A New Table: On Writing & Happiness

It is half past eleven on a Saturday night. The whole city of Ghent is partying and even from my first floor window I can spot a crowd of revellers spilling out from the alluring depths of the Fleura Feufka – our extremely proximate local late-night drinking hole. I have come home at this hour to celebrate the inception of my new writing table – small, discrete, black – in my new room at Syrus’s house. So as you can imagine, much has changed in these past weeks.

The business of carrying the table – small though it is – back to my new address in Prinsenhof from the Afrikalaan by the industrial banks of the Handelsdock, was not a task to be sniffed at. In fact, my readiness to take on the challenge only highlighted to me how familiar I had become with carting around articles of furniture on the back of my bike from my year as a boater, when I owed one of those most glorious objects – a bike trailer. It was already dark at five o’ clock when I arrived at the large furniture warehouses on the Afrikalaan – I had only an hour in which to find the correct sort of desk and trundle it back to my new house, before the beginning of my late night shift at MacDougalls. It was a tight schedule; but as the shops close here on Sundays and Mondays, I had little choice; especially as the symbolic value of the desk (and my lack of it), began to accrue a painful significance to me. But of course my lack of desk was only a material excuse for the disheartening lack of work that I have been able to complete since I moved to Syrus’s house – and not the real reason for it. The real reason is perhaps simpler – and because of that, more dangerous – I have been happy.

It occurred to me about three weeks ago, that despite the occasional ups and downs – a feature of our human condition (how does Proust put it? A change of wind here; there; every moment) – I have been very happy in Ghent. This realisation even surprised myself, for in many ways my ‘position’ in society has descended – I have retreated back into the services industry, I do not have the same support network that I had in London and I was at that time living in one of the most undesirable areas of Ghent. Yet despite all of these apparent disadvantages, I felt really,authentically happy.

The shock of this discovery prompted me to reflect how direly depressed I must have been in London even with a good job and a home and a boyfriend – all the appurtenances, so they tell us, of the good life. I was lead to consider what it was about Ghent that was making me so happy. Of course, on one level it is the environment of Ghent: the beautiful, nefarious, medieval, disorganised, artistically enlivened spirit of the place; on another, my independence and sense of gratefulness for the meaningful social connections that I had managed to build up. But such things, I felt, were just supplements to the essential source of my happiness, which, when I pondered a little, I realised was two-fold. The essential reason for my happiness in this city – after all not so far from London– is firstly that I am really doing what I love – writing creatively and working on my own projects – and secondly, that I am free.  I am free in Ghent and I am doing what I love. Who knew that the recipe for true human happiness was so simple?

It is fashionable these days to discuss happiness as a social theme. There was, I remember, an incredibly influential poll some years ago, in which statisticians drew up a kind of gross national product of happiness for each European country. It did not surprise me that the UK came very far down on this list, below, even some of the very poor Baltic countries. The reason for this is very simple and that is, that as far as I can tell, London is a place where not many people can boast that they are truly free and almost nobody is doing what they truly love. I had to move onto water to barter myself a kind of temporary freedom in the city – but now I realise that this freedom was only skin-deep. When you are truly free, the exhilaration of liberty is unmistakeable, just like the thrill of true love, which when it happens – turns your whole body and mind captive, and moves with great, heaving, seismic shifts, the mountains within.

I remember reading somewhere that unlike sadness or melancholia, happiness is a very difficult emotion to write about: it is more complex and capricious; less emotive. I feel that this is true, both because the experience of real happiness can be both banal and difficult to describe, but also because when we are really happy in life, just as when we are really busy, it is difficult to find the time to write.

All writing is an anachronism. It draws our glance from the future into the past – as Proust’s great work so beautifully illustrates and monumentalises. The action of this retreating wave, casts all sorts of debris onto the sand banks of the mind; but it is an action which is essentially a little sad and regressive, as all nostalgic acts or those of re-memberances are.

If writing is concave, the structure of happiness is the opposite: happiness looks towards the future or exists in the moment alone, like the projecting face of a jewel or a ray of light.  To write then, is to betray the fundamental precondition of happiness. One cannot help but conclude, then, that it is a dangerous thing to love to write as writing will inevitable drag you back towards the infinacy of the ocean, where real human happiness exists on the shore alone.

Songs

I was swimming in a dim emerald sea, soft caresses skimming passed my fingers like sea-foam or discs of surf. And we like two rowers… Waves of hair fell lightly – darting on skin then falling back down like a skirt full of wind or the billowing tail of a jellyfish. Isomorphic, strange, bracketed and blooming with light as the tilted, nerve-net of the moon jelly. Blackness pitted with sparkles of unbearable phosphorescence.

