At home in Lönngården, sat in the cool gloom of my apartment, listening to deep, bassy rolls and flams of thunder as they surge up through the pink-noise shush-wush of an early summer downpour. Home is a thing you recognise most at the moment of your returning to it; I had an intense week away, then a long day of travelling back, and I am very glad to be here.
I am less glad of the unsettling spectacle of the FT working itself up to a full and unmitigated gush as regards its Starmer coverage, which I take as circumstantial evidence in support of my own interpretation of that man and his character, and of the direction his administration will take.
I will feel no small satisfaction in seeing the Tories kicked to the curb—though given my postal vote hasn’t yet arrived here, I’m guessing my opportunity to play a part in that process is going to be missed. (Thanks a bunch, Postnord!) But you can definitely add my name to the list of people deeply worried that what replaces them (or simply absorbs them) will be even worse, and will—after five years of empty managerialism and technocratic tinkerings-around-the-edges from Starmer’s lot—walk into Westminster with ease.
Otherwise I am actually trying to detach my attention from politics as much as possible, having come to understand that politics is almost entirely beyond my control, and therefore only ever a source of anxiety. (Quod erat demonstrandum1.) The newsflows from the US in particular are already almost unbearable, and we’re still five months out from the actual election—the outcome of which is, I suspect, all but decided already.
Hence my desire for a renewed focus on forms of work where I do have control, and/or where control can be surrendered in safe and productive ways: my newer visual-artistic dabblings, certainly, but also my core practice of writing, and particularly fiction. I am in one of those periods where it feels like I have a lot of ideas clamouring to be developed, and I want to respond to that feeling in better ways than I have responded in the past (i.e. by acting upon it, rather than hiding from it, or just talking about it).
Drinking my second coffee of the day while reading Nina Allan’s observation that, between projects, she is once again asking herself what sort of writer she is—which seems incredible, given it’s perfectly clear to me what sort of writer Nina Allan is and has always been.
(That’s not at all to say that I think I could articulate that classification in a way that satisfied me or an interlocutor, mind you; true singularity is perhaps best defined by the impossibility of its reduction to simple definitions.)
Allan notes that the process of asking what sort of writer she is involves “turn[ing] to other writers for insight and inspiration”, and this is a habit I recognise in myself. It is perhaps slightly concerning that the writer to whom I am currently turning is Philip K Dick, thanks to having stumbled across a small collection of his mid- and late-period novels—in the gloriously po-mo “I have an early version of Photoshop and I’m gonna use it” livery of the early 1990s Vintage reissues—in a local second-hand store a few weeks back.
In VALIS in particular, there are suggestions of responses to some questions of autofiction that had heretofore parked as beyond my skills and capacities to answer. Those responses are partly to do with perspective, which is of course a function of distance from that which is being observed, but also a function of the viewing angle, and the active narratological lens. A previously impossible apparatus suddenly seems within my reach… though I am at least wise enough to know that it will take a lot of prototyping.
- I’ve been off Mastodon for around a week, now; I haven’t missed it at all. I think it highly notable that the few times I’ve thought I wanted to post something, it was to snark about politics or complain about minor difficulties. The world is better off without either of those contributions, and I suspect I’m better off for being obliged to keep them to myself. ↩︎
Leave a Reply