On Focus

Just lately, everything I read provides another example of extraordinary creative productivity. Agatha Christie, for instance, passed through amazing periods of writing, Between 1930 and 1940, she published 27 novels or collections of short stories, and that’s not counting the plays. And these were her magnificent years, the years of her best work, not just the best speed of production. One of the novels she published under the name of Mary Westmacott she wrote over the course of three days on holiday. How could anyone do such a thing?

But she’s not alone; there’s an anecdote I always remember about Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. Three weeks after war was declared, he went to see Harold Nicholson in his chambers at the Temple, and commissioned him to write a Penguin Special of 50,000 words entitled, Why Britain Is At War. He took delivery of the manuscript a fortnight later. Then there’s the extraordinary women of the 19^th century: Mary Braddon, who brought up 11 children, five dating from her common law husband’s first marriage, six that she gave birth to herself, while writing over 80 novels. Or Fanny Trollope, author of a whopping 100 volumes, who also had money problems and numerous children, a fair few of them languishing towards death while she wrote in the other room.

Now me, if I get 5,000 words a week, I figure I’m doing quite well. I often don’t.

I’ve been puzzling over this, wondering why it is that we are such slowcoaches compared to those 19^th and 20^th century authors. (Who are the big-output writers of the contemporary culture? Ruth Rendell, perhaps, Lee Child? I can’t think of anyone headed towards 80 novels.) Nor do I think I’m alone in being a slow writer, in fact, most writers I know or know about produce more or less the same number of words. Partly it’s because we are expected to do more towards the business of living, despite all those so-called labour-saving gadgets. No servants these days to cook and clean and look after children. All those emails and phone messages to answer (although the authors I mention often wrote quite a few letters), the internet to surf. But it still doesn’t quite account for what I feel in my bones is a more dissipated way of living in the modern world, in which our focus is fragmented time and again over the course of each day.

Reading one of my student’s essays today on Foucault, I got excited about what felt like a revelation. And perhaps it isn’t; maybe it’s just me following some little jumpy idea around, bedazzled by its lustre. But anyway, it was an essay on surveillance, and the way that changes in the systems of discipline and punishment had resulted in changes in the way we govern ourselves. So the example most people know of Foucault’s theories – if they’ve heard of him at all – is the panopticon. This is the prison arranged with a central viewing tower and cells surrounding it. Each cell is visible from the central vantage point, but prisoners in the cells do not know if they are being watched or not. All they know is that they may be under observation at any time of day. In consequence, they tend to internalise discipline, rather than have to have it imposed upon them by punishments. They are more likely to behave according to the rules ‘just in case’. The system of justice is only one example of a society ever more concerned with policing its citizens closely. Take health care, for instance. Nowadays it’s not enough for us to be healthy; we have to engage all the time in health-promoting activities, just in case something we are doing may be killing us. It’s not enough not to smoke; we mustn’t even feel urges towards our vices. Agatha Christie was not bothered about getting herself to the gym, or eating well-balanced meals. It must have been a weight off her mind. And she lived to a fine old age, regardless.

We live in a world where increasingly we could be guilty at any moment – guilty of not doing or thinking or feeling the things we ought. And I wonder just how much of our energy goes on self-surveillance, and on trying to do things or stop doing things, that our society censures. The rise and rise of attachment parenting must be contributing to this, because what attachment parenting means is that the child is constantly observed by its parents. Darwin was the first to promote observation of small children. He motivated an army of mothers to watch and note down their children’s growth and development. For the first time, unsurprisingly, the children began to suffer from anxiety, having been made aware of themselves and their potential to do things wrong. Of course, children who are neglected get anxious too – it’s a fine balancing act, weighing enough concern against enough healthy neglect. But I do think it leads us to watch ourselves more closely as adults. What is social media, after all, other than a form of self-surveillance that we hold out to the attention of others? Why would people post status updates on facebook about the nice piece of toast they’ve just eaten, or their relief at having finished filling in tax forms? All this requires time and energy and attention. If we weren’t paying so much time and attention to policing our inner worlds, wouldn’t we have more energy and focus to give to projects outside of ourselves?

(And given that blog posts can also be a form of self-surveillance that wastes energy, I apologise to all my friends waiting for emails from me – very busy week! So sorry! Will write soon!)

Girl Power

She referred to herself as a feather on the breath of God, and ‘wretched, indeed more than wretched I my womanly condition’, but this belied her tremendous strength of will and purpose, her creative stamina, her charisma. Hildegard von Bingen is one of the few women whose names have survived history, and if she is not as well known now as she was in her peak years at the end of the twelfth century, it is only the fault of religion’s decline. She was a mystic and a prophet, a composer and a dramatist, a writer, a public speaker and a spiritual leader.

