Light images

 

Walking through the dapples and the falling drab pieces of leaf, and the wind gently against your face and around you, and the murmur of passers by, and a haze in the distance, scuffing the church steeples and making them unreal.

 

 

And how this is another year, and how this is another autumn, and you would wish to stand at a bonfire, in the dark, looking at the constellations and the smoke reaching out futilely to them. And how the stars are not as they seem but immense and near ageless, scattered more miles away than you or anyone you love  could live to travel through.  And that you will for as long as you live be here, never more than 40,000 feet closer to them.

 

 

But that, regardless of any passing facts and wishes, this is what you have – a pile of leaves in shade and cold sun, and that anyone who thinks this is nothing, that this is somehow too frugal, needs to look again. There’s nothing romantic in it. It is romantic like a stone is romantic, like a branch. But it is your shadow, right now, passing over the leaves. It is your breath and the wind and your murmurs and others with lives that are right now, briefly, intersecting.

Dream logic

 

How does time pass in dreams? How has the month of September gone for you? Slow or fast. Some impossible mixture of sluggishly quick. In dreams you are mute – every voice you ever use only ever spoken in your head. Nothing you can do in dreams affects the world in any stable, lasting way. You can yell as loudly as you want and no one in the street is any the wiser. Are there any people out there? A gale blows leaves through the dream, scattering any traveler, bustling them out of sight. Pressing the leaves on a slicked black pavement as in a precious Victorian scrapbook. They say you cannot write or read in dreams, but I know this is not so. A single word, here or there, blurring as you look at it. A leaf, peeling at the corners, you suddenly know to lift and see the message in the skeleton veins, held up to a golden light. The colours are rich or not in dreams. Movements barely recorded. That’s September.

 

Or, rather, a little better on the writing front, though I have been fighting off a lingering illness, a cold that never burgeons. The second novel progresses, the world doesn’t turn in the old ways – the equinox hit, and now it’s so dark in the mornings it’s like walking to work still in the haar of a dream.

 

Where are you, October, I now ask. Plaintive for some day to be full awake to me, and I to it.

Being here

 

Walking home from work the other day across North Bridge I saw the sun gleaming on the roof of Waverley train station, and the castle on the hill silhouetted against that sky, and the spire of the Scott Monument to the right. Walter Scott, who I’ve never read, wrote the Waverley novels after which the station is named. Shall I read them, ever, I ask myself. So many more books. Such a profusion.

 

I’ve recently thought to add Ford Madox Ford to the list, after the wonderful (if mumbly) production of Parade’s End. If you haven’t watched it or had the chance to yet, I recommend you seek it out. Not something I’d ever really go for – a landowning Tory statistician trying to live honourably by his philandering wife, despite falling in love with a much more wholesome suffragette and facing the dismantling horrors of World War One. But it’s one of those rare examples of lush BBC drama brought convincingly to life with excellent actors. Little scene-chewing here, just subtle hand movements and flashing eyes and rich draping fabrics coupled with oddly stagey set pieces. Tom Stoppard wrote the script and apparently this is something of an achievement, given the source material’s anti-narrative, Modernist style. Which makes me want to read it all the more. That and FMF encouraged Jean Rhys (after or before their affair, I’m not sure). How does the one feed into and complicate the other?

 

So that’s the week, the last few weeks. Watching this drama of restraint and farce and dizzying luxury. Waiting and working and reading. And being disappointed and carrying my bags and planning. And being anxious about the future of my first book and my current manuscript. Taking long breaths out, stretching my arms in front of me and behind. Creeping inch by inch across the pages and hours. Do I make progress, or do I just hope I do?Time progresses, regardless. The sun burnishes the panels of glass and blackens the old stone buildings, the clouds in the sky arrange themselves like silks and wool. And it is beautiful, and I despite it all, have time to notice.

Days for

Days when the streets seem older than they are, set back in decades before this one.

Days when you cannot make your vision square with the haziness of the weather, or the pace of things.

Days when the herb and weed filled spaces are more useful to you than the spaces where business is being done.

Days where nothing is inscribed clearly, even in stone how something is left out.

Days when you will walk through the dry cold air and turn your head and catch sight of ways up, ways into spaces that belong to others.

Days when you should be at peace with the peace and find it all coloured strangely and suspended as if time itself has stalled and no one has the heart to tell you or acknowledge this.

And so keep on walking, and doing and making, all the while a burn in their chests, from the chill.

Mute

 

Because it is hard to speak today, because I need something solid to lean on, let someone else speak well:

I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks
and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk.
Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back?

Now mounting the steps
I enter my new home full
of grey radiators and glass
ashtrays full of wool.

Against the winter I must get a samovar
embroidered with basil leaves and Ukranian mottos
to the distant sound of wings, painfully anti-wind,

a little bit of the blue
summer air will come back
as the steam chuckles in
the monster’s steamy attack

and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least.

