They did their best

No time to write as hail falls on the ground and I worry for my youngest grandson, only three weeks into the world, and such a cold inhospitable world. His parents will keep him warm, but their house is cold, and heating is expensive.

I need to stop tormenting myself with worries such as these. The hail falls on the ground. It fell overnight. I saw it at the back of the garden when the dog went out for its first pee and poo.

I saw it in among the crushed autumn leaves signs of winter cold. Fresh bracing and invigorating cold, the stuff you rug up against. 

I write against the cold.

‘If we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.’ St Augustine of Hippo. Words that troubled me when I first read them. St Augustine is not talking about a process of conversing with the one who has wronged us, seeking atonement from them and thereby granting absolution. He’s talking about an internal process of forgiveness whereby we reconcile ourselves to the forgiveness required, otherwise we too will be left hanging from the hook of scorn and condemnation for all our hurts of others. 

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. 

Better to turn the cheek.

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven…

The bible is full of injunctions about how best to conduct yourself in a contradictory world where right and wrong and nuanced, and yet we crave absolutes and certainty.

A list of ten commandments, including the one that says, ‘Honour thy mother and thy father’. Honour them no matter how badly they behave towards you. And if they behave badly and you are called on to forgive them, in the end you do so because the argument runs: they did their best, even if they did not. 

They did their best in the circumstances in which they found themselves. They did their best in the life they were handed, their response to that life, including any decision to have you.

If indeed there was ever a decision made to have you.

Which is never true. No one plans on the child to whom they give birth. They might plan on a child. They might seek intercourse with another to bring together egg and sperm in the hope of creating new life, but they cannot simply construct a child of their wishes, nor an exact replica of themselves, much as some might want.

Life is tricky and my time is running out at this keyboard.

Through the window to one side I see a golden glow, not of Jesus come to greet me in the morning as I once might have imagined when I was a small child and impressionable, but the morning sun filtered through the thick clouds of this cruel cold morning even before winter arrives.

A May Day in the southern continent where the seasons are opposite from the Europe I grew up with. The Europe in my head. Where May signalled spring and new growth and my mother’s happiness came shining through the clouds much as the light outside my window,.

But now we are geographically located at the other end of the earth where May heralds winter and with it fallen leaves and clashes high in the sky between the warm winds coming off the land and the cool torrents rushing in across the seas. 

I was never any good at understanding the elements, the way they mix together to create our climate, but I know about the consequences of storms and heat. Of the way the earth is changing too fast and heating too much to sustain life for too much longer, and the tiny baby, the newest in my family to enter this world, must tackle a hotter climate into future if the rest of us don’t learn to behave differently and find new ways of dealing with our waste.

Toilet training and the art of writing

Try this: Enter a space or activity without expectations, without attachment to a specific outcome. Very Zen like and not one bit easy. Most days, most times I find myself attached to a certain limited outcome. For instance this morning my aim was first to get the puppy outdoor for its morning poop and then give it just enough activity coupled with a bit of training, which is new to me, and then settle. 

All those things I finally achieved within my limited aim of one hour, except the puppy won’t poop on demand. She’ll pee or at least give the appearance of peeing to the word ‘toilet’ but for the rest of her bodily functions, we can’t control them on command. 

Anyone who’s toilet trained a puppy will know how tedious it is. Eye on the clock. A constant sense of the need to take the dog out for a pee or poop whenever you’re on duty. Hardly the stuff of ‘eschewing memory and desire’ which are the words of the late great Wilfred Bion who urged the people he trained in therapy and analysis to approach each session without any expectation of the outcome and without any sense of immediacy from previous sessions. That way you come in on the moment and don’t derail the process with your own expectations. 

It’s another tough one but with a memory like mine, one that holds onto events. Not all of course, but many over time, that can get in the way of a fresh approach. The same applies to the business of puppy training and of writing. 

The first time I learned to stop rehearsing my writing was under the guidance of the Canadian writer and teacher Barbara Turner Vesselago. She holds five precepts for writing. The first to use as much sensuous detail as possible. And by sensuous she means use all your senses, your taste your touch, not just sight and sound, your smell. Get into the scene with as much detail as possible. In other words lean into the particular. 

Her second precept is based on the idea that as you sit in front of your blank screen or sheet of paper you let things settle in your mind and wait for a bite, like a fish nibbling at the end of your line. But not just any fish, many might come along and have a nibble. The best ones for writers are the ones of which we’re afraid. 

Go fear wards Turner Vesselago argues. Her third precept. Write what makes you sweat. For the fourth she urges you to write without correcting. Write without even going back on the words you’ve written so that your flow remains uninterrupted. Don’t even correct spelling mistakes. Just let it sit on the page as it emerges. For some folks this is hard. Not for me. I’m good with mess knowing that I can come back later to correct but not at the time of the writing. Writing and reading as in writing and editing require different parts of the brain. The one is a more right brain activity the task of ordering and logic, the other the more creative and freewheeling, is a left brain activity and one that uses your left brain. 

The final precept suggests it’s best to write about material that’s composted, the ten-year rule. 

Most freefall writing as I describe, at least in its early days, brings up autobiographical material and therefore it helps to write about stuff that’s ten years old or more.But this is not a hard and fast rule, as many of us who have write about events that happened yesterday can testify. But it’s a good point to bear in mind. When you write about experiences from the past you have more of a sense of closure around them even as they might impact on you in the here and now. An event in the past tends to have a beginning middle and end, not so the events you’re in the process of sorting and you can er too close to the material to allow for the writing that best captures a reader’s imagination.

These then are the precepts I follow when I write. Not having much of a clue about where I’m going until I get there.

It fuels the joy of discovery. The pleasure of suddenly winding up back where I began with a puppy who is starting to yelp once more for my attention and a day ahead that demands my attention.