Sunday Scribblings: Why I live where I live
This is the post I would have written even without the prompt from Sunday Scribblings as today is the one anniversary of my arrival in this rented two-bedroom flat, three storeys up, ten minutes from the sea. Two months after the man I loved died from a heart attack, I left my flat in London and returned to my hometown. When the lettings agent first showed me around this flat I did not believe I would ever be able to fill the space as I had nothing – no furniture, no future, no hope, yet now I look around me and see colour and life in every corner and on every surface. Furnishing this apartment gave me something to think about when all I wanted to do was stay in bed and sleep forever.
The man on the television behind me has just said this sentence: “the act of building is the physical tangible expression of promise”. He is talking about Russian architecture, but that sentence sums up everything I am trying to express tonight. Moving into this flat I gave myself the space to grieve. Moving into this flat I was forced to rebuild myself, forced to believe that one day I would live again. Each piece of furniture I bought was a promise to myself that one day I would be okay, and that wanting that was not a betrayal of all that had gone before. The walls have been painted in my tears, the rooms filled with ghosts, the sheets on my bed are imprinted with my yearning for a man who will never again lie with me – or to me.
This flat represents my phoenix-self, risen from the blackened remains of my old life. It is within these four walls I have had to relearn everything I thought I knew about life. I have found answers to some questions, and accepted that some answers will never be found. This afternoon my goddaughter told me she loves my flat – being here, in this town, has allowed me to reconnect with friends and family and retread paths I walked along as a child, a teenager, a young woman. I have come home in all senses of the word. I have found a strand that will lead me to the future and picked up the unravelling end of a life I thought I had left behind long ago.
This flat doesn’t just house all my worldly goods; this flat is me.
** The picture above is of my beautiful godchildren. I worship the ground their little feet walk on, even if they do get chocolate on my pristine white sofa. For more Sunday Scribblings go here.
The wind of change
“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Yesterday was a day off, yet my ‘off’ days look remarkably like my ‘on’ days, and that is the problem with working at home. I can’t get away from the office as the office is slap bang in the middle of the living room. But it’s more insidious than that. I’m finding it so difficult to switch off, as if, were I to let go for a second, to take a break from this ever vigilant awareness I have cultivated, I would fall down and dissolve. So I sit at my desk coiled like a spring, perched on the seat, waiting… I can sense that life is beginning to change and while I’m happy with this forward movement I’m not sure I want it either. It has taken a long time to get to this quiet place, one not filled with blood and sadness and rage.
How many times last year did I wish that time would not take me further away from my painful memories yet wish for the clock to speed up so the healing would begin. And here I find myself, tentatively, outwardly healed, thinking about myself again, striving, moving, living again. How dare I! For so long I felt the wind in my face as the world and its inhabitants rushed past me, the woman sat in her own bit of time, motionless, stilled. I envied my friends as they lived and loved outside the glass box I was trapped in. The grief that has anchored me for so long has shifted – the air outside has changed, the light is different. I can smile at friends again; I can talk about what happened without the tears coming. But where does that leave me? I’m not sure I know who I am if I am not defined by grief, by loss.
Standing before the sea yesterday, my head still spinning from a successful, satisfying day in London, I felt more open; last night, for the first time in a very long time, I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to be held in another’s arms again. I have always pushed this thought down, denied my feelings, my yearnings, but last night they came out, dancing around me, tempting me, calling to me, and now they are out I cannot squash them back inside.
Curiouser and curiouser…
A window in my heart opened a little yesterday, and I let London back in. Walking through the Soho streets, the people, squawking, talking, shouting and laughing, the scent of coffee and cigarettes and cabbage leaves in Berwick Street market, all wafted around me, smoke fingers poking me, playfully. I stopped in Foyle’s to look for poetry; I sat with my friend Louise outside Bar du Marche and watched the Hari Krishnas go jangling past, the street cleaner and his spinning wheels obliterating all chance for conversation, our steak and frites washed down with bottles of cold beer. I was back in my beloved city, back in wonderland.
