Writing week 07

Do you have anything?

Monday

Most days I spend 20 minutes or so reading stuff on Substack, and I notice that the most successful Substacks are those that are full of ideas and instructions for how to live and what to do with yourself and how to work. I devour these, of course. Today I was scrolling around and I came across a video of a man’s hands, typing. The note was something like: ‘I wrote an article. Here’s what that looks like.’ I spent about a minute watching these hands typing, until I realised that my need for instruction had led me into some brainless behaviour.

Next door’s construction work has finished and I can write at home again, with just the rain, and Jerry tucked down one side of the chair. I am very happy about this.

As I write I’m trying to follow what is interesting to me – as this seems like the only way through the masses of material I’ve piled up. But sometimes I get into a contorted, suspicious state and I decide that my interest can’t be trusted, and that none of it would interest anyone else. I decide that secretly I am just looking for excuses to show people things that I have seen but don’t know what to think about. ‘You don’t really have anything,’ I tell myself when in this state.

On the weekend I went to visit my parents, for instance, and certain things they said were interesting to me, but beyond that I don’t know what to make of them, and I suspect they’re not – at heart – part of the thing I am trying to write about. I will put one example here:

Mum: See the little red chairs out there – I was sitting on one, enjoying some sun and coffee, just sitting still. Next thing, crack! And my bottom started going through the frame. It was terrible, because for two days I could hardly walk. It was like somebody had belted me across the back of the legs. It was really miserable. So we got that sorted.

Me: I remember the exact same thing happening to you, Dad, when you came to visit my flat in Newtown once. I had a chair that I thought was fine, but it was rotted through. You went straight through the middle.

Mum: Goodness. You’re right. And Uncle James got caught years ago, didn’t he, in a canvas deck chair? Uncle James.

Dad: It can be very painful. I found I was really quite alarmed at how sudden it was. You go down.

Mum: Terrible crack. Dad came rushing out of his office to see what was going on. It’s been a marvellous office. It gets the sun in the winter. It’s lovely.

I’ve never been able to resist an anecdote about someone falling over, or someone falling through a chair in the way described above. It is hardwired in, because of this family tendency. And it takes me a long time to accept that such things may be better left out, and (perhaps) better put into a post like this one. Sometimes, it takes me years to accept it. But at the same time I think, why is it such a goddamn crime to leave things in? I want to hear about people falling through chairs. Martin Amis had that amazing scene of Kingsley Amis falling over, in his memoir Experience, after all (‘this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was a work of colossal administration’), and The Chair Company was a fantastic series because falling through a chair was really all that it was about. I know that we need to be able to show the reader that we’re going somewhere and that each moment is carefully considered and essential. As an editor, I know it is right – at the very end of things, when our eye is at its steeliest – to interrogate a scene, a sentence. But as I get deeper into my writing leave, the greedier I get. I want to put everything in, everyone in. I am a hog. What a nice thing it is to not be an editor right now, to be able to be the one who makes a lot of weird honking sounds and bleeps and bloops, rather than the one who has to say what kind of song that is and who might like it. I have to trust that later I’ll be smart or brave enough again to see that what I thought was interesting, isn’t really.

Tuesday

For perhaps only the second or third time since going on leave to write, I feel happy with something I’ve written (and able to accept that this happiness will not be permanent). I realised that I won’t get the resolution I’d hoped for at the outset of writing the piece. I might not even get any clarity whatsoever. But, perhaps, as a result, it might make the thing better. Or, at least, truer. Or, perhaps more annoying. But truer!

Wednesday

I have the fear again, and spend the morning dilly-dallying.

I’ve figured out that any degree of proper effort and change – for me – will always be accompanied by a bit of horror. And that this is actually not a problem. Still, I don’t always succeed in not making a big deal of it and feeling that it must mean I have failed.

I like what the writer Sasha Chapin says here : ‘It’s nice to enjoy what you’re doing. But there is a greater liberation available: accepting that the Work in front of you is your Work, and that has little to do with how you feel.’

