Will Buckingham's Blog, page 13

Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: Machines, Mathematics, Organs and Pandas

I’ve just about finished the proofs for Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, my I Ching-based novel-of-sorts, ready to send off to Earnshaw Books. All being well, I’ll be launching the book in a few weeks at the Beijing Bookworm book festival. But just to whet the appetite, here’s an extract from the book’s index. All novels, I feel, should be equipped with an index…

I’ll post again when the book is finally published.

The library and the apocalypse

This evening I heard the news that Birmingham’s wonderful new library is going to be savagely cutting its opening hours, and laying off just under one hundred members of staff. This is a huge blow for the city that for many years I was proud to call my home, and it is part of a much wider horrible hollowing out of the public sphere that is happening across the country.

I don’t have much to say about this, except to register my enormous sadness at this development, and my utter contempt for the system that makes it seem ideologically uncontentious to claim that one of the richest countries on earth can no longer afford to provide public services such as libraries. In my recently published Complete Write a Novel Course, I wrote the following:

Libraries are wonderful and miraculous things. If libraries didn’t exist, and somebody said to you, “I’ve just come up with a brilliant idea for a massive book-house where you can go free of charge, and sit all day and read stuff, and take books home for short periods without paying a penny, and talk to knowledgeable, well-informed experts who will help you find just what you are looking for,” people would say that such an idea would never catch on, and that if it did, it would bring the entire capitalist world crashing down apocalyptically.

This book has only been published for a few weeks, but I wonder if this passage already makes it look quaint and old-fashioned. Because the apocalypse is taking place here and now. But it is not the capitalist world that is coming crashing down. It is the libraries. And the reason perhaps is this: when the logic of capitalism becomes the only game in town, it becomes unthinkable that such utopian spaces should be permitted to exist at all.

Some jet-lagged reflections on travel

I’m a bit jet-lagged and weary, after a long journey back from India that has involved (in this order) a rickshaw, a train, a taxi (one of Kolkata’s glorious yellow Ambassadors), a lift from a friend, a plane, another plane, two tube journeys, and now another train, after which it is just a quick hop in a taxi to find my way home once again.

I’ve only been away for a couple of weeks, but in truth it feels a lot longer. It seems to me that subjective time is measured, at least to some extent, by the experience of change; and this being so, it feels as if it was along time since I left the UK. The final few days in India were I spent in Rabindranath Tagore’s university town of Santiniketan, reading, thinking and making a great many new friends and connections; and it was a humbling experience to meet with so many warm and generous people, and to find myself engaged in so many fascinating and enriching conversations.

So—partly to stave off the jetlag a while longer, and to keep myself awake, so that I don’t end up falling asleep and finding myself missing my stop and ending up in Nottingham by mistake—I thought I’d write a few idle notes on the subject of the virtues of travel. Nothing that I’m writing here is particularly new or startling; but (the issue of staying awake on one side) I thought it worth saying at least as a reminder to myself.

Travel breaks apart the crust of habit

The first thing that strikes me is that travel breaks apart the hard crust of habit, that slow sedimentation of the day-to-day that ends up ossifying the imagination. There is some virtue to repetition: if you want to write books, learn to meditate properly, teach yourself Chinese, train your cat to do cute stuff, play the flugelhorn or what have you, then you need repetition. But repetition needs to have the pulse of life to it. When it becomes mere formalism, then ossification sets in. To be on the move, to find yourself in different contexts and settings, starts to break up those hard crusts, so that things can take root in the cracks. And when they take root, who knows how large they will grow?

Travel is an antidote to cynicism

I am, I confess, sometimes prone to cynicism. I don’t mean cynicism in the wholly admirable ancient Greek philosophical sense of living in a barrel, or considering oneself cosmopolitan—a citizen of the cosmos as a whole—and wandering about with a staff and a pack on your back. I mean cynicism in the more mean-spirited contemporary sense of attributing the worst motives and intentions to the activities of others, and focussing on those aspects of life that reinforce this. I don’t like this kind of cynicism, but I know that I am capable of it. In fact, thinking about it now, it seems to me that these two ideas of cynicism—the wandering cynicism of the ancient Greeks, and contemporary stay-at-home cynicism—are diametrically opposed. Experience shows that when you get out there and meet people, it is hard to maintain a cynical lack of faith in other human beings.

