115. Thinking about Thinking

In a previous blog (113), 'Don't think about building a wall. Think about laying one brick perfectly', I wrote about the eight week workshop on creative writing that I completed in 2004. In the final session on Wednesday April 28th the tutor, Judith White, circulated a number of pictures and articles among the class members with the following instruction: "Choose a picture you can relate to - something that triggers a memory or a situation - and write about it from the second person ‘You’ point of view."

Among the material circulated was a programme for Hamlet. I briefly thought about that as a starting point but decided not to pursue it. Then I came across a coloured magazine photo for a court jester which put me in mind of Yorick and of Hamlet addressing Yorick's skull. This was the initial impetus for my writing The Hanging Clown: A Story for 9/11 (blog 64, 11th September 2013).

During the writing of The Hanging Clown on the Thursday and Friday of that week, I tried to keep a record of the mental mechanics of its construction. I recognise how impossible it is to thoroughly track the thought processes in the conception and writing of a story, to accurately record the eddies and flows in a stream of consciousness, let alone deal with what may or may not be going on at a subconscious level. (For a sophisticated demonstration of the difficulties of recording conscious thought, see David Lodge’s 2001 novel Thinks.) Nevertheless I kept as full details as I could of the development of my story by adding footnotes every step of the way. Each item that sprang to mind was footnoted in italics, then follow up explanations added in normal type to elucidate the note, trace any searches it prompted, and indicate whether or not the idea was subsequently abandoned.

The result was that the footnotes were longer than the story itself. They are set out below in Arial font. Where the present font (Times) is inserted the comment is a current 2014 one. At various points reference is made to 'Finger pieces' and to a book I was planning on creative writing.*



Thursday morning, April 29th 2004

“Ha, ha, said the Clown” [Manfred Mann].
This was my initial title for the story, the memory of the title of a Manfred Mann song. I played in a college cricket team with Michael D’Abo, who succeeded Paul Jones as lead singer in the 1960s pop group Manfred Mann and thought I might be able to work a story out of that contact and the song title. Later I searched on Google and found the lyric to the song and realised it was hopelessly inappropriate to the story that I had started out on in the workshop session – the song is about a guy who fancies a lady in the circus and then discovers she is married to the clown. So I dropped the title and the idea completely.

The Universal Clown.
The Sage Fool.
The Clown at the Court of the Emperor Dubya – none (parody the new crusaders).

2014 comment: 'Dubya' = George W. Bush. 'The new crusaders' = Dick Cheney, Ronald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz - the core of 'NeoCons' in the Bush administration who promoted and planned the invasion of Iraq and developed the doctrine of preemptive war to promote a US version of democracy.

A drahm of merriment for these times. 
A recollection that I had a quote from Balzac in a piece of writing I did in 1982.

We need you now, clown, more than ever we need you. Your wisdom, your drollery.

Yorick, Lear’s clown, the medieval Fool’s Day (see article on cartoons) --> also Balzac, Rabelais.
I looked up the Hamlet speech (Act V, scene I) in which he addresses the skull of Yorick:

Alas, poor Yorick! – I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fall’n?

I didn’t look up the fool in ‘King Lear’. The reference to cartoons is to a three-page segment, ‘The cartoonist as fool, sage and psychoanalyst’, in chapter six of my (non-fiction) book Business and the Culture of the Enterprise Society published in 1993. I have drawn on this material for paragraph five of the story.

The Balzac, Rabelais note was a reminder that along with the Balzac quote I had a pastiche of Rabelais’ prologue to ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ in which he addresses the reader in the second person, ‘Most noble boozers, and you my very esteemed and poxy friends.’ Nothing came of the Rabelais prompt.

Use material from Dali.
'The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali', which I see from the flyleaf I bought in June 1978, is the origin of the potty training segment in paragraph two. It was obviously a memorable story for me to recall it after so many years.

Clowns on the Internet. 
An Internet search revealed some bizarre stuff but nothing I subsequently used.

Sacha’s giggles. 
A reference to my daughter who, as a child, loved to giggle and have ‘giggly friends’. In paragraph two my baby clown originally sat giggling to himself but I later changed giggling to chuckling.

Now wise fools are dead and only the idiot clowns are left to hold sway in the world.

Scaramouche, Everyman clown.
I saw Peter Postlethwaite’s one-man show ‘Scaramouche Jones’ in Auckland last year and thought it might trigger something useful, but it didn’t, other than reinforcing the idea of the clown as some everyman figure. At that time I didn’t pursue the original Scaramouche story so have just done so (it’s May 7th 2004) and to my surprise found that the opening line of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche – A Romance of the French Revolution (1921) is ‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’

Overall tone of sadness and despair.

Mary’s letter to her son on his twenty-first birthday.
This was a sad letter, written but never sent, expressing a mother’s concern about the character of her son at the time of his coming-of-age and pessimism about his likely future. It was the antithesis of the optimism of the narrator in my story, yet it was my narrator’s clown son who came to a sad end.

The Hanged Man / The Fool. 
A reference to two of the cards of the major arcana in the tarot pack. This prompted me to dig out the book that is now sitting on my desktop, The Hanged Man: Psychotherapy and the Forces of Darkness by Sheldon Kopp, published in 1974. Here is the opening paragraph of chapter one, ‘The Myth is Everyone’s Story’:

Sometimes I feel as though I am four hundred years old, heavy with wisdom, knowing too much and burdened with the pain of it. I miss the wonder and the hopefulness that I experienced when I was young, though now I can hardly recall how I once felt. I’ve seen too much that made no sense, witnessed too much pain about which I could do nothing.

