Uncertainty
There’s a scene from Indiana Jones that I talk about a lot. It’s from The Last Crusade. In it, Indiana must find a way across a ravine and steps out into what looks like thin air. Just before he takes the step, he murmurs, It’s a leap of faith, in a voice that indicates how very significant this is. Then he takes a ludicrously exaggerated stride into the abyss and we anticipate him plummeting, emptiness below, the stomach-churning drop, when – there it is, the bridge, solid under his foot. It was there all along, disguised by optical illusion, and only now he is standing on it can he see his way to the other side.
It’s a very silly scene, but also a pretty good metaphor for that moment before you start writing, when there’s nothing there in the abyss of the blank page and you have no choice but to move forwards anyway, into all that emptiness and uncertainty. Every time, it’s horrifying, but every time the blank page rises to meet you, catches you, reveals that it was ready for you all along. You can’t see the bridge until you step onto it.
Whenever students came up to me after class saying they didn’t know how to start writing, this is what I would tell them – about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, about the empty space and about the secret, invisible bridge. I tried, in rambling about all of this, to reassure them that their uncertainty was inevitable but, also, an illusion. The words are the bridge, I would say, in the same tone Indiana uses for, It’s a leap of faith. If the student seemed confused, I’d say, You have to write the words to prove to yourself that they’re there.
The truth was, though, that I knew uncertainty was not an illusion.
At the beginning of December, the Head of Department sent an email to all staff seeking to reassure us that there would be no compulsory redundancies before Christmas. This had not previously been something I had thought to worry about, but the email set off a panicked rumour that this meant there would be compulsory redundancies after Christmas, and I spent the holiday period agonising over my unanticipated precarity.
I have never dealt well with uncertainty. I have always taken steps to drive out the possibility—certainty, even—that I don’t know what will become of me. This was the most significant motivation for seeking out a job like the one I had: I wanted to know that I could make a living regardless of whether my books sold or flopped, my advances ballooned or dwindled. And so, there I was, teaching students about the invisible bridge in The Last Crusade and happy in the knowledge that I could pay my rent that month, and the month after that, and the month after that.
Now it seemed I had made an error. Conversations in the corridors of our ever-so-slightly-crumbling university building were dominated by discussion of falling student numbers, government policy pushing arts-inclined students towards STEM degrees, the budget dwindling. We were urged to work harder, be more engaging, kinder, more exciting, to prevent students from dropping out. It seemed that, despite all these enormous structural issues, the real problem was that I was not showing enough fun video clips in my lectures.
Later on, an “extraordinary departmental meeting” was called, in which we were asked to review top secret documents about the university’s financial situation and restructure plans, which would be emailed to us all thirty minutes in advance. We were instructed that under no circumstances were we to leak these documents to the press, and I was excited at the prospect of having, for the first time in my life, documents I could leak to the press. When they arrived, however, the documents in question were outrageously dry, just a series of graphs about student recruitment numbers, not worth leaking at all, not even worth trickling. I hadn’t realised that things could fall apart so boringly.
It also happened slowly; there were years between those first murmurs about redundancies in the department and the official announcement that people were going to lose their jobs. During that period, I went on strike three times, which was its own kind of uncertainty: whether union members would vote for industrial action; whether it would then be called; whether, having been called, it might be called off; whether the students would be sympathetic or angry, the university reasonable or cruel. And throughout it all, I just wanted to know what would happen, wished that life could be more like reading, so I could turn the page and skim ahead, or skip to the last page to find out how it ends.
The words are the bridge, I told myself each day as I sat down to work on a novel I was struggling to finish. And I would summon them, from somewhere, writing into the uncertainty of everything, unable to know what I now know, which is that I would find a different job before the redundancies in my department were confirmed, but would still lose over £300,000 from the value of my pension, and that the difficult novel was, in fact unworkable and would soon be abandoned for a better idea. And I was unable to know what I still don’t know: the future of arts subjects in British universities; the future of academia as a viable profession for anyone other than the already-very-rich; whether, each time I start a new writing project, it’s going to succeed or fail.
As I wrote, I thought more and more about reading, about the thing we offer other people by writing words they can read: an ending, an answer, a reveal that they can move towards. We write into uncertainty so we can read our way out of it, it seemed to me. And the only thing to do, then, was to keep stepping into the ravine.