Sacrificing Children On The Altar Of Literature

The two questions any author gets asked the most, are ‘where do your ideas come from?’ and ‘do you use real life people for your characters?’. If the answer to the latter is yes, the follow up question, is ‘do they know?’

The child psychologist Jean Piaget drew up his theories partly through observation of his own children. Sigmund Freud psychoanalysed his daughter Anna and though anonymised, she was the case study for “A Child Is Being Beaten” published in 1919. Neither author was challenged at the time over any questionable ethics, though some of Freud’s modern critics have since rounded on him, not just for the ultimate in Oedipal/Electra Complexes concerning his own daughter, but accusations of virtual incest through opening up her deepest intimacies on the analysand’s couch. 

Both authors would have likely offered up scientific method in any putative defence. However, fiction authors have no such recourse when frequently asked whether we base our characters on real life people. And while our attempts at anonymising (through fictionalising), may just about get us through condemnation for identity theft and lack of consent, when children are used for material that is feasibly an invasion of privacy too far.

I knew I wanted to become a parent, through observing my own childhood as a singleton with a certain dissatisfaction and some resolutions on how I might do it differently.  I was an observer by nature and writing seemed well suited to such a temperament. I started writing stage plays, but when my twin boys arrived. I switched to late night novel-writing since I could no longer devote the time hanging out at theatre bars networking. My early novels barely mentioned children, but now that my sons have attained the age of majority and fledged from home by attending university, I've turned my literary observations to writing about parenting and children. In doing so, have I betrayed their privacy?

The comedian Stewart Lee had a routine about now that he was a parent, his entire life was in service to his children, driving them around to play dates or watching kids’ movies with them, so that he had no real life material to draw on to create a new comedy routine (which of course he adroitly subverts by offering up plenty of comic evidence, eliding Scooby Doo with the political woes of our nation). When you become a parent, one of the things it does is prompt memories of your own childhood in offering perhaps a ready reference to apply to that of rearing your own children. But I had already covered this happenstance through my own reflections that had fed into my desire to become a father in the first place. I may not have always prefigured my parenting actions correctly, but I wasn’t taken by surprise. So the first childhood experiences I offered up to the altar of literature were actually my own. Not quite the scientific method of Piaget and Freud, but I do probably hold the intellectual and emotional rights over my own experiences.

But such content was not enlisted in isolation. There was an echo with the more recent layerings provided by having my own children. But a good deal of what I put into the novel were certain universals about children and in particular child development, rather than details that would identify and out my children as the raw material of the book. Piaget outlined developmental stages which all children go through as their brains mature and although his timeline for such phases has been challenged, the principle remains generally accepted. The same in my book, that language really only enters the picture once the child is able to take on solids through the resultant change in the anatomy of the throat. How we then gain words through imitation long before we know how they are spelled, before we acquire knowledge of the alphabet and the school-borne struggles of mastering the stroke of our pencil to write our letters. From these universals I could proceed to consider how we all acquire our personal forms of self-expression, how much it stems from our parents and how much it deviates as we are able to individuate ourselves. I don’t credit I am betraying any confidences in sharing some observations on these developments. Indeed, one of the arts of novel writing is to make its themes universal enough to speak to a wide diversity of readers. A novel that remains subjective to the experiences of the author is far more likely to fail to communicate. 

In real life I have twin boys. In my novel the protagonist mother has two girls. So my experiences standing on the touchline managing my twin’s Under-9s football team to an FA Fair Play Award couldn’t feed into the novel. However, the overweening ambition of some of the other parents stood there on the touchline screaming at their scions, did inform the novel’s contemplation of the hazy line between a child’s individuation and the parent’s overlaying of it with their own projections for the child, rooted in the parent’s own neediness or unfulfilled dreams.

