Micro-Theories: A Definition.

So, here's the deal. A micro-theory should be a single paragraph of text no longer than 250 words, and it should fully articulate an idea, on any subject, with as much eloquence as the spatial limitation allows. And that's it. The challenge is to think inside the box, if you will. 

IoW.

There are no motorways here, no enormous monoculture fields, no depressed goth kids skulking round the village green (well, not many). Instead, there are hedgerows deep and full of song, bustling with the colours of celandine and vetch, cow parsley and primroses, dandelions and forget-me-nots. I’ve seen field mice hopping along the path in front of me, thrushes and blackbirds exploding out of bushes, fritillaries spiralling up into the flawless blue of afternoon as little freshets pour down off the fields into a brook beside which snowdrops and blue bells grow out of the cool black loam beneath the trees. In the woods there are chestnut saplings pushing up among the nettles and laurel candles nodding from among waxed leaves, and full-grown trees whose names I don’t know showing off great diadems of white flowers thirty or forty feet up their slender mossy trunks. In the banks of the brook I saw a ford criss-crossed with the tracks of animals. Here all paths lead eventually to the sea, where the sweet green smell of blossom and the sharp, fennel tang of sap rising give way gradually to ozone and seaweed, dreams of salt instead of soil. You can walk out along a rickety, storm-beaten pier and watch the white isosceles of sail boats tacking across the Solent while cruise ships and oil tankers inch their prostrate shadows across the horizon. Back inland you come across an old churchyard which has a yew tree in one corner and a giant pink magnolia in the other that sheds its petals over drunkenly subsided gravestones. Once ornate with mourning, today they’re chipped and faded and lost beneath thick growths of moss. Alongside the churchyard there’s a Victorian manor house with gouges in the chimneystack and slates in the gutter. Plastic and ripped drapes cover the windows. It looks the perfect setting for a gothic ghost story. Inside the church, there are several jars of marmalade made by a local woman and sold for £1.20, all proceeds going to the restoration fund, one of which you buy, leaving the money in the basket provided, feeling oddly enriched by the experience. As you progress homewards, first by paths and then by roads, as you feel the peopled world part to reabsorb you with all its motion and noise, you realise that this was the first time in years you’ve been completely filled with silence. 

Ego Dominus Tuus.

I am currently attempting to write the literary equivalent of Andrex toilet paper: soft, strong and very, very long. And guess what: it reads like shit. As if that weren’t problem enough, it also appears that I’m typographically constipated; I’ve been sitting here for ages and I’ve still got hardly anything to show for myself.

Perhaps the problem is that what I’m writing is heightened autobiography, which is where people get to rewrite the actual events of their lives so that they get all the best lines. Well, actually, it's not quite that bad. Heightened autobiography is really just autobiography in which you get to add as many fantasies and grotesques as you need to convey the truth as you see it; you lie to tell the truth.

Now the problem with this is that everything I write at the moment feels a little bit stillborn. Either that or the little sparrow of a new idea emerges alive and chirping and then I put it in a cage and very slowly flick it to death. I worry that this happens because I’m already bored of the material; the act of describing people and places in this proximate world, even when largely fictionalised, feels depressingly familiar and clichéd. Worse, the act of drawing from my memories of real events seems to generate a sort of stylistic constipation – the type of writing which is a pain to read and even more painful to ‘pass’.

And yet, for all the discomfort, I find the thought of abandoning this story terrifying. Is this Freudian? Am I clinging on to unresolved grief and preventing myself from evolving either as a writer or an individual? Perhaps. And yet one of the main reasons I have for writing this story is that, as a troubled and too-serious teenager, I promised myself that I’d one day try and write something which defiantly answered all the pain and stupidity in which I found myself so that no other poor fucker would have to go through it quite as alone as I did. A relatively pure motive then, surely, despite all the adolescent narcissism.

On the other hand, there are so many other stories which I want to tell and which I’m neglecting in order to focus on this one. And the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything was Untitled Story No. 4, which is essentially a horror story with a pseudo-religious streak. No self in there at all: it’s pure genre.

Perhaps writing through the veil of genre still enables you to interact with (and expiate) all your psychological baggage, only via the tangent of metaphor as opposed to head-on? Maybe, in fact, we can’t help translating our own experience through the metaphorical prism. After all, everything anyone ever writes is the product of how they see, and how you see is indistinguishable from who you are.

I suppose that, ultimately, you could say all fiction is metaphorical, since one of the primal incentives for writing fiction is to transmute the actuality of personal experience into something universal. But what does all this mean? What can we learn from it? Only one thing: I need to get on with some bloody work. 

Sitrep.

I’ve decided it’s time to try and refresh this site a bit. There are a great many things happening in real life at the moment, what with all the wonders (seriously: wonders) of fatherhood and being back in the UK, exploring the Isle of Wight, visiting old friends, seeing Spring steal over the landscape. However, there are also lots of shoots and leaves straining towards the light from the stygian funk of my hard drive. I’m still working on my big thing (more of which shortly), with numerous pained hiatuses for real life (real life – pah!). I’ve also got lots of blogs to post, some new poems and my new idea of ‘Micro Theories’ to hammer away at. Finally, loads of thanks to my beautiful wife and the only slightly less beautiful Mr Donal Kerr for the prescient advice about moving towards shorter, more immediate and hopefully more readable content. Excelsior and so forth…

Coalition.

A piece on the evening news last night referred to the nations in favour of military intervention in Libya as the Coalition. This struck me as an interesting and potentially dangerous fuzziness. I mean, the original coalition of 2003 consisted of the Americans, the British, the Australians and the Poles. In 2011, the Coalition means America, Britain, France, Canada and Italy. So, in short, what started as a euphemism intended to legitimise an illegal war is now, we must assume, an umbrella term for whichever nations feel desperate enough to join the US and UK in bombing the shit out of whoever upsets them. In our recent history, nation groupings of this sort were called stuff like the Allies, a term which denoted unequivocal solidarity and commitment to a cause. It was a black and white term for a black and white era.

Coalition, however, is a term for a more hazy world. It tentatively evokes thoughts of collaboration and moderation. It also, critically, implies evanescence; the word coalition derives from the Latin coalitus (fellowship) and coalescere meaning to join or grow together, which is the meaning it had when we received it from the French. Therefore the implicit understanding of coalition is that sympathetic factions coalesce and form a union for as long as their needs converge and then – critically – disperse when the purpose for the alliance ceases. There is no question that the purpose of the current action in Libya is not the same as the war in Iraq (unless these various and shifting nation groupings have all signed some secret memo about expeditiously toppling nuisance regimes in the name of democracy), which means that this isn’t by definition the same Coalition as the one in 2003.

Questions of definition and meaning are critical in the current climate because obfuscating meaning – via the recycling and scattershot application of inexact terminology – reveals the underlying and insidious power dynamic of such friendly little euphemisms. Everyone outside the West, everyone who looks down the barrel of the Coalition, can surely see the real meaning which this word is bringing into their lives. It is not, as it purports to be, the democracy and freedom, but rather a declaration of intent to preserve self-interest and the status quo at any price. And this surely will play a decisive role in radicalising both individuals and political groups in opposition to Western hegemonies, thereby prolonging these tragic conflicts at the cost of many lives.

Finally, let us also remember that in the arena of domestic politics here in the UK, coalition is now a byword for fecklessness, a wholesale betrayal of political principle and the permanent discrediting of the third party alternative. So coalition is also a word that will one day hold such negative associations that it will cause a reflexive (and regressive) cringe back towards the tired certainties of oppositional, two-party politics in which both parties are the same. Long live the Coalition.