Wheat Dreams

Wheat at night is like cheese. It disturbs my sleep, gives me weird dreams. Dreams that I can only vaguely remember when I awaken, which pieced together make no sense at all. And the scraps aren't even all illusions, some are drawn from life. Like for instance when I dreamt on a wheat night about a door-key as large as a spade, which sounds rather Bluebeard-like – though it wasn't stained with blood – before I remembered the pub where the key to their storage shed is kept on an industrial kitchen spoon. The sighting of which happens regularly and always amuses. Why are they trying to get into their shed with a spoon? A slotted spoon. And using the handle end too. Ah, the key's on it. Now I smile knowingly if someone else is witnessing it for the first time and wondering why aloud.

So, my wheat dreams, you see, are all muddled up. Life, art, fantasy. Past, ghosts of, and sometimes ghosts to come: those I have not yet met and may not ever if instead I take a different course and so paths don't cross. They are then just a dream face who bear no resemblance to anyone I know nor anyone I've seen who will quickly fade and be forgot for there will be no life trigger.

Faces from the distant past though are unnerving. Why are you visiting me? Why now? And why not ever on a non-wheat night when my last meal hasn't been inspired by the Italians or accompanied with bread? If they came on such a night I might be able, in my sleep, to stick with the vision and not instead have many successive broken dreams. With no beginnings, no endings, just middles. Unsatisfactory middles. What? Who? Where? Abstract and cubist-like. Where my inward eye struggles to adjust to these shapes within shapes, shapes over shapes, shapes concealing, hiding what they most want me to see. Hard, sharp, no softness, no rounded edges, just distortion. The eye has entered a less friendly Mr. Men and Little Miss land. A country filled with painting upon painting by Franz Marc or August Macke. The seen and the unseen. A town of bowler hats and men raining from the skies with apples as faces. I've poured over too much Magritte. Eaten bread with my cheese and then looked some more, and seen Napoleon, standing, with his back to me, looking out to sea. I know it's Bonaparte and yet his back looks nothing like I imagined. I want to laugh at his stature.

And then I wake, I drift. I toss and turn. I mumble or cry out. The darkness has turned grey, dark grey...I'm pulled under.

I'm in a bar, there's a sparrow sipping from a glass. He flies to his master and deposits amber liquid into his mouth. Now it's night and I'm outside where a man is standing on a roof and wailing his lungs out, wails to scare those within as if he were Hamlet's father. His son does not come to meet him.

I wake...I speak, eyes shut: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Whence has that come from? These lines are not in Lamb's prose version. I shouldn't know them. Who is speaking through my mouth? The great man himself? Is he in the room?

I peek...it's dove grey. Night has been pushed further away, but it's not time yet to welcome day. A new day. I turn over.

And in my dose see a figure I take to be a young Laurie Lee walking, walking, walking under a blazing sun. I have gone back in time, to a time when I wasn't a thought; my parents weren't either. The imagination is strong, as strong as a midday sun.

Who's this approaching? A reverend with a camera, or a nun? No, it's a woman cloaked in black and it's me that's approaching her, not her me, for she leans against a whitewashed stone villa, her gaze elsewhere and her face a wise but dry cracked mask. She puts a finger to her lips; who is she silencing? Bewildered I look away, down at my feet, where there's a pregnant black cat (her familiar?) winding, winding itself around my legs. I look up, the woman is gone, but the sun, the sun is beating.

The light is gold, a white-gold, a gold-white. Day must follow night. The wheat has been gathered in.

Picture credit: The Gleaners, 1889, Camille Pissaro (source: WikiArt).

This post was written in 2019.

Night Has Come

The workers have lain aside their work, uncompleted; they've tidied their tools and gathered their coats. They've taken leave of their colleagues in an abrupt, even gruff, or cheery manner. Some have walked off alone into the fading light, some have left together on the path that leads home or to the local tavern, where the long dark hours will be spent.

There, in the tavern, they might find the wanderer. He, who has spent the whole day and the day before that and the one before that wandering, looking for employment or simply looking at the world. If he's of the first sort: a seeker of work, he might retrace his steps when the light dims, turn back, homewards to whatever is there waiting for him; whereas if he's seeking the world: all it contains and all that he might see in it, it's more likely he will find a place to stay: an inn which might give him a bed and a meal – although one of these will suffice if the host can't offer both and be gratefully accepted – or a ditch, a place by the side of road or further off the beaten track where what's left of his dry bread and cheese can be eaten and his feet rested. He would rather have the kindness (and sometime company) of strangers, but on the road strangers or kindnesses don't often conjoin. He takes what he can when he can get it, which sometimes means bedding down in unsafe and unfamiliar places with his knapsack as a pillow. One night, that is all, and then that sort of wanderer passes through – he moves on.

