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Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and Gaddafi’s Little Green Book, stamped into the streets on the TV News. Isn’t it always the sign of the madmen and dictators, writing bad books that claim the whole truth? In Gaddafi’s case he was a rather unusual ideologue, more in the Michael Jackson stamp of bizarre military pop star, propped up by vast oil wealth. ‘He said lots of good things about democracy,’ said one Libyan, ‘problem is he never did anything about it.’ But though more so in Libya, perhaps, it is never about just one man, one Monster, so can they avoid what happened in Iraq? Queue the Zen Master – ‘we’ll see’. But one up for David Cameron and Nato too, with a Libyan woman crying ‘thank you, thank you, David Cameron.‘

“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”

Alfred Lord T

The Shipping News blog wasn’t about my terrible nature, though my father’s will and temper at times was a very destructive thing, it was about bad elsewhere, and in fact, although ‘the past’ contains many dark things, for many people, loving through it and holding to a bigger truth than my fear or eventual manipulation, would not have seen such a psychic assault on me, and from me, and some kind of personal life miracle too. Pity, but it’s the kind of language I have far more respect for. Actually, it is the theme of most things I’ve written well. The language of science and of spirit, that somehow must walk far better, side by side, and are very much at odds in the crisis of our age. I now really understand some kind of connected force of pure negativity too, that can build in a truly awful way, and just attracts more and more negativity. Its real ‘evil’ is the breaking of true human connections and responsibilities, wherever that starts, that can produce a kind of awful chain reaction. If we realise we are both individuals and part of group forces, it has happened in history time and again.

I also understand that terrible ‘single-eyed’ will that Tolkien writes about in The Lord of The Rings. The eye on Sauron’s tower, a searchlight of blame, aggression and negative judgement. Duck it, avoid it, resist it and throw that ring of possession and bad magic into the Cracks of Doom, my presssssciousssss! It is why the eyes of ‘the World’ are such an invasive thing too, from the nastier press, or backroom rumour and injustice you cannot fight, and we all deserve privacy and respect. Since I have allowed such invasion to me, or it was inevitable at my own publisher, always being the writer trying to talk too, all I can do is think of The Order of The Phoenix, or Gandalf guarding others, and trying to turn into Gandalf the White, in the cavernous psychic canyons of Moria! Is this just the stuff of fantasy and imagination, or the madness and delusion I was labelled with, and sadly accepted on my own head? A true story could not mean there was too much delusion, not if you have an inkling of the enormous force of the imagination and Unconscious, and the reason for great, life affirming stories too. Well, if I never write another thing, I’ll always have Fire Bringer, and so will others! DCD

‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my back…’

‘Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered…’
HAMLET

You might say many things about Hamlet. That, in a way, he is the archetype of an alienated, even adolescent consciousness. That he is on the cusp of modern self-awareness, beyond religious absolutes, that haunting paradox of thought and action, the never ending ripple effect of consequences. Armed from the start with a knowledge that he cannot even speak about – ‘But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.’ One thing is clear, that while partly being a ‘sweet Prince’ and enormous idealist, he also becomes a figure of black tragedy, in the incestuous little court of Denmark. The paradox in turning the spotlight on him as the cause, is that real evil has already taken place, in the murder of a father, and in life’s great and cynical ‘move on’. ‘ Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table..‘ He is also a Master at castigating himself, as much as others. He both ‘beats himself up’ and sets enormously high standards. In that he sometimes becomes an enemy to normal life. There was a book I was given to read at school, studying Hamlet, called ‘Poison, Play and Dual’, a brilliant examination of a masterpiece’s many elements, I would recommend to anyone.

But Hamlet’s supreme sphere is the inner world of man and woman, even the awareness of how it is rotting his own soul, and turning everything to meaninglessness. Wilde might call it the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s why the play within the play becomes the ‘mousetrap’ to ‘catch the conscious of a king’, and so justify a real act of justice, that he has only intuited in his metaphysical dealings with a ghost – ‘oh my prophetic soul’– but does not want at all, perhaps knowing the fatal consequences of the revenger’s path, and all those blood soaked revengers tragedies too, that used to put bums on seats. Yet still Hamlet cannot act, except to trip up betraying and manipulating Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, prefering events to drive him towards the fatal conclusion. Perhaps that becomes Hamlet’s real ‘bad’, swept up in whirly-gig of things, and seeing ‘providence in the fall of a shadow’. Trying to touch some greater human meaning and justification too. It certainly makes him the companion of the most enormous metaphysical awareness, and the grinning skull of Yorick too. Death haunts the play, and only for the floundering individual is the rest ever ‘silence’ in life. Enter martial Fortinbras. Hamlet’s huge shadows always remind me of the Knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, playing chess with Death. In his supposedly heroic journey, the only winners are the loving gypsy couple, in their caravan, who simply duck and get on with being alive.

