Micro-Theory 1: Plainsong.

God, you’d think, was born in the minds of man. But something has made me think otherwise. You see, I’ve recently been using a sort of rubbish circular singing (a combination of mantra with cod-Gregorian chant) to help our baby get through his teething pain, and it occurred to me, as I sat there droning away, that our awareness of a spirit or soul may have been conceived out of such verbal play. Making noises like these feels strangely old, and we have surely been making them since we were living in caves. Imagine how different these noises sounded echoing within a cave to how they did on the plain or in the woods. Indeed, the cave is the antecedent of the church: a locus of power which attains to this power by its capacity to echo and reveal the inchoate, inarticulate realm of man’s spirit, his yearning and supplication. Of course, the mouth is a kind of cave too, and it is as a well of echoes that this transformation occurs; that a thought makes the metempsychotic journey from disembodied essence to embodied sound. Perhaps this is how our awareness of a soul evolved: by tracing the physical manifestation of the defining attribute of our humanity, our speech, to its origin.

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…