Notebook
1
1)
Long ago, during my first year as an undergraduate, my father told me that a friend of his, a senior academic, made all his research notes on index cards, which were duly filed away. I remembered this when I began writing poems. Unlike my friends, who wrote poems and prose and quotes into notebooks, I never did. Everything ended up on cards or, more often, scraps of paper. I have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these, going back fifty years.
2)
From time to time I made attempts to start a notebook. Somewhere in a cupboard are the abandoned beginnings of many such aborted notebooks. The problem was that I had introjected a different work method: this may have suited a scholar accumulating and processing certain kinds of data, but it did not suit me.
3)
Richard Holmes, in his book about writing biography, Footsteps, tells us he wrote about Shelley on the right hand pages of a notebook and himself on the left hand. That’s the way to do it, as Mr Punch says. I seem to need not only the chaos every writer has swirling around his or her mind but additional chaos, you could say meta-chaos: confetti with words on. Why?
2
1)
The practice feels like a mutation of bohemian nonsense concerning order which I picked up somewhere; it was a childish rebellion against organisation, which I experienced as grownup imposition. Oh dear, the time I wasted, and to a lesser extent still waste, working without notebooks, leaving bits and pieces lying around, then trying to find them and make sense of the scraps.
2)
Not that a filled notebook itself is not chaotic. That indeed is one of its purposes. But it always seemed to close options, because it was finite. Index cards or scraps of paper are endless, they keep the options open. Word processors have changed everything and nothing: even on the computer, my files are poorly sorted and labelled, giving me similar problems to those I face with my scraps of paper.
3)
So to repeat my earlier question, why do I make things more difficult for myself than they already are? I believe it has something to do with my academic failure which was, mainly, self-induced. I always made life more complicated than it needed to be. The academic failure involved an inability to accept reality: I did not have the mindset (even if I had the brains) to get a first class degree. I was surrounded by friends who did have the mindset. I was self-pitying and attention seeking: if I cannot be first, I will be last. I duly got an “ordinary degree”, i.e. non-honours, having changed subjects after my first year.
3
1)
After graduating I had no choice but to find myself a day job outside the university, whereas virtually all my friends went off to get PhDs and teach, eventually retiring as Professors and heads of departments. Half a century later, after subsidising my life as a writer with day jobs of no interest to me, which topped up my insufficient income derived from translating and similar activities, I look back with mixed feelings.
2)
Mixed feelings: despite wasting an inordinate amount of time thanks to the flaws of character or givens of temperament hinted at earlier, I have written a number of books, in addition to editing or translating others. Once in a while, even in the bad old days, everything lined up and I gave myself permission to switch on the green light. I “travelled in the direction of my fear” (Berryman), wrote something down and closed that particular option.
3)
There is no going back, no replay. I will never know what would have happened had I been more disciplined, more ordered. I believe there would have been more green lights. The good news is that in recent years there have been, for I have spent and spend many hours in the studio of a painter who, perhaps without knowing it, has improved my attitude.
4
1)
This painter masters chaos and disorder by application of technique and skill in the interests of story: story is how she orders her inner world, a place of fear and dread. Little by little, I came to understand that I had spent more time in defeat and creative darkness than I needed to, than is already built into the process.
2)
“Do another picture”, says the painter’s grand-daughter, if something goes wrong. (Do another picture anyway). “Don’t throw good paint after bad”, says one of her friends. Now I know that to keep all the options open is a recipe for disaster, a kind of promiscuity, a failure to commit. It is a defence against mortality, a denial of mortality. It is a decision to remain a child. However childlike, the true artist is never childish. Mozart is not Don Giovanni.
3)
Leporello-like, I have a list, in my case a list of projects. I know what I want to do in future years. Fingers crossed that my health and spirit and morale stand up to the ravages of time. Slowly but surely, the list is getting shorter. With luck, I am unlearning the comfortable role of melancholy juggler in a painting by Watteau.
