Nerval's Madness

What if he saw symbols we didn't see;

what if Nature did indeed communicate with him.

What if he had crossed a plane that most mortals can't;

what if by that definition he wasn't mad at all?

What if he instead spoke the language of the Universe.

Picture credit: Gérard de Nerval by Félix Nadar

Written October 2021.

Lives

Lives fascinate me; but biography is for me to read not to write. The obsession with the chosen subject over a prolonged period would be too much; that is the way I think one might descend into madness. For, it must grow difficult to separate the lived from the living, the two must, to some extent, converge. To understand the lived, the living must try to inhabit, or at least try to visualise or imagine, some of their world as it once existed. The old and the new travelled between, or the modern, for a time, suspended. The subject, the life must be breathed for the biographer to animate the words they will in turn write. The places their subject dwelt in or frequented must be visited; their footsteps followed. Any trace they may have left of themselves must be read or investigated. It must an exhausting, all-consuming search, and accompanied therefore by euphoric or depressive moods, which may chime with the subject's own. I cannot imagine, from my limited reading of lives, how it could be otherwise. It requires more mental, emotional stability, I think, than the average human, or perhaps the resilience to bounce back, to shake off the lived, after the experience.
Perhaps however I'm wrong and the lived subject can be divorced from throughout the whole process. I cannot believe though that this approach would not affect how the life was written and read. I cannot conceive of not, as a biographer (and indeed a reader), liking and identifying with the lived. Why then choose to write of lives lived? (Why then read biography?) There must, there has to be, some affinity, some attraction, a wanting to know.
The best biographers, the best written biographies, will always be for me those that live and breathe their subject.

Picture credit: Englishman in the Campagna, 1845, Carl Spitzweg (source: WikiArt).

Journal entry, October 2021.

We Look Far

We follow, in many ways, our ancestors' paths instead of forging our own. We look back to their achievements, their times of peace and conflict, and their colonial past. We look far, beyond our grandparents, and even our great-grandparents, great uncles and aunts. We look far, to understand, to critique, to atone. We look far, to praise or blame these long ago events for our present state. We look far, too far. Our eyes less eager to examine more recent history, for roots of problems, for solutions, for it's too fresh in public memory and forms part of our own lived history. We look far because we do not wish to acknowledge our own mistakes, our own participation, as a nation, in certain events: the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan. We look far, and blame our present division on Victorian values or Empire, and not our own failure to integrate, only to divide further. All-white, all-black, all-male, all-female groups; safe spaces, yes, but charitable, commercial, dramatic enterprises? All one race, all one gender does not, it is obvious, promote equality or tolerance, but then nor do quotas. We look far, to assess power, the power given to or taken by authority figures, the leaders of governments or states, the voted-in officials, and say in response to rapes, murders and mass shootings: 'Never Again', when history, near and far, testifies otherwise. Never, in the historical context, does not exist. Some things cannot be prevented. Humankind is not designed to be all good. We look far, to study the Greats, the great men, the great women, and uncover, too, their flaws. We look far, and in present time rewrite their past, their character, as man, as woman, as playwright, as novelist, as artist. We look near, and study not, in biography, their works, but their personality. We look near, too near, and learn nothing about art.

Picture credit: Ink Valley, 2012, Jacek Yerka (source: WikiArt).

Inspired, in part, by Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life by Lyndall Gordon. Written October 2021.

Crisis

A week after reading of William James and whilst reading Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, I had a crisis, not a physical or spiritual crisis but a writerly one. I suddenly questioned what I call my 'work', and whether I actually wanted anyone (other than myself) to read it.
It had not, I felt, been a good year for writing. The year before had produced better material, in spite of, or perhaps because of Covid restrictions, not that in reality they impacted my life that much, except that suddenly my part-time job was gone, but then the nature of it (in the service industry) had begun to make me feel vulnerable anyway. In a sense, my first lockdown had started a week before the government called it, and perhaps in that 'protected' time that went on and on and on I'd said all I wanted to say or used up all my creative ability, and now, in mid-September 2021, I was growing dissatisfied. The urge to write still very much there, longhand or freehand (in the creative flow) on the keys, and yet something that's impossible to define was not the same.
The changes in seasons affect me, so perhaps - I hoped - it was only that; it would settle, it usually did, once the clocks went back; although until then I might continue to feel uncomfortable at the thought of my work being read. Work that was unpolished, unedited, and flouted, at times, grammatical rules. Work with poorly constructed sentences, because it's all about sound, how it sounds to me personally, and the grammatically correct I often don't like; and with too many commas and semi-colons sprinkled everywhere, and new sentences beginning with And. Work that was neither prose or poetry. Work that chose not to explain anything, that expected a reader to know or if interested to do their own research. Work that said less is better: I have no energy to fill this blank space, and anyway, people's attention spans are shorter; therefore, my pieces will reflect that.
Reflect that they had, and still do. They said only what they needed to say and then stopped, instead of, as I would have done in the past, drawn them out, until the white space crawled with black words. I had, I felt, explained too much; and now I could afford to be more condensed, more abstracted. I shifted, it is true, with some difficulty to this new perspective, and entered – I think on reflection - a new exploratory writing phase; all had been well until this new uneasiness stirred. Stirred at a time, too, when I was in a feverish process of writing twelve pieces (for publication 2023!), all of which had to be a maximum of 250 words. The last, though it was intended to be published eighth, I rewrote three times, which for me is unusual, and I was still, though through editing it met the criteria, unhappy with what was to be the final version.
Through it all the uneasiness tugged, like a form of self-doubt or self-consciousness. As I type this, freehand, it's even now tugging away, causing me every now and again to pause, hands clasped almost in prayer before the keyboard, lips pressed to the thumbs. I don't want not to write, but do I want some of what I write to be read? It's no good, no good at all. I'm not a writer. Yet writing a journal on its own I know won't be (though it used to be) enough. If there's no purpose, other than my own selfish need, I might stop, which I don't think would be wise for a mind whose thoughts circle ceaselessly and build, layer upon layer, unless released and set down on physical or digital paper.
This writerly crisis must, it has to, pass.

Picture credit: Robinson Crusoe illustration, 1920, N. C. Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

Written September 2021.