Tag: childhood
Playlist: May 2018
If April is the sweetest or cruelest, May has become the strangest month. Not ever but ever at present. It is summer's gatekeeper, but also something other. Nurse of darkness and grief, rushing in bright lines and new delusions. Keeper of shadows flickering among green. In previous years, the season when confusion blooms. A dull need that quickens with the light through dawn to dusk, that honeys the flesh and the flesh's sense of itself as pearlescent. Coming to endings. I brush my hair smooth copper in a mirror and notice green rings beneath my eyes. My eyes turn green from the copper, the sun. Moss agates held to the light. My irises look less like little sad pools of ocean; more forest now, with secret capillaries. With vague fantasy, I keep planning day trips I don't then take. The sense of this name or that, a train stop, a heady clifftop walk, is sometimes enough.
Alcohol does me favours, then doesn't. That absolute sinking sensation of four in the morning, the day already blooming before you a pale lilac silver that streaks the sky and exacts a sort of spermicide resistance to the nourishment of sleep's regeneration. So you are still electric, pacing at six, drenched in the ersatz light of the screen. White upon white. Straining fingers. I leave early one day to buy crystals, snapping photographs afterwards of bluebells in public gardens. The bluebells hide miniature universes. Still entranced by the fairies; the barmaid knows because she offers me absinthe, green bottle labelled with a delicate eye. The beer garden teeming; cradling sticky glassware back to the bar. Couples come out in the sun, as if so many never existed before it got light and warm. I'm very small, like a vulnerable child, but then swollen and huge altogether. I can't help the Alice comparison: that sudden shrinkage or growth, beyond the normal bounds of the human. I lust for the fall—that's all I want now. Air rushing quick around my skull, a delicious plunge. Shake out plumage, feel ridiculous. Everything limps.
It all started with a simple accident: flipping my bike off the road, the front wheels spun thrice, a smashed head smashed knee smashed hand and leg. Smashed brakes. The most extravagant black-purple bruise spread down my shins, clustering like a brand new galaxy around the bloody wounds of my knee. To bleed with gleaming garnet blood. Shocking the folk outside bars with my bleeding. To feel fresh and young at the sight of your insides red against the old old blue of flesh. This youth, this youth. I pedal forever to exact the same feeling, the rush of getting back on again, unlocking the city. I seem to be terribly in love with falling. The streets feel dizzy, the shapes and forms of things are not what they are. I sense they have changed without telling me. The world knows a secret I don't.
Illness, as it hits. The invisible sickness. I become an overflowing jar of water when I drink, the brimming emotions about to spill—things I usually hide and quench and disguise. Need to piss in awkward situations. Things you can roll out with a bike ride, a cluster of lung sucks and cheek flush adrenaline. But when they get to the surface, they poison the air around you. I spend longer hours in bed in the morning, night shifts and gigs leaving me delirious. To unroll from the covers is an art hardly mastered. I spend hours drifting back into sleep's coma: a settled levitation of uncertain images, which I try to translate upon waking. A friend and I keep a dream journal. I notice she is always noting faces in crowds: skins, layers, mirrors; juices and rinds and types of paring. My dreams grow more detailed over time, a side effect of writing them down, giving them the agency of language. They dance with image, they have additional emotional import.
I walk across the city, because sometimes that seems the only safe thing to do. The colours in the park just shy of midnight. Pastels brushed and blurred by a child's ham-fist. Chalked sentences around Woodlands. Pick up your dog shit. My nails grow long and strong and I do not clip them. I want them to seem like a pianist's, as if at any moment they might pluck out a symphony.
