December 20
I’m trying to concentrate.
But I can’t. So I’m going to write this.
Last night as I fell asleep, I had possibly my worst ever story idea. A real humdinger.
I don’t know how it came to me. I never know how they come to me, or where they come from. Apparently that’s common enough; lots of writers and creative types (though I never thought “creative type” stuck to me very well) claim to never remember the genesis of an idea, the spark, how the lightening ended up in the bottle.
I have come to believe the “brainstorming” (such an apt title by the way; to me it implies something violent and chaotic and charnel, like the storming of the Bastille, or the beaches of Normandy) part of the process is the most important part of all. Obviously, in conclusion, all parts must be of equal importance, lest there could not be the final thing itself, but in the soul of Animal Farm, some things really are just more equal than others.
Naturally, being the most important part, the brainstorming process is of course going to be the most difficult to do, the hardest part of all. It stumps me, if you will. The rest I’ve figured out, mostly the hard way, as everything really is figured out. The writing itself is done in short bursts, in the mornings preferably, always with an eye on two thousand words by the end. The place varies, but it needs to be a desk of some sort and it need to be in order, clean as possible, and silent. Coffee is a must, as is eating before and after. The research is self-evident and doesn’t need to be explained, but I prefer to type notes up and print them off, rather than use notebooks. A bit labour intensive maybe (and costly — ink), but it’s a good way to filter as your work, in my experience.
Yet I’ve never figured out a good brainstorming routine or technique. Sometimes I just pace back and forth in my room, listening to music or a podcast. Sometimes I hit upon a vein of decent thought when I’m exercising, swimming, or walking. Sometimes it happens when I’m reading or watching a YouTube video. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. But it can never be forced. Conditions can never be exactly recreated and the brain stormed with ladders and trebuchets.
It’ll just hit ya when it hits ya. It just is what it is. And all you can do is hope that when to does strike, you’ll be ready to follow, pay close attention, and take notes.
Anyway, I’m off back to not concentrating.
Oh, and that story idea? A spirit (ghost?) stuck inside an antacid tablet, dissolved in water and swallowed by a man. I saw it as a horror rather than a comedy, but that would probably be a distinction without a difference.
It’s yours if you want it.
Merry Christmas.
November 5
The mercurial, hit-and-miss Paul Bowles once differentiated the soul of a tourist from the soul of the traveller thusly: that the tourist travels knowing that they have a home to return to; and that the traveller travels having yet to find their home.
That, of course, is a paraphrase from the American writer and composer’s most famous work, The Sheltering Sky, an existential novel in which a married couple, desperate to save their marriage, travel to the north African deserts and find that their problems lay not with their environment, but with themselves (but of course). Bowles — a committed orientalist in the mould of a Sebastian Flyte or a Dickie Greenleaf (Bowles, like Patricia Highsmith’s tragic one-act character, was also from a well-to-do New York City family) — lived most of his adult life, till his death in 1999, in Tangiers, Morocco. An expat artist in a dusty city full of them. His fin de siècle death was an appropriate one; not following the wave of 20th century physical and philosophical excesses as it crashed against the barriers of the 21st century was a fitting way for a middle child of history to bow out.
But this is not a book review. Nor is it about the life of an author, as interesting as this particular itinerant author’s life was. No, it is about the above throwaway musing that author penned on the divergent natures of those who travel, and how that idea stuck with me over many years.
It’s not the only one-liner, phrase, couplet, aphorism, heuristic, pearl of wisdom (not always from wise sources, which is forever a kicker) or meme that has stuck, of course. I have collections of them in notebooks, on my phone and my laptop — even on superannuated flash drives. Scores, if not hundreds by now.
When I’m conversing with people — especially, interestingly enough, if those people are new to me, or are people I don’t know very well — they tend to crop up with ease and dovetail nicely into whatever the topic may be. That’s the easy part — passing them around like a bottle of cheap champagne in an even cheaper nightclub. The hard part is applying them to your life, in real life.
As I don’t wish this to turn into a listicle, I will refrain from sharing my collection of such excerpts. But be assured/be warned, if you were to ever meet me in the flesh, you would be bombarded with them. But hopefully not in a nauseating way.
I had never read any Bowles before I picked up a well-loved copy of The Sheltering Sky with the classic cover of a mysterious shawled women picking her barefooted way through towering, golden sand dunes at the Oxfam bookshop in north London’s Crouch End (itself an urban redout for artists and creatives, a sort-of mid-20th century Tangiers inside the M25, without putting too fine a point on it). (On a brief side note, the Oxfam bookshops dotted around that city are a great little London literary institution, to rival Foyle’s or Waterstones or Charing Cross’s dwindling bookshops, any day or night.)
It was a curious time in my life; I was like a man being pulled out of a chaotic marble slab by a wiser, more talented man, emerging into a different reality with fresh possibilities, and leaving behind a dried-out, used-up one. An existence that I had used-up and dried-out all by myself. I was, to coin a phrase, between worlds. In flux. A paradigm was shifting deep within me and I was unsure of my next step, or whether I was even facing the right way to begin with.
