I have just started writing fiction. I may have something to show you in a few months, or not. At the moment, the “or not” scenario seems more likely as writing fiction is proving to be a very slippery beast. And I though non-fiction was tough. The problem seems to be somewhere in the output section in my brain.In my head what I am saying sounds brilliant. It’s coherent, it’s witty, it’s insightful, it’s powerful. On paper, it’s a garbled mess.
This is nothing new. In my English A-level class, the teacher asked the class what Eliot was trying to achieve in Rhapsody on a Windy Night.¹ Up went my hand because finally I knew the answer to something and I was determined to show it. My school history had been a long and painful experience of me answering questions, being told I was wrong, and then listening to the next child give the same answer as me but being told they were correct. “But that’s what I meant” was my silent battle cry throughout my education.
Anyway, clearly and confidently I explained what Eliot was on about. Silence. Although the puzzled looks from the teacher and fellow students were quite loud. Then the girl behind me put her hand up and said “What I think Liz meant was this” and proceeded to say the same thing that I had just said, but using different words. She then asked me if she had correctly understood me. In fairness, I thought she had missed a few points but I was feeling once more mortified and humiliated, and just wanted to slope off and die. But the teacher looked at me and asked if that’s what I meant and then proceeded to compliment me and point out to the class how I was right. Until that point, we hadn’t been friends but when you find someone that gets you, don’t let go of them. She’s been my best friend ever since no matter how hard she may have tried to shake me off.
In fact re-telling this tale has left me unsatisfied and I have re-written it several times to try to get it close to the story in my head.
So translation doesn’t seem to work and I’ve begun to wonder if sometimes we think in ideas and pictures rather than sentences. We think they are sentences but as our hand or mouth starts to emit them they become a big pile of spew. When we think about something that is blue, for example, we see blue, we don’t see the four letters B.L.U.E. Maybe when we are thinking about what to write next, what we are seeing / hearing in our brain as words, just aren’t translating properly to a structured sentence. Well they certainly aren’t for me!
However, this is my medium. I may be a bit of a Jackson Pollack when it comes to writing but hopefully, I’ll get a bit better and I’ll find a few more of you that get me.
1.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lunenegardeaucunerancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
—-
All posts are written by Liz Hurley, author of SCRIBBLES FROM THE EDGE and LOSING IT IN CORNWALL These two books are collections of her columns, written for the Cornish Guardian. They available from Amazon as e-books or paperbacks as well as from Hurley Books.