Something of grief scored into my bones. We lost someone we loved, after days of looking and sharing and fighting. My timelines overflow with collective sorrow and personal pain. I spend hours scrolling through tiny stories, slices of joy and memory's catharsis. We have all been hurt in some way; there is a tear. What rushes in and scolds the fresh wound. It is the one grey drizzly day I remember of this May, utterly fitting. I walk along the Kelvin, listening to The Midnight Organ Fight over and over, hymn to my youth and so many others. The drone fills my blood; I do nothing to stop the rain dampening my hair, filling my shoes, dripping down my neck. Shake out my stolen Monet waterlily umbrella. Remember the bleak streets of Ayr, adolescence an age of cool slain time. Kicking litter, drinking. Rain. Falling into sick sick love then forgetting. The rain rain rain, the rain falling into the sea. It is a membrane I crave, the pale wet indifference to shroud my pain. Sand on skin. What glisters at the edge then beckons. I did not know it was possible to hurt so much for someone you barely knew. It hurt more, in a way, than forms of loss by blood. Family funerals. Toasts. Drunk, I walk back along bridges and try not to cry at the moon, the black black water. Something astride us, everlong waxing and waning. Photographs of plastic, closeup and swallowed in song.
I tore an elegy out of my hours in bed and maybe one day I'll share it. Something in the darkness, heard.
By some miracle, I regain my night off to go see Phoebe Bridgers play Saint Luke's. It is a warm night and I walk all the way from west to east; the football's been on so the drunks stumble out of pubs in their green. She purrs something from the stage, like "So I heard y'all had a sports ball game on today". We smile at the understatement, there's a mesmerising space. I stand and my body is so weak my knees hurt and thighs burn and it takes every nerve in me to keep standing, to negate the presence of those around me. Her silvery voice slices through all that, makes perfect rivulets in my soul. When I think too much about it I can't breathe. There's a trembling of recognition, little swells of emotion that prick the whites of my eyes. What you thought you were over comes crashing again and over, over. The world whirrs and hurts. It's barely enough to keep clinging. Walking home, seeing old friends, I felt exhausted: every pore stung but I was also exhilarated. Climbing the concrete city. That feeling of release. The sweet way her vowels lit up the Mark Kozalek cover, the encore. I imagine bright candles snuffed out one by one, the great murder and the guilt of afterwards. Cold and red. The soft caress of the senses, a temporary catlike imaginary. Darkness comes over, consumes the white space you left for happiness. You can't have it without dreams; you can't have dreams without darkness. I am dependent on this sorrow. Watching the Ohio river flow at night. These landscapes I know mostly through song, these burning reeds and the gilt-edged clouds over desert metropolis, lost coyotes.
I start writing a novella, set between Britain, Berlin and some mysterious American prairie. Think cheddar-red sunsets, unrequited desire, distance. The indigo swimming pool, covered in leaves.
Distracting myself from everyday idleness, I go to see vast quantities of decent indie, mostly at The Hug and Pint or Glad Café. I take a break from an all-dayer to sit atop a hill in Queen's Park, south side, watching the sky grow peachy. Chew fruit bars. Drink gin to feel better, in soft medicinal quantities. Do not write as I wish I could. Leave gaps. The pages don't fill as I'd like. Walk back alone.
I think I am okay but then I walk over water and think of the cold decision. My mouth sours as though filled with the juice of an apple and any word I might have dissolves in the acid, prior to speech.
Remember as kids we'd build dams in rivers? Inefficient structures of misshaped rocks. The cool cola feel of water, smooth through our fingers.
In some hot bright room of the CCA, practicing Oulipo techniques with Lynn Crawford and Josh Thorpe. I write a handful of sestinas, a process that feels akin to weaving. I am paring threads. In times of crisis, I used to sit and make friendship bracelets, focusing on the unconscious flicker and flow of my fingers. The particular colours woven thrice. Pick six words and make do with their pattern, the possible.
Iced Americano from Caffé Nero. Jolt of the nerves. Heat haze over Greenock.
A delay in the body akin to the moon. Waxing slow motion; glitch and lag; the sense of being dulled; the sense of being injured, cramped and twisted. Walk around, see friends, drink bright and early. Waves of hot agony. Go to poetry readings. The sparkle and trance of listening. Speaking. Record poems that settle a corridor of airwaves, signals, emoji. However the connection works.
Get haircut. Scalp massage. Brighter orange bleeds to gold. Sodium. Get on a train.