There, in the domestic home, which the householder is returning to, fires are beginning to be lit, and preparations made for supper. There's a fire to cook by, to warm by, to see and read by; its first lighting says daylight is departing, and then later on, much later on, shows daylight has gone. The day is over, night has come. Darkness has banished light.

But in present time, the sun has not yet set. It's still drawing the sky down, like a curtain, and readying itself for an twilight chorus of 'More! More! Bravo!' with the dying of these notes as it fades from sight. Night and the moon pushing him aside, as dawn will push night.

The setting sun makes the boy hungry. The boy being idle, sitting on a hill, sitting in a field, against a tree or in the branches of a tree. The tree until the sun sets a place for birds and boys.

The sun dips and dips until the earth seems to be consuming it; his stomach growls. He spies his father trudging home and runs to meet him. Both hear the mother call.

They arrive, laughing and panting.

Inside, hats and outer garments are discarded. Chairs are scraped back from the table. Father and son take up their customary seats. The mother ladles stew onto plates and slices bread. Her men will be fed and fed well.

The boy attacks his plate, as does the father. The mother's cheeks are rosy from the heat of the kitchen; she has served herself less and eats slowly, ever-watchful, primed to ladle or slice or pour tea.

The father finishes and retires to his chair by the hearth, where he'll smoke a pipe and rub and warm his weary feet, and where the son will sit by his side on the rug, like a devoted dog, and take in the flickering flames until his eyes are heavy with sleep and he has to be carried to his cot.

The mother sets about the kitchen, washing plates with a rag, and straightens everything up for the morrow. Then she, too, takes her chair by the glowing fire, and sets about other tasks: patching holes in clothes or cleaning shoes, and observes her husband and assesses his mood from his silence or chatter and the way in which he sucks on his pipe as a child might suck his thumb.

Outside, where there's only a glimmer of light from a few stars and the moon, full or crescent in shape, uncovered or covered by cloud, every bird and beast has gone to his nest or pen. The trees belong to birds now, as does the dry land to beasts and water to those decreed to live in water. Even in barns the beasts that work for and alongside man have settled on their straw beds. Every creature has a proper place to rest its head.

Night has come. Its command to sleep is not disobeyed.

Until dawn pushes night away and the wanderer in the field wakes soaked with dew. 

Picture credit: The Attack, 1834, William Henry Hunt (source: Fine Art America).

This post was written in 2019.

Imagine...

Imagine being given a plaster cast of your teeth as a present. Imagine being ecstatic about it. A very personal present from your dentist lover, the courtship conducted over a surgical chair, you with your mouth stretched wide and him peering into it instead of your eyes.

Can you imagine that? I can't. I can imagine feeling horrified, revolted even. Though I don't have a fear of that profession or of the instruments they use or of the chair you lay back in, but a cast of my not-so-pearly-whites presented to me in a pretty box would suggest to me that something was a little off. In my love for you I give you a model of your teeth. Seriously, who does that?

But presumably in the imagined scenario you'd willingly submitted yourself to it: this courtship and the cast being taken, for love, for art rather than correction. Still, I'm not convinced anyone would welcome their own teeth as a gift, no matter how finely executed. It's a bit weird, isn't it? The girl in this case was happy. This was love, reciprocal love. If Laurie Lee is to be believed and I do believe him. Perhaps this is how they used to do things in Andalusia?

My conclusion however is this: Dentists should date dentists or nurses, or those with perfect teeth or teeth fetishes. They may like problem cases but they shouldn't date one.

Now, imagine a room of anger. Imagine being in a bad mood and having a room you could retire to to work it off. In that room you could do whatever you want: roll around on the floor, pound it with your fists and feet; hurl yourself at the walls; rant, yell, sob; run, jump, stamp; and if there were cushions to throw, throw them. That's my kind of room. I want one. But to have one I'd need a palace, or a wing of, like the king's favourite wife (she's one of three) in the Ramayana, or at the very least a two-bedroomed apartment. But if I imagine a second bedroom I see a study-cum-library – that's the dream, always the dream – and so then I'd need a third room in which to exercise my brain and body in anger, where darts couldn't be made of pens, pencils and rubbers, and birds from books. Have I ever in anger flung a book? Almost, in anger with it and its author, but not quite.

