But this isn’t a bad thing. Although I learn very slowly and change more slowly still, I have one very beautiful thing in my favour – I write, I do something creative. This means that when all is darkness, it isn’t. It can’t be. The way of life I have chosen allows me to take – sometimes quickly, sometimes not – any negative element and use it, change it at some level. I don’t at all subscribe to the idea that the ardent typist should dress in mourning and cultivate fake doom – that’s a form of self-harm and a waste of energy. Life will inevitably have its bleak spots without our help. Meanwhile, it can be cheering to consider that, if we survive, we’ll maybe get a sonnet on divorce, or a character with toothache, a novel that can be properly lyrical about grief, or a joke about colitis. There may be times when we end up just sticking our tongues out at reality and times when we can connect with the human condition as we never have before, maybe both. We may even have the unlooked-for pleasure of being useful to someone else who draws strength from what we’ve built. Above all, the pure act of writing – the truth that it is still there for you, and you for it – is a wonder. And it need have nothing to do with the details of your life. Within it, you can be away from everything and saying out new dreams, just because you can, because human beings do sing for other human beings and make unnecessary beauties. Onwards.
Introduction to the Essays
BEFORE WE BEGIN these essays, I thought it would be appropriate to tell a story. It was, like all my useful stories, told to me by someone else. I have found it sustaining and hope that you may, too.
My grandfather, who was an amateur boxer for some years, would sit up with me into the night and tell me about his early life, his work in the steel industry and his exploits in the ring. He told me wonderful truths and magnificent lies, his voice purring in his chest while he did so. I knew him as a huge, apparently invincible and yet deeply gentle man. Until I was four or five, he could extend his arm straight out and I would swing on it, as if he were a tree, or some other wonderful thing filled with the forces of nature and indomitable life. He was one of the few people whom I have loved beyond my capacity for affection, someone therefore who always made me larger and better than I was.
One evening we were together, everyone else asleep, and he told me about his first competitive boxing match. He said that it was the only fight he’d ever lost and that he knew why – he’d been scared. I found this difficult to imagine, but there was something very young and small in the way he spoke about himself, climbing on to the canvas square and facing someone bigger and stronger and faster than he believed himself to be. I was a nervous child and understood, or thought I did, exactly how he must have felt. I was frightened by almost every door I had to open, by strangers and apparently more assured acquaintances, by most available knowns and unknowns. I wasn’t aware then that my grandpop’s father had been violent, that his home had been uneasy when he was young and small, and that perhaps part of his pursuit of physical excellence and power was intended to help him defend what he loved. He may have intended never to be scared again.
My grandfather made sure I was physically confident, taught me self-defence at such an early age that it was just another game, at such an early age that it became instinctive. He took steps to keep me safe, even without him. My grandfather worried that I had trouble with figures and so he taught me how to play cribbage, a card game which is rather more complex than it seems and which demands a grasp of basic arithmetic. He took steps to make me numerate and, as he did so, to illustrate how charlatans and tricksters might seek to prey on me, with and without the aid of pasteboard. And my grandfather advised that I should be very, very careful before I granted any gentleman the honour of touching me above the knee. He wanted me to know what I was worth.
And my grandfather understood that I was fearful, often terrified. When he told me about that first fight, he explained why he lost. ‘When you’re scared, they don’t beat you – you beat yourself.’ He gave me that insight. I refer to it elsewhere in this book, but I don’t say that it took me decades to realise what he meant.
I wouldn’t suggest that living one’s life as if it were a constant combat would be wise, and I try not to do so myself. I do know, from repeated experience, that I can defeat myself with fear at a moment’s notice. I can encompass the combat and its ugly end in a breath. Procrastination, half-heartedness, cowardice – they are all fruits of my fear and have robbed me, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly, of many joys. Caution is wise; I’ve found that paralysis is less rewarding.
