Love Thyself? A Reply Post…

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I don’t feel as though I have been writing very much lately although I now seemingly am trying to have content running for TWO blogs and I write essays for uni. It just somehow feels not very much.

I used to do other writing as well and that has stopped because it feels unwanted? Unappreciated? Erm… something I should redirect my focus to somewhere else –  hence the now TWO blogs (just call me “Lozzy Two Blogs”. Lol) I am running simultaneously. 

This “other writing”…I almost buckled over the past couple of days in thought of doing it once more. That it felt “overdue” – but I refrained. I ultimately derived pleasure from it. It helped keep my creativity going even if it felt like at other times it was a fruitless exercise. It kept me writing and that was the important thing. Even if it seemed as though that was its only reason for being – was to get me writing. One-sided “communication.”

I like writing in an epistolic way – even with this blog – even though I don’t necessarily start each post as “Dear Blog reader” and sign off as Priptona or Prip or Larelle or Loz. I have always written as if SOMEONE is reading. Something that has been with me and has been the way I write since having read Ann Frank’s diary, with each entry in her diary starting with an epistolary “Dear Kitty.” I didn’t even know there was a term for it until recently. 

Anyway, I digress.

Today’s post from Jim. It all seemed to centre around creativity – being self-taught(?), leaving school early and having a career despite the odds. 

I don’t seem to be able to help myself when I see that he’s posted. I always respond. That desire for “dialogue” is so strongly entrenched within me now. 

He spoke about leaving school before 16, which, to be fair, wouldn’t have been entirely unheard of then. I mean, there were still enough kids leaving at 16 when I was in school. It was only becoming “the norm” to stay on until you were 17/18 during my time at high school. It was very rare for kids to go on to the final two years of high school when my siblings were in school. My brothers barely made it to 16 – they probably didn’t in fact. A school year used to run from Feb-Dec in the 70s and 80s (more holidays through the year and a shorter summer holiday means the Australian school year normally runs from Jan-Dec presently) – unlike the UK where in England and Wales it runs from Sept-July and in Scotland from Aug-June. (Not sure what happens in Northern Ireland – they may be the same as Scotland? Don’t know.) My brothers (apart from my eldest brother – not sure about his schooling) have April and May birthdays so I could imagine they both left at 15, not really bothering with what would have been the final year of high school for most students back in the mid to late 70s.

Jim rolled off some names of early school-leavers that were “self-taught” in their artistic fields. Amongst them he mentioned Dickens. He was 12 when he left school – extenuating circumstances forced his hand with that as his father ended up in a debtor’s prison (very Little Dorrit). Young Charles ended up back in school after a few years though and continued his education. Besides, to have left school at 12 in the 19th century would not have been a rare occurrence.

Ernest Hemingway was another Jim mentioned, but when looking at Wikipedia, Hemingway didn’t leave school until he was 18. As for William Blake and Frida Kahlo…well, Blake was a child in the 18th century – although Wiki states he left school at 10, which is VERY young – he continued to be home taught by his mother. 

Researching info has caused me to lose my train of thought. 

Anyway, Jim’s point was probably something to do with … schools killing creativity or something. Who knows? But these kinds of posts always get me wanting to get into a debate with him. Which I love and hate at the same time. I love that he sparks my thoughts and imagination and just gets me thinking. For him, he speaks of there being “no muse” but for me – he very definitely IS (or has been) a “muse.” He always manages to provide a spark. 

Actually, I think his post probably came more from this idea that there was no “songwriting school” he went to. That applies to nearly every songwriter though. I genuinely can’t think of a band or music artist of modern times that “learned” their craft not through experience and being self-taught. I mean…yes, some people learn an instrument but they don’t usually learn writing lyrics…it just forms usually from a love of language and the use of words and writing stories. You could say, therefore, that he was learning to write songs from the time he was young, going to school, writing the way he did. His mum giving him the notebook so he could “write down [your] thoughts and dreams.”

I really wish I had thought about other forms and other styles of writing more, you know? I convinced myself when I was younger that I had no imagination. This idea formed from days in school…when I was actually there on any given day – and I’d be in English class and we’d be given the task of writing a short fictionalised story. Asked to write “on the hoof.” I could never do very well. I could never articulate very well. The way I write came along much, much later. The benefit and expression I gain from it arrived to me so much later than one would hope to to try and make any kind of artistic living from it. 

The only other book I can think of that used an epistolary approach to writing was Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series of books. So, when it comes to my own development of writing, these three things – Ann Frank’s diary, Adrian Mole and Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo, are the things I think about.