It was in part this tone of resigned acceptance that I wanted to convey in the voice of my narrator contemplating the life and death of his clown son.

Lucy’s hatred of clowns
A reference to a friend who told me she found clowns very disturbing, a friend who I identified with the childlike innocence of my son clown character.

Marcel Marceau (now only mime). The sad pierrots have taken over the show, dolorous.
Later included in the text as ‘dolorous pierrot miming a wordless despair.’

Festival of Comedy. 
Currently on in Auckland. Not followed up.

Clowns: from patronage to the market --> wisdom to entertainment.
The notion that the modern day clown has to make his or her way freelance as an entertainer whose primary function is to amuse the audience. Disappearance of the gentle sage fool dispensing wisdom? Thus the idea of my child clown as something of an anachronism in this day and age.

Billy Connolly, The Big Yin.
Ability to see the general humour in the particular idiosyncrasies of behaviour. Not followed up.

SHOW, DON’T TELL: yet most creative writing workshops as Tell – see all the handouts.
A note that cuts across the thinking about the clown story to the idea of the present book. A recognition of the irony of one of the mantras of creative writing courses, the need for fiction writers to reveal character through behaviour rather than through authorial description, letting readers discover character for themselves rather than being told what they are like. Yet most creative writing books are ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’.

Opening up seams rather than just finding/picking out nuggets.
I have no idea now what this note referred to or what line of thought it was supposed to prompt.

'Soup for One' [title for supermarket piece].
Clearly my mind has wandered from the task at hand for it is at this point that I decide to title the story in Finger Piece 11, ‘Soup for One.’

'The Hanging Clown' to replace 'Hot Water Blues'. 
My mind now on story titles I decide at this point on a title for the clown story and then that it should replace Hot Water Blues in the title of the present book, which was originally Hot Water Blues and other Fun Experiments in a Creative Writing Apprenticeship.

Sept 11/2001. 
This is the first glimmering of the notion that 9/11 might have some role in the clown story. There are no follow up notes at this point as I am clearly more focused on the creative writing work than the short story.

Idea for book - coming out from the underneath, from footnotes to text. Keeping the creative flow separate from the analysis. 
Here I am wondering how to construct a book that is as much footnote as main text and at what point, if any, the material in the footnotes should become the main text.

The ‘lost idea’. 
I had a good idea but forgot to write it down. Well, I clearly thought it was a good idea at the time because this note was supposed to prompt me to work to recover it. I tried to at the time of writing the note and again later and again now, but have no idea what it was that I so carelessly let escape. I am sure it was a very big fish. I keep some notepaper by my bedside and scribble things down in the middle of the night in the dark. Usually I can just about read them in the morning. Unfortunately sometimes I have such a ‘big’ idea in the middle of the night that I imagine I will remember it in the morning without the prompt of a scribbled note. But of course I don’t.

Incorporate Wicked Goblins, No 6 bus and MikeD’Abo and Miriam. 
Still thinking about this present book I speculate about adding other pieces of writing of mine that were not generated by the workshop, a story called ‘Wicked Goblins’ and a piece about riding on the top deck of a number six bus during which I spot Mike D’Abo striding flamboyantly up Lower Regent Street. Miriam is a reference to Mike D’Abo’s actress daughter, a one-time James Bond film girl.

2014: Her name was Maryam and she was his cousin.

Plunder Bruce Barton. 
Still thinking about other possible stories for incorporation, including possibility of developing a story on ad copy-writing from my journal entry of April 18^th which was triggered by the words “God is Alive. Are you?” (not included in ‘Finger Pieces’). The reference is to Bruce Barton’s 1926 non-fiction bestseller The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus which includes a chapter titled ‘His Advertisements’ in which Barton extols Jesus’ use of the media to promote his message.

The Masterpiece. 
Reminder to myself that the end goal and end point of an apprenticeship is the creation of a masterpiece, that is, in the traditional medieval craft guilds, the piece to satisfy the master of the craft that one is sufficiently qualified to be released from one’s apprenticeship and let loose on the world as a journeyman craftsman.

Close with ‘The Archaeology of a Box’? 
Another earlier short story that might be included in the book.

Piece on Tarots and Dad. 
Yet another piece of my writing sitting around that might be plundered, this one on giving up religious belief without necessarily giving up a religious sensibility, on finding substitutes for God in one’s life and yet not being caught up in the tarot and other forms of New Age psychobabble.

Writers and ‘Locked-In’ syndrome. 
I had been reading Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (1997) in which he describes being marooned in the cocoon of his appalling paralysis, only able to communicate by moving his left eyelid. Rather tritely and tastelessly perhaps, I saw some parallels between his ‘locked-in’ syndrome and the view of the world through the eye of a writer or of my child clown bat hanging in the corner of the cave.

