‘Add water and stir’ stories shake up your essence

TO BE born a human being is a unique experience. To arrive at the consciousness of oneself as a human being is a sublime state. To be denied one’s humanity for reasons of political expedience is untenable.

Not many people are interested in descriptions or recollections of this condition. The human story is well documented. Its perennial interest lies in the permutations of the condition.

Story telling is a human activity, and it constitutes the commonality that binds all nations.

Recollection often reduces to nostalgia; nostalgia is often tendered as emotional blackmail; emotional blackmail is unforgivable.

My stories are of the “add water and stir” genre. I try to present them as modern parables, observations which are simple, yet which, in their simplicity, capture the essence of being human. I write from where I am. The writing is not fictive. Yet it is not fully biographical in a generic sense.

At the same, time I write from the assumption that most people have had similar experiences.

What I explore are the nuances, the varying levels of consciousness and sensitivity to the unique set of circumstances that make up the life of an ordinary human being.

I refer to my stories as “the short and simple annals of the poor”, echoing the sentiments that triggered Grey’s seminal elegy for the ordinary folk buried in the country churchyard.

At the same time, I nurture the fond half-conviction that I might be a writer of sorts, that my stories might trigger more detailed, more closely choreographed, more fine-tuned narratives by other writers to add to the sum total of our experience as human beings.

The thrust that drives this urge is the disturbing truth that we all, as far as our present knowledge goes, get only one shot at being human. Which is not cocking a snoot at those systems of knowledge or belief which would have us believe otherwise – and here I include philosophy, science and religion.

But, as Milan Kundera says, God created the human form and packed it tightly and safely in a waterproof skin. Those who wish to play God will breach this envelop and intrude with one or other agenda. What they achieve can be marvellous, stunning, revealing – or just sad.

I do not claim that the human body is unblemished. This would be naive, and deny those imperfections which make the study of human actions such a fascinating one. I know a little about the dualism that has fascinated thinkers for centuries.

I have some sense of the psyche that is somehow aligned with the flesh.

But I hope my probings are gentle, untainted by scepticism, and minus an agenda in the broadest sense. I have stories to tell and I hope the stories will find readers who need to read them.