“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
“And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 25: 29-30).
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.
- Milton
I consider myself to have many talents. I will not enumerate them here; maybe later, as we go along. And the reward of talents well invested, ought to be recognition, celebrity, remuneration, abundance. Let me speak in a plain voice, and tell the truth; if I write down, that I have had no recognition, it is not because I am asking for any one human being to give it to me; I am talking to myself, and analysing what has happened. But in writing an essay about the poor returns on the investment of my talents, I am certain that I want to make a cultural and political point, too. My case might be representative of what has happened to more people than I. I’ll start with that.
In the field of war studies, which concerns itself with the power and fitness of a nation to survive, it is held to be true, that in nations where men are denied entry to their culture, even where their access would be beneficial to the survival of that nation, men such as myself are said to be subject to what they call ‘downgrading’. If a man of talent cannot join the elite of his nation, it might be because he belongs to the wrong part of the nation. His part of the nation has been downgraded, so that the higher honours are reserved for men of a different part. As an example, you would say, that the Welsh man of the fifteenth century did not rise to become a bishop or a noble knight in his part of the world, because the Welsh had been downgraded. I should add, that I do not think that ‘class’ should be associated with downgrading. We could say, that the traditional British man has been downgraded in Western Europe, regardless of his class, and it would probably be true. And, both high and low class Welshmen of the late middle ages, were equally prevented from having authority in their own land.
I have said, that I don’t resent this situation, and am happy to accept, that there are other causes of my failure, and that they are largely my fault. For instance, there is a sense in this: I have chosen to retire into obscurity, because I am part of an ‘elite defection’. A nation in a state of health, is of roughly one mind, and forms what we call a ‘culture’. But if the nation is unhealthy, and factionalised, split up into irreconcilable parties or tribes, then a man may choose consciously or not, to avoid getting involved in its higher functioning. Not from cowardice or indifference, but from disgust and anger, and because he is reconciled to the idea of being part of a faction, rather than being part of the culture.
When I speak of the ‘elite’, I mean, that part of a nation which is talented, and mobile; the elite is not characterised by class, but by talent and proven usefulness to the nation as a whole. A healthy British culture has always had tiers and layers of refinement and power, which we call the classes. But the elite always did work alongside the highest class of the land, purely as a result of talent and usefulness. It is in this way that a talented engineer can become head of an ancient scientific society; or, a painter of low or no class, can become useful to the authorities, and associate with the wealthy and permanent upper class, by doing his painting for them and the nation. But where the land is factionalised, the elite of talent and energy do not carry out any work, because the culture is not healthy and structured in that way. And where there is an elite in such a society, it is probably just a part of a faction vying for direct power, rather than doing typical culturally useful work.
The culture of any nation, is its general behaviour, and its self-expression in its work; it can be seen in the nation’s preferred activities, the way the members get together, and the way they do things. That is what I mean by the word ‘culture’. I think that I have been a remarkably loyal part of Britain’s ancient or thousand year culture. I have a Masters degree in Philosophy, and a PhD. I did a bit of time in the Army overseas more than once; I looked after a medium sized business; I have studied and created continuously. But I suspect that people like me, have been down-graded; that there has been a cultural revolution, taking our centre of power and reward for such things away from Britain, toward something else, and not toward Europe. For instance, if British culture is broadly patriarchal, then in my day, we have seen a revolution, such that patriarchy is actively discriminated against. And, the other point: if there was a chance to belong to the elite in our time, it was a choice I faced, whether to defect from it, and despise the idea, of belonging to the elite, because there is now no single culture, but at least two, and they are factions. Someone in my position has no place in his culture, because there is no culture to join; rather, there is a set of opposing ‘movements’, or parties, or factions, where talent is not required, but rather numbers, and shouting, and celebrity, and skills of a baser kind, more appropriate for an invasion or a resistance.