Thursday afternoon, 29th April 2004 3pm

To the dentist for an extraction (29^th April 2.30pm). On the way home (driving) I began to think of the possibility of the clown as an alter ego – that it was the clown in me that had died that day – e.g. 9/11 in NY and 3/11 in Madrid (when are the Ides of March?). How would there be room in the world for innocence any more? Surely all clowning must now be of a satirical Cassandraic form, but then how often has that been the case before – WWI, Nazi death camps --> see Steiner The Language of Silence [sic]. Antidote to the mushiness of Mr Oliphant’s Tears and back to Cameron Gunn’s nightmare – I discovered this morning that the original developer/ entrepreneur of Lagonda was Wilbur Gunn. And Gunn (I have just remembered) is my clan tartan on my mother’s side (Henderson).
The Ides of March are March 15^th so that was of no relevance. The suggestion that I should look at George Steiner’s collection of 1958-1966 essays and articles, Language and Silence, was ignored at the time of writing the story. Today, May 12th 2004, I have taken my copy down from my bookshelf and see it was a present to me from my younger brother, inscribed, with our family’s characteristic lack of sentimental endearments, ‘Christmas 1970 To John from Stuart’. I have been scanning through and (re)discovered some telling comments for current times, both in respect of literature and events in Iraq. (This last week has seen the publication of the graphic images disclosing the treatment of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib Prison and today, as barbarity is heaped on barbarity, there is news of a video showing the beheading of an American civilian by a militant Iraqi group.) Steiner wrote, contemplating the legacy of Nazism and Stalinism, that ‘certain pressures of totalitarian politics, of social barbarism, of illiteracy and modishness are bearing in on the genius of language… Underlying these essays is the belief that literary criticism… must have a distinct philosophic and social awareness, that it ought to accept as its essential provocation the fact – to me scandalous in the highest degree – of the coexistence in one time and place of ‘high culture’ and political bestiality.’

2014: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. As I write this ten years on (October 2014) ISIS is publishing videos of the beheading of hostages (journalists and aid workers among others) in its rampage to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Image from www.authorstream.com

Tales of Innocence. Tales of Experience.
Thinking of William Blake. Not followed up.

Friday 30th April 2004

Lying in bed (Miriam [sic] Keyes writing method).
Marian Keyes was in New Zealand recently promoting her novel The other side of the story and a common item in the media coverage was of her spending most of her time in bed when writing her novels. I was in bed when I wrote this last sequence of notes for the story.

Idea that The Hanging Clown in my bedroom should be my shrine to you, my dead clown son --> purchased at Mount Maunganui, hanging and fell (on New Year’s Day 2002) lay for a long while on the table below, broken leg, reglued --> now holds a little triangular ball game in his right hand, a child’s game above a triptych of pictures of you --> 3 scenes from your life 1 --> 2 --> 3 so sequence of story goes:
     1.   childhood reminiscences
     2.   the Everyman Sage/Fool
     3.   deaths of clowning -->  each generation WWI/Gallipoli (ANZACS)
           --> 9/11
     4.   now we need clowns more than ever (Balzac)
     5.   My Hanging Clown

     This clown hangs upside down in my bedroom much in the manner described in the last paragraph of the story, though the photos in the triptych are of the clown himself sitting upright in various poses. It has this typed caption alongside: ‘THE HANGING CLOWN. Extravagantly accepting life’s chances and hazards, the suspended mind, anarchic, irrational and venturesome, sets out on a psychic voyage of self-discovery.’

When I lost you I lost the last remnants of the clown in me.

Ironically, also at my bedside this week, Evan’s gift to his mum for her birthday on April 4th - The Queens’ Fool by Philippa Gregory.
A novel about Mary Tudor told through the eyes of Hannah, the Queen’s fool, who has the gift of foresight.

The Upside-down Clown Hanging on My Bedroom Wall (2004)

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*
The title of Judith White's workshop was ‘Seize the Clay! Moulding Reality into Fiction’. In each session members were given instructions for a piece of writing to be drafted and read out in class that day. We were then free to take this away and polish it up if we so wished. In addition Judith provided ‘triggers’ for the daily journals we were invited to complete for the duration of the programme. She also gave us a number of ‘how to’ handouts and guidelines on such matters as narrative voice, creating character, using symbolism and imagery, and a checklist for polishing and editing our work.

In the months following completion of the eight week course I put together a 40,000 word book.

The book is in three parts.

Part one, Finger Pieces, is raw material created during the period of the workshop in response to the stimulus of Judith’s exercises and handouts. It contains a record of my eight session ‘writings’ together with a number of extracts from my journal entries. Some of the session outputs are as written in the classroom during that particular afternoon. I disliked reading my work out in class, especially when I had not had an opportunity to give it a spit and a polish, so in most cases these pieces were spruced up, usually on the same day or early the next morning. The chatty style is the consequence of their being written to speak rather than to read. In some of these pieces I included jottings made at the time; these give an indication of how one idea led to another. I added footnotes throughout part one to show where I looked for inspiration, or to comment on an aspect of the writing process.

The title ‘Finger Pieces’ for Part One was inspired by Judith’s idea of seizing the clay. It is taken from the first exercises in clay modelling classes (I've tried that too) and expresses my sense of being an apprentice fiction writer/piano player trying to master some preliminary exercises/piano scales.

Part two is made up of four short stories. Three of them, And there the Antic Sits, Hot Water Blues, and Mr Oliphant’s Tears, were started and ‘finished’ during the workshop. The fourth, The Hanging Clown, was completed in the week after the workshop ended. They have scarcely been tinkered with subsequently. There is a brief footnote at the start of each story to recap its workshop origins and a more detailed footnote at the end to elaborate on the sources of ideas influencing the story’s development. As we have seen, the endnote to the last of the four stories, The Hanging Clown, attempts to comprehensively record the thought processes around its creation.

