People Whose Heads Are Full of Stuff

I'm reading a Tom Robbins book at the moment - Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates* - and boy, has that man got a lot of stuff in his head.

I periodically get paranoid about how little stuff I have in my head. This last fortnight or so I've had a spurt of such angst-ridden meanderings, for five main reasons:

(1) Mr Robbins' book, as mentioned above. My work was once compared to his, and I read Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas as a result. And loved it. And happily repeated the comparison a few years later. But now that I'm reading him again, I'm embarrassed to have claimed any such connection. His head, his words and his writing are all much fuller than mine.

(2) Reading my 1985 diary. This was written when I was 16, and was first discovering 'extreme' politics - as well as getting the inspiration for my subjects at Uni (maths and philosophy, joint honours). I don't know if my head was fuller then, but I did at least make the effort. For a few years.

(3) That article I wrote about popular culture the other day. I stand by everything I said, but one of the reasons I get defensive about my lowbrow cultural tastes, and my tendency to give up on dense prose (not in the case of Mr Robbins though), is because of this angst I have. About my head not being full enough.

(4) Him Indoors, who spends most evenings at my side on the sofa, tapping away furiously on his laptop, reading political articles and thinking / arguing vigorously about, well, serious stuff.

(5) Writing my third book, and getting all the usual angst about whether it's any good. It's probably not bad at all, will stand up as a goodhearted entertaining read and might even be the making of my career. But, I suspect, it's the least thoughtful of my books. It's not exactly deep. And this trend worries me, helps to smash this idea I have of being an intelligent, thoughtful, philosophical person.

Theoretically, supposedly, I'm clever. I know a lot about politics and philosophy. I can, when pushed, hold my end up in discussions. And I think of myself as being interested in it all. But in reality... I run away from it. Fast, and far. And often don't hold my end up in conversation, unless things are confined to the strictly abstract. As soon as I'm required to know / remember any facts, I'm buggered. I can't remember a thing. And anyway, I'm generally too busy running away to get into conversation in the first place.

Why do I run away? It's partly because, although I love abstract rumination and open-mindedness, hate assumptions, love to question everything... I hate the up-its-own-arsishness that often goes with it. I speak plainly, I write plainly, I hate obfuscation for obfuscation's sake. But it's also because, oh, I just can't be bothered. It's hard. I might get shown up for being stupid. I'd rather watch Coronation Street.

And when it comes to politics... I know we're all surrounded by shit. I still believe, in theory, that the world can be changed, but... not by me. It's too hard. I don't want reminders of how crappy everything is, don't need to be convinced that things could be so much better. But I don't want, personally, to be responsible for making those changes. And I'm deeply ashamed of my apathy, my demoralisation. So I avoid political discussion, avoid being reminded of how useless I am, as well as how ignorant and prejudiced and downright wrong so many others are.

I could blame it on motherhood. It certainly encourages my tendency to be inward-looking, to be tired, to focus all my energies on my own small orbit and my own small son, and sod the rest. But the rot had set in long before I gave birth. Indeed, far from resenting the constrictions parenthood placed on my life, the reason I finally took the plunge after putting it off for so long was that I was ready. I was bored of thinking, bored of partying, didn't want to look outwards any more.

In some ways, I've never been any different. I may well have been thinking about these things when I was 16, but you only have my word for that. There's barely any mention in the diary. I've always tended to skim the surface. I've always, for instance, preferred to absorb information through one-to-one teaching, through lectures and documentaries, through conversation. I've never enjoyed weighty academic tomes and my worst memory of being a student was having to read Kant's bloody Critique of Pure bloody Reason, which was torture from beginning to end. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, I loved. He was snappy and to the point. I knew what he was on about.

And when I'm feeling good I defend myself on the basis that I'm not stupid, I just like simplicity. Elegance. Straightforwardness. And am not impressed by the stultifying atmosphere that can exist in academia, where people... well, like I said above. Obfuscation for obfuscation's sake.

But oh, my head. Is it too empty? Maybe. And do I want it to be fuller? Well no, that's just it. I'm impressed by the idea of it, but...

Ooh, look! The cats are playing in a cardboard box!

Aw. Cute.



* That's a fascinating interview, I recommend it. As I was reading it I kept coming across great lines that I wanted to copy and paste here, but in the end there were too many and I gave up. Here's one, though:

"At the end of every writing day I feel like I've been wrestling in radioactive quicksand with Xena the Warrior Princess and her five fat uncles."

It was also a reassuring thing to read, as I'd imagined him writing super-fast, with all these ideas tripping over on top of one another. But it turns out he writes very slowly, and thinks long and hard about each individual sentence. And I refuse to go up yet another oh-I'm-so-rubbish avenue by concluding that I don't write slowly enough...


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