allanhunter.net Blog

It’s no pleasure to feel I have to write a blog about the events in Mumbai, which are still going on, it seems.  The attacks have created panic, carnage, and pain, and as far as I can see they haven’t created anything that resembles political awareness, any more than a wild animal rampaging through a china shop can be said to have created anything at all.

The thing that saddens me most is that this will ultimately be a self defeating action. In this sort of situation, when people pick up guns the ‘political’ process, whatever it was, goes into free-fall. When the shooting starts all bets are off.  It’s an activity that simply does not work, which is why it makes no sense for ‘terrorists’ to act the way they do. Yet they keep doing it. Can they really be so in love with death?

No, I’m not in favor of appeasing every armed group, and no, I’m not saying that wars are not sometimes the only way forward with an aggressive opponent. But terrorism as a tactic to get one’s voice heard is always short-lived, and ultimately unsuccessful in creating any long-term meaningful or productive change.
I suppose that’s news for some folks, although you could ask any bereaved person in Mumbai right now and get a similar response.

We all like to think we’re the center of our own life story, and that we’re also the leading role in our particular world.  This is natural, since we matter most to ourselves, and we know we matter just a little less in other people’s worlds.

Reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of her four uncles, ‘The Knox Brothers’, all of whom achieved eminence in their time, one is led to the consideration that it was the lives of all four that made a difference to twentieth century England.  Alone each made some impact.  Yet all four together illustrate the nature of the times, and show how a group can be at the center of a general movement of those times which, to some degree, they directed.  In writing this loving biography she shows us that we are all part of a greater whole, no matter how distinguished the parts might be.

Robertson Davies in his wonderful novel ‘Fifth Business’ has one of his main characters recognize that he is not the main character of the larger story he is telling, nor is he its hero (although he’s a decorated war ‘hero’).  Instead he sees himself as ‘Fifth Business’ in a play - the character who acts as intermediary between the hero and heroine and the villain and the villainess, without whom nothing could get resolved.  He’s a catalyst, of sorts - the inert chemical that does not itself change but which allows the other chemicals to do so.

Which brings me to a thought I had as I was painting the new ceiling today. I was thinking about two colleagues who could be considered my bosses.  One is having some sort of nervous collapse.  The other is having a crisis of personal faith. It hasn’t been fun this semester observing either person and knowing that to some extent my intervention was neither wanted nor welcome.  And then I began to wonder if, perhaps, my role in the dramas that surround me is, to some extent, that I help to precipitate events that have been simmering for some time. Obviously I don’t cause them.  I just happen to turn up, with remarkable regularity, at the moment when others’ lives are going through major reassessments.

Anecdotally there’s a lot of evidence to support this, all of it rather dull.

If true, though, it begs some questions.

For example, I know one person who can walk into a house where there is perhaps an unruly dog and the dog immediately becomes docile. I know another who has the most amazing ‘beginner’s luck’ at almost everything she does. Even she can’t quite believe it at times. And so on.  I’m sure you have similar stories.
Robertson Davies played with these ideas freely.  As a former theater director and convinced Jungian he sometimes felt that we are all living out roles that we don’t fully recognize (because we all think we’re the hero) in a drama that is much wider than our lives. That drama seems to have been written in the Collective Unconscious. He does not suggest who wrote it, but perhaps that’s beside the point.

The point, if there is one, is to notice what happens around us, and not impose our version of reality upon it. In my case the challenge is to know what to do when people collapse around me, since collapse is often the only way forward for them and patching them up is the worst thing one can do, like sending a wounded soldier back on duty.

Huge thanks to Yahoo for working so devotedly, just before Thanksgiving, to get the site back.  Have a wonderful Holiday, all of you!

If you’re reading this, then the blog is back.  As of right now, though, I can post messages, but alas, no one can actually access them and Yahoo is working on that.  Since it’s possible their engineers may put the blog back where it belongs and I may not know in the Thanksgiving melee that it’s back, this will be a sort of placeholder.

My apologies to those who came, couldn’t see, and so weren’t able to conquer, at least here.

That of course is all the more relevant to those people who have sent in comments and are doubtless surprised that these seem to have evaporated, at least temporarily. Personally I empathize: I feel as if I’ve consigned a message to a bottle and set it adrift.
In the meantime, do have a very Happy Thanksgiving, in whichever ways you chose to observe it.

This is a new word to me, one I discovered in the pages of the UK’s own Guardian on-line, and like the slowfood movement in Italy, slowblogging believes that fast is not necessarily better.  Slowfood emerged as a reaction to fastfood, which it saw as bad for the health, the palate, and the psyche.  Now we have the slowblog, and I suspect that’s a very good thing.

Some bloggers update their pages five times a day.  Some are wildly diverting about highly forgettable topics. Some give us endless descriptions of their child’s illnesses, which becomes tiring rather fast, at least to me.

And the center of slowblogging is that one chooses words with care, writes only when there is something worth writing about, and that the process respects the reader’s time constraints.

