A very slow day

So it’s another perfect winter's day in Sao Paulo, the last in a long bright string of them. A sky so flawless it stills you inside. The wind scouring out thought and blowing rags of sunlight into impossible corners. It’s been very quiet around here lately. The city has emptied itself for the long vacation. The spate of intense work which I had throughout May and June has slowly ebbed away until I’m basically unemployed but without the final sign-off which would oblige me to get on with something else. My wife is also at liberty, on her summer holidays. So our days have reduced their focus to smaller acts – getting breakfast, venturing out to buy food, getting hold of a new lamp for the living room, speaking to our families at home in Britain, making dinner, eating a peach. Small victories have become important once again. We dream vividly and discuss whatever remains most vivid when we wake. Our dreams and the TV shows we’re binging on in the evenings seem more real than what we think of as our lives, the occupations we pursue in the outside world, our responsibilities. Reality has retreated. It is confusing. It feels as if the layers of my mind have become transparent glass, and I can look down through pellucid depths, reading each layer simultaneously, the meanings overlapping and making no sense except cumulatively, as the wholeness of a dream, unbound by the linearities of reason. One should enjoy these moments, but they make me feel guilty, anxious. There is occasionally the scratch of fear. It’s an effort to let go. 

The problem with advertising

Is that the people who do it are liars. That's OK, though, isn't it? I mean, actors are liars as well. Aren't they? But no, that doesn't work, because an actor lets his assumed persona fall away at the end of the play so that people can leave the theatre reassured that what they saw was an illusion, an exercise in make-believe. The advertiser never does this, he’s always performing. A very quick example might be Saatchi & Saatchi. In the eighties, they represented the Tories. Now they run election campaigns for Labour. Therefore, even In an arena purportedly concerned with telling the truth, and with the manifest intention of affecting people’s fundamental beliefs, the advertisers are, and must be, changelings, saying whatever the highest bidder asks them to say, being blue one day and red the next.

This process closely resembles creativity, in that it entails an imaginative projection into the mind of another person or corporate body in order to understand and articulate the concerns of that person or entity. And for a while you can kid yourself that you are actually being creative and, moreover, getting paid for it: the best of all possible worlds. But that feeling soon falters as you realise that you’re only ever getting to play with the tiniest gnat’s fart of creativity due to the fact that advertising insists on limiting the scope and tools with which you can express yourself. Your ads must confine themselves to  the unique health giving property or the personal growth or the amount of sex you'll get from consuming this or that product in a world without death, blemishes or clouds. Which is to say, you’re working from a small box of preformed and increasingly threadbare sentiments, stock phrases and metaphors.

So it's not and can never be genuine creativity, because genuine creativity uses the full palette of the imagination. It has the freedom to say the horrific and the hilarious, not just the asinine and the good. It is unpredictable and subversive. A language without this freedom, a language without recourse to extremes, with no-go areas and taboos, is a crippled and diminished language. In the old days, people knew this. Classical rhetoricians taught the value of establishing the ‘confutatio’ (counter-argument) after the main argument so they could establish and demolish those arguments in the ‘refutatio’. Which is to say, they knew that you cannot effectively persuade someone without revealing the whole picture, including the bits that don’t agree with what you’re saying. Advertising does not trust its bovine public with this level of intellectual autonomy and discernment. That’s why you so often have to scratch your head and try a bit of deductive reasoning to work out from an advert what the particular product is meant NOT to be via the infinitely diluted platitudes of what it is.

It would be wonderful if this situation could be changed, if you could have an ad agency with scruples. But to do that you’d either need to change the discourse itself, which would be an uphill struggle because consumers have become accustomed to being spoon-fed nothing that will disagree with them; or you’d need to have an agency which could be unfailingly positive because it only represented clients which embody the ethical and humanitarian concerns of the more enlightened portions of society. I can’t see the latter ever happening because, as wondrous as it would be, I don’t think there are enough of those businesses around, and turning enough profit, to keep an agency afloat. And even if there were, the bank manager would very likely reject your investment proposal as an unsound risk, because it’s not based on a recognised business model.

The reality is that the ad agency reflects the society it is in, and multiplies those reflections through endless repetition until the average consumer doesn’t know what the hell is real anymore. And we live in a capitalist society full of businesses that habitually cheat and double-deal, so this farrago of deception is what advertising reflects back to us; it’s what we eat with our cornflakes and put on with our deodorant: a distorted and untrue simulachrum of what life is like, and what our priorities should be as members of a society.