Returning to land.

It was cold beyond the covers. A silver light glazed and shimmered on a window pane laced with frosty morning air. Chilled and pink, shimmering with incandescence and sated desires, I swam in the room illuminated like light shining through a glass of blushed, ice-cold rosé wine.

I remember the opening sequence of MacNiece’s beautiful poem Snow:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

The room was pink, I was in the pink bedroom.

Busy Brain: The Love Detective

My head feels about to burst with the number of different narratives and parallel realities coexisting and coursing through my brain: there is the world of the stories, and the need for them to ‘compost’ slowly and vegetate slowly in the back of my mind. Then there are the more philosophical questions that my brain keeps asking about life and love, especially love. Then there is some need to sustain an account into the at times rather interesting, at times frankly boring nature of my life here in Ghent. My brain is pulsing and dilating with this tumultuous mixture of thoughts: from Proust, to plates of hamburgers, from turn of the century London and Paris to Arnaud’s bottomless irony, from Tintin and online translation applications, to what the stomach wants to eat for lunch.

I cast an eye over the small heap of books I have accumulated during a short ten minute browse among the public library book-shelves, and they seem to testify to my fragmentation of spirit and mind:  Henry and Jane by Anaïs Nin; The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane; How Proust can change Your Life by Alain de Botton; England, England by Julian Barnes; Pulp by Charles Bukowski, The Infinities by John Banville. Here I am – reified, constellated, riven.

Some thoughts in passing:

Alain de Botton has absolutely put his finger on it here (through his avatar-medium Proust):

Q: Did he think that love could last forever?

A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.

(How Proust can change Your Life by Alain de Botton, p.175).

Absolutely perfect, and it returns a memory from last month, that of the conversation with the blonde cellist I met in a hostel in Toulouse. In the opinion of this polite German musician, the great problem of love could be summed up thus: how to get the balance right between dependence and independence. It is simple, but it struck me at the time as being entirely right and resounded with some of the same thoughts that I had been turning about in my head at the time. Some of these were discussed by Josipovici in Goldberg Variations.

But then I realised that Alain de Botton was closer to the really profound difficulty that love presents us with, namely that of familiarity. I realised that the single most healthy decision that any of the couples I knew had made, was not to live together. If you live apart from your partner you preserve your independence in a fundamental way, but you also prevent love from becoming stale or wrecked by over-familiarity and petty domestic routines.

So habit and familiarity are the most dangerous things in the world, romantically-speaking. They are the despoilers of love.

The question is not: is there someone out there for us? There are hundreds, indeed perhaps thousands of people eligible for the job of loving you. It is a question of time, perseverance, some degree of sexual attraction and intellectual compatibility. The real question that we need to address is practical and behavioural.  How did we keep our understanding of the one we love, fresh and exciting? How do we, as Botton so excellently puts it, keep the thing we have beside us every day not quotidian, but extraordinary;  receive them not as a habit but as we found them at first ‘swan-like’? [In the context of this discussion of Proust, how ironically does this old term of laudation from Harry and then later dire opprobrium – the demise of the swan within – haunt me. But Harry, aren’t swans meant to die, isn’t that when they sing best?]

These thoughts recall another memory, a sad one. It was Harry and my final night together. But indeed, at the end, there were no words left. Just the spectre of a vanished swan that was too beautiful and too good to live forever.

This break up has precipitated more self-questioning than any other heartbreak of mine in the past. Before, discontinuation made sense, we were bound for very different lives or we did not share the same basic instinct for life. But with Harry, it was different for in many ways, we seemed so perfect together. This makes me want to, perhaps unfairly, bring Love itself to tribunal. I mean why did it end? Was it our fault or was it Love’s?  Was it some fundamental incompatibility and misunderstanding, or was it our inability to understand the true nature of love and adapt our behaviour accordingly? How do we reconcile human nature and our longing for fun, adventure, novelty, beauty and intimacy with the notion of immutable enduring love. Is this a farce? Is it accomplishable? If it is accomplishable (because most things are if you really put your mind to them) is it actually enjoyable?

What went wrong? Throughout these months of self-examination and cross-questioning, I feel that I have sustained a pretty thorough enquiry into the nature of Romantic Love. I have become a sort of detective of the heart. A love detective.

I turn to Henry and June, and open a page at random:

“Sunday. Hugo goes to play golf. I dress ritually and compare the joy of dressing for Henry to my sorrow at dressing for idiotic bankers and telephone kings. Later, a small, dark room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately, the richness of Henry’s voice and mouth. The feeling of sinking into warm blood. And he, overcome with my warmth and moisture. Slow penetration, with pauses and with twists, making me gasp with pleasure. I have no words for it; it is all new to me.

