Advice to Writers

You don’t need to use ‘howled’ or ‘growled’

or ‘yowled’ or ‘cried’ or ‘muttered’.

You don’t have to say ‘wailed’ or ‘wept’

or ‘yelled’ or ‘roared or ‘stuttered’.

You don’t have to use ‘moaned’ or ‘groaned’

or ‘sobbed’ or ‘griped’ or ‘grumbled’.

You don’t need to say ‘giggled’, ‘sniggered’,

‘snorted’, ‘sighed’ or ‘mumbled’.

You don’t need to ‘expectorate’,

‘reveal’, 'confess' or ‘cachinnate’.

You don’t need to ‘affirm’, ‘allege’,

‘deliver’ or ‘pontificate’.

These words all have their uses

but maintain a level head:

sometimes, when you’re writing,

it’s OK to just say ‘said’. 

Is Love the Opposite of Science?

Obviously they are not strict opposites, in the sense that if you look in the dictionary you will not find one defined in terms of the negation of the other. What follows is not rigorous philosophical analysis so much as an attempt to make a profound point in a scattered, imperfect and perhaps awkward way.

Let’s start with science. A cornerstone of science is that scientists change their minds if the evidence demands it. They construct hypotheses to account for observed phenomena, and then rigorously test these hypotheses, altering them or abandoning them as the evidence demands. Some hypotheses stand the test of time, and others don’t, but in order to have any validity a scientific hypothesis must be, in principle at least, capable of being proved wrong. In the words of philosopher Karl Popper, it must be ‘falsifiable’.

Love, it seems to be, is the opposite of this. It is unconditional, not falsifiable. The psychotherapist David Richo writes that love “is an unconditional response to what is, rather than a conditioned response to what we have learned.” In other words, love does not shift to fit the ‘evidence’; it integrates everything. It is in this context that we can see that the phrase “I just don’t love you any more” doesn’t make much sense – if you can stop loving someone then it wasn’t really love in the first place.

This might suggest that love is something that just happens to us, out of the blue. However, I don’t think this is true. The genesis of love is commitment, which is governed by choice. We choose to love someone unconditionally. Those of us who think of love as primarily a feeling will find this idea a bit weird – we can’t choose what we feel, can we? – but love is not (just) a feeling, it is action, or a commitment to undertake a course of action.

How does this relate to science? I’m not sure, except to say that gathering ‘evidence’ doesn’t strike me as an especially helpful way of deciding whether or not to embark on a course of loving someone. We might need a certain threshold, some indication that our partner is basically reliable and sensible, say. But love will always involve an element of risk. A commitment to loving is not a commitment to examine the evidence but a commitment to act in the light of incomplete evidence and the possibility of pain and disappointment.

I said at the beginning that my thoughts would be scattered, imperfect and awkward. Love itself is all of these things, so perhaps any treatment of it in writing demands nothing less. 

POEMS FOR MOTHER'S DAY

I recently worked with a group of students to produce poems for Mothers Day. I started by asking them to write (or draw) TEN OBJECTS that are particularly important to them. We then used these objects to create metaphors describing their mums. This is a very simple technique, and it can be used to create poems about anyone and anything. Here are some examples produced by the students at my weekly lunch club at Plashet School:

You Are by Eliona

You are the key to my heart

You are the light showing me directions

You are my sweater keeping me warm

You are my pillow keeping me comfy

You are my umbrella protecting me from the rain

You are my teddy bear keeping me company

You are always by my side

I Love You by Fatima

I love you mum

because you gave me everything

I love you

I love you because

you gave me a gift

I love you

I love you like a star

shines bright in the sky

I love you

because you make me happy

because you laughed

My Mum by Safia

You are my book

When I open you

You get me laughing and excited

You are my sunshine

My shining star!