I also have scenes set in the nursery school playground, but again the mother of girls demands a different depiction than my actual experiences of a father waiting to collect his boys at going home time. Though the playground politics of who talks to who and who shuns who, is likely a universal scenario, standing as a man huddling close to the smattering of other fathers among the preponderant women does ineffably change the dynamics. So while the portrayal of the fictional mother’s isolation reflected my own, I’m happy to report that the by extension isolation of her child, did not reflect the true status of my own twins who were perfectly blended into the social scene of the kids at their school. My fictional mother doesn’t even have the consolation I managed to utilise, of quietly imagining that I would assuredly be in possession of the best record collection of any parent stood in the playground, seeing as I worked in an independent record shop at the time. See, one doesn’t require the direct experiences of one’s own children to get into an infantile mind, one just probe’s one’s own stock of such behaviours.

Further novelistic reflections of pester power in the supermarket, or of the end of service for a teaching toy as all its peripherals are finally and unutterably lost, each represent my reflections looking back on similar incidents; they happened while bringing up my twins, but again there are dual refracting lenses, me as a father casting back to when I was a child so that the outcomes written about is a new synthesis, neither truly representing my childhood nor that of my twins. The choking on a raisin never to the best of my knowledge afflicted either of my boys, while the panic over the body dysmorphia engendered by dolls, was never any direct translation over from “Action Man”^TM, seeing as I wouldn’t provide my boys with anything military in the toy department. So a good deal of the work just comes from the imagination, rather than transliteration of actual events, that in another register might appear in a memoir or biography. 

And this is the rub and which returns us to the questions readers ask of authors. Novels do many things, but one of the most significant is that the author takes you inside the mind of his characters, someone likely to have different experiences and thoughts to that of the reader. But where do these characters come from? They come from the mind of the author of course, but ultimately authors are writing about themselves. They may pick characters seemingly diametrically opposed to themselves, but in doing so they are likely tapping into lesser seen parts of their own personality, exploring or imagining themselves in these guises. For a writer cannot write wholly outside of their own experience. Even if a writer employs an anecdote someone else told them, or something they read in a newspaper or saw in a film, it becomes part of them if it enters their stock of memory enough to be recalled when the writer decides to use it in a book. Second hand experience rather than first for sure, but still from within them. So I don’t believe I have pillaged the lives of my children for my novel, only myself. If I'm wrong in believing this, then I guess they will call me out on it. I'll let you know if that's the case.

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon  and all good book shops in the UK

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The Origins Of My New Novel

The novel developed from the idea of 'misprints'. 

When DNA divides in order to reproduce, that is when errors can creep in. Such transcription errors can lead to mutations, both serendipitous (evolution) and of course pernicious (hereditary diseases). These misprints are in the strings of letters representing the four chemical bases that make up the DNA molecule, A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine) and T (thymine). A single one of these letters being changed for one of the other 3 anywhere along the chain may lead to a genetic mutation.

Before mass printing, books were produced by scribes working writing with quilled ink. For those scribes reproducing the Old and New Testaments, they could not afford a single wrong transcription or the whole volume would be junked. Since the Holy Writ had to be flawlessly reproduced in print, being the word of God. 

Perfection was the sole value for the human scribes, erratum was the driving force of genetic evolution.

Our development as infants takes place in a fairly fixed order. One of the first things babies have to learn to do is support their own heads. Then it will be sitting up, then crawling and finally walking. Babies start life only able to consume milk, but when they start taking in solid food, their throat undergoes an anatomical change (sparked by genetic programming) and it is this change in the throat that also allows them to begin the path of acquiring language. Such developments always have to occur in these sequences. 

I was interested in the concept of fixed sequences and the novel both portrays them and undermines them as that sequence becomes out of order in the narrative. Just why the narrative is out of order you'll have to find out by reading the novel! 

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Shortlisted for the Not The Booker prize

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The Treachery Of Language

Rene Magritte "The Treachery Of Images 1928

Marc Nash/Google Images "The Treachery Of Language" 2018

Magritte's painting has the caption "this is not a pipe". In doing so he is admonishing/advising the viewer that it is not an actual pipe, merely the representation of one in painting. Yet there is a further distancing layer than that even, in that it is a painting of the image or the symbol of what we mean by the word 'pipe'.

