MT Spaces

When I am working alone or with very close friends who I talk at, I am in a hugely safe space. I am using this blog like a diary of my creative process to deceive my mind into thinking its private because I think so much time is wasted being afraid to make mistakes, be wrong, or to produce rubbish. Those things are important. The only reason I could think not to do this is that it's a terrifying prospect. But that's not a good enough reason not to.

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Sleep, O! my mother, sleep

(N.B. To the atheist or agnostic reader I would ask you suspend your disbelief for the purposes of this article; the narrative of Christ both in its biblical and apocryphal forms requires that the reader function as part of an addressed chorus. In order to properly analyse the meaning of the narrative in literary terms one must be able to insert oneself into the role of fallen man redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice irrespective of one’s own personal faith or lack thereof because the narrative of Christ is not one that resonates in a vacuum but incorporates the reader as an integral literary function; without the exegete there can be no exegesis.)

As we are now in the season of Advent (some of you may know I have been a church musician for the last eleven years) my compositional thoughts have been turning to Christmas and the image of the Nativity.

I came across an excellent reflection on the link between Christmas and Easter written for the season of Lent, and this proved an interesting provocation for me to discover literary and imagistic parallels of the seasons of Christ’s birth and death and to render these in poetry and music.

Consider the image of Michelangelo’s Pietà in Florence, arguably the finest example of the Pietà subject: Mary holding in her arms the body of Christ is a common trope in Christian art, as is the Virgin cradling her newborn son in the Nativity. In the former the Virgin is sometimes depicted weeping, though a solemnly stoic dignity was often favoured by artists, certainly those working in a ‘classical’ style. Seldom is weeping the case when Mary is cradling the infant Christ and understandably so: it would be easily misconstrued. (Further note that Mary often does not age in her depictions from Nativity to Lamentation, her agelessness being an artistic convention to convey purity.)

Yet my own poetic imagination cannot help but see the tears of pain and joy of Mary at the scene of the Nativity and finds their absence notable. There are two times when weeping is most crucial: at the joy of birth and at the grief of death. Shedding tears is our most profound physical expression of catharsis, and in the Christian narrative the duality of birth and death has additional resonance: Christ is not born and then dies, as in the case of mortals. He is born in order to die: his birth is simply one mechanism in the preordained narrative of his life. His birth in human form not only humanises God, but it allows him to die as an act of substitutionary atonement.

Yet while Christ takes human form to condescend to human kind it is in the image of Mary that we find unadulterated humanity. Christ is man and God. Mary is a woman. Chosen, yes, but still entirely human. Even the most affectedly Marian of catholic Christians cannot claim her to be God. Thus, the image of the stoic Mary is one that feels incomplete to me: deified, more than simply human, and this makes her less accessible to the subject meditating upon her image.

Thus, it was on this parallel of the tears of Mary that I turned my poetic and musical attentions, writing this small hymn told from the perspective of the infant Christ to his joyfully-weeping mother:

Sleep, O! my mother, sleep, There will be time enough to weep For I am born to die, To be Christ broken, Christ woken Yet without a cry.

Sleep, mother, save your strength; The labour’s passed the cruel night’s length, The day will shine as gold To light Christ growing All-knowing I will not grow old.

If you can’t help but gain Those tears of joy to see again Your sweetest child to smile Whom you bore gladly, More sadly Wear those tears a while.

There is an intentional straightforwardness to the style of this text which belies a great deal of its complexity. Much of this simplicity lies in the use of conventional rhymes: sleep/weep, die/cry, gold/old, gladly/sadly. Usually these are a bugbear to me but here they seemed wholly appropriate, and fit with a general tradition of rhyme in hymnody. One could find innumerable examples of these specific rhymes in the New English Hymnal and as such they seem to be an intrinsic part of the particular rhyming lexicon inherent in Catholic and Anglican musical culture. The one way in which this poem might fail is in its affect which draws on the melancholic tradition of Elizabethan writing. This often seems self-indulgent to modern ears more accustomed to irony than sincerity, yet I think in many other ways it is a poetic success and I am personally very fond of the Elizabethan style (as well as seeking an unselfconscious emotionality in this piece), so for those of you who are interested my analysis follows here. But first, some wonderful Antonio Lotti (1667-1740): the Crucifixus being a setting of the words of the Nicene Creed in Latin from ‘He was crucified under Pontius Pilate...’ to ‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom shall have no end’.

The first thing to note is that the last three lines incorporate internal rhyme to add intensity and poignancy to the conclusion of the poem and thus subtly to direct the attention of the reader/listener to the poem’s thetic point: the tears of Mary will only again find equal motive at Christ’s death on the cross, a truly horrifying end and yet inescapable. His birth has set into motion God’s plan.

There is also considerable ambiguity of meaning in several of the lines. ‘To be Christ broken / Christ woken / Yet without a cry’ reads both as a rephrasing of ‘The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, / but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes’ (’Away in a manger’) and as a gentle consolation that after the breaking (of His body) Christ will wake from his sleep to new life. We might think here of the final lines of John Donne’s sonnet: ‘ One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!’, itself a reworking of 1 Corinthians 15:26, ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’.

Christ cries out at his death, ‘it is finished’ and yet I have always read that as declamatory more than pained. Knowing the importance of his own death and that it would be recorded, it was important for him to say something. The ‘it’ may refer to his torture, but it may also refer to the completion of his task which, finding its summit in his act of redemption, was a process spanning thousands of years. Thus, while the image of Mary seems incomplete without tears, the image of Christ crying - at least out of pain - feels overblown. As Christ is a part of the threefold nature of God, a solemn, quasi-Buddhist acceptance of fate seems perfectly natural to me. If he does not cry as a baby, it seems incongruous to me that he might cry from torture. One might think of the deeply disturbing and yet mesmerisingly-dignified self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức in Vietnam, 1963. Reputedly, he didn’t make any expression of pain as he burned alive.

Christ is ‘our guardian and our guide’: through emulation of the Christ nature we fulfil God’s purpose, and thus Christ’s instruction to Mary is to save her tears: one must neither rejoice in one’s own happiness nor grieve at the harm that befalls one, but simply be in full acceptance of God’s plan. Again, this reflects the Buddhist lens through which I can’t help but read the Christian narrative, having been for a significant period of my life a committed Vajrayana Buddhist, but it also reflects a common teaching about prayer: one must not pray for things, but in order to better understand God and to grow in a relationship with him.

However, a contradictory reading of this line (’Yet without a cry’) yields something similarly compatible with the thetic thrust of the poem: there is an expectation of tears later. ‘There will be time enough to weep’: not only Christ’s figurative ‘weeping’ at the suffering of humanity for which he died, but the suffering of the stabat mater dolorosa: Mary at the foot of the cross.

