On the nature of inspiration

It has often been my experience (and that of many other authors, I suspect) that when there is lots of time in which to write, the inspiration with which to do it well has a tendency to dry up – at least once the immediate section of prose or poetry that has been nagging me to be written has been committed to paper or at least the computer. When wonderful stretches of time are ahead of me, my paid work (copyediting and indexing) having dried up (one hopes temporarily, for fear of the Wolf at the Door) and I’m looking forward to writing without interruption, the joy and expectation are intense.

And then, quite suddenly, after a week or two of plain sailing, with the story apparently running merrily before the wind of inspiration, the novel hits some kind of block. Perhaps I thought I knew which way the story was going, but without warning it develops a kink and seeks to rush off in a new direction, and if I stop to consider this, or to work out which way I should take it next (should I follow the interesting subplot that has occurred to me, or plough on with the original trajectory?) then the whole thing can grind to a halt. There are then two choices: to go on sensibly, if on rather leaden feet, writing the story as it was originally planned – which has the advantage of its being well thought out and all fitting together neatly into the original schema; or to try to see where this new idea might lead. And if I’m not careful, in the midst of this indecisiveness, the whole plot falters, and the inspiration for the next section fails. Or perhaps I simply lose my way in the immediate plot and am left with a bridging section that I just can’t capture.

Does it really matter what happens to these characters that I thought were so interesting? I ask myself. Shall I just wipe the whole lot out, or (more prudently) save it in a Pending folder, and start on something else (there are always two or three novels hovering somewhere in the wings of my mind, clamouring for their turn in the sun)? The lack of paid work suddenly seems a nuisance rather than a blessing – at least I know what to do with the copyediting and indexing, and they have the virtue of, well, being paid; and if there were outside work clamouring for my attention I shouldn’t have to sit at my desk with the screen in front of me, trying to work out what to write next. Fortunately, if I really get stuck, before too long another offer of copyediting or indexing will usually come along and rescue me, and the cycle repeats itself, with my finding the next part of the story reeling itself off, and longing yet again for some space to write it in. This can feel very frustrating.

And yet, it may be that this stop-start progression is actually how the writing process works for me. Perhaps I need to have the story percolating somewhere out of sight beneath the level of conscious thought, to spring out ready to be written when time becomes available. Perhaps I shall never be able to write in long swathes of time, as I constantly dream I will – looking with envy on bestselling authors who have the luxury (or so it looks to me) to write full time – one day, when I retire, when I don’t need to help with the family finances, when my children are grown up and don’t need my time and energy (and if you’re reading this, Izzy, don’t feel that I grudge it …), when (if?) my novels start to sell well and there is therefore the financial incentive to write more quickly (my two published novels each took years to write, edit and hone before they were ready to go out into the world, and I sometimes still want them back to make improvements!). One day… The dream is important, in itself, I think. It keeps me looking forward, making the most of the time there is, continuing to stretch for the best writing I can do, and hoping that as time goes on I will be able to write better. If it feels disruptive to go back and forth between the creative work of writing and the reactive work of copyediting and indexing, yet perhaps that tension in itself keeps the inspiration ticking over.

Who knows? This week I’ll finish the indexing work on which I’m engaged at the moment, and there will be some weeks when writing (between school summer holiday duties) will be tantalisingly possible.

I’ll let you know how it works out ….

Libertas vel liber: Marriage, Civil Partnerships and the Freedom to Choose

I was interested to hear of the disarray in our Coalition government, even among members of the same section of it, on the subject of gay marriage. Of course, part of this is a latent homophobic tendency in the right wing, submerged now and often iceberg-like in its tendency to show only a little of its bulk above the surface. But I think there is also a genuine recognition that marriage is fundamentally an institution that cannot be altered to fit the whims of our particular generation. It has a tradition going back millennia, quite possibly into the very earliest human societies of the Pleistocene, and at its heart the union between one man and one woman with the possibility implicit that that union will culminate in a family. Although I hold no brief for any kind of homophobia and count several gay people among my friends, I can see that this point of view has a validity that it is hard to overturn.

