Month: November 2013

One morning I sprayed window cleaner onto my reading
glasses so that I might see better through the usual smear of finger prints and
collected grime, the build up of days of use.  That morning the fog was out thick and crusty like dirty
glasses and the air was filled with moisture, tiny invisible water droplets that
together created a grey blanket shrouding the back yard in sorrow.  Everything outside was wet to touch and
the washing on the line would take days to dry.  

This sort of moisture permeates the washing in ways a good
drenching never does.  A good
drenching is in and out in no time, but a moisture soaked fog gets into the
fibres of my sheets and stays there for far longer.  It lies like a curse and refuses to budge. 

I heard Craig Sherborne on the radio speaking of how he feels compelled to make sense of the
details of his life and relationships by including whatever comes up for him in
his writing.  

At times he thinks
this is fine.  This is art.  This is the only way he can write with
authenticity, even if it upsets some of his readers who imagine, rightly or
wrongly, that they find themselves described in his stories. 

At other times he tortures himself with the unethicality of
it all.  It is reprehensible.  He should not do it and yet he cannot
do otherwise.  It is his way of
coping with his life.  It is his
passion, his obsession, his reason for being.  

I struggle similarly to justify my writing, on the one hand
as necessary as a means of coming to some greater understanding of the meanings of my life.  

It’s all about having
greater insights into what it means to be human, as Sherborne suggests, and at
other times I thump myself internally for daring to write as I do.  

Somewhere in here the desire for
revenge pops up its head and insists on being counted, alternatively as
a reprehensible motive for which I must apologise, at other times as a valid
basis on which to build an argument.  

Perhaps it is not so much the fact of the writing itself, it is the
business of preparing that writing for public consumption.  It is the
determination to put on view to allow others to read it that both
attempts to satisfy the desire for revenge and also shifts it.  

Once the words are down on the page the
hot feelings pass.  They have entered another sphere.  Perhaps they enter into readers who can now detect those
yearnings in themselves through the vengeful one’s writing, or perhaps it transforms
into something else, some deeper understanding of the human condition.  

No wonder the reader might imagine, no
wonder the writer feels like this, I would too.  Such hurtful behaviour meted out towards them.  

I, too, want to hit out.  I, too, want to find some way of releasing that pressure as if from a cooker valve. I, too, want someone else to recognise my grief, and if in so doing I dishonour
the perpetrators of that grief, if in the process, I get behind the veil of
respectability of polite society, if in writing in this way I strip off the
masks from the faces of those who would prefer to remain hidden, even including
my own mask, then so be it.  

I can always put it back on later, when we meet for
polite conversation.  But in my
writing we are stripped bare of such false sensibilities.  

Through my writing hopefully we can approach
one another with honesty and integrity even if that experience causes one or
both of us pain.