The power of a horse race

What follows is an attempt to explain to those of you who couldn’t give a seasonal fig for horse racing one of the reasons that those of us that do love it, do.

It’s because of the story: the true story. In fact, a horse race is so true I want to attempt to separate it almost entirely from the world of story. It’s not easy and here is why. They say there are only seven types of story out there, literature being based on one, or another of them. And what we are inclined to do is (sometimes interchangeably) impose one of these seven narratives onto our own muddled existences. We do this backwards, to understand the past, and we do it forwards, to better enjoy, or ‘plan’ the future. However, the fact of the matter is that we only know the now, this present moment, and in this moment there is no particular story to be grabbed on to, unless we want to take down a reel from the shelf of life and roll it both backwards and forwards to make the present, the now, cohese with the past and the future that exists only in our minds.

And as complicated as that sounds, that is pretty much what we do. For example, many of us will have played the showreel labelled ‘Christmas’ on a loop for the last few days. We tend to think in narratives and we have accompanying reels for just about every mundane, and otherwise, scenario. And we do it so very well that the storytelling about ourselves, our lives and others becomes an automatic way of being and before we know it those stories are not just super-imposed onto the current context of our lives, they become our lives. Our minds become a dark space waiting for a reel to flicker into life. The flickering stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and others, start to run our thinking. Our thoughts fit the narrative from the shelf…

I am not against stories, but I am cautious of the way we let might let sloppy ones run riot in our own heads, unexamined and rarely called to account. The power of a narrative tool, used judiciously is a beautiful thing, but the reality is that we are awash with cheap, emotive and polemic narratives that do us all a disservice. Our unquestioning acceptance of our own and consequently other people’s stories about our lives, their lives: Life… leads us into an unthinking loop and when we tire of those narratives, we reach for the alternative but equally manufactured ones via tv remote, or a book, or the computer.

It is in this state of narrative-induced inertia that we en masse sponge up the stories of advertisers who infer to us that we’ll be more cool if we buy an iWhatever, or we’ll capture love if we buy and wear a certain perfume. We take those stories, and we say, ‘Aha! That’s a rubbish story that is. Of course I am not going to meet a film star if I buy a coffee machine. What do they think I am, stupid?’ And we forget about it… But do we? Actually we don’t. Of course we forget much of the detail, perhaps even the actual name of the perfume or coffee machine. But our memory has a remarkable tenacity and clings onto the basic narrative like a piece of driftwood. Our brains remember the gist of it, minus some detail and part of the reason we do this is because it makes the complication of life more simple. It makes the downright dog’s dinner of human existence cohese into a more palatable selection of amuse-bouches. It also makes us buy products whose advertising narratives best fit our own…

It’s not at all our fault and it partially explains why memory is so unreliable. See that showreel labelled Christmas? Well it’s not a re-run every time you play it on the Dave channel of your mind. It’s more a story board for the future made up of the basic gist of the past, missing quite a lot of forensic detail. We tend to retrieve only an abstract impression of the past, especially the commonplace, and even that shifts with every separate retrieval.

So why hang onto the horse race, which could itself be described in narrative form? Because amongst the smoke and mirrors of so many individually nuanced stories about life, crossing the line in front is a one true fact. A fact of the matter. It stands outside my context, and yours. It is what it is. And in the seconds of victory, that can be replayed at will in detail, unlike our own plentiful faulty memories, it ties us to a present moment like the very few other facts of existence that are uniquely glorious in their own immediate context: like the birth of a baby, or a gin and tonic.

Horse racing is a factual account that sits in its own context and demonstrates the power of now. Of course when Kauto Star won his fifth King George, in his sixth run in the same race, we ran the story backwards in our minds to enjoy the possible forwards of it all that much more if he won. But nothing was certain; he might have lost. For me, the power of a great horse race like yesterday’s story…

Kauto Star’s Fifth King George the Sixth

…lies in this one thing, the thing you can be fairly sure of amongst all the hyperbole, in all our story-ridden intepretations of life – the horse wasn’t counting. We can choose to overlay the day with a fantastic and triumphant narrative, if we like, but the main protaganist, the horse, will not.

We can learn a lot from that.

Yeats & Murtagh: one of them has a story, one of them does not

Le désespoir…

It’s that time of year, n’est-ce pas?

Must be the government, the cold, the impending deadline & the Christmas thingummyjig.

The boredom, the hunger, the despair

Here’s a French proverb: La faim chasse le loup hors du bois ~ Hunger drives the wolf out of the wood.

‘How Goes The Work?’

‘Quack’

Taken from the formative text 'Farmer Duck' by Martin Waddell

The Book is Dead. Long Live the Book!

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbours, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Voltaire

I’ve been reading on the Kindle for PC for a while, but have been upgraded to a Kindle, before Kindle upgrades itself again – to include colour graphics – which the Kindle for PC offered anyway.

There’s no doubt it’s a complicated business. I’ve been disappointed there’s no backlight on the Kindle, which of course the Kindle for PC does have but, overall, reading from the Kindle itself is a lot more user-friendly than reading from a screen: less tiring on the eyes.

