Life According to Brian

What is life?

It’s a challenging question few attempt to answer comprehensively.  And to propose a purely scientific basis for that elusive spark, well, in some places that could earn you some unpleasant correspondence, at the very least.

I am on the edge of my seat for the next episode of Dr Brian Cox’s Wonders of Life (BBC) which began its series with an episode asking precisely this.

The general line of the broadsheets seems to be the contention that sure Cox’s explanations are only in GCSE-level chunks, but despite this it still makes quality viewing.

Ahem!

It’s cracking on for three decades since I took my O levels, and vague memories of copper sulphate and palisade cells are about the sum of what remains of my scientific education.

Mitochondria ? Electrolysis? Whaaat??? 

Mere GCSE-level explanations are about the limit of what my intellect can digest  - particularly on a Sunday evening. So, thanks Dr Cox for recognising the difference between dumbing down and enlightening the ignorant.

I don’t believe that great mathematicians and physicists generally make great teachers. They inhabit an ‘other’ world of imaginary numbers and engage with that world through their mind. They are up there – out there – in the ether, far away from the hoi polloi. 

In physics even ‘equals’ are not all equal. Such startling linguistic anomalies makes the special language of physicists impenetrable to the uninitiated.

½ of MVsquared may carry potential understanding from their point of view, but from where I’m sitting comfortably on my sofa, M is mumbo jumbo and V is the speed of this information passing, uncomprehended, through my brain.

So Dr Cox is a rare (and some might say beautiful) thing. He is attempting to be a compassionate conduit of knowledge between an alien world and me, the viewer.

I should probably leave it there – Brian has taken it on himself to prove that the plebeian masses can appreciate science in much the same way Jamie Oliver has tried to foist nutrition on the fast-food generation, so it seems a tad precious to examine the man behind the mission (key word alert).

But.

There’s one other factor, other than my scientific illiteracy, that hinders my ability to take on Dr Cox’s painstaking explanations of protons and disordered energy …and that’s Dr Cox.

Is it his unpretentious gravitas? The intensity of his passion for the subject?

In Sagada, Philippines, Cox gazes out over the flickering torchlit spectacle of hundreds of people celebrating and communing with the spirits of their departed. He seems utterly rapt in thought as he surveys the festival of the dead; the viewer’s gaze through the camera feels intrusive. 

He is on the brink of dismissing the belief system that has prompted this festival; the viewer can only guess at his feelings over this display. 

When he articulates his thoughts about how we amount to something more than ‘a bunch of stuff’, he finishes his sound-bite and the pregnancy of his pause and the unbridled candour of his look to camera make me feel so uncomfortable, I find myself looking away.

I felt…what did I feel? Was it, as one friend speculated, his pain?

For someone who possesses such certain and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, does it hurt to witness the wilful disillusionment of humanity in pursuit of the mystical and the occult?

Dodging wild animals and, undoubtedly, many vile tropical diseases, to bring us a beautifully shot fest of the weird and the wonderful organisms to which we are all related, and the scientific reasons for them (and us) being here at all, seems to me the mission of a science evangelist.

And don’t forget that Dr Cox also has a pop music pedigree, and in choosing to collaborate with Eric Idle on an updated version of Python’s ‘Galaxy Song’ shows us the colours of his flag, for the lyrics declare:  Life from a star is far more bizarre, 
than an old bearded man they call God
/So gaze at the sky, and start asking why
/You’re even here on this ball
…

I wonder just how different our world might be if scientists were as vocal and influential as religious leaders.

Imagine, as Mr Lennon put it.

Jump at the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston. One of my first literary heroines.

I read her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God  at university and loved it. When I then found that she was not only a fine novelist but a folklorist and anthropologist, I realised that I had met with someone utterly unique.

This was a black woman in the 1930s!

Her intense interest in black folk culture of her native Florida and the Caribbean led her to investigate black magic in Jamaica and Haiti.

I became intrigued by the idea that this woman, whose photographs depicted her as elegantly attired in tea dresses, suits and cloche hats, tramped around the tropical interiors of these islands, notebook and Kodak in hand, consulting obeah and bokor for folk remedies, rituals and - one of their most notorious secrets - zombis.

