NoJo
Happily Marred
- Joined
- May 19, 2002
- Posts
- 15,398
This week I turned fifty. In a panic, I called my oldest friend John, who, when we met as eighteen-year-old university undergrads, was three months older than me, and older than me he remains after all these years. His fiftieth year was an annus horribilis punctuated by death, deceit and divorce. Mine was a stumbling series of impulsive decisions, fluttering resolutions made and broken in a day, like mayflies splattered against the windshield of car driven under the Influence.
“Remember”, he reminded me, as I had reminded him once, “you write your own story.”
John is a tutor at a film school in Cornwall, and a film cameraman. A few years back, he and I tried to pitch my film script “The Orbit of Mars”. After a year or so, I ran out of steam and money, and went back to being a part-time wedding musician and freelance software writer, dejected and dazed by the effort of maintaining a delusional state for so long.
The Orbit Of Mars was written in a year-long period of mourning for the death of my father, a commercially successful writer of television drama. Actually I began it two weeks before his death. I wept most nights that year, as The Orbit Of Mars erupted from me, red-hot and seething.
After it was completed, I entered it in a screenwriting competition. It won. With my £1,000 prize money, I decided I could call myself a professional. (Hah fucking hah.)
The Story of The Orbit of Mars is the story of the two 16th century astronomers Tycho de Brahe and Johann Kepler, whose relationship reminded me of my own relationship with my father.
I committed the beginner’s error: I put way too much of everything into the story, producing a dense cacophony of clashing themes and characters. The language in which my characters spoke was harsh, filthy and violent, closer to the East End of London than Reformation Prague. I was suffering from a kind of literary Tourette’s Syndrome while writing it.
I was unhinged, in the grip of wild delusion. Luckily, I was living alone in a rented flat. It was the top floor of above a shop in Muswell Hill, and my little office overlooked London. In summer, I stared at the white-and-yellow glaring dawn from there, sipping Absinthe and puzzling over Kepler. In November I watched the firework display playing against the black night sky over Alexandra Park. The rockets reminded me of Kepler’s dream, a real dream, where he was fired off in a cannon to the moon, Méliès-style. Throughout the time I was working on the script, I was Kepler. I dreamed his dreams. Oh, I was in the grip alright.
After a year I returned to my family. I quit Goldman Sachs, I knew I would never return to the city. Goldman Sachs had allowed me to save enough money to rent that beautiful apartment in Muswell Hill, to get away from everyone, where I could deal with the rage engendered by all those years working at Goldman Sachs.
So what is The Orbit Of Mars about? Why the title? It’s about the efforts we go to in finding meaning and purpose in our chaotic life. See, Mars’ orbit is very unpredictable and “wobbly” – it was an intractable problem to try and explain and predict it in the 16th century, until Kepler came along with his laws of planetary motion. The great drive for Kepler was to look to the heavens as a place of harmony and order, a haven and an escape from the utter chaos into which his life had been plunged. It was not just upsetting to Kepler that Mars seemed to be literally capricious and malevolent in its motion, it implied that God himself allowed evil and disorder to pollute the heavens, the way war, chaos and pestilence dominated the lives of 16th century Europeans.
Kepler was a poor man, a son of pig-farmer, a mathematical prodigy, who rose to become the Astronomer Royal to the Emperor Rudolph. A man of destiny. Tycho, on the other hand, was a wealthy powerful political Dane, cynical in politics, pragmatic in his science and sceptical of theory. His tale is one of decline, of ultimate defeat and disappointment, as he dies knowing that his own planetary theory is fatally flawed, a fact proved Kepler himself, working as Tycho’s junior assistant.
It’s a good tale. It’s true, and it helps me to believe the myth of destiny, that everything that happens to me happens for a reason.
There’s an incontrovertible story arc to a man’s life. The biological facts alone, of birth, growth, senescence and death shape the overall narrative. In a lot of fiction, the structure, the plot mirrors this universal and inevitable timeline , the timeline of a mortal man. But if I were to write my autobiography, I’d be hard-pressed to make it a gripping tale.
