Secrets of the Toad

E.B. White wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.”

As a self-addled idler, I say screw the former part of that personal conundrum and let’s fall helplessly into the enjoy part. Mixing hedonistic pastimes with little bursts of languid philosophy, I’ll take a lazy swipe at the idea that so much thinking is now done for us that it’s damn time we indulge in all kinds of idleness until we are all over Descartes “I think therefore I am.”

If I don’t see the sun soon, I’m going to contemplate taking up heliotropism.

Yesterday it was the mercurial swiftness of 3,000 words added to my novel. Today it’s the slow burn of 800. I wonder if lawyers have similar problems? Shit, I got that guy off with a fine. Now my new client is looking at 20 years to life!

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is a staple in our house in the middle of the Maine woods. And our favourite woodland character?

Why, Mr. Toad, of course. You’ve got to love an animal that gets 20 years for being green. And I don’t like motorcars as much as Mr. Toad, but I just love his obsessive nature.

Here’s me as Mr. Toad explaining the need for a life that is more than just spending, getting, jumping in the first available lifeboat to make it to the other side. “Why, I’d say anything in there, Badger. You’re so eloquent and persuasive in there. But, no, I’m not at all sorry for smashing up life to get to the gems.”

The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air
in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges
in the orange groves as I passed them
outside of Seville, I understood
I’d been riding too long in cars,
probably even should get a horse,
become a high-up, flesh-connected thing
among the bulls and cows. Stephen Dunn

“A battler is someone who struggles forever and will never, ever, really get anywhere. And in Australia that’s a really honorable position.” Peter Carey

“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Nelson Algren.

Here are some Scots.

Aspects of A Novel Idler

E.B. White wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.”

As a self-addled idler, I say screw the former part of that personal conundrum and let’s fall helplessly into the enjoy part. Mixing hedonistic pastimes with little bursts of languid philosophy, I like to take a lazy swipe at the idea that so much thinking is now done for us that it’s damn time we indulged in all kinds of idleness until we are all over Descartes “I think therefore I am.”

The 17th century, metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell wrote: “But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”

What dominates the wholesome vista is a sense that everything we do must be productive, should be moving toward a sane and balanced end. The idea that you would do something just for the momentary blissful escape of it, for intensity, for feelings and sensations, is so out of fashion, it’s like spitting on Oscar Wilde’s grave!

Each hour has to be like the next hour. Every day has to be exactly the same. When that whistle blows (not at five anymore, darling, think more 5:15),  you have to be there. “Time discipline” is what they called it in the nineteenth century. Why is it that I feel like I no longer have control over what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it?  Everybody, it seems (including me) is fighting to get back control of their time. And that’s a fight worth fighting for!

I’ll end on a more positive thought: Sex is really a religious predicament; a faith in the eternal erection.

In the Beginning Was A Storyteller

I keep hearing it said in the grocery aisle, while I wait for my waiter to bring the main course, and on deserted streets in Maine (now that summer is over and the tourists have fled) that the 19th-century novel had more moral complexity and social subtext than contemporary novels and allowed 19th-century readers to make sense of the world they lived in. Now it’s the triumvirate of TV, radio, and the Web that reigns supreme, it seems, when we need to shape our moral landscape and define ourselves as social animals in the 21st century.

My response to that is: “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.”

OK, besides the faulty programming system that religion imposed on me as a young boy and the best laid schemes of my parents, school, and the BBC, the social and moral fabric of my being owes much, if not all, to books (music, too — of which I may well write about later).

I read, therefore I am, is my logos — said at the beginning and at the end of the universe.

The countless authors whose work has educated, amused, entertained, challenged, enlightened, broadened, corrected, and enlarged the shallow “I” that I live through are the ones I credit with my life beyond an unimaginative one: the one of facts and figures, the “cold clockwork of the stars and nations” (Ted Hughes), the one of time disciplines, the one of seeping realism that wants to set its cement between my atoms.

Which is not to say I go to books to seek out some better way to live or some better way to think or some better way to act or some better emotional life, what I’m saying is that what I read matters, it sinks in, it coats, it feeds, it breathes. It all goes in, and between my brain and my balls, some magic happens.

And as it happens, invention is always more interesting than reality, anyway.

Nietzsche said: “What is good is easy; everything divine runs on light feet.”

Writer Russell Hoban responded: “Yeah, right. It’s easy for dead guys to talk bollocks.”