‘The day will shine as gold / To light Christ’s growing’ is an ambiguous line, too, and reads both as the ‘day’ of Christ’s glorious life lighting his growth so that Mary can watch him grow with a mother’s joy and so that we might witness his life through scripture, and also as ‘Christ is growing to light’. Not unlike a flower (though hardly the image I intended) Christ is drawn to the light of God and grows in that as an example to all. The idea here is the same as Micah 7:8, ‘Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.’ This idea of acceptance - of falling, of sitting in darkness - is common to many biblical passages.

Of course, at the conclusion of the poem Christ tells Mary that if she must cry, she should cry not with unadulterated joy but with mixed joy and sadness (’More sadly / wear those tears a while’). I.e: the birth is not only a jubilant event, but one that predetermines unimaginable suffering for this woman and her son. And it accepts that we, as human beings, unlike the twofold-natured Christ, cannot help but cry.

The irony of the poem is that Mary cannot know her son’s fate. The voice of Christ unpacks and unpicks destiny and addresses his advice to Mary, yet as the infant Christ, this communication would, obviously, be impossible. It is only through our post-hoc reading of the entire narrative that we can fully appreciate the meaning of the Nativity, and thus the poem, as the omniscient and timeless human vocalisation of God’s plan seeks to bridge Christmas and Easter, birth and death, and their binary relationship of joyful and grief-fuelled weeping as expressed through the most human and accessible of all the figures in the narrative: Mary the woman and the mother.

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Drama as thesis and antithesis: a structuralist model of the place of drama in the field of ‘writing’ and how we might approach the question of what makes ‘good’ work

The late Brian Sewell remarked on this painting that part of its genius is the way that the red and green, in close proximity, ‘excite’ one another. This is little more than a statement of fundamental colour theory: colours on the opposite ends of the colour wheel make each other more vivid and striking, but it serves as a useful analogy for my approach to writing, in particular drama.

Allow me, if you will, to talk about ‘conceit’.* I refer to the idea of the literary conceit. Wikipedia defines it as well as any other source, and its definition reads: ‘By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.’

This is commonly discussed in relation to the Metaphysical poets, but it is a concept that extends far beyond literature and applies to the field of aesthetic psychology. It is not merely that the subject is invited into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison, it is that the surprising juxtaposition of disparate ideas provokes pleasure. It is an aesthetic experience and one that we encounter across the arts. Of course, this is only if the juxtaposition is successful and I will unpick that more a little later on. For now, let’s look at ways in which the conceit is commonplace, despite being an idea usually only referred to in relation to literature.

A joke, for instance, brings disparate ideas together in a way that amuses through that surprise, often achieving this with a pivot concept or word. Consider this politically-incorrect one-liner of mine: ‘I recently bought a suit from an epileptic. It fits.’ The word ‘fits’ provides a pivot from the idea of a suit to the idea of a seizure, two things that have very little else in common. The ingenuity of this parallel is pleasing in a way we find amusing, and is heightened by the fact that it’s slightly shocking to make light of what is a serious problem. Levity in the face of something that is usually treated with gravity is a ubiquitous* juxtaposition in humour. And that’s why I like it as a joke: you are not laughing at epileptics, you are laughing at the juxtapositions and the elegant way in which they are handled. With red and green, the disparity in close proximity causes an ‘excitement’: not between red and green themselves, but in the viewing subject. Just as this disparity, so wonderfully handled by Caravaggio, depends on an understanding of how the human eye sees colour, so too does the pleasure ‘inherent’ in the conceit depend upon an understanding of our aesthetic psychology, which ultimately means: how can we categorise positive human responses to artistic stimuli and exploit that to ‘strengthen’ our work.

Here’s a rant from Lloyd, AKA Lindybeige, whose videos I usually like, though I think in this one he misses the point that the enjoyment of analysing humour happens inside the writer and is part of jokesmithery. It still holds true that analysing a joke makes it less funny because it takes the element of surprise and waterboards it until it begs you for mercy. Again, this is just to break things up, it’s really not relevant to my argument so feel free to skip it. Or watch it and ask yourself: did he make that collar? Yes, Reader, he did!

Put another way, this notion of the conceit is the idea of antithesis and synthesis*, a concept that, in a recorded form, goes back to Plato but almost certainly is just a part of the make-up of human psychology.

All art does this, and the extent to which we derive intellectual pleasure from a piece of art depends a great deal on how successful we believe the handling of the juxtaposition to be. ‘Success’, in this case, is a question of degree. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, E really does equal MC squared. The ‘equals’ sign is the ultimate in the union of two ideas and might be termed ‘absolute success’: it is irrefutably true. If you don’t understand it the problem is in the subject, not in the object. All a priori truths share this characteristic, and the more apparently-disparate the ideas on either side of the =, the more beautiful the equation. Of course, equations do not combine real antitheses, they identify the synthesis that was always present in things we simply misconceptualised as ‘antithetical’.

But a priori truths are true self-referentially. 2+2=4 is true because the meaning of 2 is half of four, so 2+2 necessarily must produce 4. ‘Four’ is not a ‘real’ thing, it is a signifier of an abstract concept, but it does have bearing on the real world because if I have four sweets and you steal one I know the difference between four and three and will come and kick your arse. What is amazing is that we have a concept of numbers at all. That is a truly mysterious thing. The fact that a priori truths are irrefutably and self-referentially true renders them extremely beautiful, but it is a purely intellectual enjoyment. For the purposes of this article I will call the intellectual aesthetic experience ‘Platonic’ (in the mathematical sense of the word) and the emotional, subjective aesthetic experience ‘Romantic’. I use these terms because the logical conclusion of the former kind of experience is completely intellectual, while the logical conclusion of the latter does not involve the intellect at all, except insofar as one might rationalise the experience post-hoc.

(Here’s a bit of music. The prelude is irrelevant to my argument here: it’s the fugue that matters. The fugue, as a form, depends upon two themes: the subject (thesis) and countersubject (antithesis), having sufficiently independent melodies to be truly antithetical, while the fact they fit together (synthesise) and each adds to the other without being in any way diminished as independent entities renders it ingenious. I continue to be obsessed with fugues, playing, analysing and writing them. And this is by the master of the form: J.S. Bach, who I believe to have possessed the single greatest intellect our species has yet produced. And I say that without hyperbole. What he does is as profoundly beautiful and austere as the = and there is not much art I can say that about, not even Shakespeare.

In art and culture, as opposed to logic, the success of the juxtaposition is more subjective, but I think we would all agree that there are some principles that render them intersubjective as opposed to open-to-any-interpretation. David Hume explored these principles in an essay that I can’t remember the name of (though it may have simply been called Aesthetics). It dealt with the idea that the connoisseur whose deep knowledge of something increases the validity of his enjoyment of it is a model around which to base canonical thought.

I don’t like this argument because, well, it’s a bit vague. Rather, I think human aesthetic experience depends upon a number of factors: universal features of human psychology and cognition; deviances from the ‘norm’ in the psychology of the aesthetic subject (quirks); the extent of the aesthetic subject’s knowledge of the aesthetic object (which might manifest as context); and the interest of the subject in the topic of the object (or the object itself).

