight.

Ulysses. The James Joyce version. Epic in a different way. (And no, I'm not comparing this blog to that tome - you always get antsy right about here. I should leave the second paragraph blank, just for you .The Point? Granted, sometimes this is where The Point bares itself. But said Point defies convention! Even if its existence depends upon it.)

Back to spines and books with heavy burdens. I am not a shameless name-dropper. I own said epic. I have pried open the covers and run my forefinger beneath a page, ready to turn it over. My ownership is proclaimed with a green bookmark. I even have an opinion about the book and author. But I have started it twice and never made it past page 96.

That is not an invitation to stop reading, you. Pay attention.

My bookshelf contains some equal and some lesser tomes. Roberto Bolano's 2666, Murakami's trilogy, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, another James Meek. Most of them unread. I also have a Kindle. Ditto. A library card, with a slightly higher rate of success. But ditto. And a magazine app to which my subscriptions get delivered. And ditto.

Time. I imagine Time as my scapegoat, on a leash, trotting at my heels towards a bridge underneath which a troll lives. As I get nearer, I realise the goat is the troll, and I wake up sweating. Like most bibliophiles, I need many lifetimes to read the books I own as well as many more for those I want to read. Having nine lives, though, is as realistic as a troll on a leash. Or even just a troll, I guess.

Turn on your heel and back to my career and here we reach my standard gripe (no, this is not The Point). Who wants to dissect an object they love? Intellectually, perhaps. But physically? I spend at least seven out of my allotted nine lives grappling with that.

This blog has been as lonely as a Skeleton Coast ghost town for about two weeks. So have most of my social media accounts. (This is not how I define my life. I swear. By my scapegoat.)  I have been publishing. At silly hours. Doing silly, mindboggingly boring things. Convinced that these things, these assembled bits and pieces will change lives.

This is not just a job. This is passion - not a passion. Just, passion.

"A book lover should never go into publishing." Perhaps not. Unless there are (lucrative) career opportunities for people to read. I can think of lots of reasons to reskill, find another industry or find a wardrobe to hide in (with a book obviously). Most of those reasons are scattered in posts around this blog - many of which, I'm afraid, weren't labelled because they like the darkness of that wardrobe.

Ulysses, that big lug, is the part that best defines this whole: Do you really want to read something created by someone who doesn't think that book will change your life? Do you want to read something that you don't think will change your life?

Bibliolatry: an exploration

You're mouthing out the words still. Bib-lio-la-try with a jump and slide from 'Bib' to 'lio' so that 'lio' sounds like 'leo' and two quick rehearsals to get the accent (as in ' not your native drawl) correct, then the easy part: 'la' and then 'tary', except you double-check whether it is 'tary' or 'try' or 'tarary' (common mistake, I say, blushing), because when you run all the sounds together, you still put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, and 'try' becomes 'tary'.

If it were easy to say, it wouldn't be such a wonderful word.

It means to idolise books, before you ask. You knew what it means? Five smartie points to you who couldn't pronounce the word a paragraph ago. I'm comfortable admitting I didn't know the word until yesterday. Did you know then that the connotation of 'idolise' here is religious: literally to worship an idol? Only bibliophiles could conceive a word about their obsession that has religious connotations.

Who oh who would worship a book, you-who-aren't-bibliophiles-and-are-living-vicariously wonder. No, you don't. Because then there would be no blog post and you wouldn't be reading it, and this clearly is a blog post and you are reading it, so the answer is me - and perhaps you, too.

Blasphemy! Heresy! But listen here, ours is a quiet and solitary idolatry - we're not exactly sacrificing animals to our bookshelves. Just time and a few trees. If anything, we should be at the mercy of the environmentalists, except that they're busy raising money and protesting conferences and reading.

This whole blog is devoted to my bookshelf (with regular deviations into metaphysical crises, as befits a reader. And a writer. Ask yourself which of these you are). It's an altar. I admit it. An altar, not The altar, because I brush my teeth and eat my vegges on the other side of this page (which is incidentally the same side of the page that you are on). Sometimes I don't read. Don't cry. I read a lot. I just don't read all the time. Although, nothing else is quite as satisfying.

Devoted. Did you notice that? This blog is devoted to... Now I'm not the only one engaging in blasphemy! My blog is too! Like a plague it travels. This digital world mimics its backbone of hidden 0s and 1s. It is ordered and logically structured. Maintained by the pulsing of keyboards. It is to blasphemy what the gutters were to the Black Plague.

Don't abandon me yet - I promise I am not contagious. Although who's to say I didn't catch this from you?