Hers are not the books that appear on the shelves of your average bookshop - at least not here in the UK. It took a couple of decades, and the dictates of my own research, before I finally ordered my own copy of Tell My Horse, which reveals what she found on her travels through Jamaica and Haiti.

I was not disappointed. She entered into her investigation with relish, attending feasts, ceremonies, nine-day wakes and even an excruciating and dangerous wild-hog hunt.

I was also left with the sense that Wade Davis, in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow , perhaps did not give her the credit she deserved. For she clearly states her belief that zombis are not risen from the dead - rather revived from "suspended animation".

Have a listen yourself: Zora Neal Hurston Interview.

Reacquainting myself with Ms Hurston moved me to revisit my copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, complete with hectic pencil-written annotations from my undergraduate seminars.

It opens with sassy, sexy, black woman Janey, who has suddenly reappeared after an absence and is subsequently the hot topic of local gossip. Her conversations with her best friend are written as verbatim black Florida dialect. It brings life and veracity to the story. These days, a reader doesn't think twice about encountering vernacular dialogue in a novel, yet Hurston's Harlem Renaissance contemporary, Richard Wright, regarded this as a backward step - he considered it Uncle-Tomism pandering to racial stereotypes. To me that's like accusing Emily Bronte of pastiching Northerners by reproducing Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights.

Several decades lapsed before Zora Neale Hurston took her rightful place in the American literary pantheon when writers such as Alice Walker (The Color Purple) and Toni Morrison (Beloved) took up the literary torch to celebrate "racial health" rather than continue an embittered diatribe. It was a vindication of Hurston's remarkable life and work that in 1973 Alice Walker erected a gravestone in memory of an extraordinary woman who had languished in such obscurity in her final days as to have been buried in an unmarked grave.

Why did the author of stunning literary works, essays - and even two musicals - simply disappear from the public eye, in her lifetime? How could this happen?

In his afterword to Tell My Horse, Henry Louis Gates Junior suggests that perhaps it was the more popular contemporary ideologies, championed by writers such as Wright, that pushed Hurston out of the popular sphere.

The "not so well-digested Marxism" as Alice Walker puts it.

The visceral social realism of Wright's novel, Native Son, couldn't contrast more starkly with the lyrical celebration of black lives in Hurston's work. Her instinct for seeing and portraying humanity and love transcended the historical and social circumstances of her people's plight; defied the body politic of the male-dominated Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston's work was obscured by a curtain of contemporary racial politics, but once the idealogical fog began to dissipate, her words became visible once again: poetic; joyful.

In an interview, Alice Walker reflects on how Hurston's work is imbued with a wisdom that was sadly ignored in her lifetime, but still rings true today: "Joy in your life is a great victory."


An unmarked grave seems so pitiful, so tragic. But that was not the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston!

It was her mother, Lucy, who always urged her to, "jump at the sun!" And, boy, did she ever.

Like a tree falling in the forest, just because there was no one to hear the great, echoing crash of her departure from our world, doesn't mean she didn't leave an impact, and in doing so pulled back a tangle of branches to shed glorious light on what was once a dark place.





 

The First Draft of the Second Part in the Third Person

For the past six months, this message from Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes has been my writing proviso:

“Just in case needed: Just write/create at will; let the ocean in your heart and head flow out. Keep going. Don’t try to shape it yet. That's later. After you have the ocean in a notebook.

This comes with prayer for sluice gates to remain wide open and cleaned of debris. Stay focused on 'the one thing.' Completion comes from focused hard work daily. I know you know what I mean. Don’t meander all over the place. Remain committed as you promised”

So I commit more than I ever have in my life. To give form to the flurry of linguistic bricks and mortar that is building the quickening story I carry in my head. As the words appear relentlessly unchecked, badly spelt, back-to-front in my notebook or up on the laptop screen I repeat to myself the reassuring mantra 'The first shitty draft…the first shitty draft…the first shitty draft.'  (Thanks Anne Lamott. )

Then joy of joys, I hit the point last week when the crashing chaos of the creative ocean began to coalesce into a calmer body of water. I could see the story begin to emerge as an entity, characters beginning to command their destinies, themes at last visible to the naked eye, gratuitous back stories dropping away and at long last, a shimmering mirage of structure suggesting itself.