In mathematics ‘interest’ does not enter into it. As many have remarked: mathematics is worthy of study for its own sake. If you don’t ‘get’ it, that’s your loss. In art, interest is, sadly, a factor. It would be a wonderful world if everyone had a mindful interest in everything, but they don’t. This is why we say ‘know your audience’. Writing is communication whether it takes the form of an essay or a novel and you have to know your audience’s propensity to derive aesthetic enjoyment from the work you are making or it will fail to say anything to them. In fact, it may say everything, but if you have expressed it all in a way that means people can’t understand it then you have not created a work of art, you have created a provocation for people to make a piece of their own art in their minds. That might do for Damien Hurst, but it will not do for us. We cannot say ‘we are artists’ if all we are doing is encouraging others to engage in a process of artistic creation.

Just as a comedian can rant and rant about how his audience didn’t ‘get’ a joke that he or she thought was very funny and clever, so too we can blame our audience for not appreciating our work. But really, the fault lies with us. If we considered more rigorously how our work would, well, ‘work’ in the mind of the audience we would find ways to express it in a way they would  ‘get’.

Consider Van Gogh. I find it infuriating when people say that the phillistines around him didn’t appreciate his work. Of course they didn’t! They were born far too early! He wasn’t making work for a contemporary audience, he was making work for a future audience (whether he knew it or not). He believed in his own aesthetic faculties as ahead-of-his-time and was, as it turns out, very justified in doing this. He knew his audience: his audience was himself. That’s great if future generations are going to share your aesthetic psychology, but an audience of one does not sell many paintings.

Making sure the audience ‘gets’ our work means understanding those factors upon which aesthetic experience depends that I listed earlier: knowing the ‘quirks’ of your audience; knowing how people are cognitively ‘programmed’; keeping them interested; and ensuring people have sufficient information to be able to be receptive to the work and the ideas within it. Do that for future generations and you may well be a genius but you will also die poor. If you are ok with that, then all I can give you is huge respect. My approach is to take my ideas and to convey them in a way that people can understand. Yes, it’s a select group of people, but I do have an audience in mind. I am just hoping I don’t turn out to be a genius with myself as the only member of that group because I don’t, actually, want to die poor.

(Here’s another picture to break things up. This time it’s Stewart Lee who plays with audience expectation and deliberately confounds his audience at times as part of his act. He uses this device with such pleasing self-awareness to ‘destabilise’ his own set so that when it ‘re-stabilises’ it we feel an overwhelming catharsis that adds real punch to his punchlines. Total craftsman, I like Stewart Lee a lot.)

Many of these things come under the heading of ‘craft’. We draw on and create devices of plot, character, etc. to ensure interest is kept. We draw on and create expositional devices with which to communicate the necessary information. We have the ability to research our audience to find out what they respond to in the way of subject matter. But when it comes to how people are programmed, that’s where we can get truly creative.

Because people respond to argument. It is the life blood of thought. We enjoy being confronted with new ideas. We enjoy resisting them and being won over. We love to hear our own thoughts and ideas crystallised with elegance and power, though in this case it is usually the rhetorical devices that provide the synthesis, rather than there being a synthesis at the thetic heart of the piece, and that is polemic, not a good model for drama because it preaches to the converted and if that’s what you want to do write a fucking pamphlet and save us all the trouble of watching your plays! I will explain in part two of this essay why dramatic work must do more than this.

That is why art endures: because it is always, even if it is not immediately apparent, argument. But what we love more than the process of argument itself, is the synthesis it produces. Either slightly or greatly, one is always changed by having been exposed to an argument.

The argument of this essay is this: that there is a synthesis between all forms of writing based on a deep-structural commonality: ‘good’ writing is the synthesis of until-now-thought-of-as-antithetical ideas. The more ingenious the synthesis (usually because the antitheses are more disparate), the ‘better’ the work. Just as the more disparate the ideas in a joke, the funnier the punchline, the more antithetical the ideas in a dramatic work the greater the conflict present in it at a deep-structural level, and the more cathartic the resolution when the synthesis emerges. Conflict and resolution is not simply what happens to characters when they overcome obstacles, it must be derive intellectually from the thesis at the heart of your work also if your work is to have what we human beings figuratively call ‘depth’.

Fail in your craft, misjudge your audience, or overestimate the ingenuity of your synthesis and that synthesis will be obscured from the audience and you will fail to produce the desired result.

This article may be enjoyable. Some of you may not be finding it so, but you’ve probably stopped reading by now so it is likely that you, Reader, are enjoying the ride at least a little. If so, this is likely because you had not seen the connections between the things I am connecting, you understand what I’m actually saying, and you have an interest in the theory or writing or aesthetics.

But there is a reason I am a dramatist not an essayist. Clearly, I do both, but it is the former that I rate more highly. Why? Because drama is elevated essay.

It is not enough to say that drama is an essay or an argument. We must also look at what a drama can do with an argument that an essay itself cannot. As this post is quite long enough for anyone to digest over their morning coffee (at over 2,000 words) I will put part two in a second post, likely titled: ‘Drama as surface structure and when drama is more useful than essay (and more importantly, when it isn’t!)’

I will also, if I remember, write a post about thesis and synthesis in music, beginning with fugue and extending to sonata form and beyond. But I may well forget. Let’s hope I come back to re-read this article like the narcissist I am and see this paragraph!

*Note that the use of the ‘conceit’ concept could easily come across conceited. The word ‘ubiquitous’ is, itself, pretty ubiquitous. Synthesis and antithesis are antithetical concepts. Self-referentiality is pleasing in a very similar way to the conceit, but rather than bringing together disparate ideas, it creates a regression of the same idea. Sometimes this is only regressed once, but in some cases it can be regressed multiple times, or even to infinity. Consider a suggestion I have for the Uxbridge English Dictionary: Functionary. A dictionary of funk. If we take this idea to its logical conclusion we create an infinite regression, or endlessly-repeating self-referentiality. If a functionary is a funk dictionary, then a dictionary is a dick dictionary. Which makes a functionary a funk dictionary of dicks, and a funk dictionary of dictionaries about dicks, and a funk dictionary of dictionaries of dictionaries of dick. All of which is just semantics: of course who has a dictionary that defines different types of funk, dicks, or dictionaries? Because it is nonsensical it is not especially pleasing, but it is recurringly-meta, and, for better or worse, I find that a beautiful idea in the cold and austere way in which the self-referential meanings of mathematics are beautiful. I am sure there are better examples of this, but I invented this one so I thought it might as well get some use. I thought of putting it in a stand-up set and then realised that would be contradicting my own advice!

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Children's show review: Katie and the Mona Lisa

Edinburgh Festival Fringe children’s show review: Katie and the Mona Lisa, reviewed by The Scotsman’s Kelly Apter. ★★★ A lot of care and attention has gone into bringing James Mayhew’s picture book to the stage. A beautifully constructed...