A culture is the self expression of a set of people who share the same beliefs, attitudes, and usually the same language and the same physical geographical location. It can be best understood, as a ‘religion’ which all take part in. At its highest point, people usually look toward God, and thus the most solemn parts of their culture do directly try to interact with God, in music, painting, worship, architecture; and their usual activities can be understood, and should be understood, as rituals, even when they are almost comically mundane. They resemble rituals which all members of the nation or group are expected to perform as a rule. Examples would be school attendance, or the expectation that everyone should have an occupation; the rituals of the British are things like wearing trousers, and tucking your shirt in; drinking tea; owning your own car; thinking of yourself as part of a class; keeping up to date with the News; holding a familiar relationship of veneration with technology and progress, and so on.
But I don’t want to go any further along those lines, but to return to the first point. What happened to me, as an individual? However it goes on the large scale, and despite downgrading, defections, and the lack of opportunity in general, I could still have made my way toward fame. Let’s be clear: I am not famous, and I am largely irrelevant in this society, this culture. So, what happened?
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If I tell you, that I don’t resent being, by my own standards, unknown; and that I accept that I am guilty of this failure; I also tell you that I do have an expectation, and have expected better of myself. I think, that in our culture, it is rightly believed, and generally believed, that a talented man should have found his place in the world. And I don’t think I ever did.
If someone were to ask me, why do you think you deserve fame, I would answer him. I will do so now. But the question has another sense: you are asking “Why do you want fame anyway? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be”; that question makes a separate point, and has a different answer. It is easier to respond to, and goes something like this: “We expect recognition in our nation, for what we have done. It is a rule of our culture, that we encourage and recognise achievement”. It’s not a personal desire, therefore, when let us say, that an inventor who has invented something, wants to be famous because of it. Recognition and fame is literally owed him, in our nation. The sense of fairness and truth demands that what he has done becomes generally known. He might not feel he deserves anything, but it is owed him all the same. So, there are personal reasons for the need for fame, and social obligatory ones.
The whole subject is obviously affected by a comical as well as a tragic aspect. The neglected genius is often given his fame after his death, by people or generations who feel regret or remorse about the way he was neglected. But the struggling self-assertive man without a name, who believes he deserves better, and may not deserve it, is not a sympathetic character; he is boastful and ludicrous: he is comic. I don’t mind that; I’m not interested in being the man who boasts and demands attention.
At the age of fifty, and basically reaching the top of the hill, and going down the other side of it, I find myself with disappointed expectations, relative to what I had expected, when I was a younger man. In theoretical terms, I have become another statistic of the dysfunctional nation: I am part of an unemployed excess elite. I mean, one of a growing number of people who form a surplus, and who, in better times, would have found a place using what talent they have, but cannot do so in these times, due to structural faults in the culture. Such a man is not needed, but feels that there should have been a place in his nation, where he could have been useful.
For nearly a decade, I have made a living doing semi-skilled labour in construction. There is no need to make a big deal about how, I also run my own business, or how I am in charge of my own schedule. Those things are not worth praise; they are only due, to my disinclination to work for somebody else. The main thing is, I work at a trade which might have taken me six months to learn and master, and which is not easy, but which does only use up a fraction of my potential usefulness. I work outdoors, and I always finish my work with dirty hands and clothes. I often cut myself, and sometimes, but rarely, I injure my hands, legs, or whatever. Once I have started working at a job, I usually have to carry on, physically engaged, for between six and ten hours at a time. It’s an employment for someone who swears a lot, who has to carry weights approaching his own body weight from time to time. There is moderately stiff competition for this kind of work in my local area, which means that my work is well-subscribed, and that if I were not doing it, others could take my place with relative ease. I am at the lower end of the scale of national income, earning roughly the equivalent of the minimum wage, with those additional perquisites which are allowed to the self-employed, and which are not available to people who are on a salary. I am necessarily familiar with how to maintain a car or van at a mechanic’s sort of level, and I have a large set of tools of the trade. In short, if one were to designate a man by his employment, then I am Working Class. I also have no prospect of leaving that class behind me, and moving on to some other kind of life; I have earned a living like this for nearly a decade, and the decade prior I earned my living managing an office and factory in the same profession.
