“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Walt Whitman
I don’t know whether I’m more schizoid than most but I
struggle to jam all my opposing interests into a coherent this-is-me whole
person. Am I serious or funny? A specialist or a generalist? Can I do a PhD on
Art and Trauma while also being a mass-communicating astrologer? I did actually
pursue that idea until a Cambridge academic so irritated me with his
angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin approach, I gave up. Otto Dix, the painter,
couldn’t be included because I didn’t speak German etc. Though maybe he’d
discovered I was a disreputable stargazer and sprinkled a few landmines
around to deter me. Successfully as it turned out.
Life would have done
it anyway. As soon as I decide to head one way, my internal see-saw flips me
off in a different direction. Part of me looks with envy on those who found
their vocation as teenagers, had their talent nurtured and sailed into their
true calling for fifty fulfilling years of – - doing the same thing. Couldn’t hack
it.
That slice of me
thinks I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be diverted from an early ambition of
writing novels, firstly by a father who said ‘get a proper job’ and later by an
evangelical therapist propelling me into a professional training. Not that
journalism and delving into Jung, Freud, Klein and their ilk wasn’t all grist
to the mill, building up a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I had starved
in a garret being creative, wouldn’t I have run out of ideas for novel after
novel over the years?
To be fair to my gestalt self (whole greater than sum of
parts) I've always written no matter what job I was in - factual journalism,
television scripts, psychology treatise, astro-wisdom, political blog . Words
define my identity, I suppose, just across a wider span of subjects than most.
One of Carl Jung’s
favourite notions, lifted from the physicist Nils Bohr was that “defining an
event requires two entirely opposing and contradictory views of it, both of
which are true”. Jung psychologised that into ‘me and my shadow’, the conscious
and the unconscious. You don’t get one without the other. I am me and the exact
opposite. Intriguing theory but I’m not big on personal sin, despite being
immersed in crime these days, and regard it as one of the oddities of
Christianity. Ramakrishna, the Indian mystic, thought it bizarre as well. You
become what you think, he reckoned. Think about sin too much and you’ll head
straight for it. Perhaps I can embrace being a contradiction that doesn’t
require self-flagellation.
Paradoxes have
always fascinated me perhaps for the above reasons - that which is true and not
true at the same time, of which Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw are literary
masters.
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde
“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your
heart's desire. The other is to gain it.” ― George Bernard Shaw.
Some are destined to
plough the same furrow in life. I’m more of a migratory bird, flitting here and
there, at home in many regions. Writing novels in my seasoned years may give me
a canvas on which to pull all the disparate strands together, if I may be
forgiven the mixed metaphor.
Read my other blogs: on Fictional characters who live on,
Memory, Books better comforters than parents, Choosing Names, How to cook up a
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