26.08.2024: A phrase about impermanence had barely come past a friend’s lips, when to my mind’s eye came George Harrison sitting in his garden amidst gnomes for the cover of his album All Things Must Pass. We had been discussing recent events and tending to the difficulties and rawness of sudden change and, somewhat unwillingly, coming to the moment when one must say: well, that’s done. While such a resolution is not in itself a tonic, the stoic in me hopes there is yet something of deeper value to be found, beyond the freshness of having a weight off the shoulders.
Looking into the past has its pleasant paths—and its pitfalls. At the granular level, though, it can make the project of spending time to recall what has gone before, personally, seem as if one is suiting up for a run into a compromised core, to shakily reach for the geiger counter and then, on feeling a rise in heat, to lunge for the backspace key.
The work over recent months on the next book, FtB, has been a building up of raw materials that come out of the past, along with a process of filtering what of that material is in, and what is not. In a strangely counter-intuitive way, it can turn out to be that omission may lead to a leavening effect on the eventual story, a telling that will come from a distilling into what truly matters.
I saw again recently, in a film, the well-used trope of a person skipping a stone on a lake. Many of those who come to the water’s edge to play out this depiction seem never to have done the stone skip before, and so are unconvincing in their attempt. This is no criticism of the actor doing their job because in the majority of cases the scene exists to specifically portray the subject’s struggles in life. With that metaphor, they project themselves—with something of their essence—and frequently send their stone out with the result that they achieve no more than a very few skips, sometimes even not a one. Mere mortals after all. Sometimes they repeat the action, in a kind of learning, or to press their determination, which will either improve their prospects, or not. This scene, at what is usually a picturesque locale, is a writer’s means of furthering a character’s challenges, while revealing their necessarily troubled journey. None has the balletic capacity for the elegant ballon, the required weightless suspension that will allow a transcendence to some sweet utopian landfall. But a test of one’s character, there will come. There, then, also come the limits. Of course, the ultimate metaphor is we must all, in the end, sink in order to make the journey to that fabled other shore—or not. One may also find the equivalent scene played out with the hapless subject surrounded by taunting onlookers, at a bowling alley. The gutter-ball rattles down the gutter, while the pins stand imperiously erect, serving to hone one’s further intent because, ultimately, the pins are there to fall.
It’s a primarily personal story I’m working on so it can be a tricky business. There’s the sensing of themes, running a rule over the reliability of recall, leaping the crevasses of embarrassment, and being true to the elevation of those dear, and now only near in memory.
TA
07.03.2024: The prep work for FtB is moving along. That's author speak for I'd better get up and do some work.
Going through the material, I read again an email I received from the PI. He was very complimentary. I put that down to PI speak for Keep the customer satisfied, but I did take on his praise: "Your dossier's impressive. If you ever need another job to fall back on, you could try investigations". Which is humorous because I remember speaking with a volunteer in a suburban parish office and trying to extract some basic information thinking this is the thing - this is what investigators do all day! But then you look at the dossier, growing in thickness, and it's not about the ordinariness of individual details, but the build up of the big picture. The empty puzzle with pieces plopping into place...
15.07.2023: FtB is a volume that has waited patiently in the wings since 2019.
An unexpected event occurred in that year, an event which, as I reflect on it seems to loom more and more into what could be described as a shocking event, released me to think about how I might write the story I had never before seriously considered writing. The decision was made and I began making notes and perusing the relevant evidence to assemble the material needed to write said book. Amidst these notes is a dossier, gathered detective-like at an originating stage of the story. A document that contained all the hope I had laid down: single A4 pages holding one, or perhaps two facts, confirmed in triangulated searches. Even this document had been set away at a time when a way forward seemed to have run out of steam.
As thoughts of this project come through—often daily—so too, do images of relics in memory, or in boxes, or on shelves where they dwell until the time they will each speak and reveal their small but important part. Thoughts also go to the serendipity of things, how the hoarder’s irresitble impulse can provide the key that permits entry into an old hope, once thought impossible. In the case of the story in development, it was a yellowing object hidden for decades and then seemingly, deliberately placed atop empty used envelopes and ancient receipts in a black plastic garbage bag locked inside a storage box, waiting to be found.
Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction and one will, on occasion—should the timing have a say in it—turn a corner and run into a person, or persons, in the most unexpected of places.
FtB is due for release around the end of 2024.