Woke up heavy with memories. God knows what was in that eight hours, but on the tipping point I was thinking about the newsagents on Hardman Street? I traced it back to the last time I was at his house, the last time I rode away at 7am on Monday the Second of March, en route to my class In London. I remembered sitting in that workshop feeling WOOSH, these worlds do not match. What the fuck is going to happen here. I glanced her nails, watched them play with a pen, idly and consciously at once. No word for that feeling then.
Facebook suggested a group headed up by his photo. Falling. There I was thinking I'd chaptered it off, and there's fb telling me we're linked on twenty eight accounts. No wonder the memories keep flashing up. Ever since I started the autogenic training actually. These flashes of, excuse me, why am I thinking about reading the Saturday paper in a pub in Parkgate, right now? Er? Is this really being productive? Or, oh, there's another one from the car boot sale at the Women's Hospital, deckchairs, five pounds for the two, he'll carry them home and I'm so glad. They'll rip and rot over the next three years. Then flashes flashes flashes of the kitchen in our house, the oven, me spending an inordinate amount of time in that fricking room, trying to create an income, a belief, something.
The mind is so interesting. So so interesting. We can try and aid it, but really we only have a hold of a minute of a percent of the show that it's running. I wonder about the section that holds these paused pictures, ready to be played if I put my pen to paper, fingers to keys, hands round a glass of something alcoholic. What truths are ready to be replayed, and for what reason, or any at all. I started a new, ish, book last week. I now have a red book, a blue book, a black (Mac)Book, and various on-the-go Asixers. Slightly multipolar you might think. Slightly Golden. I should read that book. I just don't particularly like the topic, only the concept.
I am reading two books! TWO! I can't possibly expect my writing to move unless I am an involved reader, and since the course I've given up the papers. I am not even pretending to read the books, I am actually doing it. I am picky about everything, I really don't like a lot of what is available, so why should I have expected to find all writers amazing? I like her language. I like the way she doesn't put in speech marks, flattening the characters and writer and reader into one. It's all words, only. I like his topics. I like reading a short book that has been somehow pre-approved by Penguin for it's successful brevity. I will think of cafe au lait whenever I remember it, memories of reading about memory.
He asked me what I wanted to write about. Again, I felt a falling and panic, again. Some days I'm just not set up with an answer. Some times I just want to stop on the street and scream I DON"T KNOW. I did better at his birthday meal, chatting with them, somehow finding formulas and ideas in strangers. The only difference was my confidence. I pictured a website of offerings, a fiction section, a non-fiction section, perhaps a new blog of kind-of reviews, critiques. I applied for 3 a-n writing bursaries, thinking they're not going to pick me, they don't want crafted writing, they want regurgitated second-hand opinion, trite-art style. Maybe I'm cynical. Maybe I'm not ready to take on reviewing, my writing stuck between lyrical and processed information.
I started trying to write something fictional after the jumble sale. I felt that I should start an index card box of emotional situations, things to tap into, tools for removed realities. It started off ok, but just didn't feel fiery. Perhaps the blog is a really extreme version of expression. It was interesting the way he thought something typed was open to change and adjustment, over and above the handwritten. And to me, it is something so ridiculously final, these fingers dancing over these letters, the process of thought out onto a keyboard. It is the handwritten, to me, that is fragile. A process that is now only a beginning, a style kept for journals, love letters, Post-it reminders, passive-aggressive tirades, humorous intervention. I don't know what I'm planning, but it's nice to have flickers of light.
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