My employment situation is a serious matter, of course. If I cease to work, then I will have nowhere to live, be unable to support my wife and children, and so on. And, therefore, this occupation is essential to me; but it does not saturate my entire being. Although this working class life is likely to continue into my old age, which will be in at least twenty years’ time, my days could have been spent differently. Worse still, I am aware that it may still be different, and so I am haunted with other possibilities, beyond my grasp. But gaining what I have referred to as ‘fame’ is the only real way out or upwards; and this ‘fame’ is, realistically speaking, not likely to come my way. I will live out what remains of my life working to earn a living, using a fraction of my ability; and rather pointlessly doing things such as poetry, which might, but won’t, bring fame.
What is fame? And what do I do, which inspires me with the idea, that I deserve ‘fame’? I have already said, that ‘fame’ is a synecdoche, for recognition and success in our culture. I do not believe that I have ever tried to ‘become famous’. But I have done things over long periods, which I hoped would result in fame. I can at least claim, even if my subject is dark and comic, that I have worked at poetry, music, electronics, or whatever, with a disinterested focus on the work itself, rather than on becoming notorious.
I suppose that a realistic estimate of what fame a poet can gather, would be the recognition of people who read and appreciate poetry; and likewise for painting, or singing. This is different from the acclaim which surrounds ‘celebrities’, famous actors, and generally notorious people, who are famous for being famous. I think I should now try to clear up what I do not mean, what I do not expect, when I want to be famous. Perhaps the most famous people, are politicians, and actors; add to these a certain type of musicians and celebrities of that kind. Politicians are certainly the most talked about group of people in our time; and some of them are likely to have a kind of eternal fame. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, are famous politicians. Nevertheless, most politicians are transient, and their renown is not only passing, but frequently an occasion for hatred. We cannot dissociate fame from the activity of politicians: they are the most powerful people of their era.
Actors are usually adored and famous, not for their power, but for different reasons, more silly reasons. I see no particular talent in actors, and their success is usually due to luck, rather than talent. There is no intrinsic difference, that I can see, between a good actor and an out of work actor. It is just that one of them is very well known, and the other one is not. Their quota of skill or talent is roughly the same. The actor is an example of celebrity, and unearned fame. In musical matters, it is not very much better. The most famous musicians of our day are frequently a kind of actor, raised to prominence as a craze, with a long tail of equally talented people in their wake, who can sing and dance with equal plausibility. This is the kind of fame which I do not require, personally. The admirers of such people are frequently a nuisance, I understand.
But there ought to be people famed for their talents in every field of our culture. So, in games and sports, there are the best performing stars, who are rightly brought to the attention of their society: in football, running, tennis, horse racing, or whatever. The senior cleric of the Church is well known to the public; he is famous. For his time in post, the senior soldier of the Armed Forces, the Chief of Staff, is famous. Every field, including business, or the writing of fiction, has its famed practitioners.
We learn about them from the television, or from the newspapers, and these days, from the internet. Those from the past who are now dead, who excelled in our culture, we learn about in school, and in our education. The TV has its own brand of famous people, of course. That class of famous people is described as consisting of ‘entertainers’ or journalists, TV show hosts; such people are characterised by being both very fortunate, and also by being sociable and pleasant to watch on the screen. They have no other remarkable qualities necessary to their fame.
I think that it would be right to say, that the idea of fame changes from age to age, in that the medium of communication changes; where there is no mass media, fame and renown belonged either to a small area such as a village; or, where a man was talented above everyone else, it was ideally a fame among the authorities, the ruling class, at a centralised court of some kind. The ideal example being the court of Elizabeth I, or Augustus, or London during the Enlightenment.
