Her novels are full of a dark humour - death lurks somewhere in the background (she was first moved to write as a girl by seeing news footage of Nazi concentration camps).  But in person, her humour was gentler.  This is more a personal memory than a piece of ‘lit crit’, so I shall concentrate on the latter…  At one festival, in one of those discussions about favourite writers which often degenerate into a competition to produce the most obscure Bulgarian post-structuralist, she trumped everyone with Rhoda F Comstock, whose ‘Like Flies to Wanton Boys’ is masterpiece of dark rural fiction.  Or would be, if it actually existed.  A friend of hers, the novelist Paul Bailey, was on hand to keep the joke running, and everyone (except a few people who didn’t ‘get it’) had a wonderful time.   Apparently, there was a rather snotty article in the Daily Mail a few days later, saying how these devious highbrow authors had tricked an audience of good honest country folk…

Another time, Beryl admitted that as a drama critic she had ‘only once’ made up a play to fill her weekly column…  Incidentally it was typical of Beryl to go on to say that she was very rarely rude about a production, as she knew as a former professional actress how much effort would have gone into producing even a turkey.  A subtle hint that an evening could be better spent elsewhere was enough for her.

But now she is gone.  The festival will never be quite the same.

A number of her friends from Lynn brushed the straw out of our hair and came down to London for her funeral.  I’m not sure what Beryl would have thought of the cameramen waiting outside the church – an unnecessary fuss, I expect.  Inside, there was plenty of fuss – but fuss of the right sort, in the form of a beautiful sung mass, in Latin.  Alongside her capacity for friendliness towards anyone, however inept or flawed, Beryl had a strong sense of what was correct in procedures, manners and generally ‘how to do things’.  She once got herself in trouble with the liberal establishment for saying people from deprived areas ought to have elocution lessons.

We sang two hymns.  ‘Dear Lord and father of mankind / Forgive our foolish ways’ is both childlike and deeply wise, two apparent opposites that Beryl managed to combine herself.  ‘Jerusalem’ reflected Beryl’s traditionalist side again – though the hymn is also a call to renewal.  Both hymns have tunes that are simply beautiful.

The priest gave a brief eulogy, centred on the Beryl he knew, a kind, approachable woman who was fond of babies and was greatly liked in the local community, by all sorts of people who had no idea she was ‘famous’ or a Dame of the British Empire.

After the service, a hired bus took us to Highgate cemetery – via Camden: in a moment of comedy Beryl would have appreciated, the bus turned the wrong way into Kentish Town Road and had to take a lengthy detour to make up for it.  Finally we got there, and walked slowly up a winding tree-lined path past long-dead Victorians – Elsie, Albert, Jeremiah (and a family called Greatorex: why aren’t there names like that any longer?) – to her final resting place.  There, as one does at funerals, we sang Rolf Harris’ ‘Two Little Boys’.  We threw earth onto her coffin and muttered thanks for all she had done and meant.  It began to rain…

Funerals are times for reflection, for celebrating lives as whole things rather than just public achievements, for remembering ‘what really matters’.  In a piece in The Independent published that morning, Beryl wrote of her love of certain writers: Dickens, Shakespeare, JM Barrie, Dr Johnson.  She wrote about her love for her family: her parents, her children and grandchildren, even an ex-husband who hardly seems to have deserved it.  She concluded: “We should remind ourselves to the last breath that what mattered was tolerance, patience, regard and a love of a neighbour…”

We’re going to miss her a lot.

Beryl’s final piece in The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/beryl-bainbridge-on-the-art-of-facing-death-2024233.html

More on the indomitable Rhoda F Comstock at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/mar/24/fiction.berylbainbridge

Yesterday I went round the RA Summer Exhibition, something I used to do every year when I was in my ‘young man about town’ phase, but haven’t done these last 25 years.  And I really did feel the art wasn’t as good as it was in the old days.  Some old big names – Gillian Ayers, John Hoyland – still delighted, but very little else held and captivated me. In the old days, most of the art was representational or abstract.

Now, a lot more of the art seems to be concept-driven, in the sense of having a clever idea at their heart.  The ultimate expression of this was perhaps a Tracy Emin, who’d written some words on a canvas – and was asking £125,000 for it.

