henrybrook.com

I met a Swiss guy who said he’d seen enough of red sky sunsets. I’d been on the island a few weeks and I still stopped and stared in the sundowner bar with all the other gringoes but he’d come from six months living on the beaches in Thailand and I guess he was missing the mountains and the snow. Those tunnels that burrow through black rock for twenty miles or more. But I’ve seen a lot more sky since then and I’ll still pull the bike over for the evening redness in the West (apologies to Cormac).

things happen for a reason, in real life they don’t. In stories, the cavalry makes it over the hill in time, the lost letter is found, the villain is revealed as victim, things generally pay off. The pieces have to fit. When writers step close to real life, when Chandler has Marlowe alone at his desk, waiting, expecting nothing, it’s an unsettling glimpse at the truth off-page, but you always know there’ll be a doll or a moll or Moose Malloy along soon, looming up in the frosted glass of the office door. And if you read of the wind humming and sawing in the pollarded trees above the head of your protagonist, you know it heralds some dark act or thought, some next turn in their tale. But in life it doesn’t. In life, it’s just another frightening and unreckonable dissonance, a happening strange and out of your control or prediction, like all the important events in your life – childbirth, accident, disease, maybe even success. These happenings are countless and rushing away, out of your clutches or ken, they diminish you. To tame them, to catch up with them, you have stories and hopes and better than those, you have love.

in a December bleakness, seeing writing finished as a thriving, important force in our modern lives. More trouble than it’s worth. And then a few pages steal in front of my eyes and I’m smitten again, stopped in my tracks by the scenes and visions of another mind, empathy in ink. Books are subtle seducers, they undermine any world or word-weariness. But they disappoint too, you won’t find the answers there, just doorways to other mysteries, other books. Better never to have opened the covers, was Wolf Larsen’s lament, watching his more ferocious and untainted-by-literacy bro, Death Larsen, bearing down on his ship. Death was too busy living to be leafing. But when I do come across a page that’s tender and intelligent and true, I get that shot of life, the seconds of raw glee when the world seems right and spinning correctly and not cruel and futile. Books have lost the clamour and fanfare of the Press and what’s left of the arts establishment, writers aren’t admired and envied as rising stars and beat heroes the way they were when I was a kid. But there are fine voices making it to print, hidden away in quiet places, unpraised and unpaid. They flame to words because the voice comes out, not for money or a spread in a magazine. And if your heart needs the books, you’ll still find them, wandering pilgrims on the plain.

a parting in the leaf canopy, and the pearl to light me home.

about trains running late, nuisance parking and the failings of society and state. They carry their own cares, have an eclipsing confidence in their powers and rights to shape this life. As it should be. Leave the arcane laws and ties to the bumbling shufflers, the rheumy-eyed greybeard curators. Resist that urge to start seeing the world as a museum.

that would lay down their lives trying to help you in this life. And risk it all for those you love even more than self. And there are others that don’t value things the same way and would walk away unmoved. And it’s the difference between the beating heart and the lifeless husk. And most times, a meeting of the eyes will tell you all you need to know.

down Cuckoo Lane. There’s an arch bridge to scythe it off. A ghostly spot, it struck me, but that could be the Washington Irving I’m reading this week, storms trapping travellers in baronial halls, the branches of the garden oaks rapping on the casements. If you walk a lonely lane like this, you might hear a twig snap, footfall behind you in the leaf mulch. Or is it your imagined self, a glitch in your neuron folds trying to assert the spectral figure of your own placement in the universe, a flicker in the machine?

but still flashes of beauty in winter’s sunless press. The sports field floodlights gild the trees around the parking lot silver white and gold.

what lies behind a man’s deeds. Brave acts might stem from fear, misunderstandings, the desire to protect a friend or a thousand other things. And those lauded as heroes often say they never thought about what they were doing, they just moved with events, reacted as per their training. Why pick one from the many who fought and suffered, from the deeds unseen or recorded in metal and ribbons but no less heroic? So I’m uneasy about the idea of the simple, lone hero, too much is left unknown. But, when I stand in front of a memorial to a man awarded the VC and Bar, the only recipient from the First World War and one of only three soldiers to earn it in all our nation’s battles, then my doubts drop away. Humble and heroic is that sign. Scholars look on as you hurry to class, there’s much to live up to, twined to those little words.

the colourworks, and the shy moon drifting to the south. I’m nervous in the crowd, everything can lie hidden in a phrase, a glance, a voice too close. Winter’s turn. All the night magic to come, the yearning. We live in a world of oceans and peaks, bear no surprise when some things cut you deep. This is what we are, made to shatter or stand.