Some people may ask why there has been such a delay in issuing out the general invitation to the blog. The truth is that I had filed out a number of entries ready to send off for the cyber pigeon-post, but on re-reading had decided that they were not adequate. Why? In most cases because I realised that they did not read well. Why? Well, many of them were passively or even patently bitter, angry or depressing; they revealed the ‘personal’ and indeed the person, but not through a lofty generosity of spirit, assuming a prudent philosophical distance from the events that they enclosed, but ‘close-up’. Why is the personal or confessional mode so offensive to the reader? Why is it that accounts are easy to read as long as they describe noble emotions and responses but as soon as they deviate into the murkier depths of real human emotions; mixed, complex and tortured by contrasting desires, these accounts can appear vulgar, polemical and naff?
It strikes me that this is just another example of literature being unable to describe reality – or perhaps, more honestly – it just describes the limits of my art. For the complexities of our own responses, the way that we receive experience cannot always seem virtuous or philosophical. And sometimes I have found myself writing with a strained formality about people or events which shook me to the very core, or I expunged, or glossed over events or occasions purely because they did not show me in the best light.
This recalls something that I remember reading at the end of Revolutionary Road regarding this hierarchy of the emotions. I think it was Kathy. She was composing a letter for her husband explaining why she wanted to abort their child. The character composed the letter many times. The first were angry and bitter. She knew that they were no good, so she threw them away, and presented him instead with the sixth or seventh version of the letter, chillingly pared down to the few words: “Dear Frank, whatever happens please don’t blame yourself.” Her rationale? Kathy believed that nothing that was written in the spirit of anger, blame and recrimination of others was reliable. At the time I was struck by the truth of this insight. What she meant of course, is that the purely retardant emotions that arise from any kind of trauma are bound to generate responses that we might regret. The results might seem rash, unflattering or make us appear cringingly vulnerable. In other words, we cannot trust our first responses about things. But this goes against popular wisdom which tells us that we should always trust our instincts – the first note struck on the emotional sounding board. So let me reformulate: what Cathy meant was that we cannot trust our first responses about things in writing.
What her husband read was not actually her first unadulterated, raw response but a more considered, moderated and political revisioning of these feelings. Why is the latter to be trusted more than the former? Isn’t the corollary of this process of revision and self-censorship that we never receive a true impression of the way that people really feel from a psychological point of view?
I have heard this echoed by a thousand friends before: No, don’t write that too him! You’ll regret it. Say it to him if you want, but if you write it down, there’s a record that’s down for ever.
Is there something deeper going on here than prudence and questions of accountability. Is the written word anathematic to that seizure of initial, pure emotion, or as Cathy might have it, the first version of the letter to her husband?
It is thoughts like this that convince me that the final taboo in writing is not sex or prejudice or anything like that. The final taboo in writing is anger.
But it is not just anger. In fact there are a whole list of emotions that in reality we do not privilege with a place in our autobiographical writings, or at least seldom do. As a mental exercise I decided to compile a list of some of these that spring to mind (I will call them the ‘ignoble emotions’):
Ignoble emotions
- Boredom (real boredom, not romanticized ennui)
- Bitterness / gall
- Trivial nastiness/incidental bitchiness
- Jealousy
- Inability to feel compassion for others
I’m sure if I thought about it enough I could come up with more. But it is an interesting thought-experiment. Imagine you are writing a narrative about your travelling adventures. What are the stories that you decide not to write about, the things that do not appear literature-worthy or that you would rather not focus on? Now ask yourself why. This of course provokes an even more serious and graver question: what is narrative and can narrative ever be trusted?
But that is a topic for another day: On Writing & Lies
.But to bring this back to some kind of mandate for this blog and setting up what parameters I wish to follow with 833 words. I will reach a compromise: I will write the truth so long as I do not risk offending anyone that I know in Gent, or my position here in general. The internet appears to me to be the ultimately fulfilled expression of Foucault’s panopticon. Indeed it is true that if there are no police, we self-police, especially if we have digital binoculars. Can I do this? Do I want to? What are the ethics surrounding disclosure of the real truth? Couldn’t it hurt someone or many people? Isn’t that why the real truth is so dangerous and why – even in literature – so many strategies have been developed to disguise it? I would finally say that I may not tell the truth about the small things, such as names – but I will remain faithful to the true nature of my time here, be those days spent in happiness, anger,boredom, desire or regret.
833 words a day 