Hastings to Charing Cross train, again, 10.44

to know the value of everything and the cost of nothing

And the child sits at the table, her dark hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. She’s wearing school uniform but certainly late or left early, the adult she’s with passes her a bottle. I guess he’s her dad, although I have nothing to go on. The bottle is big. Very big, like bottles people have taken to carrying around, indented with measurements all the way up, so you know exactly how much water you’ve drunk all day and certainly I’m tired and definitely seeing the underside of life, it’s what happens, with the books I write, I have to think it to write it and when was it, I first began to measure myself?

And I’m not talking in inches, although they came later. Maybe it was the reports I had to turn in at the end of every month. Sounds nonsensical now to say it and it was, but live in a surveillance culture and you don’t stop to ask if it makes sense. Every month then, these report slips. I was about seven maybe when I turned my first one in. Wrote down how many hours I spent a month on the ministry. How many magazines I placed. How many Bible studies I had. These numbers directly correlated to my chance of salvation. No surprise then the inches that came later. For many years, being fearful of what would happen if my waist was more than 20 inches. Hips more than 30. Try keeping that up and living.

At school, they used callipers to measure our fat. Still recall the horror of having these attached to my underarms. The existential dread of the scale. My insides measured by something outside. Fell into the trap though. Thin was safe, fat was the unknown.

But it was more than inches. It was steps taken and hours spent at the gym and classes taken and grades never dropping below a first and it was the house immaculate and everything in its right place before it was word count and pages totalled and it was all, every single last piece of it, arbitrary and just as nonsensical as the report slips I put in a box for the elders, that first rush of doing something right. The certainty of the highest numbers on my side, or the lowest; where ever the greater value lay. As nonsensical as the water bottle is now and sure water’s good but get hung up on it, on it or on your numbers on the screen, your followers and likes and views and it’s all just a playground popularity contest repeating, and of course I’m thinking about this on a train to talk about Ava Anna Ada again because that’s what it’s about, the way we value each other, the way we value ourselves, how arbitrary it is.

These external systems of measuring value take away from the core that’s essential to creating any art. And there comes a point in a career you have to choose what you’re for, and I’ve spent a lot of the last year thinking about this. Ted Hughes and Edna O’Brien both have things to say about this. This jumped out at me from O’Brien last week, life after all was a secret with the self. The more one gave out the less there remained for the centre. To gain the required numbers demands a certain forfeiting of the self, a certain giving that’s not sustainable. And this really is essential, to maintain the centre. That unmeasurable secret thing, the essential thing. These games of performance and numbers erode it. And Hughes too, in Context, the poet’s only hope is to be infinitely sensitive to what his gift is…or he will lose its guidance, lose the feel of its touch in the inner workings of his mind, and soon be absorbed by the impersonal lumbers of matters in which his gift has no interest, which is a form of suicide. The argument for the staunch although difficult disavowal of numbers is a strong one when it comes to making new things. I am not prepared to suffer that form of suicide just to watch my value rating rise.

And the selective privileging of numbers, increasingly feels disgusting. And yes, disgust is a strong word but certainly not too strong considering the wider context we live in. Certainly, it’s easier to count digital hearts and followers than look the numerical reality of dead babies, hostages, endemic poverty, terrifying climate data and the list goes on, and some numbers do matter, just our arbitrary value systems really don’t.