Theme Park

The Fife Park year was all change. Maybe change is the theme of this book. But if that’s true, then it’s a cop out, because change is the theme of life, and the theme of fiction, and the theme of causality, and the theme of reason and the theme of love and growth and time and friendship and joy and work and everything else that is not the same as it was, which is pretty much everything.

If I could pick a theme for my own book, it would be this mysterious glow I’m looking for. It would be that happy, joyful, electric excitement that I felt running through everything back then. It would be that eagerness, that willing, that enthusiasm. But that would imply a level of control that I don’t have. Does anybody really choose their own theme?  I hardly even think we choose our lives, let alone the narrative.

Back then, I found a project for change, and for years I credited it with success. It was a pop-psychology solution pieced together from cereal packets and lecture notes, and I thought I had it all figured out. If I’d written this book aged twenty-five, it would have been central to the story: how a man can change. Fuck me, I might have even called it that. [How a Man Can Change, that is, not Fuck Me. I might yet write that one.]

But I was carried away with the illusion of control.  Now I’m more sceptical. Change is a wild, untameable thing. There is romance in the idea that people change out of will, that they can be made whole again by effort. But I don’t believe it.

Sure, you can make a change. You can always make a change. You can’t look for something and find nothing in this life, it is too full. But it is just any change, desultory and undirected. Serendipity is the Queen of change; you almost never get what you are looking for.

Maybe you sense the paradox in this book. Why am I looking for what I used to be, if I don’t believe I chose it even then? What is the point of looking for what can’t be found? When finding it would be no guarantee of understanding it. When understanding it would bring me no closer to reviving it. Why trace over old footsteps, if the path will always be a lost one?

Well, maybe finding anything is better than not looking. Or perhaps looking for something is that specific thing I am looking for. Who doesn’t love a paradox? Maybe that fluidity, that flexibility, is its own release. And, I suppose I just wonder, if I am looking for serendipity, what will I find?