3. Inspiration and Sources

What will I write about in this blog of mine? I suppose all diarists over the centuries have asked themselves that.

I'll write about anything and nothing, as fancy takes me. When fancy fails I'll raid, copy and paste from the plentiful material I've accumulated over the years, material stretching back to my childhood letters, my first diary (1959), and files of scribbled notes and ideas squirrelled away and boxed up periodically for transit from place to place - from multiple addresses in London (Queens Park, Enfield, Leytonstone, Finsbury Park, Carpenders Park) to multiple addresses in Auckland (Milford, Takapuna, Papatoetoe, Otahuhu, East Tamaki [Sugar Mountain], Whitford [Amberfields], Milford again, Orewa). One more Orewa to go and that should be it.

I retired in 2002 at the age of 62; partly on health grounds, partly because I could afford to, partly because I'd worked at The University of Auckland for thirty years and that seemed long enough, largely because I wanted to devote more time to writing creatively. Between 2002 and 2005 I wrote two to three hundred thousand words: some poems and short stories, the drafts and redrafts of two novels, a children's story, a television script, and a short book on my experiences in a creative writing programme. Just as suddenly I stopped writing and decided to amuse myself painting. I joined James Lawrence's class in Abstract Acrylics at the Mairangi Arts Centre and later, when my lungs complained about the fumes from acrylic paints, a class in watercolours at the Lake House Arts Centre in Takapuna. A couple of Christmases ago I suggested to all the members of my jigsaw-puzzle family that they might like to pick a watercolour from my boxful as a part-present. They all did so bravely, diplomatically claiming that they had found one that they liked.

We had a big clean up prior to our move to Orewa culminating in a garage sale on Saturday October 8th. Sharon was amused to see that I was happy to part with my recently purchased books but packed up all the tatty old ones to take with us. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) was for sale but not The Portable Nietzsche that, the flyleaf informs me, I purchased on 16th March 1963; its paperback cover is now almost worn away. I have the Nietzsche on my desktop along with a 1975 Penguin Education edition of Walt Whitman's The Complete Poems, half held together by brittle brown pieces of sellotape, and an almost new copy of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude, purchased online a few years ago. Most of my books are in storage in the garage here but I deliberately kept these aside. They are three of my dipping books.

I was brought up in a very religious household. Like newspaper horoscopes read with the morning's toast and marmalade, the bible was consulted daily by my parents (and briefly by me too in my teens) for inspirational verses to shape the day's activities. So when I lack inspiration for my blog I will go dipping, open a page and see what jumps out. When thinking about today's blog I opened The Book of Disquietude in this random way. It was pages 122-123 and contained the start of a new piece, number 211 titled Lucid Diary.

I have no doubt that if Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) were alive now he would have been an inveterate blogger. The edition of his work that I have here contains five hundred and twenty three pieces spread over a little under three hundred pages. Largely unpublished in his lifetime, the introduction by Richard Zenith informs me, he left an archive of 25,426 documents, wrote poetry under three different names and created over 70 'dramatis personae' in his 'theatre of himself'. Pessoa, like an addicted game-player on the internet, lived in and for his writing and only returned to the reality of the physical world when he had no other choice.

Perversely I dip into The Age of Disquietude to cheer me up. Bernardo Soares, Pessoa's partself author of the book, has a vision of everyday life that is bleak and despairing. He describes the 'paltry pinnacle' of his job as an assistant bookkeeper for a fabric warehouse as 'like a siesta', at the same time recognising that his ability to feel and think is 'a function of my denial and evasion of duties.' Soares/Pessoa turns the agonising miracle of self-consciousness, and his unflinching conviction of the futility of life, into art. And when his ability to dream ebbs away he finds himself abandoned to 'musing on my dreams, and so I leaf through them, like a book one leafs through over and over, finding nothing but inevitable words'.

But such words.