People often hear words like “grace” and “mercy” and associate them with weakness. In fact, grace and mercy are not ‘less’ than justice in any way; they are more. It is bigger to forgive than it is to seek justice. There is nothing weak, unmanly or feeble about forgiveness. Forgiveness is definately not the soft touch.

Forgiving someone takes strength, determination and guts, and it hurts. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and wasted most of his youth in a jail cell as a result. The best years of his life, he spent in a dungeon, but he knew that he had to forgive. The Bible says that when he met his brothers again, years later, he was so anguished that he wept loud enough for Pharoah’s household heard him. Joseph was second in command of Egypt after the Pharoah: this is like Gordon Brown breaking down at the Dispatch Box in the Houses of Parliament, or at a press conference. Joseph’s pain went deep.

Jesus forgave, and he ended up battered, broken and bloody, finally dying on a cross.

Forgiveness isn’t cheap, nor is it easy. Forgiveness is seen as a way of letting people walk all over you and in a way this is true: forgiveness isn’t justice, forgiveness isn’t fair. Forgiveness isn’t just ‘letting something go’ — that’s a nonsensical idea. Forgiveness is a fight not to let yourself be dominated by hate and spite. Forgiveness is man’s work (unless you’re a woman, in which case it’s woman’s work), and it takes courage.

But forgiveness always brings healing, and not just to the forgiver, in the end. Seeking justice so often becomes seeking revenge. The Bible says “an eye for an eye” and many people see this as promoting vengeance, but in actual fact it was probably to limit vengeance. “You can pay that person back, but only for what they did, and then you must stop.” The Bible doesn’t condone vengeance, and clearly places mercy above justice.

Forgiveness breaks the vengeance cycle and brings wholeness. Genesis 45:14-15 reads: “Then he threw his arms around his brother Benjamin and wept, and Benjamin embraced him, weeping. And he kissed all his brothers and wept over them. Afterward his brothers talked with him.” Who knows what was said after all those years? But it brought restoration to his family. Later on it says that Joseph’s father’s spirit is revived: after all he’s been mourning a son for decades. As if that’s not enough, the whole family — and it’s a huge family — moves to Egypt to live in abundance instead of poverty.

Forgiveness is hard, but it’s worth it.

I have just made a discovery. It happened when I was typing, and some would call it a typo but I really don’t buy into all that. When I make a mistake in typing, I like to think it happened for a reason. Otherwise I just wouldn’t be able to cope.

Anyway, I have discovered … eeflings. Eeflings are like feelings only they’re more ambiguous. Eeflings are what you get when, for example, you’re supposed to be doing invoices and such, but really just want to jump around and go a little bit mad. They can be quite dangerous. I remember when I got my A Level results at the tender age of 17…

I was a miserable teenager, and part of that misery expressed itself in never bothering to do any work. Consequently, when I got my results they were quite significantly below what they ought to have been. This wasn’t a surprise, but it did mean that while all my friends were being accepted into their first choices, I was left with the prospect of ‘clearing’, which for some reason sounded to me like a euphemism for a sort of academic ethnic cleansing.

Anyway, I had quite considerably strong eeflings that night, and they pushed me to break a lot of glasses without having even touched a drop of alcohol.

So there it is. My discovery. Eeflings. A mix of enthusiasm, frustration and despair resulting in a turmoil-esque surge of emotion buried beneath social constraint. Freud, eat your heart out.

(But of course he can’t. Cos he’s dead. And anyway, he probably wouldn’t have called it a ‘heart’, he would have called it the id — but that’s really another story for another day.)

I don’t mean things like the combustion engine or the secret of flight. Things like that come about because someone sees something obvious like an explosion and then goes “how can I harness that power”; or they watch a bird and say, “Hm, that looks like fun, let’s try it.”

I mean things like coffee, and steamed milk. And pasta. Things like copper, and glass — stuff that’s not obvious.

Who was it that saw a coffee bush and thought, “I’ve just had the best idea, I’m going to open up those red fruit, get the seed, roast it, grind it, put it hot water, and then drink it.” How do people arrive at these conclusions?

Who decided to push steam down a small metal tube into some cold milk? Who decided to grind up wheat and mix it with eggs and things to make spaghetti? (Incidentally, it’s generally considered that pasta was discovered independently in every culture. Just like bread, and alcohol.)

Actually, to use some very poor style I’m going to refer to something outside of parantheses that I just wrote in parentheses: who discovered alcohol? Who thought that it would be a good idea to let fruit go bad and then drink the fluid? I do believe I remember reading a Björk interview where she said that she’d seen a video of elephants hiding apples and waiting for them to go bad and then getting drunk on them. That’s quite funny.

Anyway, I have no idea how these things came about, but I’m glad that they did.

Mysteries solved.*

* Check it out, no mysteries have been been solved at all!

Be warned: the first couple of lines of this post are covered in horrible sticky crap that looks like pretention. In fact it is not. What appears to be pretention is merely lack of writing skill.

Thank you. This has been a public message on behalf of Mark Kenny.

It occurred to me today that a novelist is a type of sculptor. Instead of working in clay, or bronze, or whatever, they create their sculptures right inside your head. Plot lines, metaphors, dialogue, these are all the long, arduous processes which take the medium, whatever is inside your head at the time, and form them into the sculpture: whatever is inside the author’s head at the time.

