A Joint Decision: A Scene in Twenty-Five Sentences

He had stocked his mind with feelings where thoughts used to be. Feelings of disrepute; of insanity; of calamity and disaster. That is what writers do, of course, but she was still looking at him and he knew he had to say something. The cadence of their dialogue, perfect or otherwise, had silenced moments ago and a new sound - the sound of vacuous trepidation - had solidified around them, encasing them in that too-common atmosphere known by the youth of today as 'awkwardness'. Her stare was invasive, but he could forgive that. She was allowed to invade his mind because she was the one who created it - created, naturally, using leaves and stems and bits of broken bark.


Breaking the traditions that his relationship had taught him, he spoke first.


"We can never grow if we don't leave, Lucy. We'll just stand here, stagnant, waiting for the world to come to us. Your choices - your desires have made us this way; stuck with nowhere to go. The world waits for no-one, Lucy, and no-one waits for us. Haven't you seen how our friends surpass us? Haven't you seen how they move on to better things and we just stay here - stuck - just fucking stuck, going nowhere but down. I know that you struggle with change; I know that you're happy living the easy life, but there is so much more out there. We only get one chance at this - if we don't go now, we'll never go and we don't have an excuse anymore."


"Can I talk now?" came the interception.


"We don't have an excuse because we're stifling ourselves. We are giving up on living just to survive a little longer."


"Can I talk now?" the voice came again, with authority this time.


"These are decisions that we should make together; I refuse to remain content while you dictate my chances. I don't think I can do this anymore."


Assuming that meant no, she stood and took up her suitcase in her hand. In her other hand, he was astonished to see she carried a train ticket to the capital, where a new phase of her new life could begin.

Home: A Scene in Twenty-Five Sentences

Outside of her house was dismal. The edges of her garden were marked and plotted by trees - trees waving in the heavy gales, clawing at the sky with their extremities. She looked up from her coffee cup and began to wonder secret thoughts to herself when she heard a noise coming from the kitchen arch. Her thoughts, clandestine from all in her surroundings, were forced to surrender her attention for reality. A large, jovial woman had grounded herself in the doorway like a female Falstaff. The new figure offered a "good morning" to her mother and sat on the opposite side of the kitchen table, pouring some nonsense about the weather over breakfast. It was as if the air she expelled included a bit too much oxygen and was slightly too faint of the other chemical elements that could have made the mixture interesting.


She had refused to move away from home, claiming it to be too expensive, and proceeded to live in the biggest room of the house. Well, she was still young after all, and her mother didn't need so much space in her old age. Old people seldom need things that young people do. When a person reaches a certain age, they appear to give up a life of ambition for a life of reality. Besides, her mother always knew that she would move out when she could find a man to take her, but as the years rolled on, it was looking less and less likely to be a probable scenario. The women, though a generation apart, were growing old together at quite the same rate, it seemed, and they had become something of an indivisible force, prone only to give each other love and hold everybody else at a safe, dispassionate distance.


The house still felt empty to her since George died. Her daughter was more than adequate company, but there was always this voice in her head suggesting that she was a burden in her old age. "Perhaps she hasn't moved out because of me," she would often consider when alone with her secret thoughts, but it was unlikely. She had merely raised a young woman with enough confidence and little enough pride that she was able to stay in any living situation that made her happy, that's all. Her secret thoughts would wander down the most horrific avenues sometimes, but she often found she could resolve all else by telling herself that she was - that she is - a good mother. Her daughter, though unsuccessful, was happy; though overweight, was appreciative; though dreary, was good-natured, and that was all that really mattered.


There was a certain beauty, she always knew, in her relationship with her daughter. Though happiness can rarely be found in others, it can become apparent in their presence. Therefore, seeing her fat face chomp down mercilessly upon an unsuspecting croissant with no reservation whatsoever made her grin to the point that her thin, stick-like lips and her crow's feet became one; each indistinguishable from the other.


