Red Rowan

Late at night, editing to strange music choices – poppy hip hop from The Hairpin, a playlist of the music of Modest Mussorgsky, he of Night on Bald Mountain.

 

The text takes on strange shapes with the changing light, my eyelids growing heavy. But my fingers work almost independently, like little tailors, sewing up the gaps and ripping out the bad loops and snarls. I have to pull back before some witching hour comes. I set myself a placeholder, I embed a white rock in the ground, to know I can come back this way again, as many times as I need. Everything, I feel, should be form-and-function. Sometimes I’d like to write from ideas, to speak bolder, but the truth is, the text comes out this way, everything a fairytale and everything sharp and weighty as a hunk of flint. Perhaps the right material to spark, but not an overt flame, as the writers I look up to can manage.

 

Perhaps I have read too much of Virginia Woolf’s criticism to think out these sorts of things on my own terms.

 

Lastly, before bed, the Rowan of the title. A tiny one, but on its way. Rowans planted to keep out the fairy folk from houses, if not texts, to put a red bloom at the doorway. To mark and defy this liminal space.

 

 

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.

Signal Clear

Moss growing in the words carved on a grave flagstone, Dunbar. Contrast turned way up to help with reading

I have been trying to read what the stone above says on it – Here lyes haste Patrick…who…this life…take(?)… – if anyone is good at decoding the worn and the moss grown, please chime in (like the bells of a cathedral). I am interested in those spaces mutated by time and nature, the worn, the seeded, the words interrupted by lichens and the washing away of stone by the weather.

 

This in contrast to the living spaces some of you have so kindly shared. It makes for an interesting and incomplete dichotomy, between the living line (word brush pencil) and the dead.  In both, the continuity is change: Lyra’s train seat which she leaves and returns to, a seat which is hers and different each time.  Anna Fonte’s chair, which is still in the picture as it once was, now moved (that makes it sound terribly serious). Think of your papers, ephemera,  work in motion, creativity manifest. The changeability and constant of human needs and wants: for a light-soaked view; for home comforts; for the sweet consolations of pets at our feet; for a good drink of water; for our words and images to mean, endure, be transferred on.

 

I think of how I am constructing characters who must always place and replace themselves within this frame, of the living and the remaining and the sometimes terrible inevitable pace of change. I think of how they must make their peace, and how hard that is sometimes.

 

For myself, I think of how much information I am taking in on a daily basis – how many words, how many sights that fire, overfire my brain.  Which is my way of coming to – how I need a short break, after all these encounters. Insightful as they have been, I need now to sit and think, instead of search and see. Not for long, just to give myself time to read the words and the images with due diligence, instead of at break-neck. I’ll be light as a ghost till then, back to full solidity at some point next week.

Which Reality?

I saw this on my travels down into the Dean Village today. Dean Village is an old settlement within a deep gorge (Dean, coming from the word Dene, for deep) within the city of Edinburgh, a fascinating, absurdly scenic place…and while I haven’t finished organising all my photos, I felt like I had to share this one.

In the city where Holmes’ creator was born, this seems quite apt –  and I like to think that the person who wrote this graffiti does believe, in some way, in the existence of their hero. That by writing this affirmation, they might be hoping to call others into doubting the stability of the borders between fiction and reality. Some kind of zen stance, perhaps? It also makes me think of JM Barrie, asking us to clap our hands if we believe in the existence of fairies. Just here, covertly, and transgressively, under the dark bridge at the bottom of the Dene.

What do you believe?

 

**update**

 

It’s a meme. Quite a sweet one, really. I think my question still stands.

Friends, Heroes, Countryfolk

Tulips, Amsterdam flower market

In recent days, two readers have offered me blogger awards for schietree. However, in lieu of acceptance, I’d prefer to forego formalities and just share a few blogs.

First off Seekraz and Melfrommass, who both were kind enough to mention me on their blogs. Seekraz (Scott) posts beautiful pictures micro and macro of the Utah area where he lives, along with thoughtful, humane commentary. Mel is on a mission to see all 351 municipalities of Massachusetts, and finding all sorts of quixotic and beautiful sights – she also talks to any friendly looking animal she comes across too see if they have the inside scoop.