Marc Nash's version is that whatever the treachery held by imagery, there is further treachery upon treachery, when you introduce language into the picture. 

Firstly let's not overlook that without Magritte's caption painted on the canvas, the painting would have far less meaning to transmit. This painting without its words, would be a fairly contextless painting of a pipe. It is only the injection of language through its caption that transmits Magritte's meaning, as it sets up the resonance through the paradox it presents. 

But Nash points out language is equally treacherous. The word 'pipe' does not conjure up a singular, universal image. Magritte's pipe burns the solid state of tobacco and produces gas in the form of smoke. Nash points to a whole host of pipes who don't deal in solid states at all, but channel the passage of fluids and in some cases, like a car exhaust pipe, gases too. 

Apart from a sprinkling of onomatopoeic words, few of which are employed as object nouns (most are sonorous verbs or objectless exclamation nouns such as 'boom'), the sound of a word bears no relationship to its meaning. It is this disjunction that makes language treacherous. Without the visual image Magritte provides, we would have no idea if 'this is not a pipe' refers to something not being a smoker's pipe, or a hosepipe, some duct piping, a drainpipe,  an oil pipeline, a sewer, the outside of the Pompidou Centre, or a pipe bomb. 

Magritte relies on language to contextualise his painting, but in doing so undermines it at a stroke. It is language whose treachery far outstrips that of images. Images and their referent symbols are nothing without the labelling of words grouping them together as 'universals'. Yet it is that very universalising that reduces much of the essence of things, grouping together broad categories of objects which have significant differences one from another. Can you smoke a sewer pipe? You can light it and it would likely explode from the gases passing through. A literal approach to the word sewer pipe would be fatal in such a case. Can you pass water through a smoker's pipe? Well only if it was one of those comedy bubble-blowing pipes perhaps. And the ingenuity of the crack smoker, who forges a crack pipe out of anything that resembles a piece of tubing, merges the two 'universal' meanings of the word 'pipe' into a single function. 

Now Magritte's work has led to self-reflection on the image within the art world, but there has been far less investigation in fiction of the treachery of language; of the dissociation between the sound of a word and its meaning. Consider how we acquire language - as a child language is modelled for us by adults and the child imitates those sounds. Over time the child starts cohering those sounds to associate them with specific words which further will be constructed together into sentences. By age 2 they will have a grasp of pronouns, by 3 they are able to construct sentences and by four understand directions for them to respond to. It is only when they start nursery school that they begin to be taught how to read write and spell these words they have already mastered vocally. They learn to spell by wrote or by reading and picking up spellings, because there is no logical relationship between sound and meaning. 

This is one of the themes I explore in my novel released in 10 days. 

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

"Apoptosis: The Things We Lose" - Flash fiction

The webbing between our toes and our innate ability to swim as a neonate, swiftly disappear as we begin to ground ourselves in the world. 

When our gullets are no longer reliant on being coated by our mother’s milk, the sounds shaping words can start to form, but in doing so we lose our singular pre-vocal communion. 

And until our infant eyes and brain can attest to the material permanence of an object, babies are blessed by not being immured in fixed notions of reality. 

And on entry into the world, we surrender our immortality and start approaching death.

A Literation - Flash Story

Children carbon copied their creators. While the physical outcomes of the genetic wheel of fortune retained a whisper of protean unpredictability, speech and acculturation remained utterly undifferentiated from that of their parents. Glossal guardians, stagnant syntactical statuary. Consummate chips off the old blocks, kids were cultivated colloquial clones.

Initially imbibing milky morphology mutely with teat-stuffed mouths at the mammary, while mum suckles safe words for them. Sat at her knee, bottled blather iterated, infused and introjected. Mounted in the high-chair of babble, being spoon-fed more solid sonant syllables minced and mashed into building brick morphemes. Until the child evidenced an incipient ability to word string sentences for himself. From there on in, the parlance predisposed, perpetually prefigured and impervious to independent importation.