Travel reminds us that we are not autonomous

This is related to the last point, I think. It’s so easy, when mired in the day-to-day, to think that we are autonomous, that we are not dependent upon others. But then you end up on a train through the dark of West Bengal, and you have no idea where you are, and there are no announcements to say what the next stop is, and you can’t see anything out of the window, and the train is already running late… and so you throw yourself upon the kindness of your fellow travellers. In such a situation, you simply have to rely on others. You have to give up your fantasy of autonomy. And whilst this can be challenging or alarming (the truth often is), it is also often rewarding. Your fellow travellers may even become friends.

Travel helps us find things we are not looking for

This, I think, is also related to my earlier post on research, and the necessity of wandering and errancy for any kind of research. One of my favourite philosophers is Michel Serres, whose book on education, The Troubadour of Knowledge is one of the strangest and most quickening of books that I know. In his Troubadour, Serres talks about the virtue of finding (“troubadour” could literally mean “one who finds”), and the virtue of setting out, not in search of some specific thing, but instead with an openness to what we might find. As the poet Miroslav Holub suggests, you may not know what you will find when you open the door, but at least / there’ll be / a draught.

Of course, this list could go on. And I could equally well write a list of the benefits of staying put (I don’t think that one should privilege moving around over staying put — as Walter Benjamin says in his essay, The Storyteller, “People imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar… but they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions”: there are two kinds of complementary wisdom here). But this somewhat idle and unsystematic list has at least had the virtue of keeping me awake on the final leg of my journey home, whilst saying something of the gratitude I feel for the experiences of the last few weeks.

The Descent of the Lyre: Out Now in Paperback

For those of you waiting for the paperback edition of my novel, The Descent of the Lyre, now that it has been launched here in Kolkata, the handsome paperback is available and on general release.

If you are in the UK, you can get hold of it via hive.co.uk by following this link, or alternatively you can buy it through the Evil Empire. In India, you can buy via FlipKart / Roman Books.

If you want to find out more about the book, this interview was published today in The Pioneer.

Thoughts on Writing and Politics in Kolkata

Yesterday I had the immense pleasure and privilege to teach a creative writing workshop with a group of students here in Kolkata at the British Council’s Teaching Centre. It was an absolute delight to spend a couple of hours working with students who had finished the British Council’s first two creative writing courses in the city, and I was hugely impressed by the students’ seriousness, their intellectual acuity, and their exuberance.

I find it is always good to teach outside of my home country, because it challenges certain assumptions that I have about what writing is or should be. And this was certainly the case yesterday. If there is one thing that stood out for me about the workshop, it was this: these were students many of whom had a very strong sense of what writing can—and perhaps should—do politically. At the beginning of the workshop, we did a short exercise on why writing matters. In response to this exercise, a large number of the students said that they were interested in using writing as a way of tackling questions of social justice, women’s rights, transgender issues, and so on. And what was particularly striking is that in many cases these were the first reasons that the writers in the group gave for writing.



In my experience, this doesn’t happen very much in the classroom in the UK. And I was wondering after the workshop why this should be. I don’t think it is that somehow the students in Kolkata are inherently more concerned with questions of justice and injustice—to make this claim would be to sell my students back home seriously short: questions of justice matter to us all. Instead, I think it is something about the discourses that surround writing, the ways that we habitually think and talk about what writing can and should do.

Back home, the fact that writing is a political act—as it must be, because in putting words into the public sphere, you are trying to affect this public sphere in some way—is something that is rarely foregrounded. There are reasons for this, no doubt. One is that our universities (despite occasional paranoid claims from the UK government that they are hotbeds of loony Marxists) are largely depoliticised. And they are not just accidentally depoliticised, but ideologically so. We are taught that we should be apolitical in our teaching—as if there has ever, in the history of the world, been such a thing as apolitical teaching. This apolitical stance (which is, of course, a political stance) is one that mitigates against exploring more openly the political power and potential of writing. But I don’t think that this is the only reason that we soft-pedal the political aspects of writing. I think there is also a general cultural tendency to think about creative writing either in terms of questions of craft, or as a way of fulfilling the needs and demands of a market, or else as a means of self-expression and personal growth. Think about how many creative writing textbooks promise improved technical skills, or commercial success, or personal fulfilment. Then think about how few present the act of writing as a robustly political act.