At work, I am looking at ways in which the unconscious mind controls the conscious.  Conscious thinking, it is turning out, is a much less powerful force than we like to believe.  In decision-making, for example, the mind ‘decides’ – MRI scans show bits of the brain lighting up, as if in a debate, then one special area lights up, a few seconds after which our conscious mind says “I’ve decided.”  In a gambling experiment, people learnt instinctively to avoid a duff pack of cards, long before they could verbalize this learning, and even longer before they could rationalize it.

Art, oddly, seems to have proceeded in the opposite direction.  The paintings I remember from the old RA shows – the landscapes of Spencer Gore, Ken Howard’s quiet studios (the latter is still exhibiting: we’re not talking a totally lost art!) – moved by appealing to the unconscious.  “Wow, that’s beautiful!” I thought, and just wanted to stand in front of it.  Why?  It didn’t matter why.  Why was a silly question.  It was beautiful, and that beauty was transfixing and transformative.

When I visit an art gallery, that is the experience I am looking for.  I want to be captivated, to be drawn to something by a mysterious force.   The experience of that force is a healing, enhancing thing: it makes me aware of something in myself that I do not usually notice or live by (something, incidentally, that I share with both the artist and other people who also find the painting captivating).   I become bigger and nobler, and I have a new link with my fellow human beings, too.  I feel lifted, fresh-spirited, delighted in a new way; I come away more alert to the beauty of the world and prouder of my capacity recognize this.

It is the skill of the artist to make this happen, and none of it has to do with conceptual cleverness or the intellect.  I’m not saying that the intellect cannot deliver great things – I get a delight from a well-constructed argument.  And I’m not saying that the two should never meet: architecture in particular seems to be a fertile meeting ground for the intellectual, conscious consideration of requirements, knowledge of materials (etc.) and the irrational, unconscious creation of beauty (actually, the most beautiful exhibit in the exhibition was a design for a bank in Kuwait).

To me, all art is ultimately magic.  That doesn’t mean it can never deliver a social message, simply that if it does so, it still must be magical.  In books, it is that ‘I can’t put it down’ experience.  This isn’t necessarily the easy pull of a thriller.  I’m currently reading David Copperfield, and can’t be dragged away from the perpetual magic that emanates from its pages.  In music, some stuff just compels me to listen.

Cleverness is no substitute for magic.

Having said this, I enjoyed my visit to the exhibition, and will definitely be going back to the Summer show next year.  My daughter enjoyed it too, which is great.  I’m not sure I agree with her judgement that the finest exhibit was the picture of a cat in a cowboy hat – but another great thing about art is that different pieces have different magic for different people.

There are loads of rules for writing, but my favourite set comes from Kurt Vonnegut, whose ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ is dark but also funny – a mixture much needed in modern publishing, where humour seems to be out of fashion and pure misery in.

Vonnegut’s Eight Rules are:

1.  Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.  Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.  Every sentence must do one of two things; reveal character or advance the action.

5.  Start as close to the end as possible.

6.  Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.  Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.  Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I particularly like rules 1, 3 and 4.  Number 8 is one I have problems with – I rather like suspense, and think it drives action.  And a good twist and the end of a story is always powerful.  The last few lines of ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’ for example.  Or any ‘whodunnit’, of course.  Rules are, of course, made to be broken – but maybe only by people who have first followed and understood them.

First is the ‘star’.  JK Rowling is the obvious choice.  This writer is ‘one of a kind’ and world famous.  She can command any amount of money she asks.  She has the enthusiastic support of marketing departments, who can try out new and imaginative initiatives.

If you want to be one of these, you either have to be an original voice (JK, Alexander McCall Smith – or of course JD Salinger, who died this week), often writing in direct opposition to prevailing ideologies (school stories, humorous crime novels, monologues…) or work your way up through the ranks of existing genres (Ian Rankin, Henning Mankell). 

Great originals, it strikes me, found genres (Helen Fielding is a recent example).

Then there is the ‘solid pro’.  I can’t think of a better metaphor – the professional who writes carefully within the rules of a genre, not venturing out beyond that and not really wanting to (or desperately wanting to, but aware, perhaps, how rare it is to be able to make a good living out of writing.)

For the marketing people, there’s a pretty standard formula for selling these writers and their books, which is determined by the genres in which they work.