"Your father would be so proud of you," the mother remarked with her usual grace and reverence. Then she stood up out of her chair and walked, lightly humming, to the garden window, letting her secret thoughts blow through her mind like the disoriented branches of the stable oak trees that preceded her. She was safe; she was stable; she was home.

Diligent Indolence (and its Effects on Productivity)

News came in today that everybody's favourite billionaire, Mr Richard Branson, has introduced a somewhat postmodern attempt at individual productivity. His idea to endow his workers with unlimited holiday is an attempt to focus "on what people get done, not on how many hours or days worked". Perhaps, then, giving free reign to employees makes them care more about the job they do. If an employee has 8 hours in a day and a job to do, it is only sensible to take 8 hours to do the job; after all, that's what you're being paid for. However, in Mr Branson's method, the job will only take as long as it takes. It's a cut-the-bullshit approach to a problem that every company in the country must come up against and it works.


Now, this wouldn't be my blog if it didn't relate in any way to popular/literary culture, so it only makes sense that I explain the situation from my corner. A commissioned artist is given a structure - a deadline. It is unfortunate that it has to be this way because, as with the workers at Virgin, this can actually be profoundly inimical to productivity. An idea - a poem, a painting, a melody - is a spark. It doesn't last very long. It illuminates and then degenerates back into whatever strange surface it surmounted from. To pretend that it can be structured, or even recaptured, is deceptive. The artist often wants to play the part of the overworked, undervalued cultural dynamo that is a mystery to everyone barring his/her own mother, but most of them just aren't like that.


Creating something special is hard work but it never feels like it and, just like Mr Branson's incredibly lucky employees might indeed find, there is nothing wrong with admitting that if you don't add a brushstroke today, it won't really make any difference. Mr Keats speaks of this as 'diligent indolence' and who should know better about such things than the undervalued cultural dynamo himself? Working for the sake of working actually wastes more time than sitting in silence and watching the world go by. At least there is some kind of (albeit, pretentious) beauty in that.


It's good to be back.
Love!
Mike.xx

The Non-Partisan: A Scene in Twenty-Five Sentences

Brazen, bold and brightly blazed, our vixen sings a shrieking squeal. She exits the room with eyes ablaze, her skin seemingly sinking into the vacuum of her skull.



"Madame," the porter interjects, "why do you seem so sad?" Her beautiful, untainted complexion, fluorescent with inconsolable wetness, is pitiful, yet alluring. He seems to care but his eyes fail him as they slope towards her breasts. She covers them indiscreetly with her descending towel and wipes the cooling drops of dew from her eyes. Perverse nature unveiled, he quickly springs his gaze back upward to her face. "Is there anything I can do for you, Miss?"



"You can leave me alone," says she, "Just leave me the fuck alone."



Turning on her bare naked heel, she starts to run into an adjoining hallway - a run inspired by the way the women in movies run - and he turns his face away. This isn't the job of a porter, he thinks; this lady needs some other kind of help. As he starts to absent himself from the scene, the click of the lock behind him acts as if someone had put a fish hook in his nostril and pulled to turn him around. A man wearing similar attire vacates the same room. He is maybe ten years older than she, but his virility and determination is instantly comparable with the drama of her youth. She being gone, he looks both ways for clues as to her escape route. He turns to the porter for assistance and gestures an interrogative, yet friendly sign. The porter points straight ahead and receives a second semiotic gesture - a rudimentary thumbs up - from the semi-naked stranger. The perception of the stranger, whose dominant strides thunder with questionless self-confidence, obscures into the distance as his lover's had before him.



There is a feeling of emptiness in the hallways once more. Their relationship, however volatile, is, at least in the simplest sense, human. Once both characters have emigrated from his presence, the porter thinks about the importance of each action. How a small encounter can make such a massive difference to the lives of others. They may have only informed his story, but he played an active role in theirs. The thought enters his mind and then dissipates into nothingness - thoughts sometimes do that as quickly as they coagulate. Then, picking up his stride, our disinterested protagonist walks on, unchanged and indifferent, as a man who has seen everything, yet still knows nothing.