As this blog is here to show things that don’t go quite to plan, go utterly wrong, or prove that success or failure is a spectrum, here’s the most unpleasant review of my show so far. We got a glowing review in the Edinburgh Reporter in which my songs were described as ‘catchy’, but here my songs ‘rarely penetrate the memory’. Just goes to show you shouldn’t accept criticism that is not constructive. All of the songs except two are based on a tiny handful of motifs which are intended to make the material more memorable as six songs in an hour could easily be forgettable with little opportunity for repetition or reprise. They also make the work hang together as a musical whole.

I will say one thing: since the script has been rewritten we have lost much of Katie and Lisa’s awareness of the fact they are on the run from the guard. They hide from him in an early scene and then we only see scenes with the guard looking for them, whereas originally Katie and Lisa were also expressing concern throughout the show that they might get caught.

This is something to talk to the bookwriter about, because I think it is a valid criticism and one that can be easily amended. No work is perfect when it first hits the stage, and so you must be willing to listen to constructive critique. Always good to remember that!

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Creative process as the Garden of Forking Paths

I wanted to make a post that explains to anyone who might want it an analogy that explicates an important approach to composing a large narrative work, be that a musical, a play, a novel, or some other long form. I find that many writers take a long time to develop the ‘feel’ of how to do this, as the number of variables involved in making decisions about what to write, what to edit, what to remove can result in the task feeling insurmountably complex.

The complexity of composing a big work shouldn’t be understated, but that complexity becomes more manageable the more experience one has of overcoming it, as you develop approaches to problem-solving that give rise to fewer problems in the future. Those who have made several large works will understand what I mean. Sondheim calls it ‘not painting yourself into a corner’. We’ve all been there. You make a decision about your work, even a very tiny one, and it naturally has implications for the other aspects of the work. If I choose to end a line of lyric that I want to rhyme with another end of a line and I choose the word ‘stump’, the possible meanings the rhyming line can express have been severely limited. This often means the rhyming line falls short of the perfection of the first line, and I am sure we are all familiar (from our work and the work of others) with the feeling that while we have ticked the ‘make a rhyme box’ we haven’t fully ticked box of the ‘and that line is also meaningful, beautiful, concise, poignant’ or whatever we want it to be.

Just as the butterfly flaps its wings and sets in motion the chain of events that will ultimately lead to a tornado, so too does each choice in the work dictate the availability of future choices. We have made not only the work, but our own ability to write, deterministic. That is to say we create something of inevitability through the exclusive act of choice: when we choose something we are not only actively choosing we are actively discounting the things we haven’t chosen.

This process is much like walking down a road. Each step I take in one direction makes it take longer and involve more effort if I decide I actually want to go somewhere in the opposite direction. Have you ever not known entirely where you’re going only to check a map to find you’ve been going quite the wrong way and you now need to go all round the houses to get back on track? It’s a frustrating feeling. Any writer who has shouted into the dead of of night ‘I just can’t get it to WORK!’ is experiencing this kind of frustration, only they’ve usually taken so many twists and turns along the way that they no longer know which route is the right one.

Embarking upon a new work, we see this road stretching out in front of us like a labyrinth and we feel excited but also scared of getting lost. We know it will be difficult to get to the centre of the maze.

And that’s where the experienced writer and the inexperienced writer differ. The inexperienced writer sees his or her journey through the maze as linear. Having only one body this is how we have come to understand movement from one point to another. And it’s absolutely the worst way to approach writing. And I wish I could go back in time and tell myself this analogy that follows, because it would have saved me so much time and so many low ebbs in which I felt I’d never be able to make a big cohesive work.

I will call this labyrinth the Garden of Forking Paths because it is not a maze with a finite number of possible routes, it is an infinite maze (see Jorge Louis Borges). When you are looking at the blank page you can do anything and that infinity is impossible to conceptualise let alone face. This is why making decisions is so important. But how do we prevent those decisions from leading to dead-ends that we cannot possibly predict?

The answer lies in plurality of thought. The mental journey through the maze cannot be a single journey. We must go on multiple simultaneous journeys. I can choose the word ‘stump’, but if I really want to craft a good lyric I will have alternatives in mind for if I cannot get ‘stump’ to work. If I want to talk about a steatopygic amputee I might easily use ‘stump’ and ‘rump’. But I might decide that ‘rump’ is an unlikely word for my character to sing, after all how many people use the word ‘rump’ seriously in conversation to refer to a human backside? So I try to go back and change the word ‘stump’, but there are no synonyms for it that sound at all natural. So now I’m painted into a corner.

Rather than approaching it like that, why not approach it like this: I want to express the meaning: since losing my leg I have gotten fatter because I cannot exercise. I ask: what words can I use in this? We think first: what about ‘stump’? And then before we start writing we think ‘what if I cannot make that work? How many alternatives do I have?’ The answer to that particular example (and hence why I chose it) is: not fucking many. So I think about other words that have more synonyms. ‘Leg’ is a possible word to use at the end of the line as it has a few rhymes. I look through a rhyming dictionary and see if there are any other words relating to the meaning I want to express. ‘Egg’ relates to food and so could relate to putting on weight, but it’s quite tenuous. ‘Peg’ may refer to a wooden leg which could work but it’s an uninventive rhyme. So I discount leg and consider something else.

I’m now making choices that have flexibility built into them, and think about some (though by no means all) of the consequences that result from my choice. The more one writes lyrics the more familiar one becomes with which words are versatile and which aren’t so much. I would be very unlikely even to consider using the word ‘leg’. But I might consider the word ‘fat’ as it has LOADS of rhymes. The only way to get better at this is to do it, but I promise you it does become easier as time goes on.

But that’s for lyric writing which is something someone writing a musical will get a shitload of experience of very quickly. Making decisions about form and structure, characterisation, narrative arc, and all of those massive things is something not only more complex, but being able to get that experience at all depends on having material to manipulate in the first place. It is said that musicals are not written, they are re-written, and I believe the same is true for all longform work: Just as building a house requires you to have bricks, so building a musical requires you to have at least some understanding of the voices of the characters, sketches of who the characters are, some musical material in the form of themes or motifs.

And how many times do you get halfway through building and you realise that it’s all gone wonky because you’ve chosen a pattern of coloured bricks for one pillar and don’t have the right colour bricks to make the second pillar symmetrical? Or, as an example in musical theatre writing, you use a melodic theme for one character and find that it is completely unsuited to the emotions that character experiences in the narrative that emerges. And so you’ve got a theme you can’t use as much as you want to, so you have to go back and change that theme. If you’ve used that theme as the basis for several vamp figures in some places where that theme is appropriate then all that material has to be changed. And that’s a PAIN IN THE ASS.

We call the process of composing a dramatic piece ‘dramaturgy’. Dramaturgy is how we analyse the material critically to try to arrange the various elements in the way most conducive to what we want the work to achieve. And hardly anyone talks about it, and so many people I meet don’t know what it is, even writers of dramatic works. Why? Because it’s something that you don’t become aware of until you’ve been a writer for long enough to have been through the process of structuring a whole piece.