So, now I turn to the engineering. Before I discovered Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering , this was a part of writing that I found both mystifying and gruelling – like trying to run a marathon without any idea of pacing myself. I thought that, provided I had enough material, the structure would just magically appear. It does for the gifted few, I’m sure. But I need help, and I am perpetually grateful for Brooks’ guidelines which have empowered me to fashion a novel from ‘the ocean in my notebook’.

Setting my stories in the 17^th/18^th centuries does demand a certain amount of research. I’m not a slave to historical accuracy, but I like to have the means to imbue my stories with a sense of authenticity. It’s particularly exciting to stumble upon a historical fact that beautifully ties in with a line of independent creation and so that one feels as if an instinct for the period and the setting is beginning to develop.

It’s easy to be distracted by research, though. I’m in the final throes of reading around West Indian zombi myth and reality, which is so fascinating I could easily read several more, even though it is but a small aspect of the story. So, I need to leave it there – at least for a little while – and focus on the dirty work.

But then, I find myself thinking, there’s the title of book two…yet another excuse for procrastination!

Austerity for posterity

Terror of the blank page. Nothing compared to the obligation of the blog.

So I’ll start with the mundane, see where it takes me.

Braved a 50-minute bus journey to save £3.90.

Was it worth it? Well, I can enjoy a divinely delicious Small Batch Coffee feeling like I’ve earned it.

People’s attitudes to money are fascinating. Money is so symbolic and spending it no less.  There must be shedloads of psychological shit on it.

Incredibly, for someone born in the 70s, I come from an upbringing tempered by post-war austerity. Mum was past 40 when I arrived. Rationing is a hard habit to break. The guilt of living in a time of plenty, hard to shed.

It slowly dawned on me how little our family seemed to have in common with the rest of the world when I began to socialise in my own modest, primary school way. It was thus I discovered that the apotheosis of 70s lifestyle was the hugely fashionable modern home of my friend. Let’s call her Cynthia.

To me, used to the enclosed gloominess and chill of our 30s mock-Tudor house with its light-sucking teak panelling and single gas fire, the luxurious expanse of Cynthia’s central-heated home illuminated by huge windows and decorated in sensuous textures of velveteen and pleather was a glimpse of a foreign land.  And it was as suspect as it was marvellous.

Her bedroom was a vast space housing a confection of white and pink – but in the best possible taste. (That was some achievement in the 70s.) Clearly they were followers of Terence Conran and his ilk.  But I felt lost in that room. It seemed to me the bedroom of someone nearer adulthood, or someone who lived in film. Who else slept in a double bed and had walk-in closets?

What was it that put me on edge about being in this home? Looking back, perhaps it was the otherness of this existence, where holidays were spent ‘abroad’ in bikinis, not shivering in a holiday camp chalet. The acute novelty of being in a house where every room was warm, and decorated according to desire not just what was in a sale, induced in me a kind of culture shock, so that I was at a loss how to play with blonde, suntanned, thoroughly modern Cynthia.

Most glamorous of all - and something which I still aspire to as the ultimate in self-indulgence - was her mother’s dressing room. Yes! A room just to get dressed in! The sweet, mysterious scents of her perfumes and hairsprays lingered, reminders of her super-femininity. But the most bewitching of its contents, beside its plethora of Margot Ledbetter style organza frocks, was what sat upon the room-length dressing table and mirror: a set of mannequin heads sporting her collection of fabulous wigs.

How humble and uninspiring my mother’s dressing table was in comparison. She kept her jewellery in a blue plastic box intended for storing nails and screws, and the comb and pins she used to style her hair lived in an old biscuit tin that sat at the foot of her armchair like a dispirited lapdog.

Cynthia’s life appeared to me to shrug off the industrial strife and power cuts that defined the doomed struggle of my home with its cold regime and despair. Knowing her, my mother was probably always a little snide about Cynthia’s ‘noveau riche’ parents, so that my own attitudes melded into an outer disapproval of such luxurious self-indulgence, but inside I hid a guilty delight in its appeal.

