About
About Me
If thinking is something that happens, how is it that it leaves nothing behind? Thought like this – i.e., as something that leaves no trace – how can an event without a structure to capture it, provide us with an opportunity to account for it or to describe the work of (for example) the writer of novels, short stories, poetic works or, for that matter, the intellectual thinker engaged in varieties of scholarly works?
Thinking, then, is eventful but how do we capture it?
In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt states that “[t]hinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to its end.” Rather brilliantly, she suggests that seeing as “thinking implies withdrawal,” it also acts “as an instrument of escape.” That thinking might be an “instrument” may give us pause for thought. Are we any nearer to knowing what thinking is?
My novels are about the process of thinking, all the while accepting that we may not be entirely sure what thinking is. What do I mean by this?
Well, why did Martin Heidegger see fit to write a book about thinking and to name it: What is Called Thinking? Moreover, having asked this thorny question, why did he then go on to suggest that “what is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” If we are still not thinking, then what is meant by “thinking,” and why do we seem so convinced that we are, contrary to what Heidegger seems to suggest, engaged in acts of thinking?
My novels attempt to explore how literature can help us imagine, understand, and rethink the space and time of what might be termed our fictional lives – my texts, including my own scholarly efforts, are about how we measure this time and this space infinitely and immeasurably. That was an unintentionally complex thing to write – in fact, when I began to write that sentence, I had no idea where it would end or what it would mean.
In other words, writing is about truth, stating that something is true is to make some attempt to be honest – like I didn’t know how I was going to end that earlier sentence – but it is also something “immeasurable” in that it is something I might happen on if I am true to the words I am writing.
I then opened a book at random, admittedly the book’s title is The Space of Literature, but the sentence might have been any sentence, and it was, but it was one that had a crucial word I had used in the (apparently) unconscious sentence I had just put down onto this computer screen.
The sentence from the earlier named book (by Maurice Blanchot) is this: “What a strange, contradictory undertaking is this effort to act where immeasurable passivity reigns, this striving to maintain the rules, to impose measure, and to fix a goal in a movement that escapes all aims and all resolution.”
As I say, my novels are about what it is to think about literary works and in literary works.
I have published two novels so far from The Catch Trilogy. Guppy – the first of the three loosely connected and autographical books – was published in November 2023, and Herring came out in May 2024; Pike is due to be published in late 2025. An additional novel, Gurnard’s Head, described as a key to the trilogy, will be published in lieu of the final novel on or around December 2024.