For the writer who wants to become one of these, the trick is to pick a genre – ideally one that you like – master its conventions, and stick to them.  A little pushing at the edges of the envelope is fine, but not too much.

Much so-called literary writing seems to me to be in genres, too, albeit of a more elevated type.  Think ‘magical realism’, ‘Indian booker novel’ or ‘reading group book’.  All of these seem to have pretty tight rules.  Saying this horrifies some people, but Shakespeare was happy to write genres – tragedy, romantic comedy, history, sonnets, plus a few oddities like The Tempest.

Thirdly, there is the ‘niche player’, who writes for a small group of loyal fans.  This is arguably the place for the true artist – but not if he or she wants to make a living.  I learnt this the hard way with my Chinese detective series: some people loved them, but not enough to coax more than the measliest advances out of publishers, and it became economically impossible to carry on with the series.  (To be fair to myself, I also wanted to write other things: If all I’d ever wanted to do was write Chinese detective stories, then I’d have found a way of carrying on doing them.)

Marketing departments have no budget for these writers.   Many aspiring writers feel that a niche player is all they want to be – but the problem for them is getting anyone to notice them.  The economics of publishing aren’t exactly favourable to this kind of writing venture.  The way to sell it to a publisher is that you are a potential star – as was JK, when the first volume of Harry Potter landed on the desk of her editor at Bloomsbury.  But as everyone is doing that, it’s not exactly an easy trick to pull off.

The other route for someone who wants to stay out of the genre trap is to self-publish.  But this is something of a graveyard for fiction writers – self-publishing is best for non-fiction writers (who have a ready ‘market’ of enthusiasts for whatever they write about) or, at a pinch, novelists with a strong local feel.

Maybe it’s best to slot into a genre and try and expand the edges a bit.  I guess that’s what I’ve ended up trying to do with The Enlightenment Club, which is essentially a comedy, but with some dark bits in it.  Time will tell if this strategy has proven a good one for me.

Option one is to run away from it. Try and avoid it at all costs. ‘Anything for a quiet life.’

Option two is to suffer in silence (quietly thinking victim-thoughts). ‘Bloody typical. Just my luck…’

Option three? Fall apart (an exaggerated version of ‘2’ above)

But there is a fourth option: treat it as an opportunity to grow. See adversity as an opportunity to learn about oneself, life and people close to you (as in the old adage, ‘now you’ll really find out who your friends are…’) It’s an opportunity to change, to become stronger, wiser, better at standing up for oneself, more compassionate to others…

I’ve spent a lot of my life doing 1 and 2. I’ve usually avoided 3, thank God, though I sometimes flirt with it in my mind. 4? That’s new and exciting.

Often I look back on my life and squirm with embarrassment at things I did wrong. But why not just think: ‘That was actually rather comical. And what did I learn?’. I used to think my lack of worldly success and excess of inner turmoil was due to having made too many mistakes in life. But supposing these are actually due to not having made enough mistakes? Not having tested enough beliefs and theories, not having found out what enough people really thought and felt, not having understood that ‘fortune favours the brave’? (Instead, I had a maxim: ‘Fortune’s a bitch, so keep out of her way.’)

Past mistakes are only crosses to bear if we see them as such.

In the past, I was afraid of adversity. I thought it was a judgement on me, by some kind of God: if I was finding things difficult, that was because I was a bad person. If I could avoid adversity, I would not have to face damnation. (And actually, it was worse than this. I secretly felt I was damned anyway, so the trick became avoiding any kind of test that would reveal this.)

More generally, I was afraid of making changes and decisions, as I thought they were ‘all or nothing’ things. My biggest project this year has been ghosting Robbie Steinhouse’s decision book, and it has taught me a huge amount about these processes, especially that they are slow things, to be brought about ‘artfully’, flexibly and elegantly.

Do the thoughts above apply everywhere?

There are a tiny handful of past deeds I am still appalled by. But even here, there are positive and negative ways of looking at these. Positive: use them as ‘reference experiences’ – I will never, never, never, never, never make that mistake again. Negative is 2 or 3 above.

Also, some adversity may be so crushing that calls for positive responses sound tinny. But there still remains the question – what’s the alternative? Take time to mourn terrible loss – but in the end, you either give in to the forces of negativity or beat them. There is no alternative.

