The Gateway

In the distance a car thrums through the empty country lanes. The sound echoes off the wild, empty hills in stereo and magnifies until it is the sound of the whole night, like the roar of a midnight tide. I am in my pyjamas and ready to sleep and my pool of lamplight is a little golden oasis against the darkness, and I will not sleep, for this is my time, and here I am the lone, secret witness to it.

I am greedy for it, I am possessive over it – my own witching hour, where I may conjure you to me by writing to you, enjoy the thought of you ensconced here with me on this little bed, my secret night time companion, midnight feasts and whispers and crooks of necks and thoughts bleeding beyond their boundaries, watching them float up together into the dark night sky like paper lanterns. That I can enjoy the anticipation of you reading this, knowing this ink right now is a gateway where a Me you will never meet can connect with a You of her future, and wonder, and conspire.

Let me tell you, future You – now that she is returned, don’t speak to her too much yet. She is full of things beyond words, things she wishes to tell you with her whole body while she is still at the full expanse of her solitude, the wild solitude you fell in love with and the ringing of all her thoughts. Let her take you where she will, and hold her as long as you can before the fear returns and the walls of the house start pressing back in on her.

Remember her wildness – remind her of it later, when she is small and afraid. Remind her of the magic of long, lonely nights – you must understand what I mean, you were a nightwalker, you know the potent magic that gathers when silence falls on the world. Write to her from your own sacred midnights – she gets so few at home; she’s trying to trade them for mornings, but the taste is just not the same. Wedge these fresh cracks in her soul where she has stretched with BOOKS – hold these wounds open, let her bleed her honey sap onto you and let her soul widen into this new shape. The two of you are too marvellous to be confined with pot-plant domestication.

Escape into fiction, and lay your roots down there – grow wild and strange. That fertile soil will give you both the strength you need to withstand the storms of life. It will bring bloom back to the woman you love and sometimes think you’ve lost. It is the antidote against the terror of politics and the news. It is the cure for a broken heart, and a reason to live. She burns for you so fiercely, off the back of one book – one book! Imagine how you’d dance given a library.

Do not let her lose this. Do not let her disappear and buy into the lie that she is less and should be ashamed for not being the dutiful wife and housemaid. Make sure there is food to eat when she returns and BUY HER BOOKS, DAMMIT. You’re welcome.

My Soul is a Furnace Fed on the Pages of Books

Oh my love. My darling one.

I have just been released from the clutches of a book I have fallen utterly in love with, and I am bereft and breathless and thrumming with life and I want to take you in my arms and tell you with kisses and hands everything my thin words cannot about how this book has moved me.

How could I have forgotten that this was the fire that kept my eyes bright through my childhood? That my soul is a furnace fed on the pages of books, and that no digital substitute will do compared to that ink-and-glue musk, that turn of a page like the crack of a fan in a comedy of manners play; that magical way the simple act of opening a book draws the curtains down around you even in the most public places, gives you privacy, gives you escape, gives you your own private theatre.

I’ve had books as my companion since before I can remember and so never ‘discovered’ these truths until now – they were such commonplace joys I didn’t think to call them joys at all; I took them entirely for granted. How could I have starved myself so? It feels like my soul had forgotten how to fly and is now unfurling its wings once again, feeling the creaks and aches of misuse with as much discomfort as relief.

I want to share this with you so badly, I want to dance with you like this. We could race through books given permission, I used to pride myself on it. Let’s chop and change and delight in the secrets as we find them. Should we find ourselves with a glorious week and nothing better to do, let us lie naked together and pass a book between us like a cigarette in a noir film and tangle ourselves in the sheets like Neo-Victorian bohemians and let the plates stack up outside the door for room service to deal with.

I wish to read voraciously. I must carve the time for this out of my cramped, anxious life at home, swamped by lists and always aware of the duties I have not fulfilled – probably from my sleep, if this latest affair is any indication. Join me, I entreat you – even a poor book is no great loss when we can comfortably conquer them in a week!

Say you’ll join me. Come and soothe my poor sore neck bowed with reading, and let me give you the fire this fiction has given me. I feel sharpened as if by a whetstone, and all my senses ring.

In Praise of Dull Holidays

This began life as a series of letters to my partner.

***

My darling, I have never felt the drive to write to you more.
When I am released from my duties
I am tearing through pages of paper like a hungry
street urchin at a buffet.

I understand it now.
These writers who excursed to beautiful, desolate places to write their books
did not so for inspiration,
or to be diverted,
but precisely for the
divine boredom
a terrible holiday can give you,
where to dance a flight of fancy across a page
becomes the truly thrilling thing it ought to be.
I would recommend it to all struggling writers.
Perhaps I should do it every year.

Writers –
yes,
book a holiday
to get that writing done that you so desperately need to.

But book it somewhere dreadful.

Book the most teeth-grindingly dull thing you can think of –
a place whose activities,
menu
and clientèle
make you want to roll your eyes
and wither into a husk at the very thought.

Dread it,
dread the mundanity of this place before you book it.
And book in advance –
give your mind plenty of time to think up
more and more terrible iterations of this
crushingly beige place.

Ideally, go under duress –
let it be a work holiday,
or some sort of family obligation.

And I know it’s getting harder and harder to do,
but try and book somewhere with terrible phone service,
and a Wifi that is so patchy it’s more hassle trying to use it than not.

Then
tell a friend about this terrible place you’re going to,
someone who can delight in the horror of it with you.
Demand their pity.
Imagine
aloud with them,
over a cup of tea,
the devastating plateaus of boredom that await you.
Beg them to put you out of your misery now.

And then
when you go off on this holiday,
write that person every day.

Even if you cannot post it to them at the time –
in fact,
it’s almost better to save these letters and
deliver them in bulk,
by hand,
after the holiday.

Make real for them the horrors you imagine.
Describe to them the flavour of your boredom,
the texture of your ennui.
Share with them your pleasant surprises,
secret friends,
and the little things keeping you sane.

Make a game of it and make it ridiculous –
find a new theme or style for each day,
and write them
letters from prison,
chapters of noir,
Gothic memoriam poetry,
or high fantasy re-imaginings of your day.

For me it is like the opening of floodgates –
once I start writing like this, it’s hard to stop, it’s so much fun.
Look at me now –

I should in bed
asleep,
and I am writing to you
by lamplight
with the rain
hammering against the windows
because my spirits are too high
to be contained, and
the words bloom
fat and abundant in my head,
and if I don’t harvest the blooms now
they’ll have withered by morning,
or their scent will have changed unalterably.

Maybe it will not work for all writers,
but it works for me
and so must work for some:

Book a holiday you actively dread for its lack of stimulating activity,
and go with no one you love.
Embrace that fecund boredom
so rare now
in our world of screens and super-normal stimuli,
and watch your mind
make its own shapes for your delight.

It may not be writing,
but I am certain
the activity you fall to
in those bleak and pulseless moments
is one of your wellsprings of true joy,
and is worth discovering.

Be well.

Be bored!

Be brilliant.