Seventy Springs

"It's better to have had your wish than to have wished you had,"


sings the dead, dancing Grandfather in Woody Allen's underrated 1996 musical-comedy Everyone Says I Love You. And it's true. We all must take our lives back. We've sold them for cheap distractions and split, incongruous minds. Since when did employers call the shots? I am certain that employees had rights once upon a time; employers would be in need of help, so they would employ people. Now people are so in need of jobs that the employers have the upper hand. If we all renounced the desire for a third television, a second car, an expensive flat and clothes for our animals (all of which are as unnecessary as each other), then we could regain that power over our own lives.


We can all have what we want much easier if we stop pretending that we "need" these unnecessary things. Regrets are much harder to deal with when we regret what we didn't do. At least if we do it, even if we regret it, we know we tried. It's better to have had your wish than to have wished you had. Mr Housman says:


Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.


And, surely, this is all that is worth knowing.


Lovely to see you again, reader. Do keep stopping by.
Mike.xx

Gender Fatality

"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly or a man womanly." - Virginia Woolf.


The artistic mind needs to be two things: honest and androgynous. It is this androgyny that gives the work of art its universality - its potency. This doesn't, as Mrs Woolf might suggest, only refer to the gendered mind, but a mind that can encompass all difference; a mind that is susceptible to the infinite idiosyncrasies of humankind as a whole. That is what sets Shakespeare apart, for example; his ability to understand and manipulate a multiplicity of human characteristics. I wish I had a mind like that; I yearn for a mind like that.


What I do know is that I have a mind that is attune to the written word. I often find it difficult to express myself in verbal conversation and yet I find it incredibly easy to sit down and write a coherent (if not self-indulgent) blog post. I've said this to countless people and, funnily enough, they often tell me the opposite; that their minds are naturally attune to the spoken word and the pursuit of any kind of stylistic writing is insurmountable. Funny how life goes, huh?


So, why is this Woolfian (wonderful word) idea of the androgynous mind such a big part of my own theory of what makes an artist? Because it is only through understanding others that others can understand the artist. Shakespeare had this talent and so few others have. I would argue that Bob Dylan had it; indeed, still has it if anybody ventures to listen to him anymore. It is a gift that comes along maybe only once in a century but it is undoubtable nonetheless. It is the one attribute that all of the great artists share no matter what their discipline or movement. They all found new, exciting, innovative ways to understand the human condition.


Another very artsy post. The next one will be about death or something to make up for it.

Happiness to you, reader.
Mike.xx

Advice from the Masters

"The reason advice is free is because it's worthless" - Michael Caine.


When I was just realising that writing was a career that I wanted to pursue, I decided to send letters to some writers that I admired for helpful tips and advice. Paul Haggis, the writer of feature films Crash and Million Dollar Baby, gave me two pieces of advice:


1) Write about questions that you can't answer and,
2) Write about things that make you angry.


At first, the advice seemed too specific. I thought that to write about things that made me angry was too much of a narrow field. I thought that unanswerable questions were impossible to make a story out of because most stories are resolved by answering the previously unanswerable question; if I couldn't answer the question posed in my own story, then who could?


But then I began to realise what both pieces of advice really meant. Things that make us angry engage us. As a writer, you can become enveloped in the story because you are writing about something that you really care about. It is not preachy to write about injustice. A man I didn't know threatened to kill me on the street today - there are some things that happen on a day-to-day basis that everyone can relate to and that (almost) everyone will create a collective consensus over.


Then, during my time at University, I read the complete letters of John Keats and Keats mentions a concept that he terms "negative capability". That is, the ability to write from a place of uncertainty. It describes how the artist can create something without the relevant knowledge of the subject that one would think necessary to do so. It was then that I understood Mr Haggis' first suggestion to me. The answer is never the important part of the story. Ever. The search for the answer is the part that engages an audience because it is that which everybody can relate to. In other words, it is not the artist's job to teach, but to communicate and to connect.


That's all for today, reader. Thank you for trawling through my (ironically) quite preachy writing yet again,


Much love to you,
Mike.xx