This is one reason it is better to start writing smaller, more manageable works. It means you can go through the process of writing a musical from start to finish more times: you could write two, three, four short shows in the time it would take to write one big two-act musical. You would more quickly develop an instinct for what constitutes a ‘good’ choice (in the sense that it doesn’t prohibit other choices you are likely to want to make) and what constitutes a ‘bad’ choice (in the sense that it’s going to come back and punch you in the face) because you will have more experience to look back on. You will have made more mistakes which means you will make fewer in the future. And you will have seen more of your choices pay off so you’ll get a feeling for what kind of choices will work in future, too.

But the best starting point is not to see writing as a linear journey where each choice precludes others, but as a multiplicity of simultaneous journeys in which you think ‘a few moves ahead’, just as an experienced chess player keeps multiple strategies in their head to allow for the variables inherent in playing with an opponent making choices that you cannot predict but you can rank in order of likelihood. Chess is a great game for writers to learn to be good at because it is very much like that Garden of Forking Paths, with its high level of complexity, its large number of variables, and the fact that certain effects are more likely to result from certain causes based on the context of the journey thus far.

The novice thinks a few moves ahead, the master thinks many moves ahead. But start getting used to doing this now and before long it will become second nature, you will find that you can deal with far greater complexity than you thought possible, and you will spend far less time assaulting your poor, put-upon cephalic follicles.

So before you decide on that motif, figure out your narrative arc. Think ‘what affects/moods is this going to have to express?’ and then use that to inform what notes and rhythms you use for the motif.

Before you decide on whether that character is going to be nice or nasty, decide what you want to say to the audience and then think through what relationships you might depict on stage to communicate what you want to say. Use that to inform how you formulate your characters’ personalities.

There’s no right and wrong in the choices you make, there are just useful and not-so-useful choices and we’re all discovering which are which, even those people who have had a long and successful writing career. More often than not we make not-so-useful choices and have to go back and change them. It’s always worth asking: if I need to change this what will I be able to change it to? If that’s ‘sweet fuck all’ then change it NOW before something else depends on it being there.

And don’t be scared of showing your work to others. It’s only inexperienced writers who think ‘that doesn’t work so x will think I’m an idiot’. The first draft of much of what I write is total shit. There is no such thing as a good first draft, but there are first drafts that are easier to shape into something amazing and first drafts that are a series of dead ends. Stop worrying about ‘this lyric is shit’ and start thinking about ‘how can I approach writing to make it easier for myself to juggle all these elements?’ because it’s when you start doing that that you see your work improve.

There are so many prescriptive books about the craft of writing but there is not enough said about the process of writing. What emerging writers need to realise is that you don’t ‘improve your writing’ you improve your approach to writing and it is that that makes the writing better.

It sometimes feels like what I do as a musical theatre writer is a dark art and abandon all hope ye who enter here. But it isn’t. I learned (and am still learning!) how to do it without any teacher and with quite little reliance on books, except Sondheim’s annotated lyrics which I think is an extraordinarily helpful and wise book and one worth revisiting often. Most people in this industry have learned by doing. For once it would be nice if people stopped waffling about craft and just started sharing lessons about the writing process itself. If you agree, please share this, and if you don’t then why not write your own meditation upon approaches to writing and share that with the world? Let’s not be scared of other people learning we’re not all mammoth geniuses, we’re just people who have used skill and experience to build upon a nugget of talent, because I think deep down that’s why people don’t share their knowledge. It’s very ego-affirming not to puncture the myth that what we do is magic.

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So I have my nose back to the grindstone. By which I mean I am not currently killing myself doing work that I want to do but work other people want me to do. I shouldn’t grumble except that I lost all of my original orchestrations and much of the piano vocal score for this project, so I am starting again from scratch and against the clock as casting for this show was done yesterday! N.B., composers: BACK YOUR FILES UP!!!!

This is from Katie and the Mona Lisa which will be playing at 12.50pm (almost) every day from 5th-27th August at Pleasance One as part of the Edinburgh Fringe (tickets). It is a musical for children based on the bestselling picturebook by the utterly lovely James Mayhew. In it, Katie discovers she has magical powers to bring paintings to life and goes on an adventure through Renaissance art with the Mona Lisa who, after 500 years of smiling is in danger of losing her famous smirk. What ensues is a battle between the orderly world of artifice in the paintings and the anarchic nature of the 7-year-old Katie.

In this song, Katie addresses the Mona Lisa, wishing she would come to life. I wrote the music and did the orchestrations and Adrian Brown wrote the lyrics.

I feel two verses alternating with choruses is rather dull (and also the structure of all the other songs in the show with the exception of one that, at my insistence, includes a middle eight) but it has a good melody, I think, and I haven’t done a bad job on the orchestrations. Besides, it is a show for children, so too much formal innovation might be overwhelming, but it’s really just one of those occasions where you find you and your collaborator have different ideas about what you want to achieve. If lots of time is not to be wasted you do, eventually, have to compromise. And I do still think it’s a damned enjoyable show if not quite perfect.

I was commissioned to write this show around four years ago, so naturally this comprises pretty early songwriting efforts on my part, but there is a lesson to all budding musical theatre writers: by the time your work is produced you may well feel it no longer represents you as an artist. Shut up complaining and collect the royalties. And then you can live off those while you write something that you do think shows you off at your best.

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Galvanising Venus: confessions from my holy of holies

This article deals with research I am doing for a project that has been ongoing for around six years. I am finally in a place as an artist where I can treat the story properly. I won’t be discussing the story here in too much detail, but my thought process that brought me to an understanding of the thesis of the show. Bear with me, I get to the musical theatre eventually, but the stuff about art is important. I am writing this post to consolidate my thoughts and to archive today’s research for future reference. I hope it might be of interest to somebody out there. who is thinking about the same subject. This may particularly be of interest to radical Christians, Buddhists, nihilists, humanists, progressives, libertarians and also probably to psychopaths. You’re all welcome here.

Above is a photograph of Clemente Susini’s ‘Venerina’ or ‘Little Venus’ from 1782, housed in the Poggi Palace, Bologna. It is one of a number of anatomical Venuses used to teach anatomy without the ethical and practical difficulties of finding cadaver after cadaver. It is rendered in wax and the anatomic detail is simply astonishing.

Today has been a day of Venuses. I am tempted to write ‘Veni’ as the plural of that; ‘veni’ is, of course, ‘I came’ in Latin. I didn’t, by the way; Give me Eros over Aphrodite any day.*

That wasn’t intended as a puerile joke. At the time of creation these Venuses weren’t solely pedagogic tools, they were also pornographic tableux. The audience for them was chiefly male with occasional showings for ladies but a general attitude of ‘they don’t need to learn anything except how not to burn my breakfast’. These Venuses were aimed at men. The classical subject has long been used as an excuse to feed the male gaze, and it’s interesting to consider the ratio of mythological depictions of nude females to nude males. (Caravaggio, Michelangelo and - likely - Leonardo are all discounted on account of their homosexuality.) Michael Sappol has this to say: ‘ [B]eginning in the 1830s and intensifying in succeeding decades, there arose a variety of anatomical entrepreneurs, eager to cultivate, exploit, and cater to the audience for anatomy through anatomical museums and exhibits, and from the outset...anatomy was assimilated to the purposes of satisfying and profiting from the demand for sexual material, to its critics pornography.’

