Writing week 05

Surfacing. Then diving back down.

Monday

Today I’m in London, where it’s raining. I’m writing in a cafe in upper Sydenham, near where my brother Neil lives. This afternoon I’m going to start to transcribe some handwritten stuff from the past couple of weeks, but for now I wanted to write this.

A few days ago, at a hotel near Schiphol, I had a strange writing experience. I needed to go to a cafe that was just down the road. I’d found this cafe on google maps – there was nothing else nearby, and mercifully this place looked like it had good coffee. I hadn’t had coffee in around 10 days as I had been on a retreat in the countryside. I walked down a pulsatingly hot road towards the building where the cafe was. I could see inside – glowy lights, wooden tables, a heartily full cabinet – but I couldn’t find the door to get in. The building was very long and I walked the length of it. At one point there was a door, but it wouldn’t open. Or would it? (I thought about Tim Robinson in that sketch where after a job interview he insists to his interviewer that a door that pushes ‘actually goes both ways’, and after a horrific struggle he rips the door off its hinges.) I walked around the end of the building and found myself in a grassy area. There were no doors on the other side of the building either, it was just a long blank.

At sea

I walked around the other side again and found a door that I hadn’t noticed on my first walk round. I pushed it. It would not open. I pulled it and that didn’t work. I pushed again and finally, with great resistance, the door began to open, and as I flung myself through the tiny gap the door sucked itself closed behind me. It was the most difficult cafe entrance I have ever done. Inside, the cafe was completely empty. (I’m sorry about how this is sounding like a scene out of a Murakami novel.) As I approached the counter a man popped up from where he had been bent over doing something, and he looked almost exactly like the Christchurch poet Erik Kennedy. When I spoke to him, he sounded like Erik Kennedy too, and seemed alarmed when I asked for soymilk with my coffee, because soymilk destroys the environment. ‘But it says you have it on the board up there,’ I said, and pointed. ‘The board is old,’ he hissed.

Eventually I got my coffee – I had two cups, and a herbal tea – and ended up having a good conversation with this Dutch Erik, and then I wrote for a couple of hours totally undisturbed, and it was a very joyful writing time.

Over the last couple of weeks I have written a lot, but almost all by hand (on my Kindle Scribe, which has a soft, slippery feel), and so I was nervous about coming back to typing on a laptop, since I associate the laptop with WORK and GETTING THINGS DONE and LACK OF PROGRESS and also FAILURE and so forth. I liked the softness of writing by hand and how whenever I scribbled things out I could still sort of see them, and I also liked that I could look back at a previous page and see all of my scribblings and feel that it was simple – not easy, necessarily, but simple – to continue. I wasn’t concerned with elegance or even sense. Most of the sentences were looping and repetitive and obvious, but I felt like I was moving along pretty happily.

The retreat that I went on in the countryside, in southeastern Netherlands close to Germany, was a psilocybin retreat over six days. This involved two big trips and a lot of talking with the other participants. This is something that I have wanted to do for a long time, and I feel incredibly lucky that at last I was able to prepare for it and do it. I can’t write about this experience too much yet, because it feels like a fragile thing, but I will say two things that were unexpected (to be clear, a lot was unexpected, but particularly these two things). One is that, during my first trip, my cat Jerry kept appearing in my mind. I have been very afraid of Jerry dying – he’s old, he will die soon – and in this trip, I kept losing Jerry and feeling indescribable grief and then having him returned to me. I could never keep him for long – even just to think of him, he would be quickly enfolded and taken away as if swept up by a river – but as all of this losing went on and on, I came to understand that he was safe and not alone, and neither was I, and this knowledge was as if he was still with me, and my pain changed into a feeling of – how else to say this – deep love. I suppose all of this is very simple. I came out of it feeling much less afraid of the pain of losing him, more open to letting pain move through me.

The last thing I want to say is that I came out of the retreat feeling like a huge weight had dissolved and cleared away, again like something swept downstream. The weight was an old self-hatred. It was either totally gone, or had gone quiet. I don’t know whether the self-hatred will come back and suspect it will make its old noises eventually. But the funny thing about this is that I don’t know where it leaves my writing. Looking back over some of the work I have already done these last months, and before then too, I think my self-hatred has been weirdly generative, or at least a crutch I’ve often used when I’ve tried to write – always concerned with making sure any reader knows that I have this thing, and that I must cut myself down at every opportunity. So, what to do without this impulse? This strikes me as actually a hilarious problem and one I never imagined I would face.

Tuesday

I woke up and found the ending to a poem, and then started expanding another one. Knowing when to go on and when to hold back, where to start and where to stop, are always the most difficult questions for me, and often I get it round the wrong way – expansion when I should be quiet, or curling up into a tight protective ball when there’s further to go. Some of the writing I most admire seems to have a beautiful instinct for when to push hard, when to frighten us and risk our boredom, when to take a big swing. Maybe some of the writing I most admire actually just goes on. It gives and gives and gives, and maybe drives us a bit crazy but then rescues us. I often think of the ending to the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez which is the most unfurling, expansive ending – it keeps giving just as we think it’s over; she seems to sense we’re not ready yet. The ending to Pip Adam’s The New Animals is another unforgettable example. And I often think of this crazy 2009 poem ‘A Jar of Balloons or The Uncooked Rice’ by Matthew Yeager, which is an unending litany of questions. (Well, the questions do end, after a long time, but in a deeper sense they are unending.)