Loch Lomond never looked so good in green and gold and blue as it did that May of 2016. I lay in the bluebells taking pictures, feeling so restful, red-headed. Fire against green. Now I arrive and make it my imperative just to walk. Early evening of a Sunday and I want to walk my way out of a sorrow, past gaggles of boozy youths; the fresh wound of loss still there and irritating, itching and burning. It is hard to have ordinary conversations, so I take myself off. Everything is so green and the green is so necessary. My body is heat and then freezing. Later, he holds his cold fingers to my neck and we trade levels of shiver. Purple nails and tales of bad circulation. I trip up on my past and can't help it, looking for the clavicle. The endless craving of a former body…
I parse more and more my botanical ignorance.
Missing the last train home from Edinburgh, after a poet's birthday party. Doors slammed shut in our face from the carriage. We missed the margaritas, and then the disco. Drank beer in the Meadows, contemplated snow. Menthol vape smoke and cluttered streets, strangers playing tennis all through the dusk. Lovely people. Record collection, good books for miles, pizza. Conversations sweet & real & funny.
The maidenhair fern grows healthy again. I have had her for two years and she's seen frazzled stages. Clipped back, green again. Does that boy drive? She asked, in the car to the garden centre. I miss the winding corridors of plants, the paint samples, colour cards, smell of wet pine and murmuring water features. May goes on, regardless.
A series of goodbyes. One friend moves back to Greece, the other to the Highlands. Life goes porous with the temporary emptiness that nonetheless lingers without supplement. Miss our wee chats at all ours, in stairwells or pink-tinted texts. Cascading games of our rucksacks swung. I listen to Josh telling Canadian ghost stories in the restaurant: tales of a bride burned alive by tea lights catching her luminous dress, doomed to forever haunt some hotel in the vast, faraway mountains. The geography remains vague in my mind. The customers come and go or don't at all. I polish cutlery to a deathly sheen.
Festival atmosphere of everywhere in sun. A sunny day in Glasgow, then another one. Minor riots in the park. How are we so blessed, it's amazing. Botanical taste at the back of my mouth forever. Bewitched house plants, buttered bread rolls, cold tea, slabs of Aviemore carrot cake, tarot readings in Thai restaurants. I wish I could be more glistening. The air in the park at night smells musky and sweet, weed smells and seeds and greening. Saying goodbye without babbling. I noticed the blue, two iris skies at the station.
The last card pulled a cosmic future.
Run across roads to see old friends, nearly get knocked over. Every day I regret not waking earlier. Not going to bed, the struggle to sleep and reset again. Scared of the endless bleed of days.
Feeling kinda weirdly low. I think he's one of the biggest inspirations in my life right now. Can someone inspire you, I mean in the way they deal with feelings? I value an honesty I can't offer myself. Not yet.
Rereading old Wordsworth and falling asleep while writing and leaving black dots of ink that seep through my diary. Opening scene of a whirlpool. Talk about Stonehenge with a singer from Portland I love very much. Something about the lapse of water, like every trickle another neglect. People walk round and round in circles, scrolling the whites of their phones as if in sync with the rolling traffic. In my childhood bedroom, I kept a framed photograph of the stones at sunset. I felt calm and serene and apart from myself, apart from time, when I looked at the stones.
I worked a 9-5 the day they found the body, his body. I was serving people with a smile I didn't recognise and trembled all over and the sense of witnessing this alter-reality or shock, the opening of feelings I thought I'd forgotten. What went on inside the shell, a quivering. Hid behind crates of dirty glasses, in curtains. Tried not to cry on my lunch break, watching solo acoustic version of 'Poke' on my phone. Hugging everyone. Earnest conversations. Work is a family. Hot strong coffee takes the edge off. Sometimes no need to talk. The lyrics come again and they burn harder this time. I need to catch my breath. Regain metabolism.
Beautiful messages out of the blue.
