WRITING

Writing Round and Round the Garden, Like a Teddy Bear

Writing round and round the gnome, fully unaware

Ever feel that reams of paper are jetting out from that typewriter into the air, one after the other, shooting off the metaphysical table onto the intangible floor… across the room… then ebbing away peacefully like white doves on the warm pulse of creative impulse?

Productive, I could have said. Prodigious. Writerly.

But do you ever sixth-sense that you are avoiding a topic so carefully, consciously unaware, that it starts to get awkward? Like dancing round the garden.

Do you think that this merry go-round might just be to take attention away from that garden gnome? Not the red-hatted garden shop horror, but the solid 2000 year old hand-carved, unique Norwegian wooden gnome, the very real gnome, really quite historical — in its own right — right under your desk and that you have inadvertently encrusted with a mythical garden lawn on which to go round. And round.

Yes, your gnome might jam up the typewriter with all that truth, and it might scare the alabaster doves, but sometimes it just needs to be pulled out and looked at. Admit it to reality. Rake off the myth.

Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

- R. Barthes, Mythologies (1972)

Has your writing become inflexive — turned round on itself to avoid zoning in on, maybe, what you really want to write about? Have you hidden nothing, and flaunted nothing, but distorted everything?

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