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.
we aspire to showing truths. If there are no truths in the serenity of considered words, what hope is there for us tottering apes? But then strong writers say books are all lies and artifice. And there’s some undeniable resonant truth in that for the reader, as they caress the upstart pages. How do you square the two states, that books are both truth and imaginary falsehoods?
It has to be some conviction in your own voice and vision. If something’s true as you write it, it stays minted true in the eye and mind of the reader, they’ll cut you a deal, see it with your eyes. And these questions range out from the books and pad after us in our lives, our mask-wearing, our inner-hopes, ambitions and unseen sacrifices. All these things are true, and no less complex than the balancing act of truths in writing. Books are life.
and the birds and squirrels are busy. Breath hangs in the air on the bike ride to school. The sky has that nothingness-white, snow-crystal look to it. I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, off in the ice-capped mountain lands near Grozny. It’s the Russian runaway’s Wild West, full of noble savages galloping into the forest and dancing peasant girls nibbling at pumpkin seeds. I can’t quite tell if Leo loves it or hates it as some silly myth-making, think I prefer Lermontov’s straight ripping yarn style, or getting lost in the blizzards of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. I’ve been reading to escape the carnage and calamity of current affairs – and the Caledonian crusher. And as you read, you learn new tips and truths. Next time I’m lost on the steppe, I’ll know how to find my way to the village. Daddy Eroshka shared his secrets with me over a cup of wine in a Cossack hut. You find a hillock to climb, cup your hands and howl like a wolf. Howl for all you’re worth. And the village dogs will start barking, way off in the distance, a call to guide you home.
I wondered about emergence, thinking it was a sense or thing greater than the lumping together of its component parts. But this week I read a gestalt writer and spotted the misquote, for he said the whole is other than its combined parts. Systems combine to produce new, unexpected different things. There’s a freshness to that rather than common profligacy, it tallies with the gestalt idea of living in the stripped-down moment, trying to understand the forces and ties that are working on you. It tallies with the journey being so much better than the arrival and settling. But I reckon Buddhism said it all a long time ago and the Berliners borrowed like Picasso. Thank the gods for the library, and the ideas, and all the journeys yet to be made.
This was the view from Tito’s cave, out on his Adriatic island HQ. Where did he see himself going from here, with the warmongers and bargainers whispering in his ear? Seventy years on it barely seems real, like a fairytale. I drank the same wines, saw the same sun. The way we fix ourselves in the maps and changes of history are all balance and imagination, spiderweb dreams.
sees me flailing, running to London for an end-game meeting, haunted by all the words I haven’t written. Same as last year. All that’s changed is they’ve blown up the cooling towers. I can see more of the Berkshire field sweep, the deer in the early light unfazed by train thunder, the brash and street-dirty fox lifting his muzzle from the evergreen embankment brush. Motion is life. Daydreams are the antidote to distraction.