Scions were unable to shuck themselves from their die cast speech stamp. They artlessly echoed the same means of articulation as their extraction. Whatever their emotional bent, which like their physical features could lie anywhere on the continuum provided by the DNA chemical crap shoot, they were devoid of the vocal means for varying its expressive pitch.

The theories of Sigmund Freud darted back for favoured diagnosis, as Oedipal dissonances were played out in the most derisory fashion, since none had the diction to defy the discourse. Juvenile abstractions might fleetingly seem unregimented, but they were soon shunted along tramlines once terminology was brought to bear to transliterate them into tangible thought. 

Bilinguals were to some extent immune. For they could slip in and out of their twin vocabularies in any manner of their choosing. Thus was their language uniquely minted beyond predictability. So radical educationalists swept aside the Sciences and even English, in order to place primacy on second languages. But the rote inculcation by lifeless textbooks proffering limp assimilations of Jean-Paul’s first day at school, or Otto writing to his pen-pal, were no less arid than the way adolescents had acceded to their own mother tongues. Fluctuating between two stuttering fluencies furnished them neither felicity nor facility. 

Yet a few whippersnappers managed to strike out on discoveries of their own that enabled them to snap their linguistic shackles. They didn’t enter such a course knowingly in a spirit of seeking to expand their verbal palettes, but merely ventured into the neglected libraries- (there were no bookshops anymore) and picked up novels to read. They were swept along the unadulterated imaginations of authors and buoyed by exposure to the words therein which cast them free of their own constricted palates. They envisioned new horizons, disinterred wonderment and evolved the means to encapsulate it in voiced reactions of their own. Then they set to work writing books to liberate the next generations that would come after them. 

Baby Steps - Friday Flash

Like everyone, on entering the world I was overwhelmed by the inundation of oxygen and burst out into a mewl. For we do not yet possess the means to register our protest in any more cogent manner. Yet such a reaction also shows that all the mechanisms are in place. It represents the maiden launch of our lungs.

Once the rods and cones settled down sufficiently to allow me to process the light, I zealously observed everything around me. Gradually the details cohered, of hair, wrinkles, smile, teeth, teat, skin and hands. Additionally I managed to compose their patterns, to contour them into faces and bodies. In time I learned to distinguish them from my own. Discovering the reflexivity of mirrors helped. Now I could plot my own features and I realised that what was presented before my eyes was very different from the picture held in the mirror. That the flashed smile I was gazing upon, was not intimately tied to me. That I had a choice now whether to reciprocate with one of my own, or to withhold. There was me, then there was not me. And I was only responsible for me. Thus did the world shake out heuristically.

Whereupon I was disgusted at my own neediness.

Since my studies were punctuated by severe lapses. There I could be, scrutinising hard, when my eyes would grow heavy with the labour and I would slip off my sentinel's perch and drift off to sleep. Right in the middle of an assignment! My raging tummy too would also override any watching brief, since I could seldom keep my peepers on the main prize for that afternoon, once ol' misery guts decided to pull rank. Even though it had an eye of its own to see out, it was usually shuttered by my baby-grow, so it started its bellyaching. Entailing any further surveillance on my part, being occluded by the juddering mound of flesh I was propelled towards. Filling my purview with mottled skin and a faintly perturbing pulsing blue line running its length right up to the grizzly knoll stuffed into my mouth. Was it pumping me full of some nefarious blue liquid? The solitary saving grace about this stage, how I could still evacuate my insides without taking my beadies off the chosen target under inspection. But that wouldn't last for ever either.

Yet I was to ascertain further wily contrivances behind these adult tactics, intended to stunt my development. That same teat which was jammed into my mouth to heed the call from the muezzin deep in the minaret of my stomach, turned out to be a false prophet. In the guise of providing me with more energy and staying power, to prolong my viewing bouts, it was actually designed to constrict my burgeoning consciousness. For the longer I continued to solely imbibe milk, the greater the delay on the anatomy of my throat changing to accommodate the aural into the oral. I could hear clearly enough, but I was unable to contribute to these one-way dialogues. All the time this deceit was being practised, my deep-throated mother was cooing and eructing noises at me. Ostensibly offering me her gift of invocation. An endowment my milky-dependent anatomy could not possibly acquire. A creamy libation to my continued dumbness. Is it any coincidence that as verbs, both 'milk' and 'cream' have the meaning to cozen or swindle?