On to writers. Life, family, toughness, and writing: Lyrical Meanderings. Averil Dean, outspoken in the classiest way possible, also engages with her readerships with windows into her life. I hope many of you will go and read Chris J Rice, and try to tear yourself away – a challenge. I never can, even in the age of many distractions. Her memoir-narratives are affecting and powerful, and not nearly enough – I hope to read her book one day soon. Another compelling voice is a short story writer, Casey Hannan, who I’ve just recently discovered. He has links to many of his clear-eyed, brazen, heart-exploding stories on the side bar of his blog. On process, feminism, and literature of the girl there is Kate Zambreno, whose novel Green Girl I hope to review shortly as part of Endless Reads. Handily, she has a post listing some entries from the past year, just scroll down to find them. For a comic, self-deprecating insight into writing and the nightmares of childhood (and writing retreats) – Molly Laich.

 

There are many more blogs I read – perhaps in a little while I’ll highlight another group of them? But for now, not so many adjectives as to flood you.

 

Methods – talking and not talking

I don’t have much time to write an in-depth reaction to this article, but wanted to share it here. It’s an interview with a writer on the  process of writing, and the effect of sharing that writing. He believes there is something holy in the hermitical approach, in keeping a silence around what he is doing, for the entire span of writing a novel.

I, obviously, do not feel this, at least not to the same degree. But I have been thinking about how much is too much. Not that I think it is possible to somehow ‘sully’ a book by sharing segments of it, but how, in sharing it, I might accidentally decontextualise that part – share a piece of the cake that is all icing, or all jammy filling, so to speak. Kilea changes over time, both the character herself and the narrative voice to reflect her maturity, so I did worry that giving the intro paragraphs would set up expectations that could not be fulfilled.

Then I thought, well, I trust the reader’s intelligence. I trust the reader to like being surprised. To want development. To be a little heartbroken, to have all endings narrowed down to the one end that feels right. Or to have the ending left a little open, like a window that lets in the air of another place, cold and stirring. Which is what I want when I read, after all, beyond the poetry of the words.

 

This still hasn’t pinned down exactly why I post little bits of the novel, fragments of ideas, point to the images which will come to form the backdrop of The Millennial. Perhaps because, particularly before I had won the Unbound Press award, it warmed my heart to share what I felt I could of it with all of you. That seems a tad meagre, and I am sure there is more to it than that.

To those who share their words online, what is it you want to do? Is it for the act of sharing itself? Do you find sharing helps clarify things – how about the feedback you receive?

Light, Placement

Japanese Garden 1 (Dublin), 2004 - taken from Glasgow Print Studio Archive

Yesterday I went with my dad and D to an exhibit of the works of Elizabeth Blackadder. She is in her eighties now, and, in the video at the end of the exhibit seemed heartfelt, tongue-tied, surrounded by the curated objects of her life, and by flowers (her other, more well known subject matter). This print above is one of my favourites of hers, and I have been thinking about why.

As you can probably infer from the title of this post, it’s to do with the light and placement in the picture. How the dark grey of the sky melts into lightness, but is still firmly divided from the snow covered earth. The luminous quality. The placement of scratchy circular lines around the stones, and the distance of the stones from one another. The dividing screen forming both a link between garden and sky, and a shelter for the viewer to stand behind – a limit to the landscape, perfectly judged, imperfectly rendered in slightly wonky lines.  It’s to do with the tiny gilt touches on the black fencing – drawing the eye, but not too much. A trust in the viewer to notice, a tip in the scale of things, a fleck of luxuriant colour in an otherwise austere scene.

Fifeshire Farm (1960), taken from Tate.org

Another of her prints tackles a larger scene – the fertile farmland of the Kingdom of Fife on the East Coast of Scotland. In opposition to the carefulness of the first picture, here is all wildness in frantic motion – a wind seems to shake through the black trees, the colour of the earth rushes, crumbles, licks into the roofs of byre or house.

At this time of year, when it is so dark, when there is a sense of holding ones breath in wait for the new year as if it will never come, these paintings suggest a kind of kinship with winter, darkness, winds (gales buffeting us here, yesterday, possibly today but I haven’t risked poking my head out the window yet), the possibility of fat cold rain outweighing the likelihood of a breaking sky, a return ever of the crystalline or verdant.