1
1)
Long ago, during my first year as an undergraduate, my father told me that a friend of his, a senior academic, made all his research notes on index cards, which were duly filed away. I remembered this when I began writing poems. Unlike my friends, who wrote poems and prose and quotes into notebooks, I never did. Everything ended up on cards or, more often, scraps of paper. I have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these, going back fifty years.
2)
From time to time I made attempts to start a notebook. Somewhere in a cupboard are the abandoned beginnings of many such aborted notebooks. The problem was that I had introjected a different work method: this may have suited a scholar accumulating and processing certain kinds of data, but it did not suit me.
3)
Richard Holmes, in his book about writing biography, Footsteps, tells us he wrote about Shelley on the right hand pages of a notebook and himself on the left hand. That’s the way to do it, as Mr Punch says. I seem to need not only the chaos every writer has swirling around his or her mind but additional chaos, you could say meta-chaos: confetti with words on. Why?
2
1)
The practice feels like a mutation of bohemian nonsense concerning order which I picked up somewhere; it was a childish rebellion against organisation, which I experienced as grownup imposition. Oh dear, the time I wasted, and to a lesser extent still waste, working without notebooks, leaving bits and pieces lying around, then trying to find them and make sense of the scraps.
2)
Not that a filled notebook itself is not chaotic. That indeed is one of its purposes. But it always seemed to close options, because it was finite. Index cards or scraps of paper are endless, they keep the options open. Word processors have changed everything and nothing: even on the computer, my files are poorly sorted and labelled, giving me similar problems to those I face with my scraps of paper.
3)
So to repeat my earlier question, why do I make things more difficult for myself than they already are? I believe it has something to do with my academic failure which was, mainly, self-induced. I always made life more complicated than it needed to be. The academic failure involved an inability to accept reality: I did not have the mindset (even if I had the brains) to get a first class degree. I was surrounded by friends who did have the mindset. I was self-pitying and attention seeking: if I cannot be first, I will be last. I duly got an “ordinary degree”, i.e. non-honours, having changed subjects after my first year.
3
1)
After graduating I had no choice but to find myself a day job outside the university, whereas virtually all my friends went off to get PhDs and teach, eventually retiring as Professors and heads of departments. Half a century later, after subsidising my life as a writer with day jobs of no interest to me, which topped up my insufficient income derived from translating and similar activities, I look back with mixed feelings.
2)
Mixed feelings: despite wasting an inordinate amount of time thanks to the flaws of character or givens of temperament hinted at earlier, I have written a number of books, in addition to editing or translating others. Once in a while, even in the bad old days, everything lined up and I gave myself permission to switch on the green light. I “travelled in the direction of my fear” (Berryman), wrote something down and closed that particular option.
3)
There is no going back, no replay. I will never know what would have happened had I been more disciplined, more ordered. I believe there would have been more green lights. The good news is that in recent years there have been, for I have spent and spend many hours in the studio of a painter who, perhaps without knowing it, has improved my attitude.
4
1)
This painter masters chaos and disorder by application of technique and skill in the interests of story: story is how she orders her inner world, a place of fear and dread. Little by little, I came to understand that I had spent more time in defeat and creative darkness than I needed to, than is already built into the process.
2)
“Do another picture”, says the painter’s grand-daughter, if something goes wrong. (Do another picture anyway). “Don’t throw good paint after bad”, says one of her friends. Now I know that to keep all the options open is a recipe for disaster, a kind of promiscuity, a failure to commit. It is a defence against mortality, a denial of mortality. It is a decision to remain a child. However childlike, the true artist is never childish. Mozart is not Don Giovanni.
3)
Leporello-like, I have a list, in my case a list of projects. I know what I want to do in future years. Fingers crossed that my health and spirit and morale stand up to the ravages of time. Slowly but surely, the list is getting shorter. With luck, I am unlearning the comfortable role of melancholy juggler in a painting by Watteau.