Emotional hangover. Best cure, I dig among the piles of clothes in my room and pull out a hardback book: Sylvia Plath's journals, Christmas gift from my mother in 2012. The book feels heavy and secure on my lap, like a complicated baby. Read her through sleep, while dinner is cooking. Steam, garlic scent, onions, steam. Her voice makes sluices through the fug of everything, so I can feel clear and real again. She mentions 'the adrenaline of failure', the up-and-down wavelengths of acceptance and rejection. A poet's lot. Lust. Apple-bitten first encounters. Fears & jealousies, petty grievances. Genuine pain. Periods of drifting depression, absence of thought. Blood. Self-laceration. Womanhood. Fizzy inspiration, sociability. New challenges in life are a test of endurance. 'Interesting', she notes, as to whether she would 'pass, keep myself intact'. How often are we aware of our everyday proximity to breakdown?
Saturday October 10th, 1959.
'Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master'.
7.30pm Wednesday, October 17, 1959.
'I don't know why I should be so hideously gloomy, but I have that miserable "nobody-loves-me" feeling'.
Journal Fagment 31st December 1955 – 1st January 1956.
'Sun well up, losing red and paling into blinding gold, air fresh and cold, essence of snow melting in sun, checking baggage and wandering toward the sea in a strange city'.
I will be flying to Munich in less than a week. The first time travelling alone without family. Somebody gift me with orientation. As though without sleep, the comedown slides across a map, egg yolk cool upon blue and green. My eyes won't focus.
Leaving the flat after 4pm each day, I am a stranger in a world I recognise dearly then don't. I am best in the early hours or late at night. Catching spiders on sidewalks. Everything between that is strange oscillation, is tuning in and out of social existence. What about when the words don't come. So many trite feelings. A terrible love. The shapes of things. I'm walking with. All of Glasgow a building site, dust of destruction and foundations laid. Piles of concrete slab, churning tar; industrial scents lace the too-warm air.
Where once I would say, hey I'm addicted to chocolate. Honestly, 200g+ a day! Now, it's a serotonin craving. Simple as. Deficient.
Playlists make better sense of these feelings. Thin black lace, an open window. Warmth.
Easier not to just clack and bite.
Go to prom re-enactment. Balloons and alcopops, rhinestones; blue velour and slacker rock. Fall asleep, nearly, on the night bus, passing airport and eerie business estates. The pool and the plastic palms. Walk home, low battery, ruinous sadness. Insomniac documentaries about Karen Carpenter. Milk cookie eyes and innocent villanelles. Her voice a creamy river, glossy brunette, hometown glory.
We enter Gemini season. The energy shifts. Borderlines and places I can't cross in my dreams, lost people glinting in distance. Blue folds of tumblr embrace me again. Streams of midnight images, pastel landscapes and metallic objects melted to abstraction. Things split and twin and I miss all my soulmates, past and present. Editing, editing. I miss when the truth felt less of a shimmer. Sleep it off, sleep it off.
The loud loud noise of all these feeds.
Out in the hot dusty yard of SWG3, disco ball scintillating in the sun, I see LCD Soundsystem with my friends around me. For once, that's totally enough. Stand between two brothers. Smile all through set. There is a sort of ultimate feeling. I can change I can change I can change. Synths blister through me. Drums. Feel drunk when I'm not. Feel heady. The old chandeliereal, teenage way. Sun glitters. Swap limbs. Burst memories are easy.
Wander home through herbaceous border. Covet her 3am poems, blog posts. We stay up all night discussing complex crushes, then I'm sad because endings are happening all around me. Withdrawals. Wilted tulips. Little flurries of unexpected messages, best sensation. Campari with soda or cherry brandy, amaretto on ice and sharing a seat, clinking glasses and feeling breezy. Sitting in dark galleries on hay bales, waiting. Clutching cigarettes I won't smoke but stole anyway. Talk of literary idols, musicians and artists. Writing things down with conviction, like: I love the new Stephen Malkmus album, so much! Sparkle Hard! The dreamy subsistence of the suburbs at dusk. Those shoes are shinier than my future. I hope he's okay. Plagiarise conversations. You could boil it all down to a haiku, May a tiny, significant bulb of gorse:
Luxury sadness
Twice for sale, gold and then green
Forget to mention.
