we exhume and expunge any peripheral debris from the day’s sights and soundings. We roam lawless and boundless. All slights and imbalances are levelled, rich and poor, there’s no distinction in the dreamworld. And we all emerge into the same reality slap, the mind carried blinking into a new day, testing its fetters.
and there’s magic in all animate things. I had to give up on Nansen and his North Pole quest diary, Farthest North, when he started butchering the dogs. I didn’t have the stomach for it, couldn’t face the slaughter memories and those night sweats Nansen suffered in the years after he’d made his miles-per-dog calculations. He goes on to say that this might be the cost of any great challenge, you have to expose yourself to the horrors and strip everything down to a brute determination. Is it the same in the arts, that you have to shun and neglect the things you love – and that love you – to write something that might earn its ticket into the library of the dead? If that’s the cost of entry it’s not one I’m willing to pay, even if I had the words in me to dig out, that’s clear to me now. But I can live with my failings. And while that’s going on, I’ll try my best to swerve the Nansen horrors and not kill a living thing. Lately I can’t even step on a bug, I rehouse spiders and heave at the sash windows to liberate wasps. I’m with Kerouac in Desolation Angels, blubbing with Buddhist remorse when he kills the mouse that’s made a home in his forest cabin. I remember reading that passage when I was about fifteen and almost dropping the book in my lap; here’s a man who can say it’s wrong to kill a mouse, that’s an insight looking up at me from the page. And there aren’t many insights in Kerouac, more that glorious, gurgling flow of journeys and faces, books he’s reading, letters from friends, lost hopes, new hopes, cafe interiors and rambling chats with Cody. Insights are rare. So when they come along grab hold. And see that magic in living things, even in the ride-by glimpse of a walled rose.
and tried to write stories about the soldiers who’ve fought in them. It’s not easy to write about a metal cocoon, the first thing you want to do when you get inside any tank is to get out of it, unless the bullets are flying. Under fire, you want to be inside the tank. That’s hard to imagine. In the tank, everything’s sharp and unfinished and it hurts when you crash around inside it. And you do. Your face is never far from the massive breech that fills the turret and the other crew and the metal walls. You keep turning, looking for space to push out a leg or rest your arm somewhere and you don’t find it. There’s nothing forgiving or soft in a fighting compartment. It’s a hard metal sleeping bag. The new tanks aren’t noisy, you wear headphones that cancel out the din. But they wrap you in a dead sound, some frequency of white noise to trick the brain, and when the corporal commander speaks you flick your head back in surprise at the clear voice in your head, “down right, down right, happy days”. If you can, you’ll stand up on your seat and lean on the edge of the hatch, head and shoulders out in the air. The tank’s suspension makes the ride weirdly soft, a trundle in a bus. But the helmet won’t fit and the headphones are clamping, the impact jacket around your chest is strapped so tight you can’t breathe right and you’re sweating, salt stinging your eyes. It’s hard to get any sense of how fast you’re moving and how far things are from you. Tanks mess up your senses. And there are other tanks and crews out there on the plain or in the wood, all of them trying to kill you.
It’s not easy to write about tanks or make films about them that ring true but I’ll try Fury. I worry it’ll start off real and then for the finale one lone Sherman will be wiping out hundreds of charging soldiers. I’ve tried to watch any films about tank crews, showing them inside their tanks. It’s a short list: Sahara, Lebanon, The Beast. And I still hope I can sell my book about a Sherman crew, fighting a duel with a Tiger. Like the forecastle mariners riding a storm, tankies invest all their trust and hopes in their machine, willing it to carry them back safe to the people and places they love. That would be a story worth telling, if I could tell it true and well.
and I didn’t have to go to Arizona to get them. The old curmudgeon was almost right, you don’t have to step beyond your garden gate to see the broad sweep of this world and the life that goes on in it. But things that are similar can still be far apart. There’s no facsimile for the hearth-hot Yuma air and a walk on the rolling prairie vastness. Restless and yearning we are, us soft organics.
into the ice,
and it’s eight-feet-thick along the planks,
you’ll wait for high winds to bring open water.
And if the air never trembles and the years settle in, you’ve no excuse for bitterness.
There’s beauty in that polar cell, the cut glass stars and high wave ridges of old pressure battles.
And your own living dreams in the Arctic night, the glittering colours you carried with you into that whiteness.
of old loyalties and work to be done. Back to the desk, back to stalking phantom sentences in the lexical alleyways.
you Jericho turns. Show me a canvas dauber who can match the dun shades and electric fizz of my ride-by streetscene, or hold a brush to the weather rub of the Almighty’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.
With apologies to Melville…
I bring a candle to breakfast. Gloom outside the walls, I work to the creak and sigh of drops on the skylights. I grew up in a drenched crease of the kingdom, I know the whisper of rain. Watched the runnels and crammed-pipe gush flow down the sash panes, lounging on a window seat, sweet coffee, even-sweeter river-cold kisses from the girl back from a dash to the shops. I remember the polished cobblestones and the black-wet trees, the dayglo green of the park lawns and the busses chugging by, windows fogged over with hot breath and cigarette smoke. We had no deficit of damp in that town. Clouds moving fast and so low, just misting the chimneys. And me looking on, same as today, only less worn, wise and weathered.
you’ll find me stamping my feet on the littoral lino of the ice rink. My kid takes lessons there, but I can’t get into skating myself, my feet start to twitch and ache as I approach the building. I remember a Clark Gable movie – China Seas – with river pirates clamping and tightening the Malay Boot to one of Gable’s dogs until he gave up the treasure – that’s how I feel in skates. Shunning the ice, I skulked and shuffled about the rink. Even with these exertions, a chill soon sets into your bones if you’re not scooting about on the freeze. I cast about for something positive to emerge from this suffering and only stumbled across it when I carried a copy of Dan Simmons’ The Terror along with me. Climate reading. With my teeth a-chatter, throat tightening as the glands swell and a hoar frost fanning out from my eyebrows, I was soon lost in the bergs with the white beast and Captain Crozier. There was a definite immersive increase, with my nose glowing blue and the loss of sensation in my fingertips. So, I’ve switched my reading to polar or wintry settings. In the Land of White Death, Kolyma Tales, Clark’s Barbarossa and Jack London with his last-match-in-a-snowstorm stories have joined my ice library. The cold gives them urgency. Reading doesn’t have to be the fireside chair and the velvet pouf, perhaps we readers should inhabit the text? My grandfather lived alone for a while in his black-brick Victorian manor. He liked to unlock the house and read murder mysteries in the basement, with his chair turned away from an open door and only a small glass of Black Label as a salve against the night.
as you chart the alleyway turns of this life. Watch close for your escape boat, stay kind and keep a racing heart.
