Choose your own -

 

Is it the evening, or the early morning? Are you here, or heading here to meet with an old friend, someone who you need to see again over fumes of coffee and little white saucers and plates of toast? Are you even here, in this city? Is this a memory, of walking by, thinking of this other life in which you could be meeting your friend?

 

Is this an evening where you are alone, and the streets of the city seem impossibly full of your yearnings, impossibly indifferent to them?

 

Do you have the sense that you might hail that cab, get in, go somewhere?

 

Where would you go? Maybe you want to go sightseeing, maybe you’re heading uptown to the apartment of that friend of yours, you have a bottle of wine twisted in brown paper under your arm.

 

Perhaps, actually, you’re not bound by the city, by the rules of streets pressing around you. Perhaps you are heading somewhere else entirely. To a place where no cabs can go. Towards utter soundlessness:

 

 

Towards winter. You can wander the woods without feeling the cold. The light never changing. You can feel fearful. Or calm. You can walk down the promenade of trees, imagining an old road there, a lumber road, a track to an old cabin that stands on a jut of granite, with views across the snow bound valley. The dark, white pines and some mountains beyond, or some open plain, or tundra, or a city  -  impossibly, that same New York City, where all those people live but you, who have chosen another path, or not -

 

Or you might look up from your coffee in the restaurant, from your friend’s chatter. Might look out the window and see, across the road, a wooded mountain, and up high a tiny figure, looking down, who turning once, disappears into a black wood cabin. And the clatter of the busy room might then return to you, now altered.

 

Though either way, it was as if you never had that other, fantastical choice. That this silence, this endless city din and company, was the only way things could ever be.

Sunday Poem

D hand feeding a wild deer, Bald Mountain, NY

 

A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden

horns, between two rivers, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun

was rising in the unripe season.

 

Her look was so sweet and proud that to follow her I left every task,

like the miser who as he seeks treasure sweetens his trouble with

delight.

 

“Let no one touch me,” she bore written with diamonds and topazes

around her lovely neck. “It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.”

 

And the sun had already turned at midday; my eyes were tired by

looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she

disappeared.

 

- Rima 190, by Petrarch (b.1304- d.1374)

 

One for the writers. Sometimes the sentence or the success is as fleet as deer, and always out of reach. Sometimes even deer are happy to be in our company, for a while.

Vistas

 

Thinking of vistas in Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. Thinking: the title fits this, an ache, a wetland of blurred polluted roadscape. The fields endlessly going by and into memory.

 

 

Thinking of how we must respond – even in not admitting to responding – to memory, yes, to a landscape, to a sight, to a disconnect of emotions, insistent and tidal, in the songs we hear, the smells, the tastes, textures of rock and bark and flagstone and subway seat. The internet allowing us to express in words wonders, but not to experience them, or only fleetingly. And in life only if there is time, if we are permitted to, permit.

 

 

Thinking also, how hard it is to sing in words.

 

 

I try to make up a singer, a woman who sang full of space and pain, for Aida to fit her pain, her longing in. I can almost see what she looks like, how she sounds. Her name, Patty Devine, sounds like she’d sing soulfully, Urban, drink-addled, though D. thinks that name signifies a Country singer. I don’t know. I like that sort of space too. A changeable, changing vista. Room, hopefully, for the reader to hear what they need to, out of her non-existent mouth.

Five Year Plan

There are modes of living that seem almost impossible to me. That tree, for example – how long did it grow while impaled on the iron fence? In its death it becomes an ode to the defiance of gravity, of enduring despite. But in its stability there is also instability. I understand the latter. It’s stability which seems an inaccessible grace for me. Perhaps for many of my generation.

I am thinking of my ongoing job search. I think of the migration to the states and back again. Before that, to Australia and back again. Continents blur. Weather and photographs and study and marriage and love and bedbugs and driving in terrifying snowstorms and fretting about the rent and the utilities, the pacing through hot streets and under dismal bridges searching, going about my day. The knowledge that the next five years may prove to be just the same.

The economy is ailing. The recovery is jobless. A flicker of breath at the lips. Chance seems to rule the day. May you live in interesting times. The unstable market, the stalls folding one after another. Those remaining grasp their goods to their chest, eyeing me as I walk by.

Some people hunker down, collude, gain. Other people march and riot. Some things improve, others continue to deteriorate slowly, secretively, like old wallpaper succumbing to spores.

There is, among this, a different kind of grace to hold us together in this period of aftermath. I am not thinking of The Tree of Life, which I haven’t seen – the way of nature, the way of grace – why would there be such a dichotomy? I’m thinking of faith in moments. I’m thinking of the stilled sky at dusk. Of the way that woman in the Pina Colada stand has closed her eyes, is holding the city crowds back.

There is grace in the quiet operatic singing I hear from my upstairs neighbour, normally so chaotic (a bedsheet she has hung out of the window to dry after a flood, still there four days later).

There is grace in the hand that helps you up. In solidarity with those who need it most, I think even if you cannot help directly, there is grace in thinking of them. Of being always humane. Of reading to learn your humanity and maintaining conscientious engagement with the world. Of applying this where you can, small amounts of grace that will never run out in the way of money. More like daylight, ebbing and flowing with what you can give, if you are too depleted  and need retreat and rest.

There is grace in getting through despair. Not denying it. Not shuffling sorrow and disappointment under the rug. In tholing them. In realistic optimism. In siting on the sofa, looking at your hands as they age in front of you.

In trust. In doubt. In the smell of coffee, even if you can no longer drink it. The bloom of bread rising in the oven, though you can no longer eat it, because your stomach has shrunk or grown weak.

In the secular and sacred moments, when the sun comes out, when the wind blows the hair about you, and the air is full of water molecules a billion years old.

