Intolerable Beginnings

‘There are all manner of beginnings…but only one end’, Salman Rushdie once observed. And who, Ayatollahs excepted, wouldn’t give his opinion its merited moment in the sun? My reading of this is that no considerable length of time should be expended on an ending, of a story, of a particularly long game of Monopoly, of a big night out, of a poem, of a life, because endings, to be overly simple and yet not simple enough, happen anyway. Most endings can be defined in the negative; that is, they usually refer to inaction, either immediate or gradual. Picking up the board in an exhausted rage and throwing it off the table, pails and ships and chances and community chests flung to all sides of the living room: this is an ending. But it is no more conclusive than just getting up, having a stretch and never sitting down again.

Arriving at her place to find your tennis trophies, lava lamp and underpants all over the footpath, covered in shattered glass from broken picture frames is, while a decidedly greater spectacle, in definitional terms the same as never calling her again. Critics extol the last lines of The Castle because, they say, it is as if Kafka simply came to the end of his dreamy train of thoughts the way an ordinary man wakes from sleep. Thus even a book with no ending, as we have come to conceive of them, is apparently just as complete as The Magic Mountain or King Lear. Funny.

Even those writers – and I am one – who seem to have a million different projects in gestation but can’t finish a single tiny poem must admit that if a piece has been sitting in a dusty, musty cobwebbed draw for five years untouched, the first cycle of its life has already ended. Were you to exhume it and have another tilt at completion the piece will read different, write different, sound different, be different. Born anew, it doesn’t matter whether its destination is an E-reader or the same dusty draw, the necessity of ending applies. Writers give birth and exterminate more than any other group of people. It is not necessary to talk about the multitude of ways in which people can meet their mortal ends.

Endings, therefore, are nothing but the inevitable negative instantiated by starting something. You needn’t waste much time on inevitabilities. But to start! Positive action is required, action which imparts force, force which imparts motion, motion which turns events into a positive sequence…culminating, of course, in an ending. A vast uncharted horizon, an infinity of variables slowly whittled down to one certainty: the ending. Human nature has proved consistently fearful of making a start on stuff. The most common excuse given for this apprehension is the fear of failure, the fear of choosing one variable from that infinity at the expense of another, the fear of the end being other than what we would like it to be, but, when we take this notion to its own end, we can see that it is more than that. Beginnings, no matter how trifling, are microcosms of death.

Writing a blog has been on my mind for a good while now. When late last year I was awarded the John Marsden Prize for Poetry it became an even greater prospect- but still I took no positive action, still I shied away from beginning. We could argue down to pencil shavings about why that was, but let it suffice to say that after all the hokum you have just read, it had something to do with my fear not of failure, but of death. Death of ideas brought about by the self-imposition of some reason to write creatively, a reason quite aside from the love of invention, of observation, of giving birth and exterminating and ordering that has imbued my personality since I was old enough to pen the letter A. Death of anonymity but conversely of ambition: death of the simmering hope inside everyone that the content of their mind is worth something to the stranger on a street corner, or beside him at a festival, or on her laptop at a suburban library. Death of the perennial excuse, ‘If only I had done…’

I  am no good with death. I am not especially good with life either, much as I adore it, which is why this humble introduction – taking the easy way out, as it were, by beginning with the end – will be one of a mere sprinkling of overt self-reflections…but who wants to shoot themselves in the foot at the very start? Many people, it seems. 

Nightmare Girl

She's dancing;

Oh yeah!

As I sleepwalk she's a jewel

in this black and white nightmare