Sitting in reception, waiting for my meeting, I looked up at the bookshelves displaying the latest titles from the agency’s clients. There was one book that made me smile, that made me hold up my hands inside my heart and say okay, maybe this is the right path. On the middle shelf, directly on my eye line, standing proud next to Zadie Smith’s rose-coloured cover, was Alison Lurie. The circle of coincidence was completed.
The meeting went well. Over the next two weeks I will embroider and burnish my six chapters then give them back into the safe hands of my agent, ready to be sent out to prospective publishers. The journey has really begun.
Spelling
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue and hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells
and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war.
And in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress; the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow and the word
splits and doubles and speaks
the truth and the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky and the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
~ Margaret Atwood
For more poetic inspiration, go here.
Now this is weird
"Beyond time, beyond death, love is. Time and death cannot wear it away”
~ Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
After I wrote my blog post last night, I followed the breadcrumbs to the bookcase in my spare room. Well, I call it a bookcase – it’s actually more of a book landslide, there are so many. Finding the Neruda book yesterday triggered a memory – and I can’t believe I haven’t realised this before now. Nestled on the bottom shelf I found another book with my face on it. (I should add that, luckily, there are only two books in the world with my mug on them – when I was studying photography, all those years ago, I posed for an awful lot of my fellow students). This book is by Alison Lurie, and the picture was snapped by a lovely guy called Spiros (who has since gone on to have a very successful career as a photographer). When I took the book off the shelf, it was like a piece of the jigsaw slotted into place: the book is called Women & Ghosts, and that title, coupled with the image, made me see that, twelve years ago, my path was already being written. And now I’ve caught up with it.
Poetry
And it was at that age… Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of somebody who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
~ Pablo Neruda
This is how I write…
‘A certain skinlessness goes with the ability to observe and describe feelings. This does not make for blithe unconsciousness. Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.’
~ Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty
This is how I write: I shower, dry my hair and get dressed. I make breakfast and drink a mug of tea while reading emails and blogs. I have a cigarette. I go and buy the paper. I come home and realise I haven’t washed up from the night before, so I do that. I then, mysteriously, feel an urgent need to vacuum the entire flat, and dust all surfaces. I have another cigarette. It’s now lunchtime so I make food, eat it, and have another mug of tea. I stare into space for a while. I have another cigarette. I sit on the sofa and flick through a magazine. I dip into the Jeanette Winterson book that I always have close to hand. I think about what I have to write. I feel guilty that I’m not writing, so I have another cigarette… finally, at around 3 o’clock, I sit back at the computer and open the word document. I stare into space for a while…
Sometimes I like to mix it up a bit. I’ll blitz the bathroom. I’ll meet a friend for coffee and gossip. I’ll take a walk to the sea (I call this ‘research’). Occasionally I’ll write an article, but that doesn’t count as real writing – real writing hurts. When it flows out my fingertips then i’m in love with what I do – what I’m trying to do – and the staring into space, the feverish thinking, the mental gymnastics is all part of the courtship. But i have the procrastination gene. I’m a single woman with no children who lives on her own – I have acres of time to write, but still I am like a dog who has to turn around hundreds of times, shuffle and fidget, until she finds the most comfortable position to lie down in.
‘A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ ~ Thomas Mann
I love that quote, and I know that these thoughts are coming from the knot of anxiety and excitement I have in my stomach. On Wednesday I go to London to meet my agent. I want this project to advance to the next stage but I’m terrified of this too. I worry that I’m not up to it, that I’m no good, that no one would want to read my words, that I’ve run out of steam. But most of all, I fear going back into the swamp of emotions I’ve been working so hard to clear. And I know this is the final part of the healing, whether TB is published or not, but still… I’m feeling intimidated.
I found myself in a bookshop today, and I mean this quite literally. Browsing through the poetry aisle, looking for poetry written by women (why are there so few? I don’t want to read Beowulf or Hughes or, heaven forfend, Andrew Motion! I bought Sharon Olds instead – her words make me roar) I found a book with my face on it. When the film Il Postino was released in 1994, a slim volume of Pablo Neruda’s love poems was published too. The cover features Massimo Troisi as Neruda, on his bicycle, and above him is me. My ex took the photograph – I think it was one of the first photographs he sold – so I bought the book and brought it home. I’m hoping that this strange little coincidence, this fortuitous finding, is a sign of good things to come.