Part three is largely analytical. The first segment, 'Boring through the castle wall', documents a public critique of the short story And there the Antic Sits by three New Zealand writers, and my reaction to their comments. The second and final segment, ‘Falling down in the playground’, contains reflections on the creative writing experiences of the workshop and explores my growing understanding of the psychology of being ‘a writer’.

Most of the Finger Pieces part of the book is the direct product of the prompts provided by Judith in the workshop and is, therefore, built on the back of Judith's copyright material. I had thought of approaching Judith to see if some kind of joint book might be a workable proposition but never got round to it. Nevertheless since I started blogging in October 2011 I have frequently pillaged my creative writing book for blog pieces.

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Image from www.charliehamiltonjames.co.uk

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The Hanging Clown: A Story for 9/11
(Blog 64)

from Fellini's La Strada 1954

How you made us laugh. You were such a clown. Everyone said so. You were like that as a child. I can’t think where it came from, certainly not your mother or I. You were a natural. Always up to mischief. As if you could see the world through a hidden eye that stood everything on its head and gave it a shake to see what dropped out. You were a friendly bat hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the cave watching the world upside down and swooping down periodically to give us a scare and jolt us from everyday complacency.

You had this ability to keep us off balance. Right from your baby days, you rejected the routines of daily life. Your potty training antics were a nightmare. You thought it a huge game. A kind of hide and seek war-game in which you would find some outlandish unexpected place to make your mark. Having completed your business there, you would rush around the house announcing your exploit in delight, turn somersaults across the living-room carpet, and then sit chuckling to yourself as the whole grumbling yelling household set out, tempers fraying, on a frantic search to track down your latest escapade, searching the staircase from the attic to the cellar, through cupboards and drawers, underneath tables and chairs, in shoes and pots and pans and waste paper baskets. You had us all in a state of panic and fear but a panic and fear mixed with hilarity and laughter at the whole charade. And then one day, for your pièce de résistance, you finally went in your potty. By that time it was the last place we bothered to look and we spent a whole morning in trepidation at what we might inadvertently stumble on. Now, we thought, seeing that you had delivered your gift in the appropriate place, you were ready to buckle down to the discipline of growing up.

How wrong we were. You never did grow up. Not in the conventional sense. That was part of your charm. You were a happy child wholly entertained by your own imagination and you grew into a happy clown. In your innocent way you pricked everyone’s pretensions. But without bitterness or irony. You popped your eyes wide open, pulled disbelieving faces, went tongue-in-cheek at everyone, everything, yet never from malice. I don’t think there was a malicious bone in your body or thought in your head. To you the whole world was one enormous playground laid out for your entertainment.

Of course we despaired of you. What parent wouldn’t? How would you ever cope we wondered with the serious business of life, establish a career, make commitments, look after money, a partner, a family? It never occurred to us that clowning was your career, that there was a whole wide world of clowns for you to play with, that there was money in clowning - not that money was something you took the least bit seriously. We never dreamed you would find a lovely clownette waif to journey with you, or that you and the saucer-eyed Gelsomina would produce, irony of ironies, two of the most serious little children on the planet, children who seemed to feel they had to grow up in a hurry so that they could care for their clown-child parents.

We let you loose on the world, watched in astonishment as you thrived, and were proud as only parents can be proud. In our eyes you became a clown for all seasons and all ages, your origins in antiquity. You were the sage-fool of classical times, the rustic naïf unsophisticated commonsense philosopher. You were the ritual Amerindian clown violating conventions and taboos, simultaneously silly and wise, simple and crazy, sage and oracle. You were the tarot’s alpha and omega fool, anarchic and venturesome in your quest to understand and expose the idiocies of the times. You were the mock Pope at the medieval feast of fools, licensed to criticise and deflate authority, permitted disrespect. You were the artless Shakespearean jester deflating affectation, confronting unvarnished realities with a clear eye and ready wit, wiser than your betters, penetrating to the truth beneath wordy spin-doctored facades. You were a son of a world beyond our world. And you were our son too, our family safety valve, standing between us and our hostilities, releasing and neutralising our tension, anger and aggression, defusing our conflicts and violent outbursts.

I suppose it had to end in tears and a terrible sadness. Isn’t that the destiny and legacy of clowns? You could not have foreseen what would happen. None of us could. Perhaps you overstepped some invisible mark in the clown cosmos, some point at which the God of All the Clowns decided you should be brought to account, that you were having too much fun, that the joke was finally over and your laughter should be turned to our tears. Were you ever conscious, I wonder, of how charmed your life had been? Of the miracle it had lasted so long?

Does every generation have its childish laughter stifled by some watershed event that wipes out the innocence and optimism of youth? For your great grandfathers it was the trenches of the Somme and Passchendaele and the ravines and gulleys of Gallipoli. For your grandfathers the annihilation wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrors of the opening of the Nazi death camps. For your mother and my generation Vietnam and the My Lai massacre. For yours the world of innocence came crashing down with the Twin Towers. I am glad you did not survive to understand the significance of that September morning.

