By Neruda

The weary one, orphan

of the masses, the self, 

the crushed one, the one made of concrete,

the one without a country in crowded restaurants,

he who wanted to go far away, always farther away,

didn't know what to do there, whether he wanted
or didn't want to leave or remain on the island,

the hesitant one, the hybrid, entangled in himself,
had no place here: the straight-angled stone,
the infinite look of the granite prism,
the circular solitude all banished him:
he went somewhere else with his sorrows,
he returned to the agony of his native land,
to his indecisions, of winter and summer.

The not blog

Welcome. Blogging seems to be a thing of the past for me these days. But you can read a little about me here, some past blogs, and about my novel, Rocks in the Belly, as well as sampling stories and excerpts.

Thanks for stopping by. 

The past

I gave a talk at Perth writer's festival and some of the audience asked me to put the words up as a blog. Here you go.

The past has never been as unloved as it is now. The past has never been as stigmatised as in today’s society. I sense that bygone eras were more shamelessly steeped in story, legend, folklore, and a reverence for ancestry.

Never have we been more obsessed with the future, or struggled so much to abide in the present. Mindfulness is just a quiet wave moving through Western society now, a wave that is up against the technological pace of life.

But the past is not a foreign country. Nor is it passed. It is not yesterday or last week. It is you. Now.

To say you are not the past is to say this building is not brick.

I realised this week that my relationship with the past is not as I thought. I have long held the view that my struggle and my fascination is with the future. Of that paradoxical holy trinity that is time: the past, the present, it’s the future that I hold most sacred.

And yet all of them are ghosts. The future because it never arrives, and the present because it is always, like the past, abandoning us.

Time, I’m sure, is a concept, an abstract. Man made. And like everything man made, like everything that will die when humanity dies: time, money, religion, democracy, folk dancing, it doesn’t make sense.

I was asked by a WA paper what I’m good at, my answer was the future. I’ve always been a pathological daydreamer. And so I suppose I’m in the right profession now. My daydreaming certainly didn’t hold me in good stead when I was a marketing executive in partitioned offices. Though daydreaming did help me slip through those grey walls and out over the Thames. Flying away like the swans that passed our lofty office at eye level, their necks undulating elegantly forward, their white wings beating them out across the city. I used to be so jealous of those swans.

I always believed the past is nothing to me, until I sat down to consider what I’d say here. It was then I realised that for several hours of every day I am in the past. When I write. Not my past per se, but since the best writing is writing that achieves authenticity (how else do you make fiction ring true?), my craft necessarily involves the past.

For my fiction to feel real for the reader it must feel emotionally real for me, which means applying my own authentic emotions to a fictitious scenario or character. It means painting fictitious lives with real emotions.

And where are the realest emotions from? You’d think it was the present since this is where we are when feelings happen. But our reaction to the present is never about the present.

If a loved one does something that angers you, where does that anger hark from? The present? Their actions?

No, our reaction to the present comes from previously learnt ideas of right and wrong, of pain and betrayal, of our own remembered shame. Any strong feeling is about you, not the action of the present, or the behaviour of another. You. It is the machinations of ego and of empathy. And ego and empathy come only from your own experience. And where does experience come from? The same place feelings come from.

This trick of time is what makes life so confusing, and interesting. It is what makes us mysteries to ourselves. (routine/feelings story?) Because our reactions to the present are emotional postcards from the past. That’s hilarious when you think about it. A bit like having a conversation over a long distance phone call with a thirty year delay. A delay that happens instantaneously. No wonder our feelings perplex us.

Directly translated, nostalgia means return home pain. Writing – meaningful writing – is about returning to pain, regret, loss, love, childhood, ambivalence, fear, is it not? There’s those other ones, happiness, hope and all that stuff. They’re the flip side of those coins I just mentioned. The existence of sadness relies on the existence of happiness. You can’t mention happiness without sadness being in the room.

So in writing about the emotions, we are writing about the past. You can’t escape it. Sure, fear is the emotion of the future. Ambivalence belongs to our tendency to travel between the three time zones constantly. You’ve been doing it the whole time I’ve been talking.

So our feelings are citizens of that so-called foreign country. We are all citizens of that country. Denizens of the past. And yet we’re taught to be ashamed of that. We’re taught the past cannot be rectified.

Except. The pain of the past can. And if the past is where the pain is, visiting the past is where the healing is.

I write to entertain, I write to spin wonderful, powerful stories. And yet healing is also why I write – the healing of myself, and, hopefully, of those who read me.

Healing is the hand I want to hold if I am to walk boldly into the future. Or sit comfortably with myself in the present.

But (and I struggle with this) if I want my bright future, if I want to get on with life, to hurry onward, then I have to confront the fact my past is here. That I’m carrying little magpie stashes of emotion. Because I’m betting my fascination with the future is really a search for some recompense for the past.

Isn’t our yearning directly proportional to our pain?

Nevertheless, it’s a surprise to me that I am here sticking up for the past. But I’ve realised that without the reverberations of the past, I also don’t have writing. And I don’t know where I’d be without writing. And reading.

Without the reverberations of the past we don’t have the emotions. And it’s the emotions, like time travelling messengers, that make the present so abundantly, confusingly, painfully, but beautifully, alive. And it’s what brings books alive.

Carving Carver

Raymond Carver changed the way I write, but that doesn't mean I approve of his writing. Reading his stories those years ago, I couldn't help but rant at him in my head for his half-bakedness as a writer. He claimed not to have the time to invest in a novel, but I feel he couldn't have done it. I've read stories where he tries for a more rounded shape and they always come out wonky.