And actually, it’s the way forward isn’t it? I am not some burn-the-books fanatic, but spreading the word is a lot easier, a lot more cost-effective and a lot more democratic via electronic devices than through print press.

There’s a sadness about that too though. Print creates jobs, but it also uses up resources, so to take the sustainable view, using Kindle and suchlike to read your basic ‘print’ matter must be better in the long run surely? But tell that to those people involved in the publishing, printing, distribution and book retail sectors and see what they say.

People say: oh, I love books. The 3Dness of it, the tactile nature of the experience, the smell, the sense of where I am in it all when I turn the pages. I can lose myself in a book. Equally, I hear the same said of the Kindle. Well I hear people say – I love my Kindle. There doesn’t seem to be quite the range of kinaesthetic experiences available to someone kindling their way through a novel.

On the other hand you can store so much matter on a Kindle. Now I know there are many people who love books enough to keep everything they ever read: I come from a family of bibliophiles who, if they happen to read this (and I kind of hope they don’t), will be gnashing their very teeth at the heresy of this kind of post. Bibliophiles have shelves and shelves of books and that’s lovely, if you’ve got the space. But what if you don’t? And what if you are living with a bibliophobe – someone who finds books untrustworthy at best, and oppressive at worst. Well, a bibliophile will say that the phobe needs correcting in the error of their ways. And I agree that to not enjoy reading is to miss out on one of life’s great pleasures. However, if you want someone to try something out perhaps a handheld gadget is less threatening than a 300 page book, or twenty. It’s a thought. Maybe there’s an aphorism to be had in all of this conflict: that to be well-read these days does not have to mean you have to keep lots of books.

Perhaps, if I try some premembering here, a book will become a luxury item, only warranting a print run for the production of beautiful images and text, or leather-bound collector’s limited editions, or a vanity publishing project, which is where the whole shebang started after all. In fact now, as people can self-publish straight to ebook, we are returning full circle to writers using print to self-publish to reach a wider audience: William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau to name but a few…

Books are desirable, but they also need to be accessible, sustainable and available when you want them. The Kindle is a great device for all those reasons, but it’s still not a book. Rather than entertain the notion that a Kindle’s subtext is about tossing paperbacks on the bonfire, I prefer to think of it as wholly in the spirit of the Voltaire quote this post started with. The differences between the two media are a cause for celebration, not a reason to start a fight.

The Clan Motto: Forget Not

‘I am the place ~ where creation is working itself out’ from ‘The Outpost’ by Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer - Nobel Prize for Literature 2011

We are surrounded by the white noise of words these days.

As much as I hear, there is more to be heard.

As much as I read, there is more to be read.

So to stumble upon a poem that you can see, and feel, and offer an unconditional home in your soul is like finding an enduring, if challenging, friendship on life’s journey.

Stories, books, they leave only fading impressions as time passes; maybe the odd leitmotif lodges itself in your consciousness. You might re-read a book to remind yourself of the story, and of yourself.

But a poem that resonates is an instant passion. Like an arrow through your heart, or ‘an ever-fixed mark’, to quote Shakespeare. Here’s one such from the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer who many may never have heard of before yesterday (including me) when he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

A google around finds his work described as that which ‘barrels into the void’, a phrase I find profoundly reassuring. That his poetry has this quality doesn’t seem a surprise when you learn he was a psychologist working in prisons for much of his professional life.

Whatever, he’s got my attention alright.

This, from ’20 Poems’ by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly, Seventies Press (1970)

After A Death

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armour of black dragon scales.

07.10 Walk to School

The butcher sets out red flesh on stainless steel trays
I notice he has grown a beard.
It’s too early for the delivery lorry
with its pig carcasses,
split lengthways.
The bookseller has cleared out his van
I can see the wheelchair hoist
Once covered in cardboard boxes.
Strange that he walks everywhere -
Without a dog
In school the parent grills the Maths teacher
In gentle Canadian
They both wear jeans
A carer lets himself into the one-legged woman’s house
His wrist is strapped up
An industrial injury?
Someone is missing their b&w cat, Mouse
A one hundred pound reward
Look in your sheds
Please?

Consulting the Coracle

I know it’s not really a coracle, but never mind.

At least I’ve spared you another delirious rambling about:

* particles *
~ high energy cosmic rays ~
…and a drawing of a neutrino…

Coracle says no

Illustrating That Groovy German Word: Feierabend

Feierabend: my own literal translation – celebration of evening, also translated as knocking off time, done and dusted, clocking off.

Goodness knows -
I won’t be dancing
this Friday night,
but someone,
somewhere,
might.

Perhaps it will look like this…

Shed Maxims

‘The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.’ 

Roald Dahl

 

‘Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.’

Henry David Thoreau

 

‘If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.’

Virginia Woolf

 

‘We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.’

Harold Nicolson

 

‘All great truths begin as blasphemies.’

George Bernard Shaw

 

This is not my shed, but it is the height of my dream property ladder…

Me