We need you more than ever now. Your wisdom, your drollery. You promised hope in a cruel, barbarous world, a dram of merriment for these weary times when there are so many causes for tears. There are no sage clowns in the courts of our new emperors. The wise fools are dead and only idiot clowns hold sway in the world, harsh strident Cassandras screaming abuse, and dolorous pierrot miming a wordless silent despair. The last vestiges of the child in me died with your death and my laughter now, such as it is, is driven by fear and a sick foreboding.

Sadly, we never had any part of you to bury, but Gelsomina gave us a little toy clown you had bought her in the Grand Bazaar at Istanbul shortly after the two of you met. The clown has a small crimson hat perched on his frizzy hair, and a large pink bow-tie above his pristine white shirt with the mother of pearl buttons. He wears a sequined jacket in a kaleidoscope of colours over turquoise pantaloons, yellow and white hooped socks and large yellow boots. We have made him the centrepiece of a tribute to you. He hangs upside down in the hallway above a triptych of family photographs and a copper plaque engraved with the words ‘In memory of Jonathan Mehmet, June 23 1959 – September 11 2001’ and a quote from Balzac: ‘As children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out. To laugh you must be innocent and pure of heart.’ It reminds us as we go in and out on our daily business of the privilege and burden of laughter, and of how you made us laugh so.

114. Vignettes of Family Life in New Zealand: (9) Hot Pools in Waiwera, Snow in Happy Valley, Winter/Spring 1974

On the Devonport Ferry, Winter 1974

57, Sunnybrae Road, Takapuna, 14th June 1974*
    Dear Mum and Dad,
    Thank you for your letter of 28th May.
    Lewis' convulsions have not been connected with any special traumas or frights. He had two while we were in England but both were connected with sickness and were brought on by a sudden rise in temperature. The two here were not related to sickness in any way but were probably the result of getting over tired, he's a great rusher about. We've not had a TV since we came to New Zealand so it had nothing to do with horrors on children's hour!
    We are now entering our 'winter' which is marked by the period between two bank holidays, that for the Queen's Birthday, a fortnight ago, and Labour Day in October. Queen's Birthday was a beautiful clear day with very little wind and since it was a little cold for the sea we took the children to Waiwera, about 20 miles north of here, to the open air hot mineral pools. They had a marvellous time and we couldn't get them out of the water. It was warm enough to have a picnic lunch in the gardens that surround the pools - there are six pools of varying depths and temperatures, some for swimming in but mostly for just sitting in and relaxing - and very relaxing it is too.

    I have been very busy at the university this week. On Monday we started a new ten week lecture course on Industrial Democracy, on Tuesday I had to give a lunch-time talk to the Auckland Rotary Club and on Wednesday we were involved in running a management course for one of the local hotels.

27th June 1974
    Dear Mum and Dad,
    Many thanks for the marvellous birthday present. I have been meaning to read August 1914 for a long time but never got round to buying a copy - books are relatively expensive here. It's a massive tome and I hope to find time for it during our August break if not before. Pat has already got started on it so I won't get a look in for a while! Thank you too for the copy of Solzhenitsyn's address sent to the Nobel Prize committee.
    I had a very pleasant birthday. Pat and I went to the pictures the evening before to see The Sting which we enjoyed and on my birthday itself we all went to Waiwera (again) to enjoy the hot pools - that looks like becoming our favourite winter trip.
    Nothing much is happening here. We are all busy with work and school. Last night Pat and I went to see the teachers at Sunnybrae School to hear how Sacha and Stuart are getting along - pretty well on the whole. Stuart is very good at reading but careless with writing and spelling, particularly when he can't be bothered. He spends his lunchbreaks reading playlets with a group of friends (mostly girls) - seemed a good thing to us but the teacher obviously thought he should be roughing it around in the playground! Sacha, as you might imagine, is a real livewire at school. Recently her class went down to the Auckland docks and had a most interesting day there. Before she went Sacha thought a Wharfie (i.e. a docker) was some kind of monster!
    We have had some correspondence with Sheila Tan about jobs in New Zealand but unfortunately we are not able to help her much as we cannot cull much information about the employment prospects for Medical Secretaries. In general, however, jobs are plentiful and there are still no registered unemployed in Auckland.
    Lewis' pills seem to be stimulating him - he is the terror of the playcentre at the moment as he and a little friend, Richie, rush all over the place at a frantic pace - the supervisors will heave a sigh of relief when he goes to kindergarten which should be in a few weeks.
    Sorry for the delay in finishing this letter. Today (June 29th) it has been so warm that we have been sitting on Takapuna beach - in the middle of winter!
    Love from us all,
    Pat, John, Stuart, Sacha and Lewis.

Stuart in middle in blue jumper with his eyes shut.

Sacha sitting second from left.