Conclusion: A room reserved for black moods stripped of objects that could be launched as weapons would be less dangerous and maybe even fun. The door to that room, though, would have to be kept shut to prevent the anger released from permeating other areas, or windows opened to allow that energy to disperse. That would be a sensible precaution and yet in thinking of it I've gone right off the idea; I'm too sensitive to draughts.

So, imagine that same spare room – no longer an anger room but a bedroom decorated red - filled with monkeys feasting from a fruit platter on the bed and arguments breaking out as grapes are snatched and run off with and stuffed in mouths. There are the elders, there are the young, there are the cunning ones, with typical monkey ways, there are the wise ones who watch and wait. There are the ones that deal in cuffs, there are the ones that deal in cries. And there again there are the wise. But, yes, think of the noise. Think of the mess. Think of the smell.

Conclusion: A room such as this is conceivable, but a monkey's rightful, no, natural place is not a chamber in which one sleeps. Where would any guests go? I guess they wouldn't come or would make some excuse not to stay. No sleep would be had if they did, not with monkeys swinging from overhead lamps or squabbling amongst themselves, and even if quiet there'd be all those pairs of eyes, blinking in the dark.

Then, imagine a creator. Imagine a sculptor fashioning an egg out of clay or a weaver weaving a cloth on which there's a tree heavy with fruit, or a painter dabbing at a canvas on which there's a giant man. Imagine each and choose, without too much thinking or hesitating, which to examine. Pick which intrigues you most, as to how the world might have come about, as that is what these creators are depicting. My choice is the painter and his giant man, from which the three realms that today exist were once all said to come from.

I chose the painter because painters, like translators, make mistakes.

Picture credit: Monkeys Feasting, 1620, Jan Brueghel the Elder.

For the story of the plaster cast see A Rose for Winter, Laurie Lee

Telling Tales

I am a teller of tales. I speak the truth. My truth on me.

Other people – those who don't know me very well or say they are trying to, they'd like to get to know me – will distort me. Create their own versions of me, to suit their needs or what they want me to be.

Where memory fails, they rely on their notes or imagination. And dream up a fictional persona, with which I'm meant to agree: Yes, that's me.

It has my name, it has my features. The same eye and hair colour, the same date of birth. The likeness can't be disputed. The thoughts, the statements they've attributed to this person can.

I do not know her; I have never known her. Never, not as she's mirrored back to me.

The mirror held up is a circus mirror. The looker, looking at me through it, has a distorted eye.

The mirror is cracked from side to side: a crooked line across, a crooked line from the top to the bottom.

The looker has a story and I've been fitted to it, in it. Me to it, not it to me. Because had it been it to me I wouldn't fit. The story would have had to be changed. But as the story offers no alternative beginnings, middles and endings, I have to be changed.

You can't do to a real person what you can in a story. It's unethical. Especially if that story is based on life and the living of it. Especially if it becomes so contorted the person no longer recognises their own image when they look in a mirror. If what they see instead is nothing. As no version of them exists. There's a blankness; they have been wiped out. Cancelled. Deleted.

Their Truth obliterated.

The truth given to the fictional persona a lie, that they couldn't, they wouldn't live. Yet nobody would believe otherwise.

Their mind, their knowingness of self taken from them, almost destroyed but not quite. Although they feel powerless in the face of it. The mind, the knowingness the last to go.

Already the slippage has begun....

For they cannot talk of themselves as 'me' or 'I' any longer. They are 'it'. A thing with a mind and body that's not their own. If they do use 'I' or 'me' it's because they imagine someone else is saying it. There is a narrator: someone who speaks of them through them.

Me is now She. Behavioural traits belong to Her. The place the me inhabited grows smaller, the size of a point of a needle. She fills the heart.

She is now the Captain of the ship. Me is a lowly member of the crew. The parrot that sits on her shoulder and nibbles at her ear, and doesn't try to escape because there's nowhere to go. Me may not be in charge but this is Home.