The wallpaper of this blog is a black-and-white shot of a railway bridge. It looks as though it is three-dimensional, but it isn't. It cannot be. Even if Google Glass succeeds in displaying a world so convincing that you try to reach for a book, you cannot. (You will reach through the bookshelf, but don't worry, you can't get stuck. I think.) This whole digital world is one-dimensional and, to some extent, an illusion. (I don't really sit with my head propped to the side like that. Sometimes I change my clothes, too.)

Now that I think on it, the photo tells you what to expect from this blog: nuances, shadow and light, and hints of other things. A snapshot without a supporting landscape, where the viewer is two-faced (the photographer and you - oh and also me, since I chose it), that you cannot touch or walk into to find out what those hinting things hint at. And all so hipster-ish-ly black-and-white cool. We see what the photographer selects for us to see. You read what I select for you to read (granted, sometimes things slip from the edges of my fingers and perhaps you catch them).

To get to business now, my thanks to Barthes and Derrida and even Descartes for providing the argument I can't argue against but others can by burying it under the word 'extreme'. Meaning is lost, well, it was never there, I protest fists in air (on behalf of those oblique writers), blah blah, stop rolling your eyes. Can I then truly idolise anything? Yes!

Let me explain. Words are in on it. The whole business. Words are wind, Jon Snow. In Ragnarok (mixed references but you understand), the god Loki values nothing. He turns everything inside out and upside down to understand it and make metaphors of it. He's the one worth trusting when Odin's looking at you with his one good eye and the other eye that sees more, and suddenly you do not know who you are. He is also very serious and not much fun. I'd run for Loki's camp any day.

Words pretend, a lot, just like the trickster god . They gain your trust, though notice they never ask for it - the gullible lot we are, we just assume. Not gullible, no, just hopeful. Hope springs eternal, to complicate the barrage of sayings I'm throwing in the hopes that you'll agree with me just because you're too overwhelmed to fight back. (See what I did there?) But when you uncover their disguises, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and say it was all a hoax anyway.

Don't cry (again. You are an emotional bunch). When the one-eyed and all-seeing god is staring at you, it is very reassuring to know that it is ok to know that you don't know and that not-knowing can be discovery.

Discover. Discovery. There we go! Bibliolatry is idolatry of a tricksy creature - creatures - that laughs at itself and you (and you at you) and then leads you down the winding path. Paths. This blog is one path, and because the 1s and 0s (and our attention spans and our capacities to process information) say so, it can only be one path with one view, even if we can meander to create a beaten track from which we see the one view from different perspectives.

So, we're not blaspheming, if only because our paths are too convoluted for you to capture and prosecute us.

What next?

When I was a wee intern, I dreamed a dream. To set this dream against a dreamy background: I have always loved been possessed by worshipped books, so I skipped from school to an English literature and media degree into Publishing postgrad. I studied with the earnestness of my namesake marching into battle. (Which was how I thought one captured dreams.) Halfway through postgrad, I raised my head, threw my hand in the air and begged to be an intern. They said yes, and later would make me do jumping jacks. Lookee! We've wrapped this up in the first paragraph. Not.

Interning was a dream and now the intern had another dream. (Even if this were It, we're now in the second paragraph. Crisis avoided.)

Editor. Intern Me knew I was an Editor. Now, every person who studies a BA with any seriousness graduates in existential crisis (I have the relevant data). Who are we? Where are we? What are we? Why are we? Are we? So 'knowledge' is a misleading statement. Let's quantify it. I had done well in my editing course and often felt as though the skills were being extracted from me rather than embedded. I could spend hours gleefully editing or proofreading. I edited menus. Signs. Emails. (Still do.) I intended to be an Editor. I was Good at it.

Aside. An Editor is not someone who checks for spelling errors and punctuation. Only. We edit for sense: Is there enough groundwork leading to this concept? Do the paragraphs flow in sequence? Are there factual inaccuracies or discrepancies? Does the artwork link with the text? Is every editorial and design convention consistently applied? Does anything smell of Wikipedia? And on. The Editor's job is to take an author's work and bang it into the best it can be without changing the essence of the work. And sometimes, if the work is really bad, we just change it.

Phone calls to magazine editors, emails to reviewers, persuasive marketing copy, book launches. This publishing intern was suddenly a marketing publicity intern. Recap: Editors are by stereotype reclusive, detail-orientated, routine-bound. Publicists? I see a disco ball and it is definitely not actually in my kitchen. My first job in the industry. Trying to convince different media to review a book I hadn't read and didn't intend to. A disco ball. Then they hired a real publishing intern. (I.e. Not me.) She proofread. I called the same people I had called yesterday about a different book.

I needed a sign.

To cheer myself up (for example, after doing jumping jacks) I would: Choose a book, caress the covers (especially if there is embossing or foiling - look it up and be amazed at the things publishers could do but can't afford), open the pages to look at the typeface and smell the paper. (Yes. Smell. Like you don't have a quirk?!) I'm not decoding and cataloguing the scent like a wine drinker here, simply experiencing, but my favourites are those that remind me of reading as a young 'un. This did the trick for a while.

