The Point Of Existential Angst

Blood was 5.8 this morning, my little Vampire friends.

Let me ask you this: If we take away all the existential balancing systems, like an equalising afterlife, what, ultimately is the point of any action? If we choose to do something, and not something else, to what are we accountable, other than our own eventual store of memories and experiences?

Yeah, I know, it's not exactly light-hanted banter about exercise bikes and greasy shit, is it? Stick with me though - who knows, there may even be a point to it all...

I've had a day of unexpected existential angst (which, now I come to write it out, would be a pretty kick-ass tongue-twister, but anyway...). My getting behind the wheel of a car again for the first time in a decade has, I know, given plenty of people a dose of existential today - that's why many many people in the Merthyr area decided they didn't really need to be outside today after all, and barricaded themselves behind concrete walls. Me, I drove like a stainless steel stick-puppet for about half an hour, so angsty was I about my own existence...then I relaxed and pretty much stopped caring about oncoming buses, and started to take pleasure in the experience.

Then I went to see my dad, which was highly pleasurable at first, as I haven't seen him in over a week, but the ongoing illness of one's parents is a good solid kick in the head full of existential angst too - if you've learned to rely on a view of the world that has them in it, and has their characters writ large across your sky, then their illness acts as a cloud of necessary adjustment, a shift in your worldview like the fist that shakes a snowglobe, seen by the snowman inside.

And then I heard a name from my past, and it briefly made me seethe and rage with pure unbridled self-revolving me-me-me style existential angst. The name was Simon Spanton.

Anyone? Any literary fucks among us?
Simon Spanton's a publisher. I 'met' him on the radio about 14 years ago, when I was still young and idealistic and trying to avoid gainful employment like the plague. I'd written a book, and I got picked up by local radio, for a show where they put your work in front of big-shot publishers. Spanton liked my stuff, as indeed did a few other publishers. I ended up in long discussion not with Spanton as it turned out, but with the folks at HarperCollins. The discussions were so long in fact that ultimately, the idea of a deal collapsed, and I went into journalism in retalliation, feeling that that'd show them!

It didn't, of course. Didn't show anyone anything except that when all is said and done, I'm not that good at being a journalist, because in most cases, I simply don't care long enough to sustain an investigation. And I see far too many sides to most stories, which might be all very zen and balanced and all that, but it plays merry hell with your narrative flow. The point was, I stopped writing for the best part of a decade, and have only really taken it up again in the last couple of years. I've written one massively overlong but still quite funny book which needs a good hard pruning, and I've been working on a 'simpler' one for about a year now, being stuck in Galileo's Italy for far too long.

Simon Spanton resurfaced in my life today by offering someone else a two-book deal for a high five-figure sum. Someone who, up to this point, has been very successful in their own sphere, but has no particular experience of novel-writing behind them. And perversely, that made me seethe. For about ten minutes there, it was like someone had stolen my life at the age of 24, and was living it more successfully than I was.

This of course is clearly bullshit. There's no connection between events, and - I should add - the books that Spanton's commissioned will in all likelihood be hugely funny, and I'll probably read them. It's just one of those moments of feeling overtaken that can push you face down in the dirt if you're not careful, without any intention (or indeed, any knowledge) by those you can too easily blame. I had the same feeling once about Terry Pratchett - I was writing a book with a bunch of themes, and then he published one with the same themes. I tried a different tack, and perversely, he published one along those lines too. Actually, Practchett's managed to gazump me three times like that in total. Ironic, really - on that radio show where I first met Spanton, I was described as 'like a new Terry Pratchett'. Now of course I know that'a a label given to anyone who does funny fantasy at some point. Does rather depend on the 'old Terry Pratchett' not being able to beat you to the punch by already being published though!

All of which led me down a weird way of thinking - we know the point of pleasure. Pleasure is an enticement to action, and a sensory reward for necessary action performed. Nectar is sweet to entice pollinators to do their job, for example, and there's some evidence to believe the pleasurable sensations of sexual reproduction too are merely an evolutionary enticement to get the right bits of people together to pass on genes. But what about existential angst?

If we go - rather generously - beyond the idea that existential angst is just self-indulgence personified, then what is it for, in the wider scheme of things. We understand the pleasure of eating a piece of cake, but if, then, one is wracked with guilt and loathing and - once more with feeling, everybody - existential angst about ourselves, what purpose does that serve?

Well, here I can only speak for myself, but for me, I think if pleasure is the reward or the destination, then existential angst is the accelerator pedal and fifth gear. Existential angst on the road made me determined to be as safe as I possibly could, to make sure d and I survived (didn't particularly care if the instructor survived, but his continuing existence could be seens as a fringe benefit if you like). Existential angst about my dad makes me determined to spend time with him, to make him laugh, to make him proud where I can, and at the very least, to avoid giving him additional causes for grief. Existential angst over my future as a writer has made me pound this keyboard for the last couple of hours on my own creative project, locked away here in my little white room looking out over a school, and then my town, determined, more than anything, to be done with bloody Galileo and move on. And existential angst about being a Disappearing Man will drive me back here before I sleep, to get back on my bike and peddle, determined not to let the almost-two-days of doing nothing, of letting my blisters heal and Being Normal, drag me backwards in my quest to live at least long enough to publish something!

Don't worry about a little existential angst. If you don't let it grind you down, it can be phenomenally useful.