Writing in organisations

One day in my early 20s I was walking down Chelsea Manor Street in London and, as I passed the greasy spoon café (no longer there), a man with a strong London accent came to the door and proclaimed “My name’s Bill and I’m not married.”  I continued on my way but I had to laugh out loud at his humour and directness. I even felt a bit flattered.

This memory was triggered by reading and reflecting on Lisa Smith’s delightful story “Auld Lang Syne” recently published in the Guardian newspaper. Rufus, an elegantly dressed black man in his 70s, finds himself spending New Year’s Eve in Brixton police station, amongst drug dealers, drunks and prison officers. He clearly notices precisely how each female member of staff he encounters looks. For example, while he is standing in queue waiting to see the Custody Sergeant, this is what he is thinking:

He estimated the police lady behind the desk was in her early-to-mid forties. Her dark hair was scraped into a tight knot on the top of her head, making her face look pinched, severe. Rufus thought that with a little rouge on her cheeks she might be pretty, he’d dated a couple of white women back in the seventies. He smiled at the brunette. She didn’t smile back.

This short passage brought another memory back, this time from my late teens. I was working behind a bar in London SE1 (before it became trendy) when a customer suggested I take off my spectacles. I think he even leaned over and took them off himself and then said something like "You're actually quite pretty." Again, I think I felt somewhat flattered, but this time I couldn’t help thinking of the old, disheartening saying “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” (Glasses have since become much more trendy.)

Going back to Lisa Smith's story, at the police station Rufus also meets Dr Kwarshie, the doctor on duty, a black woman. He notices how much she resembles his daughter, with her round face, dimpled cheeks and almond-shaped eyes. 

The story left me wondering what to think of Rufus and his interest in women's looks. It doesn’t feel at all black and white (pun not intended). His conversations in the police station reveal a rather charming and honest person who has ‘a love of rum, dominoes, gambling and women’. He is currently on his fourth wife, half his age, and has been arrested because of her allegation that he assaulted her (it never becomes clear exactly what happened between them). But do I condemn him (no)? Would I want to avoid meeting him (no)? Do I take into account the culture he has grown up in (probably yes)?

And what about the two strangers who paid me compliments when I was younger? Do I condemn them? Certainly at the time, I had no desire to get to know either of them any better, but Bill's words still give me amusement today. (I notice now that I have no recollection of Bill's face or his figure. Just his words and the precise location of the café. I even know I was walking north, away from the river and towards the King’s Road.)

Ironically, not long before that experience, I had come across the ‘women’s lib’ movement (this was the 1970s). We resented the way women were viewed as ‘sex objects’ and how their bodies were displayed in advertising and tabloid newspapers. Nevertheless, when someone paid me a compliment, with humour, I couldn't feel cross.

To me, these kinds of incidents are relatively harmless, though they do reveal something about the men involved. My conclusion:  I don't think every compliment made in public by a man to a woman is automatically sexist or 'predatory'. It all depends on the circumstances. ​


Related reading: 

"Auld Lang Syne" by Lisa Smith. This short story won the BAME short story prize in 2017, which is supported by The Guardian newspaper and by the publisher 4th Estate.

The reason for my journey to Devon was to hear McGilchrist speaking at the one-day Limbus conference at Dartington Hall.* Since I can’t possibly do justice to his thinking in a short blog post, I’ll just share a few thoughts and phrases that have continued to circulate in my mind since the event:

How we pay attention makes a big difference.
Only living beings can pay attention to the world. (A machine can carry out tasks, but it cannot attend, says McGilchrist.) And the fact that we have a divided brain – as apparently all animals and birds do – means we can pay attention in complementary but very different ways. In essence, the left hemisphere enables us to control and manipulate things, steering our attention to detail, clarity, analysis and a-leads-to-b logic – all very useful for our survival. The right brain, on the other hand, allows us to understand the wider picture and deeper meaning and is at ease with connections, paradox, myth, metaphor implicit meaning and feelings.

The modern world is out of balance.
Symptoms of the dominance of left-brain thinking strike me every day – e.g. public services increasingly ruled by measurement and marketisation; people getting busier and busier, lacking the time for reflection on deeper meaning; and interacting more with their devices than with other humans. And this left brain emphasis can make us blind to many things that matter, such as quality, feelings, context and environment.