Sunday Scribblings: Chocolat
There are many places in the world that I have visited and fallen in love with. I have walked in the shadow of the Great Pyramid in Cairo, driven through the Rift Valley in Kenya under a rainbow, climbed the Dunn’s River Falls in Jamaica in pink rubber shoes and a bikini and eaten king prawns with my fingers in a restaurant in Lisbon; but there is one place on the planet where I left my heart, in more ways than one.
One wintry weekend in February 2003 my ex and I went to Paris to see if we could repair our relationship. We walked along the banks of the Seine, and paid our respects to the Mona Lisa. We got as far as the Eiffel Tower, then decided we didn’t want to queue to see the view from the top; we were too tired, of the day, and of each other. We walked and talked, talked and walked, finding new streets to take our conversations along, and when the talking dried up we cried. We constructed solutions only to knock them back down; we looked into each other’s eyes and saw the same thought reflected back. Sitting in the Jardins du Luxembourg we wrapped our coats around us and watched the Parisians strolling past, women with scarves like exclamations marks tied around their necks, men with perfectly polished shoes and cigarettes glued to their lips. We pulled our wooden seats closer together, but in the watery light of the afternoon sun, the distance between us echoed and hummed.
Walking back to the hotel along Boulevard St-Germain, we stopped in Café de Flore for chocolat chaud. Sitting in wicker chairs on the pavement outside, I looked at him and smiled. The chocolat thawed my insides and ten years of life together flooded back and I reached for his hand and told him I loved him. He squeezed my fingers and said the same, and it was then we both knew for sure our time together was over. A new life awaited us back in England, two new paths to follow, a divergent route that would see us fall in love with other people, a birth for him, and ultimately a death for me. When we paid for our drinks, I left a little piece of my heart as a tip for the waiter. Some day I plan to go back to Flore to reclaim that piece, in the café that marked a new beginning, and a bittersweet ending.
To read more Sunday Scribblings, go here, and to get a taste of the wonderful Cafe de Flore, go here.
Back to normal transmission…
It seems my subconscious is a bit of a prankster: last night I dreamt about the queen. I should add here that I am very ambivalent about the royal family and I resent the fact that a fraction of my hard earned cash goes towards paying for Prince Andrew to jet around the world playing golf, and for someone to lay Prince Charles’s underwear out on his bed for him every morning. They bleed the same as I do – why all the privilege? But for some reason (probably because it’s her birthday and every newsagent I enter displays magazine covers reminding me of this) her Maj was in my head last night. We were at a state function, and every leader of every country was arriving – I had to help Liz with the meeting, greeting and general chitter-chatter of the evening. I kept turning to her and exclaiming ‘I can’t believe you’re the queen – you’re so normal!’ and she would grin and tell me a joke, or some self-deprecating story, and we’d hunker down in comfy chairs and chat like old friends. It was a very curious – and entertaining – dream. I think my subconscious was trying to make amends for the night before.
I’d like to introduce you all to my belly button, as I have been gazing at it an awful lot these last few days. Grief makes you feel very sorry for your self. It has uncovered every shitty thought I have ever had about myself too. But it is in the silence, in the moment after I remember, for the millionth time, that he is gone, that I find peace… grace…a connection to myself. I have been exchanging emails with a very wise and beautiful woman who I know understands what I feel, and we have been talking about the never-ending silence. In some ways, grief is the most extraordinary journey we can be given. I hate that I now know this – that I know how I will feel again one day, when another person I love shoves off their mortal coil and leaves me behind. But how else do we know we are alive unless we know death? When I was a child I couldn’t understand death – for obvious reasons. I was a charge of electricity, fresh and new, that crackled with LIFE. But I do remember, when I was about eight years old, sitting at the kitchen table and staring at a glass of water. For those long long minutes I couldn’t quite believe that I could *see*. I saw the straight lines of the glass, the curve of the water’s edge, the tiny bubbles, the blues and creams of the kitchen twirling inside the reflections, and I was breathless. It was a real moment of consciousness – of being suddenly aware that I was alive, that the body I was in wasn’t necessarily me, but the thing that could see, the entity (me?), was.