For what was Cynthia’s life if not fun? Perhaps the most foreign cultural more that I encountered amidst her tribe was that they were so happily and blithely enjoying their lives. Such quixotic aspirations as fun were sighed over in our house. Not because we were desperately poor, far from it. Because, not only would it be terribly bad taste to enjoy spending money – it would be indicative of moral collapse.

And so is sown that most virulent seed that spreads a web of guilty confusion over money. Hiding shopping bags and receipts, going into a cold sweat at the thought of paying full price for something, a phobia of small expensive-looking boutiques…I think I’m over it now, but the imprinting of my parents’ fiscal neurosis remains.

So, if I catch the bus twice a week for a year, that’ll pay for how many coffees?

Heirs to the g-string

Women over 40 after eight o'clock with glasses of wine.

Yes, there's some discussion of the husbands/partners/boyfriends...children.

But then we reflect on clothes. On fashion. We agree, every decade of style fascism has different victims. In particular we sigh over the most recent abomination in our collective memory: cut-off tops and hipsters, and the inevitable thong-underpant exposure it brought with it.

As traumatic as it was buying underpants back then (unless your backside was as pert and perfect as Kylie's), g-strings were the thin end of the wedge (no pun intended). Shaking our heads, we recalled how shapely women were suddenly seen publicly revealing quaking rolls of midriff and expanses of buttock. Not a good look. And in this country those love handles turned a serious shade of cyan when the chill wind blew.

Does our disdain signal body fascism?

The feeling was more disappointment that women could be so in thrall to trends that they fail to see what was in the mirror.

But on the high street back then it was damn hard to find a pair of trousers or jeans that passed the 'squat without showing your crack' test. The only alternative seemed to be elasticated waists from BHS. Muffin-top or mumsy?

My feeling is the backlash is finally here, bigger than ever: vintage.

I recently went to see the Valentino exhibition at Somerset House in London. As well as 101 lush frocks there were quotes from the master himself. This was a man who created gowns for individuals, at the cost of thousands of dollars, but what he says holds true for all women.

There should be an interaction between a woman and a garment; clothes are there to create the best of a woman's body and individual style - a woman should never be a victim of fashion.

There were gowns he'd designed in the 50s and only realised in the last ten years. That's style.


Sometimes your body, your hair, your colours simply don't correspond with what's filtered down from the catwalk onto the high street. We're so lucky to have a choice, now. Marilyn or Matalan? Corset or onesie?

There are a helluva a lot of boobs and bums to be celebrated in all their many shapes and sizes, not degraded by ill-suited trends aimed for a particular rail-thin figure that few females beyond their teens possess.

True, it's a bit harder when you don't have Julia Roberts' budget.

But let's hope that the vintage boom lives on: tea dresses; pencil skirts; maxi dresses, they are being revived because style transcends trends. Women seem to be remembering how to look their best and discovering their inner diva instead of their secret builder's bum.

To Have and to Hold

Since I announced the publication of my novel on Kindle, how many people have said to me, "Yes, but  I love to have an actual book in my hands. I love to hold a physical thing...No, I'll never use a Kindle."(Of course, other electronic reading devices are available).

I totally get it.

But.

I think back to the mid 90s when I lived in Japan. The sound of the mail man braking his scooter produced a Pavlovian response in me. No, I didn't salivate, quite, but my pulse would quicken, my mood would lift.

It meant I had letters. Hand-written. Some pleasingly fat, some slim despatches on a single sheet aerogramme. Some embellished with stickers, or commemorative stamps obscured with a newly inked frank. Running-out biros, fluent fountain pens, errant capital letters and curious interpretations of my Japanese address.

And what lay within? The physical act of putting pen to paper. Paper that had been breathed on and pressed against in a distant land. Smudges and scrubbings out, grumblings and wonderings. Questions asked and answered, blithe discourses on trips taken, films watched, places visited. Sometimes 'it's time for bed - will finish this tomorrow', sometimes 'I can't think of what else to say, bye till next time'.