            For many there is also a religious element, that Christian marriage has held a particular status in a society that has been, even if it no longer is, built on Christian values. Certainly the Church has always held that marriage is a sacrament, with a spiritual and symbolic quality in addition to its physical reality. And the relationship between Christ and the Church has been compared, by St Paul among others, to that between husband and wife. It is hardly surprising, then, that many Christians feel strongly about marriage as a fundamentally and unalterably heterosexual institution, and will feel that the unholy conjoining of disparate parts of Coalition and Opposition to defeat the so-called Wrecking Amendment is one more indication of a long slide away from the values that they hold dear. And I will not be alone in viewing the proposal to penalise registrars who don’t want to officiate at gay marriage ceremonies on grounds of conscience as a serious erosion of liberties. There has already been a long-drawn-out case involving two nurses who refused to supervise abortions for conscience reasons and whose NHS employers have threatened to sack them as a result. Owners of bed-and-breakfast accommodation are no longer allowed to choose whom they allow to stay in their own homes if there is a suspicion that their objection to a couple has anything to do with their being gay. It is one thing to pass laws to protect the vulnerable and ensure social order and peace, but quite another to  insist that everyone takes the same view and must act in the same way. There is more than a whiff of Big Brother about all this – in the Orwellian sense not the reality TV one, I hasten to add.

            The suggestion of promoting equality by allowing heterosexual couples to enter into civil partnerships, which has come into play even as some politicians are considering phasing out these partnerships when (if) the Gay Marriage Bill becomes law, has been ridiculed by some of the news media. But making access to these partnerships available to couples of all orientations seems to me to be a splendid notion, and something that I have in fact been touting among friends for some while. It would have the advantage of giving gay and straight couples equal status. It would also allow for long-term relationships of a quasi-marriage type, such as cohabitation, to be given proper standing, as civil rather than spiritual or religious arrangements – something which would suit many people who see their relationships as purely civil and whose marriages are conducted by non-religious registrars in a variety of venues. Civil partnerships allow for some legal status for spouses with regard to inheritance, which would be of great benefit to cohabitees who do not actually want to be married, for whatever reason, but who wish to act responsibly – and this could extend to some legal recognition for women in such partnerships where a relationship breaks down. It would also lead to the word ‘partner’ acquiring some real meaning, rather than being a rather vague euphemism for ‘live-in lover’ or ‘father of my children’ or ‘current boyfriend’, covering a wide range of possibilities and often creating confusion and embarrassment when ‘business partner’ is actually what is meant!

            It is time we began to think clearly about the kind of society we are trying to create, rather than lurching from one proposition to another, propelled by a desire for political correctness along a vaguely liberal and secular line that is often ill-thought-out and full of its own type of prejudice with regard to anyone who happens to disagree with it. “Liberal” ideas are supposed to allow people freedom for contrary opinions, not curtail it according to a received set of values and opinions, as is fast beginning to happen. The word has its roots in ‘liberare’ – ‘to free’ – not ‘liber’ (a book).

            No, let’s not go back to ‘doing it by the book’. Please.

Where to now, C of E?

I’m ashamed of the Church of England. As a long-time lay member (I was confirmed when I was 18), I’ve been with her through thick and thin and never felt so alienated as I do this week. It’s not the decision of our governing body in itself – one can argue quite validly either for or against women bishops from both the Bible and Church tradition, and it seems to me that this is not a matter of doctrine but of Church government, which we should simply decide on prayerfully and then get on with peacably. But the vitriol with which the debate was carried on has no place in the deliberations of any church, however deeply felt the position on either side, and will leave a scar whatever happens next. Where did we lose sight of “You will know my disciples by the love they have for each other”? or “Be united, so that the world may believe”? Washing one’s dirty linen in public is what my mother would have called this sorry debate, and it makes me sick.

 

The wider question, however, is where we go from here? I started training as a lay reader in the late 1990s – though I never finished the training for various reasons including a move from one diocese to another – and I remember clearly in one of my earliest essays deploring the doctrinal chasm between liberals and evangelicals, which I was sure even then would lead to a split in the Church of England, right down the middle. My tutor, a canon at Winchester Cathedral, disagreed – indeed, he seemed surprised that I had even suggested such an idea (what planet was he living on, I wonder?) But the problem is now that these two opposing points of view make it quite difficult for the rest of us to live harmoniously in the “broad church” that the Anglican Church has always managed to be, with room for everyone. In earlier days we could agree to disagree, and none the worse for it. Now it feels as though one has to choose between the two camps, whose views are actually very narrow. The whole argument about women holding leadership roles in the church is based on a very small number of biblical verses, and as I said at the beginning of this post, both points of view can perfectly well be argued without overly distorting those verses. Which surely must make it likely that this really isn’t an important issue, but one where both sides should proceed with respect and an awareness that their point of view might be mistaken, or not important enough to make an issue of. There are much much more important threads in the Bible that we should be majoring on together, things like care for the poor, love for (all) our neighbours, and generally being a light in a very dark world, which cares not an iota for our petty differences, but is crying out for hope and a better way in the face of the hatreds and despair with which many are faced. The Church of England is letting down those people who most need her help, particularly since its status as an established church has meant that its clergy and congregation have always held a special place in the community. I wonder whether they will hold that place for much longer.