But it wasn't a sign.

One week, there was a company sales conference. The publisher's in-house editor (we usually outsource this work) and marketing manager were flying up from Cape Town. The editor had a 'history', the industry was all a-scandalled (as it often is); no one apart from the directors had ever seen him - only ever heard his name or received one-line emails from him; and the office thrummed in anticipation. We were ordered to make a full report to a colleague who couldn't be there. We were prepared.

We almost missed his single appearance entirely. I was publicising and my colleague next to me was selling, when my manager came out of a meeting and into her office. Straggling behind her was a man, clearly a visitor by the way he was looking up and around him. He wore a tweed vest over a long-sleeved white shirt and brown slacks, probably brown shoes. He stood, put his hands in his pocket and walked to the bookcase behind and to the side of me. My manager called his name, and he turned and spoke to her.

Ever so surreptitiously (as if there is such thing), I scanned him for intel. He looked like a bird, a wren maybe. Not that he was small - it was the way he carried himself - daintily, I suppose. He was balding, with fine brown hair that he probably just combed once a day, without any concern about his balding. His face was average: eyes, eyebrows, mouth, nose. No prominent feature. Except, he looked at things.

Here was an Editor, of the Tweed variety.

I turned back to my spreadsheet but watched him from the corner of my eye as he picked up a large hardcover book from the shelf. He caressed the cover, front and back, as he eyed the title and the blurb. He unfolded it and flipped through a few pages. He didn't bother with the rest of the ritual. He leant down and smelt the pages, the book almost closed, in a V, to capture the smell. Yes! I haven't thought to tell you the importance of these details, to preserve the essence of the scent and your own nostalgia.

That was The Day I knew I was an Editor.

Everything is in flux: editing conventions change over time as someone decides that the use of 'whom' is matter of choice rather than a grammar rule; writing styles change as we react to stark melodrama of the Post-modern landscape; pop philosophy changes as someone wanders even further down the garden path. Dreams do, too. As an intern, and a young sub-editor and then project manager, I revelled in the detail as if I could control some part of the world with my red pen on a black and white page. Now a publisher, I long to manhandle concepts and leave the detail to someone else. This one though, I'm figuring out on my own.

Voile! The value of art

Art is escapism, right? It whisks you from your mundane or burdened world and plonks you into someone else's. You cringe at 'plonk', I'm guessing (I do), because it feels such a crude rendering of the sense of release you feel at your escape. (Escape?) Such a smooth, elegant, longed-for release. I'm out of adjectives to describe this sense and none of the ones I have used feel right.

Tell me, what are you - the specific you, reading this post, and not the general you of all readers - escaping from? The complications of modern life? Its mundaneness and routine? Or something more sinister?

There are the more fantastical escapes - sci-fi and fantasy, historical what-ifs - and then the escapes into the complications of other lives. Which do you prefer? Does it make a difference? What would you do face-to-face with a dragon or in another skin or faced with a perfect Prince or Princess Charming? (Can we know?)

Following on from the previous post, when I was about seven (young enough to be called innocent but able to read), my mother subscribed to a Reader's Digest series of hardcover books about legends and fairytales, on my behalf. Each new one would arrive every six months. The more... disturbing... she would hide, saying I could read them when I was older. Nothing stays hidden from a seven-year-old for long.

I adored the ones I wasn't supposed to read, probably because I wasn't supposed to read them, because the stories and illustrations were threaded with an illicit thrill, and because ala previous post, isn't that the intention? Both the stories and illustrations were violent, harsh, dark, possibly disturbing. But they were more 'real' to me than glittering fairies and happy endings.

They were an escape.

But... but... but... An escape is from, not to, the real; isn't that what I said, oh, 15 lines ago? So fickle is the blogger, such an hypocrite, abusing the impermanence of the online space.

No, wait! Why is George Orwell's 1984 one of The Great Novels? Why does it resonate when it is our world but not? Why do Terry Pratchett's novels have so much to say about the ethics of leadership? Because they are like telescopes: they cast a circular limit around a point and, with some fumbling, focus and magnify the point. They give us the distance to see ourselves.

For me, literature is about burrowing into myself - beyond the superficial landscape of the imagination - with a backpack of symbols, ready to inflict my magnifying glass on anything that latches onto one of the symbols, like an enzyme in my intestines.

Does this mean you can continue to judge a person by the books on their shelves? Perhaps; I confess I do. You won't know what that book represents to that other person, and chances are you won't get a satisfactory answer if you ask them bluntly. But maybe your judgement says something about you and your inner world, and perhaps that's enough.

In this vein, my favourites by a wide margin are Possession by AS Byatt and Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz. Make of that what you will.