I have no personal advice to offer anyone, beyond mentioning to friends that if they’re asking me for guidance, then they’re already in more trouble than they know. (I’m always good for a cheap laugh.) But if I am talking to a writer, or if I am trying to encourage myself, I find more and more that being without fear seems the key, the solution to most problems. I feel it is both practical and beautiful to demonstrate that of ourselves which dreams, and to do so in security and freedom. Our nightmares are fearful enough: our dreams, I think, must be better and louder and unafraid.
Insomnia
PERHAPS BECAUSE I was born in the middle of the night I never have really associated the hours of darkness with wasting my time in sleep – more with being up and about and ready, I sometimes think much more ready than I manage to be in the day. Insomnia started early for me, but it wasn’t about not sleeping, it was about being full of other things, being too delighted to let go and drop away. I’m told that when I was little I would go to bed quite obediently, but then for a while I would sing – small person in under the blankets and singing, happy to elongate the day. And perhaps fond of music, I suppose, I’m not sure. I had no work to engage me, no social calendar, no pressing concerns, I only wanted to be me, with my own restless skin, just following along behind my thinking.
This was around the time when I can recall my parents tucking me in and then edging out of my room with ‘I’ll just leave the door open a bit, so it won’t be dark.’ This meant that I suffered from nightlight envy. Other kids had nightlights that glowed fondly, or revolved endearing pictures around their bedroom walls, that played tunes, even. I had the door open a bit. This, very obviously, was going to let the monsters in. And also provide just enough illumination for me to be stricken by the sight of them as they pounced. I’ve slept with my head underneath the covers ever since. Sheets are impervious to monsters, everybody knows that.
By the time I went to school, my twin causes of sleeplessness – overexcitement and monsters – were already well established. I was a pupil in the same institution for thirteen years – primary, junior, secondary – and until I became an occasionally carefree senior, my education seemed based around a core curriculum of shouting. The primary-school shouting was especially intense. To be sure, I was usually much too spineless and translucent to be shouted at myself, but there were always the wholesale excoriations of our class as a nest of imbeciles and ne’er-do-wells to be endured and I never did know when some unforeseen regulation might not be personally transgressed, or my inability to handle sums or swimming or shoelaces might become finally intolerable. Sunday nights – already full of the chill and flinching that were a natural part of Monday morning – became ill-fitting and pushed me into a habit of wakefulness. When I finally did drift off, I would dream of uncompleted homework and werewolves and shame.
But the stronger push was always from varieties of elation. I could read before I went to school and – as soon as narratives didn’t simply involve the variously hapless animals of Blackberry Farm – I would be found and held by book after book. I wouldn’t be able to stop reading: all comfortable and uninterrupted, and what could be wrong about staying in this or that beautiful world until three in the morning? I knew that I’d wake up tired, I knew that I’d feel queasy if I had to run about in gym or if – since my school was obsessed with the moral and physical benefits of Scottish country dancing – I were required to disport myself through a gauntlet of Dashing White Sergea
nts and reels. And shouting. But I’d also worked out that the world was full of books, that centuries and continents of books were heaped around me, enticing and funny and scary and hypnotising and overwhelming books, and how could I possibly read them all – never mind the new books mushrooming up on every side – if I didn’t keep putting in the hours?
And more overwhelming still was the unmistakeable drive towards writing. It wasn’t at all that I believed I could do better than any of the authors by whom I was surrounded, it was only that writing my own words was the most overwhelming experience of all. Given the horrible standard of my early scribbling – ramblings through a pseudo-Celtic mythical kingdom, mildly satirical songs for the school magazine, years of utterly inexcusable poetry – I can be entirely certain that no one else would have been overwhelmed by anything other than nausea in its clumsy, purple, self-important presence. But it made me elated and, after dinner and schoolwork and dog-walking and the rest, even if I’d put the light out and laid myself down for definite repose, little ideas and scraps and nonsenses would tickle in and start to shake me. They would make the nights too bright to resist. I remember once, long after school and university, being in possession of my first laptop – I’d pottered out to the kitchen and left it by itself in a darkening room and when I walked back in with a coffee, it was there and shining: this word-holding thing just quietly glowing like a window into somewhere else and better and more wonderful and I remember thinking, ‘Yes, that’s how a good page would look if you could really see it, that’s how it always did look in my head.’ It’s a light that I hope will always wake me.