Venus being made in the 1780s, this pre-dates such a movement, but it may well have served as inspiration. This is how this Venus is described on the website of the Palazzo:  ‘The agony of a young woman is represented in her last instant of life as she abandons herself to death voluptuously and completely naked. The thorax and abdomen can be opened, allowing the various parts to be disassembled so as to simulate the act of anatomic dissection.’ It goes on to describe the alienating effect of the ‘rough and repulsive’ anatomical detail juxtaposed against a ‘harmonic’ and ‘supple sensuousness’. The latter, her morbidezza quality, is down to the use of beeswax and animal fat which has a fleshly realism that modern waxwork cannot capture. The pose also contributes to this sensuality: her head may be thrown back in agony, but the ambiguity between expressions of extreme pleasure and pain leave the question hanging more than the Palazzo might care to admit, at least publicly.

She wears pearls. Her legs are animated as though in movement and movement is implied by the disturbed sheets of her bed. She has human hair on her head. She has a bold, black bush. And, of course, she conforms to long-established norms of Florentine beauty. None of this is necessary to her function. Did Susini intend to make her so sexy? Possibly. He certainly intended to make her beautiful and when dealing with the human form the two aren’t always easy to distinguish.

These anatomical Venuses captured my attention because I have been working on a musical project about a pathologist who, after faking his death and assuming a new identity and taking a new wife, is shocked to discover his ex-wife on the slab bearing the message: ’Naughty boy’. In the husband’s traumatised imagination she springs to life and serves both as the narrator of his paranoia as he desperately tries to discover who sent the message, and as a symbol of something unfinished, a sense of all-consuming regret and an unhealthy obsession with the immutable past.

This story began as a straight play (of extremely dubious quality) that I wrote while at sixth-form college. It was shelved for a long time, but I couldn’t get the image of the husband cutting up his true love out of my mind. There was something inescapably delightful about how a post-mortem might, in this context, become a sublimation of sexuality, especially if done with a caring sensuousness. The quasi-sexual union of external and internal, and the scope for a highly-stylised, aesthetic depiction of gore and violence played on my mind on-and-off for over half a decade, but crystallised in the image of the anatomical Venus: I am not alone in observing some parallel between the female anatomical model and the male sexual gaze.

There are many holes at the centre of the work, many of which will be filled in soon by thorough research into the process of the post-mortem and the environment of the mortuary. But there was something hollow at the centre of the show that kept stopping me in my tracks: WHY does the world need to see a parallel between the post-mortem and sex? After all, Susini was not trying to make some clever point about sublimated sexuality ‘on the slab’, he was most-likely just reflecting - consciously or unconsciously - something about the time and culture in which he lived. (See here for an examination of the cultural and theological connotations of the anatomical Venus). Was my obsession with this parallel more than a desire to shock? I wanted to shock my audience, but I knew there was more I was trying to do than simply shock people: I wanted to make a statement about something true to me that I think is true to others (if not universal) but under-explored. The closest thing I had found to that (whatever it was - I didn’t know then) was in the aestheticisation of violence in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal novels which I have long thought of as ‘my story’ in a sort of oblique way, though I couldn’t quite place why. But it was about more than a shared interest in haute cuisine and the harpsichord.

And that brings me on to timing. I have recently grown very interested in principles of Open Space as an approach to collaboration and believe many of the principles are indicative of the general attitude one should have when working alone, and one of those is: whatever time something happens is the right time for it to happen. And yesterday the conditions were right for everything to fall into place.

Have some Schubert.

I had given myself the day off from all projects, so naturally I resumed research for this so-far-on-the-back-burner project around 18 hours ago by trying to hunt down a pathologist or mortuary technician who could tell me precise details about not only how a post-mortem is carried out, but what observations are made when, how these are recorded, and - importantly - who has access to bodies and at what hours because my character needs to be alone with the body in two crucial moments of the narrative. This research led me to discovering the anatomical Venus. That led me to the work of Mark Dery who wrote an excellent article about her. (In fact, much of this post is derived from his observations and some of his points I have directly lifted.) Dery is currently writing a book about the ‘Pathological Sublime’.

And then it hit me: what I am trying to say in this piece has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the Pathological Sublime and how we relate to our ‘dark’ sides. Unfortunately, I did not know of the concept before or I could have forgone the endless pacing that has all but destroyed my lounge rug. (I don’t actually have a rug in my lounge but if I did it would have all but disappeared anyway, so it’s the same difference.)

The sex is simply a device to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of delight and horror we experience when confronted with images of the grotesque. I have never felt cognitive dissonance about anything (though a priest once insisted that I should, as if that was going to change anything) and I have often kept multiple sets of books regarding my personal identity. The thrill of violent imagery is no exception. I have always openly delighted in observing the worst of mankind and have never felt any need to adopt a moral standpoint about this. I simply observe. It is worth saying that, to my knowledge, I am not a sociopath. I feel compassion, am moved deeply by music, art and drama, and have felt overwhelming love towards others. And I write stories because I want to understand others. Yet I also get a kick - not quite a sadistic kick but definitely pleasure - out of viewing extreme violence and studying suffering both real and fictional, though I stress not from causing it, which is quite against my nature. I know that sounds concerning but I just do not understand the root of that concern: what you like is what you like, so what is the point of beating yourself up about it? I suppose the beating up cannot be helped; you can either compartmentalise such things or you can’t. I am not defined by my dark obsessions but they are a part of my identity and because I do not believe it is healthy or necessary to challenge those parts of it (Fthe not-challenging it is an important part of my identity, too) my identity as a whole (if it is a whole... is anyone’s?) is somewhat at a tangent to public opinion.

What Dery argues so eloquently is that we all have a desire to look at the things that horrify us. We are, as human beings, drawn to those things that are so horrific we cannot properly comprehend them. Instead we are forced to consider the intensity of our own rapture. In an article of his, Dery criticises Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ for its ‘moral ponderousness, her ever-present sense of her own gravitas, [which] crushes flat the subversive glee in Thinking Bad Thoughts and Looking at Forbidden Things that I believe is essential to free thought.’

Well said, Mark! It seems to me that what unites Hannibal; The Pathological Sublime and what I am trying to achieve, is a polemic against that moral ponderousness that many people adopt when they are being watched watch suffering. So often people express their repulsion histrionically but their fascination not at all. In Harris’ novels we are made to like Lecter: he is cultured, suave, polite, extremely considerate and has a very mordant sense of irony that one can’t help but admire. All blurbs on these books say he is a ‘chilling’ character, but for me he’s just a breath of fresh air and the narrator is pretty non-judgemental. Yes it IS funny and intellectually satisfying to disembowel and hang a Pazzi from the Palazzo Vecchio after lecturing on the topic to the studiolo. Yes, it IS poetic and satisfyingly economical to feed someone their own brain and then use the cavity afterwards as a bin for the leftovers. Why shouldn’t that be the reader’s response? Harris sets you up to enjoy those things and people do. And they love the character as the launch of a third TV series demonstrates. (I personally find all of the food porn and food gorn rather masturbatory but I’ve never denied myself those kinds of pleasures so I’m an avid fan!) See the glorious plate below with its funereal purple flower and blackberries. As a little aside: post-revolutionary Frenchies used to throw lugubrious feasts of only black food in memory of the dead. I understand they were quite unpleasant to actually eat.