 

- from ‘Poem‘ by Frank O’Hara

Of stone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August like a sharp intake of breath in a field of bright yellows and something like wheat

 

 

It is already August, it’s never August in Edinburgh until suddenly the streets are full of revelers for the festival, for the comedy, the book, the music, the children’s festivals and the populations swells and butts up against one another in the street, or else wanders drunkenly about, or else begs or juggles and we get a tiny break in the clouds, once or twice a day, that shows a scorching blue.

 

I have been having great fun reading the submissions for the Thresholds Project. Stories of imminence, of tension, of waiting at the doorway of life or simply a window, looking out. I really would love to read more. If you’d like to send me a poem or a flash piece, please do!

 

This, along with my Share Your Spaces project, are tentative attempts at something bigger. I might not be able to create a literary journal just yet, but I can wobbly step in the direction, here on the blog. I can look at the spaces within which you write, and be inspired. If you want to inspire me, and the readers of my blog further, and you have work that fits the criteria of ‘thresholds’ (a wide, and welcoming criteria of simply, a point of boundary, or a breaking of boundary, or traversing), please email me your work, or questions if you have them to: wheresthebread[@]hotmail.com

 

It all really began this year with the Endless Reads project, which lead to me reading some amazing, challenging works, to expansive and though-provoking connections with their authors via various social media, and to my becoming a reviewer on the online arm of a really fabulous magazine, which was something I had for a long time dreamed of doing.

 

The year is still young, even if the sun is setting earlier and earlier. Now at nine, it’s growing darker. Now the gloaming is thinning, and the nettles in my neighbour’s garden are dusty. New flowers grow all the time. Big-eyed daisies, bright orange things I cannot name. The reek of honeysuckle. I am hopeful.

The moon, finally

 

Sometimes I get a freak lovely shot like the one above, in the new Quartermile area of the city, and take a notion that I might have some skill at this. But really, it’s hard to take a bad photo in Edinburgh. There are all these vistas that open up quite unexpectedly, in between glassy office buildings and the renovated shell of an old hospital. Just waiting for me, and the moon above it all, revealing itself at last.

Mother Night

 

We walk the dusk, the gloaming, cuffing The Meadows, watching the sliver/slipper of the moon evading all attempts to capture it on film. We walk past the gable-ended houses, the closes, the fringes of the university.

 

 

We note the places where the light gathers like dust in the overshadowed courtyards.

 

 

We see the old hairdressers that has been there since I can remember, Violet in the violet hour. Kitsch becoming something else, more elusive. An old photo of yourself as a child, with relatives now dead, a time you can’t remember.

 

 

We walk past modernity, symbol of the New Scots settling in. The lighted windows, the rushing cars.

 

 

Above are the gardens you cannot get in to, looking out on the field (below) that belongs to everyone.

 

 

 

We cut a path into the new development on the park, the looming offices, mostly empty. All lights on here, ready for some bright future pre-recession Edinburgh seemed to hold.

 

 

And there is space for the dark too. And it all soon passes, and we walk back to our flat, and into our own box of warmth and light, however parceled and temporary.

Driving over the mountain

 

This shot taken by complete accident around eight o’ clock while A was driving us out of Ullapool, a village near to the bothy at Badrallach. And by near, I mean about 17 miles or so. This is mountain, field, moor and sea loch country. All that yellow you see is gorse bush, giving off its perfume of coconut to no one at all, and no bees right now. Perhaps little speck flies pollinate it, I don’t know.

 

I come back to the shot, and think of how it seems so much like my writing mind at times. A delicate blur of some grand scene. Right now, I’m working on a review of Reality, Reality, a collection of short stories by Jackie Kay, and thinking, because she is a Scot and mixed race, about race in Scotland, and trying not to make the review about that at all, because Jackie Kay is Jackie Kay, herself utterly, and a lovely writer.

 

So the review is blurry, because things need to be said to an international audience, that Scotland contains more than the image you can hold in your head of it.  Tartan and pipers and whisky and medieval men, pasty and freckly, in kilts. Or that film, Brave, which makes me put my head in my hands. That alluring, tourist-consumable image. Much more it is, and still becoming.

 

The landscape wooshes by, and now you are in the empty Highlands, but you might not know why exactly they are so empty - The Clearances, for one, as I like to mention here, and other socio-economic reasons I have not begun to contemplate. Woosh, and now you driving by a skiing town built up in the sixties and seventies and only less than hideously ugly when the snow is lying, as if it were designed that way. And then you are stuck in slow traffic on a bridge across a firth (an estuary), looking over at that icon of the railway, star of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and then the sun is shining and warm for once, so you go outside to a beer garden and listen to the crack of summer, a chick inside an egg beaking out and cheeping. Then you are in your house, tapping at the internet, sipping  more and more tea, trying to bring it all together.

 

This is the job of a writer in small countries and large. Bringing the moment together, or the whole nation, or some crumbly part of it, holding up to critique or make shimmering. And my eyes are blurry, and I need more time. And right now my mind is elsewhere, stitching at the world of grief and love in New Mexican mountains. Or it will be soon, when my head stops swinging.