Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I’m aware that I’ve been having a go at some big targets lately. After politics and religion, what comes next? I expect there are some subjects that might elude me, or that would be just too tricky to package in a way that would be acceptable to every reader. I always try to be just a little controversial, like a small chilli slipped into an otherwise-innocuous dish, but I sometimes wonder whether I’m a little too anodyne. No doubt there are also those who think I’m too outspoken.
Well – “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said this, but it was originally written by a poet called John Lydgate. Or maybe a French writer called Jacques Abbadie, or maybe Denis Diderot wrote it first. Who knows?
I don’t remember what
According to the Internet, what was really said was this – “You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”. And then Dylan sang this – “Half of the people can be part right all of the time, some of the people can be all right part of the time, but all of the people can’t be all right all of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.” Then Leonard Cohen sang – “I can’t forget, I can’t forget, I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what.” There you go. Who knows anything?
I do sometimes have to stop myself, because I can get into a bit of a lather about something, and I come round after furiously typing several hundred words of rage and injustice and plain old anger at the stupidity of people and things. I’ve amassed quite a collection of these written outbursts over the months and years, and they won’t see the light of day, at least not in these columns. I suppose the secret of good writing lies at least partly in knowing what to cut, and how much, and how often. Frankly, the more I let my strong feelings out, the worse the writing becomes.
The whole myriad of bees
I doubt there’s a writer alive or dead who hasn’t wrestled with this problem. I’ve been on lots of writing courses, and I’ve run writers’ circles for years, and I don’t feel I’ve come any closer to cracking it. But I haven’t even yet worked out why I’ve got to write stuff, and more particularly why I persist with the madness of a weekly column. Why does anyone get any bees in their bonnets in the first place, and what causes one particular bee out of the whole myriad of bees to settle in their bonnets? I have no idea.
In my case it’s writing. And looking stuff up on the Internet. I have a terrible habit of being diverted towards something else I notice on the screen, and following that up, then getting redirected down ever-narrowing pathways. For instance, while I was researching bees in the bonnet, I thought of a half-forgotten line from a long-ago-heard song, and eventually I found this, which sums up my thoughts on writing, although it’s actually about love – “Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, I gotta love one man till I die”.
Man gotta sit and wonder why? why? why?
That’s from Showboat, written by Kern and Hammerstein. I’d better get that right, after last week’s Cole Porter blooper. Then I noticed a lovely and slightly wilder version by Tom Lehrer – “Sharks gotta swim, and bats gotta fly, I gotta love one woman till I die.” Another quote, from Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, describes me almost exactly – “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, man gotta sit and wonder why? why? why?”
Then I found – “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!” I always thought John Wayne said that in some cowboy film, but he didn’t. It was John Steinbeck, in the Grapes of Wrath. “I hate catching spiders. Still, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” He obviously had spiders in his bonnet, rather than bees. Apparently Alan Ladd, in Shane, said – “A man has to be what he is.” Which, inevitably, led me back to Popeye, one of my minor deities? — “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam”.
Songs about love for unsuitable men
Funnily enough, all these sayings refer to men. There’s not a single quote like this that I can think of (apart from songs about love for unsuitable men) that expresses such an idea for women. Is it because women are far too sensible? I want to be careful to say that I generalise here out of curiosity, not to express any prejudice. So I looked it up, and found a book called – “A Woman’s Gotta Do What a Woman’s Gotta Do: Wisdom for taking control of your life” – by Michelle McKinney Hammond. I believe this to be a self-help book. I read somewhere that self-help books are almost exclusively bought by women, and I have no explanation for that either.
I think my own urge to write is somehow to record my own peculiar journey, which started early in my life when I started asking questions that start with “Why?” I never got an answer to any of these, which annoyed me for decades, until I understood that these questions can never be answered satisfactorily. But they raise even more, even more interesting questions. Life, for me, is a gallery of questions, like opposing mirrors, receding and curving, ever smaller, down an unending corridor of identical images and reflections. In just the same way as you’ll never get close to a rainbow, because it moves with you, you’ll never get to the end of the questions. Some people might find that scary, but I think it’s beautiful.
What do you want to know?
So my last quote is from one of my three most favourite films, the Big Blue, between two lifelong friends, one French and the other Italian, who are also competitors. One of them sums me up, and the other is everyone who has ever known me.
Jacques: I don’t understand. Please explain to me.
Enzo: What do you want to know?
Jacques: Everything!
Enzo: About what?
Jacques: About everything!
Enzo: Mama mia.
If you want to be happy, be who you are
What I want to say here is very simple. There’s nothing to be gained in living your life afraid of someone else not respecting you because you are who you are. If you want to be happy, be who you are, and people who care will be happy for you and with you. And I’d rather be misquoted than never quoted by anyone.
As the great Oscar Wilde didn’t say – “There’s only one thing worse than having everyone misquoting you, and that’s having nobody quoting you at all.”
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Image: Pixabay under CC BY 2.0
Image: Rama under CC BY 2.0
Image: Sailko under CC BY 2.0
Image: Pixabay under CC BY 2.0
Image: Public Domain under CC BY 2.0
Image: H-Stt under CC BY 2.0
Image: literaturereviewhq under CC BY 2.0