And what about the bone-like off-white of that round thing on the left? And what the hell is it?

The books, films and TV show all feed (no pun intended) into a very similar aesthetic to the anatomical Venus. Hannibal goes to Florence which is where the anatomical Venus of 1790 (and many others) is housed at La Specola. Anatomy and butchery differ only in their detail and their purposes but either way you’re learning where body bits are so you can hack at them accurately. And there is no danger of moral ponderousness in Hannibal’s playful approach to murder and cannibalism. Publicly people are shocked by cannibalism, but if you say, ‘ if it were put in front of me I’d give it a go’ it is staggering how many people will enthusiastically agree as though they have just been waiting for someone to give them permission to say it. Is it such a leap from foie-gras or veal to human beings? In fact, at a genetic level, is it such a leap from pigs to people? And do we really need to be scared of that? A fine line is still a line.

The thetic point of Harris’ books and Dery’s current research is that thinking bad thoughts and looking at dark stuff is human. We enjoy it and we don’t have to make that morally complicated.

Thus I now know the thesis of the show. The character’s journey is about regret and not appreciating what you have when you have it, but the message to the audience is about the danger of repression, the ugliness of moral pretence and the value of insight and honesty with oneself.

If I have any quality of genius (and heaven knows I’m not short of vanity in that respect) it is that I can empathise with the victims of terrible atrocities and in the next breath dispense with emotive terms like ‘terrible’ and see it completely and utterly from the perpetrator’s point of view. We must, yes, preserve an intellectual morality and act upon our desire to help others. But we must also evolve out of the kind of civilisation that causes mobs to form outside of the houses of paedophiles, the kind of society that calls for murderers themselves to be killed, and the ridiculous internalisation of the idea of thought crime that leads to the self-flagellation and self-loathing that perpetuate violence and suffering. Humanity is a sham if there isn’t the application of understanding and compassion to the ‘wicked’, and to those parts of ourselves that we hide and punish out of fear of being thought of as such,either by others or by ourselves. In this show the evil (take a pinch of salt) is not to be found in the necrophilia, the deception, the fraud, the murder or the sadomasochism. Rather, the horrible tragedy at the centre of the story is that the protagonist gets so terrified at being ‘outed’ as wicked and so hell-bent on keeping up appearances that he does the one truly wicked thing in the story: he ignores his new wife who loves him and needs his attention. Evil is not glamorous like it is in Hannibal (though that is not to say it cannot or should not be glamorised for the purposes of entertainment). Neither is it embodied by serial killers and child rapists who through a rare but fatal combination of genetics, upbringing and neurology are doomed to cause harm to others.

Evil (yes, let’s keep using the word but with even more salt now) is banal and nothing summarises my conception of it better than simply being absent when if you were to just look, someone needs you to be there for them.

So my show will be shocking and intentionally so, but not in the way I originally intended or for the reasons I had previously entertained. The more revolting I can make the gruesomeness the better, and why? Because by the end of the story the audience must understand: none of the in-your-face stuff mattered. It was all misdirection. What mattered was the one horror that they - just like the protagonist - didn’t see: the suffering of a real human being who is screaming for help and nobody is listening. And that is a profoundly humane and hopefully affecting bit of narrative trickery in which violence, gore and psychopathology provide maximum contrast to the utterly mundane and undramatic lack of action that we call ‘neglect’.

There is an additional and very important twist, but I must keep some things private or no-one will get a surprise when they see the show!

Universal compassion is central to the teachings of Buddha. ‘Let you who is without sin cast the first stone’ is central to the teachings of Christ. It is the same teaching, and a lesson I believe in my foolhardy optimistic way will eventually come to be accepted by society irrespective of religious faith (but not necessarily in its absence) just because it is RIGHT.

*It is interesting to note that Cupid/Eros is the son of Venus/Aphrodite. That deserves more unpicking than I will afford it here, but don’t you think it is curious that the parent of love is the female character, the offspring the male? Cupid was depicted as an adolescent male until Victorian prudishness did away with his sex appeal altogether and turned him into a chubby baby. Venus is all woman. When I was an adolescent male my interest in love didn’t get much beyond sex, and it is a very small generalisation to suggest that that is typical. The implication is clear: women are warm, loving cuddly things perfect for popping your babies into whereas men are cheeky sex-obsessed chappies who exist just to have fun at the expense of women. Look at some depictions of Cupid pre-infantilisation and you will notice the just-fucked grin in many. In some of them the moment of the narrative chosen is when he is about to bound out of bed and leave his sleeping partner to wake up alone and probably feeling a bit used and embarrassed. Check the Jacques-Louis David painting of 1817 or the less subtle treatment of Psyche’s abandonment by  François-Édouard Picot (also placed at around 1817).

The woman raises the child because she is Love. The man ejaculates and then fucks off because he is Sex. Men have all the fun while the women are left to be dutiful. Note that the anatomical Venuses are all pregnant with little wax foetuses. Venus as mother, Venus as wife, Venus as anything other than independent. Venus as object of lust for horny 18th century med students. I can’t help feeling Venus has been a bit shat upon by her own mythological meanings...

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This is a song, also from a couple of years ago. The cameraman corpsed which made me corpse. Bad, Robert! But there’s a time when you say ‘we can’t be bothered to do another take’. And I think it contributes to the general ‘mad’ feel. Even though I say this isn’t my story, there’s quite a lot of me in the character singing.

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This is a piece of street art by Bambi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi_Graffiti on the wall of 442a Coffee House in Haggerston. The coffee shop has unspoiled white walls except for in this spot, low to the ground and easy to miss. It’s my local coffee place so I’m there quite often and I’d never noticed it until I happened to sit right next to it.

The coffee shop owners have embraced the piece, and their exterior space is an interesting one. There are the usual tables and chairs (also in white), but on the corner of the building the space is given over to a lady called Jenny selling flowers. Often, on the pavement (which is quiet), there is a crippled pigeon who seems to live on cake crumbs and can remain undisturbed.

And there’s this artwork.

Outdoor tables and chairs for the use of customers extend the idea of the privately-owned space onto the street. After all, wouldn’t it feel like taking a liberty to sit at one of their tables without buying anything, even if that table is on the street?

And yet there’s much more going on in that space than coffee drinking. Jenny is visited throughout the day by people who want to stand and chat. She’s a friendly lady, and her collection of flowers is not unlike an impromptu garden. Jenny has created an inviting space through her chat-to-anyone manner and her beautification of her spot. This might make business sense, but most of the people I saw stop didn’t buy anything, they just updated Jenny on their lives.