The innocence of fairytales

When did we decide that children were too innocent for fairytales as they have been told for generations? Instead of the little mermaid sacrificing herself and becoming foam on the green green waves, the wolf dying of a belly-full of rocks, the evil stepmother dancing to death in a pair of heated iron shoes... we have - well, you know how it goes. When did we decide that children needed to be lied to?

As a child, my favourite fairytale was of the selkie wife: a seal who could change into human shape. A fisherman stumbles upon a group of selkie women dancing. He steals one of the seals' coats and holds it hostage, forcing one of the beautiful woman to marry him. He locks her coat in a chest, so she is indentured to him for years, even having having children with him, while her selkie husband and children wait for her. One day, the man forgets the key to the chest at home and she frees herself, escaping back to her family. So what does her second husband do? Of course he kills her selkie family, and in return she vows to kill every man in the village.

Every fairytale is a moral tale, whether you can verbalise this moral or not. That's what I love about the original tales: the rich symbolism, which as a child I would puzzle over - I could feel the meaning (almost literally taste, smell, touch, those underappreciated faculties) but still not explain or even construct a thought about that feeling. The anxiety, the suspense, the unforeseen and foreseen twists and turns, the bad choices, the beautiful tragedy - and of course the illicit pleasure in the sense of fear that is the heart of any fairytale.

The best equivalent I can think of is Hamlet - most will have read Shakespeare and some will have enjoyed the plays. In the end, our hero is the cause of his own destruction, as are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and Othello. The initial event just sets them rolling down that slope. Macabrely we wonder: Would Hamlet have destroyed himself anyway? Could he have dug his heels in and stopped mid-roll? What is it that makes this type of hero curl into a ball before their enemies have even aimed a kick? Most importantly for this post: Why do we enjoy watching them roll downhill? What are our minds distilling behind the scenes? The answer rolls like a sweet in our mouths.

Fairytales make our conscious mind shudder and our unconscious mind shiver. They warn that nothing is what it seems - that the unwary will suffer - that we must mete out punishment ourselves, because there is no one to appeal to - that bad people do good things and they do bad things and so on and so on. They warn that life is not fair, but sometimes you get lucky, and another but: you have to work for what you want and stay away from anything that so much as touches trouble. Do you think these stories are primeval? No they are not! They attribute happenings to people. They recognise that some events have no rhyme nor reason. They warn us about wolves and evil stepmothers and vicious men, but they also hand us a set of tools with which we can understand the less obvious menaces of nature and human nature, even if only on an unconscious level.

They prepare us for life.

What sparked this meander? The movie Red Riding Hood, which is really just a mishmash of Grimms' and Perrault's and Angela Carter's versions, with some movie studio rep's meddling. Even a sanitised version - imagine: the wolf is re-released into the wild (because international law forbids wild animals being housed in zoos), and the 'girl' and the woodcutter live (here it is, folks!) happily ever after - would have been less offensive. Actors with more than one facial expression would be preferable but perhaps that's taking the hand when you're offered the finger.

Illustration in Old-time stories (1921) New York: Dodd, Mead. Perrault, Charles, 1628-1703; Johnson, A. E. (Alfred Edwin), b. 1879; Robinson, W. Heath (William Heath), 1872-1944, ill

For anyone who would argue differently (and if so, I'm offended that you're reading this blog) consider these conventions of romantic cinema: the love triangle wherein Bella - I mean Valerie - has to choose between the good boy and the bad boy, the unveiling of a family secret, another unveiling: of the bad boy as a good boy (unlocked by love's virtue) and the good boy as a good loser, finally, the resolution of the lovers' trial - and, again... The conventions of the plot masked by a red cape set in relief by black and/or white. (By the by, we've been through the bad-boy-needing-to-control-his-dark-side in Buffy, Mrs Meyer, with not a whiff of abuse in seven seasons.)

What do our sanitised fairytales teach children? That life is fair, that there is a clear line between good and bad, that bad is just bad, that these people will be punished by their own plots turning back on them, that the reward for good behaviour is a picket fence (or moat), that the happiness (or sadness) of a moment will define your life, and that wealth is woven in there somewhere. Is life just less harsh nowadays that we don't need more severe warnings? Are these the things we should strive for - do they have a moral value I have overlooked? I still prefer the original tales. I like to think they taught me a few things. When I stumble, I don't fall on my ass and ask 'Why?' I regain my balance. Because I know there are far worse things to watch out for than skinned palms.

As She Climbed Across the Table

Bear with me, folks. I have two very unlikely books to compare, and I'm sitting in the sun on an autumn Sunday mor- - midday, and if I stand the cat will claim my cushion and I won't have the heart to move him. Keep me company, because days spent contemplating in the sun are best shared, in silence.