 

So what are the options? We can divide into two, and let different parts of the worldwide Anglican communion join whichever section they wish, or be divided as well. That would be radical and simple, but to my mind a tragic outcome that we should avoid if we can – and which poor Rowan Williams spent the whole of his archepiscopate trying to prevent. Or we can opt for a looser linkage that keeps us together formally while allowing different national churches to take different routes. Our own church here would still have the difficulty of opposing camps, but at least we wouldn’t be dragging everyone else into the abyss too. The North American church is culturally very different from the sub-Saharan African churches, and I think should be allowed to take the route with which it is comfortable. Thus there might be women bishops in some Anglican communions, but not in others. Individual national or regional churches might choose their own conclusion on this issue.Would that matter so very much? If I move to Africa, I would accept that they take a more traditional stance. If I am in Canada then I recognize that for Christians there gays and women are acceptable in leadership as they are in secular government. They may be mistaken, but they would not be evil. I may be wrong about some things too – and pride of opinion has no place in a church where we worship a God who recommended (in the Old Testament) that we “do not lean on our own understanding”, and in the New (via St Paul) that we “do not indulge in petty arguments about minor doctrinal matters”. As long as people are sincerely seeking the truth and trying to follow God’s way, there is room for a little error with humility. It is the arrogance of assuming that our way and only our way is the correct one that has caused the venom of the debate last week. That is a way we should follow no further, for our church is in grave peril.

 

There has always been argument, much of it angry and venomous, in the history of the church, ever since St Paul began to formulate doctrine within a few decades of Jesus’s resurrection. The result has always been schism, division and often even open warfare. I guess perhaps there always will be. But it doesn’t mean that there should be, or that we are advancing the Christian cause or God’s purposes. The Crusades didn’t do so, the Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th centuries didn’t do so, nor have any other conflicts brought about in the name of religious differences. God is not in the earthquake, the wind or the fire, but in the still small voice. Let us listen to Him.

Obama and the election of 1828

Reading about the upcoming US elections, I was reminded suddenly of the choices facing Americans in a much earlier election, that of 1828 – an election that ended the one-term presidency of John Quincy Adams and resulted in the rapid unravelling under Andrew Jackson, his successor, of the American System designed to improve the US economy. The work of the Adams administration required a longer time span to achieve its aims, and didn’t get it. In retrospect, Adams’s presidency appears as a blip in American history, and has been seen by historians (and also by himself at the time) as a failure. What would have happened if that close election of 1828 had been won by Adams instead of lost?

 

I have the feeling that Obama’s reforms, hindered as they have been by the checks and balances built into the US constitution, by the financial crisis and recession that hit just as he began his term, and also by blinkered right-wing obturacy in some quarters, need that extra time – another presidential term – too. We have not yet seen the best of Obama, whose scholarly and lawyerly reasonableness and desire for consensus sits ill with the adversarial and visceral politics that he has had to contend with, and I hope very much that US voters will give him chance of a second term. I would prefer to see him bring the best he can offer his country to the role of Chief Executive, not to some lesser capacity as Adams was forced to do, brilliant though the latter’s post-presidential career was. To those outside the USA, to waste Obama’s talents by rejecting him and choosing Mitt Romney in his place would be a mistake whose enormity we would find hard to understand.

 
The election process creaks, undoubtedly, with its electoral colleges that can run counter to the popular vote, to the detriment of US democratic credentials, and the swing states have too much power. I think the system is out of date and needs changing. But we will put up with swing states and electoral colleges, if they deliver an Obama victory. Then perhaps we will see an Obama unleashed, unfettered, able to lead as perhaps only he can. A good start has been made. America, don’t throw it way.

Let's hold on to our fossil fuels - we may need them yet!

Much print, digital text, and air (some of it hot) has been expended on the issue of oil, gas and other fossil fuels. We have carbon capture and carbon trading. We have protocols such as Kyoto and attempts at improving them such as the Copenhagen conference (generally considered a fiasco). We have those who toe the line and those (now subject to an almost religious intolerance) who are seen as, or identify themselves as, sceptics.