Thoughtful writing, by any other name.  Well: I’m a wordy writer rather than a fine writer whose every syllable is chosen after agonies of consideration.  The great latin poet Horace was said to have spent a day over each line.  I’m more rough-hewn than that. But, as I hope you’ve noticed, I try only to write when there’s something worth thinking about. Writing slowly, and re-reading one’s words a few times, is as good a way as any I can think of to allow one’s soul to emerge onto the page, if only for a moment.

And if there’s no authentic soul in the writing, why bother?

As one who has ‘lost’ some money (well, they were figures on a page, and now they’re much smaller) from my supposedly safe retirement account, which was linked to various stocks and bonds, I’m left wondering what all this will mean in the wider sense.  Prosperous times nearly always mean that people are pleased about the way life seems to be heading.  The money comes more easily, and we feel we’ve somehow earned it even if we haven’t. When it doesn’t come in we feel rather differently.

Perhaps that could be good. When we stop focussing on all the toys we can buy and start to concentrate on what we may need to understand about being alive, then I can’t help feeling we’re on a slightly better path.  I do not wish to disregard the real suffering that this economic downturn (or whatever it is we’re supposed to call it) will surely cause.  The poor will suffer, and suffer grievously, as they always do at such times. Yet there are often opportunities, in the gloom, for real soul-work to get done.

Perhaps we could remember that, even as we lend a hand to make sure that suffering does not go untended. Both actions will be important now.

I don’t spend a huge amount of time at the computer (college teachers have so many other claims on our time) but I do spend quite a lot of time writing.  Those of you who read this blog may not know it, however, so I’ve decided to let you all know that this is not the only place I write.  I’m a regular series writer (once a month since last April) for PlanetLightWorker Magazine which you can find on-line. I also write for their sister publication CNE  and for inspired Parenting Magazine, both of which are also on-line.  The articles are about 1800 words each and so rather too long for blog entries, yet you might want to look them up anyway. They deal specifically with writing, Memoir, the six Archetypes, and with knowing more about who we are using archetypes as a lens.

It’s easy for one’s efforts to become fragmented in life and in the blogosphere. The blog I write occasionally for Amazon.com reaches many people who might not know about this blog or about PlanetLightWorker. Unfortunately, though, in England Amazon.co.uk doesn’t have the author blog capability, so there’s little chance of them stumbling across what I write.

Why should I worry?  Well, authors write because we believe we have something valuable to communicate that deserves wider dissemination, so we wonder, often, about how word can get out effectively so the discussions can happen.  And to some extent that depends upon you, dear reader.  To whom do you talk about what you read…? The conversations begin or continue, my friends, with you.

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading just about everything of Penelope Fitzgerald’s I could get my hands on, and finding myself unexpectedly in a new realm of delicious, sharply-observed understatement.  She penetrates so easily the polite evasions we all live by and accept, and can turn a section of dialogue into something extraordinary by the way she delivers the final sentence so that, suddenly, we see with new eyes.

Now I’m all set to begin the memoir of her father and Uncles, “The Knox Brothers”. Since all four brothers achieved eminence it promises to be a splendid read.
In some ways Fitzgerald’s plots matter far less than the marvelous wisdom we see as we move towards their conclusions, which is probably why she never achieved commercial superstar status - despite winning many prizes.  Plots and resolutions are something that readers want, desperately it seems, especially when life rarely provides them, and memoir almost certainly doesn’t.  How else do we account for the perennial allure of mystery and detective fiction, of thrillers, of suspense genres?

Perhaps what Fitzgerald lets us know in her own gentle way is that we can’t expect dramatic denouements in most of life.  Perhaps the best we can hope for is knowing, after the fact, what has happened, and then being able to access the wisdom….

One of the things one notices about Melvyn Bragg’s ‘Remember Me’, which I have just finished, is that the inward journey which both characters attempt destroys one of them and nearly destroys the other - and one can’t help feeling that things didn’t have to be that way.

I’m a great believer in this inward journey.  That’s why I teach Memoir, and write books about the life journey, and teach ‘The Therapeutic uses of Writing’, and counsel people. It can certainly be tricky, and even hard work.  Sometimes it can be dangerous, and it’s usually frightening at some point.  Yet it is not a one-way journey into the abyss unless one fails to ask for help.

Perhaps we all have to meet with our own private ‘Heart of Darkness’ and discover that it is, in fact, our own heart.  Many cultures that we mis-label as primitive know this, and they take great care that this journey should not be left to chance, that there are guides and helpers and forms to follow. This assures that the journey can be taken successfully and that the trip to the underworld allows us to retrieve what has to be re-claimed, and that we leave that space, like Orpheus, without looking back.

Bragg’s book is compelling, haunting, and a heart-breaker.  And to some extent it tells us that we, all of us, have help at hand if we wish to ask for it. The characters in the story, representatives of their time, don’t fully seem to recognize that. It’s not a journey we can take without a few guides, a sword and a shield perhaps, and even a ball of string to allow us to find the way back.

Perhaps I could sell more books if I advertised them as guide-books for the soul’s journey, but that sounds rather pretentious.  My old therapist in England put it this way: “It’s like you’re going on a bus journey to someplace you’ve never been before.  But I’ve made the trip before and so I might be helpful.”

British understatement.