Speaking of silence... That Tome of Silence, Agaat (it's there, to your left, under 'today's read') where the diacritics are plentiful and so are the pages (metaphorically speaking, since I'm reading on Kindle), but the plot is not. This is not a spoiler, but a warning. At least one of the characters has the symptoms of clinical depression and no personality left to anchor herself. By turns, the farm that is the setting (Groetmoedersdrift - Google translate that one out) is a metaphor for the protagonist's... reality... and for relationships on the farm and perhaps in general.

And herein lies my real gripe with South African literature. It takes itself too seriously. 'Serious' being the operative root word here. As if it is intent on revealing the truth about humanity, in a world in which truth is undecipherable.

Deja vu.

That's the cue. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem. I picked it up to ward off the spreading depression in the soil of the Western Cape that is 'Greet Mother's Drift'. And finished it in a few hours. I may have mentioned that I dislike the tongue-in-cheek playground of contemporary literary fiction that attempts to disguise the cynical seriousness with which it is written - a protective critique before the critics spot it. But some authors have a style that forgives this.

Perhaps its forced metaphors are tolerable because it is short. The metaphors? Can you guess? The principles of physics and quantum physics, forced into the shape of people and relationships and even settings. Ugh, how the physicists must hate us writers. (They must hate Ian McEwan the most, for his empathetic critique of their critique of our critiques in Solar. It's the lowest hand in any argument: empathising with the other person, so they aren't sure whether it's genuine or not, which the first person knows, because they're being empathetic.)

But Lethem's novel fits more comfortably than van Niekerk's does. There is a scene at the end of Possession by AS Byatt in which she observes, basically and probably badly paraphrased, that post-modernists (meaning me and every other BA student) crave to simply cease to be, to dissipate, to go gently into that good night. Right there is the sum of my desperate scrabbling, which made me stop for a second to nod.

Because, as all those tongue-in-cheek-to-catch-us-out authors are trying to express, here is a piece of science that embodies our conundrum: the world seems to be real - to possess 'truth' - but it is not. Take your moral relativity and subjective realities, pour some paraffin on them and light it. Perhaps you realise that you are replacing one paradigm with another to be able to live (because our minds need it - and that's the human condition), and perhaps not. But think of the word 'truth', think of the word 'real', and no matter how much you twist them, they are bonded to objectivity.

And here comes the inevitable 'there was this study...' I'm not asserting the 'truth' of it, only that it is a good display of my point. There was this study at some university (has anyone ever made that connection with 'universe'?) into how we make everyday decisions - reaching out for a glass of water, taking a step down one path and not another. They recorded at what level and in what sequence decisions are made in. They found that the instinctive, automatic part of the brain is triggered first, and you begin moving before the rational, supposedly decision-making part of the brain kicks in. That, in essence, you justify decisions on a conscious level in retrospect.

Paradigm. Oh I hear your chorus of hooting. Simmer down, I disclaimed myself first - look above.

Study or not, paranoia or not (and what post-modernist isn't?), your subjective reality is controlled by a part of the brain that does not consult you. Does that sound like something you really want to hold too tightly on to? You might want to check with it before your answer. Maybe by Ouija Board.

All I'm really saying here (and this goes out particularly to the physicists) is that the quantum realm offers us hope. It would give us a definitive answer. Hope. The option of dissipating into tiny particles. But also, of knowing for sure. Because despite my argument and those of my fellow writers, and in part alliance with - we don't know. Our language says there are things that are true and real, but our experience says not. So which is it? We just want to know. Even as we spit on knowledge and trample it.

I cannot relate to Agaat because (apart from the constant whinging) the characters have realities and we can see them and we can see the misunderstandings, and even though each does things they cannot rationally justify, they remain blithely unaware of the effusiveness of any kind of truth - in the moment - but justify these irrational moments in hindsight to make another complete story. An evolving one.

To me, it reads as a Romantic story - as in that era of human history where Luther has questioned religion and that question has kept rolling, on and on, with each rotation pulling up the scabs of societies' paradigms. Forcing some backlashes, some projections, some truces - in Romanticism, the transcendent was forced to earth to imbue everything that human beings have not touched. (The Modernists did the same, but with less babbling, and with more cynicism. That I get.)

Round and round the question rolls, even though my fellow writers and I like to believe we have stopped it in mid-rotation. And in a sense, in a moment that is shorter than the speed of light, we have. We have stopped it to look at it, but we are no wiser than we were before. Cynicism is a kneejerk reaction to the desecration of something you hold dear. (I know this well; I work in publishing.) It is an insufficient response to the world, but the only one that keeps us safe from being hurt again.

