Postcard 6 from Marseillan: Passing Thoughts and Copper Pans.

Being on holiday, unwinding and getting back into mental shape leads to a kind of transient reflection that finds its way into my notebook with various thoughts and inspirations  scattered across various pages.

After making a drawing of some lovely copper pans D found at the bricolage, I gathered a few of these thoughts together last night and put them together in a series of short lines.

These make not-quite-a-poem just as my paintings make not-quite-a-picture.

Here goes:

How do I know that I am

more than my generation

more than my actions

more than my present self?

Under a gibbous* moon

I was thinking of Barbara –

how she would love this

soft wind from the south

how she would relish the sound

of the  sea as it surges up

from Africa and the far south

Of course she did not know these things, except

for the globe in the front room of

her terraced house, haunted

by debt and the urgency of existence.

A bright star follows

the north star of my imagination,

surviving in this sub-blue sky,

charting my affections above

the curling red roofs in this

village by the Mediterranean

The moon here shines

down on the shadow-play

of palm trees, tall pines and

rustling bamboo, all

filtered by the warm Siroccan wind.

Beyond all this I hear the bark of dogs,

the song of birds, the hungry cry of wolves

the clatter of armour clad feet, beneath

the insistent shimmer of the North Star,

pointing the way home.

* The word gibbous comes from a root word that means hump-backed. You can see the hump-backed shape of the waxing gibbous moon.

On Not Being a Futilitarian

  

 'Sontag was among the first critics
 to write about the intersection
between 'high' and 'low' art forms,
and to give them equal
value as valid topics...', 

I found this quotation (see  below) - by the magnificent Susan Sontag -  on the brilliant Brainpickings Website which provides insights from  all kinds of writers and writing. I turn to Brainpickings when I need something inspiring to spur me on in my life and my writing. Take a look at   Brainpickings    

My favourite phrase here is ‘I choose not to be a futilitarian.’ Being somewhat depressive I have to avoid the company of negative people, whom I shall now - following Susan Sontag - call futilitarians.

Susan Sontag quotes From Rilke:

'… the great question-dynasty: … if we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision, + impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist?’' Then says ...

'...Yet we do exist, + affirm that. We affirm the life of lust. Yet there is more. One flees not from one’s real nature which is animal, id, to a self-torturing externally imposed conscience, super-ego, as Freud would have it– but the reverse, as Kierkegaard says. Our ethical sensitivity is what is natural to man + we flee from it to the beast; which is merely to say that I reject weak, manipulative, despairing lust, I am not a beast, I will not to be a futilitarian. I believe in more than the personal epic with the hero-thread, in more than my own life: above multiple spuriousness + despair, there is freedom + transcendence. One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong + fruitful.'  

Long fiction, the short story and the poem. Plus Work in Progress

As friends here will know I am enjoying the new adventure of writing short stories.

So I thought I would share here my introduction to the six story collection Writing Matters where I meander about thinking of the connection between long fiction  the short story and the poem.

And then also here is work in progress - an extract from one of these stories. Hope you enjoy it.

I once said in a room full of dedicated short story and published writers that a short story was the waste of a good idea. Such blasphemy got the gasps it really does deserve. In the end I did protest that my tongue was firmly in my cheek.

In fact I admire the short story form. It sits neatly between the novel and the poem. It combines the broad narrative significance of the novel with the precision, the economy and illumination of the poem. Both the poem and the short story demand of the writer the precise and focused use of language and true involvement with the processing of unique human experience.

And the truth is that I have always written short stories. The very first publication for which I received hard cash was for a story in Annabel magazine about a little boy called Sam who stood on a rusty nail.

As the years went on, while publishing long fiction, I continued to write short stories, mopping up the ideas that teamed in my head. Some of these were published in Sunday supplements and other places. After a while I started to collect them together more systematically. So emerged the collection called Knives and Other Stories (first published by Iron Press). Then came Fear of Flight and Other Stories which is to be published soon with the re-issue of Knives by AudioGo.

It’s difficult these days for a writer to place very good short stories, despite substantial national campaigns to reinstate the value of this prose form in the public consciousness. I have been advising serious short story writers to build a collection around a theme.
In producing Painting Matters and Other Stories I have followed my own advice.

Often we don’t quite realise quite what we are influenced by or what may be threaded there in layers below our surface narrative. And recently, when re-evaluating my own long fiction, I realised how much painting, painters and teachers and inspirers thread themselves through quite diverse novels.

My first job (when barely out of my own teens) was teaching art to disaffected teenagers and when I moved on I continued to admire art history, contemporary painters and to paint a little myself. Also – very significantly as I re-read my work what also struck me was the degree to which I see painting as a liberating process.

So I decided that Painting would be the loose theme for my next short story collection which has emerged here as Painting Matters and Other Stories. I hope you enjoy these stories.

Work in Progress: from the short story actually called Painting Matters:

"… And the person knocking at the door could definitely not be Sheena’s sister Geraldine. She lived on a boat somewhere in the Midlands with her arty friend Roy and her musical so n Seth. Geraldine’s focus on Emma was a five minute telephone call every Sunday night.She often told her step-mother that she made phone calls standing up. Time, she would say, was to be spent, not wasted.

Emma was breathless when she finally reached the door. She put a hand to her throat, took a deep breath, undid the chain and opened the door. She blinked up at the boy who stood there. He was tall and rangy, his grey eyes were ringed with black; his black hair shot up from his brow was cut oddly short at the side and. He was clutching a big square parcel which he hoisted so she could see the label. ‘Emma Unthank?'

She nodded…"