So, being in such a mood, I was of course on the look out for a bit of guidance and, dare I say it, a bit of inspiration. When my mind is like that, it becomes a sponge for little get-out-of-life free type ideas; it goes on the great hunt for new perspectives, new ways of thinking about, and seeing the world — because in those days, I felt like I was entering a new world altogether, so I would need those fresh eyes.
Reading that Bowles one morning between sleep and work, I realised that I was a traveller still and I was left with the distinct impression as I waiting for the southbound Victoria train at Finsbury Park Station, that I was a long way from ever not being one. At least according to his standard, which quickly became my own.
Home is a shifting thing. Hard to pin down. And you’re never quite sure if you’ve really got it when you’ve got it. Naturally it’s more about people than place, but that is of course the very thing that makes it so unstable; as our relationships change and die and flourish, so too must that place we call home. And a place that feels like home because it was where you were born or grew up or know the most intimately? Behind that are people too, many of them, living and gone, family, friends, lovers, ancestors, kin.
The wariness to call anywhere home these days is a constant in my life. A happy constant, mind. For me, it doesn’t have to mean feeling out of place wherever I go, or not feeling like I belong. Rather, I try to take it all in, as a traveller, a stranger in an even stranger land, knowing that one day, home and I will probably find each other…and if we don’t— then that was not the life for me after all
…
As a person who writes, I can only hope that a few phrases or insights of mine might burrow their way into the subconscious life of the reader, and perhaps crop up now and then in conversations or arguments. Maybe they could even change the way someone saw and behaved in the world now or, to steal from Dickens, generations hence.
I do sometimes wonder if Paul Bowels ever truly felt at home in Tangiers, or if he dreamed of another place, left behind or yet unfound.
November 2
It’s finally cold.
Today in my little coastal corner of south Dublin, the temperature is drifting casually between six and eight degrees (centigrade, of course). It feels long overdue. I can happily deal with extremes of heat and extremes of cold, but extremes of mildness just will not do in my book.
When the cold bites down into the land, a sense of freshness permeates everything, as though winter’s teeth pierce so deep as to release a valve of some sort, puncture a Febreze can deep within the earth. Death has come to the world, and with it comes the opportunity to explore new and forgotten inner states.
Yes, I know that it’s not technically winter yet, and that it will not be for a skip and a hop of the calendar, but for me the seasons — along with many other things, I’ll admit — have always felt more intuitive and less rational. So, as soon as it gets proper cold, my mind thinks: winter; and as soon as it gets proper hot: summer. The gentleness of conditions that dominates the in-between states can belong to autumn and spring in some sort of nebulous fashion.
On days like today, I find enjoyment in walking through my local park. Breathing deeply without even noticing and appreciating the views its elevated position offers of the entire county of Dublin — from the bay to the mountains and up to its northern marches — and the northern tip of Wicklow, Ireland’s lumpiest and most wooded county. But the sea views are what always draw the eye around here. And not just my eyes; people come from distant parts of the globe just to snap a couple of pics of the vistas I was blessed with as a child and have continually done my best not to take for granted.
The terrain in these parts is rather craggy — granite rock with quarts seams — and the Victorians who took it upon themselves to pedestrianize the park did an excellent job fitting humans into the natural world, and not vice versa. Those men — who I like to imagine wore top hats as they planned the park — made sure, I believe, they did so with an emphasis on the seascape over the landscape, and it is reflected in the cliffside pathways and hidden overlooks, at times revealing the entire bay. On a good, cloudless day, you can see all the way to Wales. Specifically Snowdonia, the snow-tipped highest point in the UK outside of Scotland.
No doubt you can probably guess that there is a long and (in my estimation) interesting history to the park. I won’t go into that topic today, but it certainly justifies an essay all unto itself, so do watch this space.
As I mentioned, the coldness of these months so often leads us think of all this death and all this loss. I have never taken this to be a bad thing. Remembrance for times past and people gone is an important aspect of what makes us. Sipping from the well of melancholia can be a vitalizing endeavour, as long as one doesn’t drink too deeply, or fall in altogether. Take it from a lifelong Irishman — a life untouched by tragedy is the most tragic life of all.
When the air is colder, I think about the people I’ve lost, the dead ones and the still alive ones. Not all of these people lost me, and I know that there are some out there who have lost me and that I have not lost. Such are the curiosities of life’s shifting dynamics.
This afternoon I sat beneath an obelisk built for Queen Victoria by way of a birthday present a century and a half ago, and was occasionally visited by grey-hooded crows, stout chiffchaffs, yellowish warblers and hawks I can never see, only hear. When not watching birds do bird things, I looked out over the frigid sea below me. And when I wasn’t doing that either, I took out my phone and privately read Shakespeare’s Sonnet no. 97 for some comfort. Shakespeare, missing his dear friend, did what he did best and wrote about it. He saw the winter’s freeze as the perfect analogy for such wistful longing, and I can see why.
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
Being too late in the day for coffee, and not being one for hot chocolate, I’m going to make myself a cup of tea and think on these things a little bit more, while the sun falls into the horizon’s warm embrace in a sky turned rusty brown. I invite you to do the same, in whatever way is most appropriate, and with or without whatever hot beverage takes your fancy.
And, just in case the thought crosses your mind that the entire point of this rambling little essay was to share that sonnet…
Yes, it was.
© Liam Power 2021