I mentioned yesterday that this blog is a deranged song of praise to an inspirational university professor. Today I feel more inclined to suggest that it is symbolic of a poetic dry patch which is perhaps best summed up by the fact that yesterday I submitted three poems to an online poetry community for discussion which were composed 3-6 months ago. This blog is, as much as anything else, a search for those things which compel me to write... I will use that dangerous word, that poetic mantra: those things that 'inspire' me.
And yet, when I cock my head to one side, squint my eyes, raise a slightly bushy eyebrow and stare this dry patch in the face I realise suddenly, in what one might refer to as a flash of the aforementioned 'inspiration', that this dry patch is not a case of not knowing what to write about - Indeed only last week I took some notes in my journal that, in my prolific period 3-6 months ago, would have excited me - nor is it a case of attempting to write and falling short of anything acceptable or, for want of a better word, 'chic', or, as W.N.Herbert eloquently phrases it, looking in the mirror after a writing session and, with a great deal of Italian hand gestures, asking myself "Why you no write proper no more, huh?".
It is simply a case of not trying hard enough, vis-a-vis that these 'writing sessions' do not happen. In a bizarre splitting of the self which hauntingly resembles the last entry of Anne Frank's diary, I chastise me:
'I should sit down and write.'
'Yes, I should.'
And yet, despite all of that, I am fairly sure that I don't even have a biro in my flat, which is a great shame considering that 'the pen is mightier than the sword'.
Which, in turn, is a phrase that I was thinking about in the shower earlier this evening. The shower is one of those places along with 'bed' and 'outside' in which my thoughts tend to flourish. It was only last night that I got out of bed around 3am to make a note that I intend to suggest in my paper on 'Detective Fiction, Historiography and The Culture of Imperialism' that a possible reading of Conan Doyle's 'The Sign of Four' is that it signifies a shift towards a cerebral/intellectual/cultural rather than physical/concrete puncturing of Britishness by its colonial other...
Returning to my thoughts on that mantra 'the pen is mightier than the sword': It strikes me that we no longer use swords in war. Military technology has, in a convenient though unnecessary parallel with my chronological shift from a physical to an intellectual puncturing of Britishness in 'The Sign of Four', developed with time. Rather than swords, we now use bombs, occasionally of the nuclear variety.
And yet, in a remarkably concrete example of Saussure's principal that language is a plastic medium that moulds to fit thought, this doesn't make the statement invalid. Rather the 'sword' that it mentions shifts, again like the puncturing of Britishness in 'The Sign of Four', to a symbolic/cerebral sword which stands in place of 'conflict on-the-whole', rather than a physical/concrete sword with a shiny handle.
As I made this fairly banal observation an essay that I read (in the passive rather than active sense - the words tended to flow over and around rather than into me) around 18 months ago suddenly resurfaced and registered, made sense. I refer to Jean Baudrillard's rather melodramatically titled 'The Evil Demon of Images and The Precession of Simulacra'. I thought I would share.
Baudrillard argues that there has been another chronological shift, I apologise that I keep bringing them up, from the concrete to the cerebral. Or rather that the 'real' has gradually disappeared from society:
"For us the medium, the image medium, has imposed itself between the real and the imaginary , upsetting the balance between the two, with a kind of fatality which has its own logic. ... The fatality lies in the endless enwrapping of images which leaves images no other destiny than images. ... Images become more real than the real."
To translate as best I can: There was a time when we as a race/society were in touch with reality, but with time, in a sort of helter-skelter effect, we have gradually spiraled away from reality, through Aristotle's 'Mimesis' (Imitation), creating image after image until we are left with nothing to imitate but images.
At a conceptual level I always felt that I knew what Baudrillard was getting at, but for lack of a concrete example (perhaps this lack of a concrete example in itself seems to illustrate his point) I failed to cross that often unfathomable abyss between 'knowledge' and 'understanding'. (One need only look at the Holocaust to see this abyss in action: I know that it happened. I do not understand, nor incidentally do I wish to understand, how it happened.)
However, as mentioned above, the phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword' finally provided me with the concrete example that I have evidently been subconsciously seeking for the last 18 months: There was a time when 'the pen is mightier than the sword' applied literally to that physical/concrete sword discussed above, but now we have shifted away from concrete reality (away from the sword with the shiny handle) towards a world of semiotics - signs, symbols, images - where swords are not swords but images that stand in place of something else, in this case of what I described earlier as 'conflict on-the-whole'.
Nevertheless I genuinely feel that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' remains true despite having become something of a 'faded coin' since it was written in 1839 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. In fact, I recently watched a Russian film called 'The 9th Company' by Fyodor Bondarchuk which briefly presented the idea that conflict on-the-whole (i.e. 'the sword') was art in itself: A form of beauty because it had no excesses, no superfluous lines, everything in it was necessary. This destruction of the time-honoured dichotomy between conflict (the sword) and art (the pen) troubled me. It strikes me that what one can achieve ideologically through art will always be firmer than what one can impose ideologically through conflict. As I wrote in my 2006 book 'Close Up Theatre': "Allow them to come to their own conclusions. Their belief will be stronger".
I hope to prove myself right, if only I could find a biro.
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