The ship is nothing like it used to be, is nothing like it used to look. A sentence has been handed down and it's for life. The fictionalised truth on record now, and referred to regularly. Brought up in discussions or the mind's filing cabinet opened up and checked against. Everybody does it, everybody that must be engaged with: from friends and family to civil servants. That is their Truth. That Truth was authorised, weighed and judged to be right, therefore it must be right.

Me lost. It was too hard to fight Truth versus Truth. Me resigned the self to that Fate. The fate mapped out: the path to a 'normal' self. To a self that was acceptable. That didn't know anything. That had no enthusiastic interest in anything. To enthuse was wrong. To have likes and dislikes was wrong also. To be invested in anything was too irregular. To know Self was too unusual. Self had to be shut up, locked away, hidden from view. Or be so tortured with mind games and by questioning tones that Self agreed to the coup: She was the only hope, She was for the best. Anything to be left alone.

Else the old Self would be banished. Vanquished. Laid on a pyre in their old ship, set aflame and pushed out to sea. Given the funeral of a Viking: go down in flames.

Me didn't trust that She would furnish that honourable death; all the world is a prison now. 

Picture credit: The Funeral of a Viking, 1893, Frank Dicksee (source: WikiArt). 

This post was written in 2019.

Nine Gates

Know, friend, that the City of Nine Gates lies within you. You are it. You are the city: its gates, its walls, its defences. There are nine ways to admit strangers and nine ways to bar them, or through which to expel them should they have gained entry.

A city of one, sometimes two, three, four or five, even six on rare occasions. Two, three, four, five and six will leave after a duration, and the city will return to its post-visitor size, or almost. And happy to no longer have to play host, maybe, but unhappy, maybe, at the changes playing host brought. Like the gate that swelled with their stay; like the damage done to the precious gate on their departure.

A female city of one.

We need a language like French to tell a female from a male city. They are the same; there are differences. Differences in how they might swell or fall to ruin; differences in the width and height of gates and how they're used, although they number the same. Always nine; a city of nine.

However, sometimes a new gate might be made, by force or design, or by accident, and then it won't be a city of nine.

And sometimes a gate might be blocked, again by force or design, or by accident, and then, too, it won't be a city of nine but a city of fewer gates, perhaps eight or seven.

Some boast of a castle, with eleven gates, within their walls.

Some lament their ruinous state: they are nothing but broken gates and toppled walls.

Some say gates made or blocked, by force or design, or by accident shouldn't be spoken of, shouldn't be counted or discounted.

They say: Those with new gates want to be more than a nine; whereas those with obstructed gates should still have them acknowledged.

They say: No city should have more or less.

And that new gates, within the city, aren't true gates, they're holes. Gaping spaces. Unnatural hollows. The city, according to them, is, then, in a permanent state of openness. Vulnerable. To the outer world. For it cannot flee from it when it wants peace. Peace is harder to attain.

That is their argument.

Though they don't say the same if a gate is closed, permanently. Peace, then, supposedly easier, to obtain and to keep. Since an unused or a newly obstructed gate makes the city inward rather than outward-looking.

Whereas others say: eleven is permissible, if one or two gates are impermanent; if one or other of them at some point closes, never to open again or to only open every now and then.

That is their argument.

What is the Truth?

The Truth is: All are gated cities, with rulers; the ruler of nine controlled by nine gates. But over a tenth or eleventh gate, the ruler has control. The ruler sits in his castle, cross-legged, and has forgotten his desires.

Those that are of nine, and only nine, gates have the following:

Four gates that lie side by side, functioning together and independently. Another two, level with these four, that sit across from each other, unseen by the other yet invisibly linked; a secret passage, a tunnel running between them. One, below all of them, operates like a drawbridge: open, shut; open, shut; yawns wide, wide, wide, then bars the way, with teeth clamps shut. All day in permanent action (and non-action): admit and deny, admit and deny. Whereas at the far end of the city, one gate acts as the front and one as the back, through which there is creation, through which there is release.

Openings and exits. That's all the city is; that's all these cities are. In very basic terms. For there are many, and yet none like each other. The same gate in another acts differently though visibly it may look similar i.e. recognisable by position what its function is, but its efficiency in its duty undetermined. This can only be felt, by the city itself, or by any admitted within. 

Loosely taken from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

Picture credit: Simultaneous Visions, 1912, Umberto Boccoioni (source: WikiArt) 

Hill View

I love to climb up to the top of a hill and stand, because I always hope at the top I'll see the plains of Troy or a black ship on the horizon, far out at sea.