And so to respond. The delightful confection of Japanese stationery awaited me. Classic should-be-written left to right paper with wood-cut images, cutesy cartoon animals, babies, flowers, patterns. Opaque, onion-skin, lined, watermarked. The choice was mine. Pop in a photo, a sticker, a flattened origami figure. Lots of Love.

So then, if someone had said: Forget all this letter-writing, what about sending and receiving electronic messages instead? I'd have said, "Yes, but I love to have an actual letter in my hands. I love to hold a physical thing that someone has created...why would I want an electronic message on a computer instead?"

But how the landscape of life alters. One Post Office remains. A twenty-minute wait and I might not even have the change for the stamps if I've written more than three pages...not that I can claim to do that these days. The friends determined to eschew FB and stick to writing those paper gems that land on my doorstep remain banished to some outpost of a windblown Luddite prairie. Unacknowledged.

The cheapness and convenience of electronic communication has won me over and my boxes of letters join the case of mix-tapes in the loft. Covered with the dust of nostalgia.

Do I ever open up my laptop with the eagerness that I once awaited the postman? Rarely.

Maybe if I've put something on Ebay...

Voudou Fugu

The first day of a new year...ho hum...philosophical musings of the usual kind...but no, I feel I must explain myself a little.

(Strenuous throat clearing).

Why the reference to samurai and sushi? I quick glance at my bio reveals my association with Japan - a brief but intense experience that has enriched my understanding of the world, and myself. And inspired me to write.

It started with a cathartic deluge of personal experiences and second-hand stories that gradually coalesced into something resembling a novel, which I subsequently lobbed at various literary agents. One of whom, Sonia Land, was kind enough to reciprocate with some tough-love criticism. It was hard to take on board that I probably needed to rework the manuscript on such a vast scale, and so it was set to cool on the back burner, and has remained there ever since.

Then, to quote Dr King Jr, I had a dream. It coincided with the viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Stranger Tides, which I found bitterly disappointing, and soon I found myself wading through 17th century history with a story in mind.

A story about pirates, of course.

A story about a teenaged Japanese girl thrown on the mercy of callous greedy gentlemen of fortune.

It became Tankard's Legacy.Tankard's Legacy.
Now I'm working on book two, and that's taken me from Asia back to the Caribbean, and many a dusty tome about black magic and voudou. Little did I realise there would be a connection between the myth of the Haitian zombi drug and the Far East country with which I am so preoccupied.

I knew about Japanese people eating fugu (blowfish), of course. Who hasn't seen the episode of the Simpsons where Homer partakes of this notorious delicacy? But I thought the whole concept was the Russian roulette of 'poison...poison...tasty fish', little did I realise that the whole idea of knowing how to prepare this fish is to leave just enough of the poison so that fugu becomes a tantalising combination of food and drug.

I learned this from Wade Davis's incredible exploration of Haitian zombi culture in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Yeah, OK, but how do zombis fit into this?

There is a Haitian man, Clairvius Narcisse, who claims to be a zombi survivor. He went into hospital one day, seriously ill, and died. The doctors even issued a death certificate. But over a decade later he was identified by a sister when she saw him walking around a market.

He claimed he'd been held as a zombi slave, but his 'master' (a bokor, or sorcerer) had been killed and he was now free.

Species of blowfish exist off the shores of Haiti whose poison produces many of the symptoms that Narcisse dispayed when he was admitted to hospital. Wade's hypothesis when he visits Haiti, is that there is a zombi drug, and the blow fish poison ticks many of the boxes of how an initial deathlike state is induced. When someone died due to fugu poisonings in Japan, bodies were routinely left for several days, because of the number of cases where people had 'reawakened' from an apparent death.

Not quite the decaying, flesh-eating drones of mass-media legend perhaps, but why have we created them to be so 'other'? Is it because it is less disturbing than to imagine a zombi might look just look like anyone else rather than a lumbering, groaning monster? Is it the final scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that really scares us? Because a living death is worse than living after death?

What is a fresh start for some of us, is still Christmas for plenty of others. A new year for this calendar, doesn't begin until February for another. Ends and beginnings are never as sure as we'd like.

There, got my philosophical musings in.