My TV

When you turn on

I’m really happy

You Are by Farha

You are my star
always leading the way
You are my key
always opening up new places in me
You are my glasses
always opening up my eyes
You are my umbrella
always protecting me from the rain/sun
You are my boat
always holding me up

You Are by Safiyah

You are my phone
My privacy
You are my chicken curry and rice
My favourite food
You are my anime
Thriller, Adventure, Horror, Romance
You are my medals
The achievements I've earned
You are my books
You are my glasses
My shield
You are my merchandise
Everything I cherish
You are my life
My everything

SUNDAY MORNING LION

On Sunday Mornings

mum and dad

have a lion.

They say to us

“we’ve been working hard

all week. Please don’t

disturb us in the morning.

We need a lion.”

When they get up

the lion

is always gone.

I’ve never even seen

mum and dad’s lion.

In fact

the next time

they have a lion

on a Sunday morning

this is what

I’m going to do:

I’m going to call to it.

I’m going to stand outside
mum and dad’s room

and shout

RAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!

MUSICAL DYSLEXIA?

I recently had a chat with one of my students who is dyslexic. She explained to me that, whilst she feels she is clever, she has a very hard time demonstrating this on paper. She knows that she ‘gets’ things but she finds it difficult to express her ideas. If someone could see into her mind, she said, they would appreciate what she is capable of, but as long as her ability is gauged by her schoolwork, or by other such measurements of ‘success’, people will not know this.

I myself do not have dyslexia but there is a certain area in which I can empathise with my student. That area is music. I feel there is a huge discrepancy between my musical creativity and my ability to express this creativity in conventional ways – by singing, for example, or playing an instrument.

I’ve never spoken to anyone about this before, and I do not know how common this feeling is. Perhaps it is a kind of ‘musical dyslexia’. I constantly have tunes bouncing around in my mind, and I do not mean Coldplay or Mozart or whatever. I mean original compositions, tunes I have come up with myself. I am constantly playing percussion on any available surface, and am obsessed with making up little ditties. Perhaps it is a kind of tic. I could easily spend an hour in the shower, singing or humming to myself.

But I have never been ‘musical’ in a conventional sense. I was absolutely hopeless in music lessons at school. It didn’t help that the only music taught at my school was classical music, and that this was taught in an extremely dour way that seemed more akin to mathematics – tones, semitones, crotchets, quavers and all of that stuff. We had to play on pathetic little xylophones, and our teacher would bark at us if we made mistakes. I thoroughly hated music lessons, and used to put no effort in at all. I didn’t see the point.

As I got older I did take up a few musical instruments – clarinet, bass and guitar. I was even in a band for a while, but I was never any good. I could never for the life of me read music, and I didn’t have the patience to improve. It’s not that I didn’t, and don’t, enjoy playing the instruments; it’s more that I always felt inherently kind of crap at them, in the same way as my dyslexic student feels useless at reading and writing. The frustration, in other words, lies not in the fact that I am not musical, but that I am musical but unable to express it.

This feeling of frustration reaches its nadir when it comes to singing. I cannot sing with my mouth, but I can sing with my mind. This sounds very flowery I know, but that is how it feels. If someone could wire up electrodes to my brain and convert my mental compositions into actual songs, I would probably be a fairly successful musician. The creativity is there, but the ability doesn’t seem to be.

Maybe I am making excuses for myself. Maybe I just need to practice, to work harder to improve. Maybe I am lazy. However, it does feel as though, whilst all of this might be true, there is some kind of additional block as well, something similar to dyslexia. I wonder how many people out there feel like they have music inside them that is unable to get out. I would be really interested to know.

THE NAZI WITHIN ME

The psychotherapist and visionary Sheryl Paul, drawing on the work of Carl Jung, talks of different ‘characters’ that inhabit the mind. One of these characters, I believe, is akin to the Nazi. Consider this poem by Stephen Dobyns:

Confession

The Nazi within me thinks it's time to take charge.

The world's a mess; people are crazy.

The Nazi within me wants windows shut tight,

new locks put on the doors. There's too much

fresh air, too much coming and going.

The Nazi within me wants more respect. He wants

the only TV camera, the only bank account,

the only really pretty girl. The Nazi within me

wants to be boss of traffic and traffic lights.

