Mr Squiggle and the Inner Pyramid

I decided I was to be a writer when I was four, the surest decision I have ever made. Four was a big year for me. The onset of kindergarten (yes, it felt like a disease) stands out most of all.

To me kindy felt like a prison where everybody was supposed to be having fun. Like clowns, the screaming, shouting children in the yard had a dual quality, as if their cries were half pleasure, half pain; the play equipment was a mad funhouse, a desperate place. I sucked my thumb to comfort myself about the absence of my mother. According to the teachers, this was okay for girls but a weakness for boys (remarkable that even at that age we are being defined by what’s between our legs). I was told off when found sucking my thumb and the rest of my playmates would run to tell the adults if I put it back in my mouth.

The anxiety and depression this created in me was profound, and the single moments of respite that I remember are all when I lay quietly in the little reading area on carpet flipping the pages of picture books. Books for me have always been safe places. No matter how horrible what’s happening in a story may be, I feel at home. Inside stories, I was safe to feel. I didn’t have to conceal myself. If I showed my vulnerability—which seemed to be me, at that time—to people, I was punished, or made to feel precarious and unsafe. I had control of my imagination, and the authors who visited me were knights carrying me to a place magical and protective. I think discovering a precious desire to write was a method of my spirit arising in time of adversity. As if that passion rescued me. And that the books did.

I don’t want you to think that my love of stories began there. My parents read to me earlier than during the Kindergarten Days. Reading a book is strangely like having a relationship. I think that relationship helped me to retain a little more of my inner beauty, my authenticity, when I was so distressed. This is a pattern that has continued. To me stories were absolutely sacred things. They had the power to save your soul. They were windows into brighter places. They were gateways into yourself, and into a place where you knew that you still felt and could access the magic of your sensitivities.

As I grew older, I at least got to know that there were other people like me who didn’t seem to want to smash everything. My approach to the world seemed sensible to me—I thought it was common sense not to kick another boy, take his lollies, pull his pants down and then laugh at him, because I wouldn’t like it in his place; but a lot of other kids appeared to enjoy it, and a lot of people seemed to think that was normal, if less than Good Behaviour. That other people treated me as if there was something wrong with me for being so—the word was sensitive—divorced me from the flow, the narrative of life. How important it was that I could find another narrative, an intuitive, psychic one, in books.

I think in many ways, stories made me feel normal, because they put me inside the hearts (more than the heads) of people who felt like me, cared like me. Stories broke down the masks people wore in ordinary life. In a book all sorts of emotions are allowed. Once embraced in story, I could feed on a substance purer than my own truncated life-flow. I was reconnected and empowered. I had to feel, imagine, and express. I didn’t have the courage, strength or maturity to be my fullest self in relation to other people, so it wasn’t strange that I discovered both a smouldering passion to write and an erotic need to imagine and create.

When I finished school at age eighteen I had absolutely no desire to do anything whatsoever but be a writer. I could find not an ounce of passion for any other calling even though I felt pressured to do so. I developed a mysterious, plaguing fatigue illness that caused me to have repeated breakdowns each time I got a job—I went through a few: admin, couriering, grape-picking, painting, knocking on doors for charity, night fill—and in the end I packed it in for writing.

I remember when I sat down to write my first novel as an adult, one I intended to finish, that there was such a lot of subconscious fear surrounding the project, as if I was attempting to fly. I was only twenty-one and I’d never proven myself in the world. Quite the opposite when it came to my attempts to maintain a job. Would my novel be good enough? Would I get writers’ block? Would people see my inner, secret self and step on it like a cockroach because it was dirty, or innocent, or weak, or just because they could? It was hard to believe in myself to write. It was hard not to be self-conscious, to not be aware of how young I was.

For me the most challenging aspect of writing is the fact that when I do it the art always brings me face-to-face with my deep-self, with whatever lives there; and when I began, what was inside was plenty of self-denial and fear. I was in the process of comprehending that in the development of this strange, debilitating illness, I was dying to the person I’d once been. I was living through a death of self and looking at a frightening emptiness within.

It was possible that writing could lead me to the visceral experience that I wasn’t emptiness; that what I would find contained in emptiness could in fact be a signpost to something divine within; but to make that discovery I’d have to journey through the Sea of Fear.

And how was I to do that? Does writing always have to be frightening?

No, of course not; but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gone wrong somewhere if it is. I have found that the fear is never about the writing, it is always about you. In the beginning I didn’t know that. I thought it was about what I was writing.

As I wrote this first novel, which taught me so much about myself, I did develop a few habits that eased me through my fright, which I still use today.

On a day which I devote to writing I like to get up, breakfast in the late morning sun outside, and then meditate for a while, sometimes in silence, sometimes to music. It’s a way of going into my internal self, of finding calm and clarity, and turning on my creative faucets. Nothing more than that: just being present and happy.

When I was twenty-one, I read an anecdote in a self-help book, which I adopted and bastardised for my purposes. This man said he meditated upon the image of himself as a pyramid on which the waves of other people’s emotions would break imperviously. He did this to find calm. I liked the image and so I built my fount of creativity inside a pyramid that represents me. A place that I would visit in those morning meditations to find something sacred and protecting to help me follow my path. I don’t care where that path leads because it is the path of my soul and my job is only to follow.

