Dropping my guard
It’s time to come clean. To stop dissembling, and to start writing the truth. I haven’t been doing so until now. I have been transposing aspects of my life in ways which compromised the idea behind the site.
It is common in blogs to disguise certain aspects of a life, to transpose them in ways which are as unintrusive as possible. Sometimes this is easy. Names can be changed, and often may retain whatever aspects may be necessary. A name might in this way be working class, for example, or denote in some way a more privileged upbringing, it may be Italian or French, or a nickname analogous in some way to the original, tubby instead of fatty. Alternately, it may be though peripheral and to hold no such characteristics. Many things can in this way be altered.
This is how this process is viewed by the writer of the Magistrate’s Blog at http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/:
“If you think that you can identify a particular case from one of the posts you are wrong. Enough facts are changed to preserve the truth of the tale but to disguise its exact source.”
Writers in my view have in recent years become increasingly lazy with incorporating autobiographical material into their work. It has become acceptable to change almost nothing at all of the facts of the author’s life, to mask nothing and yet pass it off as fiction. Consequently readers often overestimate the amount of factual material in any given work of fiction. They tend also to dismiss any kind of disclaimer such as the above. Because I write fiction I would like to describe the process of transposing from real life, fictionalising, metabolising real events, and to go as far as to say it is a very natural process for me, before I go on to abandon it, to unravel it here and describe my reasons for doing so.
Just as every musical note has a number of harmonics and related tonics, and can form a part of any number of chords, I believe that every life event has any number of analogues. Just as each chord will have its own mood, and will suggest a chord progression of its own, so any of these given analogues will have a number of significances of its own, and will suggest any number of paths onward. Each analogue can be chosen on the basis that it shares a certain significance with the life experience, or perhaps because it shares more than one.
Let’s say a young writer loses his job to a relative of the boss. The boss takes him in and apologises, says he’s work isn’t up to scratch or that there’s just not enough work to go round, and it’s last in first out. He later finds out that the boss’s son-in-law, by all accounts a pretty clueless guy, has been taken on.
The writer may have any number of reactions to this. Whether he enjoyed the job or not, he may find that he relishes the time he now has on his hands to write. In this case he may pick an analogue with a similar significance. But the circumstances need not be the same. He may work in a bookshop or as a hospital porter. His character might be a lot older, have fewer chances of reemployment, and work in a sawmill, or she may be a woman. In the first case, the character might find that he has time to dedicate to hunting or woodwork, to the making of model airoplanes or to playing guitar. Time he didn’t have before. In the latter case, it may be to charity work or swimming, to anything at all. What the writer may feel he needs to convey is whatever it was about his experience that made it significant for him, here, perhaps the loosening of a need for structure and stability, overcoming a tendency to give way to fear, something that is a feature of many people’s lives, and to experience this as freeing. The writer might here believe that in transposing the story, in erasing his own role as a highly-educated man who is underemployed solely because of his literary aspirations, and in writing instead about a man who has grafted all his life, or a woman who, being neither too beautiful nor too bright, has kept her head down in life and never tried to get ahead of herself, he might be in fact be saying something more relevant to the society he lives in, since these are “real” people who have not chosen their lot.
Equally, of course, he might have experienced losing his job as an overwhelming experience beset with anxiety. Here, he would have to choose a different analogue to convey it. He is worried about his novel and so, the rest of his life. He can see now a life of penury ahead of him. He is getting no younger, and his book isn’t writing itself. He now has the time but with no structure in his life he finds he can’t make use of it. He has for much of his life had no time to exercise and now has no energy to do so. He has had no money for decent food, and so he is looking none too good. Women aren’t impressed by this latest might-be, this man with the big ideas and small bank balance. He sees a life alone with his burden. Women are a concern of his. He is alone and spends much of time when he should be writing thinking about them. What do they want? How do they see him? What do they see in other men? More “successful” men? He thinks about them a lot. They possess his thoughts, and so it is natural for him to write about one. A pregnant woman might worry about the future for her child. Perhaps her employer did, and perhaps he didn’t know about her baby, which as yet is barely a bump. Perhaps he cared no more than the writer’s employer cared about his novel, if he knew about that at all. But again, a story about a pregnant woman losing her job with a no-good employer in a no-good town, might be more arresting than a writer writing about another writer struggling to get words on paper.
