Writing in a Time of Turmoil
“May you live in interesting times,” contrary to popular belief, was not an old Chinese curse but, instead, was coined by British politician Joseph Chamberlain or possibly his journalist son, Austen. His other son, Neville, probably came to regret that he was Prime Minister in some of the Most Interesting Times Ever.
However, for an artist, writer or any other creative, to live in Interesting Times is to be blessed with subject matter aplenty as the world goes rapidly to hell in a handcart. I always tried to encourage my daughters to engage with whatever was going on in the world as they were growing up. Every experience comes in useful one day.
But, at the same time, there are mountains and mountains of analysis of events being spewed out by the press and television and on social media videos. Where does the creative artist break in and find gems to carry off for their own use?
When we look at other tumultuous times in History (and here I count only British History because I don’t know a great deal about other significant events from around the world) it is people’s lives that become of most interest. How did people live whilst all this was going on? One of my distant ancestors lived in a tiny cottage in what became the field of the Battle of Cheriton. I’d dearly like to know how she may have dealt with the cavalry charging backwards and forwards across her cabbage patch. Did she stand there among the rows of carrots shooing them way with her pinny as I have seen country women do to this day when the garden is invaded by rabbits? It strikes me that when confronted by an existential crisis of global proportions it is good to look up from the ground rather than down from a drone flying high overhead. Against the spectacle of war or disaster that video makers love, it is the human stories that are most telling.
When I have researched historical events for my own writing I have always been intrigued by the ephemera of people’s lives. I am reminded of their journeys by bus tickets, by a shopping list, by a bill for the repair of a pair of boots. So, I learn what it was to be them and to live like them. How they went about their daily business whilst the world was engaged in existential melt down.
And what I learn, what I have learnt, is that there is a real, continuing experience that human beings undergo. We have to live. And living means eating, sleeping, being in love, being annoyed by music coming from up-stairs. Travelling to and fro to work. Loving the scent of flowers. People living amidst the most unspeakable horror and desperate circumstances still go on being human.
One of the most dastardly things that the Authoritarian oligarchy tries to do is to deny people their humanity and thereby diminish their worth to the world.
They see human beings as an hazy grey mass only there to massage their fragile egos and make them more money than anyone else could ever imagine.
But somehow the dehumanising process never works. I have spoken to holocaust survivors from concentration camps and realised that there is the sheer indomitability of human nature that makes me glow with pride that I have shared the world with such people. It is called “humanity” for a reason and we all share it.
So, when we look back, we read novels and films that may not even mention world events. We do not look to Jane Austen for a record of the Napoleonic Wars with the universal fear of invasion. That they all might be murdered in their beds by a marauding French Army, has little mention in her writing. Her field of view may be limited to the Upper Middle Classes and the junior aristocracy but we still read her to learn about what it is to be a young woman of the time.
What survives from our time might easily be as random as the classic texts of the Greece philosophers and playwrights which have come down to us largely because they were used as bindings for other, later, works. Other documents survive because they were palimpsests, the words erased and the papyrus reused or were retrieved from rubbish heaps. Such is the potential fate of all writing.
I wouldn’t dream of advising you on what to write but I would suggest that you write as much as possible about people you see around. It is what you can do if you can’t do anything else. Observe and write for them and their humanity. Whether fictional or biographical, tragic or hilarious, write as much as possible because a few pages of what you write might just survive the coming fire-storm. They might be charred and disjointed but they just might tell some future reader what it was to be alive in such Interesting Times.
