]]> http://benleto.com/blog/1248/death-of-the-novelist-3/feed/ 0 http://benleto.com/blog/1241/death-of-the-novelist-2/ http://benleto.com/blog/1241/death-of-the-novelist-2/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:32:42 +0000 Ben http://benleto.com/blog/?p=1241 One day, someone might even ask why I stopped.

I’ll reply that I found all the people I wanted to share the world I saw with.

It almost makes me look back through rose-tinted specs at ‘Dear ……………………….’; a form of address which always perplexed me more than a little. I mean, if you’re going to be made to feel utterly ephemeral to the person taking 10 seconds to read a synopsis it took you a week to compile about the novel it took you years to write, there’s no better way to do it than by receiving a template form with space for your name, and discovering they’re so uninterested in your submission that they haven’t even scrawled your name into the aforementioned space:

‘Your insipid ink-dribblings offend me so much I’m not even going to pretend you’re an autonomous being: Dear intangible concept so offensive to me that you do not even merit acknowledgement of your very existence, go away.’ *

This new no-frills approach however makes me feel like a sort of literary Jehovah’s Witness. Imagine if the tables were turned, and it was considered acceptable for authors to write prospective letters in the same way:

* Anyone who’s never received a rejection letter/note/word from a literary agent may wish to listen to this. It may help you to understand why many authors have no friends and hate everyone. And never get published.

I marked up a candidate’s exam paper today when one mark wasn’t clear. Perhaps it was Question 22. I don’t remember. As soon as I did it I had a vivid fantasy about a life-saving operation I will undergo in about 30 years at the hands of a surgeon who once almost failed a critical exam if it wasn’t for one mark. It wouldn’t surprise me if it came to be. Impossible things lie in each and every corner these days.

The room where the exams take place is one of the college’s museums – a collection of internal organs, limbs and body parts forever preserved for trainee surgeons, visitors and temps such as myself to gawp at and possibly consider the nature of dignity of one made immortal in a plastic casket; a tide of formaldehyde sweeping back time to keep them forever close to their moment of death. An old lady – an actress playing a patient in one of the assessments and still in her red and white dressing gown – moves from exhibit to exhibit, regarding them and commenting as she does, either half to me or entirely to herself. “They are grotesque,” she says, “but I also find them comforting. The capillaries in our body look no different from those in a leaf or the roots from a tree. It reminds me that everything in the universe is connected. And I think that’s beautiful.”

I’ve started hearing music – a cacophony of clashing, incompatible noises and sounds that have only now started to slow or speed up, occasionally intertwining to become a melody or a beat. A simple sound that is beautiful by its very simplicity. Life plays on in endless Variations. I see these Variations every morning I leave the house, these beautiful things inconspicuous by their plain sight: traffic slowing to let an ambulance pass; two people who once had the improbability to meet and are now holding hands; sunlight within huge mountains and cities made of cloud reflected in a tall glass building, manmade. What is my chord? What key is my brain thinking in? What door does it want to unlock? What is behind door 22?

A cautionary tale for adult persons as to why one should not accept denominationally unstable wishes from strange fairies in forests. Written and scrawled by yours truly and read by John Rayment.

The soldier stood upon the cliffs and looked out across the land, golden and new once again. He lay his beloved sword upon the tall Spring grass, and leant back upon the wind. “Goodbye,” he sighed as he fell into the sea. “Goodbye, and thank you for my purpose.”