metaphor: the downhill dribble of mind and politics

Today The Guardian carries a column from John Naughton of The Observer, on metaphor in intelligence systems combing everyday discussion searching for metaphorical mindsets, contriving to link it using a metaphor to the Chinese Government's approach to managing the media with a measure of subtlety, as one might manage engineered water systems. Article entitled:

The great firewall of China gets metaphorical: The Chinese government's increasingly sophisticated approach to censorship demands a new interpretation

 I offered a comment, then a followup comment, you will see I manage to return to my despond about Australian politics too:

The notion of metaphor can move the brain either to opening or to clickclacky simplification and dogma; The latter more evident in this discussion than the former.

I am very conscious in broader historical context (and it's quite useful to consider this metaphorically in terms of water if we keep the natural river and ocean and atmosphere water movement in view, not just human engineering) that for Chinese leaders and most [Chinese] citizens there is not much example to follow as sociopolitical model. Where to flow, where to break banks and sea walls; where and how to limit and control.

Metaphorically we might constructively describe much of the preoccupation of the developed world's polity as bottom pimple comparison and ridicule. Along with tsunamis of absurdism in avoidance of blindingly obvious critical problems.

Can we get enough empathy to see how difficult it is to run and ameliorate a country with 1.3 billion people .... without the help of R Murdoch, S Berlusconi, etc.

Pursuing the aqueous progress metaphor and its evidence of downhillism of the cerebral potential of Homo urbis, the evidence is there not just in the comments sections but also in those cute sections or footers which draw us, like the flush of toilet bowls to what is most popular.

Were I to have command of a large and complicated country just for any moment I trust I would try a bit to keep the citizen brain away from self-destructive addition to useless water flows by dribbling behind the levee banks of wankerie.

I am carried forward towards a national election in Australia by media which by and large, vaguely insightful that we will get a leader choice between hubris and mucus, fail to see in the mirror that that is about what most of them offer themselves.

My second comment more elevated perhaps:

DennisA

15 July 2013 1:50am

It is rewarding to go back to John Naughton's earlier article to which he links and to which this is also a link.
This article by Ray Peat is insightful on metaphor:
Academic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals, & science

When something new is noticed, it excites the brain, and causes attention to be focused, in the “orienting reflex.” The various senses participate in examining the thing, in a physiological way of asking a question. Perception of new patterns and the formation of generalizations expands the ways in which questions are asked. When words are available, questions may be verbalized. The way in which questions are answered verbally may be useful, but it often diverts the questioning process, and provides rules and arbitrary generalizations that may take the place of the normal analogical processes of intelligence. The vocabulary of patterns no longer expands spontaneously, but tends to come to rest in a system of accepted opinions.

So, generally, even the new must fit the old moulds. How should we proceed to awareness of the moulds by which our brains are strangled daily.
To imagine that reporting in some idealised western circumstance is somehow pure suggests we should at least metaphorically revisit the tabloid sub-editor's table around which I trembling crept as a copy boy, fifty years ago, and to which journalists approached with varied degrees of courage, their stories written one sentence per single A5-ish piece of butchers' paper, loosely pinned together, for subeditors to throw in the bin, re-order, part-remove, rewrite, calling in the miscreate at some point to explain comparative wisdom, authority and marketing insight.
What Ray describes is the inevitability of spin, conscious, subconscious, unconscious; denied or contrived . Who says who should have charge of that? That's the question.

 I wonder why I write comments... I suppose I have some notion that anything that goes to the internet trickles down eventually somewhere and may kick a neurone usefully, maybe not. But we outside the spheres of notoriety can expect no more, failing public indecency, a heavy price for notoriety.

When I had a tractor I would pass the time while driving hither and thither composing letters to government ministers and auditors general; seldom later sent. Like those composed in the restless night, they were often less meaningful if one attempted later transcription. I suppose that in terms of management of my frontal lobes, like other people theirs, offering comments is thus valuable, especially now I am 70, uncommitted to any employer, needing to do something definitely different from Sudoku.

It is important, I think, when writing, to say something new. Including neological contribution to the language.

As to providing supplementary comment, there is that thing that happens when you press 'send' or equivalent: The "oh-I-should-have-said" phenomenon.

When I trained for the foreign service, an eminent (within those walls) senior diplomatic figure gave us some golden rules. I relate three, to give the third of them proper context:

[1] "If yew mest merry, merry menny." (I offer accent to show superciliousness, say it aloud with curled lip, a tad pizzicato with a little timbre of inharmonicity and nasalisation.)