27th July 1974
    Dear Mum and Dad,
    Thank you for your letter of 14th July with all your news - you certainly keep very busy.
    The Paddington Bear story has arrived safely and I'm sure Stuart will be very pleased. He identifies with Paddington because the bear is always messy and does silly things and eats a lot and makes people laugh - just like Stuart. He has quite a collection of the books now. I don't know what to suggest for presents. We seem to have so many things already and have the C.S. Lewis and A.A. Milne paperbacks. Last weekend we made a sort of puppet-theatre out of old bits of wood that the PlayCentre didn't want and Stuart in particular likes doing "theatricals" which may give you some idea for books. Books are still the best present really because they are that much more expensive here.
     Teachers do seem to be better paid here, although it is difficult to compare because the tax rates are higher here. I earn about £6000 before tax. Buying apples in 20lb lots at the Albany orchards costs about 5p a lb and a couple of weeks ago we bought 20lb of Chinese Gooseberries at c. 8p a lb.    Lewis has started at Kindergarten this week and likes it a lot. It is very well equipped and there is plenty for him to enjoy. The two staff seem very competent. One of them got married this week and Lewis came back saying that they had been throwing food at her. Pat asked him if it was rice? "Yes" he says and after a pause "and spaghetti"! But the spaghetti was really confetti.
    Today was Open Day at the University, so we went there this morning with the children. Stuart and Sacha found plenty to interest them. The engineering school had some working models going, the computer centre was also open and there were various film and drama activities to see. Yesterday evening we had a visitor from Nottingham University, a geologist, to dinner and the children made a great fuss of him.
    We have received confirmation from the YMCA that we can go to their chalet in the Tongariro National Park from Monday 26th August to Friday 30th August. We will be sharing with a number of other families since the chalet sleeps 32 people. It is near Mount Ruapehu just above The Chateau which was a big hotel I sent you some pictures of last year. The children are looking forward to seeing some snow and it will make a lovely break for us before the third university term starts in September. We have also been planning our summer holiday and hope to stay at Rotorua, then on Lake Taupo and then go to New Plymouth for a few days.

YMCA Chalet, Tongariro National Park, 27th August 1974
    It is spring in Auckland now and a couple of weeks ago we had a lovely sunny day on the beach at Long Bay. Then we went for a trip to Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf, about ten miles by ferry from Auckland. We stayed a night with some friends near Onetangi and had some lovely walks. Now we are back in the middle of winter. Yesterday we drove down to this chalet just above The Chateau - it was a beautiful drive through rolling green countryside with hundreds (literally) of tiny new born lambs about. Last night there was quite a heavy fall of snow here and the children woke up to a real Christmas card scene with snow on all the trees and Mount Ruapehu, which is over 9000', at the back. This chalet is at the height of 3800'. This morning we had to fit chains on our car to drive up to 'The Top o' the Bruce' at 5300' where the skifields start. There are beginners slopes in Happy Valley and we all played there for a while, sliding down the snow on plastic sheeting rather than hiring skis and things. The children had had enough after about an hour by which time we were getting cold so we came back down again for lunch. This afternoon we drove down to Turangi to find somewhere to stay for our summer holiday and then came back to the chalet for tea. As well as the fantastic skifields here there are also many beautiful walks, and the views when the clouds lift, as they did this morning, are fantastic (again!).

Sliding down Happy Valley

    We are here as part of a group of 32 - twelve adults and 20 children. I think ours enjoy playing with all the others as much as anything. Lewis is the smallest so gets made a fuss of but since they all sleep communally - boys one end, girls the other - they keep each other awake at night and get everyone up first thing in the morning! Each family provides its own breakfast and lunch and then there is a menu for the evening where everyone brings the same food and it is all cooked together.

Wednesday
    To-day it is bright and sunny but with a very cold wind so we are going for a walk near The Chateau. Last night when all the children were in bed we played Scrabble, the first time for some years!

Mt Ngauruhoe (upper); by Lake Taupo with Ruapehu in the background (lower).

    Schools are on holiday now for two weeks and the university has a three week break. I don't know if I told you but I expect I shall join the Department of Management Studies in time for the 1975 academic year. We have already been planning the courses that I will teach, all of them third and fourth year courses in the Bachelor of Commerce degree. My principle teaching next year will be on Industrial Relations and Manpower Management. Because of my change of department my study leave arrangements are likely to remain a bit vague. Management Studies is a new department with only three staff at present and so some difficulty in covering staff leave. It is my intention to apply for leave in 1976 but next year is definitely not possible. I am sorry to disappoint Stuart if he was anticipating that I would be at his wedding. We also want to be able to afford to bring all the children too since it is unlikely at present that either you or Pat's parents will be coming to N.Z.
    Lots of love from us all, Pat John and children.

5th October 1974
    Dear Mum and Dad,
    It seems ages since we heard from you so hope you are both well and have settled  in at Church Road after the move. Last time we wrote was when we were at National Park and we posted the letter at the Top o' the Bruce on Mount Ruapehu so hope it arrived safely.
    The children are back at school now and Lewis is at kindy. They enjoyed their holiday at Ruapehu. We drove back round Lake Taupo on the most beautiful day as you will see when you get the slides. Auckland seemed quite smoggy after the lovely clean air in the mountains. We are hoping to go again next winter.
    The papers are full of gloomy stories about Britain's inflation and not very optimistic that the General Election coming up will solve anything. Hope its not that bad. Mr Kirk's death** was a great shock to people here, especially the Maoris who were very fond of hi. Love from us all,
    Pat, John, Stuart, Sacha + Lewis.