I have to relate this to my writing too: that, nearing the beginning of the end of the draft (I’d give a word total, but it would only be for my benefit, and not really meaningful) I long for the betterment of my sentences and a crispness and fruitfulness that for course can’t and shouldn’t be there in the text just yet.  Right now, I must see the value in having the bones, the stark branches, all lying out. And in the sense of possibility – a sudden blast might metaphorically tear off the roof of Aida’s cabin, or sweep her to her country, before I expected that to happen. I can’t know quite yet how things will place themselves of the page –  like the progressive inching of frost or the weight of snow – or whether, what this time will do to the text. Bring the weight of an absence of colour, or a chill, brooding space where the words can breathe.

Image(image, image, image) in various lights

On my birthday in June, D took us on a trip through Long Island to camp in Wildwood park. We picked strawberries – the rental car filled with the scent of them – drove for the joy of a landscape blurred at speed, saw lighthouses, passed the artificial looking garden townships that looked like England remade by nostalgic lumber barons with a penchant for designer home interior shops. Ate luscious swordfish from a polystyrene  tray. Saw the traffic bunch, saw it relax as the fields took over. Took the South fork and the North. Got to the park, and later, as dusk was coming down and the deer beginning to stray among the trees, would eat our strawberries dipped in an opened container of cream, watched the fireflies make their serious digressions around our tent. I caught one, for the first time, and watched in crawl around my wrist. Beasties with inner light have overridden the insect’s power to disgust (what is the source of that?) by being miraculous.

But before we had set up the tent, before the deer and strawberries and green torches flicking off, on, over here – we went to the beach at the back of the camp.

And it was beautiful, a break from the claustrophobia of the city. One of the many points where I realised, I can’t do this, I can’t live in New York and be happy. This peace was too far away, trips like it possible only two or three times a year, because we didn’t have the money to get in a car and drive until the green and the sand and the air and the space could make the city fade.

But I have been thinking how it would have been for other people walking on that beach. Of how the millions of the city would bring their millions of circumstance to bear upon the landscape. Though of course the landscape doesn’t feel it.

Of how, thanks to the ease of digital manipulation, I can remake this image a thousand times, inch it in one direction or another, change the meaning of the beach, or at least, change its range of meanings.

 

And it is the same with novels. The book cover articulating a certain version of the content. The blurb on the back reflecting a particular interpretation. The hands that hold the book, finding it too heavy, or light enough to dismiss (perhaps they have been reading Kundera, and have taking him to heart). Then the transmission of words into the mind of reader, another miracle in the manner of fireflies (that is to say, not a miracle, perfectly scientific and possible, but still…giving off the essence of the miraculous). And the million experiences of the reader flickering against the meanings of the words, the sentences, the core of the novel, because I believe there is a core, and that core is a human heart beating distantly away in the pained, or arrogant, or hopeful or dead chest of the author. A human heart in the sense one may mean of it; desire, soul, device of opinion, communion.

I don’t really know where I’m going with all of this, except that the line of thought consoles me greatly. Though it may not be terrible new, there is worth in watching, pausing to measure all this space we find ourselves in, to note the little lights dancing, though they might not be speaking to us at all.

 

Marking the Silence

Obsessions, once again:

A ruined cottage, Isle of Rum. Likely the inhabitants were cleared from the island when the landowners wanted to turn the whole thing to game hunting. Rum became Rhum, the forbidden isle (because the landowners would take pot shots at any boats that came to close to shore)

I think, looking at this picture, of other relics of the Highland Clearances, an event which rippled across the world – the displaced shipped off to Canada, America, Australia, or South to Glasgow. I try to imagine the lives that the crofters would have led, families in those single-room spaces. Peat or wood reek blustered back down the chimney. Cracks in the wall stuffed with carcinogenic bracken. Beds made of the stuff. The damp, the biting midgies. I grew up next to a spike-grassed, boggy field which held one of these ruins. Remember going down with a neighbour to poke about in the nettle-ridden interior, finding nothing at all but the mud tracked in by generations of sheep and cattle.