Not that my life so far has been particularly dull. I can fill many pages with true episodes from my life which I’m sure I could make quite entertaining reading. No, the problem is simply that I haven’t so much lost the plot, as thrown it away.
“Remember”, he reminded me, as I had reminded him once, “you write your own story.”
John is a tutor at a film school in Cornwall, and a film cameraman. A few years back, he and I tried to pitch my film script “The Orbit of Mars”. After a year or so, I ran out of steam and money, and went back to being a part-time wedding musician and freelance software writer, dejected and dazed by the effort of maintaining a delusional state for so long.
The Orbit Of Mars was written in a year-long period of mourning for the death of my father, a commercially successful writer of television drama. Actually I began it two weeks before his death. I wept most nights that year, as The Orbit Of Mars erupted from me, red-hot and seething.
After it was completed, I entered it in a screenwriting competition. It won. With my £1,000 prize money, I decided I could call myself a professional. (Hah fucking hah.)
The Story of The Orbit of Mars is the story of the two 16th century astronomers Tycho de Brahe and Johann Kepler, whose relationship reminded me of my own relationship with my father.
I committed the beginner’s error: I put way too much of everything into the story, producing a dense cacophony of clashing themes and characters. The language in which my characters spoke was harsh, filthy and violent, closer to the East End of London than Reformation Prague. I was suffering from a kind of literary Tourette’s Syndrome while writing it.
I was unhinged, in the grip of wild delusion. Luckily, I was living alone in a rented flat. It was the top floor of above a shop in Muswell Hill, and my little office overlooked London. In summer, I stared at the white-and-yellow glaring dawn from there, sipping Absinthe and puzzling over Kepler. In November I watched the firework display playing against the black night sky over Alexandra Park. The rockets reminded me of Kepler’s dream, a real dream, where he was fired off in a cannon to the moon, Méliès-style. Throughout the time I was working on the script, I was Kepler. I dreamed his dreams. Oh, I was in the grip alright.
After a year I returned to my family. I quit Goldman Sachs, I knew I would never return to the city. Goldman Sachs had allowed me to save enough money to rent that beautiful apartment in Muswell Hill, to get away from everyone, where I could deal with the rage engendered by all those years working at Goldman Sachs.
So what is The Orbit Of Mars about? Why the title? It’s about the efforts we go to in finding meaning and purpose in our chaotic life. See, Mars’ orbit is very unpredictable and “wobbly” – it was an intractable problem to try and explain and predict it in the 16th century, until Kepler came along with his laws of planetary motion. The great drive for Kepler was to look to the heavens as a place of harmony and order, a haven and an escape from the utter chaos into which his life had been plunged. It was not just upsetting to Kepler that Mars seemed to be literally capricious and malevolent in its motion, it implied that God himself allowed evil and disorder to pollute the heavens, the way war, chaos and pestilence dominated the lives of 16th century Europeans.
Kepler was a poor man, a son of pig-farmer, a mathematical prodigy, who rose to become the Astronomer Royal to the Emperor Rudolph. A man of destiny. Tycho, on the other hand, was a wealthy powerful political Dane, cynical in politics, pragmatic in his science and sceptical of theory. His tale is one of decline, of ultimate defeat and disappointment, as he dies knowing that his own planetary theory is fatally flawed, a fact proved Kepler himself, working as Tycho’s junior assistant.
It’s a good tale. It’s true, and it helps me to believe the myth of destiny, that everything that happens to me happens for a reason.
There’s an incontrovertible story arc to a man’s life. The biological facts alone, of birth, growth, senescence and death shape the overall narrative. In a lot of fiction, the structure, the plot mirrors this universal and inevitable timeline , the timeline of a mortal man. But if I were to write my autobiography, I’d be hard-pressed to make it a gripping tale.
Not that my life so far has been particularly dull. I can fill many pages with true episodes from my life which I’m sure I could make quite entertaining reading. No, the problem is simply that I haven’t so much lost the plot, as thrown it away.