I also like what Mary Ruefle says in this dizzying essay on fear, where she points out that perhaps she doesn’t mean fear but dread, and notes that the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich – who lived as an anchorite, in total seclusion, in a cell attached to a church – had a way of categorising forms of dread. The first of these forms is a kind of fright, like a response to the smell of smoke or the sight of flames. Ruefle goes on: ‘The second form of dread is the anticipatory dread of pain, either physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological, and that, folks, covers nine tenths of the world’s surface. The third form of dread is doubt, or despair. And the fourth form of dread is “born of reverence,” the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us the most.’

I try not to get bogged down in all this diagnosis – but it is nice to see dread recognised and coralled in this way, so we can see how old and ordinary it is.

Thursday

Today I manage one hour in the morning and then a few more focused hours in the afternoon. I’m close to a first draft of a manuscript of poetry, but this is a side project, so as well as pleased I feel a bit guilty, as if I’ve painted the wrong wall of a house or eaten the wrong cake or something. ‘Not that one! Not that one!’

Friday

On my morning walk I listened to a podcast with Michael Pollan (How I Write, with David Perell). Over the years, I have overdosed on content by and about Michael Pollan, but I can never resist going back for more. In the podcast, Pollan said he nurses a single cup of coffee from around 9:30am until 1pm. ‘I sip a cup of coffee all morning. I mean, I really stretch it out.’ I was annoyed that the interviewer did not ask how the hell he keeps his coffee hot – if he has some kind of thermal mug, then what brand? where can we get it? – but it renewed my interest in coffee, so I had one. (I’ve been off coffee for a while, as I’ve finally admitted that it makes me feel bad and that simply drinking more of it doesn’t solve this.) I could only stretch this coffee out for 20 minutes, amateurishly. I can’t get my head around how tiny the sips that Michael Pollan takes must be, or how large the cup. Anyway, the coffee did focus my mind into a sort of panicked laserbeam for that 20 minutes, or the idea of it did, and then as usual I felt like a husk afterwards.

In the afternoon I started sorting out my bookshelves, as I’ve had a hankering to reorganise, and it is well time to clear some old stuff out. At the beginning of this process, I was flinching all the time. I came across a copy of Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, given to me around 25 years ago and inscribed lovingly by a boyfriend. I don’t like to see these things but I must always, always keep them. The other part that I found difficult was looking through books about subjects I used to read voraciously about. Chaucer! Birds! How to connect socially with others! But then I rediscovered some other, more recent books I had kind of forgotten about; it is crazy how forgetting gets closer and closer to the present, gaining on us all the time. My favourite so far is a book of prose poems called Where Your House is Now by Louis Jenkins. Jenkins was a recommendation from my friend James Brown, the poet. I love a lot of Jenkins’ poems (though am sad that a lot of his books have this kind of terrible typography on their covers). At the end of a poem he will often escalate to a note of obsessive intensity. Suddenly the speaker turns to us with glittering eyes, and we glimpse a secret, anarchic self, where he is also saying a very true thing. (This isn’t all he does – there’s a lot going on! – but I really like the poems where he does.) He also does a great line in poems about enjoyment or appreciation, where the enjoyment becomes competitive and the enjoyer sort of a lunatic.

from Where Your House Is Now: New and Selected Prose Poems by Louis Jenkins (Nodin Press, 2019)

I also came across some zines and a postcard from the Australian writer Vanessa Berry, who I met around 2018 and who gave me – as well as the zines – a pair of socks. ‘Here are some things I’ve made and some good socks for writing in and also walking around in,’ the postcard says. I still have the socks and I still write and walk around in them. I couldn’t believe this kindness. Socks! The zine I love most of Vanessa’s, in this small collection, is called Disposable Camera and the issue is a short lyric essay, really, about an uncanny toy koala whose fur is from a kangaroo.

And I found a little stack of pamphlets and zines from the late writer Catherine Vidler, whose poetry I adore, so I carefully re-ordered them and tucked them away.

I was struck by the flimsiness of all these objects. They are so unprotected, so vulnerable to the light, and so rare, with their tiny print runs. I wonder how long they will survive and if I can look after them and what will happen to them eventually, along with all the other flimsy papery things everyone amasses – letters, drawings, notebooks, earnestly written goodbye cards from places we used to work, and ‘books’ we made as children which are just pages from a Croxley notepad stapled together.