The other side of the fence

Confess. At least every so often - I'm guessing more often that less - you wonder how you got here. 'Here' being shorthand for your life (isn't it interesting that we use a vague spatial indicator to refer to this 'thing' (again) that feels like an undiscovered dimension). I wonder why I have been so lucky (I haven't been: I have worked myself into diagnosed exhaustion and fought my way through every obstacle, with dirt and flesh under my fingernails) and why it feels like reading an autobiography and identifying with the author. Hey, but then, my brand of nihilism allows for this.

This is not actually my point now, although it makes for a meandering tangent (oxymoron intended).

My career was always meant to be enough - to be the thing that defined me and filled me and distracted me from all the pain in the world. I predicted that I would have nothing else for fear of turning around one day (unforewarned) and realising that I had nothing. Forewarned, after all, is forearmed. Now, destructively curious, I am turning around (more like turning my head cautiously so as not to alarm anything, anyone, myself) and there is... almost everything. Almost everything I had written in a list a year and a half ago in a crisis similar to this one now.

Damn right I'm watching someone else balance on this precipice! I say. You respond: but what's the problem?

Did you ever have a mantra that you leant against when life overwhelmed you because you were young and needed something? And did that mantra ever have sprout from some perceived deficiency? In other words, did you ever think you weren't 'good enough'? Urgh, you've read this story before, probably some Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque coming-of-age tale, about the misfit made hero, the duckling made swan, hopefully the damsel made the narrator of her own tale. Well, I am reading the story of my own life, so just think about it.

If you lean there long enough, you grow around the mantra, like a tree around a chainlink fence. You hold onto it just as closely as you do your fantasy of your future. Maybe the two even bond and so break each other down and so create something else, corroding, like rust on said fence. My mantra was work hard and achieve (implicitly convincing me that working is the same as being). Obvious, but not so obvious to me until I turned 16. Logic driven by emotional distress (this is why you should never send an email when angry) concluded that the only way to be whole would be to work hard. Ta-da, the secret of life!

A decade and a bit later, blah blah exhaustion. Believe it or not, this is not the problem.

Heaven help me, I have a will and a sense of determination to fuel it that need an outlet. At the risk of dissociating, my will always reminds me of those horror movies where the living dead are crushed by something and then stand back up, clicking bones back into joints. No, my will is really a Nancy Drew who wants to learn (oh, knowledge!) and keeps sneaking back into the library, perhaps because it drafted every line of the building plan.

I have seen so much and learnt so much, and can appreciate that no 'problem' is unsolvable, and that people are damaged, and who to trust and who not to, and now my life is filled with people and passions and hard-won security. I can appreciate how 'lucky' I am, even if from afar.

The problem is that I hadn't really thought further than this point. For that decade and a bit, my world has been the curling of bark around the chainlink fence. You can't chop a gap between them without damaging the tree and even if you were to separate them cleanly, there would be a gap in the tree trunk in the shape of the wire with a plaster of rust. To compound my dilemma, scrutinising and defining this isolated point of a larger system has brought me closer to myself, just not close enough.

What now? I can think of at least 50 things, but choosing one of them would mean accepting that the wire should be there, rather than accepting that it already is. Surprisingly (to me), my will wants the latter - perhaps because I want to have my own story and perhaps because I have tried a few of the 50 things and the latter seems like a greater challenge. (Discarding the metaphor now - can you see in the previous paragraph how it started to blur - and that that is the point - that it cannot move and it cannot change and it is but a tool of dissociation.)

I have already chosen: to 'pull myself toward myself' and with arms accordingly folded around myself slowly stand and scrutinise the world around me rather than scrutinising my huddled self with the world's eyes. Confession made, liturgy recited from behind a veiled screen (what that makes you, you'll have to figure out), and as I leave I wonder why I am confessing that which is not a sin. Why I asked you to confess, whether you heard my instruction and sat yourself on the other side in the confessional, or heard it, held my hand and let me talk it out, or heard it and had heard enough and walked away.

Rereading People's Act of Love: The end

For years now, the protagonist of my adolescent novel and I have been pacing the streets of our imaginary, historical city (which is also the base of any 'real' city, so perhaps he and I have a chance of Pinocchio-ing it out and finding - what?), wondering what we are doing here. Where we are going. Because a quest isn't complete without a path - a 'from' and a 'to' - right? Let's follow this alleged path, like - you guessed it - like a certain young woman and a rabbit with a pocket watch. There it is - a hole in the ground within which the laws of relativity jump into the quantum realm - without unifying jack.

To confuse the issue, Calim (my protagonist) and I are sitting outside the entrance to the hole (a sudden eruption in the pavement before us, or perhaps the work of municipal workers doing something municipal, or a hole we dug ourselves). We are just sitting there, a convenient place to sit, taking a break, not saying anything, not doing anything but considering these roiling contradictions that don't unify anything, when there is a movement within the hole - we hear it more than see it. (This doesn't make any sense, I know - a movement without the rabbit to-ing and fro-ing, but quantum physics forgives many literary licences.)