But came the time that my body demanded gritty, more granular nourishment, in such a way that it could not be ignored. My throat finally permitted to perform its pre-programmed meta-morphology. Now Mater could no longer produce inside her own body the liquid blue foodstuffs which alchemically turned to golden yellow within mine. Deuced, she was forced to decant me to my own umpire's high chair. However it was not only my food she mashed with the back of a plastic spoon. She continued to slice and dice her own words even as she served them to me. Cooing to me like a pigeon, as if it were strictly for the birds. A mummy-bird regurgitation of a bolus of phonemes, dripped directly from her tongue on to my own. Babble talk. Non-Language. I could only move in the narrow furrow of imitating her sounds. Distending my muscles, waxing my larynx, disinterring my tongue from the floor of my mouth. Hefting the weight of syllables. Hoping the alphabetti spaghetti I was periodically consuming, would rub off its runic wisdom and coat the membranes draped across the inside of my cheeks.

Eventually I scaled the pinnacle. As with my Lego, I was able to snap into place the building bricks of lexemes in order to harvest sentences. There was no holding me now. Sure I still had the odd nap and the occasional interruption of flow caused by the failure to control that other flow of nether regional evacuation. But boy could I launch into a litany of 'J'accuse' against my parents. I cast brickbats at them like Thor hurled his hammer. I tore into the history of their indignities visited upon me, of their conspiracy to keep me held under. They don't call it the "Terrible Twos" for nothing. Yet mine were not hissy fits, but perfectly articulated arguments. I did not make a scene, but rather delivered a perfectly weighted broadside. I knew that conniption was mock Latin, even as I unveiled my fine arts of Greek rhetoric.

POSTSCRIPT: He went on to win every youth public speaking competition in the land and captained the Oxford University debating team to victory in the Varsity match. Whereupon he entered politics, securing a Parliamentary seat, but had to resign after a scandal in which he was caught suckling at the breast of a suburban prostitute, while dressed only in a nappy and baby's bonnet. 

Speak To The Monkey Not The Organ Grinder - Friday Flash

As with the rest of the species, I was to discover ones parents were capital betrayers.

For they were to spoon feed me the cod liver snake oil of language. The viral broadcasts of talk Radio Malt. The contagious pathogens of linguistic wheat germ. Antibody inoculations against self.

The inheritance conferred post-natally, rather than at the cessation of their own lives. The baby reins that shackle us our whole lives.

It commenced sat at my mother's knee. Insidiously. The incandescent glow in her face- her maternal pride before my imminent fall- a fleshy interrogator's beam blinding me. Effacing all my features, save for my mouth. Freud's psychosexual developmental continuum, freezing at the initial oral stage.

Mincing and dicing her own words into gobbet sounds. Mummy bird regurgitating the syllable boluses and spitting them into my mouth. Coated in her indelible mucus. All the while I still clamoured for the pulpy plasma emitted by the teat. But jabbed in my face now, was only the solid heft of language etched on the labial contortions of her moon-face. Duty eclipsing love.

Apparently it no longer sufficed for me to smile, blow raspberry bubbles nor catenate saliva strings of unadulterated joy. Now I must append clarifying sounds for such emotions. Ghee whizz.

Every day mother takes me through my facial calisthenics. To coax the pink fleshy worm from its lair in the floor of my mouth. To start waggling and perform a dance of the seven veils as it exposes my inner being, plastic and unformed as it is. Therefore it is what my mother tells me it is. The intravenous word stock she salts away under my skin.

Now that I am a fatted calf chock full of lexemes, she addresses me differently. Dice becomes splice, as I have to string them together like amino acid chains. Any avoidance of syntax is met with a scowling sin tax demand, rigidly posted on her visage. She will countenance no deviation.