My most favourite and cherished writer, Jeanette Winterson, says this in Art Objects, her book of essays: My work is rooted in silence. It grows out of deep beds of contemplation, where words, which are living things, can form and re-form into new wholes. What is visible, the finished books, are underpinned by the fertility of uncounted hours. A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.
There is something so fecund about the silence of grief that I have been ploughing myself these last few months. Words have been born out of this grief, and I am grateful, today on Grateful Friday, to the man who has given me this gift, purely because he stepped out into the light before I did.
* The photograph is of Lake Naivasha in Kenya, where I floated out in a little boat to watch the hippos minding their own business. Thank you all for keeping me afloat yesterday. *
Poetry Thursday
I wasn’t going to post anything today other than a poem, but it appears that’s not going to happen. I woke up an hour ago after dreaming about my love for the first time in a few months. My brain has been protecting me and before this morning I had been feeling angry that he had left me in my dreams as well. But now I see that that was a good thing. I’ve had six dreams over the last thirteen months where I have met him. I can’t call them anything other than meetings, where for a moment we were together again – him flesh and blood once more, tangible, solid - somewhere else, somewhere outside of the real world, and we talked and touched and were together. Every time I woke up from one of these meetings I was devastated to be back. Since the one-year anniversary of his death last month, these meetings have vanished, as if he has gone somewhere else, off on another journey. But an hour ago, in my dream, I wished him back, and he was there. The tears have not dried yet.
This blog was going to be for the writer in me, as I think I said in another post, to honour the new person I am becoming, but it seems my fingers have other plans as I type this. Revealing a little bit about the book yesterday, reading other’s blogs and learning how happy they are with their husbands, fiancées and partners, and finally acknowledging to myself, just before I went to sleep last night, that I want him back, no questions asked, but back HERE, now, has meant that, for today at least, this blog has needed to be my diary. I’m not writing this for anyone, I’m just writing it. The book, my life and now my blog have blurred into one and right now there is nothing I can do to change this. Why is the light of the dawn so unwelcoming, so cold? Why do cigarettes burn your throat so painfully at 6am? I will still type out the poem I had picked as it feels incredibly relevant right now.
Write
Write that the sun bore down on me,
kissing and kissing, and my face
reddened, blackened, whitened to ash,
was blown away by the passionate wind
over the fields, where my body’s shape
still flattened the grass, to end as dust
in the eyes of my own ghost.
Or write
that the river held me close in its arms, cold fingers
stroking my limbs, cool tongue probing my mouth,
water’s voice swearing its love love love in my ears,
as I drowned in belief.
Then write the moon
striding down from the sky in its silver boots
to kick me alive; the stars like a mob of light,
chanting a name, yours. Write your name on my lips
when I entered the dark church of the wood
like a bride, lay down for my honeymoon,
and write the night, sexy as hell, write the night
pressing and pressing my bones
into the ground.
~ Carol Anne Duffy, Rapture
Edited to add: the photograph is one of mine, not very well reproduced on the net, but one i chose yesterday to share.
Balm to my bruises
This is the sea I live beside, and the laughing beauty in the brine is Anna, who in true London-girl style rolled up her jeans and ran into the waves as soon as we reached the beach. Her jeans got so wet that she was shivering as we walked along to the pier and bought chips swimming in vinegar, eaten with gusto sat on the pavement alongside the grockles*. Anna is a travel journalist extraordinaire, and this week she is off to Verbier for skiing fun, and next week it’s Tobago to lie on the beach and watch turtles. I’ve made no secret of how I’m sick with envy.
So I’ve been blogging for a week now, and it’s becoming more and more addictive, you were all right. The best part of finding new blogs to read is that generally there’s a whole archive of posts waiting to be explored, so I find myself like I did last night, staying up till midnight reading them. I’ve discovered I’m susceptible to blog envy; I’ve also realised I may have to start two more blogs: 1. The Moaning Blog and 2. The Witty Journo Blog, as inspired by this very witty blogger, just to mix it up a little. For now, though, I’m loving the connection I’m feeling with this sisterhood I’ve found ~ balm to my bruises.