How do we see life? In one sentence… Right now, my best shot is that life is a series of challenges. We have to meet them: they won’t go away. And they never stop. We overcome one, then another comes along (the retirement so many people crave is actually a whole new set of challenges: how to best use your time; how to spend time 24/7 with your partner; how to deal with advancing age; in the end, how to face death…)

I used to think this was a kind of terrible burden, like that of Sisyphus, forever pushing a rock up a hill, which then rolled all the way down again. Oblivion (to which there are many routes) was the only way out. But now I see that the myth is incorrect. We sometimes get the rock to the top of the hill, or we get it as far as we need to. And it’s always a different rock and a different hill. And anyway, even if the rock rolls back quite a lot of the time, this is what we’re built to do. We need ways to express our life-energy. It’s through meeting challenges that we grow (and all the other nice things outlined in ‘4’ above). We meet and bond with people through tackling challenges, not through sitting at the bottom of the hill moaning or hiding.

OK, sometimes we fail, but even then, the rock rolls down to a different place than the one from which we started. And that is in itself a challenge – dealing with failure.

Going back to last week’s post, the philosophy of Nietzsche helped my understand this great truth. But so has my work on the decision book – such is the benefit of ghosting; you get to work with some very inspirational people.

Anyway, this has put me in a very positive mood for the new decade. There’s a lot to do, but I can get out there and do it. May all readers of these blogs face the 2010s with similar energy and determination. Good luck to us all!

On reading his work – or some of it, anyway – I encounter a strange mixture of poetry, profound insight and man-in-pub-who’s-had-one-too-many generalizations.  What I never do is get bored, which is a danger with reading more conventional Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy (or incomprehensible French post-everything-ism).

To get the bad stuff out of the way first, Nietzsche’s views on women seem to me unworthy of a man of his intellect and sensitivity.  Perhaps he didn’t have enough experience: in his day, the sexes were much more segregated than they are now, and the women he did know were rather rum – his great love Lou Andreas Salome sounds a bit of a tease, and his sister was a raving anti-Semite.  But still…

Similarly, his view of the mass of humanity is too bleak.  Are huge swathes of our fellow human beings ‘superfluous’?  I’ll say more about his later.

When he stops harrumphing about women, the plebs etc., Nietzsche has glorious things to say about the life-force and its divinity.  He had little time for religion, but would have made a great pagan, as he was filled with love of life.  ‘I should only believe in a God that knew how to dance,’ he wrote.  His ‘superman’ was above all someone who felt, celebrated and lived by the joyfulness of life, unimpeded by the self-pity inculcated by certain styles of religion.

He is particularly scathing about what we now call passive-aggressive people who hide behind protestations of virtue when they are actually trying to score points off others (usually off people who know how to have fun better than they do).  His dislike of ‘equality’ stems from this, as passive-aggressives are often levellers-down.

Nietzsche understood that the path to wisdom is a rocky one, and that people on that path often make themselves look stupid in the eyes of the purely practical (or attract envy from the timorous).  It is from this understanding that his dislike of the majority springs: the majority will often damn or at least belittle a spirit seeking authenticity.  Is he right about this?  I rather accept that the mass of people as a mass are a bit dim, but as individual human beings most of us find quiet, private ways of expressing our beauty and wisdom – away from the prying eyes of philosophers!  Also, the act of disdaining others is itself damaging.  It may be a necessary, temporary defence for the original but unconfident individual, but it is not in the long term sustaining and life-enriching.  Better to look for the good in people, while at the same time being aware of their faults.  Nietzsche did not seem to understand this.

But still, his understanding of the search for meaning, of its difficulty and its centrality to the well-lived passionate life, puts him way ahead of most philosophers, who seem to be rather schoolmasterly observers of life rather than bloodied but unbowed participants in it.  ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ he once wrote.  I can overlook even his arrogance and misogyny because of that.

The journey to genuine selfhood is something I’ve found pretty difficult – not to selfishness (that’s easy), but to understanding who I really am, what I really believe and what I have to do to make my life worthwhile.  I get embarrassed too easily, and behind that lurks a deeper fear of nihilism – both of these make the honesty (with self and others) and mistake-making necessary to real personal development hard.  I hope I have done honour to these things in the character of Stella.