It is not that I think questions of craft, personal fulfilment, or the market are unimportant. I delight in well-crafted writing. I think that fulfilment is a worthy goal. And if writers care ultimately about communication, then it is good to think about who it is we want to communicate with, which raises questions of the market and readership and so on. But these three sets of questions are not the whole story, and if we want to think about writing more broadly, these questions should take their place alongside questions of politics.

What happens if politics drops out of the way we talk about creative writing is that the political motivations and concerns we have as writers, students and teachers do not so much disappear as go underground. They become subterranean. It is not that my students back home—or my fellow creative writing teachers—do not have political concerns. They do. And it is not that I do not have these concerns as a teacher and as a writer. I do. But more often than not we don’t really bring these political aspects to light, so they don’t become a part of the general discourse surrounding what we are doing as writers, or as students of writing, or as teachers of writing.

Perhaps—and I don’t know if this is true or not—there is also something here about a lack of faith in writing. Perhaps back home we have lost our belief that writing can change things, or can address broader social and political issues. Perhaps we have become too complacent, and have fallen into thinking about writing either in terms of some kind of self-referential aestheticism, or else in terms of feeding a market hungry for ever-new entertainment products.

But if this is the case, then we at least need to address this lack of faith head-on. We need to admit to it, to examine it, to see if it really holds up. Because I wonder if what appears as lack of faith can often, on closer examination, turn out to be instead a simple failure of nerve.

Whatever the case, I am grateful to the students I worked with yesterday here in Kolkata for their energy and fire. And I am grateful for the reminder that writing is, and always has been, a political act.

A few photos from Kolkata

I had a hugely enjoyable time at yesterday’s event at the Kolkata Book Fair, and the morning workshop at the British Council Teaching Centre. I’m going to write a bit more later, in particular, about the workshop, but I thought I’d just post this small gallery of images, to give a flavour of the events.

[image error] The panel: Sujata Sen from the British Council, me, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Nayantara Palchoudhuri from IBSA, Suman Chakraborty[image error] Audience[image error] Signing Books[image error] At the Book Fair[image error] With the creative writers at the British Council Teaching Centre

Turning About Once Again

I only have one more day in Bodhgaya, after which I fly back to Kolkata for the book fair; and it’s been absolutely delightful to be here. I’ve just been pedalling around, making the most of the local food, meditating when I feel like it, sleeping when the mood takes me, making new friends, sitting and thinking, reading things that come my way, and feeling pleasurably purposeless.

There is, however, one problem: in theory, I am in Bodhgaya do research. Before coming here, I filled in research proposals and even managed to get a modest amount of funding for this trip. These proposals were tied to a couple of book projects that I’m working on at the moment, both of which have some kinds of interesting connections with Buddhist themes, ideas and history. But as the days have passed, I have begun to realise that it doesn’t particularly look or feel as if what I am doing is research. Not only am I spending more time at tea stalls and in temple meditation halls than in libraries, but I also have to confess that I’m not even thinking about these books very hard.



This is, or should be, a problem. Had I filled in my funding proposal and said, ‘Look, I’m just going to meditate a bit, borrow a bike, cycle about, eat some food, read a bit. Does that sound OK?’, I would have not sounded very convincing. But on the other hand, that is precisely what I’ve been doing. Looking at it like this, it all seems pretty shameless, even fraudulent.

And yet… something is happening here (even if, as Bob Dylan might add, I don’t know what is is), and this something seems to me to be intimately connected not only to my practice of writing, but to these two works in progress that I’ve spent the last few days happily not thinking about.

Let me tell a story about this ‘something’… Yesterday afternoon, I headed up to the Japanese temple to join their evening service. The sun was already sinking in the sky when I slipped off my shoes and went inside. A number of meditators were already there. I took two cushions, bowed before the shrine, and joined them, sitting cross-legged on the floor. I could smell the scent of burning mosquito coils. Slowly, a few others came into the temple and took their places. There was the sound of wooden clappers, heralding the start of the service, followed by chanting. After that there was silence: just twenty or thirty of us sitting in the hall, as the sun set outside, and the mosquito coils put up fragrant smoke into the air.