The left brain has a close relationship with communication and information technologies (or so it seems to me).
Evidently we invented writing mainly to be better able to control and organise things (the left brain’s preference). But then of course every tool or technology we invent makes new things doable and ends up “acting back on us”. Writing, for instance, made highly-organised societies possible, but it also opened the door to excess bureaucracy. Let’s not forget, though, that technologies are intrinsically neither good nor bad – what matters is how we use them. Nowadays some of us feel overloaded by email and distracted by smart phones, but these newer tools also enable a lot of people to work whenever and wherever they want.

Metaphor is a crucial way of understanding the world...
...and was viewed as such up until the Enlightenment in the 18th century. “A lot depends on what you compare things with,” went on McGilchrist. If you compare them with machines, for instance, it has certain consequences. Today, our language is suffused with the machine metaphor – again and again, I am struck by how unthinkingly people use words like “mechanisms” and “feedback” when talking about human communication. In my view, this sloppy use of language cloaks some deep assumptions. It also makes it harder for us to grasp that human communication involves feelings, is interactive, and is seldom (if ever) unambiguous. McGilchrist used a striking metaphor himself, likening left-brain thinking to clear, translucent water, and right-brain perception to the ocean: deep, dark and mysterious.
​
That’s enough for now, but I don’t want to finish without mentioning briefly how struck I was by the quality of McGilchrist’s talk. For a whole hour he spoke in a slow and calm manner, barely consulting his notes. I think this allowed him to stay connected with his surroundings and attentive to the human beings in the room. And he projected just one slide: a picture of the majestic mountain he sees from his home on the Isle of Skye. He used it to illustrate the different ways in which we can perceive the world. We might associate the mountain with history, weather, spirituality and the senses, for instance. Or we can simply say “it’s just a rock”. But that would surely not do it or ourselves justice.
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* I'd like to thank the organisers, Farhad Dalal and Julia Vaughan Smith, for putting so much time and thought into the day.

** Astonishing when you think that our alphabet has just 26 letters and (if I’ve got it right) computer algorithms consist essentially of the same 26 letters, plus 10 numbers (0-9) and some grammatical and mathematical symbols.
​

Thoughts provoked by “Several short sentences about writing” by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Many years ago my training persuaded me that the key to good business writing was to organise one’s thinking before starting to write. As an editor at McKinsey & Company in the 1980s, I became used to building a logical structure before starting to write any prose. 

How liberating then to read in Klinkenborg's book that the writer's job is “making sentences”. And how refreshing to come across a book about writing that does not try to sell a systematic approach to the subject. 

Here is one small example of what the author says about sentences (I could have chosen many but this one will do to show how precise and revealing his own sentences are):

We forget something fundamental as we read: 
Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.
We can’t see all the decisions that led to the final shape of the sentence.
But we can see the residue of those decisions.

Klinkenborg sweeps away much conventional wisdom about writing. His book left me itching to begin my next piece of writing rather than introducing it. And I couldn’t wait to experiment with cutting down on transitional words and phrases. Readers don’t need their hand held at every step. If we write clearly enough, they will never have trouble following us, writes Klinkenborg.

Even as I write this piece now, I am experimenting (and in some cases struggling) with Klinkenborg’s ideas. For instance, I am not yet in the habit of creating each sentence in my mind before writing it down, as he recommends. Often the opening words suggest themselves to me and I then find it hard to resist touching the keyboard while I keep searching for the rest of the sentence.

Nonetheless, I feel liberated in so many ways by this unusual book. 

It has reassured me that there is no “right” subject to write about. If I start by noticing what fascinates me and then write clear, direct sentences about that, my prose stands a good chance of engaging readers. Good writing can make any subject interesting. 

And if I revise a text over and over again, I won’t necessarily edit the life out of it. On the contrary, it may come alive as I re-order words, slice out unnecessary verbiage and uproot clichés. All writing is revision, writes Klinkenborg. Making prose demands sustained effort. How reassuring.

I can even give up trying to “find my voice”. It might just emerge naturally, provided I keep composing clear, fresh sentences about things that matter to me. 

Ever since I can remember, I have loved language. Now I will devote myself to it as never before.

Related reading
Verlyn Klinkenborg. Several short sentences about writing. Vintage Books, 2013.