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There is a part of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, where Mill explains what it means, for a man to attain his objectives, and to attain and realise his most profound purpose in life. For me, fame might be one fraction of the deep and forbidden meaning of my life. One day, around the age of twenty, Mill tells us that he carried out a thought experiment on himself. He asked himself, what he would do, and how would he proceed in life, if his deepest wish were to be fulfilled. His deepest wish and the motivation of his activities at that time, was to bring about a fair and just society, to implement his liberal political policies. He asked himself what he would do, after he had achieved that, and, having no answer, he immediately fell into a period of morbid despair which lasted several years. He realised, that his happiness depended on his having an objective, which gave his daily life meaning; and when that objective had been attained, he effectively lost any meaning or motivation, to carry on living.
For many years, too many to count, becoming famous, both while alive and after my death, was my meaning, it was the meaning of my life, and it accompanied any action. And yet, spelling out what real fame is, would be something to frighten me, and bring about despair. For, fame appears to mean this: being at the top of your profession, being the heavy weight champion of your field. And once that has been achieved, there is every possibility, that a deep despondency would engulf me. So, there is a reason to believe, that a man such as myself, who craves recognition, is also avoiding it.
I have already pointed out, that I work regardless of my desire to be acclaimed. If I paint, it is because I want to see a painting unfold and to be finished. If I write poetry, sometimes, it is because I want to make poetry. I do not hold the pen, or even take up the pen, in order to gain celebrity. Writing is something I just do; I cannot live without doing it, so to speak. I have to make things. The fame aspect, the need for recognition, is something which, as a grown up, I would like. I must add, that as a youth, the fame was a far more consuming passion; but that is not to say that it was the incentive for leaning toward poetry and philosophy; there are easier ways of gaining notoriety, after all.
If I begin at the beginning, I believe that from the age of around five or six years old, I started to draw, and I was immediately known by teachers at school, and by other adults, to be more than averagely good at this. I would say, that I also preferred the sense of being a child rather in the shadows, and on the outside of a society, rather than in the middle of things, enjoying acclaim. And this is very possibly why, although I paint now, and although fame would encourage me to develop my skills and give me new ideas, it may be the case, that I have surreptitiously avoided it; because I enjoy work, and fear too much interference by other people.
I can tell you, that I lost my skill in drawing, to a very large extent, in a catastrophic attack of depression, at the high tide of my adolescence. I want to return to that, later. But, I returned to drawing and painting aged around 35 years old. I know that I did not avoid acclaim and recognition after that, because I know that I have tried unsuccessfully to get involved in what our culture calls ‘the art world’. When I began painting again, I used to be engaged on a painting most of my days, and this was so over many years; and for at least three successive years, I submitted portraits to the BP Prize in London; and I used to submit my work to the Chester gallery competition; and to a local book shop which put my big canvases on their walls once every year. So, I was trying to get involved in the ‘art world’; my lack of fame is not for want of trying.
I think that I began a work, with the aim of pleasing myself, and hoping that it would be good; but I began it with the feeling that this one might attract attention. You might now want to tell me, that to attract attention in Chester is not good enough; you would say, that I did attract attention in Chester, and that would be true; and then you should add, and remonstrate with me, that there are around three hundreds towns and cities in Britain which are equivalent in size and importance to Chester; and that it is necessary for a man to go to the metropolis, and set up there. This is all true. I would reply, that I have lived in London, and I went there looking for fame, when I was twenty years of age. I had no success, not a sniff of it. I also went back, for three years, at the university in London. I have found that there is a set of fortuitous circumstances which must coincide, of talent, notoriety, sociability, and pure luck, which would be necessary to attract attention in London, and that after three or four years, I discovered that there was simply no easy way of blending them together.