At the end of the meditation, I massaged the stiffness out of my legs and then I left the temple. By now it was dark outside. I walked down the steps and put on my shoes, and then I collected my bike and unlocked it. I started to push it through the temple courtyard, back into the street. Then… well, then this something happened. Pushing my bike through the dark, I found myself suddenly choked with emotion. I had to stop to catch my breath and to wipe the tears away from my eyes. It was not that I was upset by anything. Nor did I have anything much on my mind. In fact, I’m not sure I had anything at all on my mind other than where I was going to eat dinner. But just at that moment, it was as if—how can I put this?—I was overwhelmed by the sheer fullness of existence.

I stood there for a few moments, allowing the experience to pass. Then I wiped my eyes a second time and wheeled my bike to the gate. I pushed the gate open and closed it softly behind me. Then I climbed onto the saddle and rode back to the guest-house.

As I rode home, it struck me: this was what I had been missing over the past months, whilst turning future projects over in my mind. This kind of quiet revolution in my sense of life, this anchorage in a deeper sense of things, was exactly what I was waiting for so that I could better know where I should go next. And, yes, if research is, in etymological terms, a kind of re-circling, a “turning about once again”, then this was the moment that I knew that this research trip had been worth making.

But none of this is really how research is thought about in universities. Nor is it anything like what I said on that damned research proposal. I’ve written before on this blog about the strangeness—perhaps the impossibility—of trying to square the circle of fitting what writers do into the standard definitions of research used in universities. But when it comes down to it, what many writers do isn’t anything like what universities think of as research, even if many of us pretend it is. In our armoury we have various forms of low cunning — we talk about “practice-based research” and so on — and we use these to justify what they we up to. I too sometimes find myself spouting this kind of nonsense. But my heart is not really in it. When I talk like this, I smell bullshit. I don’t believe a word I am saying.

What, then, do I believe? I think that what I believe is simpler and more basic than this. I believe that writing is indeed a practice that can help us “turn about once again”, and that can thereby help us get to grips with the fullness of existence. I believe that this turning about is something that cannot be programmed or anticipated in advance. Instead, it is something that necessarily involves a degree of wandering and purposelessness, a looseness of relationship to existence that leaves space for the unexpected to emerge. I believe that if we want to do our best to write things that matter—and to encourage others to do so—we need to keep open a space for this wandering, this purposeless and this looseness. And I believe that these projects on which I am currently working will somehow—even if I am not yet sure how—be better and more substantial for having come here to meander repeatedly between temple and tea-stall.

Kolkata Book Fair

Here’s the invite for my event at the Kolkata Book Fair this coming Saturday, where I’ll be launching the paperback of my novel, The Descent of the Lyre. Do come along if you are in town.

Thunk, thunk, thunk…

Bicycles are my favourite mode of transport. They are less grouchy than camels, they don’t have minds of their own the way horses do, they are cheaper than cars, and they are speedier than going on foot. So it was a pleasure today to borrow a bike from my guest-house here in Bodhgaya, and to set out to explore the outer reaches of the town.

I started out with some trepidation, as it’s a long time since I’ve cycled anywhere like India. Back in the day, when I was living in Pakistan, I used to regularly cycle across Lahore to my job as a school teacher. After miles of cycling through the choking fumes, jostling horse-carts, rickshaws, motorbikes, buses and cars, I developed style of cycling that combined fearlessness, justified caution, and a degree of panache. Today as I got on my bike on Bodhgaya, I found that old knowledge coming flooding back.



Although it was a delight to be on two wheels (I’ll see if I can upload some photos tomorrow), it has to be said that the bike was not particularly great. There is a much-circulated—and somewhat contested—claim that the Buddhist term for suffering, dukkha, derives etymologically from roots meaning something like “an ill-fitting wheel”. By the I’d spent an hour or two getting used to the thunk! thunk! thunk! of my back wheel, I was beginning to think that—leaving questions of etymological accuracy to one side—there was something in this claim.

Fortunately this suffering hasn’t precluded a great deal of pleasure. It has been good, in particular, making connections with people from the Triratna Buddhist Order here in Bodhgaya. There are many people here with whom I have a great number of old friends in common, so it has been good to just cycle here and there, and meet with people, and fall into conversation over cups of tea, finding that there is much common ground, even for a no-longer-quite-Buddhist-practitioner like myself.

It’s increasingly apparent to me that one of the reasons I’ve come down here to Bodhgaya is that I’m keen to rethink my relationship with Buddhism once again. I practised Buddhism with the utmost seriousness for probably a decade and a half, and since then I still continued to do so in some kind of wonky and sporadic fashion. And there’s much in the various traditions of Buddhism that I feel has long ago taken root in me, and that is here to stay. Often—perhaps more often than not—Buddhism is what I think with. But these days I don’t really feel that I can claim that I am a Buddhist. As I cycle around Bodhgaya, there is both a kind of kinship with what is going on around me, and also the question in my mind: what it is all for?