So now I'm sat there bouncing up and down on her lap- no, since I am being armed with this depleted expressive ordnance let's wield it with laser precision shall we- I'm jouncing on her lap. Parading before house callers (not to be confused with bingo callers calling "House"). Each ruffled my hair or pinched my cheek as inspection, eliciting a forced/natural (depending on the pressure imparted to their gambit) performing monkey smile from organ grounded me.

As each well-wisher approached, I could feel mother's shaped breath parting my downy hair from behind as she went over my head. Sotto voce family lore delivered on each and every one of them. Their unimpeachable blood relationship to me, underscored with her tone indicating her judgement on their moral values and behaviour. I believe I only wanted to go with my own impressions, the moisture of their hands, the lingering dab of their fingers, the unmodulated pronouncement of their grip on me. But her cadences overrode every thought I might muster. They coloured each gladhandler's touch, so that caress could be turned into pinch just by her envenoming word.

While she layered the domestic realm with monochromal spite, my father took me out into the world and immediately shrunk any expanded horizons to be derived there.

We would go for walks and he would point at the clouds and name the object shaped therein. A veritable bestiary of terrifying giant creatures in spectral white. He would pounce on flowers, inform me of their poetic, lyrical names, before trepanning them as he plucked them from their coddling soil. Back home he revealed to me his collection of butterflies, each delicately staked out with a brutal, unseen pin on to a cork. To be named is to be tagged and labelled. To be held still and lifeless in place so as to uphold the name. No sliding off into grey areas of the inchoate. Purity and therefore no danger.

Nouns therefore seemed wholly pernicious to me. Stultifying, static, strangling. But my muscles developed and my body began to inhabit verbs. Father couldn't just march me hither and thither through suburbia's green killing fields. I demanded to exercise my rights, wrongs and scraped knees on the playground obstacle course. All he had to do was sit down on the bench and let me run free. He relented, albeit with a corrosive parting shot. He named the bloody apparatuses. The slide, the see-saw, the climbing frame and the roundabout. Cunning devil had ginned me. All my physical surety drained from my body.

It may have been his enunciation of the word 'swing'. My favourite playground activity as I was wont to push myself to ever vertiginous heights. And yet I had also been sternly counselled against swinging my arms when walking, a most unladylike motion. In the realm of the domestic I'd been forewarned against swinging on the furniture, "like monkeys in the arboreal". Father had painted me a picture of frightening men sat on the benches quaffing from tin cans, whom he advised me would inevitably be taking swings at each other with their fists, such was the countermanding control exerted by the "demon drink" (alcohol was always diabolic, inhibition and self-restraint divine). He had further clotted up my ears on a previous occasion about swing votes in elections, demonstrating the lack of constancy and muddied thinking of "the great unwashed".

Then there was its near cousin "spring", rhyming but no more poetic in his throttling epiglottis. An even more terrifyingly promiscuous word with a welter of inferences. Spring was first and foremost the season associated with maximal tutelage as he laid bare Nature's pullulation (sans birds and bees causality). The season when father most definitely had a spring in his strident step. Then there was the spring mechanism for the rusty rocking frog in the playground, that has since been removed by Health and Safety, for fear of being a death trap. Traps waiting to be sprung. Gaol breaks springing dangerous criminals from their incarceration. A springing leap for freedom as he demonstrates his spring heels to stay out of the clutches of law and order. Mother's blessed spring clean. Springing up, springing forth, springing back in recoil. Springing for someone as you steadfastly refuse to change your nationality to Dutch. Springing a leak, like porous language itself, unable to hold meaning through its riddled apertures. Springing from the source, in this case the primordial soup of obfuscation.

With such a variety of meaning, it appears that context is all. But I want to flow free, like a babbling brook. I don't desire word lumps and slabs to be sewn blocking up my bed. Damming and channelling the course of the flux.

But parents are the organ grinders and we the children, their dancing monkeys.