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Telling you about how I learned to paint, and what it takes, and how good I might be, bores me. And, it is not my point, in this essay. I am not claiming to be worthy of your attention, or asking why you don’t appreciate my works. That is, I am not claiming to be any good, for it is in your gift, to use your own judgement, and apply it to my work, as you please. You may disagree with me, and believe that I am not talented. Let us leave painting.
There are several other things which I have done, which have had a similar progress; and they are on going. I have worked above all, as a youth and adult, at poetry and philosophy, and reading. I don’t know how you would characterise this activity in our culture; I suppose you would call it ‘intellectual’ activity, or something. I have been a poet and critic, perhaps. I have also been a musician, and a singer, and a rather poor song writer, but I had a go at composing songs all the same.
I have not expected fame in this, but I did expect more, when I think about what I did in the Army. The least that I expected there, was to join with the grade or rank of officer, but that was withheld from me. And when I worked for ten years at a business, I did expect a kind of fame which would bring me celebrity, a kind of admiration; it was service to the country, as I saw it. And I would say, that I began doing electronic engineering with the aim of making a living, and growing a business, in high technology. I spent five years of work, more or less every single day over five years, creating a piece of state of the art digital technology, between 2014 and 2019, in the hours after work. That came to less than nothing, after five years of investment, because I could not find the financial support to scale up the production of that digital device. Should I tell you how much effort and love of science it takes, to build a miniature computer, with radio frequency reception and transmission, using microchips? About how you have to be at least Bachelor of Science in electronic engineering, and learn to use several coding languages, and deploy them over thousands of lines of code, for the design of an embedded device? Let’s not go there.
When I think of how I joined the Church, and immediately thought of becoming a priest, with the intention both of becoming important, and also serving God, I think that it becomes clear, that in everything I have done, I have wanted to excel and that this is what ‘fame’ has meant to me. I wanted to be the best at things; and where that was not possible, to at least be in the top ten percent, associating with the celebrities in any field. I have tried so many things, and enjoyed them all. But as the years pass, the returns run down to zero, it seems, and the chances of leaving a mark on this country and this culture, diminish.
I have something to say about this, and let me see what it is. The urge for fame in the wider world, first came to me, and not by accident, when I became interested in music, when I, almost in the space of six months, all at once, as it is when we are young, grew to realise that the world at large, outside the school and the house, was offering me a vast new challenge. It offered its challenge to me in the form of pop and rock music. But popular music, I did not realise at the time, is largely a way of bringing people together; bringing together people of all kinds. Popular music is, for that reason, quite a simple art form, and it is easy to join this part of our culture; guitars take weeks, not years, to learn to play. That pop music is widespread, broadcast widely, is of its essence; and therefore, the celebrity of the people who make the music, is intrinsic to the rock and pop music itself. If it is not well known, then popular music fails in its core meaning. You are not doing popular or rock music properly, if you are not famous and broadcast across the whole country, or the world. There is a cruelty and stupidity built in to this, for, music which fulfils that purpose, of bringing people together, fulfils it by being broadcast. And people grow to like something, the more familiar they are with it, and the more familiar everyone else is, in a vicious circle of simplicity and stupidity. Hence, it is not necessary for music to be derived from talent, at all, but the most important feature of it is, that it be broadcast to a wide audience.
That there is no great astonishing talent in the rock musician, by and large, led me to seek out more challenging things, even at the point, when I had the chance, being young and ambitious, of attaining to fame in that field. I as it were gave up at the last moment, and found a new interest.
What took me away from rock music was philosophy; I began learning languages, and wanting to know everything. In secret. And the loss of interest in music coincided, not by accident, with a deep loss of meaning and confidence in my self. And, strangely, with an unbearable desire to be famous in the same way as the immortals of politics and literature, are famous. That was a great challenge, which would last decades. I am perhaps still on that path.