Once, when I was a serious Buddhist, and not a wonky not-quite-Buddhist, this might have been an occasion for some kind of heightened existential drama; but these days I can’t really be bothered with all that. I don’t think that I have to really work all of this out, or that I have to come to a settled position (one reason that I gave up calling myself a Buddhist was because it felt as if that was a settled position, and I wanted to maintain my ability to slip across thresholds and cross borders). But I’m also inclined to think that it probably doesn’t really matter that much either way. So whilst I’m not really trying to work it all out, I’m intrigued nonetheless to trace the multiple threads here. And as I cycle round, the thunk! thunk! thunk! does not bother me as it once might. It’s just good to keep moving; with a measure of fearlessness, with a dose of justified caution, and, if possible (it is not always possible), with a degree of panache.

The Whatever-it-is of Existence

It is seventeen years since I was last here in India. Back then, I was travelling around the Buddhist pilgrimage sites as a young and rather earnest aspiring Buddhist, making notes towards an excessively pious travelogue that I’m now rather glad was never published.

Now I find myself back in India to launch the paperback of my novel The Descent of the Lyre at the Kolkata Book Fair. As it’s a long trip for a book lauch alone, I’m taking advantage of being here to spend a short while doing some research towards various projects that I have in the works. And this has involved (for reasons that are still rather hazy in my mind) finding my way back to Bodhgaya, the foremost of India’s Buddhist sites, the place of the Buddha’s awakening.



It is strange to be back after so long. Before coming here, the one thing that almost everybody said to me was this: ‘India has changed. You won’t recognise it.’ But whilst India clearly has changed, it has not changed beyond recognition. The altercations between passengers as our plane touched down in Kolkata—vocal, animated, and ultimately oddly amicable; the cart on the road by the airport, laden with images of the goddess Saraswati, close-packed in with straw; the frogger-like experience of crossing roads crammed with motley fleets of vehicles—all of these seem pretty familiar. India, like everything else, has both changed and not changed.

Bodhgaya has also changed. Seventeen years ago, it was still more or less an overblown village. It is now larger, more sprawling, more crowded. And whilst I don’t recall Bodhgaya ever being particularly peaceful (I remember, all those years ago, sitting under the Bodhi tree and meditating as a fidgety Korean nun rustled constantly in a large plastic bag; and I remember thinking to myself that if the Buddha had had to contend with Korean Buddhist nuns with plastic bags, Buddhism would never have got started), this former village is now vastly more chaotic. Bodhgaya has transformed itself into a strange and frenetic Buddhist carnival where consumerism, tourism, sincerity, hope and delusion are all equally mixed. There’s even a ferris wheel…

But as I settle in, I get the sense that there are continuities here as well, that the changes are not absolute. There are places I am beginning to recognise, despite the fact that even the layout of the streets has changed. This afternoon I spent a couple of hours walking around, and I found myself able to trace the map of my earlier visit. The unfamiliar is starting to become familiar again.

And of course, the same goes for me. Since I was last here, a great deal has happened. I lived for several years in Buddhist communities, practising Buddhism very seriously. I almost—but not quite—got myself ordained as a Buddhist. Then found myself going from identifying as Buddhist to identifying as Buddhish to preferring to simply change the subject if anybody brought it up (although I still meditated, and still thought, more often than not, in Buddhist or Buddhish terms). Somewhere along the way, I started a PhD in philosophy and soon found myself publishing novels and philosophy books and falling into the strange priesthood that is the world of academia…

Like India, like Bodhgaya itself, it seems to me that I too have both changed and not changed since I was last here. But as I wandered around town this afternoon, mapping past onto future and future onto past, I found that these two things started to blur together, until it was hard to say precisely what had changed, and precisely what had remained the same. And in this blurring of now and then, I could feel the subtle shifting of my sense of life, a quickening of the spirits, the beginning of new possibilities for thinking about the whatever-it-is of existence.

Whatever that is.

I don’t know where this is all going. I’m even not sure, exactly, what I am trying to say in writing all this. But all in all, across a gulf of seventeen years, it feels good to be back.