What appeals to me about her is the uniqueness of her vision. One of her favourite concepts was that of ‘greenness’, or viriditas, developed from the rich symbolic language of medieval times. Greenness meant the visible new life of plants, but it also meant the fierce power of life, vigour, energy, that lay beneath, the deeper greenness of the life force itself. Hildegard speaks of nature as the persistence of spirit, of ‘greenness’ being found in the moral life of human beings as they mature and grow, and in their emotional and physical strengthening. Greenness in her religious vision was what the word was steeped in, when it entered peoples lives and took root.

I recalled Hildegard and her idea of greenness walking to the bookshop yesterday, and having to step carefully around an eruption in the pavement, where the roots of a nearby tree had sought blindly for growth. Nature is so powerful, it surprises me how time and again we try to deflect and restrain it. Why do we think we will win? I often have trouble understanding the word ‘spirituality’, or making sense of it in my life. And it occurred to me, thinking of this greenness, that nature is the image of the spirit inside us. No matter what we do, the natural self persists. And just as spring must always follow winter, even if it is delayed or disappointing, so our spirits will always rise again, regardless of the damage they undergo. Our spirit returns because it cannot do otherwise, although we can choose to cultivate it, or let it run wild. Reading my student’s work to check her English, my favourite error/insight of the day: ‘I need to be blossomed in my work.’ Indeed, so do we all.

Hildegard actively sought her own blossoming. She was the tenth and final child born to a noble family in Germany, and was

The octopus legs are in fact holy flames communicating to Hildegard's head

given to the church at the age of eight. She became handmaid to Jutta of Sponheim, an anchoress who lived in a cell next to the monastery of the joyfully named St Disibod, who taught her Latin whilst attracting more noble women about her, eventually forming a Benedictine community. When Jutta died, Hildegard became abbess. Since childhood, Hildegard had had visions, and suddenly, aged forty-two and seven months, after a particularly prophetic vision, she wrote to Bernard of Clarivaux, one of the best connected of all the mystics and something of an evangelical touring performer. She had seen Bernard in her vision, she wrote ‘a man looking straight into the sun, bold and unafraid’ (such brilliant diplomatic flattery!) and she needed his advice, uneducated and lowly woman as she was, ‘about how much I should say of what I have seen and heard.’

For Hildeburg had embarked on one of her greatest theological achievements, a three-volume set of mystical writings, the Scivias, which Bernard took on her behalf to a gathering of bishops in the winter of 1147-8. There he read parts of the unfinished manuscript (it would take Hildegard until 1173 to complete the whole three books) and gained permission from the Pope for its publication. This made of Hildegard the only medieval woman permitted by the Pope to write books on theology. Hildegard’s fame grew and she became an advisor to popes and to royalty. Like all good authors, she went on a lecture tour. What we know of her life comes from biographers employed by her friends to put together a case for her canonisation. (The first biographer died while still engaged in writing her up, which must have been a bummer.) Her life stands as a warning and a reassurance to all those who seek recognition. Hildegard died in 1179, the canonical proceedings only began in 1227, and she was finally approved by the Vatican in 1940.  What’s a mere 750 years to a woman of Hildegard’s tenacity? Now she is the subject of any number of scholarly books.

One of the 35 illustrations in her text, she was the first multimedia religious artist

One of Hildegard’s modern day commentators is Oliver Sacks. Hildegard described her visions as being accompanied by a continuous display of bright lights, a kind of cinematic screen on which her visions unfurled. She insisted she was not dreaming, but experiencing ‘the shadow of the Living Light’ with her ‘eyes wide open’, not lost to a state of ecstasy. Charles Singer, an early 20^th century historian of medicine was the first to suggest that Hildegard was suffering from migraines, a diagnosis with which Oliver Sacks agreed. This, for me, represents like nothing else the passage of time, and the essential differences between medieval and modern ages. What to Hildegard and her compatriots was a source of divine revelation, the origin of creativity and a supreme gift is reduced in our dull pragmatic age to a medical condition. Much as I am no medical person, I find it hard to agree with this viewpoint; if nothing else, Hildegard got a hell of a lot done for someone with a permanent bad headache.

The easiest way to get in touch with the essence of Hildegard von Bingen is to listen to some of her choral music. This is how I first heard about her, as I really like this kind of chilly expansive composition; early music of this kind feels like meditation that you can listen to, it puts you in a different place. Hildegard wrote music because she believed it was the most reliable route to spiritual experience, and that it put us in touch with a more ancient part of ourselves. I think it’s the music of mountaintops, made up of voices as cold and pure as ice. A world of whiteness, against which it is perhaps easier to spot the creeping greenness of our spirits.