[2] "When you are planning the dinner party, ensure you have the right mix of tall poppies and short poppies. Remember tall poppies are never comfortable unless they have some short poppies with whom to compare themselves."

and thirdly, he said

[3] "Beware of esprit d'escalier. Write what happened in the foreign ministry, not what you thought of going out the door." Note that when spoken, this has great impact given the pizzicatoliness of [1] and extension of that through pronunciation of repeated poppies in [2]... this flows into a contrapunted slithery sound of scathing cadence in [3]. +++

Nowadays I don't have to worry about [3] because most of the people I've been talking to are in my head.***

As regards that esprit d',  Sir Harold Nicolson once said, as I once read but can't find citation, he had never seen a record of any conversation in any foreign ministry archive in the world in which the author of the record did not win the argument.

For fun, see the high dudgeon of Herbert Highstone regarding Nicolson here and the diversity of his commentary here. And see, see, he learned to think about a thousand rageable things while working on the farm, I'm sure.And Herbert always wins, same glorious fate of most others who write comments. I have, to put Nicolson around another way, seldom had a discussion with anyone who was wrong.
...................

I think that the plaster on the wall will be dry enough for me to go and paint now... :-)

=====

+++ how you say things is almost everything, as the actress may have said to the bishop.

***The novelist's privilege. Great chance of avoiding the straight jacket or psychopharmacologist:

 "No no, you don't understand, the voices are OK, I'm a novelist!"

reading and editing

Perhaps my last post's darkness was shaped in part by my being affected at the time by a minor concussion, but the year has not gotten off to a wonderful start with the dessication and inflammation of much of the Australian continent and climate abnormalities and extremes at the cold end of the scale in the northern hemisphere—plus further decline in governability in Saharan Africa, inflamed by the disintegration of Libya and spread of arms and angry people from there, and now with western interventions and problems in Algeria. It was good to be sent this article from the Transcend organisation, with some real information on the Mali situation.

My period unable to get out after concussion mercifully did not prevent me reading.

Two very good books read, I have reviewed at Amazon, Mo Yan's Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Ann Jones's Kabul in Winter. Links are to the review page, egotistically, my review the most recent as of this date  .. :-)

Ann Jones's book should be read, serialised, at the beginning of every sitting of the Australian parliament and the US Congress until they begin to learn something about the world (more than they seem to get from the ritual reading of the Lord's Prayer).

I found Mo Yan's book relevant to my preparing to go on with my novel. It is intimidating though, to seek to write about China from the outside, when there is such astonishing literature from the inside. On the other hand I do want to do something which is from the outside, with an Australian perspective...

Meanwhile I am delighted that I have today been able to take to the printer the formatted copy for the memoirs of Isabel MacCallum. My first venture into editing and publishing thus plus also a very worthy book, which definitely will be launched in Nowra on 25 February. Wonderfully impressions** of early life, with good recall, candour towards self as well as others and situations, a nice blend of intellectual and ethical and practical perspectives... and entertaining.

More will be reported at the Backhouse Press blog soon.

** as regards 'impressions, I remain greatly influenced by those words of Ford Madox Ford which I quote at top of A Place of Info

and around

Researching the novel, I have been reading Wei Jingsheng's astonishing letters. Which include his letters to Hu Yaobang in the early 1980s... delivered or not at the time, they will have been received in the novel, they will be discussed, as the liberal minded leaders n Beijing struggle with the ideal and the possible, between dinosaurs and impatient reformers. Informed by He Yuhuai's wonderful Dictionary of Political Thought of the People's Republic of China, plus my knowledge of the Hu Yaobang and Hu Qili... albeit knowing so little at the time of what they were doing behind the scenes.

Drawing remains an important balance, a mental diversion. I recall hearing the incomparable Joni Mitchell say she needed a second art form (painting plus poetry, she said: perhaps, just perhaps, she has three?) for balance and creative energy. And drawing requires some courage, the plunging in is like the plunging into fiction.

I have a dislike of the rigidities of rectangles, hence some preference along the way for painting objects. But having some time ago picked up in someone's kerbside chuckout in Sydney (how to furnish your house well and interestingly for cost of travel) about 20 old canvases, I have just done a life-size drawing over three canvases, something of a triptych, not a rectangle, nor separation between the canvases. The textures of the three canvases differ and thus the mood of the three parts, impacting on the three figures. In total about 150cm wide, 135 high.