Sitting there as people come to share their stories, Jenny’s space isn’t unlike a big shared diary: she gets little fragments of narratives, and that’s really interesting to me.

Inside the coffee shop, the walls are taken with paintings for sale which have been chosen either because the owner likes them or the artist, or the artist is lucrative. In all of these cases the space is arranged by the owner. Outside, the space has been reclaimed: by a conversational garden, a pigeon and a street artist. And, of course, it’s proximity to a public pavement. Yet how much of the claim over the space comes from the coffee shop in the first place? Arguably, the coffee shop doesn’t feel possessive about that space and my interest in how it is used stems more from my own expectation that private owners of space will lay unambiguous claim to it. Maybe I could just stop at a table without buying anything - if it was free and I fancied stopping to read a newspaper. Maybe they wouldn’t mind. Maybe they would. But if they would, why would they?

I have been thinking about ‘reclaiming’ spaces for the Flashmobs project, and it makes me ask: what is the claim over a space in the first place, and how much of that comes from the owner of the space, and how much of that comes from our own assumption that in a space we don’t own we are simply a guest? In a sense, don’t we take ownership of a space any time we engage with it or use it? Our presence not only changes the context of that space for others, but by inhabiting it and by letting it inhabit us sensorily we have necessarily made that space ‘ours’ - at least in our own perception of it: our perception (which is all we have of the space) is ours: subjective and personal. The space itself is a spook: what we perceive is the dialogue between ourselves and the space.

In a train station, which will be one of the sites of one of our mobs, the space is defined by its purpose. Lots of people need to be able to: 1. move around, stand around and look around; and 2: entertain themselves while they are waiting for a train.

Point 1 means the space has to be large and open-plan so that people have freedom of movement. Point 2 means that you can buy overpriced sandwiches or have a meal in a pub that doesn’t rely too heavily on returning custom. In the case of point 2, those things give the space over to private ownership, and where space is scarce the message is: if you want to use this space you have to buy something, which is tantamount to renting the space. And you will be given one small space and that is what you will occupy.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt welcome in a train station. I wonder how much of that is down to the space and how much of that is down to the assumptions we make about spaces and ownership. I continue to ponder this question.

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This was from about two years ago. My friend Michael wanted to experiment with green screen and asked me to write something. So I wrote this: a fable about a man who decides to go to bed with someone morbidly obese. I didn’t know she was going to be obese until she appeared in the poem for the first time and she just was. It might have been the flow of the words leading the narrative, which is a weakness in the writing, but I still enjoy that flow and as such still enjoy reciting it. I have since shed my obsession with internal rhyme as I was drawing too much attention to myself in my lyrics instead of letting them belong to my characters. As such, I have not been able to duplicate this highly-rhyming style of narrative poetry, but perhaps a sequence of words will set me off at some point. So far, no luck. I wasn’t completely off-book in this recording and so had to discreetly look at the computer screen that Michael was scrolling for me like an autocue. The particularly smug moment at ‘beached more than landed’ was because I did not know the next line, though I believe I’d been watching a lot of William F. Buckley, Jr at the time which may also have affected things. I perform it much better now, but the video remains of the realisation of the work when it had just been written and I think Michael’s video is quite provocative. I’m not shocked by idiosyncratic pornography and I would like other people to be more normalised to the diversity of human sexual proclivities but I wasn’t trying to convince people of the acceptability of fat fetishism, just to present something absurd and I think there is something grotesque about the morbidly obese female form. I don’t know why the female form particularly. Perhaps the Lucian Freud painting is to be blame, as I do think that is wonderfully grotesque. Perhaps it is because for a long time I was terrified by the female form. A different Freud at work. I think extremes are interesting and I like to write about them. I’m not sure there’s a purpose behind it beyond that.

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This is an empty second-hand photo album I found in my local Oxfam. It interested me that this once served as an archive of memories to someone but now lies empty so that someone else can fill it with their photographs. I wonder who it belonged to and what happened to them. What might we have discovered about them and their life if the pictures were still there? That this has been used before gives the new pictures you put into it a new context: one day your pictures will be cleared out of this and no-one will remain for whom they have meaning. That’s quite a bleak view, but it’s also quite freeing. It was this that made me decide to make my own ‘photo album’: after all, one day I’ll be dead and no-one will care what I put on this blog. Eventually, perhaps the URL will be freed up for someone else to use. What will they use it for?

Returning to this post some hours later it occurs to me that this may never have been used. It may have been kept empty. Someone who thought they would have more photographs than they did? Or an unwanted Christmas present? All rather less poetic, but possible!

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Around 80% of the work I make is not intended to be seen by the world because I'm afraid people will judge me. I want to overcome this, so I am going to share EVERYTHING I make whether it's good or not. Along the way hopefully I will make some people feel better about the work they do that they are embarrassed of. I will also be posting stuff that I think is good and representative of what I want to achieve artistically. This video is definitely not that!

The story behind this is that my flatmate started feeding the pigeons from her balcony, calling them her "bitchin' pigeon friends" and they have since become repeated guests. One took a crap on one of the sofas today. The only purpose of this song really was to entertain her, which it did.

[emteespaces]

What am I doing here? And where am I?

Welcome to MT Spaces. This blog itself is an empty space and I intend on part-filling it with thoughts, meditations and responses to prompts which centre around the idea of space. ‘Space’ as a term can mean many things, and is a commonly-used word in creative writing and in theatre. As a musical theatre (MT) writer (and now facilitator!) I’m interested in how we perceive the mental spaces in which we work, the way our work interacts with physical spaces (and particularly spaces other than the traditional proscenium arch/4th wall theatre) and the creative space that artists share during a collaborative process. I will be using this to archive my own thought process and creative development as I lead a collaborative project called Original MT Flashmobs (blog for that coming soon). That project is a chance for writers to come together to write flashmobs that explore non-traditional theatrical presentations of work: the non-linear, the site-specific and the non-commercial. This project is all about taking risks, and while leading it I hope to publicly and visibly share what I am learning, the ideas I am having, and the mistakes that I am making. Often people in the creative arts feel as though they must present themselves as experienced or insightful in case they are laughed at or thought of as foolish. I want to buck that trend and make an honest and unselfconscious blog that allows people to see the development of a writer warts and all, and to take what is usually a solitary journey and open it up so anyone who is interested can have a look. This blog will be written from a very personal POV and I am not going to overthink it. What I say on it might be true or profoundly untrue, but it’s all part of the process. By all means criticise me, engage with me or just ignore me. This blog is simply a space you can inhabit for your own reasons and whenever you fancy it. In it, I am leaving myself the space to be stupid, to be foolish, to be plain wrong because we all need a space in which to do that. For most people it is a private space. I am making mine public. You are in my space and as such it becomes OUR space. Please wander around at your leisure.

[emteespaces]

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them."

Lawrence Krauss