I used to write in my diary as a teenager with this wonderfully fanciful idea that, one day, when I was long gone from the world, people would read my diaries. I felt like I was at least trying to give myself some skewed purpose for existing because I really couldn’t find one from day to day. A lot of the time I feel there is no real purpose for human beings at all. We’re just some mutation of some germ and we really have no right to exist at all and offer nothing of any real substance. We seem ultimately hellbent on destroying ourselves and the world we live in. Some days I find it hard to see any redeeming features to us as a species at all.

The mystical “songwriting school.” There was none, Jim. Every songwriter is pretty much self-taught. I don’t think there are many people out there right now creating music and writing songs that are educated specifically to do so. There will be some, of course, but not many. 

You dared to dream. I could dream as big as the rest of them but when the realist within you sees what looks like an insurmountable mountain to climb, one that just seems to grow exponentially as you dare even begin to contemplate trying to scale it – your dreams become quashed. 

You had the luxury of youth. I didn’t even feel like I had the luxury of youth. I didn’t have anything. I felt completely talentless and incapable of even the most mundane things. “Youth is wasted on the young,” to paraphrase Bernard Shaw. 

And, so here I am now with all this “experience” (age!) behind me and it’s only now I feel mildly confident to try and do something with this desire to write that I have. Will it lead anywhere? The important thing is that it leads to personal development and fulfilment. I’m not expecting to be on the Booker prize list any time soon. The notion of writing fiction still scares the bejesus out of me but I am starting to believe that it IS something one can learn. A trade. Something you can bring your own style to. Something that, if you are prepared to put in the hours for it – it CAN be something you can learn. A good friend keeps saying to me “you need to learn the rules in order to be able to break them.” I’m wanting to learn the rules. 

A big digression and getting back to Jim’s post in general and his mention of David Bowie. Jim wrote that Bowie was asked what he wanted to be doing when he was 25, he said “I hope to be in Tibet studying Eastern philosophy.” He eventually did study it to some degree, I’m sure. I love the song “Seven Years In Tibet” on the Earthling album by the way. If anyone was allowed to place things on the back-burner, it’s our dear David. It’s not as if he wasn’t keeping himself busy doing many other creative things. Also, I really need to watch Moonage Daydream again. Really, one doesn’t need to watch it as much as one needs to listen to it. David is SUCH a brain and that’s the most wonderful and evident thing that comes from experiencing the Moonage Daydream film. (Side note – I have done some study of Eastern philosophy through uni recently – it’s bloody hard! But I loved it!)

I did take in that ending. “Fact is, there is a tremendous ‘high’ involved with our work, and it is a ‘high’ that comes from the love involved in doing it. Who in their right mind would want to come down from that? Not me. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

I hope you never do either, Jim. But, you are a mercurial sod, even now. One day you talk about things with finality, the next…it will never stop and never end. You have the beauty of the duality you have created for yourself to be immortal with your art though fixed through your human mortality. 

I love the cheek that you had to not only quote from your new favourite television series but from your own self! Why the hell not, Mr Ego Head! Lol. I wish I had that kind of gallus crap in me! Perhaps one day. Oh, the invincibility of it all! 

Jim’s talk of uni got me going, ultimately. It also created the dilemma of where to post this. It’s waffling and bordering on the personal so I started to wonder if I should post it on University and Unicorns – or here. I decided it should go here as it is a reply to Jim. A skewed and wishful piece of “dialogue.” I still long for it. I don’t think I’ll ever stop desiring to have a conversation with him.

I started to think about just replying to his post(s) exclusively on the blog and not by leaving comments on the FB posts. And then I commented on his post today and he went and liked my reply – the dirty rat! Lol. Still, the limerence continues to slowly dissipate over time. I’m slowly letting go. It’s gonna take a long time and I am on the verge of tears thinking about it like this. I (have) had so much love for this man that comes from (what felt like) …. A real and genuine place. He changed my whole world.

I’m doing uni because I could finally believe I had the strength and the capacity to do it. I felt capable – finally. A lot of the time over the past eight years Jim made me feel capable. I have continued crises of confidence when I feel apprehensive about certain aspects of uni – essays, particular topics I find it hard to engage with, etc.

Even the topics he brought up in his post; classics, philosophy; the fields of art the people he mentioned excel(led) in; writing (creative writing, storytelling, novelists, poets), art – painters, sculptors. William Blake – he was a creative polymath. And David Bowie ended up like that too in the end. 

Dare I even dream I can even REMOTELY be of that ilk? I’m 52 years old. What kind of “career” can I have, conceivably? I don’t know. I just want to write and try to write well and enjoy using language. If I had an audience of one, it would be enough.