Fun, light relief...Title is:

"No, he's not here, but we're looking for a soprano"

returning to novel

It remains unclear whether the novel which got stuck early in 2011 can form a coherent whole. People (including masterclass mentor) say "how does it end?" Strange thing: we want no clarity of ending in life, we want novels to work towards clear ends. I am more driven now by the perspective of Ford Madox Ford as I have quoted at last week's update of my aplaceof.info. No narrating, let the text be alive through impressions. And for me, the writer, let it find its own end/s.

Initially focused in southeastern Australia, I thought I was in control until one character told me he was Aboriginal and then my lead character told me she was Chinese and had a huge history. This latter  made my way forward difficult, as did distractions like living in Italy early 2011 and ill-health later in 2011.

Restoring momentum, getting back to a situation where the novel chatters in my head daily, has had to wait. It is working now, and writing flows. On 7 July I wrote 50 words – good words, a doorway, I thought – on the eighth another ten, then rushing to 1500 cryptic words... It was a good process to read the draft daily and find that the text was obscure because I did not understand what was happening. I figured that out as the story grew to the present 4000 words.

I do not have the matter of eventual shape settled at all, but I know a core issue to be about how people interact, how they relate for any length of time, when the traumas in their lives have been disparate in scale.

For the China half of the story, I have had to research, add more background to what has been in my head of the times and certain people. The excellent news this past week is that my main character has begun to write her own story and I find she has a point of view, or is developing a point of view, which I had not anticipate. The 4000 words just done, grounded in a moment of Beijing politics, 6 December 1978. I am including real people but as my characters are fictional the place and utterances and attitudes of the 'real people' are also fictional. I am not writing a history, though I find in exploring the way through modern Chinese history through the mind of a young intelligent woman that I gain insights myself as I hope may others. The novel will have a bibliography. I place this draft here for any comments. It may be torn up eventually, who knows... as Lionel Bowen said to me when I was writing speeches for him long ago, "You've got to remember, kid, the best speeches are the ones you never get to give."

Here some links for reference:

The Democracy Movement in China, 1978-1979: Opposition Movements, Wall Poster Campaigns, and Underground Journals

Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard

Asian SurveyVol. 21, No. 7 (Jul., 1981), pp. 747-774

Wikipedia:

• Hu Yaobang
• Hu Qili

Wei Jingsheng

another step with those two works

I have taken the sketches discussed in last blog entry a little further.

I think the title of this now may be:

"I don't know, maybe they feel the cold..."

 

and here is where I am at with

"Are you finished yet"

Just looking a little bit northern Chinese? 

To turn from the frivolous to the sublime: 

Where I wrote in previous blog entry about needing to build in the novel the office of Hu Yaobang and Hu Qili, I have scanned, as part of getting my focus, an old photo from April 1985. Known to some as the 'erhu' (the erhu is that two stringed instrument in the Chinese orchestra that can be heard above all the rest; er means two, so the two Hus) these two people were the big voices of reform, what is more, in Yaobang's case, coming with a raspy smoker's voice from a very small man). This photo in what had once been Mao's bedroom in Zhongnanhai, the centre of government, before Hu and Hu visited Australia. People of gentle and sincere manner and good intent.

Conversation with the great reformers —  CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang and Hu Qili, the head of the Communist Party Secretariat, April 1985. It was the death of Hu Yaobang which precipitated events in Beijing in 1989; HuQili was one of two people at the special meeting of leaders in May 1989 to vote against steps taken which I do not mention here.

charcoal start to two new works

These works will probably remain charcoal sketchy with wash. I am really more happy drawing than painting.

Life is freely expressed in sketch lines and shades.

For me, when painting on from such a start, there becomes a need to work out the balance between the literal and artifice... with concern to avoid artiness and obscurantism. Involving a lot of thought about process... and all that becomes contrived, somehow, too much thought. Also the drawings take just moments or minutes, or a number of moments, after taking the eyes away for a time.

People have done various humorous things with the label of the old record company HMV ("His Master's Voice", including of Gromit from Wallace and Gromit and by the wonderful Michael Sowa (with whom the devil - or the cat in this case - is in the detail.

The original 'Little Nipper'

Gromit

 

Michael Sowa's vision

Now I offer:

His Mistress's Poise  draft at 7 May 2012, charcoal sketch on acrylic on canvas 76x84cm

and ...