Don't get me wrong. Carver was a master at what he did well. But rather than writing some up-myself dissection of him here, why don't I'd just like to share a short caricature I wrote of him for a recent talk I gave:

Friday Night Weather

They were sat up in bed listening to the wind. She was nursing a tall glass of rum, the dead oak tapping on the window pane.

“This wind,” she said. “This damn wind.”

“Why d’you have to drink in front of me,” he said, “When you know.”

“Know what?” she said.

“You know, that thing. Plus what’s happening tomorrow.”

“Oh,” she said, in that way she had of saying oh.

Somewhere in the next apartment a radio was broadcasting the game. He wondered who was winning.

“Who d’you think’s winning?” he said.

She looked at her rum, the ice tinkling. The drink sweating in the heat, condensation dripping down the glass and on to the bedspread. She wondered what country the wet patch looked like.

“Bet it’s the damn Yankees,” he said.

France, she decided. It looked like France. He’d promised to take her, but that was back when there hadn’t been this wind.

“Now it’s raining,” he said. “First this damn wind and now rain. Maybe we’ll get cool now though. Maybe we’ll get some rest.”

She thought about her washing on the line, her knees pulled up under the blankets like an impenetrable range of mountains, her sweating drink spreading a darkness across them.

“I wish they’d turn that damn radio down!” he said.

“You oughta go knock,” she said.

“You think?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, in that way she had of saying yes. The ‘y’ sound at the front, that ‘e’ after, then that ‘s’ sound, right at the end. The finality of it.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, in a different way. She’d never had that way of saying it before.

He looked at her.

She looked away.

That dead oak tapped on the window.

She looked at him.

He looked away.

Then he got up. His body looked like his. He looked like him.

She gazed at him and thought, he looks like him.

He put on his dressing gown. He lifted a leg to put on a slipper, some knick-knacks rattling on the chest of drawers from his balancing. They rattled again for the other slipper.

Now he looks like him but in a dressing gown and slippers, she thought.

“I don’t see why I have to go do it,” he said. “Especially with what I have to do tomorrow –

that thing. Why can’t you go knock?”

“Remind me again about tomorrow?” she said.

“You know I can’t tell you. You know it won’t be nearly as good as forcing you to imagine all manner of ominous things I have to do tomorrow. Why do I have to make stuff up all the damn time! What am I, a writer?”

She looked at the wall. In the lamp light she could see his shadow looming over her, breathing. The breathing quicker now.

“You should go knock,” she said eventually.

“Right,” he said.

He went.

He’s gone, she thought.

She heard voices in the hall. She lay there thinking about yesterday, when she’d hung her washing out there clean and fresh and bright. It seemed like only yesterday.

He came back.

“What’d they say?” she said.

“They said they’d turn it off.”

He took off his dressing gown. Now he looked like him taking off his dressing gown.

He got into bed.

“These sheets are awful drenched,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said and put her drink down on the side. It still dripped. She lay there waiting for him to touch her. She could tell by his breathing. He put a hand on her leg but just then the sound of the radio stopped.

“There,” she said.

“Yes,” he said and turned away, the bed sheets squelching when he moved.

She put a wet hand on him.

“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “Best get some sleep.”

She lay there shivering in the wet. She lay there listening to the rain on her white sheets. She lay there waiting to take her hand back, and wondering, what did he have on tomorrow?

 “Goodnight,” she said. But his breathing was already leading him away, carrying him out across those rolling prairies of sleep.

Going underground

Ever since the miners were trapped I’ve been thinking about them. Worrying. Following the saga. And taken over by the idea of an experience like that, of indeterminate length or outcome. In those conditions.

For seventeen days after the collapse they were lost, eking out light, food, air, water. Hope. Unsure if they were already in their graves.

In some ways that would certainly have been the hardest time – those hours waiting to see if they would be found, or slowly starve or asphyxiate. But I’m sure being found would have added its own new urgency. A new terror that having been found, the rescue might fail and they would have to be buried all over again.

I’ve imagined what it must be like to lay in the dark all those feet under ground. So much rock above. The idea that it could collapse at any moment. The constant heat. The abject black. A rocky bubble at the bottom of the sea.

When I was hit by a car on my bike I remember the sense of post-trauma, lying in bed directly under a wall-mounted air conditioner that had stayed put for years but suddenly felt to me as if it could fall and crush me at any moment.

And so I’ve pictured those thirty-three men laying in the dark at night, with all that potential energy of rock above them, all that dark uncertainty.

I’m writing about blindness these days and the trapped miners and blindness are holding hands in my mind. It feels to me that both are a deep submersion inside your own body. Vision-impaired readers may be shaking their heads now. But as a new and ignorant visitor to their world, I’ll allow myself my dramatic misinterpretations as my research progresses.

It strikes me that those miners have been buried inside their own bodies. That they were subject, in that dark (it must surely have had to be dark from time to time) to an immersion into their feelings, their worries, their corporeal ebbs and flows. Nothing to distract them from it. They were at the coal-face of themselves. More of a submersion than an immersion.

Nothing but them and the cruelty of consciousness.

Which is how, to me, a new severe vision-impairment would feel. Until you adapt, and there are many full adaptations, you would be in the coffin of your own experience. Almost certainly an opportunity for emancipation or destruction. Or both.

And so today, as the miners climb up out of that pressing experience and see the sky again and see the agony of love on their family’s faces again, I'm shedding happiness for them. But also thinking about those blinded or suffering other submersions into something difficult and unavoidable, because today they are not climbing up out of that to greet the sky. They are still underground.

Here’s to the miners, then. And here’s to those still buried. They have nobody but themselves to dig them out.