‘Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I had bad dreams.’ (Hamlet)

I start with the memory of a little book. ‘A Little Book of Loneliness’, the title I found in my father’s council flat after he died. I quote from that book at the opening of my own book, No Boys Play Here, what is a study of loneliness, isolation and rejection through Shakespeare: the character of Falstaff.

In Pond Life, I have created another lonely character, because loneliness is everywhere. We all are. And like all of us, Edith longs to be included. But in what? Edith wants to be bathed in light. To be chosen, to be elected, to be one of them: the on screen stars. To be or not to be?

But the screen world is selective; we must audition. Some of us know how to make ourselves look good; turn ourselves into film stars. Makeup (a lot) and good lighting is all you need. A good angle. Much practise.

But who are we doing this for?

I see loneliness everywhere: in the young people I teach, all twenty something or just before twenty; a few in their thirties now wondering about families – that comes later and later if ever --- and those stretching into their forties. They still come and see me. I’ve seen them grow up or not grow up because the current world keeps them young. The current world is only interested in the very young.  It is easier to control infants; it is easier to sell things to them --- all the things they sense they want they can’t have – houses, homes, holidays, interesting, well paid, well recognised jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, babies -- all interesting things, all distractions from the loneliness. The empty screen before you switch it on in the morning -- if you ever switch it off. That dark grey morgue, the blank screen, before it turns bright white to light up on you.

Edith Cull, my current character, exists before the digital age took over, but she has the same hankering to be on screen; to be enraptured by silvery light; to be scooped up and set down elsewhere; to become someone else enjoying a more enhanced life. The cinema is her commodity-fetish, and her cinema seat is what she saves her pennies for. It is what she leaves her pokey little flat for.  

For, usually a preposition but sometimes a conjunction, as in ‘for it is difficult to mention money, payment.’  For: like because.

For: a reason for doing something, a cause. ‘What are you for?’ I used to ask my friend and colleague to make her laugh during our tea breaks. What are ‘we’ for? We meant our institution, our association; we both had one, albeit of rather marginal status within a prestigious university.

A university: these days often a rather made-up place. A lot goes on beneath that banner, that grand brand, where nowadays people don’t always know what they are for?  

I thought I was for teaching, but it is hard to really teach, to educate, to lead anyone out of ignorance, if what you are for is mainly selling things. Course, grades, degree rankings, all half made up for the marketplace; all arbitrary and all far too easily given away to please those who pay you. Almost half my students now get Firsts. It is a game, and they play it; they first learnt the game at school. All my visiting students have As. But then so did all the students who came my way. I was taught to believe an ‘A’ never existed. It must mean you’re perfect, everything perfectly right. Nothing to alter. I find that thought terrifying. Sylvia Plath says in one of her poems, or rather her speaker says it: ‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.’ I always thought that meant the idea of perfection forecloses any sort of creative production or reproduction. It is a brilliant metaphor for the creative mind. Creativity is full of holes and error. It is built upon the premise of failure, of limits. ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not I had bad dreams.’ Hamlet. The imagination must be bounded in; it must contained by form – the nutshell – it must have some developed methods and techniques.

 What are those grades for? What are you for?

A few of my students can write well. Few have a critical voice of their own. It has never been encouraged. Most of them don’t know what voice is; they can’t hear it. Few have any engaged relationship with language. Most cannot hear language. They have not been encouraged to live with and alongside the music of words and sentences, to own phrases, to coin a phrase or two because they know they can cut and paste. Very many use words they think they know but their knowing is quite approximate. They guess, infer meaning. Approximate meaning is good enough. It’s good enough to ‘sort of’ know what a word means, so they keep on ‘sort of’ using them.

‘What are you for’?

Answer: It is a love of language and its secrets that keeps me going.

As a teacher I am not meant to please. I am meant to challenge, to upset preconceived notions of rightness. As I grow older I realise that the chance I might be wrong is far higher than the chance I might be right. Real intelligence is knowing what you don’t know, what you can’t see from your narrow perch. That takes a lot of work; it often means not pleasing. I realise that this is turning into a manifesto. What are you for? It is a difficult question to ask. It is a difficult question to answer. I notice that not many people answer me.