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Sunday, September 11, 2005
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Friday, September 09, 2005
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
W I P - 4
She prefers thinking about the past, or focusing on the external abstractions of water and light in perpetually shifting patterns. It stops her thinking about the other things, the things that seep in whenever her mind is stilled, when the external stimuli stop coming, or when she lets her internal focus shift away from the colourful, concrete past. Work. That's the thing that comes relentlessly to mind.
Work. Which she doesn’t even enjoy. Which she hates, actually, and which even so seems to monopolise all her waking hours and all of her energy. She always gets up extra early, and skips breakfast mostly, and is in the office before anyone else, but it doesn’t make any difference: however many hours she puts in, however many lunches she misses, however late she leaves – whatever she does, there’s always too much work to do, and no sense that it will ever end or ever get better. So she feels weak, and defeated, and destroyed, and she comes home with her mind spinning and her emotions roiling and boiling in her stomach and chest, and her breathing uneven and her thinking twisted and acid. And she can’t sleep because of the irresolvable circular problems she keeps rehearsing in her mind, and even her dreams are suffused with echoes of workplace tensions, frustrations and confrontations.
Sometimes she can barely remember the drive home. One day last week, when things at work were so ridiculously chaotic, and so many people were obstructive or stupid or inept, she’d almost gone head on into a truck as she drove home when, furious and aggressive, she committed herself to a blind bend at inappropriate speed. Instead of sobering her, it had just made her more angry, sweeping her into a swirling vortex of self-disgust and self-criticism: You’re too weak and stupid to cope with work. And you’re too cowardly to do anything about it – too scared and useless to quit and risk doing something else. So why don’t you put up or shut up? Because you’re weak. Fraudulent. Stupid. Useless. Fucking useless.
The car headlights on the opposite bank flicker and fade back up as the driver starts the engine, and exhaust gas farts into the glow of the taillights. Then the headlights withdraw from the embankment, swing sideways across water, bollards, tree trunks and brickwork, and sweep off towards the city centre.
The night settles back down into the deeper canal side darkness. She puts the mug down on the hard gloss paint of the window sill, twitches her dressing gown closed, and heads back to bed, where she hopes she can sleep and not dream about work.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Wrk n Prgress
She seems to remember that she wasn’t allowed to have candy floss before Josh was born: that wasn’t fair. Walking along the promenade in the sun, with the pavement all dusty and bright and hot and full of bits of mica that shone, smooth, she’d see all the other kids with their parents, all seeming to converge on the glass-sided stalls at the start of the pier, where the sweet smell of spinning sugar was sticky and tantalising in the air. And toffee apples: how she longed for one of those bright red glistening things on a thick, square stick. But however politely she asked, however persistently she whined or grizzled, however good she was – whatever she did – nothing worked; it was always ‘later’, or ‘you’ll spoil your dinner’, or ‘no, you’ll get in a mess’, or ‘it’ll attract the wasps’. And they’d drift along the seafront towards the quieter, deader end, where the ‘crazy’ golf courses petered out and gave way to car parks and pathetic gift shops that had glossy seashells, hideous cups and saucers, and wasps in pride of place in the window display.
She remembers one magical evening, though, an evening when some of her deviant, ungrateful desires for fast food were satisfied. Mum and dad were walking hand in hand for once: she remembers that clearly, it was so rare. And their shoulders were touching – they were leaning into each other as they walked along in the dusk – she could see them becoming a single silhouette joined at the shoulder as she trailed along behind them.
It must have been late in the season, because she remembers the evening air starting to chill her legs where they were bare, between her long white socks and the hem of her yellow linen skirt. She’s sure – almost sure – that she remembers smelling the colour of the burger buns toasting in the Wimpy Bar…she has a sense of the pale bread browning under an orange grill, and the colour and smell entwined as they spilled out of the doorway, out into the cool air. She can feel the crumbly cut surfaces of the bun crisping into ridges and scratchy nodes of toasted dough. There was a cliff-face looming over the road, darker than the sky, and the lights of the shops and the pier ahead. And then they were inside, amidst the bulky, shiny seating, the smell of caramelising onions, and the tacky feel of tabletop grease and smeared ketchup against her elbows. She barely dared ask for what she wanted, so she chose the cheapest things she could see, sure that this was too good to be true, and that, if she overstepped some vague behavioural mark, all hope of actually getting her meal would be dashed away. So she gambled low: the standard hamburger, orange squash, a share of her parents’ French fries. She’s never enjoyed a meal as much since.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Work in progress
The lounge floor is covered in polished wooden boards, but she knows that there are a few rough edges in the space between the big rug and the window, so she moves tentatively, her toes curled in a protective arch, like a caterpillar inching its way across a hazardous surface. (She supposes that all surfaces are hazardous for caterpillars, but she lets the simile stand in her head.) Although she can only see shadows and the pale, half-imagined ghosts of her insteps, she looks down as she shuffles towards the window. She can hear the dry skin of her feet sliding across the slick, varnished wood and, behind her, the steady chonk, chonk, chonk of the kitchen clock’s oversized second hand. The fridge hums and judders. The sounds you barely notice in the daylight, expanding to fill the night’s silence.