This second new work is just a ghost of an idea on a large canvas, but when to stop?

Already she asks 'Are you going to stop now?'

These drawings begin to talk.

Hopefully the characters in the novel will be talking again soon. I have to create for my female protagonist the office of General Secretary Hu Yaobang in the 1980s with whom and with Hu Qili I was privileged to spend quite a lot of time, though I knew so little of their lives or struggles at the time.. This is a gold mine for understanding the period, the history of ideas and debates, as also this is important.


For I am a Minimalist Girl draft 7 May 2012, charcoal on acrylic on canvas, 48x113cm
apologies for the bad lighting.

(These are both on large canvases (old, found canvases, painted over). So much more lively to work in a large space, it reduces my distaste for fitting the world into a two dimensional rectangle)

bedroom mural: "Escape from Jervis Bay"

I wrote on 9 November that I had gone into a bedroom to consider what colour to paint the walls but had strangely carried with me not any colour samples or pots of colour but a piece of charcoal. I had duly reported to Helen abashedly saying here, I did this but I'll paint over it. To which she replied no you will not paint over it you will finish the job.

So I have finished Escape from Jervis Bay in charcoal and 'natural paint'. Taken some courage, actually. The theatre-screen-ish drapes are from a Lebanese home via eBay, the accompanying drop curtains have gone to charity shop. Interesting to find that the heavily-flower-patterned Moygashel Irish linen main curtains work very well with the strength of this painted wall. It's not just been a need for courage to put the figures so boldly onto the wall, but also the challenge of the strength of this paint job relative to the rest of the room. Interestingly with this strong treatment of two walls a large nude photo of Margaret from 1977 looks now very isolated on the opposite wall. Must add to that wall, photos not mural. (I have accumulated dozens of picture frames from charity shops and the A3 colour laser machine is producing lovely images.

a drop of writing from 24 busy hours

I have been trying, after all the other bedlam, to get back to writing and particularly to the novel.

I have just written this account of the last 24 hours.

I wrote this in part at midnight, in part just now.

In passing it on to my writers' group I said

I submit this as being something that seems to help me find my way back into writing mode. I found myself entering a story that told itself to me as I had to do things. I think I had advantage of some attendant drama, hard to imaging how it was, sitting back here now, but I think something like this can be written almost about anything we do, if we are open sensually and visually and to rhythm and temperature and stress, all things we tend to muzzle or deny. And I am pleased to say I then sat another few minutes at midnight and have, I think, a way forward with the snagged novel, starting in a different part of the story. Next to find out how hard it is to move chapters in Scrivener, hopefully not hard at all... but not now... time to veg out!

Also from Liz, an introduction to Scrivener.

It is wonderful to use Skype to communicate around the world and I have now discovered the great value of sharing desktops with Skype. That is, in explaining the writing application Scrivener, Liz was able to show me her computer desktop and how she was using Scrivener.
And so I am pleased to report that I have today begun a 30 day trial use of Scrivener. I am not good at making general notes, or actual cards with concepts for what chapters will do. but in several hours I have placed the text of my novel so far into Scrivener and been able to produce in the appropriate space on screen, a note on what each chapter is supposed to do... and sketch out some next chapters.

I have added labels, to indicate the kind of voice and point of view each chapter has, and this means order of a kind I have wanted, and a way to make notes and actually push the text in possible directions. You can click on the first thumbnail image for it to enlarge so you can see a screenshot of the situation after just a beginning. It is the order I need to go forward. The second screenshot shows what happens when I press on the 'corkboard' button... maybe, maybe, the corkboard, but more to the point the main work setup is a great start. The corkboard does display with clarity the colours which denote different voices, so I can get a sense of the balance of that easily with it.

This is a Mac application only, there is a link in the bottom right of the home page of Scrivener to a suggestion for Windows users.