I never do because the image I hold of myself on a hill, gazing into the distance, is in the mind, bidden sometimes from memory of admiring incredible views from walls, from hills, from up high, into and across a life-filled landscape – a swathe of green or roiling waves, a mist of cloud or stretch of sand. Perfect, with very few two or four-legged animals blotting it. An uncongested space where breathing is easy, where any breeze is the wind on your face and not somebody else's breath, where the sun is pleasantly warm, and the land nourished, blossoming; not parched or drowning, subsiding.

Views are never as romantic as that though, in reality; only in paintings. Even the bleak look romantic then.

Still, I place myself at the top of this imaginary hill and think 'What can I see?', 'What would I like to see?', 'Where would this hill be?'

The last is the easier to answer. For this hill wouldn't have any location; it would just be there, and once I'd clambered to the top I'd be able to see whatever I wished, even if it was just to see for miles...and miles, with nothing very significant to attract the eye. Why? Because it's rare that I can do that now. The eye is always confronted by a structure. The sky has been filled.

It's a liberating feeling to look out, out, out; that, too, these days, is slowly being taken away. The natural environment eaten up: paved over, dug up, built in, built up, built down.

To spot nothing, maybe a bird or butterfly or glinting aeroplane, is special, a memory collector's item. Am I in the minority here?

I'm thankful, no, grateful, that I banked a few memories then. Caught them in a net à la Nabokov.

Is my reading memory serving me ill? I'm sure I read that somewhere about him...thinking that it was an interesting fact and might come in useful one day. Well, it has, if only for the image, even if dubious or incorrect. Net; memories banked. Fewer of us will have them soon, the memories, and possibly the memory.

Hills with views, where they still exist – the hill and the view – are less enjoyed for what they are, taken in with eyes. The camera phone is the eye; the human eye has lost its function. The human body is depreciating, catching up with the earth which has been unappreciated for too long. The song of the earth has died. That song was always meant to die, so a new song could be born.

The song of the lion; Aslan.

Perhaps the hill I climb is set in a world, a time like that. I walk through a door in my mind, then face an upward climb, never knowing what scene, when I reach the crown, will lie before me.

Will it be empty, unpeopled? Will it be filled with men, polishing armour, or bloodied and engaged in battle? Will it be tranquil, have a holiday feel? Or stormy, womenfolk watching for their men, out in their boats, to return? The sea, never far from my mind.

Though perhaps it will be a green country, with parks, picnics and parasols; or a yellow land, with desert sand and a scorching sun. A view entirely different, and indifferent, to what I wanted.

I can only ask. The mind does not have to conjure up what I'd like to see, what I think it should be. It knows better; it gives me what I need, although never without some effort on my part. The ascent varies. Sometimes as I near the summit I could almost be crawling. My hands clutch at tufts of grass and I gasp like a fish or a beast winded from the chase. But it's worth it for the reward even if I don't know, for sure, what it will be. Even if the sight is not a pleasant one. A sight seen can never be removed, real or imaginary, even if you're removed from it.

Picture credit: Louise loved to climb to the summit on one of the barren hills flanking the river and stand, 1907, N. C. Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

This post was written in 2019.

No One

No one paints a desert or prairie landscape like Willa Cather.

No one draws a garden in the mind's eye as Elizabeth von Arnim does.

No one writes about Cornwall like Daphne du Maurier, or about India like Rumer Godden, or China like Pearl S. Buck.

No one makes use of the autobiographical 'I' quite as Christopher Isherwood does.

No one builds suspense into their novels like Patricia Highsmith, and holds you there, in thrall.

No one invents and inserts twists into popular fairy tales quite like Angela Carter.

And no one writes as sparingly, as simplistically as Hemingway.

Though some try.

Because we are all triers, and naturally want to emulate those who found success or those we admire. Yet no one can produce a better body of work, in our opinion, than they have already. They have set the bar and set it high, almost beyond reach.

We will never tire of them, of their novels, though some of them have long grown tired and disappeared into the ground or been scattered on the wind.

Still, anyone that comes after and expressly tries to take up their pen will seem a poor Jane Austen, a second-rate Virginia Woolf. It cannot be done; it would be all wrong.

Why do we compare? Why can't a newly published author or a newly published novel be like no one, like nothing before? Do favourable comparisons bring sales? Attract readers? It's not about Self, it's about who you're like.