The car is still parked on the opposite bank, the headlights white on the water. Her flat’s window frames’ edges are cream-coloured in a sheen of reflected light, and there’s a broad wavering band of light on the ceiling. As she moves into the blur of light near the window, she steps sideways into the shadow of the window frame, feeling the winter cold that’s pressing against the flat glass. There’s a wind blowing down there, and the combination of waves and headlights is like a film show: the way the patterns ripple and change, dissolving and reforming nets of light endlessly, swallowing dark patches, always in motion, so fast and complex and unfixable that you can only capture – momentarily – little pieces of stasis in the constant flux of light and dark. It’s the same when there’s rain falling on the canal: she could watch it for hours, the shifting patterns of disturbance and stability: scattered splashes, ripples, and the wind-blown planes of water and spray. Mesmeric. Watching it, she drifts out of the concrete world of conscious perception, absorbing different rhythms and patterns; none of them capturable or repeatable. But the waiting, the watching, the sense that it might suddenly make sense, and be fixed in her mind – that’s what keeps her watching. And sighing.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Something I was working on today - part of a work in progress
She’d forgotten that there was such a time as 3 am – at least, other than as a time for getting out of bed, going to the toilet, and then hurrying back to the heavy confines of the still-warm duvet. Especially now, when you were about as far away from summer as it was possible to get.
But something’s disturbed her tonight: a bad dream. The type of dream that leaves you confused and shaken when you awake from it, not quite sure if the terror and the threat of violence was actually real, but knowing for certain that your sleeping body thought it was real; the irresistible and urgent promptings of flight or fight, the residual deep breathing, the echoes of panic and funk. Before the dream dissolves into lost memory, she registers a few vivid images: mercenaries in the desert, firelight, and a man’s head being gradually destroyed – vaporised – by the sustained close-quarter machine gun fire of a vicious rival.
She makes a cup of tea in the kitchen, hyper-aware of the kettle’s roaring heating element in the dark hours silence and stillness. The light switch’s click makes a big sound in the dead of night, and seems to echo through the building’s infrastructure.
As she turns off the kitchen light and starts back towards the bedroom with her fingers curled around the smooth, hot curves of the mug, her feet’s cool soles on the colder tiles, a car on the other side of the canal switches on its headlights.
Looking down at the car lights’ reflections shivering on the dark water, she thinks of childhood holidays: harbours at night, with long looping chains of coloured lights shimmering on the wavelets – red, yellow, green and blue on the water; the smell of fried onions and deep-fat-fried fish and chips; the gusty sound of laughter from the quayside pub’s yellow-lit interior; her parents hissing at each other as they all walked back to their hotel together. She remembers the sound of their anger in the dark air three feet above her head, and the feel of the breeze lifting her fringe off her delicate forehead. Mum and dad were holding one of her hands each, stiffly.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Monday, August 29, 2005
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Everyday Epiphanies
The 4 AM drive to the airport. A half moon peering over the night, like a white face above a wall of dark; a red star high up; the big-brushed fox startled into flight across the street; the young couple kissing in the flare of headlights, leaning into each other and against a wheelie bin.
The flat plain of Essex sprinkled with lights in the black; tendrils of mist wavering over the road in the arc of the headlights; a vast white stretch limo on the opposite carriageway, heading back from some London night out; the empty sweep of the motorway under the grainy amber lights.
Night fading up into dawn; the first jet's white lights rising like a bright star against slashes of silhouette clouds; the sky slowly turning milky, grey, blue. A scattering of dew-shiny cars under the car park's towering lamps.