The role of the women in it all too is very sad. Devoted and innocent Ophelia, driven to madness by Hamlet’s viciousness, and slaying of her father. A figure who might have saved him, but who he can only embrace in death. His mother, touching incest and marrying his father’s brother. They are Oedipal themes also touched on in King Lear, with its many blindings, and its bad male love and enfolding tyranny. Ophelia is not as advanced as loyal Cordelia, who expresses all the true virtues of responsible and balanced love, both for Lear and herself – ‘What must Cordelia do, love and be silent?’ But cut off from positive relationships with women, deprived of the ideal of a father that is somewhat in question too, and aware of his own sins, Hamlet finds himself in a place he cannot cope with, where ‘the world is out of joint, oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!‘. But that is the consciousness and scope of a Prince too, that the whole world is somehow on his shoulders. Who would want his kind of tragedy, no one at all, but it is those great works of tragedy and consciousness that provide us with a ‘mirror up to nature’ and also those vital acts of catharsis, in touching pity and terror, that make written art truly important. Especially in such an enormously democratic age, that has seen so much world suffering, it no longer really believes in the validity of individual tragedy at all, or the fall. But inside the mind too that fall can happen to every one of us.

It’s an AOL headline today, but tell me about it! With our ‘scientific’ obsession, we also miss what we know intrinsically, or instinctively, and that is often held in common stories. Dad told me one as a boy, about a guest at our home in Wales who tripped and broke a leg badly, and went grey overnight. But so often the ‘insights’ of science are as absurd as those scientists in Britain who did a lot of work on a study to prove that stags suffer stress, if they are hunted to death! Sometimes we are completely nuts, but I guess it’s good for research grants. DCD

IF…

Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Ah good, they’re doing a new version of Jane Eyre, and we need active heroines in abundance nowadays! Watch those psychic Grace Pooles in the attic, Mr Rochester, and never go blind.

Jung said the greatest thing that affects children and their ambitions is ‘the unlived life of the parent’. Perhaps then it was Dad’s thwarted writing ambitions that led me to be a writer. Apart from Lord of The Rings, and the astounding excitement of that book and its narrative force as a boy, there was one writer in particular who rather obsessed my father, and whose stories of course thrilled me too. Robert Louis Stevenson. Tusitala, they called him, on the island of Samoa where he’s buried, cutting a swathe through the rainforests, to lead his body by torch light up the mountainside. It was the kind of honouring my father needed and longed for, and perhaps I did as a writer too. But then Stevenson, apart from his classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde and Catriona, filled with the subtle loss of idealisms, as we came out of a more heroic or even ‘childishly’ idealistic age, in its best sense, also fought for the rights of the indigineous Samoans, in a battle conducted in The Times. He hated the pettiness of power, and supposed priopriety too. It is indeed harder to fight for yourself than others, sometimes, but it’s a very important thing too, or how can you help anyone else at all? DCD

‘I have come to rely on the kindness of strangers!’

You don’t exactly expect to be turned into Blanche Dubois by people you loved, out of a Street Car Named Desire, but take the strain and never complain. Then you’ll be a man, my son! Not exactly what I’ve done, I know. When I was informed though, out of a deeply personal and supposedly private relationship, and by the CEO at my publisher I ‘burned my bridges’ I snapped back he had no right to say it. He didn’t, or to turn a personal ‘take’ into a company take, as bridges weren’t burnt, but simply removed completely, despite contracts and promises, and their unnecessary little conspiracy. With all the authors in the world, and all the people trying to survive, do I have a right to a living, or a readership? No, of course not. You are as good as what you write, or what you can sell the public. But I did have a right to support of the work Abrams contracted.

I wanted to heal everything once, family pasts too, always inclusive of people, I think, and I’ve ended up healing nothing at all. Stories are only echoes of how life might be better and people much bigger. Better fictions, perhaps, and better tears. I wondered why I couldn’t be more proud or confident though, when Fire Bringer came out, of wanting to buy back a lost family home, or to succeed for myself, at last. Because the contradictions inside my Dad were just too great, perhaps, the draw of his past, and I’d also been wounded personally. Because I also hated invasion. Then you can become ‘your own worst enemy’, another take from my own editor. Is it better not to compromise the heart and soul, and fail completely, knowing not one of them could have coped and peace in such tongues is outrageous?

I don’t know right now, but when the person you love and your ‘best friend’ become the enemies, at the heart of your working life and livelihood, watch those street cars. Well, dear Abrams, loving exes and decent friends, big companies and editors always ‘win’, unless you’re Prince, and you’re about to take Vanbrugh Court too now, home of fireworks once and birthday balloons, and little offices of Phoenix Ark Press. Quite a road, out of opening a heart and trusting. So ‘burn this’, and many congratulations on all you’ve done to a man, life and a writer, in brave New York City. I hope you’re all hugely proud of your loyalties and imaginations, professional standards, and the connected and truly seeing world we all seem such a vital and nimble part of nowadays!

Boy them writers know how to do it, sometimes! I thought I had, but I’ve never read Charlotte’s Web, and it’s enchanting. ‘Some Pig’ in fact, and ‘radiant‘ and ‘humble‘! Since the world is a strange miracle, books too can be miraculous and magic at weaving what’s bigger than us all. What’s you’re word, because especially with the good eyes of friendship, it should be far bigger than you might sometimes feel?!

The picture is a public domain photo of the original book on Wikepedia