A novel is an attempt to communicate an idea, an opinion, an emotion, in a non-mental way. We can explain things using words as best we can. Textbooks are a good example of this: clear, concise words being used in a relatively dry manner to get an idea across as efficiently as possible.

But I think a novel is different because it gives us an example to directly encounter what the author is thinking. We don’t just read about an idea, we temporarily take up residence in a little world designed to reflect that idea, that point of view. It’s one thing to be told that injustice is wrong, it’s another to get to know characters and then watch them suffer under injustice. It brings the message home in a much more experiential way.

So that’s my view of novels. And now for the programming part…

I dabble in web programming and as a consequence my brain is a little more used to seeing things as a computer does. I am more familiar with the way they operate, and this permeates my thinking to a certain extent. For example, when I read Isaiah 55:11, in which God says that his word does not “return to [him] void” I giggle because it’s funny to think that God does not return void.

Geek jokes!

Computers approach things differently from humans, and this is obvious to anyone who has tried to install wireless networking. One of the things that computers do not do is learn. More precisely, they don’t “get used to things”. They approach every task as if it is the first time they have ever done it, pretty much. They may save settings and things like that, but from the computers point of view, it’s the first time they’ve seen those settings.

It’s like having no memory at all. Imagine you were given a list of things to do to accomplish a task. Imagine that you forget each item on the list as soon as you have done it. That’s very similar to how a computer program works. The instructions had better be pretty detailed, and able to deal with unexpected situations. For example, you could say, “At this stage you should be seeing this. If you are not, stop what you are doing, sit down, and cry for help.” That’s called error-detection.

If something unexpected happened and you didn’t check for it, you would carry on as normal until you actually physically couldn’t do it any more. Then you would still carry on trying to do it until a nice person came up and told you to start again. That’s called a crash.

And it’s this difference between humans and computers that makes novels similar to computer programs.

A sculptor has total control over the sculpture. She can choose the material, the tools, the shape, the amount of time she spends on it, etc. The finished piece of work is entirely her creation.

The novelist, however, doesn’t have that luxury. He must simply write the “instructions” for making his “mental sculpture” (i.e., the experience he once had and now wants you to had, or the view he holds that he wants you to be able to see) and hope for the best. His novel might be read by someone who doesn’t get all the references, or who doesn’t find all the jokes funny, or who has no appreciation for the language he is using. He is limited by the reader.

For example, I have lost count of the number of times I have said, “oh, she had brown hair!” or something similar, and had to track back to where that character was first described. I just finished reading Winter in Madrid by C. J. Sansom, and I regret to report that the characters Hoare, Hillgarth and Tollyhurst really weren’t all that well defined in my head. They were like the Three Persons of the Trinity, I had no idea where one ended and the other began. Or who they were, for that matter, and these weren’t minor characters, either! This is because I am a lazy and impatient reader. If it’s not making me laugh, or cry, or say “ooh, that’s deep”, I tend to read it quickly to get to the next good bit.

Authors, calm yourselves, it is a habit I am trying hard to remove!

Anyway, do you see my point? Like the computer program, the reader has no idea where he or she is going. Instead of being able to see the finished piece in front of them, the reader must build it in their head before they can really look at it. (Incidentally, why are sculptors female, authors male, but readers gender neutral? Political correctness, I fear, has had a hand in my pronoun choice.)

Poetry is a funny thing. I kinda hate it.

But also, I really like it, some of it.

For the most part, I find it hard to understand. I think maybe I pay too much attention to the words. Or maybe I read the words like prose, which of course makes it sound disjointed and crap. I think you’re supposed to read poetry out of the corner of your eye. Kinda like squint at it.

There’s poems I really like, Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy. It’s about a woman who gives her lover an onion on Valentine’s day instead of the usual gifts. It’s fully of really nice images like, “I give you an onion./It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.”

Imagine getting a moon wrapped in brown paper! How totally awesome would that be! It would be all glowing and small, and you could keep it in your bag whenever you needed light or whenever you just wanted to look at a little moon. It’s like the ultimate office toy, a Newton’s cradle but a million times better. If anyone has a moon in brown paper, tell me where you got it, because I want one.

So anyway. I think you’re supposed to enjoy the images and stuff. I’ve always liked little bits of sentences and nice words and things. Like “optical” and “five”. Those are good words.

I can’t take a whole poem though, so maybe a good way of reading poems would be to take it to pieces and enjoy each little bit at a time. You could spend as much time reading a poem as you do reading a novel that way.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to introduce a new poem I wrote. It literally took about 10 seconds to write, it’s like the best poem ever.

It’s called “I had a friend once”, and it’s all lies. I never had a friend called Jacqueline. Read it!

Microsoft’s genius was to get a computer into everyone’s home. Apple’s genius was to make everybody love their computers like they love their pets.

Caught the tail-end of a programme called Supporting Acts as I was eating my lunch today. It focussed on 2 people working “behind the scenes” in TV. The first was a set builder, who enjoyed his job immensely, and the second was a stunt woman called Daniella Da Costa (who also enjoyed her job immensely).

The last thing I caught before I switched off was,

Life is very short — but it’s far too long if you’re doing the wrong thing.

I thought that was very true, I liked it very much. Hooray for good careers!