 “Global warming” may or may not be caused, or exacerbated, by human use of fossil fuels. Evidence from recent centuries (the short-term view, you might say) appears to be conclusive. Carbon dioxide and temperature levels started to rise at almost exactly the same time that the Industrial Revolution began in Europe. But paleoclimatologists (taking the long-term view) seem less certain. Of the two measures, the former appears more significant, in that carbon dioxide is now at an all-time atmospheric high, where temperature is less easy to determine from proxies. There is good evidence that the so-called Holocene Climatic Optimum of around eight thousand years ago involved temperatures higher than those we have today, and it seems very likely that temperatures about 120 kya (thousand years ago), when tropical animals roamed southern England not long before the onset of the last Ice Age, were at least 2̊C higher than today. There is also the possibility that global warming has been caused by increased solar activity, which occurred during the same 150-year time period. That activity has now largely died away, giving us an excellent opportunity to see whether temperatures now fall, or whether (with carbon dioxide levels continuing high) they continue to rise at the same rate as before. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere should, if the Gaia system of checks and balances were working properly, be lowered by the absorption of CO₂ by the oceans, and the fact that the oceans are presently CO₂ saturated may have something to do with the horrendous abuse of the marine environment that has occurred over much the same period as industrial pollution of the atmosphere and soil, so could be a factor too.

 Until very recently (in historical terms – I mean, less than 50 years ago), scientists were convinced that long-term solar system rhythms meant that we would soon be faced with a renewed icy period comparable to the Pleistocene. Those rhythms still exist, and presumably would reinstate themselves if we managed to lower carbon dioxe levels sufficiently –  so the question we should  be asking ourselves is whether our (very short-term, in geological time terms) use of fossil fuels is likely to raise carbon dioxide levels sufficiently to offset the solar system rhythms and continue the upward movement in temperatures.

 But that raises another question. If fossil fuel use raises carbon dioxide levels, and those levels prevent us entering another Ice Age, is this a good or a bad thing? On the one hand, burning fossil fuels might be all that is preventing the onset of another Pleistocene-type episode. In which case, perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so worried about it, because if we stop burning them, the Ice Age tendency may reassert itself. And whilst the prospect of warming, with rising sea levels and possibly more chaotic and extreme climatic conditions, is bad enough, it’s nothing to what we shall face if we are assailed by another Ice Age, in which drought as well as cold, and probably violently fluctuating weather conditions to boot, if the climatic proxy evidence from the Pleistocene is correct!

 

But on the other hand if it gets really cold, we shall need some fuel to warm our benighted cities and probably to provide greenhouse heating for the food plants that won’t grow nearly so well outside. Which fuel shall we use? Solar will probably be helpful, as there will be more sunshine and fewer clouds, and there may be violent storms with winds and waves we might utilize for power. But surely, surely, the best, most concentrated form of fuel that past ages has bequeathed us is our much-demonised oil, gas and coal. Let’s conserve them – not because using them is going to force the Earth into a global warming spiral, or not only because of that possibility, but because we may need them in the future. If we squander them now, at a period of warmth and optimal growing conditions, our children or their descendants will curse us. And with good reason.

On French and British national anthems

I heard a wonderful story some years ago about two Englishmen who lived in France – rural France, in the Saintes area – in the 1990s. They were enjoying coverage of an England–France rugby match during the Five Nations series in the local tavern where they were known and on the whole accepted. Unfortunately, our Englishmen made the mistake of crowing too soon – for much of the match England was in the lead, and they were, of course, cock-a-hoop about this. But in the end the French came with a late surge and won the match. This was a mite embarrassing for our Englishmen, one can imagine, and it was made worse by the action of one of the French fans who had been drinking in the tavern at the same time. He swaggered over to their table, leaned down and thrust his face close to that of one of the Englishmen, eyeballing him at close range.

            “Hah!” he exclaimed, in basic English, with a strong French accent. “That for Agincourt.”

            Now the Englishman dined out on the story in grand style, seeing this as evidence of the pettiness of the French and their inability to understand the essential camaraderie of sport. But when you look at the words of the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, dating of course from the days of the French revolution, but still sung with fervour, before rugby matches and on the occasion of French victory in the Olympics for example, it all makes a bit more sense. The Marseillaise is, not to put too fine a point on it, rather a paranoid confection. Not only do we have the warlike and rousing refrain “Aux armes, citoyens!” calling all French people to fight for their country, but this call is based on the conviction that the enemy is at the gate, threatening the people and all they care for. The interesting thing is not so much the adoption of the Marseillaise in the first place, at a time when the threat was real and most of Europe was at war or about to be at war with revolutionary France, but that they still sing it, unexpurgated, full of xenophobism and fury. Why is that, I wonder?