On a wider front, our pluralist, competitive, individualistic, emotional, self-improving culture seems to owe a lot to Friedrich Nietzsche, or at least to have developed in ways he foresaw.  My lecturer should have stuck around…

It got me thinking about comedy again, and what its message is and how important that message is. I guess one way of looking at gentle comedy is to say that it is about how people (or some people) learn; about what price in embarrassment, dismantling of unrealistic dreams (etc.) they have to pay for experience and wisdom – for learning how the world works, what’s fair and unfair, what you can expect from life and what you can’t, what you can expect from other people and what you can’t, and generally the necessity of big basic values like kindness, consideration for others, honesty, courage, pride, effort, forgiveness, optimism and, of course, love.

They do this learning by bumping into the brick wall of life: other people and their wants, needs, expectations etc.  They need a certain feistiness to do this – or at least to do this with a big enough bump to be dramatic and funny.  In my own novel, Stella is rather a quiet person.  Is she too quiet to be a true comic heroine?  I’m not sure.  But she is who she is, and I love her (in the way authors love their favourite characters!) and feel a powerful need to tell her story.  Maybe this means another Chris West unpublishable novel – time will tell.  In the end, she learns, which is the destiny of the true comic hero or heroine; she learns a better balance between her own needs and those of others (and an improved capacity to merge the two) and to be more forgiving and less silently furious (and to stop taking her rage out on herself).  Another character (I’m not going to give it all away, in case the book does get published, by me or someone else) doesn’t learn, and suffers.  A third character doesn’t learn, but lands on his feet anyway – ainsi donc la vie.

I contrast gentle comedy (which essentially believes that the world has some good lessons to teach us) with raging comedy, which rages at some unjust aspect of the world – this is what Robert McKee looks for in comedy.  Maybe there is also existential comedy, which doesn’t even accept the notion of ‘injustice’: the world is just random and mad, and that’s all there is to it.

To me, gentle comedy is actually the deepest of these, as it relates to the real journey of life, which I see as a struggle to make one’s true self positive, life-affirming and loving.  It’s a hard struggle, as human beings are full of contradictory passions and the world can be random and mad.  It’s also one where the price of failure is high.  So I don’t see work that reflects this struggle as trite.  Nor is such work unrealistic: the struggle can be, and is, won, all the time, by lots of people.  Optimistic work can be trite of course – that’s the skill of the great gentle comic, to avoid that trap, and show how bloody hard the struggle can be, without making it seem impossible or pointless (or not funny any longer).  Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale has always struck me as a good model for this.  There’s some pretty dark stuff in there, but good triumphs in the end.

A lot of so-called ‘serious’ literature seems to rather cop out from this – it often seems to focus on people who lose the struggle and end up alienated.  This can be interesting if the struggle was noble and close, but not nearly as interesting as stories of people where the struggle is successful.  And there’ll be a lot fewer laughs.

I hear the objection: the world isn’t just ‘a bit nasty’; it is a place where truly terrible things happen.  Isn’t comedy somehow trivial in the face of these – the 9 / 11 atrocity, the continuing poverty of a billion people, the threat of global catastrophe?  But these things are only atrocious because they are an insult to something higher, and that something is the dignity and value of the human beings who will suffer from it.  And that dignity and value is celebrated by comedy.

It’s no accident that people faced with dire circumstances often use comedy to protect themselves, to reassert their humanity.

Behind the spirit of comedy lies the message of forgiveness.  ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’  In comedy, the stupidest deeds can be forgiven if the perpetrator turns round, admits their folly, realizes there is a better way to live and follows that path.

The objection again – every deed?  Even the worst crimes like murder or sustained cruelty?  I’m not sure.  I believe that people who do these things have layers of pomposity around them – after all, what gives them the right to inflict misery on others, other than their sense of overweening self-importance?  (Often this is a reaction to an even more overweening sense of self-hatred, but that is also a false overreaction to life and themselves and ‘what it means to be human’.)  Maybe comedy can’t directly look at atrocities, but it can certainly undermine the arrogance of the people who commit them, and reassert the value of the victims (not as ‘victims’, the tabloid way, but as people).  And maybe, just maybe, it can look at atrocities directly – it would be a brave comic writer who set a piece of work in a concentration camp or a building about to be destroyed by terrorists, but if someone had been through such an ordeal and said they had found humour both present and a consolation at that time, I would have undying respect for such a person.