27th October
    We have been very busy here since we came back from our holiday at Tongariro National Park in August. We are now in the third and final term of the university year with about another month to go. It has been the busiest term for me with classes on four evenings of the week. This weekend, however, is Labour Weekend and tomorrow, Monday, is a bank holiday so we get a bit of a breather. Labour Weekend is generally taken as the sort of sign that summer is here - rather like May Day - so everyone is busy with their gardens or boats or whatever. Our latest addition is a tree hut in one of the tangled willow trees of our garden, constructed for Lewis primarily from odd bits of wood and from pieces of bamboo from the clump that grows along one side of our garden. The main use of the tree hut at present seems to be as a jailor for cops and robbers games with Stuart as jailer and Sacha and friends as internees.
    I was interested to hear that Stuart (brother) was doing some teaching at the Barbican. I spent quite a lot of time there when I was working for John Laing's on a project back in 1966 - they were one of the main contractors for the development.
    Thank you for the skipping rope you sent for Sacha's birthday and for the I-Spy books. Sacha had a pair of roller skates for her birthday and has been stumbling up and down our fairly long drive gradually getting the hang of it. Lewis and his friend Nicky take a skate each and sit a piece of board on them to ride down on. Plenty of spills.
    We have had a couple of outings since coming back from National Park. One splendid day climbing Rangitoto in the Hauraki Gulf. It is about 45 minutes by boat from Auckland and about a two mile climb to the summit from where you have marvellous views of the whole of the Gulf and the city of Auckland. We went with Alaister and Margaret Scott and Andy and Julie and also with the Smith family who were visiting here from the University of Southampton - Fred Smith used to be on the LSE staff and played cricket with Alaister and I in South London. We have also been to Wenderholm for a picnic, very peaceful with all the Kowhai trees in flower and yellow and green everywhere. And one rainy Saturday we all went to see The Three Musketeers at an Auckland cinema.
    Pat and I have also been out a bit. One evening we went to Rangi Walker's to a farewell party for Pare Mills who used to teach at the Centre (of Continuing Education) and was returning to Oxford. It was a very Maori occasion with lots of singing and speech making. Last week we welcomed another Maori to the staff of the Centre - Rev. Charlie Matai who is taking a leading part in the educational activities associated with a new Maori marae (or community centre), the Orakei marae in Auckland. In November I am going to another Auckland marae for a management seminar designed to discuss problems faced by Maori and other Polynesians in industry.
    Love to everyone from Pat, John, Stuart, Sacha and Lewis.
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*   For the origin of these letters see Love, Death and Letters from My Mother's Hut, blog 30, 4 February 2012.
** Norman Kirk was Prime Minister from 1972 to his death on 31st August 1974 following a heart attack; he was 51.
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Previous blogs in series
Vignettes of Family Life in New Zealand

    1.    72   Summer 1973-74 (incl. Queen at Waitangi), 13 November 2013. 

    2.    78   Summer 1979/80 (incl. Mt Erebus disaster), 27 November 2013.

    3.    80   Summer 1986/87 (incl. holiday, Pakatoa Island), 5 December 2013.

    4.    82   Christmas/New Year 1975/76 (incl. broken arm; dunking off Motutapu), 17 December 2013.

    5.    85   Christmas/New Year 1977/78 (incl. new ventures, Tutukaka, Whale Bay), 28 December 2013.

    6.    87   Christmas/New Year 1990/91 (incl. holiday, South Island), January 2014.

    7.    97   Winter 1987 (Rugby World Cup, Tikitere, Fairy Springs), 31 March 2014.

    8.  106   Summer 1982/83 ( Horse Riding in Ekatahuna: Milford Track Washout), 26 July 2014.

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113. 'Don't think about building a wall. Think about laying one brick perfectly.'

In 2004 I enrolled in a workshop (two hours a week for eight weeks) on creative writing run by Judith White for the Auckland University Centre for Continuing Education.

There are many task-focused guidebooks on creative writing, complete with useful exercises for the novice writer. My interest, however, was in moving beyond theories and hints about ‘how to do it’ to focus on analysing ‘how it was done’. My purpose was to understand and illuminate, as explicitly as I was able, the process of creative writing as I experienced it over an eight week period.

Let me summarise what I discovered about the experience of creative writing in the course of my short apprenticeship. Here is part of what I wrote at that time.

Creative writing is by no means all creative experience. That 90:10 ratio of perspiration to inspiration seems to be the norm. But the 10% of inspiration is the drug that drives the whole caboodle, stimulating my desire to write and continue writing.

Creative writing is feast and famine. I have phases of obsessive activity in which everything else is crowded out by the work going on in my head. I live on the edge of my daily life, of the routines of eating and sleeping, of others’ conversations and concerns. At these times, I wake early – 3am or 4am – and scribble notes on pieces of paper and perhaps write for an hour or two. I begin to understand why creative folk have a reputation for being a nightmare to live with and am thankful for Sharon, a tolerant partner who sleeps well. I try to go with the flow, knowing these full moon risings won’t last, that the inspiration and energy will wane and be replaced by dead patches, calm resignation and aimless staring at Lake Pupuke. Eventually I know the wind will get up again and blow me in new directions.

There is a kind of creative ‘mucking about’ that seems to be part of the creative writing process. Doing nothing, going to movies and plays, watching television inertly, surfing the internet, moping about, walking round the rocks to Takapuna, watching the arctic terns assemble for their journey north, a scavenging seagull, a child exploring the waste basket, musing about the one-legged man with the three-legged dog, the long silences between Peter Hillary and his dad, broken by Ed saying “How would you like to go to the North Pole?” It all seems so random, yet is all grist to the mill. All potential material to channel into a story. One day. That mythical one day.