To put it another way, it is universally the case that the nastiest, most unethical companies spend the most on advertising because they need the most image management. Their success derives directly from their lack of scruples, but they don’t want us to know that. It is not a coincidence that the most lucrative clients at my last agency came from the defence sector, petrochemicals, banks, major pharmaceuticals and controversial FMCGs. Most of whom aren’t the kind of people you’d like to meet down a darkened alleyway. They’re more the sort of people you’d like to meet in one of the lower circles of hell having their private parts gnawed on by Satan whilst being shat on by demons.

To conclude, then, let’s have a couple of quotes from Plato and The Princess Bride, because they knew what was going on.

'The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.'

‘Life is pain, highness. Any one who tells you different is selling something.’

Why do I write poetry?

Because I'm a demented narcissist and I want you to love me. LOVE ME! 

No, the reason I continue to write poetry – despite the fact that it's generally derided, doesn't get read and makes no money – is because I think that reading and writing poetry has the capacity to refine and anneal our sense of what it is to be living moral beings in a savage and complicated world. The reason I think this is because I believe poetry gives us the chance, and the responsibility, to face ourselves in a way that we simply don't during our daily lives.   

Telling a story or writing an essay just isn't the same. The longer forms allow room for more fabulation, more self-justification, more unpacking of the idea. Poetry is not like that; it demands that we crysallise the shifting and contradictory sea of our thoughts and emotions in a single clear and concise image of the particular thought or emotion associated with the particular moment in time. To do this we must examine and re-examine the moment from every angle, explore all the possible avenues of interpretation, reject all the cliches and cant. In short, we must try and say something at once evocative and true. 

This is not easy, and it gets harder as you grow older. You get hurt, you give hurt, you realise the inherent difficulty in saying anything about those experiences. The insufferable fifteen year old you once were – who fell in love five times a day and imagined that all life would be a grand chivalric bed-hopping saga from which sonnets and venereal complexities would flow unending – gradually comprehends that being a human being is serious – and seriously impenetrable – business. The fact that I don't think I am alone in finding it increasingly difficult to orientate myself within this strange new landscape (which is always strange and always new, for nothing ever happens the same way twice) only persuades me that it's all the more important to try and speak when the feeling arises. We need clarity like we need love. Thank goodness they're both still out there. But love is encroached upon by the outside world and the need to make money and the myriad complexity of other people's changing feelings and sufferings, and all of those factors are of course pressing and relevant themes in their own right. 

I suppose that is why I like to think of poetry not in terms of poetic forms or movements, but as a state of mind – that heightened awareness in which you recognise that you can use language to pluck a single moment out from among the chaos and flow of phenomena, a state in which you feel something simple and true enough to write about. The poetry that I write is defined by this perception: my hope for it is that it retains and displays that clarity, eschewing complexity for complexity's sake or for the fascination of what's difficult. Life is difficult enough. Emotions are sufficiently inscrutable. 

I write poetry, then, not only because I love the discipline and practice of it but because I hope that, by transcribing these moments before they slip away again, I can clarify things a little, if only for myself. I don't believe in a substantive, objective truth which we can all grasp, and I would hate to live in such a world. The joy of poetry is that it partakes of the contradictory and ineffable. I have probably failed to reflect that myself, but if I could define the poetry that I would one day like to write, it would be a poetry that delineates the truth as I understand it: a fragmented, partial and relative thing, unstable and permeated with contradiction; a poetry of the ephemeral, which implies the whole via the accumulation of fragments and reflections, moments seen at one remove, out of the corner of one eye. Perhaps the record of such moments would ultimately make for little more than a stream of soap bubbles. But I like to think that by assembling these fragments of a poetry which is itself aware of and defined by the transient nature of consciousness, by our changeable attachment to ideas and emotions, something like the truth could be revealed. 

Also, I want you to love me. LOVE ME!

Why This Website

It's pretty simple, really. I am out here in Brazil primarily so that I can write something long and hopefully saleable. But this takes time. And while I am getting on with that, I'm still writing other stuff, and thinking about writing, and getting affected by the world and doing all those other things which trigger thought and the urge to write nonsense blog entries.

There's also a lot of old material cluttering up my hard-drive and its metaphysical corollary, wot is otherwise known as my head. While I don't view this stuff as worth pursuing more seriously at present, I also don't want it hanging over my head while I’m trying to embark on new adventures. I've therefore decided to air it here in the humble hope that it will help to pass the odd half-hour.

So, to recap, the plan for this website is that it will act as a showcase for some of my new stuff, a repository for my old stuff and a place where I can come to talk about the things I've been doing or thinking about during the intervals when I'm not banging my face against a keyboard. I think this is called self-promotion and I am completely new to it, so please bear with me.