I sit out here within my resplendent garden, or should I make that necessary correction – not my garden, my parents garden, a garden of one generation; the burial place of a duck, dog and countless collections of memories that linger under the new growth of vegetation. I sit here and carefully place words upon the screen of this laptop, and yet, I am still being bitten by this cold, this chill wind that resembles too closely the sensation that often runs the gauntlet of my spine. It seems that this ambience, this mistake of sensation, has no respect for this technology nor the ones who wield it. What difference does it make to it? Indeed, what difference does it make to me? I am the one who chose to come out here, amongst the ferns and the gardenias; the lavender and the parsley? Indeed, I came out here to get bitten, knowing that I would be bitten. Why is that? What reason is there other than the momentary satisfaction of warmth after the cold, only for the cold to return? How like writing it is, the gratification that cannot outlive itself, the memory that does nothing but forget, just the way I have forgotten what it is that I have come out here to get bitten for and write about. What is the subject, who is the subject, have I forgotten myself underneath all the greenery?
There is no point in stretching the imagination in the search for memory, even though I find myself doing this on a more than regular basis. I will often write the words, sentences, and paragraphs because they amuse me, not because there is anything to be done with them. Not because they remember the beginning or have any foresight of the end. Words do not believe in predestination or providence. Words cannot join political parties, even though, at times, they are pressed into service on account of them. So I spend my time out here writing because it is a much more productive form of thinking. I do not encounter the unbearable weight of guilt that accompanies the time I spend thinking. You have nothing to show for thinking but you have tangibility in writing, the proof that you have been doing something rather than nothing, that mortal sin of our day and age.
I have always wanted to write professionally - away form the confines of my garden. It is the only method I have for distinguishing professional from amateur writing – the fact that the former is done away from home. In hotel rooms, town squares, snow capped cottages in Alps with romantic names and histories, in the great cities of the world where the writer sits with literary ghosts peeking over their shoulder, mumbling inaudibly about the decline of the letter. I write at home, so ipso facto I am an amateur. I have often thought of becoming a war correspondent for a prestige’s newspaper, but have always doubted my ability to convince them in the pros of my hiring. What could I offer them other than the unknown? The unprofitable of the unknown. Would I duck the bullet or stare its inevitable trajectory, knowing that I would still be writing the story after it had severed one of my arteries. I doubt my principles and in turn it is this doubting that inhibits me from applying. Its not fear. That is the one thing you must understand. It’s the impossibility of principles. Why bother?
Why bother indeed? I think it could be the apathy. I suffer this constant sifting through all possible options and opinions and being convinced by none of them. I do not wish to be encased by an age, a particular pathos that grips the world for an instant. Even if that instant lasts for half a century. If the outcome of the written word is immortality what is the use in constraining yourself to the political jargon and jingoism that would relegate you to the ranks of journalism. I do not believe that the newspapers contain history as it happens. History is a child that is nurtured through analysis. The papers might give birth to it, but it whinges and whines like a new born, incomprehensible to all, only to be made sense of when it reaches maturity and lets go of its childish impetuousness.
To think of George Bush, Iraq, the tidal misgivings and shifting of Europe, the state of an economy I have no part in because I can’t pay the admission, what good would it do me when I have my resplendent garden to contemplate. When I can sit here and imagine the personality of God and his son. Perfect trinities distilled in a fractured sunlight, tinted green and gorgeous – mute and unavailable, beyond the musings of history. But, I will admit, that it the ease with which politics lends itself to opinion that makes it an attractive option when all else fails. It is impossible to be wrong when formulating an opinion about politics. Who will disprove you? The only ones capable are the ones in government themselves, and seeing as they will not converse with the Lilliputians we find ourselves in a de facto safe haven.
This is not prose. This is aimless, fruitless thought. Guilt free of course, but it brings as much joy as fat free cuisine, that penultimate of misnomers. It is just that I find no character worthy anymore. The existential man is no longer an insight but a core component of any democratic society. Patriotism has become a choice of conscience, a feat against the self, with a sense of irony and humour. We are now ploy savvy, media savvy and ideologically savvy, it means nothing that we are incapable of articulating this new found education, this intuitive understanding of our own cynicism. I can no longer think or imagine character because character is something for the real, it is a thing that is seen on cable news channels the world over. When real people are characters that possess all the high drama and false sense of tragedy that used to be the heart of all literary enterprises, what role does the novel, play or opera have to fulfil? What truth is there to be told when we have come to the tacit agreement that nothing is true and it is only this truism that we must adhere to. We are a society of scheduled causes, fractionalised identities that are in small possession of small truths that are destined to compete with each other on a micro scale. Let’s face it – we fight wars for the fun of it.