Limbo

1. In limbo I learn a French euphemism: ‘he went out to buy saffron’ to mean abandonment

 

2. In limbo I read difficult books

 

3. In limbo I read the internet which is difficult for reasons other than syntactical complexity

 

4. In limbo I do not edit

 

5. In limbo I do write sparsely

 

6. In limbo I can see the people above me swimming in heaven, though perhaps it is not heaven, but it is blood bright blue nonetheless

 

7. In limbo I hold vigils over my email account

 

8. In limbo there is a palace of all possible futures overhead and I am in its shadow

 

9. In limbo I am a feminist, I am clumsy, I am a teacher, I am wading through the green grass after the rain has fallen and I am breathing deeply

 

10. In limbo I am in limbo

The sand adjusting underfoot

 

 

Think of the sea, a long way out from where you are. Think of the exact number of footsteps it would take to get you to a place where you wouldn’t see someone for an hour or more. Think of the memories you take with you every step. How do you imagine these memories? A bundle of sticks, a miasma? A cluster of people calling and chattering in your head?

 

Or are they a set of pictures, creased at the edges, or faded from the years. Is there a feeling that goes with a photograph, something innate, or do we bring everything, and make the image contain?

 

I try to think beyond the image. I try to layer and organise and bind. Or, I’m going to try. Today was adrift and small fingered.  That’s all right. We don’t always have the strength for every day to mean something more. And luckily granted peaceful days we should take them where we can. A day without any sadness, outside or in, is a good day. I’ll write tomorrow, or I’ll wait a little more. I’m standing watching the tide with a rock in my hand, waiting to break the silver with it. One skill I have managed to acquire with writing is the ability to know when to write and when to wait. When to make cakes and take walks and sit on the sofa, resting. Worrying, now I do that all the time, but I’m trying not to, just for the change in the air.

I shall throw words at the sea another day.

Tomorrow, tomorrow.

 

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.

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

Now and Then

 

Now and then there is a high wind. Weather heavy with a ragged bit of storm come off the Atlantic. A moon that sucks at you and air that pummels the chest. Now and then you look for excuses for the tension in your chest, a wire the wind seems to draw out of you, crying this way, like a telephone cable buckling between two posts.

 

Now and then you wait for a year. Now and then you write or not now and then, every day, every day wanting to ease and to make. Now and then you find an old coin from the year you were born and it seems strange to think this coin has traveled the land from fist to pocket to counter just as long as you have been alive. Now and then you wait, and the coin gets spent but does not decrease. Now and then you don’t wait but plan, or sit still.

 

Now and then you seek solace in whispering a poem, in trying to memorise ‘the rain is full of ghosts tonight’ though that poem fits ill in your life. Now and then you wonder why you can’t write more poetry yourself. You write a poem and whisper it into a soundfile and then it hushes into the bright wires tangling elsewhere and is not you any more. Now and then you build an idea out of a photograph. Now and then you misspell something. Now and then you feel hope like a strange lodger. Now and then like lead in an old pencil, stubbed but revivable. Never feathery, hope.

 

 

Now and then there is a dark construction on the edge of a park. Now and then you walk by, skirting it. Now and then the seasons come like tides at you. You wait and read. Now and then words are a wind in the sky. Now and then they tear at you and you wonder if people in the street hear that wind in awe. Now and then you walk through your neighbourhood. Now and then there is only a leaf or two under your soles.

Transition extended

It is raining or the rain has just ceased, and there is a white slick of sun on the cobbles of Causewayside, a road leading to the South side of Edinburgh. Fine Georgian houses lead off in the other direction by the smidge of green of St Patrick’s Square. I wish I could show you it, or show you the reindeer and the mountains and the cliffside castle in the lashing rain I saw on my birthday – but my camera batter is at home, and I am again in a Starbucks. Blog narrative always becomes a little more piecemeal for me, without the image. I wonder why that is? I’m fine enough typing away at the current book, finding the colours there are bright as vegetable dyes and those determined summer days that are rare here.

 

The weather mooches between grey scuds and blistering blue. People in thin tee-shirts and warm jackets are walking and crossing past one another with their heads down through this latest drizzle. The open door is letting in the sneaky dibs of rain when the wind gusts.

 

I’m in here to write a book review, and to try to connect a little more. It’s been hard to keep up – when the internet is back at home I’ll have entry after entry of blogs to read – I miss them, but have thrown myself into reading. The latest is Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen. I’ve brought it along in case the need arises. It’s that kind of book, the kind you feel better after reading. Nourishing fictions, utterly lacking patness or patronisation or self-satisfaction. Words that are connected and connect with little latched fingers.

 

So when the internet is back, I’ll have reviews to share. Concrete photos and stories of the chaos moving 10 minutes up the road has caused. Until then, endurance. Writing in private. And of course, books, books, books.