            Much is made of the Last Night of the Proms, and even of the mention of the Queen being ‘victorious’ in the British national anthem. These are sometimes said to exemplify the gung-ho imperialism still underpinning our national life. But when you remember that the vitriolic second verse of the national anthem has been quietly dropped (I haven’t heard it sung in years), and that in the third the Queen is reminded that she is to ‘defend our laws’ as a condition that we continue to wish her to reign over us, you have quite a different picture. Not to mention the fact that the most heartfelt community singing at the Last Night of the Proms, and the place of honour at the end of proceedings, is reserved for Jerusalem, which is essentially, for all Blake’s warlike language, a pledge for civil struggle, for social justice.

            I mention these differences as observations. I have no idea at all what significance (if any) they have. But I do just wonder whether, if the French were to decide to dump the Marseillaise in favour of a more peaceful song, Europe might be more ready to believe in their commitment to a united Europe. I haven’t studied the words of the national anthems of other European countries, and perhaps it would be an interesting piece of research. How much do the sentiments of a national anthem affect the attitudes of the people of a country towards their neighbours, and towards the wider world where there may well be enemies? Is it something that we should consider more carefully?

The bricolage culinary arts and the bricoleur life

I recently learnt the true meaning of the word “bricolage” via an excellent book on qualitative research that I have been indexing for Wiley-Blackwell. In this volume a semi-humorous example was given of a bricoleur chef who produces great culinary masterpieces from whatever she happens to find in the family fridge (I couldn’t help wondering whether the author knew such a chef, perhaps in her own family). Now this really appealed to me, because I am that kind of cook. I rarely remember to plan meals much in advance or look up recipes – I might just decide to get some meat out of the freezer during the afternoon with the idea of cooking it that evening, but often I forget, so we do eat quite a few non-meat meals in our household, unless it’s cold meat that I can reheat from frozen, or a quick-unfreeze meat such as mince. My cooking is most often driven by the leftovers in the fridge from the properly thought-out meals I may just have managed to prepare over the weekend. Indeed, I am so allergic to using recipes that my husband, giving me a small recipe book for a birthday or Christmas in our early years together, wrote an adaptation of the Nunc Dimittis for the occasion, on the fly-leaf, beginning: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, from according with thy recipes; for mine eye has perceived an improvement ….”

            Recently my 11-year-old daughter had a barbecue for her birthday, with four of her friends invited round to share it. The barbecue had to be cooked inside, with grill, frying pan and oven, because of the appalling weather we in the UK have endured for far too much of this summer, but it tasted pretty good and everyone enjoyed it. However, owing to two of her friends having cried off within a day or two of the event, I had bought too much meat and made the mistake of cooking most of it, partly because I had already frozen it and didn’t want it to hang around raw in the fridge, and partly in the belief that 11-year-olds are always hungry. To their credit, most of the participants ate well, but even so, we had a number of beefburgers, lamb grills and a portion of chicken breast left over in the fridge, and there are only three of us in the family to eat them up. So I had a wonderful time creating curries, rice dishes and even a lasagne out of these various leftovers, ably abetted by my husband, who always cooks on a Saturday night and made a beautiful beef casserole as his contribution to the culinary bricolage.

            But it occurs to me that actually the best kind of life, or at least the sort of life that I would feel most fulfilled to be living, is also a bricoleur life. After all, along the journey of life we all have a number of different experiences, good and bad, painful and joyous, and these are like leftovers in our fridge. We can leave them there to moulder and go rotten, or we can take them out and make something of them. If you have suffered some terrible trauma, then you will be able to have true sympathy with someone else who has suffered that trauma. Sympathy can be so very superficial, and it may seem quite miraculous to discover someone who really knows, for example, what grief a stillbirth is, if you have suffered one yourself. If, on the other hand, you have had the joy of seeing a child grow up into a mature, sensitive citizen living a life completely independent of your own but nevertheless appreciative of her upbringing and her relationship with you, then you can encourage those parents who are still battling with teenage rebellion or toddler tantrums. As a writer, I continually find that my fiction writing in particular is informed by this bricolage effect, often unconsciously. Readers say to me “How did you know it feels like that?” and when I think about it I can see that even though I have not experienced that particular emotion, I have walked with friends who have, or I have learned enough through those emotions that I have experienced to imagine my way into a slightly different one for the purposes of a novel.

            Nothing needs to be wasted, neither in the fridge nor in the experiences of our lives. Even the things that hurt can be faced and brought into new and fruitful relationship with our present situation, or used to help or sympathise with someone else. And all the little skills we have picked up, life skills and people skills as well as technical and physical ones, can be brought into play creatively in making our and our near-and-dear’s life happier, better and more effective. Let’s use them.