A little bit stir crazy and crazy to write, I found myself in a local hotel with its own ancient history but with modern spa facilities that mean as well as the usual through-put of ladies lunching and businessmen meeting and lovers assignating, you are sometimes treated to the sight of women with their hair up in toweling robes resting, after having a flash of fitness.
Writing in such neutral places - escaping, relaxing entirely separate - can be a flash of fitness for a writer too. I've posted here on the blog before about the joys of Cafe Writing. This evolves in a changing world.
I can be invisible in such places - useful for a writer who needs to think and imagine. Here I draft an introduction to the new book. I think of where it goes from here. I estimate its direction and audit its possible impact. I write some notes on aggression that might end up as a poem in a year or two. Probably never. But at least that aggression is expressed, which could be therapeutic. Unexplored emotion can be ugly on the page.
I can be invisible in such places - useful for a writer who needs to think and imagine. Here I draft an introduction to the new book. I think of where it goes from here. I estimate its direction and audit its possible impact. I write some notes on aggression that might end up as a poem in a year or two. Probably never. But at least that aggression is expressed, which could be therapeutic. Unexplored emotion can be ugly on the page.
While I've been busy in my other writing world a young couple enter the deserted lounge. They buy a beer and a latté and play musical chairs until they find just the right place to sit before a window on a deep couch.She has her natural hair swept up and not a speck of make-up on her face. With his stylish specs he is handsome in that geeky way that is so fashionable these days.
At each station they flip open a miniature laptop and peer at the little screen, saying nothing - squandering, in my view, a clear opportunity for intimacy.
But who am I to judge the reality of this situation? This is surely only the modern version of the back row of the cinema where you listened to the dulcet Americanised tones of stars and looked at the iconic images of great films, This was always so useful to cover up the tongue-tied awkwardness of that first or second - or tenth - date. I remember you would both look hard at the screen in silence while his hand crept along the back of the seat.
But then - if I remember rightly - that screen was very big: much larger than life. This screen in the silence of the hotel lounge is very small - no larger than the palms of two hands. And this girl and boy could very well be guests at this rather sweet hotel where there are other spaces to get closer, and to say more.
Nothing like that in the 1960s. More's the pity.
WX
No comments:
Post a Comment