Would you rather write or teach dolphins to swim?
Charles Davis returns to my blog today, bringing dolphins, a lesson on why we write, and a healthy dose of idealism, or not, as the case may be. He's the author of Standing at the Crossroads (click for my review - I loved it!) and Pilgrim of Love (which I plan to read soon). Last time he visited, he brought Toy Soldiers with him; I shall soon have a virtual toy box of ideas. So, pour some coffee, sit down in your favorite chair, and enjoy.Welcome Charles!
Teaching Dolphins to Swim:
Negative Ambitions &
Lamentable Idealism
by Charles Davis
Why write? I don’t mean what characteristics define a
writing spirit, I had a bash at that in an earlier blog, but what is the
underlying motive, what do you as an individual want to do with your writing?
It’s a worthwhile question, though possibly one best asked in retrospect. When
you start writing there’s such an overwhelming desire to do everything all at
once that, if you thought about it too long, you would probably end up doing nothing
at all. For the rest of it, the deep motive, the thing that will keep you at it
for years on end, will generally declare itself as time goes on.
When I started writing in my twenties, I had two ambitions.
One, was to write the ultimate book, the greatest Great Novel, the book that
would in sort be The Book for everyone, a definitive book that could be enjoyed
as much by a fifteen year old girl as a fifty year old man, by somebody who was
barely literate and by an overeducated academic, in short read with equal
measures of pleasure but varying depths of understanding by people of any
polarity you care to name. The other, marginally more modest ambition, but only
marginally, was to write a book that could make a reader weep with pathos then
weep with laughter . . . on the same page!
The absurdity of these ambitions when set against my
abilities is so extravagantly ludicrous that it’s not even funny, and they were
in any case such thoroughly noisome aspirations that, if I had any shame, which
apparently I don’t, I would keep quiet about them. The first, after all, was
effectively a desire (this from a professed lover of reading) to write a book
that would end all books, terminating the dialogue between past, present and
future that is the proper field of the written word, and which no other medium
can rival. How sick is that? The second was scarcely less brazen, being a
symptom of rampant anal retention, a craving to control and manipulate the
emotions of others. I’m not too fussed by all that, though. It’s embarrassing,
but nothing more. There was never any risk of either goal being realized and
it’s always as well to aim well above the realistic scope of your abilities in
the hope that you will stretch them just that little bit further. But the
underlying motive as opposed to these expressed aims, that was something else.
Some years ago I was with a group of French friends,
strolling along a broad sandy beach on the Black Sea in Turkey when we came
across a young dolphin that had been washed ashore. It was in a hell of a
state, its body covered with hundreds of tiny cuts where it had been slashed by
the razor sharp rocks that lay a little way out to sea, but it was still alive,
so we took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our trouser legs and lugged this thing
back into the water. It was mid-winter and bloody nippy and the dolphin didn’t
seem to think much of our efforts because he promptly beached himself again.
Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that a tot of rum may have been more
beneficial than immersion in icy waters, but we were young and misguided, and
wanted to do good as only the young and misguided can. So we rolled him back
into the sea and he rolled right out again, and we rolled him back and . . .
well, you get the picture.
Time was getting on, we had a rendez-vous with other friends
in the next town, so I told the rest of the group to go ahead while I stayed
behind to see what I could do about the dolphin. I didn’t say anything, but I
was determined to save him whether the little sod wanted saving or not. I
simply would not let him die. Thinking the offshore rocks were the problem, I
decided the best thing to do would be to get him round to the next beach where
there were no rocks, so I went back to the house to fetch a sheet with a view to
slinging him over my shoulder and carrying him across the headland.
I don’t suppose you’ve ever carried a dolphin, but they’re
dense little blighters, and even a young one was way too heavy for me. I got
him into the sheet all right, I even managed to heave him over my shoulder, but
I’d only staggered about ten paces before I realized I wasn’t going to get to
the end of the beach, let alone over the headland. So I stripped down to
my underwear, shoved him back in the sea, and waded out with him for a while,
hoping he would get the idea of heading north rather than south.
I stayed in the water with him for several minutes, making
vaguely encouraging breaststroke gestures (as if I could teach a dolphin
anything about swimming!), but it really was very cold, so eventually I patted
him on the back and left him to it. Retreating to the beach, I hung about a
bit, wringing my hands and generally being ineffectual, but time was passing
and I had to get moving to catch up with my friends. It wasn’t a happy departure.