I came to the same cafe as yesterday to finish transcribing my handwritten notes. I was hoping to start shaping this morass of text. But the cafe was uncomfortable or noisy or smelled weird, and I couldn’t settle. I’ll never stop saying it: it’s important to be physically comfortable when writing. Who can write on a cold pointy chair at a wobbly table (why must every table in London be wobbly, why?), while two people are barking their work complaints at each other and (somehow also) their Christian beliefs? Then I felt sick again with my chest infection flaring back up, so I came back to my brother’s place, fell asleep, woke up three hours later, then sat in the sun in the garden and played with the cat, then started writing again with relief.

Wednesday

Writing at the moment feels like being asleep on a train. I feel it distantly chugging along, but we could be anywhere. It’s possible I’m on the wrong train, or on the right line but pointing in the wrong direction. (When I travel, I always have to get on the wrong train at least once. It’s like I can’t fully relax until this has happened and I have learned, again, that it’s not usually a big disaster.)

I’ve fallen out of the habit of doing morning pages, and instead just get going when I feel like it. So today I went to Beckenham Place Park to write for a bit in the cafe. My table was visited by a scruffy red robin that kept peering directly into my eyes. Since the retreat, I have been very moved by the sight of animals – more than usually – and especially their eyes, which seem to hold a sweetness and knowingness. Mostly, of course, I think of Jerry’s eyes, and am moved even by the little bits of scunge in the corners.

I didn’t get much writing done, except for waffling about my feelings and uncertainties. I can never figure out if this sort of writing is a waste of time or not. Probably it is, and also that’s fine.

Later I went to Westminster to meet a friend for a coffee. Westminster Station has an incredible industrial drama and heft to it. There are massive braces and pillars crisscrossed by walkways and staircases and escalators. The station is full of men who look like 12-year-old boys with new haircuts and beautifully draped suits. Some speak in tragic tones to each other or into their phones.

I’m thinking about fear of writing, which I feel especially when I think about getting home next week and settling properly back into my project. I’m trying to feel OK with this fear rather than seeing it as some big problem. It’s like something in my nervous system still judders when I even think about writing, even though I really love to write. I’m sort of disgusted to talk like this, but at the moment I have to baby myself – ‘Come on now, you’re scared, but we can go in together’ – without any scolding or resistance. It gets a bit lighter to carry, the more I do this, and I can see that I can ‘accompany’ myself and not be alone in there.

Thursday

I woke up from a dream in which I was giving a reading with some other writers, and I went on for too long, unable to stop reading. I felt it happening but hoped that somehow nobody would notice. But afterwards, a good friend said, ‘You went on for too long. And you didn’t read any good ones.’

Very halting writing today, again. The chest thing has got me down again, which is a drag. Months of this business! There are some sicknesses that are easy enough to work through, but this isn’t one of them – it has a sapping quality. But, I made a sort of creeping progress on a piece. I’m ready to go home, to write surrounded by my own comforts.

The best bit of today was watching the latest instalment of Emily Perkins and Charlotte Wood’s Elements of the Writing Life course, which again I recommend so heartily if ever you have the chance to join it. This session was titled FAITH and had everything I needed to hear: why one can still choose to write despite a world telling you to do something else, how to work with avoidance and paralysis, and how to put emotion aside and to do what you planned anyway, like taking an umbrella when it rains.

I’m getting ready to get the train back to Amsterdam then fly home. (I know this trip sounds badly planned – but it’s just how it worked out. Also, it was badly planned.)

Friday

I tried to write on the train, but instead was captured by the conversation of the two young men sitting beside me. It was clear they didn’t know each other well. When they sat down, one said shyly to the other: ‘So, do you . . . know much about trains?’

The other said, ‘No, not much train knowledge.’

The first one said, ‘We’ll need to ask ChatGPT what to do on the train.’

Second one: ‘Do it!’

(I put in my headphones on for a bit at this point so I did not hear what it recommended to do on the train.)

They were well-travelled young men, both at university and both with dads who were always nagging them to study, and at one point the first one said, ‘You know in many ways, London is like Paris, and Paris is like Vienna, so if you’re in London you actually never need to go to Vienna.’

Once in Amsterdam, since I had a full clear afternoon and evening, I decided to go to a magic mushroom shop. I got some Atlantic truffles, the same ones I’d taken at the retreat. I’d been thinking about doing this final trip for a week or so, and had wavered back and forth, wondering if I shouldn’t just settle and let everything I’d learned from the retreat properly bed in. But I had this sense of unfinished business, or perhaps of wanting further instruction. Again, I won’t say too much about this trip, because at the moment it feels fragile, funny, useful – well, after much floundering through the dark in the first half – but I wanted to share this one image that came up for me. I am a little embarrassed to share it. But I think it might be helpful to anyone who is also fearful in their life and thinks they’re weak. On this trip I was being reassured, over and over, that I am quite a bit stronger than I think I am. I asked, ‘But I don’t feel strong. I always feel weak and afraid of everything.’ The voice that was guiding me – there were many voices, all of them utterly sensible and practical this time – seemed to roll its eyes, and it said, ‘Look. You do not always have to believe it, but just know that it’s true. Here is how strong you are, look at this.’ And then I saw a tiny chicken running alongside a speeding train. And as I looked I realised that no, this chicken wasn’t only running alongside the train but with sheer energy and conviction and actual muscle it was propelling the train. This tiny chicken.

(I must stress that all of this was legal and safe. I don’t think I would’ve arrived at any of these insights of the past couple of weeks on my own. I don’t think I would’ve met that chicken.)

OK. Next week I am fully and soberly back to work.