Has everything been done? Everything including the many ways in which to write and create a novel: describe a landscape, sketch characters, tell a story. Maybe it has, but surely how words are used will always be different...

No one means subtle differences. No one can be the same. If one tries, one will fail. One can master a craft that way, but success, if based on this, will be short-lived once the fuss dies down. No new readers will be won, and the old may fade away, because you are not that one, their shining star. Their beacon of good authorship. One will, at some stage, disappoint; or be unable to break from the act of imitation. One then cannot become what one wants to be.

Agatha Christie has gone; let her be. Kafka does not need to be improved upon.

A silent or a little known character does not need to have his or her story told.

A good story does not need to be revised or extended; narrated from a different perspective. A story should be left where the author left it, as intended, and more especially if it's an unfinished piece of work. It's enough to wonder...or be satisfied.

Public demand should not be given into by the original author or by another writing in the name of. One does not have to obey what the agents, what the readers want. Not if one bows to it from pressure, gradually yields to it with no inner conviction. If the creative urge can't be wakened it should be not forced. Explored, but never forced. Ideas are sometimes that, just ideas: to be played with but not acted upon.

A novel that's great can't be made greater; an author once (and still) considered great can't be made greater still. Revision is the death of greatness. Revision by others dilutes talent; elaboration kills it.

And yet it will be done. Based on. Loosely. Adapted. Abridged. The 'classic' brought to more people through these methods. And on each occasion the main voices will be different; the story will change. The opinions of listeners, readers, viewers too will shift. It will be done again. And again.

One is alike; no one is alike.

No one will write about inappropriate infatuation like Nabokov. Lolita was a bad girl.

No one will, like C. S. Lewis, create a world quite like Narnia, and if they do it will merely seem Narnia-like or Tolkienesque.

No One is the name some artists use, to hide.

Picture credit: Captain Nemo, N C Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

This post was written in 2019.

Teacher's Eye

It's rare that writers revisit their work and think it good. Wholly good. I certainly don't, even though mine is that of a amateur, a school girl's effort with school girl mistakes, and so I anticipate my teacher's eye; the same eye that spots misprints and grammatical errors in reprints of classic novels.

The student is always learning, and maybe aping writing styles – sometimes subconsciously - for she has not yet found her own, though that I think is a compliment to those writers that are well-known – the highest form of flattery that can be paid. And I may not find a style or one style or my style, since my mind is too easily influenced by whatever I'm reading, and somehow this always intrudes into what I'm writing. I could never write a novel and be satisfied with it. The style, too, sometimes changes in the midst of these articles because I've picked up another book which has flooded my brain with new thoughts and ideas. I have to, therefore, work fast. Get it down; locked down, no more changes, or I'll tinker forever until it's unrecognisable and far removed from my original notion.

Happy? Sort of. Not quite.

Happy? Yes, fairly. Though the closing paragraph doesn't have quite the right note...

Happy? No, not with the title...

Happy? Yes! That's it! Done.

Only to revisit, say, a year later, before publishing, to experience the following: a piece I thought was great will seem just okay, or it will impress again, in a different way; or a piece I thought was just okay will surprise, even bewilder. I, the author, have flummoxed the brain reviewing my own work. I may not be able to relate to the piece at all as I'm now in a different head space, or I may not be able to recall the effect the novel mentioned in the article had on me. The eye reviewing is therefore not just a teacher's eye, it's an objective eye, viewing a work from a distance of time, written by a different self: a maturing writer, an experimenter.

Still, I leave the article alone, even if I can't make head or tail of it. I will not revise it. It meant something, it made sense, in that moment of composition. I have moved on, that's all. My perspective has shifted. The opinions I hold now are similar but not an exact match, and even if they were the wording in which I explained them would be altered.

With a pen and a pencil and the tapping of keys, I brought these ideas, thoughts and themes to life. To revisit and be too critical would mean an overhaul.

So, I stand by my words. And the time (and the mood) in which they were said.

That, however, doesn't mean I always like the finished then published pieces. It doesn't mean I don't either – sometimes the ego is stoked into a small flame of pride. But often I can't make the connection between me and them. I have detached myself from them. I view them through a very long lens.

The teacher's eye thinks: very good; waffle; what?! There's a word missing there... could there do with a comma...? Should that be a capital letter?...why has that been put in italics?