There is grace in never giving up.

Brief flight/ to read more poetry

Red Cardinal, Central Park

“A washed corpse, the body of rain-drenched trees

That below my window darkens further. In

Rememberance. Grave blankets of dusk over it.

Cold sheet of mist over it. Death a bird shadow

On the sill. This is the plot of my consideration.

The copse below my window, the small wood

Without an oracle, with no significant episode.

It is a hand’s breadth. It is a small ache.

The hand knocks at the window. The window opens.

The smell of wetted dirt and wild fruit steps

Up.

[...]

If you stand above woods the tree

Is one. It is many, if you walk below. Many,

If you step past the stations of your thought

And number your steps. Smaller and smaller.

The faculty of expansion decreasing. The faculty

Of breath decreasing. The rain withdrawing

With a whistling hush.”

 

Two extracts from ‘Past the Stations’ by Brigit Pegeen Kelly – from her book, Song.

 

Further – this, and this (the book of which I will be receiving as a bonus for subscribing to Hobart late at night, and having a fine talk about whisky and bourbon with Hobart on Tumblr.

 

And, if you’d like more, there is also this. Where I would one day like to go and stay in the house of the future, listening to the waves rasp the black rocks while I type. Or while on the shore I try thinking of poems that are worthy of the rocks.

What remains and what is lost

Cherry Blossoms, Washington D.C.

A hillside shack, Catalonia

Dusk, from Arthur's Seat

Ideal Hosiery, Lower East Side, NYC

Lastly, one of both - Summer in the ruin, Poblet, Catalonia

Storyboarding, Storymaking

D and I are whisking off today on the trains bound North for Oban, the gateway to the isles (though we aren’t sure what our plans are on that point).  Not a literary journey, but likely a very picturesque one.  As you can guess, I will probably have plenty of photographs to share. I hope I don’t overdo the images to the detriment of words, and that soon I will have a lengthy, word-rich post for you to sink your teeth into. You might also ask, what happened to Endless Reads 2012? Tobias Smollett happened to it. Smollett and all his Georgian puffery and personal wretchedness…I hope four-odd hours confined to a carriage will help me toil through more pages than I have managed so far. He’s going to be one of the two-weekers. Not giving up yet!

 

More fun so far has been starting a second illustration class at the Edinburgh College of Art.  This time, we have to design one lengthy project, alongside general practice and keeping an observational sketchbook.

 

Tonight, we were set the task of producing a mock-up of our project ideas.  I decided to do a series of illustrations showing Aida’s long bus journey from New York City to New Mexico. It would be a blurring of reality and the work-in-progress, of the real journey D and I took and the rough outline I’ve made in the draft of The Millennial. Non-fiction visual narrative, I suppose? I said I would put them together in a little booklet, perhaps. After class, one of the other students came up to me with a suggestion that I add diary entries for each panel, to give a feeling of intimacy. I’m havering on this idea, though I was so grateful to have kind feedback. I like the idea of having it a silent sequence,  removed from the burden of text (I know I’ve been writing too much when I say that, and welcome Oban as a wee break from type-type-type).

 

Here are the rough (oh so rough) drawings I made, plus a little extra one just for fun. There will be more scenes in the final project, I think. More drama, as there was on the actual journey.

Diary of a houseplant. The real-life one didn't take to being sketched, and has turned very peely-wally in the few hours since.

An Interior Mood

figure moving through a door

Thinking today of: inner spaces, dim lighting, blurring motion.

Inside the National Museum of Scotland

Of golden light, the hum of voices, or silence bound within walls, bound from an exterior that extends into unfathomed space.

Sign in the Subway, NYC

Of what constitutes interior space, of the void between the character and the fictional world, the reader and the character. How to measure and chart this distance.

Plant in the window of our flat

Also asking, how to write solitude, without making the character static. How to use both the silence and the chittering of thoughts to good effect. That and making up a music the character listens to, shoring herself against sorrow, or feeling at all. But further -

D with a sparkler

how to bring the warmth of living into such a text, to entrance, to transmit, to speak of the fleeting and the enduring. Getting the measure right.

The Model World

Boats, opposite Oslo harbour

Figurines, Central Park

A teeny canal in model Amsterdam

View from the hills in Catalonia

Wee Scottish parliament, Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags

I have been seeing the world in miniature, playing around with a new online tool to make everything macro and real seem micro and constructed by giant hands. I know this trick has been round for a while now, and was quite faddish a few years back – but I thought the technique behind it must be quite complex. It turns out that someone has built the software so that it’s just a matter of sliding a preset bar up and down the picture to determine the point of focus, and with a bit of work, I should improve quite quickly.

 

Anyway, I love the effect – the buildings and hills like a setting for a model railway, the strange fragility granted the human figures and the trees. It is like the creation of a short story – or flash fiction – out of the broader, coarser materials of life, a distilling of the elements. I think I miss writing shorter pieces, though I really hadn’t written many. I prefer the flash fiction or the prose (or otherwise) poem.

 

When the draft of the novel is finished, I can bring out the finer tools, the magnifying glass. The flashes will have to come later, when the bigger spread is at last done with: a vision of a chapbook I can balance on one finger, with a cover of tiny mountains and at their base, a city of tiny houses where the crumbs of narrative will live.

Over Elsewhere

A view of some Edinburgh rooftops, because text likes pictures

I have been invited to write a column at The Inner Condition, a brand new journal/zine type publication on Tumblr. There’s not much up at the moment, but hopefully TIC will grow into the community of readers and writers that hang out in picture-post land. Spread the word – they are looking for submissions. Click here to have a read of How I Got My Agent, In X Easy Steps.