Bill Piggott produced for the meeting of our Berry Writers Group last week a report on his visit to the Adelaide Writers Festival, in which he quoted this very comforting, exciting and reassuring (if you look at it the right way) perspective of Tom Keneally:

The novel, he [Keneally] says, is the big game, the great discourse and you don’t know where it will take you. There is in our subconscious an unseen and unexplored river in a winding valley which is where we go when writing a novel. Writing one is like being a South Seas navigator of old who sets out from one island with the supposition that there is another island out there somewhere, not knowing what they will meet on the way. He [Bill writes] described himself as an ageing writer “fretfully trying to attack ragged windmills with a white-anted lance on a dying horse.”

from Bill Piggott, Bill Goes to Writers Week, March 2010

part 2 of novel

After recovering from a Menieres Disease/fibromyalgia attack yesterday, last night I did an extensive rewrite of the beginning of part 2 - 2300 words. In a documentary style, covering Lucy's father's life to 1957. And this morning, after distraction of central focus to reading a couple of other things, including the Calvino but starting lighter, the way forward from 1957 suddenly appeared in my fringe vision... a flash back from 1975 in her mother's voice, mother telling story to daughter.

I know I am in good shape when I wake with a fresh idea, not a dark idea...

Novel - sent part one to Nalo

I have (ahead of 1 November deadline) sent forty pages of the draft novel to my mentor, Nalo Hopkinson, essentially my intended part 1, this introduces the two main characters in scenes in 1975, 1968, 1998 and the present. I have also provided a scoping paper, outlining how I see the story developing (rather than a firm structure). Now to work on next sections!

Image is of a possible cover with working title.

‘Sensuous’ and ‘intersection’ — at the close-in person-to-person level as well as in the broader Australian to Chinese and indigenous to non indigenous connection levels. The difficulty of life intersection at any sensitive level.

using the second person, finding perspectives

In text quoted below I am using the second person ["you"] rather than first [I] or third [She] or more abstract ["It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."]

I do not intend to use the second person through the whole book. Nikki Gemmell fiercely uses the second person throughout The Bride Stripped Bare, an extraordinary and difficult piece of writing, teetering in places, needing to be read as a whole, not hunting for saucy bits as some may. The 'you' works, the book to be taken very seriously. Maybe easier to start with Cleave, published in the US as Alice Springs: Gemmell's raw, chafed, hunting, hunted rhythm and style there have been a big influence on me.

I was very pleased when a member of my local writers group, reading my opening second person chapter (see last entry and 'writing fiction', a couple of entries below that) told me he found it very confronting. Excellent, I said, I am delighted that you found it uncomfortable to be inside of the head of an 18 year old young woman on her way back to Beijing from political imprisonment in 1975.

Other voices will be used, to provide different viewpoints and more documentary passages.

Mentorship - my great good fortune

I am delighted to have been accepted by Nalo Hopkinson for mentoring of my novel. Nalo works mainly in science fiction and fantasy, but the energy and directness, the humour and raw honesty of her writing should make this very valuable. As will Nalo's cross-cultural and social issues perspectives.

I have to have 40 to 60 pages to her by 1 November ditto 1 December and 1 January, have already been at work revising and developing existing text, lots to build, lots to chuck, I did a typo in my acceptance email saying I still needed an ending of a dynamic kink, meant kind, but kink will do better...

Here are pages regarding Nalo:

Wikipedia entry

Nalo's web site

My daughter Liz (see also here) drew my attention to this opportunity last week, thanks Liz.

... and thanks indeed Nalo :-)

Writing fiction

• There are a number of links in this entry. Click to go there, use the back button to come back.

I am endeavouring to construct a novel located around where I live but also (as one of the characters advised me in June) in China.

Here is a piece I wrote in January, as the drawing and painting transformed my writing.

Here a fragment written in March, beginning to build a voice and rhythm and style.

-- noting Italo Calvino's insight:

The novella is like a horse, a means of transport with its own pace, a trot or a gallop according to the distance and ground it has to travel over; but the speed Boccaccio [in text he just quoted] is talking about is a mental speed. The listed [by Boccaccio] defects of the clumsy storyteller are above all offenses against rhythm, as well as being defects of style, because he does not use the expressions appropriate either to the characters or to the events. In other words, even correctness of style is a question of quick adjustment, of agility of both thought and expression.

Italo Calvino, Six Lessons for the Next Millenium, Vintage edition 1988, p 39.

You see how I went looking for rhythm on that train (not horse) - link above.

Here is the current (October 2009) opening chapter, placing the reader in the head of an 18 year old returning to Beijing with her mother from a labour prison in 1975, late in the Cultural Revolution.

And here is an excerpt from a later turning-point in the book (which will not all be in second person)

... getting away from old areas of writing, like this. There is also the challenge in fiction that, unlike a speech, the novel writer must not preach, must not teach, must find other means to express ideas and make minds go tick tick boing

Photo taken Eyre Peninsula, 2006, life has risks, follow the sign...