The teacher's eye scans once more, but is no position to judge the place the article came from. It can only mark the obvious: the grammar, the punctuation, the structure, the impressions expressly given or implied; it cannot turn back time and see the world as it was seen then, it can only visit; a tourist. The article is always passed.

Successful authors, so I hear, so I've read, also have mixed feelings, changed feelings towards their own work. Sometimes if they write the introduction to a reprint they often assert they were young, or it was an early work, that they should have done this and not that, that it was overlong or their conception was flawed; that they weren't keen on its working or known title, or that they'd made it clear the punctuation shouldn't be amended.

Writers are happier writing than doing any other line of work, but generally they're not a self-satisfied breed. They don't recognise, nor appreciate, their own talents. Others – writers and readers – have to do that for them.

Picture credit: The Song of the Lark, 1884, Jules Breton (source: WikiArt).

This post was written in 2019.

Blank Page

A blank page, a white sheet. Smooth, no ceases, no frayed edges, no ragged or folded corners, no finger smudges. No untidy sprawl of ink or loopy yet legible penmanship. No childish or extravagant dotting of i's and crossing of t's. Blank. Perfect, or as perfect as can be.

Then it's handled. Unclean, unclean. Still white, with no visible marks, but dirtied. Touched, even caressed. Where have those hands been? What might they do next? Will they rumple, fold, press a ballpoint pen to its surface, hammer letters onto it, sketch lightly upon it, mangle it in a machine, rip up and throw away.

The page no longer blank has fulfilled its use. The page no longer only white is of no use. Its blankness has been filled, not necessarily to capacity but blank is now not a term that can be said of it. Now it is just a page. A page used, a page that is a sheet in a document. Its white space has been utilised, to the user's satisfaction or dissatisfaction. A crisp white sheet on which black beetles waltz and attract an admiring eye. A crisp white sheet where the black beetles have revolted. The manual or mechanical hand that applied the beetles to its surface has made a mistake. The eye is disappointed; the waltz of the beetles has been halted. Some beetles continue to dance but the eye disapproves. The unpaired beetles and the arguing couples grab all the attention. Imperfection. Chaos. In the hall, on that one page. Trapped there forever, uncorrected, or the hall brought to fall, torn up and destroyed. A improved hall constructed, its new design complex or minimal, where black beetles jostle for space or whirl freely.

A crush of crawling black, a stifled closeness. A pressing of limbs, a pushing surge. A forward movement like an army moving under the cover of shields. A war fought on the page.

Or: the war forgot, the war never happened; the war is not happening.

A swaying black, a circling current. One motion, one rhythm. Air to breathe, air to move in. The couples, like those in a ballroom, dizzy, drunk on dance. Freedom has been let loose on the page.

Neither pages have brought perfection; their beauty or flawlessness is not that of a blank untouched page. Theirs is of a different kind, which changes according to the user, the reader, the time. It can become beautiful; it can grow ugly. The beetles come alive or wither and die, dry out and fossilise. All they stood for, danced for, has meaning. All they fought for means little. The filled page, now aged and yellowed, praised or disregarded. Respect shed or earned late.

The blank page is where it starts.

Or doesn't.

Narrative beetles. Loving beetles. Amusing beetles. Maddened and maddening beetles. Philosophic beetles, given to opinion. Contemplative beetles, given to religion. Reflective beetles, given to self-criticism. Who don't begin as they end. Who change throughout. Who cause surprise and revulsion. Who bring disappointment and joy. Who reverse fortunes – good to bad, bad to good. Lift and depress. Open and suppress.

Flawed or flawless, black beetles work to keep their place on the page. To convey what was meant to be conveyed. The eye, however, will interpret how it wills. The black beetles blurred, unclear. Or their movements so obvious that the eye knows what's coming before it's reached them. A missed, never seen before, beetle noticed for the first time; a familiar beetle met again. A new beetle befriended.

These black beetles pressed to, on, the page can't be taken away, forcibly removed, not without leaving a hole in the paper, a gap in the story.

But neither can the blank page return to what it was, to its original starting point. A pencil has been run along it, a pen across it. A hand has perspired on it, left traces of its sojourn: sweat and food. Maybe other secretions, too.

The black beetles march to a beat, the black beetles dance to a tune.

The blank page, recorded on, exists.

Picture credit: Page one of an illustrated letter from Betty Parsons to Henry Ernst Schnakenberg (source: WikiArt).

This post was written in 2019.