Dreams and Nightmares In A Long Life.

Featured in my new collection, With Such Caution, are poems springing out of elements reflected in my notebooks over the last 50 years. What has emerged from this process of sifting and editing  is  a kind of hybrid of memoir and poetry reflecting the light and shade, the sunshine and shadows all experienced in a long life.

I have found as  the notebook entries were transmuted by the febrile abstraction  of poetry, that I started to recognise - among brighter notions and perceptions - a sprinkling of poems  involving dark dreams and even nightmares in a long life.

  
Possibly because I am a child of World War Two I have remembered dreams I had in the bed which I shared with my sister, in the house where I lived until I was seven.

 In that time, in  that bed, I distinctly remember  dreaming of invasion, in the form of  uniformed hordes coming up the stairs of that house in Lancaster,
 
 This was a dream. It didn’t literally happen!
 
But several of the poems in With Such Caution illustrate the impact of dark dreams successively on the consciousness of the little girl as she grows up to become a teacher, a feminist, a novelist and writer, a mentor, a wife, a lover, a mother -  in various combinations -  through a long life.
 
Of course this dark aspect combines with the lighter elements – light and shade juxtaposed -- and has contributed to perhaps a more abstract notion of a lived life, which makes With Such Caution much more than a straight memoir.

An Example:-

The poem here below - perhaps the darkest in the collection – finally written in 2002 – reflects some of the darkest aspects of the dreaming and the feelings that still haunt me.

 

Tin Drum Beat

 

Lady of shadow, where do you walk?

Come into the light

let me see you more clearly,

 

Grasping existence with your metal fingers

Sitting there hearthside to knit up the world

your face set hard to  the distance of  time,.

Your green-coin head turns this way and that,

viewing the treeless spread of the city..

 

Still you stay there at the edge of the dark

walking the streets with your diamond tread

beating the drum  with your  tough metal fingers -

choosing the child for the next conflagration

 

Lady of shadow, where are you walking?

Come into the light

Let me see you more clearly

 

You turn into an alley, darker than Hades,

and confront a boy whose eyes cannot see.

Your gaze pierces through the husk of his eyelid

igniting his soul to the darkness ahead,

 

Lady of shadows

Come into the light

Let me see you more clearly

 

I’m running before you, afraid of your gaze

afraid of your hands with their tin-drum-beat

afraid of your eyes, those glittering  emeralds,

afraid of the high-heeled click of your feet

 

Lady of shadows why do you follow?

I turn in the dark to meet your embrace.

Nov 29.02

 

Fragments of this poem are in several of the

notebooks. Perhaps this piece shows how

close are one’s dreams and nightmares

in a world where the imagination rules.

 

 

 Wendy Robertson

Blog: www.wendyrobertson.com 

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From my blue notebook; The Sublime Susan Sontag on Structure.

I was having a pre-Christmas writing room sort -out when a book by Susan Sontag fell from my writing bookshelf open at her essay on Dostoyevsky’s writing.

Perhaps you know,  as you read  LifeTwiceTasted, that when I’m not writing my novels, I’m pondering the mysteries of the writing process as it occurs book by book.

My Blue Notebook

I  am in the middle of writing an exciting new novel  which – at present- is told from a single eccentric point of view. But in the back of my mind is the thought that I might eventually wish to incorporate other perspectives to deepen and thicken the narrative.  This is both a creative and a technical challenge for any writer. And then, as if responding to my thoughts, Susan Sontag’s book falls from the shelf open at her essay on Dostoyevsky’s writing. I read the page . I read the page eagerly and copy it into my blue notebook where I note words and ideas that inspire me.

Here are the sublime Susan Sontag’s words about the structural energy in rendering points of view.

…. ‘Summer in Baden - Baden’ is unified by the ingenuity and velocity of its language, which moves boldly, seductively between the first and the third person – the doings, musings, memories of the narrator (‘I’) and the Dostoyevsky scenes (‘he’, ‘they’ ‘she’) between past and present. But this is not a unitary present any more than it is a unitary past. (Submitting) to the undertones of remembered themes, passions from earlier moments in his life, the narrator, In the present, summons up memories of his past…

Sontag’s lucid de-construction of this complex element of narration certainly inspires me to plunge back into the process of my novel with ‘ingenuity and velocity.’ 

It could – as I hope it will – make this my best novel yet.

Happy holidays to all my reading, writing and creative friends out there in the world. With this wish comes a profound hope for a peaceful world in 2016 where the self-styled warriors of every culture turn their swords into ploughshares, their bullets into bees, their bombs into poems and their drones into butterflies.

D's Christmas House 

Catching Ideas Like Cobwebs: Diana Athill

‘Where do you get all the ideas for your stories?’

 I’m frequently asked this question as I go about my writer’s business.

My usual answer is that they pile the door of my imagination, emerging from my memory, my reading, my acquaintances and all my daily life. They hang around like cobwebs in the air ,catching at me almost without my knowing.

I have just been reading the Persephone 2011 edition of Diana Athill's short story

Diana Athill

collection entitled Midsummer Night in the Workhouse. .

In her Preface, Diana Athill describes very precisely how she came upon her very first short story. In it she says: I can remember in detail being hit by my first story one January morning in 1958. Until that moment I had been handmaiden, as editor, to other people’s writing. Then, at nine o’clock one sunny morning, I was taking my Pekinese across the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park when a car pulled up and its driver beckoned. I thought he was going to ask the way somewhere but what he said was: ‘I am Mustafa Ali from Istanbul – will you come and have coffee with me?’ At nine in the morning - What an optimist! I thought as I went away laughing; and how odd that someone who looked so very like a man I had once knows, a diamond merchant from Cape Town called Marcel, should behave in such a Marcellish way. And I began to remember Marcel.

All through that day Marcel kept popping up in my head and with him came an oddly gleeful sensation of energy. When I got home from the office I thought: ‘I know what – I’m going to write a story about him,’ and down I sat at my typewriter…

’

There is much more to this wonderful Preface. Any aspiring writer would enjoy this book for the Preface alone. And then the great Preface is followed by Athill's  artful, beautifully written short stories - each one of them a fine example of the Short Story form: much to learn here too.

It is refreshing in the frantic modern forward-rush of writing and publishing to pause to catch our own accidental cobwebs and to recognise the cobwebs of other fine writers whom we can admire, and form whom we can learn.

Persephone describes the collection: A selection of short stories mostly written in the late 1950s: some are set in England and describe incidents from Diana Athill's girlhood; one or two describe holidays abroad, almost all are seen fron the woman's point of view. 'In this terrific collection female characters are sexually adventurous, introspective and enjoy a drink or three,' wrote the Daily Mail. 'A cheating wife, back with her boring husband, is wracked with agonising love for the unavailable partner of her brief fling; a writer seeks inspiration at a writers' retreat whilst avoiding the group seducer.' 

A great holiday read for anyone and  everyone.

Happy reading. Happy wrting.