Comparisons are odious

Why do we do it to ourselves?

I’m continuing, in odd moments and in between the deadly fascination of phone scrolling, to write the book that I’m committed to. The deadly fascination of the phone is in part because the book proposal is out with agents at the moment, and I’m irresistibly drawn to check my email for the next kind refusal every twenty minutes or so. Having been living in that state for the last month, the mental frame of the phone twitch has become a background hum to my writing, concentrating, or peripatetic working. I keep trying to resist, I keep succumbing.

Even more deadly to writing is the next mental battlefield. The comparison.

I’m writing about Virginia Woolf, who had a significant anniversary this last week, the 100th birthday of the publication of Mrs Dalloway, which was marked at her sister Vanessa Bell’s house, Charleston in Sussex, with a party and celebratory readings and performances by Edmund de Waal, Caleb Azumah Nelson, and Deborah Levy. August company indeed to find myself in. I thought that I would write up the story of my day leading up to the party and liken it to the plot of Mrs Dalloway. After all, how hard could it be?

It’s a neat comparison, but I’d failed to take into account the genius of Woolf. I’d failed to take into account her allusiveness, her aliveness, her rhythm and her depth. She talked, in her diaries, of the agonising slowness of composition of Mrs Dalloway, and how it only came to her by inches, how she mined to ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters with the idea that at some point they would connect.

My words are glib and surface. The impressions slide off them like glass. I have dug and create a pocket only. A pocket, pock marked prose. Imitations of Woolf continue as pale imitations, stylistic only. I have not her mind.

Here is a picture of an iris. It could easily be from the garden at Charleston.

See how it stands, so brave, so beautiful. So itself.

It’s hard enough writing with the Literary Cannon always in the back of your mind. Much less when you write, as I have been, facing them. Going down to Charleston the other day I was in Victoria Station waiting for a train. A younger woman came to sit down on the bench next to me, and as she did, a pigeon flew towards her and hovered in midair facing her. She sat down with a laugh and turned to me, two fingers pointing to her eyes and then away to indicate a face off. “We eyeballed each other” she said. I smiled. “That’s unnerving.”

It was at the festival for Woolf that someone commented how the gazes in her writing - and pictures she drew - are sliding off, indirect. There is an elusive eye. The look is inward, not confronting.

Comparisons - direct drawing between one thing and another - are odious. They fly in unbidden and hover in an imaginary face off. They do not allow the thing to be itself. They do not allow its spirit to rise, like the iris, background out of focus, able to hold its essence with a soft inner fire.

My mental process and the approach I take to my writing is as important as the writing itself. There is no creativity without curating the self. The first and most essential element is to recognise the essence of the creator - without comparison - in relation to their raw material. Of the making of things there is no end. Of the making of self, likewise. That is why comparisons are odious. That is why I shouldn’t do this to myself.

I’ll draw on a deeper well to write the next parts - write on into my adventure - to learn, to explore, to journey the self as well as the writing of the raw material. I’ll continue in the way of the making of things.

I hope you find encouragement for your journey here as I have found in sharing it with you.