It descends upon me. I drag my feet through the morning, the dark. It is a tunnel. How must it have been in Norway? he asked me this morning. I didn’t know what it was then, I said, but I felt pretty low. They must’ve thought me just grumpy and bad-tempered, I said. Six months of it. And now the morning is trying to come. Out there, it barely came. And yet, there were parts of it that I loved. They know how to make the best of the light when it comes. Gloomy thoughts and gloomy rooms. I light candles. And as Christmas approaches I will set out fairy lights. Others, students mostly, I see have them in their windows throughout the year. They gladden my heart, as do the lit trees that I see through living room windows, though most turn them off during the night. It must be lived through, endured with grace. As people are enduring this pandemic. It is all we can do.
Down at the harbour everything has been brought on land. The lobster pots have been piled neatly atop of each other. The ropes are all coiled. There is order. The winter cessation of fishing begins. Boats will soon be placed on stilts and painted and mended. I never see this process. I am too early to watch the industry of others. But I pick up the smells as the crab and lobster nets dry out in the late October sun, like that of a wet dog in a car, though slightly sweeter, mustier. Sand and sea salt. Sticky. It’s a closing down time. The dark sets in. And I must prepare myself.
It was a nasty tasting dream ending with the sensation, texture and sharp unfamiliarity of meat and potatoes in my mouth and my eager expectation of soon being able to rid it of it with some chewing gum. Why was I eating foods that I didn’t want to, and that felt morally repugnant to me? I was at some sort of funeral. At least I was in a churchyard with several other women and we were taking it in turns to hug, hold and comfort some stuffed effigies of women. We were treating them as if they were real and sentient beings. Where they to be buried or had someone they had ‘loved’ been interred? It was dark and gloomy in the churchyard, a rural one I think for I remember standing under a tree and the moonlight was all around. Then I was eating the meat. It was expected of me and duty to the fallen, apparently. And then I was at a table in a pub with some other women, one who was to pay for our lunch and she was picking a lottery ticket which would tell her what she would be eating. She was delighted with her choice and read it out loud. I shall be eating….. she said. And I’ve forgotten what it was, it was definitely something meaty, chinese-style ribs or something with lots of sticky barbeque sauce. I kept my countenance and sat there fretting about what I would chose. Prior to that another woman of my acquaintance was supposed to have arranged some washing for me. Had she done it? She wasn’t known for her organisational skills, but she’d offered. The rest is unclear, lost, foggy.
I shall sit with my writing today. Sitting with it helps. Sometimes it comes easily, in a flow but this is rare. I sit and wait. I have ideas as I walk, as I sit in the sun. Yesterday I came up with one character’s name, writing it over and over again until it felt right. I don’t know where the story is going. Shall I let it lead me where it will?
My dreams are a mish-mash of reflected thoughts, images seen or stories heard, crossword clues and conversations had. Last night’s one was no different. The bit I remember is he and I walking down a dark street and meeting a man who looked decidedly shifty. He had a box in his hand with a label saying Rooibos Tea. Somehow that made him less troublesome to me. He had a gift for us, well for me principally. A gift of food. And he led us down a flight of stairs into a chamber to give it to me. He opened the box and started to pull them out one by one. The only one I can remember, the fourth item was dangling from a wooden spoon. My delightful subconscious had somehow managed to come up with something that was called sea creatures and what looked like wet seaweed hanging from the ladle. I woke then and wrote down what I could remember while having a pee.
The morning was gorgeous, not too cold to be unpleasant but fresh and clean with the sea just lapping. And the stars were all out. A boy was sleeping in a doorway. I saw his legs and started as I walked by. This virus makes me reluctant to offer help to strangers and I am sorry for it. Should I wake him? I thought as I walked on, slightly faster. Help me to be kind amidst the fear.
She manages to purport herself with dignity despite her profound deafness and weakness of sight. We see her sitting in the afternoons on a pile of fencing in the wasteland we treat and call our garden. Do you want to sit here? she asked when she finally noticed us, her head inclined upwards at an odd angle as she tried to get our faces into focus. She is just waiting it out. She has faith. Let that be a comfort to her.