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When I wanted fame and to be supreme, in the old days, I wanted to be the chief minister, to have universal acclamation. I wanted validation. I dreamed of it. So intense was it, and so far from being possible for me, that in my early twenties, it drove me to a mad kind of paranoid schizophrenia, self-induced, guilty. And these days, I fear dying and what comes after, because if I were to die now, I would have achieved so little. What we achieve does need the recognition of other people, or, it was simply a waste of time; it had no meaning.
What makes me worry about my poetic efforts, into which I have poured so much of life, is that if I die now, or as things stand, my active life will have been total and utter complete failure, because I have not yet had a valid response to my work. It sounds odd to say it, but it is entirely true: I have had nothing published, and nobody has ever commented on it. When I remember this, my mind speculates, dimly, on an eternity of physical suffering that I will undergo because of this failure. The gnashing of the teeth and the outer darkness awaits, perhaps. It seems the nature consequence, because I am no stranger to torture and endurance, which are due to a man who has failed.
It is as when, after undergraduate studies, accompanied with a retributive madness as they were, I entered the British Army infantry training courses, and putting aside or to one side, the poetry, and the thinking, I found myself in the turmoil of physical extremity on the training areas, in the cold and dark, straining every muscle on long marches and simulated attacks and patrols, trying to deaden my consciousness, and as it were, to go through the hardship very quickly, as if that could be achieved by simply not noticing what was going on around me. Submissive, with consent, but with a spiritless resignation to a higher fate, to the condition of being private soldier; at the mercy of a regular corporal, with no wider or higher consciousness or vision of things going on, than the orders and demands of the platoon sergeant.
I have also found that praying with God, in meditation, praying near to God, has given me a great deal of peace, and more or less exorcised the demand for recognition of the unrealistic kind. If I had ever been unrealistic and self-defeating when I wanted fame and recognition, then my relationship with God and the beyond, cured me of it. I have remained the same, but the demon which used to provoke me with shame for being unknown, and goad me on with unrealistic ambitions, visions of fame not suitable to a poet, has been banished.
The rise of the poet to a condition of being famous, follows a couple of steps; first he must have written something with which he is happy. I had not achieved this until recently, I confess. And this confession makes sense of how, I have been able to live with my failure: I have deserved to be ignored. And second, he must find a publisher; but in this era of the euthanasia of the British culture as a whole, and factionalism, finding a publisher has become harder, rather than easier, as I have improved and as the years have passed.
I think that our culture in the 1990s, when I was very young, was British; but it was also apparently boring, and standing still, in a tedious and almost cowardly immobility. These days, there is a war on everything British, carried out by the authorities themselves. It appears to be grounded in an active desire for collective suicide. It can be seen in the new euthanasia laws, the abortion laws, the denial of the two sexes, the closure of industry and energy centres, and in a thousand other things which the authorities actively pursue. My poetry, or perhaps any poetry, will not find a publisher with any ease in a country like this.
But the final stage, which leads from obscurity to fame, for the poet, is for a competent critic to recognise the work, after it has been published. After that, I suppose, as much as a man can do in this life, would have been achieved. Afterwards, a man must attempt to retain his reputation.
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The case is not dissimilar with respect to philosophy. Anyone can try it, and thousands do. The elite among philosophers are chosen by critics who have a nose for cultural survival and for what is new. I have myself, aged thirty, published two books of philosophy, with a professional publisher. But those books, I freely confess, were not up to much. I make no apology nor plead on their behalf. I have had a little bit of success and fame in philosophy. Those were the years when I attempted to become a renowned and famous lecturer or teacher in philosophy; but it was not to be.
It has appeared to me, that when that fit of melancholy fell on me, at the time when I became disillusioned by the rock and pop music industry, while still a child, I seem to have died spiritually. My spiritual death was a long period lasting two or three years, just as Mill described his own living death, a morbid solitude without the least light. And, that, losing all aptitude for living at that time, it is as if I was gradually reborn, and have ever since lived like someone nearly twenty years behind his biological age. I am only now, at fifty, at the stage where other men are, when they are thirty. This might explain my tardy progress to what I would call maturity, and to a situation where I can create things with which I myself am happy.
