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.

Writing Fear

I’ve been thinking, in the wake of The Little Stranger, what it is in fiction that scares me. What novels have made me shiver, look up from the text to see the day going out, and tell myself nervously, perhaps I shouldn’t be reading this as it gets dark. Or else, what has lingered after reading, tilted the world a few degrees.

From when I was younger – the novels of The Shining and The Exorcist. Unseen malevolence afflicting unstable characters. The immeasurably demonic, the wretchedness of human weakness, in the face of a greater force.

The Red Laugh, a novella by Leonid Andreyev (you can read it in full in that link, if you like). War, brutality, futility, thirst, despair, madness as disease, madness transmittable to others, the attempt to write down ones story, but, in fact, writing nothing, writing illegible scribbles, intent, obsessed, possessed by memory, utterly.

Then, what else?

Ghost stories. I always want to be scared by them, but find this is rare.

The scariest stories I can remember are from childhood. Oral stories like “who’s got my hairy toe?” where a woman finds a toe as she is digging up roots, and takes it home with her, only to hear at night, the owner of the toe calling out for it, coming to get her. Burns’ “Tam O’ Shanter” read by my dad to my brother and myself, on dark nights on Skye. Come to think of it, he read the hairy toe story as well, and I still can remember being scared. Performance can be key.

Another story I read in a book of ‘true’ ghost stories, of a cyclist forced to shelter from the rain in an abandoned house. He waits by a lit fire, but the storm doesn’t pass. He grows tired, midnight approaches. He is woken by the sound of footsteps – damp, slippery steps- coming into the house, moving closer to the parlour he is in. Then he sees the steps, wet, as if of a drowned man, coming towards the fire. He jumps from his seat, just as a shape becomes visible, dripping, to take his place. More frightening than M.R. James, though perhaps because I read it, again, when young.

It is so much easier for readings, but for films especially, to be scary, through the combination of the visual and aural. A person speaks in a hush, then SHOUTS at the most terrifying moment. Or else, something moving at the edge of the screen. A flicker. A mouth distends, a long strange noise comes out, not human. Inexplicable signs. Low music. A girl crawls out of a TV with jagged motions of her limbs, her long, dark hair hung over her face.  Muted colours, abandoned hotels, forests that go on without end, dark and thin-branched.

Fear is meant to be experienced, rather than read of. It’s not enough for a character to be scared, but to transmit their fear to you. Make them afraid for both them and yourself, though none of it is real. How though? How does it work? Freud says, the unheimliche, the uncanny. The banister that squirms. The doorway that vanishes. The room that shouldn’t be there, or the passage that goes down into the dark.

I’m thinking of House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Another transmitted fear, passed from  Zampanò, the writer of the book-within-the-book, The Navidson Record to the narrator Johnny Truant. The physical twistings of the words on the page, printed into labyrinths you must turn the book around to read, is something I have not made my mind up on. The Navidson Record, which is the story of a non-existent documentary on a house with impossible dimensions, is frightening, but only up to a point. I won’t say which point.

I do still have, occasionally, vivid nightmares about rooms suddenly existing behind the walls of wherever I am living at that point in my life,  but I’ve had them for a long time. Something to do with reading Anne Frank’s diary –  a kind of terror of being hidden away, of the knowledge of her eventual discovery, of the last entry in her diary, leading to nothing, to absence, to seeing her father on the children’s programme Blue Peter, old, and alone, mingled with the fear of the uncanny, of a sudden, unmapped and unmappable labyrinth. Is that the first time Blue Peter has been associated with horror? I couldn’t possibly say.

I find myself drawn to writing uncanny moments in my second book, which I had not set out to do. It’s a preoccupation. It’s the sense that a human being, when alone in an unfamiliar house, will, for the most part, find something to be scared of, to resist being scared of. The dark, the untested rooms, the whispering of guilt, the surly neighbours, the howling wind, the scratch-scratch of a branch, though no trees are growing close to the house. I hope, in amongst the story of finding contentment and getting over grief, to unsettle.

I am only writing what scares me, with this compelling urge to pass it on, like a tape, to the next victim…

Share Your Spaces 6

The final post – for now – and it’s three-for-two. Writers, readers, public, private spaces -

This space belongs to: Averil Dean -

I used to think I wrote best in silence, behind closed doors, preferably with a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the doorknob. But over the past several months I’ve begun to see that a change of place is a huge help to me. So my writing space is my notebook, wherever it lands. On the weekends I’ve been known to move from coffee shop to library to park bench to diner, all in a day. When I’ve been in one place for a while and start to get restless, I fold up my pages and take my show on the road. Have notebook, will travel. That’s me.

This space belongs to: Jordan Cox  -

I’m a full-time college student in my last semester of my senior year. Not only do I commute to my university every day where I’m taking 20 credit hours, but I’m heavily involved on campus. But the end of every day (which usually ends in the wee hours of the morning for me), I just want to collapse in my bed. I spend the little alone time I have snuggling with my cat Max (not pictured) and with my PillowPet Harold (pictured) that my friends got me as a sort of gag gift for my last birthday. I also catch up on my favorite blogs via bloglovin’, check my tumblr & do a bit of reading. I’m currently reading Ring by Koji Suzuki.

This space belongs to: Teri Carter -

This is my view today.  It’s ever shifting.  I work at the dining room table, and as it’s a round table, I tend to work my way around it as the days pass.  When I get tired of this view, I’ll move a seat or 2 over and Voila!, a whole new space.  The book to the right of my laptop is THE WRITER’S NOTEBOOK, which I pulled out this morning to read a Dorothy Allison essay on writing about “place.”  Through the windows I spot my neighbors if they’re working in their yard (mere feet away) and watch squirrels scurry along the fence-tops.  The bookshelves straight ahead house most of our first editions, and the frames hold requests for reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s “new releases”: CHILD OF GOD in 1974 and THE OUTER DARK, 1968.

 

The soup container on the left means I’m having lunch and reading the blogs.  What you can’t see?  The 50 lb puppy, asleep on my right foot, snoring; the dozen short-cut yellow roses in a vase hidden by my laptop screen.  My mother’s favorite flower….