It's the plot of That Book, the one that either shook my soul or resonated with a soul that was already shook. Calim hears it too.

This is the book I want to write. A book that unifies nothing and everything and shakes all sorts of shaken souls. That is a little ambitious, so I am content to write a book through which themes creep like the roots of an oak tree trapped in a pavement that was laid around it, like a noose. You know the kind, the thick-as-your-thigh roots that heave up the concrete around it and you imagine the roots as roiling, but so slowly that it would take lifetimes and clever filming to see.

Ok, this too is a little ambitious, but I like the taste of that cliche: go big or go home.

So many post-modern authors (go ahead and call them what else you will; labels are for students - this adjective is merely a placeholder) bury their themes beneath accusations of relativity, as if beating the critics to the punch. Ah, isn't relativity wonderful (I keep typing 'real-' instead of 'rela-', which spell check says is incorrect and which my brain is inclined to agree with but my heart made of spongy hope protests)? No, it really isn't wonderful. It's a plug in a drain; it's a sad replacement for the security of religion.

People's Act of Love pulls no such punches. Life is... awful. Oh no, you yell! I can't bear to write another monologue about how awful life is. Let's compromise: life can be awful and sometimes it can feel... something else. I'm getting to that part.

This novel says what I have been saying, but better. As per my previous post, it offers you alternatives and you are almost giddy with it, with these academic offers, whose academic-ness convince you of their authority. At the same time, the novel asks you to empathise with cannibals and castrates (yes!), because morality is a set of emotional decisions made rational, like it or not. Then it asks you how you can empathise with such creatures, such fundamentally weak creatures, enslaved to an Idea. You take it as a judgement when really it is a question driving you towards the truth that such things exist in all of us and that perhaps we need to pass through each of these moral states to find a way to live.

Life is awful. So grow a pair. Make lemonade. Live within society because the alternative is bleak 'wildness', but find your way to reconcile yourself with it.

I like to believe (look how I've grown!) that somewhere in that reconciliation is... acceptance? Not accepting the awfulness, but accepting that being angry and lashing out is not going to get you or anyone else out of the awful. Hoping (personal projection here) that the way you find might be able to do something, even if only to record the lows and highs.

Richard Pare, Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia. Vladimir Shukhov, 1922. Photograph © Richard Pare 2007.

A brief hiatus

Whether you realise (or recognise) it or not, we all have strategies to keep ourselves safe. Ones we have honed without knowing it over time. Sometimes those strategies are designed to keep us in a comfort zone in which we are unsafe. Because the hell we know is always better than the hell we don't (or that we imagine is waiting just ahead). And sometimes staying there is safer than walking a rickety bridge to a potential mirage.

For me, success is more daunting than failure.

My point is that I'm back. That working myself into the ground is not as easy as it sounds, because there is always more ground and it seems that I like to dig and that I could do this indefinitely because I have a will to survive that laughs in the face of self-made strategies. That it is waiting for the rest of me to finally choose to cross the bridge and the next and the next. That it has edged me onto the bridge while I wasn't looking, taken a step back, edged forward some more etc., and that I didn't fall off and that even if I had, or sometimes wanted to, my will would just laugh some more, right itself and enjoy the adventure.

That, in spite (literally) of the burnt part of me that makes me cynical of the things I hold most dear as if to protect them from others by beating them myself, I really like the part of me that just gets out of the way of the fire, taking the things I hold most dear with it.

Rereading People's Act of Love: Month 1

Whirlwind (1906), by Filipp Malyavin (from A World History of Art)

I know, I know - you're sick of this topic. But I have to find out why this one book, above all books, 'shakes my soul', to paraphrase a review in the Washington Post Book World. In my own words, why this book resonates with the metaphysical nothingness through which I swim - literally resonates like a note and a tuning fork.

(Read back a few posts and remember that this is my virtual identity, so really this is my party and you can just close the browser using that cross-shaped thingie up there on the right. In this world, we all have choices.)

I am rereading it as an experiment. Is this book genuinely soul-shaking or was my soul already shook? As I'm learning, the benefit to rereading a great book is that you can deconstruct why it is a great book. (Or you realise it wasn't really so great, but that's not the case here.)

This paragraph bothers me, but I am going to write it anyway. There are no adjectives that can summarise the horror of the convention of exile in Siberia in the early 20th-century (and for centuries before). Trust me, I have just tried. (See previous post about trauma.) Without trivialising this, the first two chapters bring this horror home. Using something more than words. Something with all the features of psychological unease.

The beginning of the third chapter gives the reader (me) some space, like an interrogator allowing the prisoner to sleep for a few minutes. Probably because he knows the torture that follows will be even more brutal for this respite.