 

Limbo

 

I feel today in the dimness of my living room (the days are bright and then they are not) that I am in a state of limbo. Like I am trying to walk up these pipes, and cannot go any faster than I am going, and will have to grow patience. Patience, like a thick skin, is something I’ve never really had.

 

Currently, D and I are flat hunting. This requires much patience. Waiting for real estate agents to return emails. Scrolling through hundreds of descriptions of ‘lovely’ or ‘must-see’ properties. Every room becomes a variation on the other when you pass through them endlessly. You begin to focus on the smaller details. That desk looks sturdy. The yellowing walls of a kitchen. I wonder if that rug skirts the line between ‘old and shabby’ and into ‘vintage’, or if they wouldn’t mind chucking it out. A sofa plunging in the middle, grey, decomposing. Perhaps that slant of golden light allows us to forgive the tiny dimensions of the bedroom.

 

But I feel positive, want to be positive here, with so little to share. I’m working furiously on Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts and the alterations I’m making feel like my best work – which is all anyone writing can hope for.  I am even tempted to post more, to add another mark of progress. But the work is all integrated. I can’t chop one paragraph out, and never want to post too much. Caution and fear of harming my future self with a record for her eyes of less-than-perfect work.

 

So for now, little to share except my hopes. They never manage to get too trampled, not with so much to do. Next week, I should have another book review up, perhaps more news (patience, holding the wire steady) and if not, I will go on another journey. Roam the city for property or hidden insights. Await books to challenge me and invigorate my brain. Try my hardest to keep inching up that pipe.

 

What are you waiting for?

A momentary holding

Just a little notice that the blog is going to be quiet for a few days while I await things, hunker down with reading (hopefully), and editing Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts (definitely). A moment of hush, and fingers so crossed they seem to have grown that way, like twigs in thicket. I hope for straight-backed birches.

 

Anyway, the picture above is of my angel of luck and hope – a carnival schie with attitude, decked in lights. Yes some of her lights are broken or missing. She narrows her eyes in the face of doubt. She will throw down her conch shells and they will bust like smokebombs as she flies off to the sound of death metal. Maybe she will eat a whole funnel cake. You just can’t tell with her.

 

News later, if I have it. If not – I’ll surely have other stories to tell you.

Vignettes and some Kilea news

My friend C's front door has a holy peacock on it

My mind is a little jostled today, along with my body, so please excuse the slight disorder here. I made it back to the city of smoking chimneys at one thirty last night, after a long but blessedly uneventful bus journey – but most importantly, after a successful trip to London.

Shoreditch, towards the Gherkin building

The visit was not at all about sightseeing, and most of the time was spent nattering, dining, browsing and film watching with friends.  I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures around the East End, in Bow, where C lives, and trendy Shoreditch (I love calling it this, and wish they could rename it on the signs) where I met my friend G on Kingsland Road and where there is a Vietnamese restaurant for everyone.

An old industrial building in Shoreditch

On the side of a former Tea warehouse, there are lots of rather forceful missives

“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Time for Tea”  – I’m not sure Orwell would approve of this hijacking.

A gritty looking street - called Cotton's Gardens.

In contrast, C's windowsill in Bow, like Shoreditch, also in East London

I am happy to report that the meeting with my agent went well, aside from delays in her flight. I sat waiting for her in a pleasant cafe, drinking tea and reading of the exploits of Isabella Bird in the Rocky Mountains. All snow, wild beasts, ‘ghastly vistas’ and handsome ruffians with ‘neglected tawny curls’ – the wrought Victorianness of things keeping me well occupied.

The news on Kilea is that the wait will continue: word has not been received from all the editors the manuscript has been sent to – this apparently is not uncommon, and so is not something to fret about. The agent will be sending them a nudge to let them know I have won the Unbound Press Best Novel Prize, which will hopefully sharpen their pencils a little. It may be months until I hear more concrete news from these parties, and until then I can’t share the other good piece of news I had on the novel (I don’t want to speak out of turn and hex my chances).

There are a few things I can be doing – writing this blog for example, and continuing to reach out to fellow writers and readers.I’ve started a twitter account, as you can see down to the right under the bird noises (@HelenMcClory): I’d love suggestions of people to follow as well as anyone who’d like to follow me. Mine will probably feature a fair amount of ephemera alongside articles of interest. I’m still chary of the brevity of tweets, but hopefully there will be ways to connect to others, and that poignancy and poetry are there to be found.

A moment, one of many

The view outside

 

Cold mornings, fogged glass, a balance of stillnesses – whir of the laptop, steam from the kettle.

 

The snow fell last night, making the drunk students yell and slip with happiness. It had all but melted by the time I woke.