In the terminal, realising how everyone looks so much...better at the airport: how the imminence of departure and separation, and the proximity of sudden, fiery death humanise us, individualise us; make us aware, painfully late, of the fragile envelopes of love we live inside. Sitting alone at a metal-topped table, drinking strong coffee, you think about your loved ones, and about how you'll miss them; and always, always in the stillness and silence, she - the beloved - seeps into life bit by bit, suffusing your consciousness in poignantly vivid memories and untouchable details; the unattainable one who would make it all all right, who would make everything fall into place if only you could be with her for ever.
Sun up. Vast fields of golden light and glare in the sky and on the newly-lit earth; cables of mist spanning the still-shadowed valleys like suspension bridges; smudges of smoke or steam rising from freshly-harvested farms, bakeries, light industrial complexes; the dazzle of the sun in the wing mirror; the sudden cool shadows in the motorway cuttings; fat-bodied aircraft taking off into the vast sky, following each other in a standard climb up into the light, where their curved bellies flash white as they turn into the sunlight.
Slicing past the articulated lorry crabbing along in the inside lane, your body momentarily in tune with your gears, steering wheel, and indicator control stalk; the unconscious consultation of the mirrors, the split-second-perfect judgement of your smooth lane changes. The hills, grain elevators and electricity pylons vivified with early morning light; the sense that life - the whole world of senses, and textures, and contours, and light - could fall together in the right way - slot together with the solidity and rightness of a familiar song's scintillating, soaring chorus.
Regret: thinking back over your life and realising how those vivid times of emotional richness and deep, deep emotional engagement are so few, like jewelled islands of colour and intensity in a dusk-grey sea of habit and drift. And how love - especially love - makes those times glow with potential, and electricity, and hope. And how, even when you're on one of those islands, there's a bit of you that's half-expecting to have to put out to sea again at any moment, back out into that featureless, miserable gloom. And how different life could look if you only ever saw the island, and didn't think about that grey sea.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
Friday, August 19, 2005
Thursday, August 18, 2005
coincidence
just moved a load of stuff into my parents' spare room while i'm between rents. looked over at bookstack 15a this evening, and noticed these three books resting serendipitously on top of each other:
* The Plague (Camus)
* Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe)
* Dorian (Self)...a big theme of which (apparently) is AIDS, formerly known as 'the gay plague'
I worry that I might be starting to make weird conspiracy theory connections. Freak.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Signs
Finally, it all starts to make sense. I've been blind - blind. So obvious.
The birds are signalling to me. The gulls.
Last winter, at the reservoir, as the last of the sun pierced the dusk with cold white shafts of light, the gulls wheeled and spun over the water, white breast feathers flickering in and out of the light. Morse code. And I was too stupid to see it.
But now...now they've found me again, and they're speaking more clearly: last night, as I sat in the garden - ten gulls went over, in a vee. Tonight, ten gulls, in a dead straight line astern - the letter 'I'. V. I. Words forming: victim? virgin? virus? victory?
Or is it a number code? V and I. Five and one. Or six? Hmm. Think, think: Ten gulls, twice, is twenty. Plus the figure 'one' from tonight...twenty one. Multiply by the number of nights - two - and you get forty two. Ringing any bells? Forty two: the answer, the ultimate answer, to life, the universe, and...you know the rest. Signs. Signs in the sky.
Tomorrow night will make things clearer. I'll be watching the sky.
Monday, August 15, 2005
the meaning of life
Been reading a book called "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor Frankl. (Too lazy for hyperlinks today...)
Frankl was a prisoner (and doctor) in Auschwitz, and the first - and most substantial - section of the book is about his experiences there, and about his reflections on the psychology of the inmates. This leads on to ruminations about existential meaning. (I don't mean that to sound glib.)
I take two things away from this book: (i) Something relatively 'trivial' - nothing in my life could possibly, possibly be as terrible as what those people experienced. This is sobering and humbling in itself; (ii) You can find meaning in anything if you look at it in the appropriate way - even in terrible suffering. What this means to me - at this stage in my life - is that I should accept that suffering and imperfection are inevitable parts of existence. Once I accept that, everything becomes simpler: I no longer have to battle against my profound disappointment that nothing is perfect, or rage with frustration that I don't get everything (and everyone...) that I want. Simple.
There's a line in Band of Brothers where an officer tells a petrified soldier that what's stopping that soldier functioning is his failure to "accept the fact that you're already dead." There's something analagous here for me. This isn't a counsel of despair - rather, one of realism.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
d r e a m s c a p e
Argh...woke up this morning at three AM, disturbed into wakefulness by my dream: an episode of Six Feet Under directed by David Lynch. I knew it was time to wake up when a CGI baby, sat at a white table on a cafe terrace bleached with cold light, engaged in a discussion about mortality with a pair of wizened 100 year old twins (one male, one female) who spoke in Romanian accents and were being pushed around in a double bath chair by a nurse in Victorian garb.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Is it just me, or...