It took me all morning to sew a star, and even then I didn’t finish it. Does it matter? I sew and unpick it and get frustrated that something as simple as counting stitches seems to confound me. I want to get it right, even if it is only experimental. I think that the more I do the more I will learn and the patterns, the motifs will become ingrained in me. Becoming my language too. So it must be slow. It must be small. I am fastidious. Can I not accept it and see it as a good thing? And then William Stafford’s words come to me. And I am momentarily calmed. Such a wise man, a kind man, I think. He wrote everyday, rising at 3 to do so. I lean to such regularity of behaviour, I am the same. Every day. Write something every day. I want to sew. I cannot always say why. And I am trying to find my way through it, in it, beyond it even. It is the process, the slow building of image or word. (Words seem more comfortable with me.) I need to keep bringing myself to the cloth, as I need also to bring myself to the page. They are the same. Both equally slow, both awkward. Stafford talked about writer’s block saying that he wrote anyway, just not as well and accepted that (I paraphrase, of course). It is the flow of doing, no matter what, the getting stuff down. A pacifist, his son remembers his father telling him of an occasion as a child when two black kids were being bullied in the playground and his father rather than trying to fight the bullies he just went and stood beside the victims, in silent solidarity. Such bravery. We spoke of it, he and I, sitting in the sun later that day. We both remembered similar occasions at our own schools and both had wanted to intervene like Stafford did but lacked the courage. I wish I had. I wish I had.
I saw a shooting star this morning. The second I’ve seen, ever. It dived behind Constitution Hill. A great falling, fast and bright. A moment and then it was gone. Beautiful. Am I wrong to feel special for having seen it? Was it for me? Of course not. But I like to think so, for an instant.
I don’t know where I’m going with it all. With either my writing or my making, I just don’t know where they are taking me, if anywhere. He would say, in his wisdom, what does it matter?Just do it. Don’t analyse so much. And he is right, but I can’t quite let go of the need for purpose, for direction and for that awful word, an outcome. In the abstract I know that working is its own goal. That it’s the doing of it that matters. And it is, but there is also a need for completion, a sense of achievement, at least that is how I feel, perhaps I need to slough it off. Knowing that it is all just puff and wind. I love the thinking about it, the ideas that come thick and fast. My mind loves that; the somersaults it does, the journeys it takes are marvellous to me. Maybe that should be enough. There is much internal satisfaction then, and ends, after all are mostly anti-climatic. It is the doing, he is right, the being here, working with my hands, writing my words, listening and reading, always that, and trying to learn, to do better, to be better. To deserve all this.
We sat in the sun for an hour yesterday afternoon. It was warm on my face. I kept falling asleep listening to his voice calling out the clues. It made him laugh. It was the warmth, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Thank you for that, for the sun and his voice and the stroking of my feet.
There are but a few scattered reminders that Halloween is due at the end of the month. The White Horse, now called The Varsity had strands of angel hair stuck to its windows in an attempt to mimic cobwebs and I’ve seen a few domestic dwellings’ windows with rubber spiderwebs and little skeletons fixed to the glass, oh and Starbucks are advertising their ‘Vegan Pumpkin Latte’ but that is it so far. Perhaps people are feeling too jaded by the threat of another lock down to enter fully into the spirit of it. One positive must be the lessening of the possibility of trick-or-treating, for what parents would let their children knock on strangers’ doors at the moment?
Charlotte Bronte mentions one in Jane Eyre. I’ve read the book several times why is it that I’ve not found out about it before? As far as I can gather it’s a big, black hairy dog, a phantom, a northern faerie who haunts lonely roads. I collect words. Sometimes they stick sometimes they don’t. Seeing Mr Rochester’s dog Pilot made Jane think of it. I’m so enjoying hearing it. And I’ve finished the latest William Trevor book, The Children of Dynmouth, and Timothy Gedge has been dealt with, or at least accepted, someone will show him kindness. He too was some kind of goblin, a feature of life we must needs live with, I think. And now, in this brief interlude between Trevor’s (another one is on the way from the Library on Monday) I’m back with Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac once more. An old friend, and perfect with its grey tones for this time of year.
I did write yesterday. But I made slow progress. Everything I do is slow. Can’t that be turned into a positive? Must everything be fast? Must everything be done for a swift outcome? I think not.
I find the few lighted windows that I see as I walk, now in the pitch dark, a comfort. Others, like me are awake, sleepless, perhaps working, or anxious or distrait. The yellow squares of light dot the blackness, floating, seemingly without anchor or belonging. Sometimes I catch details of a blind held askew or a sparkling beaded curtain. I always think of the paintings of Edward Hopper, his Nighthawks (did he call it that?) or his images of offices, its inhabitants working late into the night, where overhead bulbs are the only illumination. The staff in the Pelican Bakery are usually in there when I walk past, earlier now than of late. Mostly it is the girl with the thin, blonde ponytail and the baker himself. Sometimes I can hear a radio playing, its music coming through the grill that is pulled down in front of the open door. I try to do a circuit that means I walk past their shop twice, one so that I can smell the baking bread and two so that I can get the comfort of seeing the warm lights and hear the murmur of their voices, though they are mostly silent, companionable but silent. Also it’s nice to see the gentle work (or so it seems to me) that they are doing, checking the orders, placing the newly baked loaves on the shelves and so on.
He’s just come into the studio all water-proofed up for his walk but we both decide, as the wind and rain lashes the window, that perhaps he should put it off.
A writing day today. My head is blank. Will it come?