People drive too fast; they take up too much space.

The Nazi within me thinks people are getting away

with murder. He wants to be the boss of murder.

He wants to be boss of bananas, boss of white bread.

The Nazi within me wants uniforms for everyone.

He wants them to wash their hands, sit up straight,

pay strict attention. He wants to make certain

they say yes when he says yes, no when he says no.

He imagines everybody sitting in straight chairs,

people all over the world sitting in straight chairs.

Are you ready? he asks them. They say they are ready.

Are you ready to be happy? he asks them. They say

they are ready to be happy. The Nazi within me wants

everyone to be happy but not too happy and definitely

not noisy. No singing, no dancing, no carrying on.

[from Velocities, Viking Penguin Books, 1994]

There is a Nazi in me. There is almost certainly a Nazi in you too. It is that part of us that can’t tolerate any perceived imperfection, that sees the world in starkly binary terms. It is that part of us that projects our own insecurities onto the world around us, and would rather annihilate that world than confront the monster within. (Indeed, there is a school of thought that postulates a possible Jewish ancestry as the source of Hitler’s vehemence.)

Do you deny that there is a Nazi in you? Are you horrified by the notion? That horror and denial are themselves facets of the Nazi. The Nazi in you can’t cope with blemishes. It believes itself to be pure, to be free from reproach. It believes itself to be entitled to “the only bank account,/the only really pretty girl.” And not for nothing did a whole society become enraptured by Hitler. His ideas obviously spoke to something very primal in us.

The challenge for us is to not let the inner Nazi win. For as I indicated at the beginning, there are other characters in us too. There is the inner Mother Theresa and the inner Gandhi. There might be an inner Casanova. There might even be an inner God or Jesus – Jung speaks, for example, of the “God archetype within.” So we have a choice. Perhaps we could smash the inner Nazi with our inner Stalin:

Does that not make us simply one of them? Won’t this produce an endless loop of self-loathing and self-reproach? After all, depression, as they say, is “anger directed inward.” Or we could break the circle with love, with acceptance and tolerance for what we cannot change about our fundamental nature. In other words, we can attempt to integrate all of the characters within us. Here is a workshop idea. Read Dobyns’ poem above, then have a think about some of the characters – good or bad –  within you. Using Dobyns’ structure, write a poem about ‘The X Within Me’. Here is my attempt:

The baby within me needs to be fed.

The baby within me wants to suck its thumb on the bus.

The baby within me wants to shit itself

and for nobody to mind.

The baby within me demands love and care

and to give nothing back but puke and noise.

It wants songs and laughter and lullabies.

It wants to be the only one to be allowed to cry.

The baby within me wants to cover its eyes

and in doing so make the bad guys

go away. The baby within me wants to play.

The baby within me can’t see black and white,

doesn’t perceive future or history.

The baby within me is innocent

and never proven guilty.

The baby within me is cooed over

by the judge and jury.

The baby within me hears its name as gospel.

The baby within me is learning to smile.

Here is a selection of lines produced by some of my students during a trial run of this workshop:

          The Hulk within me
          releases the bull whenever I get angry
          The dancer within me
          makes me think of sunshine and rainbows
          My eyes and my thoughts
          reflect the animal in me - 
          I am a liger, a hybrid
          The baby within me
          is a special gift
          The Spiderman within me
          swings from building to building
          saving the city from danger.

(Going back to the Nazi within, here is one final note. Jews sometimes refer to themselves as ‘God’s chosen people’. This pernicious phrasing has been at the root of much antisemitism and suspicion through the ages. In any racial sense it is obvious nonsense. In any theological sense it is fraught with problems. I don’t buy it at all. But consider this: every time I judge someone for their perceived imperfections it is incumbent upon me, ‘as a Jew’, to remember that not long ago my mere existence was perceived as just such an imperfection. This is not some kind of unique ‘chosenness’ but it might well amount to a  unique responsibility.)