But, of course, not being a creature of moderation, as soon as I was able to earn my living by writing and nothing but, I and my ergonomically disastrous laptops – I burned through one every couple of years – would work too hard and too long and too late into the lovely and undisturbed nights, finally being paid to do what grown-ups had told me not to. So I got ill. My spine – like every other human’s – is still mainly designed for activity, hunter-gathering, swinging in trees. It grew tired of unnatural compressions, poor posture, self-employed stress and carrying the staring weight of the brain to which I had retreated. I developed a herniated disc. Six months of misdiagnosis and increasingly desperate alternative therapies only harmed me further. Finally, an unwise business trip to London meant I folded up in my publisher’s offices and was shipped to an A&E – as it happened, on my birthday. After an afternoon of ‘If you’ll just hold still . . . oh, and happy birthday . . . press the button if you feel claustrophobic . . . and I see from the form it’s your birthday’, I was X-rayed and MRI’d and diagnosed with both the dodgy disc and muscle-wasting. I emerged with one week’s pain relief, a neck collar and the temporary ability to flag down cabs, no matter what.
Immobility and muscle-wasting and pain, pain and immobility and more muscle-wasting – I spent a decade in that loop. Waiting lists, physio, a diminishing income. The first time my range of movement was assessed I wanted to cry – I could barely lift my arms. I was wearing slip-on shoes, buying my groceries one tin at a time. And there was no sleep. I would pass the nights watching sci-fi and stand-up comedy. There was no light left in the darkness, only the thought that going to bed exhausted me, that this was my life now, that kissing hurt. And I was angry – I’d given my life to a vocation and been rewarded with this – a pain that made even typing almost intolerable.
And I hope I will never forget that slowly, slowly friends and strangers suggested remedies and tiny advances were made, and that gently the pain of unaccustomed exercise could replace the pain of being me and the fear of getting worse again, being knocked back into more days of lying down. I was offered places to stay and recuperate, advice, concern – the world was bleak, but also generous. And I did recover. A few years ago I could be in New York and arrange to meet a friend across on the other side of Central Park and I could amble over in twenty minutes and then have to waste time in coffee shops. I’d planned that my journey would take an hour. When I’d last been there, it had.
Naturally, I promised myself that I would be sensible thereafter and never overdo things again. I would take breaks and holidays. I bought a special chair to support me, I practised Tai Chi almost every day, I took vitamins and went for long walks, lots of long, long walks. I tried to remember to be grateful for mobility, for the mercy and simplicity of comfort, and to make up for being antisocial and bad-tempered on so many, many occasions when the pain was too bad and too boring to mention.
But I’m me – I love what I do, I love to sit up late in my wonderful chair and drink too much caffeine and make something mildly dramatic out of endless typing – the all-night sessions, the two- and three-day sessions, only interrupted by baths and black-and-white movies. It now seems traditional that I’ll finish my novels in an all-out dash, running just ahead of them and hoping I won’t fall. I spent last year bundled up in a New England barn conversion, supplied with Diet Coke and Jimi Hendrix, grinding the hours away between summer storms that whitened the whole sky, that flashed me into somewhere else, drenched me in warm rain when I stood out on the deck. I write, God help me, very much according to the model set out by Honoré de Balzac – a man who habitually woke at midnight, who lived through love letters rather than love, who killed himself with black coffee and overwork.
Which means that, as I write this, I am recovering – I hope – from months of viral labyrinthitis. It’s a condition which produces a kind of profound seasickness and anxiety, which leaves you clinging to your spinning and ducking bed while savage possibilities rage over you, every thought you shouldn’t have: loss and permanent ill health and hurts to those you love. For the last few months sleep has been either unobtainable or a long, hot succession of nightmares, often with the illusion of having woken, but being paralysed while yet more fears unfold. And it’s my own fault. In the last ten years I’ve taken precisely two holidays – during one of which I had to work. I should know better. I should do better. I have to do better.