Again on Rum, the open path the crofters would have taken, towards the small community that now has bought back the island for the people

I think of the brutality, the lack of recourse to justice, the legacy of empty valleys left behind, the great, slow decline after, akin to all rural places in the Western World.  I think of the echoes. I think of the weight of absences, and what it does to the soul. I think of this poem (here in his English translation), which was written by one of the great Gaelic poets, Sorley MacLean, who taught at the high school on Skye before my time:

Hallaig

‘Time, the deer, is in the Wood of Hallaig.’

The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,
a birch tree, and she has always been

between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-chuirn:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight slender young rowan.

In Screapadal of my people,
where Norman and Big Hector were,
their daughters and their sons are a wood
going up beside the stream.

Proud tonight the pine cocks
crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,
straight their backs in the moonlight –
they are not the wood I love.

I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up by the Cairn,
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.

If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,
to the sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.

They are still in Hallaig,
MacLeans and MacLeods,
all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
the dead have been seen alive –

A mostly birch wood on Skye - not Raasay, Skye's little neighbour-isle, where the poem is set.

I think of the mark the history of absence has left in me.

I think of consolations, try to understand how much it is that art can do, and how much it cannot.

Mulling

Since I started work on the little chapbook of illustrations for Kilea, I have been thinking of the lure of islands, and a book has caught my imagination – The Atlas of Remote Islands:Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will. Within it, there are wonderful hand drawn maps, is full of elaborate descriptions of place, fauna, flora, history, and it is one of those sorts of books to pour over again and again. I’m thinking of asking for it as a Christmas present, and disappearing off with it and a mug of mulled wine to sit by a window looking out on a snowy garden – there may be some romantic embellishment here.

And within the atlas too. There is something about the impossibility (or at least intense difficulty) of reaching these places which tinges the facts one does have of them with an otherworldly glamour. However, sometimes the islands, the impossible places you have reached, can turn out to be as just as haunting.

Loch Lomond, as seen from a high point on Inch cailloch

This picture was taken in 2007, in misty wet conditions (as you can tell by the blur) on the island of Inchcailloch, in the middle of Loch Lomond.    D and I went there with A (not boy-A, but another good friend), M and C (a different C from before – I wish I had another way of providing anonymity for people!). You have to take the little wooden ferry over from the ‘mainland’, and catching that ferry involves a lot of waiting around in the boatyard of the village of Balmaha. Once on the island, though, you have made it to a different world. A microcosm of a unique history.

A Graveyard on Inchcailloch

The island’s name means in Scots Gaelic, Island (inch) of the old woman (cailloch) and is thought to refer to an Irish saint who came to convert Scotland, and may have made her home here.  Despite the fact you can see all sides of the island from the summit of its hill (85m high), there used to be farms, industry and the home of the infamous bandits, the McGregors. The full moon over Loch Lomond was known as ‘McGregor’s Lantern’, because at night, the clan used to swim the cattle they had stolen across to the island.

An old tree bending to wash her hair in the loch

We wandered all over the island, discovering the graveyard, the ruined farms, the small campsite on the sandy beach. All of us struck by the beauty of the place, the soft, verdant, sorrowful atmosphere that veiled it. I grew up on an island, and a mythologised island forms the setting for Kilea. In a similar way, the Valle Grande, an isolated but magnificent (and real) meadow high in the Jemez mountains, forms the setting for my current novel. It seems that I am drawn to these places. At one time I thought this was because they were on the periphery – partially sealed off from the outside world by barriers of water or land, so that they were somewhat limited, good for a narrative, tightly binding it to the logic of a particular place. But that is only half the story – the other half is that in being islands, or island-like, they can become their own worlds. The smallest things take on significance, the smallest stories and memories nurtured and retold. A tree stump becomes an old woman, the moon a lantern for the island bandits.

While I wait for more news on Kilea, I’m likely to keep mulling over the sorts of elements that have gone into it. To lost family narratives and islands and deep dark pine woods, add houses with multiplying rooms (another theme that appeared benign in Kilea, now emerging in The Millennial). I hope I have enough to keep you all interested, at least until I flee South to Cornwall, and build myself a new bank of experience to turn into stories.

In your own writing or in novels you have read, what motifs to you find yourself attracted to?