Stories have a life, style, rhythm of their own and take you to unexpected places. I’m never sure where I’m headed but am learning not to force the pace, to let a story, or a piece of dialogue, unravel in its own idiosyncratic manner. I’m not conscious of designing a style of writing that is integral to the story but, afterwards, can recognise a style is there, as with the carousel-like rhythm of the story-telling in Mr Oliphant’s Tears. [See blog 15, Mr Oliphant's Tears, 8 December 2011]

I love the intensity of the experience when writing, its immediacy and sense of total engagement. I feel as if I am permanently on the edge of a love affair, open and vulnerable to myself. ‘All the best art helps you understand some of your own questions’, says Naomi Watts, the star of 21 Grams*. ‘Like to write? of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write – it is life, for me” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

I fill in the gaps in inspiration with the hard yards of revising and reworking and editing and find some useful writing habits to keep me persevering. I refuse to acknowledge writer’s block, learning that, if I have something to say, I will find words for it. Lousy words, perhaps, but words nevertheless. So I force them down… even if only jottings… dots on the screen… to be joined up later… with colour and frilly bits added… like stucco. I stop in the middle of a sentence so that I know where I am next time I visit the story. In the perspiration phase I take encouragement from these words from the actor Will Smith:

Don’t think about building a wall. Think about laying one brick perfectly. Just lay this one brick perfectly. Don’t let your mind wander to ‘Wow, when I’ve laid 14,000 of these bricks, it’s gonna be a great wall’. Just lay one perfect brick. In my mind I never look that far forward. I don’t hope that the movie is going to be incredible. I hope that this scene that we’re shooting today is going to be incredible. I try and make this scene the best that I can make it. And then in making this scene the best it can be, when they put them all together, hopefully they have something that is the best that it can be.**

I have a strange and disconcerting experience. I’m over in Bayview to see Harriet and James, her baby daughter, something I often do on Thursdays. On the way home I go into the Glenfield mall to look for a birthday present for Sharon. I wander around for a while, buy nothing, visit the toilet. Emerging from the cubicle in the gents I go to wash my hands. There is a long row of basins and mirrors. I wash my hands and look up to adjust my jacket. I am not there. No reflection. Just the basin in front of me, its mirror image and a view of cubicle doors beyond. I have disappeared.

There’s a simple explanation. In expecting what to see my mind has filled in some missing data. Sets of washbasins run back to back down the centre of the block facing the cubicles on each wall. Mine is the only set without a mirror so I’m looking straight through at the basin and cubicles on the other side. That I am not there is only a momentary perception but dislocating nevertheless. It sets me thinking about writers and mirrors, that the egotism of the writer needs the mirror of the publisher, not because writers have excessive narcissism but because they need to see their reflection to know that they exist. I remember that back in 1985, working at the East-West Centre in Hawaii and feeling much alone, I had visited the University of Hawaii library with the sole purpose of seeing whether or not they had a copy of a book I had written, a book about entrepreneurship and the founders and owners of small enterprises. They had. I did exist.

I also bring back from the mall two other perceptions about my developing psychology as a would-be fiction writer.

The first is the awareness that I can use the mirror experience in a story. I have no idea what story. Or when. But I am beginning to see, like some scavenging entrepreneur constantly on the lookout for new business opportunities, potential story pieces wherever I look. Everything is grist to the mill. When, as part of my 2002 photojournalism workshop, I go up to Karangahape Road with a camera borrowed from Wayne and walk into the old George Court building, it’s as though images are crying out at me to be shot. Within an hour I have used a thirty-six-exposure film – nothing by the standards of professional photographers, but a lot for a parsimonious Scotsman. And for weeks after the workshop I ‘see’ photographs wherever I go. If you are a hairdresser you notice people’s hair, if you work in a shoe shop, their shoes. Gradually my world is becoming a more dangerous place. What if that HSBC sign falls on my head, I wonder, or those kids’ bikes hanging precariously off the back of the four wheel drive on the motorway in front of me fall off in my path? My world is filling with ‘what ifs’.

My other recognition from the mirror in the mall is that dislocation is useful for a writer. A writer’s eye is for reversal of the expected, for the distorting image, as well as for the story or image that captures the essence of a particular person or place. I now recognise in my first tentative story lines the usefulness of inversion - the upside down clown hanging on my bedroom wall, the games I like to play switching between text and footnotes.*** Arthur Koestler writes that the creative act ‘does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole.’ Creative writing, to use Koestler’s terminology, is ‘bisociative’ not ‘associative’, by which he means that it doesn’t operate on a single plane with a given set of pedestrian rules but lives on several planes at once, rotating perception and cross-fertilizing to give new perspectives on the familiar.****

Text for My Photojournalism Display, Ilam 2002 (the blocked out word is re-presented/represented)

Some of My Workshop Photographs (printed the traditional darkroom way).

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* In an interview reported in Canvas, 28/29 February 2004. Twenty-one grams is apparently the weight we all lose at the moment of our death thus provoking the speculation among the spiritually inclined that it is the weight of a person’s soul.

** From interview reported in Sunday Star-Times, June 2, 2002.

*** See blog, Thinking about Thinking (forthcoming).

**** Ideas here pinched from a study of ‘Suits’ and ‘Creatives’ in the advertising industry, an unpublished paper on the commercialisation of creativity by Lucy Thomas.