I write at night, because it’s the proper time for dreaming – emails and essays during the day, journalism, correspondence, payment of bills – but I wait for the sun to weaken and set before I can find, as old William says, that ‘. . . imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown . . . and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. Unfortunate when the forms are monsters, their names familiar – ‘What if I don’t get better? What if I fall even further behind? What if the work is failing and I can’t see it? What if he doesn’t love me? What if I don’t love him well? What if my life won’t work? What if, as usual, the little joys are wasted and go wrong?’ Everyone has their 3 a.m. tribunal of mistakes made and damages received and threats that are more or less credible, but all insist on being heard. It’s perhaps why, when we care for each other, we so often ask, ‘How did you sleep?’ – we know what a terrible place the edge of sleep can be. It is perhaps one of the quieter reasons for making love, or rather for being each other’s companions in our beds – we try to be present when the people we need most have to drop into the other little death, and we like to feel them there for us when we surface badly, when we are afraid and pulling the sheet up over our faces will make no difference, will not save us.
And we wish each other ‘Sweet dreams’. Of course we do. And, sometimes stupidly and sometimes sensibly, I will spend my professional life and night after night attempting to build dreams for other people and for myself, trying to sing and elongate the day. Trying to make the words that shine, the way so many other people’s words have always done for me.
To Save Our Lives
LET ME BEGIN by saying that I gave up. Not completely, but mainly, I gave up. For those of you who haven’t worked this out, or those of you who were thinking quietly. Yes. I gave up.
I worked in the arts with marginalised people in marginalised communities from 1987 until around about 1995. I worked with people who were disabled, or less able, or disadvantaged because of phy
sical conditions, injuries, illnesses, age, various types of imprisonment and, of course, the biggest and bitterest prison of all – poverty. And then I gave up. Not completely, but I don’t now run between ten and twenty workshops a week, I don’t build up long-term relationships of trust with individuals and groups and I don’t bring people who have no access to the arts access to the arts, not really. I’m relying on other people to do that. I now earn exponentially more than I did and am more comfortable and work less. This is something I thought we had to address. So I have.
Whatever my position, it would always be an honour to address a room full of people who have an interest in the area where health and well-being and the arts meet, which, in my opinion, is the whole area. Or it could be, or it should. But I no longer do what you do. I cheer on from the sidelines and I try to help when I can. But I am, to a degree, a dirty rotten sell-out and if you want to view me in that way, I won’t object. I got out of community arts work because it was sort of killing me and I had seen people working with others on automatic pilot and not doing right by their craft, or themselves, or their clients, and I didn’t want to end up being someone else phoning it in when maybe I was providing the only session this or that (perhaps fragile) person would get. I didn’t want something that could have changed their lives to simply be a way of passing a dull and patronising afternoon, because of me. I think I had good reasons for leaving, in that regard.
I also had a very selfish reason for leaving – I wanted to do my own work. I had seen, in ways I could never have imagined, how the arts could enrich lives, alter behaviours, sing to the wider world on behalf of its practitioners and make beauty, and I wanted that for me. I wanted to mainline creativity for myself and I couldn’t deny that desire any longer. So I left. But I don’t think what I learned has ever left me and I’ll talk today about what I know of working in the arts with others and how it relates to health and well-being. This is something which is obviously particularly relevant at a time of immense hardship for many, when every sustaining possibility is needed, when the basic medical care and support systems that will keep people alive, or in lives worth living, are being more and less gently removed. This is a time when something like arts activity can seem a ridiculous luxury if it’s for non-paying, non-middle-class people and when the arts themselves – the allegedly self-indulgent, inexplicable, elitist, expensive, irrelevant arts – are perhaps less valued than they have been for generations.
On Writing Page 22