Common Ground

Finding shared space and empathy

The act of writing can bring its own anxieties. Even as a relatively successful writer, each new project brings self-doubt or expectations that can't always be realised. In fiction, trawling the trauma of one's own past, or channelling the anxieties of the present day, both seem to offer rich possibilities less available to those for whom life has been a breeze.

And, as they say, the devil always has the best tunes.

Of course, you don't have to have experienced trauma to write about it. Brilliant writers have used imagination and research to insert themselves into the past, as Sebastian Faulks does in 'Birdsong', although there is perhaps a school of thought that suggests historical acts of trauma, of which the First World War is one, can have a rippling effect which seeps into the present. We may find writers in decades time, looking back our current age of anxiety, and trawling it for stories of their own. The period after the end of the 1914-1918 conflict saw art take an agonising turn, questioning long-held certainties, producing emblematic works such as 'The Wasteland' and movements such as surrealism and Dada-ism, questioning how we make sense of a mad world.

New ages of anxiety

It feels as if we might be in the same space now. Although the term 'the age of anxiety' is said to have been popularised by WH Auden after the second of the great wars in his long poem of 1947, it could no doubt have been attached to any number of periods in history, or to other works of art. When Gloucester stares, blinded, into the abyss in 'King Lear', it feels as if Shakespeare is mining some deep, psychological contemporary dread. Probably written in 1605 or 1606, it enacts anxieties about succession, following Elizabeth's death without an heir. Whilst our concerns today are less about monarchical succession, we do face the dread of a different sort of inheritance - that of the world we leave our children, and theirs. 'King Lear' ends with Edgar, the inheritor, saying 'The oldest that hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'

Critics have argued long and hard about these lines. It suggests, on the surface, to say that the previous generation have suffered the most, and in the new world, the inheritors are unlikely to face anything so traumatic. But then there is that final coda - 'nor live so long'. Perhaps a throw-away line, merely marking the age of Lear, and as some modern directors have suggested, his dementia, it might also look towards a more uncertain future, one in which lives are briefer. If Edgar could have stared into the future he might have been talking about the lost generation of World War I.

Finding solace

So, in our current epoch of worry and instability, where do we find hope and solace? What can our children cling on to? I am concerned that in our absolutes, our anger at our enemies, our defence of our own certainties, we might lose the ability to find common ground. It's a well-known element of negotiations between warring parties (as in the discussions that led to the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland) that you start not with ideological positions, but uncritical talk - and perhaps talk about other things - what you have in common with your opposites: perhaps you both like your coffee the same way, or have a child who loves Marvel films. The humanisation of those with different values is lacking from social and political discourse.

It's easy to say that it is the little things that bring pleasure if you're struggling to pay energy bills or feed your family, but beyond those everyday necessities, expectations of what the world owes us does not need to be maximalist. We are sold grand beauty and achievement through social media at a time when those very things create the anxiety they are meant to eliminate. What are the little things for me? It's a truism to talk about nature, but as I sit writing this today, I can look through the window at the leaves of the magnolia fluttering to the ground, their burnt orange shapes gathering on the gravel. Longed-for rain is hammering the window. In the kitchen, my wife is swearing at having forgotten to add butter to the cake mix for a celebratory event tomorrow. None of these things have the power to effect change nationally or globally, but they can reduce the burden we carry from exposure to the world's problems.

Renoir and beauty

Finally, to Renoir. Last week, I had the pleasure of being able to go to the 'Renoir and Love' exhibition at the National Gallery. Ok, not a 'little thing'. Over £20 to get in, and an expensive rail journey to add to it. But the exhibition notes were keen to point out that Renoir, perhaps because of his working class roots, wanted to capture the ordinary beauty of life: couples dancing at a cafe, someone walking by the river, friends chatting idly, one holding a flaming cigar, its bitter delights almost finished. Painting just after the establishment of the Third Republic and the suppression of the Paris Commune, it's difficult to know if he was hiding from the anxieties of the wider world, or simply embracing the vivacity which comes from common friendships and shared interests - or perhaps both. The eye is often drawn in his paintings to the ordinariness of the settings - the cigarette butts on the floor as the man wheels the pretty girl around, but always, too, to the colour, the way the folds of her dress are caught in the sunlight.

Let's be honest, 'though. If Renoir were painting the folds of the robe worn by a mother holding her starving child in a tent in a refugee camp, the desert sun blasting through a ragged hole, it wouldn't be the light we'd be talking about. It's increasingly difficult to bridge the gap between our own everyday anxieties to the profound suffering which we cannot begin to appreciate. But I suppose we do need to start with light, not darkness. If our fall-back position is always to highlight the negatives in our own world, then it's difficult to move beyond that reality to something broader and more universal.

Common ground

The phrase 'common ground' has so many meanings. What do I really share with a refugee mother, with Renoir, with the person who holds opposing views to me? How do I bridge that gap? Imagination - writing - which is where we started - is in the end an act of empathy. To be able to recognise what others feel and see, however upsetting or irrational, however incomprehensible. Empathy - casting light into those troublesome areas - might be the key.

A poem of mine which shares this title has just been shortlisted for the Hastings Book Festival poetry competition prize - a little thing, but one which of course gives me disproportionate pleasure. I include it here - hoping it dramatises the possible escape from anxiety we all feel from time to time, when human connection seems a distant dream.

Poem: Common Ground

Spread across the meadow,

Bending eastwards under the breeze,

The sheep sorrel is a rippling layer of red.

I reach to pull a stalk from the soil,

Offer it to you, speak of its medicinal qualities:

The lemon tang of the lower tip, 

How it’s named for the head’s resemblance 

To the compact skulls of those 

Who watch us as we pause 

Between dyke and road.

You bite and suck on the stem,

Red lips pressed together in tight lines,

Then shrug, spit the green stalk out,

Let the residue drop back to the earth,

Where it disappears among the bow-strings

Which rise and fall and spring back once more.

‘The red flowers are female,’ I offer, uselessly, 

Staring past you to the massed ranks.

I imagine an ancient scythe in gnarled grip

Levelling their confederate souls

But fail to draw comfort 

From the chains of land and time.

 So when you smile, reach for my hand, 

It’s unexpected, like the coolness

Of your fingers curled under mine.

A hedge on the farther side of the field 

Prickles and heaves with fat, blue berries.

‘Come on. Let’s get a shot of sloes,’ you say, 

Then pull us both away from the arid sea of grass,

The disinterested, heaving lines,

Anchored to the hardened ground.

(copyright, Mike Gould, 2026)