The dolphin wasn’t exactly powering his way out to sea. In fact, he was still
wafting about a few metres from the shore, probably thinking there was no point
beaching himself again while this lunatic was loitering about up there waiting
to pitch him back into the water. At least he was in the water, though. He was
halfway to doing what dolphins are meant to do. Swim! Swim! Go on, you fool,
swim!
I hurried back to the nearest road and hitched a lift with a
Turkish peasant who couldn’t keep his eyes off me. At first, I thought he was
impressed by my Turkish, then I realized that my clothes were soaking wet and
stained all over with long streaks of dolphin’s blood. The gory sheet hanging
over my shoulder probably didn’t help, either. I looked like I had just
murdered someone in a particularly brutal struggle, possibly somebody with whom
I had been sharing a bed. To be fair to the man, he was pretty cool about it
all. He did stare, but he didn’t seem unduly alarmed. Perhaps it’s a
commonplace of life on the Black Sea coast, bloodstained strangers reeling out
of the scrub babbling incoherently about dolphins. Still, I’d love to know what
story he told his chums that evening. Probably wasn’t quite as wild as the
story I told my friends in very broken French. By the end of it, there was at
least one girl who thought I had gone hitchhiking with the dolphin. Wish I had.
Little sod might still be alive.
I returned to the beach that night. It was already dark, we
were about to leave for Istanbul, but I managed to find my suicidal chum.
Somebody who knew better than me about ‘saving’ dolphins when their
echolocation is all shot to pieces had been to the beach in the meantime.
They’d bashed his brains in and left his carcass to rot.
I suspect that encounter with the dolphin is pretty much
what I’ve been doing all my life with writing, doubtless with a similar degree
of success. For years, I have worn a mask of cynicism so impenetrable that, on
occasion, even close friends have applied to me during moments of overwrought
sentimentality (such as the hysterical mourning of Lady Di), for a dose of
derisive realism, but despite that, I am and always have been, and sadly
probably always will be, painfully idealistic. And that is the one common
thread running through almost everything I have ever written, the motive quest
that has kept me writing for twenty-five years, idealism and what to do with
the bloody stuff in a world not manifestly governed by ideals, or, at least,
not the sort of ideals I would care to subscribe to.
How, in short, do you save the world when it’s bleeding and
broken and lost and you’re not strong enough to carry it to safety and it just
keeps throwing itself on the beach to gasp its last no matter how many wise
exhortations you whisper into its blow hole? That, of course, and the questions
that inevitably come afterwards when you take a moment to think about what you
are doing: Who the hell are you to ‘save’ the world? Does it demand, need, or
otherwise deserve ‘saving’? And weren’t idealism and the desire to save the
world from itself the pretexts, if not the motives, for the majority of the
most spectacularly destructive movements in history, ranging from the crusades
to the colonies, from National Socialism to Stalinism, the brave new alchemy of
nuclear fission to the Twin Towers? You only have to look at the history of the
United States, a nation firmly persuaded that it was founded on idealism, to
deduce that. In 1800 , there were fourteen and a half million Indians; in 1900
. . . 250,000. As Jim Harrison has pointed out, little wonder the Arabs are a
bit wary. It maybe idealism gone horribly wrong, but it makes you wonder.
I hasten to add that I offer all this not as a declaration
of how uncommonly sensitive I am in order that you may admire the grandeur of
my suffering soul. I’ll keep that in reserve in case I become a celebrity.
Highly unlikely, but you never know when you’re going to need these things. It
would be a lie, anyway. I don’t really do grandeur and suffering souls. Like
most people, I muddle through a life of modest selfishness, taking pleasure of
the good things that come my way and doing my best to ignore the rest. I'm
certainly not patrolling the local beaches hoping to drum up the odd dolphin in
need of saving. But the business of idealism, it won’t go away. It lingers,
like a bad smell that sooner or later somebody is going to have to admit to
perpetrating.
Where all this will take me in the future, I wouldn’t know.
Perhaps I’ll write myself into some accommodation between idealism and realism.
Perhaps I’ll become a vicious opponent of anyone who wants to save the world.
Perhaps I’ll give up in despair and stop harassing publishers with my nagging
chimera.
Whatever happens though, I doubt it will do the dolphin much
good.
Pity. I was fond of Flipper.
Me too. And thank you for a fascinating story and blogpost.
To find out more:
To find out more:
Read Standing at the Crossroads: http://www.amazon.com/Standing-at-Crossroads-Charles-Davis/dp/1579622135/
or Pilgrim of Love: http://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Love-Charles-Davis/dp/1507775008/
and meet the author on his website at: http://charlesdavis2.wix.com/charlesdavis
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