One of the difficulties of putting pen to paper, so to speak, on matters about which one has an opinion, is that one is all too likely to come across as ill-informed and didactic. I very often find myself talking out loud to Any Questions and I am all to conscious that to do so puts me in the same bracket as all the nutters who phone in expectiong… what exactly? I don’t suppose any of them has ever provoked anyone to reflect on their position, let alone change it. I assume they just want to vent their spleen by attacking others. Is that me?
Just as bad, – and closely related, I suspect being only a reflection of gnerational preferences – is the quality of discourse found on social media, or meeja as it now is. Of course, it’s all too easy to take an oppositional stance to the oppositional nature of social media exchanges, and therefore extend its unedifying reach into the realms of the meta, and I wouldn’t like to be part of that. So..
A manifesto!
I’ve always found the idea of a manifesto appealing. A part of me longs for that period – I’m guessing the latter part of the nineteenth century up to, probably the begining of the Second World War – where earnest young things (mostly men I suppose) would start a movement and write a manifesto. Sometimes they didn’t seem to get much further than that, but the appeal is in articulating a set of principles or committments that would both decribe and guide what you do. Thinking about it I guess they were usually reactionary in nature and often self-consciously revolutionary, and they set up the signatories as –ists: communists, surrealists, futurists, cubists. Despite never being an -ist I feel oddly nostalgic about them. I suppose I associate them with a sense that things are still possible, the future open. They are all, in that sense modernist, which, paradoxically, seems like a slightly quaint, slightly dusty thing now, though strictly speaking it does not belong to a period at all other then the now.
Anyway: my own, very modest manifestio:
I will do my very best not to swear
Beleive it or not, I do find this quite difficult as I do feel very upset aout a lot of things, but it is a lazy habit and usually a way of avoiding thinking.
I will do my very best not to be a swivel-eyed loon
There are so many things about which one could, frankly, just rant, but it doesn’t seem very… reflective? Creative is better.
I think that’s probably sufficient to prevent my decent into absolute dross. Having a manifesto makes me feel a little less sad about being a lonely diarist talking to the radio, so here’s to manifestos! The extended monologue’s not dead!
