Numb fingers type faster

 

Today was one of those high, blue, fine-threaded days that brought a frost, and which means that my flat, a tenement from the thirties, is cold inside. We have heating, but it’s on a pretty poor gas system and we recently discovered that it was squeezing D’s lungs. A space heater will have to do us, when we feel lux enough to use it. The low today is only minus 2 celsius, so it’s not great trial. It just feels a little Dickensian to be wrapped in – okay – snuggies and blankets, with cold noses and fingers that bend a little unwillingly.

 

But I’m not here to complain. I’m here to express my gratitude to all of the people who have been visiting this blog recently and who have started following me on twitter. To the people who retweeted my story from yesterday, and who contacted me directly about it. Thank you! I think every writer craves an audience, and feels that when he or she has made a connection with a reader that that is something really uplifting.  I cannot explain this comfort, except that all writing is a form of communication, an attempt to lay out in textures and black marks something important to them. A story that burns through the finger tips. That wants, as Sundog Lit say, to burn the retinas. To light someone else up in the ways that they can and are able be. A less-than-perfect cross between song and chatter, physical sculpture and neon and flame.

 

 

It’s a dark time of the year, as I have said. Cold, blue, low lit. Writing is more important than ever, it feels. Reading, huddling round a book or bringing one clumsily, bittily, into being. I will have more time, now that my work, sadly, is cutting back my hours in the winter slump. The pictures above are from one of the distractions of the season: the Christmas Market on Princess Street. Outside of the picture are little huts strung with lights and tinsel, selling overpriced decorations and German snacks and hot mulled wine with schnapps. I’m thinking of setting up my own stand – selling a poem. Selling a photograph of this city. I won’t, because I’m truly not business minded, but the idea of doing it makes me smile. The possibility of physically handing my art over to someone as we both shiver and clap our hands at the chill.

 

There are ways to speak and ways to see on these cold days. If it’s warm where you are, perhaps summer, I am envious, but not. How are you managing though, wherever you are?

 

And thank you, as ever, for reading here.

Down among the mossy stone

 

Edinburgh is it seems a city of cemeteries, best visited as I said in Monday’s post, on days like this. When the water droplets seem to condense from the air around you, and umbrellas are nearly useless.

 

 

I can tinker with the filters, bring out the richness that my camera cannot catch, or leave it out. The dark sodden colours of stone and moss can speak for themselves.

 

 

At other times, I try to get the vibrancy of dying leaves in low light, and with a flick of the camera phone, sometimes fail and sometimes succeed. Compare these two images, the first with a filter, the second, of the graves below the tree, without any manipulation:

 

 

and

 

 

This one, unfiltered, shows a close up of those strange physallis-like flowerheads. I wanted to pull one off and pocket it and take it home. But who knows what might come crying round at my window in the night, to claim it back again?

 

 

In this lower graveyard, the stones are green and black, from moss and smoke. The ground is black too, under the leaves and the grass. Churned by the rain and my unsteady feet.

 

 

This is an old burial ground: as I said there has been a church on the site since at best guess the 850s AD. Twelve centuries of worship. Were there graves in those early days here? I imagine so. No visible sign remains. I found some stones that I thought looked to date from the sixteen hundreds, with angelheads with wings and mason signs. The record online might be able to let you know, if you are interested.

 

 

 

 

I explored only about half of the graveyard – the cold dampness nipping at me. Another time, definitely.

 

 

Up by the church, I saw people sitting apart on the steps, eating their lunches. Business people, it looked like, though the rain was as I said a miserable and constant drizzle. It seemed to make no difference, and I had seen people there from the upper graveyard in similar dreichness. I decided not to bother them with my photography. But you can imagine the hunched bodies on the damp steps, pushing wet sandwiches into their mouths. Seeking peacefulness, down here hidden away from the main road and the openness of the gardens.

 

 

Though it’s been a long time since anyone could say this part of Edinburgh was rural, I’m going to sign off with the open verse of ‘Elgy Written in a Country Churchyard‘ by Thomas Gray, suggested (and quoted down the phone) by my father.

 

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

 

 

Do you know of any other poems concerned with the specific peacefulness of a graveyard?

Flash up on Sundog Lit

My flash fiction, ‘What She Would Spend Her Money On‘ is up on the brand new Sundog Lit:

 

She would get huge slabs of carcass from best-beloved cattle. Smooth marbled flesh. She would hang these in a specially prepared cellar and frighten herself with their bodies and pungency in the dark. She would buy up old china tea sets, the kind so thin they seem unwell and you fear to hold them…

 

This flash is from my work in progress, Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. There’s plenty of other delights over there – I know I’ll be digging in as a reward for this afternoon’s work on said ms. My story, Boy Cyclops is still story of the week on Smokelong Quarterly, if you want to read more:

 

I met my friend the cyclops for a drink at a downbeat cocktail bar with damp green walls and mismatched furniture. We went all sorts of places together. Today, he was buying. He’d recently come into some suspect fortune. He was playing tarot on the table nearest the aquarium.

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.

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.

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

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.