The first time Henry made love to me, I realised a terrible fact – that Hugo was sexually too large for me, so that my pleasure has not been unmixed, always somewhat painful. Has that been the secret of my dissatisfaction? I tremble as I write it. I don’t want to dwell on it, on its effect on my life, on my hunger. My hunger is not abnormal. With Henry I am content. We come to a climax, we talk, we eat and drink, and before I leave he floods me again. I have never known such plenitude. It is no longer Henry, and I am just woman. I lose the sense of separate beings.”

(Henry and June, Anaïs Nin, p.76).

Reading passages such as this makes me question whether women can ever really write about sex. But, of course it’s not just women, it’s men too. It is a basic paradox of writing that sex is one of the most fundamental aspects of life; yet it proves (with just a few exceptions), almost impossible to write about. Removing an illicit copy of one of Nin’s novels from my mother’s bookshelf, preserves one of my earliest memories of and encounters with, erotic writing. She is a classic, though probably by today’s standards, very staid (I’m afraid that I have not read Fifty Shades of Grey). Yet this description seems to me fundamentally inadequate, it is swathed in abstract scales and metaphors: of largeness, of fusion, of oceanic enjoyment; yet it is not real. Must we always read about sex behind this satin blindfold, tickled by its semi-translucency, by what is half-disclosed and half-undisclosed? This is an erotics of suggestion – it is not sex. I believe that sex is anti-poetry. It is vulgar, animal, necessary; completely alien to the glamorous world that Nin really lives in, of powerful men and beautiful women. Even if she wanted to, could she really, given the pretension of her social position, write a really honest and convincing account of female sexual enjoyment?

An honest portrayal of female sexuality – that is what my most recent story is about.

It occurs to me suddenly that we cannot ask questions of love as a philosopher or as a detective. We can only be sentimental about it. I have a memory – a churlish one. Sitting beside a young journalist, awkwardly, in the morning; watching (inappropriately) Four Weddings and a Funeral. Perhaps a sloppy British rom-com offered me the most recent convincing litmus-test of true love yet. As Matthew said to Charles, the question is simple, and it is a lusciously sentimental one:

Do you love her with your whole heart?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter what ‘love’ is. The question is, whatever it means to you, do you love that person with you entire heart?

Songs

Each day is full of a thousand thoughts and a thousand feelings of love.

A Sonata to Separation

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda

On Writing and Anger

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.

 

Something Pablo Neruda Said

Love is so short, forgetting so long

Pablo Neruda

Songs

When is an injury irredeemable?

Amaury said something that struck me at the time as being very profound indeed. He was explaining the first principal of statistics which he described in this manner: “It is one of the fundamental laws of statistics that when something happens, the effect will be greatest on the things closest to it.” How true that is! So the boundless effects of love and joy reverberate and enthral the ones we love, and so, alas, eventually our own shortcomings, sadnesses, depressions and personal crises, will shake the ones we are closest to, like villages around a volcano. The same feeling is also contained within the old maxim: “We always end up hurting the ones that we are closest to the most”. Can’t we avoid this travesty? How could love ever triumph if this is true?

The only way that I can make this sacrifice justifiable is to create with more determination and more success, than I have ever done before.

Songs

I recall some words that came to me from the mouth of a man at Notting Hill Carnival, thick and woozy with drugs and alcohol. Though he was wretched and transformed, he became in that moment a miraculous conduit for some God of love to tell to truth to my unhearing ears and unseeing eyes.

I asked the man, the pilled-up gay guy, who suddenly transformed himself into a saint and a savant:

Q: How did you know that you met the man you loved beyond all others?

And he replied:

A: I just looked at him, and saw all of my future in his eyes.

O tragic suffering, to think that I too felt the same about you. You had eyes that sparkled like gems and stars, they told me: stay with me and you will be safe forever, and you will drink full from the cup of life. It was the twinkle of an everlasting life.  What a gift, what a gift you gave me.

Songs

Nothing touches one like the pain of knowing that they had already found what they sought. They were just not in the right place to accept the full gift of love. Each word admits another. Even a city full of strangers can be a balm. Pearls and plums. I must let the words pour out like petals. For you are my petal: I began writing you a love poem about that. But I didn’t finish it and never gave it to you. I shore and rock to think of the family I left behind: to think of the partner of all of my dreams.

You were everything I could ever have hoped for, and more. How black and terrible can despair be to hide that? Each stranger is a stranger in a park, each walk is a dance in the dark.