Unlike the first chapter which assaults you until you can't remember a before or see an after, the third slides into the assault, crushing hope with the heel of a boot as one would a cigarette butt. And that is where I am now. Literally and metaphorically. 19 days and 46 pages in.

This is no melodrama, folks. This is my subjective experience of a book that uses me as a tuning fork in a way that only visual art does (again in the absence of words, which sinks into the spaces of me before I have time to hold it still and analyse it) - which I am learning will have to do in the absence of objective truth. (This doesn't mean I have to like it or even value it (it is nothing but a tautology, subjective truth), but there it is. It is all any of us have.)

I sound defensive. I am defensive. Emotions - especially extreme ones - are treated with some disdain, as an hysteria of the feminine world. They are not productive - in fact they may hamper productivity. They are naive; they are the realm of creative eccentricity, which we value as do an ethnological comparison.

Get to know me, the champion of one's emotions - especially those that swim deeper, and you will find that I appreciate logic and knowledge and those good things that bring a sense of objective security. You will probably still call me naive and eccentric, but then you don't know what I have witnessed and know of human nature, which led me to understand that trauma begets trauma begets trauma. That this is as much of a fact as the arc of the Earth around the Sun.

Now, I have just written, deleted, rewritten and deleted the above paragraph over and over. All I can muster up to try to convince you (and myself) that subjectivity has value - the same as that of logic and knowledge and science - is in this book.

Lady by a Piano (1899), by Igor Grabar (from A World History of Art)

Drag races in my mind

Thoughts are screaming through my mind, like racing cars on a bridge, weaving and jostling and breaking the rules without appearing to break the rules, and every so often one spins from the edge (because there are no barriers made of tyres - this is not mere sport) and disappears. Except, no wait, it doesn't disappear because my mind appears to be infinite, so it just spins around, bumping into other bridges and scraping pieces of cement and steel from the supports.

There you have it, folks, another crisis. Long overdue, really, like the shifting of the poles. What the doomsayers don't tell you is that we will survive the changes in magnetic fields, because we are resourceful (and annoying) creatures, although this is based on the evidence of blockbuster movies, where we annihilate the aliens - and I suspect that half the time we don't even know how we did it.

(Afraid of water? Really? Build a suit of armour. A wetsuit. Coat yourselves in Vaseline. I suspect that really these aliens figured out how dumb and superstitious we are and figured it was something in the air. And since they hadn't thought to build a suit of armour etc, and probably had no way to test the air to come to a definitive conclusion, they therefore could not afford to lose what brain cells they have left.)

My point is this won't destroy me - but don't tell me it will make me stronger.

To interrupt, and really to prove my point - Interception. Brilliant movie that set my little dinkie cars off on my Lego bridge (circular pun). But the scene where the merry band of blackmailers run from a pursuing band of snowsuit-clad symbols of the subconscious - don't make me laugh. I have had a few encounters with my subconscious and, trust me, its minions certainly don't run around in furry white suits on a snowy holiday.

There are no metaphors for the pain and suffering this force that we live with every day can and routinely does enforce. In fact, chances are you would be the tool of your own torture, so that it wouldn't have to waste time on more dumb creatures - guarding the one it has is probably punishment enough.

My furry pursuers and I have reached a truce, an equitable one. The alternative is pain and suffering in the form of an eternal crisis. This way I only have intermittent ones. Hurrah. But no, these crises are now a bonding experience. Hurrah.

I know where this crisis has come from. I don't like to stand still. My past might catch up. I am in charge of a humongous project, in a job I enjoy, in a company I like, with colleagues I respect. That sounds like a stimulating challenge, right, that doesn't leave much time for boredom. My past is 1 400 km away and for the time being staying put. But I am bored. Which does not imply I want to leave my job. On the contrary.

I am difficult to manage. I am high maintenance. (Don't patronise me by pretending to be surprised.) But I have an insatiable appetite for learning. (This is the basis on which my subconscious and I have bonded so that we are no longer separate entities.) I need to be pushed, incessantly. I need someone to stand there with a stick and an ice pack, and I can't do it on my own because then the stick turns into a cat o' nine tails and the ice pack into the bloodied rags of a damp face cloth.

The usual solutions have made an appearance on the bridge and have one by one been mown down except the last: travelling, Master's, novel. But even this one doesn't quite soothe the bruising. For the time being, I am battling the urge to run by doing the things I had forgotten I liked: making things, drawing, gardening, mothering every living thing in sight (including geckos).

And writing. Hello regular blog postings and appearances on various social media.

Maybe it's ok for there to be drag races on the bridges that connect one roiling island of my mind to another. Something like the progressive levels of the Nordic spiritual plane. I like that metaphor. I might pin it up somewhere. So maybe the furry snow riders aren't pursuing. Maybe they are shepherding.