...does it seem amazing that love - being in love - can still grip you so strongly, and affect you so physically, just as much at 43 as at 16?
It seems pretty amazing to me.
I've been gripped by one of those hopeless unrequited passions for...oh, ages, and it's been affecting my moods in a profound way for months and months. I've only really started to see that really clearly in the last month or so (before that, I'd been distracting myself via various substances and displacement activities).
Now that I see this powerful, hopeless passion for what it is, I find myself wobbling between three interconnected places: (i) incredulity that I'm still emotionally open enough to feel as strongly and all-consumingly as this; (ii) annoyance at myself for not being able to break out of the ridiculous loop of hope/dashed hope; (iii) a strange kind of wistful melancholy - I find myself smiling at myself and shaking my head as I drive around..."how funny that I can feel like this, still...".
In some ways, it's great feeling like I'm 17 again. And perplexing, too. But mostly bitter-sweet and exasperating. It's enough to make one turn back to drink.
Ho hum.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Monday, August 01, 2005
Sunday, July 31, 2005
grey
It's early evening on a gloomy English summer day: heavy overcast, the hint of rain.
On the roof ridge opposite, a pair of wood pigeons are grooming themselves. Periodically they stop and look around, seeming lost. In my anthropomorphic oversensitivity, I imagine I know why: when I parked the car this morning after driving back from my parents' place, I unloaded my pile of stuff from the boot and, hands and arms full, started walking towards my front door. I noticed a grey mass of feathers in the road and thought, "ah, squashed wood pigeon' - it was too small to be a whole live bird. Then it moved.
I looked a bit closer: it was an unfledged youngster, with blood on its back and some small feathers scattered around it. I took all that in in mid-stride, saw its slow-blinking eye (or maybe imagined that bit). All the way to my front door, I was rationalising to myself that there was nothing I could do to help it, so I might as well just go in and forget about it. As I opened the door, I had a vision of a car backing out of the drive and over it, or of a cat coming and finishing it off.
So I had to go back, didn't I?
It was pathetic and feeble there on the damp tarmac: wings only half formed, clawed feet clenched tight, its body expanding and contracting with laboured breathing. As I stooped over it, it registered my presence and made a strange gasping noise, paddling its legs in an attempt to get away. It opened its beak wide, and I could see that there was blood there, too.
Horrible.
I picked it up, gingerly, not wanting to frighten or hurt it. I could feel the softness of its feathers against my fleshy palms, and its ribs and wing bones. As ever, I felt that sense of the bird's heart palpitating, not sure if it was really my own. I could see the wide-open beak, the extended tongue, the frightened-looking eye, the bloody back and feeble wings. The legs stretched and tensed..
I put it in the undergrowth under someone's hedge. It tried to drag itself into the shadows.
I felt rotten. What a horrible way to start the day.
The adult birds are resting on the roof ridge now. I must stop anthropomorphising.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Friday, July 22, 2005
corporeality
When your body lets you down - or when you treat it in a way that makes it fail - you realise how fragile and concrete you are. I've got this weird stomach crampy thing again, and it's reminding me that I need to be kinder to my body: better diet, more exercise - the usual obvious things that you lose sight of in the hedonistic rush of the day to day. When you get ill, you're reminded of how provisional and delicate your health and body is.
To counteract that sombre thought, try this exercise: enunciate the letters of the alphabet aloud, and try and monitor what's going on with your tongue, teeth, gums, palate, cheeks, lips, larynx, throat, and breathing; it's a reminder of how amazing language is, how amazing you are, and what a miracle the whole thing is.
So. I need to look after myself better, don't I? Maximise the amount of alphabet usage in my life.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Quartets
Vaughan Williams' string quartets.
Autumnal.
Spikes of notes like newly bare branches against
A flat, empty, provisional sky.
Slow, plangent phrases with cello undertow
Like time draining away.
The still, thoughtful, changed time of the year.
The seasons poised, listening to a desolate-sounding robin in the dusk.
Chill mornings, thicker clothes,
The lights coming on before you leave work.
The spacious promise of English pastoral idyll.
Wood smoke, stars coming out,
The warmth of home and of love,
Made desperately valuable by the sad,
Relentless promise of death.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Friday, July 15, 2005
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Saturday, July 02, 2005
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