A writer might have a pet analogue. The tortured, guilty secret for me of “manic depression” and the fact of living a lie became sometimes the tortured, guilty secret of homosexuality. The comparison was there so much in my head that it formed itself again and again into my fiction.
This act of transposition takes time, for sure. And sometimes prohibitively so. The story of my work has barely featured in these pages at all, sometimes because I live so much in my head that it seems barely a factor, but often too because it is so hard to transpose, and in mulling over the latest difficulty in transposing events in my life onto the page, I would be directing my creative energies away from my fiction.
This transposition, after all, gives so much more in the way of choice, and is so much less demanding in terms of time when the circumstances are familiar, ordinary, everyday. My work avowedly, is not. Given time I could have managed to transpose it all, but the question would remain whether this would be worthwhile. We may explore that more fully later later, but we could conclude that is not so much a matter in a blog of artistic expression as expedients and the minimising of risk, things which, I would argue, art stands in opposition to.
Given the circumstances of my life and work, in order to transpose my work, I would have had to invent a philosophy. Now, I’m not opposed to doing that, and I’m sure I would endeavour to do so for a novel. Perhaps one day I will. But given that it would have to be a philosophy I have absolutely no intellectual sympathy for, which would jar with my deepest beliefs in a way that could make me feel ill, and which I would have to dismiss trenchantly, that it would have to be the analogue of a philosophy that leaves me incredulous every time I hear its expression so far is it from my own understanding of the world, and which yet diverges in clear but subtle ways from its inspiration, and that, moreover, it would be for a blog I sometimes resent as a drain on my time with my actual writing, it would seem perverse to do so.
Something I did attempt to do, albeit disultorily, is replicate the contrasting groups of people at work. I did so, I believe, with tolerable accuracy, and could have made meaningful, relevant and colourful work of extended fiction from the attempt, but what I have felt at times was lost was in fact my own place in the picture. I was too much integrated into the life in my new palimpsestuous world. My role, as a circus performer, was suggested by a number of things, and satisfied me in this way: my assumed name masterkidderminster is taken from a circus performer in Dickens’ Hard Times, and it is also connected to a comment somebody made to me, asking me what my work was, “you could be a tutor of circus skills for all I know.” I could in this way explore my reactions to food, but in a wider sense something was missing, because my exclusion from things, my failure to become integrated, or my belief that I am not, is a theme in my life.
There were many and varied possible significances to the work I began to perform on these pages, that of a circus arts tutor on a travelling convoy of Routemaster buses and the like. Again, there was an element of truth here, in that when most of my colleagues were fired last summer one of them took a job working with young people with behavioural problems on a bus. Now and again, I was in the mood to pick up on this and work with it, endowing this fictional world with characters, the project with a rational, and mulled over tensions between characters and the like. But it was rare that I was in the mood, and rarer still that I actually found time to implement, to write up these newest strands and developments. My fiction took priority.
And the problem remains that my work is so peculiar, and the institution is so idiosyncratic - one of the most unusual in Britain, as they described it this week in training - that finding a perfect analogue was never going to be easy. (Of course, in fiction, a perfect analogue is never necessary, nor should it be too much desired, since it is often the differences that open up that fuel the imagination and which give most substance to a story, but as I have explained above, the problem here is that the blog was about the unmediated truth, and the transposition was nothing but a disguise, a defence.)
I work at a special needs college based on the principles of Rudolf Steiner. The curriculum is designed around crafts, some of which are the traditional crafts of the region. Our students have any number of diagnoses, but most often have some form of ADHD and/or Asperger’s syndrome. I have written more openly about this work in the sister blog of this site http://masterkidderminster.net in a blog which began as a Bebo, my first attempt at a blog, and which I then transferred onto a site of its own.
Much of the reason I want to here drop my guard is because I would like to explore some of the issues brought up at my college and by its philosophy, without the distortion and obfuscation of an intemediary philosophy. Whatever else anthroposophy,Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy, can claim to be, it is certainly inimitable. Some of my experiences over the past week have made me most keen to explore this terrain, but it has come up before, and anthroposophists are prime contenders for the nonsense which has contributed to the unconstructive and quite unneccesary divide that has opened up between nutritionists and the scientific community.
