When’s the thought fox coming?

It was a full weekend of family love. My sister and her partner came down for the weekend to celebrate my mother’s 63rd birthday, and all the food and the laughter has left me physically and spiritually filled up; it’s a good feeling to start the week with. However, the work is not unfolding as it should; I have got as far as placing the printed pages of the chapters on my coffee table ready to be read through – I even have a pencil sitting expectantly on top of the pages, but alas, I’ve yet to find the courage to look through them. This is ridiculous! I hate this stage of the process – the white-faced stage-fright stage. Suddenly, reading through the entire Sunday Times was much more pressing than the work that had to be done, though I found a quote in the magazine that has reassured me a little:

“… I’ve told her about how I write, and how waiting’s a part of that. It’s easy to panic if you cannot create something you’ve set out to do. But I’ve learnt that waiting is what you have to do, and that the brain is working even though you are not producing, and then the time comes…” ~ Clive James, talking about his writing, and his relationship with his daughter

I also read in the Sunday Times Magazine that Pete Doherty likes to write things in his own blood – on the walls of his flat and in his journals, and after my own Sunday Scribblings admission that my words would be blood red, I have to wonder: why is it that creative endeavours can be so painful at times?  That artists such as Plath, Sexton and Hemmingway (even the photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, I read in my now very well-thumbed copy of the ST magazine) would be inclined to end their own lives? I have battled with the Black Dog myself, and can understand only too well the crippling doubts and seeming pointlessness of life, but still… maybe this is dangerous ground I’m trespassing on. Or perhaps writers are simply drama queens who thrive on creating melodrama in their lives, that to – gasp – write a few words on a page is so taxing, so demanding, all commonsense goes out the window?

Yesterday I found a book of poetry in my mother’s living room, and it was a delightful discovery as she famously doesn’t read books. Inside the pages I found the poem I read so many years ago, one that describes perfectly what it is I am waiting for:

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

~ Ted Hughes

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.