Sad old bugger

Someone recently asked me whether or not my writing came from another source, was it copied?   In effect my writing comes from deep felt beliefs about “circumstances”. Circumstance’s  which afflict us all.                      

 In every "news bulletin" issues are raised about the condition of our way of life and the world around us. The bulletins can be accepted as just a “background” to life’s events as they are acted out around us, or the bulletins contain  information which affects us because it mimics much of what troubles us.  

One of the books that I’m reading at the moment is by Victor Serge. He was what is now called an "anarchist".  Of course the word itself brings to mind someone who is not very wholesome, is a danger to the society in which we live and therefore must be rejected. And yet this man spent his life fighting for humanity. His profound beliefs came from a time when people would take the time to think, form their “own” opinions and draw together with others of a similar mind-set. The point I am trying to make is that here we have a person who gave all his energy, not to making money, not to building a big house, owning a flash car, going on the latest holiday bonanza. Here was a man and there were many in his era, who felt strongly that mankind’s condition could be made easier and through their effort, would become easier. 

The more one reads the more one is influenced by the mind of the author. Each book is the outpouring of another person’s experience and it is through these many experiences that one begins to gain some perspective of one’s own life.

One of the first books that I was directed towards by a teacher was by the author Jerome K Jerome, “Three Men in a Boat”. In those days we were given time during the school day to read in class and I well remember chuckling away at the images in this book. I was also fortunate to have gone out with a librarian in Johannesburg, she introduced me to a whole range of existentialists’ writers. Gunter Grass, Andre Guide, Kafka, 

Dostoevsky ,Solzhenitsyn, and many others. It was heavy going but it taught me that writing was invariably about people and about the deep schism that lie at the root of all of us.

With all this marvellous verbiage laying in the nooks and crannies of my mind it is easy to borrow a word, a phrase, a concept and mix it with it with one’s own experience. It is the basis of any creative project that you have the tools to do the job.

 Language and the subtlety which lies in its ability to describe the deepest, lightest most frivolous set of ideas.

The danger is that one has a pet project and can then become like a stuck record, always repeating the same mantra. I know that I go on a bit about banking and the debts that the current banking system has brought mankind. There is no end in sight to the damage that has been done to the social fabric within Europe. There are of course always winners and losers and perhaps it is our turn to become the losers but that does not excuse the financial manipulation that was carried out on by the banking fraternity to gamble with our future.

Amazon is a marvellous invention. I know that it has driven many high street outlets into the red but as a service I can think of no better. The excitement of receiving the package delivered to the door, a book, is palpable.  The expectation as one opens the book and begin to read the opening lines is as good as it gets. Sad old bugger you might say!