My inner pyramid lies on an isle in a sleet-coloured ocean. I always rise up from beneath the pyramid through a trapdoor cut in the stone-block floor. The interior housekeeping is always somewhere just shy of developing the first dust: immaculate but not recently used, accustomed to the long absence of people and deep silences. A wan light sifts onto the altar at the far end of the pyramid. I can come to this altar naked or clothed, it makes no difference. This altar is the altar of me. Kneeling at it removes all garments but Creation.

* * *

But how do I write? I mean, how do I dredge anything out of myself? Isn’t that the only question that matters? There are practical answers to this, and there are metaphorical or spiritual ones. I will give both because they are both important to a writer. Every writer has to answer each. The answers are almost always slightly different for everyone and they never come immediately on setting out to be a writer. I have personally always found the most difficult aspect about writing is managing my own fear, delusions, and desires. It probably isn’t like this for everyone—I really don’t know—but I’m sure for many of us it is. Once you’re not scared of yourself, what you have to say, or what anyone has to say about what you are saying, then all the rest is just hard work at the craftsman’s bench.

I write like a vagabond. I write like a broken saint—one who has a vision but isn’t sure if he has the tinctures right. When I write properly, I write not as me but as spirit flowing through me. When I get out of my own way, when I stop wanting to be special, and follow the vision given to me by my own passion; then I feel inspired, then I’m blessed, then I can do something for myself and for somebody else.

I invent lots of tricks to outwit my fear when it arises (I’ve always been scared of being honest, and writing without honesty doesn’t work well). I have an A4 white piece of paper tacked to the emerald wall behind my laptop, where it is sure to be seen. Written on it in my hand in black Texta is:

REMEMER MR. SQUIGGLE

There are plenty of squiggles zigged and zagged around the big letters for good measure, just to get the message fully across. Mr Squiggle was a delight of mine as a four year old. I just loved him. The way he bounced around on the end of his puppet strings in a mad—and somehow friendly—way, writing deliriously from his nose. Kind of like an artistic Pinocchio on coffee, or maybe something more hallucinatory.

But anyway, I liked him a lot. The reminder on my wall is a symbol to let go of the reins. Mr Squiggle is a puppet for divine consciousness and all his squiggles are divinely inspired. He doesn’t have to worry about a thing because he’s not responsible.

When I try to emulate Mr Squiggle, I’m trying to allow the highest aspect of myself, the aspect that makes no distinctions of individuality—it’s you, it’s me, and it’s the One—to come through me. I do think the root of all inspiration comes ever and anon from the heart of all creation and that you filter it. As you strain it through your ego, all sorts of complications can arise (these complications are called Life). At worst, I sabotage my every step. This is like having one leg cemented into a plate that swivels, so that when you hop with the other you turn forever in a spastic circle. This image is Mr Squiggle trying to convince himself he’s the star of the show and not just the conduit for a good time.

Letting your higher self, if you like, take over means that you no longer get to think you are awesome or important, but it also means that you don’t have to worry about anything—not what happens to the writing, not whether you’re good enough, not whether people like what you do. Questions of ownership and personal glory aren’t important because what you are doing is powered primarily from the part of you that belongs to everyone anyway. And in this vein—how much of your writing is directly inspired by you? Not very much. Maybe 10%? The language you are using has been conjugally created by everyone past and present who speaks it. Most sentences you write have probably been written exactly as they stand somewhere before. The way you write has been amalgamated from all the writing you’ve ever read, not to mention all the conversations you’ve had or overheard. All the ideas in your mind have been poured in to make a big stew from somewhere else. We share everything. We cocreate everything. Oh, my god, what a relief. The burden of being a Sole-Creator has been lifted. I can be thankful to every other being who’s contributed to my work and not hunch jealously over it, the goblin of my imaginative terrain. All I add to the writing is a twist of lemon, a flavour to the soup, a dusting of my unique life’s perspective, and I do it because my heart demands it, I do it because it’s a good thing to eternally share love and creation with each other. And all the demands of a heavy ego screeching to be kowtowed to dissolve, and writing is suddenly a lot more fun, and a lot less stressful.

And that is the way I write best. The healthiest way. When I remember to dance on the strings of something more divine than my ego, which is the source of fear as well as grandeur. If you hand in one, you get rid of the other. But as a sense of grandeur is the psychotic flip side of terror, it’s a worthwhile trade, one that in all honesty has to be made every day and moment, and which I rock back and forth between, hopefully a little less all the time.

I used to have a crystal bowl with a lid, sculpted into the shape of an apple, sitting on my desk beside my manuscript. I tore up strips of paper and I wrote on the paper every attribute I thought I would need while writing that novel. Stuff like: COURAGE. FAITH. TRUST. REST. PLAY. FUN. HUMOUR. FOLLOW YOUR HEART. Stuff like that. Whenever I’d struggle, I’d pull out one of the pieces of paper from my glass apple. Then I’d concentrate on that emotion in place of my stress or fear. Or listen to the advice.

These are the tricks I’d play on myself to outsmart the hold of the ego on me. Maybe one day I won’t have to play so many pranks to remind my mind to be the servant of my heart and just write the things my deep-self says. Not the things other people say or other writers write, but the things I barely recognise I think, beneath the surface, under the noise, below the waters.

We are all saints when we stop watching ourselves trying to be something else. That is one thing writing has taught me about myself, on my road to inner peace.