Trivial
Writers block. Innit?
Well. Not quite. I’ve got a growing number of half-written drafts clogging up WordPress, but turning them into something worthy of publication is currently beyond me. There’s the Dubya Bush letter to Iran; a piece on the Catholic Church’s attitude towards climate change (and science in general); a second critique of The Euston Manifesto which doubles as an attack on democracy; an essay about immigration in Ireland; and some musings on the nature of “epiphany”. And I honestly have no idea whether any of them will ever see the light of day.
Right now I’m re-reading Gregory Bateson’s Steps To An Ecology of Mind, which I’d nominate as one of the most important texts of the 20th century. In the introduction, Bateson talks about his impatience with colleagues who “seemed unable to discern the difference between the trivial and the profound”. Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that this blog is filled with deeply profound writing (heaven forbid), but at the moment everything that flows from my keyboard feels painfully trivial. And that’s just not good enough.
Whether that’s a result of a dip in the quality of my writing, or of a shift in my perception of it, is somewhat irrelevant. After all I’m the one who decides what gets published and what remains mired in the drafts folder taunting me with unfulfilled promises.
Anyways, as a result of this I’m going to take a more scatter-gun approach. Kind of a monkeys-and-typewriters / david sylvian-and-recording studios thing. Hopefully I can write my way out of this dip in form, in much the same way that the authors of The Euston Manifesto have attempted to purge themselves of wet western wank by dumping it all onto their website.
We shall see.
Quantity begets quality.
June 5th, 2006 | 2:37pm
by Simstim
That’s an interesting theory Simstim. But clearly not a universal law.
Thomas Pynchon: 6 published books.
Barbara Cartland: Over 700 published books.
Hmmm….
June 5th, 2006 | 11:56pm
by Jim
at the moment everything that flows from my keyboard feels painfully trivial
Where the hell does that leave the rest of us then?
Actually I’ve got more than a few quarter-written posts clogging up my hard drive too… “Plans that either come to nought or half a page of scribbled lines”.
June 7th, 2006 | 11:09am
by Larry Teabag
The ‘worth publishing’ threshold is rather lower for blogs than other media. And that’s no bad thing; I want to read idle musings, incidental biographic bits and bobs, pieces that don’t hammer a conclusive point but just wander round some thoughts on a subject. It makes the writer seem more real and more of a friend, and as such I trust them as a voice when they are talking about something serious and important.
When species of apes evolved that started using their hands a lot of the time, they began to develop chattering as an alternative to grooming. And much of what this species of great ape does is just verbal grooing, something that bonds the speaker with the listener simply for the fact of them both being party to the conversation.
It’s this triviality that lets us devlop a community with whom to discover the profound.
If you’ve summat half-formed, it may be good to kick it out and say it’s half formed and ask what do people think it’s missing.
The trivial can often have profound aspects to the human mind and its genius for seeing patterns and allegory. But even without, trivial stuff is a lot of what it actually is to be human. I see no contradiction in posting pictures of towns with smutty names and pieces about climate change’s potential for making the planet uninhabitable to humans within a millennium.
These are big brains we carry, they want to deal with a lot of different stuff on many levels. So any writer who wants to appear fully rounded should not shy away from mixing the trivial and the profound.
June 8th, 2006 | 6:49pm
by Merrick