So I’ve decided, realised, come to the conclusion that I cannot be a full time artist however much I would like to. My whole adolescence was filled with the tussle between two denominations: art & literature. I know more about the former and have a deep passion for it that’s actually a part of my lineage on both sides of the family, but the latter seems to be what is in my marrow when I’m cut open.
Besides, I’ve not got a disciplined enough bone in my body to practise something so ruthlessly talent-based as painting or drawing or sculpting. That requires quite a lot of skill, grit, focus, selfmastery, clarity of vision. I’m too hazy and vague and ‘meh’ to consecrate myself to it...
That’s why I will stick my votives under the shrine of writing, where 90 percent is bullshit that passes for masterful work and the rest is pure truth, so I’ve decided. You, I will let decide what side of the percentage my words fall. But before you do, I will confess: there’s always been one great shadow dodging my light. In truth, if that’s what we’re really going for here, I’ve always made the worst student of literature. Despite having read English at Oxford (did you know?) where I was forced to build up out of nowhere an appetite to devour 20+ texts a week - I never was very well-read.
My problem is that, prior to Oxford, reading and writing were just for fun and I tended to go more where my intuition or curiosity led than where tradition or canon (‘f ck the canon’) dictated. To be honest I didn’t even have more than a vague and hazy idea of what this revered canon even was until I found myself beneath the very cloisters under which it was fashioned.There was this one history student who so desperately wanted to be a writer of poetry and probably thought he’d make a better English student than most of us. He’d always ask about what texts we were reading and had usually already ingested most of them himself, and then some (the public ritual of regurgitation he’d routinely perform for us was as pretty as you’d imagine). He couldn’t fathom an English undergrad who hadn’t touched or even heard of Woolf or Wilde until she was doing her A Levels. Who couldn’t distinguish between Orwell and Huxley, well, because weren’t they both dystopian blokes from around the same time?
The funny thing is - and I say this without a bit of resentment or condescension towards the guy, for I was already ashamed at my comparative dearth of rounded knowledge on a subject I’d proudly professed my faith in without him outing my arid foundations - but the guy’s writing was shit anyway. All that enthusiastic rimming of the bloody canon simply gets you a lacerated tongue if you do not already have a voice and point of view of your own to hold against it. I say again without parenthesis: f ck the canon.
The true irony is that’s something Oxford eventually taught me, whether or not it intended to - not to worship & adore the great throng of literary saints that were martyred on the pyres of fame and infamy before me, but to take up my own space outside of the great procession, however small and dim. Take it up and keep burrowing into it until I hit truth.
That’s what I’m trying to do, would like to do full time and for the rest of my life somehow. There are so many wonderful writers out there, canonical or otherwise, who I’m convinced that’s what they were/are all about. Digging digging away with their beautifully pointed words. Refining, sharpening against the rocks they meet along the descent. Finding gems and bones that hinted at that greater, brighter truth that lies somewhere deeper down there. If we could just all get to it some way. Friends, comrades, I believe I have joined your great descent.
So I’ve come to the conclusion, realised, decided that I must be a writer. It doesn’t matter what form or metaphor my writing takes on, or where it ends up, or who does or doesn’t read it. Or even whether I’m a consistently ‘good’ one. I’ve just got to keep doing it. Keep chucking earth back behind me and hope I’m not burying the world as I go… or maybe I wouldn’t mind doing that, it’s a bit of a steaming mound anyway.
