Inside Out

previously published only on Blogger
Where is it, this book I long thought I would write some day, when I had the time? I have had that time in the last seven years, almost limitless in its horizon, though doled out in surprisingly small quantities each day. I used some of it to write this blog, thinking as I went that here is some material for the real thing. Even my title tells me that: just notes. Meanwhile time does what it does, ageing everything including you and me, and my eloquence has thinned like my hair. I’ve come to think that the only book I’ll ever write is contained in these Notes—subject to a good haircut, editing and arranging; then when it’s spruce enough, send it for publishing in some other medium. I had always set my sights on Faber & Faber, hardback. Then it could be called a book.

Life has other plans. The quirk of technological evolution which enables you to read this almost as soon as I write it has also enabled a new style of literary architecture. The author’s rough notes can be made public while the underlying trend and intention remain obscure and ill-defined. Sketches of the parts have been drawn, but even the author has not been able to imagine the whole. Surely this is an inside-out way to proceed.

I say rough notes but they’ve had to be made presentable before being released to the world’s gaze: to wash their face and comb their hair, at least. Anyhow they’ve been fruitful and multiplied, till they’re nearly half a million words. It’s hard to be a parent with that many offspring. Such fecundity is in need of organization. To change the metaphor, spring-cleaning is usually accompanied by sorting, evaluating and throwing-out. For that, you need to rise above details to a vision of the whole. What do you want? Where are you ultimately going?

This, anyhow, is an excuse for a more-than-six-weeks’ silence. Meanwhile, an unpublished e-book copy of the entire blog sits on my desktop computer, half the length of the Bible or Shakespeare. [From which this post was taken, along with others recently put up on social media]. I spend my days editing, arranging, fixing hyperlinks, cutting out the more cringe-worthy pieces—before realizing that for one reason or another they need to be reinstated. Even the lists of content, organized by date and category, take up 26 pages. How could a reader navigate through those? I’ve just started the tricky problem of improving their presentation. It requires an imaginative graphic-based user interface, hyperlinked, it goes without saying, via touch-screen or pointer; something intuitive to use requiring no instructions. How will my reader find something to his or her taste from among 562 posts? How can the process of finding those morsels be made pleasurable rather than tedious? I’m working on it. What can I do about the uneven content, to raise it to a higher standard? That’s another story.

And then there are further excuses, including a sobering acceptance that I haven’t been able to write as well as I used to, and certainly not as fluently. From a certain point of view, the best years were from 2007 to 2010.

Inside out: I borrow the name from an exhibition currently on in London, about the work and ideas of the architect Richard Rogers.

When I went to Paris in May, I never thought to see the Centre Pompidou. It was another art gallery. We didn’t have time. K and I went to the Musée D’Orsay, because it had pictures by van Gogh. We found it exhausting to traipse round art galleries, gladdening to get back outside to the cold and rain. Some might call us philistines. And when I used to work in the City of London, I used to pass Rogers’ famous Lloyds Building every day without taking the slightest interest, except to pronounce it ugly. But the new exhibition is to celebrate the artist’s eightieth birthday. That fact somehow clinches it. I might just go.

“Inside out” helps define the Pompidou Centre, but in the case of my blog it refers to my method, not the resultant structure or content, which I’ve wrestled with for years. How do I explain what holds it together, if anything? I’ve made numerous attempts to write a Preface, or Introduction. They’ve all failed. More recently, I mean in these last six weeks, I’ve played with the idea that this series of 562 blog posts constitutes a kind of seven-year live performance, complete with interactive audience (to whose shifting set of members I’m forever indebted). It’s not like a long-running play or musical where the script doesn’t change. It’s more like the game of cricket, in which a Test Series, like the current Ashes, is divided into games each lasting five days, and consisting of many individual performances, intertwined. The Ashes is a particular instance of the international Test Match, where the antagonists are teams from Australia and England, vying for supremacy. My own loyalty in this is split, for by birth and blood I’m half-and-half.

“Live performance” helps explain the dynamic, but it still doesn’t give any clue as to the content, so until that is known, the thing could never be marketed as a product. I have to discover for myself what it is. A big part of discovering is deciding. Only when you decide, can you help it reveal itself to others. The best that I’ve been able to do is describe some transcendent moments. The worst? Let’s not think about it.

In one abortive attempt at publication, the one I particularly refer to as “cringeworthy”, I drafted a Preface which began: “The soul is feminine, I mean passive. It does nothing but feel.” I’m pretty sure that an idea so speculative and abstract set up a big obstacle for the reader. In its abstraction it wasn’t characteristic. But in trying to share something with the reader that I’d just discovered myself, it was typical enough. Reconsidering it now, I see that the word “soul” was a redundant label anyhow. What I meant was that the thing which inspired me to write was the ability to feel, and be passive to those feelings. Was it fair to call this passivity “feminine”? What would a feminist think of that? Reflecting now in retrospect, I see that I may have been referring to that maternal instinct which subordinates itself to the new life which it helps bring forth, and which it must go on to nurture. The new and separate life must go its own way, having arrived from some Source which we can never understand. My doomed Preface became a soliloquy on the role of masculine and feminine elements in creativity, and how difficult I was finding it to reconcile the two.

To serve that feminine Soul today, she who is better known as the Muse, I must nurture this labour of love humbly, painfully aware of its defects. Time for the mother to stand back and hand over to the nursemaid.

In the summer of 2007 I was working full-time and finding a house to live: but I still found time to publish a post every other day. They were dashed-off notes like this, a good habit. But I won’t try and emulate that frequency. The main task now is to put this inside-out house into order, so that you and I may continue to share.