This is yet another cop-out blog, and it’s been prompted by three things. First, a FaceBook friend tagged me to post 7 lines, starting at the 7^th line of the 7^th page of my Work In Progress. I actually have three WIPs at the moment, except that the IP bit has been somewhat stalled for a while, so I chose the as yet untitled sequel to The Sparrow Conundrum. (The other 2 are a sequel to The Figurehead and what will be the last in the Carston series.) The second reason is that the character it features was born because of my curiosity about the frequent photos, again on FaceBook, featuring men with unfeasibly well arranged ridges and bumps beneath their sterna (the plural which I prefer to the equally correct sternums because it’s more pretentious). Since the main purpose of Sparrow (and its sequel) is (will be) to be funny, such a character seemed to offer clear possibilities for merriment. Finally, this may (NB MAY) serve to make me get back to writing the thing or risking being proved the fraud I secretly know I am. So there you have my reasons, and here you have the relevant introduction to the character of the Highlander Hamish Dirk.

Hamish Dirk pushed the fingers of his left hand through his thick auburn hair and leaned back against the cartwheel, his right thumb hooked into the open sporran that hung over his groin. His kilt was the red of Royal Stuart and his shirt hung open to display the traditional sculpted six-pack. His previous outfit had been a pair of Beck & Hersey Red Label jeans and they’d been slung low enough for the female behind the camera to feel a certain dampness as she clicked away. Moving to his more familiar incarnation as a Highlander did little to lessen the effect he was having on her professionalism.

Hamish Dirk wasn’t his real name, of course. His father, a stand-up comedian, had laboured unsuccessfully for years in the clubs until he decided to change his name by Deed Poll from Brendan Dilly to Brian Pharte. Almost immediately, his career took off and when his firstborn proved to be a son, he decided, generously, that he should anoint him with the same success right from the outset. Thus, the puckered, squealing, red-faced  new-born was dubbed Brian Pharte Junior. It was a name which, naturally enough, made his schooldays a continuous nightmare, one further deepened by the fact that another of his dad’s legacies was an IQ which barely crept out of single figures. His academic efforts gave his put-upon teachers plenty of scope to depart from the usual ‘Satisfactory’ or ‘Could do better’ clichés and deploy their inner Wildean  selves. His biology teacher wrote ‘We can only hope that no one breeds from Brian’; his English colleague remarked that ‘Intellectually, Brian would be out of his depth in a saucer’; and the careers master regretted the demographic shift from rural to urban communities because it meant there were fewer villages seeking idiots.

Then, one Saturday, the young Brian Pharte Junior made a decision that would equip him to overcome these congenital handicaps and carve out his own brand of success. He was 16 and he’d asked 14 year old Sally McKendrick to be his prom date. He knew that the likelihood of her saying yes was slim but he wasn’t really prepared when what she actually said was ‘You must be joking. Fuck off’. It hurt and in the quagmire of his brain a sequence of slow thoughts formed and led him to determine to do something to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

So he took up weight training.

Now, eight years and thousands of press-ups, biceps curls, squat thrusts and bench presses later, Brian Pharte Junior was six feet two inches tall, weighed a sleek, shining 200 pounds and appeared frequently on the covers of novels with titles such as Bad Man at Midnight, Desire and Dirt and Lust in the Gloaming. His face wasn’t special but he had thick hair, tight pectorals and an abdomen designed for fingers to stroke, lips to kiss and various secretions to drip onto.

And, following in his dad’s footsteps, he too had changed his name. The abysmal Brian Pharte had morphed into Hamish Dirk, the envy of all who possessed a Sgian Dubh..

If you read that title aloud in polite company, it could be embarrassing but, in fact, it’s simply my brother Ron’s choice of title to elucidate a fascinating set of facts of which I, at least, was previously unaware. His post proceeds as follows:

If you want an authoritative description of the Reticular Activating System (RAS), don’t read on, but do an internet search where you will find echoes of Bill’s last blog in sentences like:

“The main function of the RAS is to modify and potentiate thalamic and cortical function such that electroencephalogram desynchronisation ensues.”

For me, those words are the equivalent of a “danger of death” sign on a power line: surely no good can come of me ‘desynchronizing someone’s electroencephalogram,’ so I’m inclined to keep well clear. That would be a mistake, however, because I think awareness of the RAS can offer the writer a useful working tool.

Put simply, the RAS is a filtering system that limits the amount of stimuli coming at us in our daily lives. We cannot fully attend to the millions of bits of ‘data’ that assail us every second, so we need a way of selecting those bits which are essential to our survival or useful to our achieving a particular purpose. In writing this, for example, I don’t need to watch or listen to the sparrow outside my window or notice the texture of the wood on my desk, so my RAS blocks those channels, leaving me to focus on the keyboard and the ideas I’m trying to convey. Without these natural filters, I’d be in a constant state of excitement, stimulated by a stream of information and events but without the ability – or perhaps the time – to interact with any of it: it would all be of horribly equal significance. The interesting and – from a writer’s point of view – useful thing about the RAS is that we can interact with and customize it.