The comedy I like best is gentle, ironic, fun-poking.  But I accept there is another kind: raging, darker, more existential.  In modern stand-up, do you like Michael McIntyre or Frankie Boyle?  (Actually, I like both.)  I do not accept that the former, gentler comedy is somehow less authentic than the latter, darker stuff.  Gentleness is a virtue, not a vice.  The gentle comic knows full well there is darkness out there (and in here), but believes that a powerful defence against this darkness is life lived according to civilized values (kindness, and so on; the virtues I mentioned in my first paragraph).  He or she is a bit like the New York mayor, who by cleaning up graffiti, litter etc. actually cut the murder rate in the city.

Having said that, in The Enlightenment Club, I have tried to write a fundamentally gentle, kind-hearted comedy, but with a sense of edge to it, an awareness that there is a terrible darkness that souls can plummet into.  Maybe the experiment won’t work, but it seems worth trying.  The spirit of comedy – which, as I write this piece, has turned in my mind from an ‘it’ to a mighty deity, worthy of a place on Olympus – seemed to ask me to do it, and I am his loyal follower.

To say this is not to criticize my parents for not making me aware of it: I think it is something one can only understand as an adult.  It is the force that comes from being a whole person, in command of oneself, responsible for one’s actions, and from using this power in the way it is meant to be used.

It is a very ‘social’ force.  It has learnt that on our own, we can achieve very little.  It is very humble in some ways, and incredibly mighty in others.  It is not the force of the aggressive (and secretly scared) young man who thinks life is a struggle of all against all.  It brings itself into play in close relationships where those pointless power games have been seen through and transcended – it puts itself at the disposal of the ‘owner’, but also of anyone with whom he or she co-operates from the heart.  (I say ‘from the heart’, because co-operation that becomes tainted with power games is no outlet for this force, which in such cases turns away in sadness at what might have been.) 

I’m not sure if it can live without others: maybe it just fritters away in solitude.  I certainly think it craves company, like a child wanting playmates (which is nature telling that child that his or her future is out there in the world, interacting with others).  Yet it is not ‘needy’ in the sense that a lovelorn teenager is needy, desperate for confirmation of their worth via the affection of another.  It knows its value, and can wait for worthy partners.  But it cannot wait forever – there is too much to be done out there!

It is ‘individualism’ – once individualism moves on from egotism and telling the world to eff off, and becomes a great shout of triumph at what we human individuals can do, make and become.  It expresses itself in openness and trust, in kindness and love, in affection, in the joy of working towards shared goals.  Its enemies are deceit, manipulation, point-scoring; deeper and darker, its enemies are cruelty, selfishness, the agonized machinations of the narcissistic ego.

It does not desire fame: it seeks close relationships with a few fellow human beings, not the brief attention of the masses.  If fame points its searchlight at it, it behaves with dignity – but it is essentially private and personal.  (It is dismissive of great public schemes of virtue, knowing that virtue lies in how you treat other individual human beings, not in the generalities and ‘politics’ you spout: it looks at the great ideologies of the last century and shakes its head in sadness at the havoc these caused; it looks at the religious fundamentalism of the current era and – just for a moment – wonders if mankind will ever see sense.)

It does not desire wealth, but it does not despise wealth either.  It knows wealth is often the result of hard work in the service of others, but even when wealth is not a result of this, it does not seek to get on its high horse and judge.  (It’s not really into judging others, anyway – leave that for the point-scorers.  ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged…’)  Wealth is, in truth, indifferent to it.  OK, maybe it is a little dismissive of people who can’t pay their way in life (unless they are truly afflicted), but beyond that…  It knows that real wealth is who you are – the values you actually live by and the people you love and work with – not your bank balance, car, address etc..

In case this all sounds appallingly goody-goody, it is not the Christian notion of ‘selfless service of others’.  It is very self-ful, not the narcissistic ego ‘look at me!’ self, but something infinitely wiser and deeper, but still clearly a self: this is about me.  And you, and your self too, of course.  It does not ‘serve’ others but works alongside them, helping them become and give of their best.  And these ‘others’ are carefully chosen.  This power can be ruthless if it feels it is being messed about by people who are not ready to work with it: its energies are too subtle and too precious to waste.  (It does not despise such ‘unready’ people, but has to protect itself from them.)  The true Christian, wading out into that great sea of neediness in prisons and addiction treatment centres and handing out love left right and centre, is an object of slightly puzzled admiration: ‘But don’t they suck you dry?’