I don’t know what picture of myself I’m drawing in this blog, but I like the fact that it’s exercising so many writerly muscles. My inner critic is an ugly medusa who turns somersaults every time I write, banging her gnarled fists against my tender dreams and telling me I’m rubbish, that the words I write are flimsy and impotent. Writer’s block is such an insidious condition isn’t it, yet I’m not blocked so much as having a natural pause, waiting for the meeting with my agent to get the go ahead to carry on. Writing TB is a very emotional experience for me – there’s a link on my website that until recently gave a description of the book I’m writing, but I’ve now changed it to say ‘under construction’. I’ve just realised that I mean this quite literally. TB, you see, is a fictionlised account of the last year of my life. Write what you know, that’s what they say isn’t it? What was going to be a book of grief, a beacon to help others find their way back to the shore has now, at my agent’s very intuitive suggestion, become fiction – or ‘fact-ion’ as she called it. For two years the man I loved and I had a very unique relationship, for reasons I’m not ready to go into here just yet; suffice to say there might be readers who’ll be helped by this book, but most of all, I’m writing it for me. Even if it was never to be published, it’s helping me grow in confidence about who I truly am – a writer – and allowing me to stitch together not only my new existence, but make sense of the past too. As I put my proposal together I learnt that Joan Didion’s wonderful book, The Year of Magical Thinking, won the US National Book Award award. I took this as a sign ~ I was doing the right thing. Didion’s book is beautifully written with her typical journalistic candour and questioning mind. My book will be very different, but both, I hope, add to the canon of work already out there that opens a window on grief and loss.
If I had a garden…
…I would want it to look like this. My sister pointed me in the direction of this illustrator’s delicious work and it’s so vibrant and colourful, I want the world to look like this. If you haven’t already picked up on my subtle clues, I love my sister very much. I have known her since she was floating in our mother’s stomach and I thank the stars every night that she chose to be my sister, my little brave daisy waving to me from the garden of our shared life. This year, in my birthday card, she wrote: “I love you more than you could ever imagine. My life would never have been so good without you holding my hand along the way. So now it’s my turn, and I’ll never let go…” I think what upsets me the most about our father being such a fool (and I want to write ****, but that’s my angry teenage self trying to get some airtime) is that he doesn’t know my sister. He is missing out on so much…
Over the last few days we’ve been talking a lot about blogs as she’s thinking about setting up her own, as a way to get the creative juices flowing in the right direction. I think this is a marvelous idea and am encouraging her in true pushy-big-sister style! How I wish I could paint what I see in my head like she does. I paint with words – always have done – but oh, how I want to scoop up handfuls of paint and smear it over the walls. To surround myself with Pollock-esque splatters and Dali dreams. I love words, I love stringing them together, letting them run over the page, crawl up my arm and whisper in my ear, but sometimes a black and white page just doesn’t cut it. Of course the irony is I did go to art college – i can life draw with the best of them! – but my sketch books were always so dry, my paintings so contrived. I think it’s very indicative of me that I write my journals in large Moleskine notebooks, serious hard black covers concealing tear splats and scribblings. I let the colour run riot in my home instead – creaking antiques next to a Tretchikoff print; red lamps by yellow sixties decanters; chocolate silk cushions against a blood-red throw. And books – have I mentioned the books? Piles and shelves and Eiffel Towers of them, so many I have to wonder if they are the ballast keeping me on the planet.
But I digress. This evening I’m simply frustrated. I want to finish this article and file it. I want to have time to get on with TB. I want to paint like Abigail; I want to rip off my clothes and run in the streets. Just as the skin on your arm itches when the cast that has supported your broken limb is due to come off, I think I too am healing. Maybe I should buy a sketchbook and see what happens… I’m still scared to go outside, but I’m starting to think it might be fun to be in that Technicolor garden.
** Sending love to Deirdre **