I am not famous because I have come to maturity in a factionalised nation, which has no culture of a coherent type, whose main activity is destroying and downgrading my way of life. I am not alone, since where once there might have been men who could help, there is now elite defection, and an unwillingness to support the young, or to do the job. Then there is a surfeit of people unhappy with their culture. And where there were once opportunities to sing, and to poetise, there are no vacancies, since those chairs and positions are filled with the revolutionaries who control our country, often from places as far away as can be found.
And I’m not famous because, by nature, as soon as I ever reach a summit, I start making my way down, and thinking of the next challenge. I prefer solitary efforts, too, and I disdain praise. Yet, despite myself, because it is the nature of things, recognition of my efforts is demanded, by impersonal justice. And, there is a painful thorn in my side, which tells me, that if I die before achieving fame, the judgement of history will say of me, as Nietzsche points out somewhere, that I was too weak to properly take up my role. It doesn’t help me to know, that Nietzsche himself went mad in obscurity.
And I am not famous, because I have produced work with which I am happy, original work, but only at an age when most painters, or poets, are already past their prime. I am out of time. I have produced things constantly, my entire life, without any aim, other than that I like impressive and beautiful things, and want to emulate them, and make my own. And, I grew accustomed to an environment where such things were praised and rewarded while at school. I understand that most people speak of their school days dismissively; but I do not. I have said and continue to say, that I learned little from the lessons at school. It is because I am an autodidact, that, although I trained to be a teacher, I could not get the hang of it, and did not finish the qualification period to become an educator in a British school. Even so, I do remember the culture, the self-contained universe of those days at school, with happiness; and it seems to me to be the ideal of a culture, where the pupils vied for the highest marks, were encouraged to work freely and to their best level, in sport, art, literature, mathematics, with the general rivalry and violent instincts of children, with the aim of improvement, and for some future reward; all the while being encouraged about good things, and discouraged from the bad. I have not found this situation, in the boundless and rather aimless world, in which we live after our time at secondary school, in contemporary Britain.
I also have the vague impression, that my highest desire, would be to lead the nation in fact, as well as, or even more so, than as a poet, leading it in its imagination and expression through poetry. At the same time, I know how apt I am to lead badly. I think it is right, for a person, such as I am, so confused and self-contradictory, to have faith in God, and to release his deepest responsibility for him self, into hands stronger than his own; and that this is an approved route to resolving these things.
Of course, it is just as likely, that what I have received in the form of thanks and praise for my work, in poetry, over the years when I used to send manuscripts, and individual poems to all the magazines, to the agents, to the publishers, getting no response, was justified back then. Maybe I simply wasn’t very good. These days, I don’t bother to do all that; and so, having no response is not only natural, but it is uncircumventable and inevitable. How can a man find a response in the world around him, if he doesn’t bother to send his work out to the world? But my questions remain, even if in a simplified form: I ask, why am I unknown and neglected, and not in some occupation more useful to society and culture? Even if I was not entirely happy with my work hitherto, there ought, still, to have been some place for me, working in literature, art, philosophy; it would have perhaps encouraged more decent work from me, at an earlier time in my career, if there were some pathway to belonging to this culture. For the sake of the nation, it would have been right for someone to have been employed to search out such people as I have been. But, I suppose there are such people, and such organisations, but, that they are not of the kind, which go out looking for my type of man, anymore. There is no idea of ‘British interest’ or the promotion of Britain and British people, in the authorities which govern the nation today.
While waiting for what we used to call my ‘break’, my opportunity to join our culture, and to join what used to be called the ‘elite’, as I used to do in the days when I had a rock band, looking out for the moment when the music of the band could be widely heard, and when we would get a recording contract, I will continue to publish my own works, and put together my own magazine.
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