Here are a couple of examples of the RAS in action. If I asked you what proportion of cars on the road were Audis, you would only be able to take a very general guess. If, however, you customize your RAS and give yourself permission to notice Audi cars over the next few days, you will be able to give a much more informed estimate. What you will have done is ‘tell’ your RAS to open an Audi channel: cars that were previously just a part of the general scene are given a new significance and register in a more dynamic way. It will feel like a series of self-created coincidences. (Incidentally, I don’t have to absolve myself from any blame for the number of accidents caused by drivers concentrating on cars’ radiator grilles rather than traffic lights over the coming days: you will not be distracted by having to look for Audis; the process is automatic and effortless.)

Similarly, you might decide to take a break in Paris and, within hours, you have found a forgotten guide book on your shelf, Paris weekend breaks advertised in this week’s local paper, a rough guide to Paris in a charity shop, a Eurostar feature on TV. They were all there ahead of your decision but now they flood into your consciousness like a stream of happy coincidences.

So, how – you ask – can writers exploit this faculty? Self evidently, they already do in their planning, research and subsequent absorption in their subject. That extreme act of attention a writer initiates in setting out her words is an act of sharp, conscious filtering from a mass of original possibilities. Well, yes, and yet I suspect it’s also useful to put more trust in the unconscious, ‘secretarial’ nature of the reticular, freeing up some of your other writing faculties. Let me offer a local example.

When Bill was writing The Figurehead, alongside his practical, hands on experience of wood carving and the focused research he was doing into the craft, he will have – apparently coincidentally – discovered loads of previously unnoticed examples of the carver’s art in his environment, heard references to wood carving on the radio and television, perhaps ‘found’ a tool shop which was always there. And all this, not simply because his research led him to these resources, not just through a conscious immersion but via a literally open-minded approach to his subject, trusting his reticular to let in the relevance which was, and is, always there. Without any conscious intention, serendipity is almost guaranteed. So, if you are anything like as lazy as Bill pretends to be, open up that portal, sit back and let your RAS do some of the work..

This isn’t my opening paragraph. The next one is, though, and when/if you bother to read that far, you’ll quickly realise why I’ve made the switch. If I had opened with the paragraph that follows, there would have been no need to write any more because no-one would even have bothered to get to the end of it and, to mix a glorious metaphor, the ensuing pearls of wisdom would have fallen on deaf ears. So, let’s now start the blog.

My consuetudinary idleness has sometimes earned me the reputation of being a cunctator. Some see me as thewless but my perpetual condition of aesthesia requires little in the way of displacement. Careful auscultation (of the metaphoric rather than aesculapian variety) is enough to gauge my existential condition and I am not emulous with regard to the achievements of others. Indeed, the concinnity of sensations and perceptions produces a satisfying sense of oneness. I am sometimes cautelous and often pervicacious to rhadamanthine extremes but while this may all be an accurate assessment of my ‘moi’, its only real value is to introduce the subject of logomachy.

If you’re still here, thanks. In case you didn’t know it, logomachy is a dispute about words or a battle fought with words and, as you may have guessed from that paragraph, that’s sort of what this is all about. In fact, it goes back to a question I’ve asked (others and myself) before: does education help or hinder a writer’s development? One of my basic replies when asked about advice to writers is ‘Trust your own voice’. Too many people try to emulate others or assume that ‘writing’ means posh words, flowery asides, towering metaphors and so, when they write, the unique person they are gets trampled on in the gush of words. (Hey, listen, if Shakespeare can get away with ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles’, I can trample people with gushes if I want.)

Education, despite what our present minister in charge of it seems to think, means opening doors, expanding horizons, leading people out of darkness and ignorance into light. It doesn’t mean reducing them to clones, making them all fit a predetermined pattern. It encourages critical thinking, individual investigations, a belief that curiosity can lead – legitimately – in just about any direction. Rather than making people conform to a set of rules, it liberates them.

In a way, that horrible ‘opening’ paragraph illustrates how destructive misguided education can be. Most of the obscure words that made it incomprehensible came from the excellent wordsmith site which, if you register, emails you a word a day. I’ve been collecting them, not necessarily with the idea of using them but because I just love words, especially ones which I doubt I’ll ever use. Of course it’s good to expand one’s vocabulary – the more words you have available to you, the more thinking you can do, and the more refined and nuanced that thinking can be. But education isn’t about whatever knowledge you can acquire, it’s about what you can do with that knowledge. I collected those words (‘cunctator’, ‘thewless’, etc.) so, theoretically, they equipped me to express myself more completely or with more subtlety. In practice, though, they obscured my meanings, made them inaccessible to most readers. (My apologies if you are one of those who frequently drop ‘concinnity’,  ‘aesculapian’, etc. into your dinner party anecdotes. You’ll be wondering what all the fuss is about.)

But if I don’t intend using them, what’s the point in collecting them? Well, as well as being inherently interesting, like all words, they have a power beyond their actual meaning. They all contribute to the ‘show don’t tell’ cliché. In the popular UK TV sitcom Only Fools and Horses, the central character Del Boy, keen to convey the level of his cosmopolitan sophistication, repeats the words ‘Mange-tout, mange-tout’. By juxtaposing his confidence in what he’s saying with the bafflement of those around him, the writers convey several layers of characterisation and social observation – all with the words ‘mange-tout’. Similarly, if I want to include a quick caricature of a pretentious git (or a failed wannabe writer) in a story, what better way than to simply hear him say ‘Look at that woman’s bursiform appendages. Such displays are either flagitious or, at best, Icarian. Cui bono? Cui bono?’

Mange-tout, mes amis.

P.S. the illustration is courtesy of the fascinating Wordle site..