Back in the Blog agane

There’s a kind of writing you’ve probably come across online, in which a narrator pretends to be recounting an unpleasant true-life memoir but is transparently indulging a sex fantasy (the salacious adverbs of manner tend to give the game away). I am afraid that the first thing I posted in this new blog might have been interpreted that way by the three people I stupidly invited to read it (one of whom was too disgusted even to manage a comment, while the other two did the polite humouring-a-lunatic thing that I would probably do myself if I had gained the above impression). For what it’s worth, the factual element of that screed was actually true: but in the end it hardly matters whether it was true or not. It was tasteless and indecorous, and that’s what counts, and that’s why I deleted it. It was, if you like, an experiment to find out if there’s a way to circumvent the taboos that limit what we can talk about, or what we can reveal to the world about ourselves. I’m at an age when it seems pointless to have secrets – when your life is almost over, it can hardly matter what people think of you – and it would, I sometimes think, be nice if even one person who previously believed he was alone in having to live with an unspeakable condition were to discover, through my agency, that he wasn’t. But it turns out that with the best will in the world there are some things that just cannot be written about, and that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.  Why can’t the thing in question be written about? Not, in this case, because of any threat of censorship, but simply because a precondition for writing about something is that there’s an audience for it – that there’s a realistic chance at least one reader might be motivated to read to the end without being begged to do so. In this case, no such audience exists or is ever likely to.

Nevertheless, I have decided to use this new space to make one last stab at that seemingly impossible task I set myself fourteen years ago: to write a Tristapaedia, or in other words (setting aside the hopeful Tristram Shandy reference, and also setting aside any further ventures into the realm of the unspeakable) to leave behind a sort of testament of what little I’ve been able to experience or understand of the world, in case it might one day be useful either to my son - now growing up - , or anyone else, unlikely though this is. Why “seemingly impossible”? Certainly not because of any vast wealth of material – you’d be hard pressed to find another person with such a shocking paucity of life experiences, or of interesting or original thoughts, or of observational acumen – rather because it is hard to motivate yourself to write things down when there is so little apparent reason to do so. Writing is hard, and the older and more isolated I get, the less point there seems to be in laboriously lining up words on a screen that probably no one else will ever visit. The one motivation I have left for writing is a constant feeling of not being represented in the discourse I see everywhere, particularly on social media. I don’t know if my ideas are startlingly original or if they are more the sort of ideas that other people toy with and then discard as self-evidently ridiculous: all I know is that they rarely surface in public discourse, although there have been a few times when an idea I played with at 20 and dismissed as frivolous or banal suddenly bursts into social media a decade or two later as a bracing new apercu. You just never know, with ideas.

So I’ll probably be writing here about, let’s see, why I suspect we do well to have a religion despite the rather obvious fact there isn’t a God, or why I think pornography is a necessary underpinning to any kind of human civilisation, or why belief in free will is perfectly compatible with a deterministic, materialistic view of the universe, or why I care more about setting in a film than I do about plot, or why the current generation is about to discover poetry, or how you can take a selfie without any human face appearing in the picture, or why it’s important to stop being Artificially Intelligent, or why the definition of a Real Man necessarily excludes owning a mobile phone, or why the definition of Beauty does not in the least preclude the presence of horse dung, or why it’s better to be autistic than oughtistic, or why I was wrong, at the age of nine or so, to dismiss the TV series The Saint as the boring exploits of a wooden eyebrow-actor with a poncey haircut. Other topics may suggest themselves once I’ve got back into the rhythm of putting words together, which I’ve been out of for a long time. If you want to browse former attempts at same, try here.