At this moment in my life, to live by this force remains a part-truth and a continuing aspiration rather than the whole truth of who I am.  There’s still a lot of pain and vanity and fury and egotism and other negative stuff inside.  But I’m working towards the whole truth.  I am lucky to have some wonderful people around who will help me get there.  (I say this, but I do not believe they are that rare – I have a hunch that the world is actually full of good, strong, loving people: these ones just happen to be the ones close to me.)  And I will help them get where they want to be, too: that’s the point of all this.

I feel hugely lucky to have come to know this force, not just intellectually but in my heart (not lucky in the sense of luckier than others, but luckier than the person I once thought I was; lucky to be this wonderful thing called a human being, with all this energy, creativity and capacity for love and affection).  I am pained when I see how often I fall short of it.  I am determined to fight on and grow towards its bright and life-enhancing light.

Otherwise, it can just leach away, or, worse, lead to a kind of ‘equal and opposite’ reaction – a point that was first made by Jacques Lacan (a writer whose work I normally find incomprehensible, but who certainly hit something here.)  If your mind has been programmed for not much pleasure, for example by a puritan upbringing, too much of the stuff can just short-circuit the system with painful results (Lacan called this ‘jouissance’).  How much pleasure can you take?

But maybe it’s not just about amount of pleasure, but about quality.  I think some kinds of pleasure are inherently more lasting and stable than others.

For the Christian, the most lasting and stable pleasure is that of knowing God’s love – the quote after which I have entitled this piece comes from an eighteenth century hymn by John Newton (which I remember singing in school).  As a ‘possibilist’ I can certainly accept that as one potential source of solid joy, but I would like to look at others, just in case Nietzsche was right after all!

Looking at the writings of the British psychoanalytic school, there is a clear and powerful belief in love as a solid joy and lasting treasure.  Fairburn postulated that our need for love was our deepest motive, and Bowlby showed what happened when it was not given to the growing child.  (So The Beatles were right!)  I certainly think that a loving family is a marvellous source of love, and a wonderful safe place where love gets cycled round and round (despite the odd argument, falling-out etc.)  Family life got a lot of stick from so-called progressive people when I was growing up, and looking back I’m afraid they were talking total crap.  To truly love another human being is the most ennobling – and wisdom-granting – experience we can have.

Another deep source of joy is our simple capacity for fun – a deceptively deep connection to those sources.  Fun is a sudden letting rip of energy and joie-de-vivre with no agenda or egoism.  Yippee!  I stress the ‘no agenda or egoism’ bit.

Neither of these two joy sources get a lot of mention in so-called serious philosophy, but I think this is a big mistake.

It’s also interesting to look at the enemies of joyfulness.  I’m afraid that public life seems full of these – by which I don’t just mean ‘work’, but politics and the more general placing of ourselves in a social context.  Envy and concern about status can ‘get to us’ and kill joy, even well away from work.  Work itself, of course, can necessitate dealing with fucked-up, energy-sucking people (as well as delightful, fun, life-enhancing people –  a third source of joy!)  Work is important, financially and spiritually – it’s more than Philip Larkin’s ‘old toad’ – but putting it right at the heart of our lives seems just plain wrong to me. 

As a young man, I thought a lot about politics, what was fair, unfair in society etc.  As I grow older, I worry less and less about this.  Human flourishing is not about success or social position, but about developing one’s ability to tap into solid, lasting sources of joy, the placing of this ability at the heart of our being, and the capacity to then spread this joy out to (at least a few) others.  Too elevated a social position (or too strong a concern with elevating one’s social position) can force false idols into the rightful place of a true, living faith in humanity – one’s own, and other people’s – and (possibly) in God.  That doesn’t mean that vicious inequality and exploitation are ‘OK’, but it does mean that removing these won’t of itself solve humanity’s problems.  We all have to learn how to live happily and on good, honourable terms with our fellow human beings, and this truth will never change, whatever form society takes.