Bob Dylan – Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You
Sharon Van Etten – The End of the World (Carpenters cover)
Cat Power – Metal Heart
The Twilight Sad – I Couldn't Say It To Your Face (Arthur Russell cover)
Manchester Orchestra – Architect (feat. Scott Hutchison)
Harrison Whitford – Poltergeist Love
Pavement – Type Slowly
LUMP – Curse of the Contemporary
Bright Eyes – Coyote Song
Common Holly – If After All
Sufjan Stevens – Romulus
Milk Carton Kids – Wish You Were Here
Mark Kozalek – Good Nostalgia
Fossil Collective – Disarm
Nap Eyes – Every Time The Feeling
Arctic Monkeys – Star Treatment
Iceage – Beyondless
Parquet Courts – Violence
The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Animal Wisdom
Kendl Winter – Shades of Green
Big Star – Thirteen
Hatchie – Sleep
James Blake – Don't Miss It
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Bike Lane
Sufjan Stevens – Make Out In My Car (Moses Sumney cover)
The Innocence Mission – Look out from Your Window
Frightened Rabbit – Head Rolls Off
LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends
Author mariaxroseCategories commentary, creative writing, culture and media, environment, lists, literature, memory, music, nature, personal, photography, poetry, reflections, seasonal, timePosted on May 30, 2018 May 30, 2018 Leave a comment
Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole
Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person
—Emily Berry
Richard Dawson's 'To the Sea' opens with anxious strings, unearthly vocal drones and harmonised chants that carry across a darkening, eldritch bay. There's a shiver in my heart and a sense of the waves chopping apart what constitutes the sea, the sea, the sea. How much sea do you need for it to be sea? Is every wave an incantation—and if so, whose? What if you took whole eons and chunks of the sea away, would you be left with puddles or rivers? That word that shudders: estuary. When does the sea become ocean? I feel it is to do with a feeling. To feel oceanic is different to feeling the sea. There's an intimacy with the latter, its intimation of bitter-green waters, childhood memories, tidal flats on which you take off your shoes and wade towards the water. The sea is a mirror for our feelings, but they don't stay still—you can't just project them. They change like light; the water answers. The water has its own shanties, stirred up by night tides that lick at the edge of the land less like lovers than knives. A silver kiss of sharpness and silence, a tiredness.
How many times have we apostrophised the sea? Built into it myth, folded our cavernous longing through song and let ourselves out into the blue. The sea is a monster, a tyrant, a Leviathan; the sea is feminine, rippling, birthing and giving. We can never decide. The sea is the unseen foetus of sound in a shell, little figure as portal, an unwhorling. Imagine how its voice would look on a sonogram, the whispers. The sea is a place to blow away cobwebs, to unravel your hair and blink into wilderness. In 'On the Sea', Keats urges 'Oh ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, / Feast them upon the wideness of the sea'. The sea is expanse, expansive, expanding. We can stand at the edge and be caressed by its urges; the catharsis in that. The elastic edges, islands and coastlands and cliffs that shift and zoom and shrink with parallax. We whisper and the wind carries forth our voices. It's good to howl at the sea, alone on a beach.
Then there's Charlotte Smith's catchily titled, 'Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic'. The sublime in this poem is born less from the sea itself, the Sussex Cliffs Smith walked all her life, than the 'giant horrors' of the man's madness. A madness glimpsed readily enough by the speaker, at a distance: 'He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know / The depth or duration of his woe'. His mind is the unseen deep of the sea. If reason is a curse, this state of nature in which the man has found himself can't be so bad. He can only plunge through his days in a kind of 'moody sadness' of unknowing, an eddying through time: his 'hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies / Murmuring responses to the dashing surf'. This primal communion between man and sea is met with the sensation of legend, adorned with a sonnet's rhythm and rhyme.
But the sea, equally, is a haunted place for all of us. I remember being obsessed with this Los Campesinos! song at a time in my life when I was stuck in the city with unhealthy constancy, wanting to wail for the blue back home. There's a burn in your chest, then indifference again. 'The Sea is a Good Place to Think About the Future' is a song about a broken girl, intimate with and yet distant to the singer, starving herself in response to grief. What could be a self-lacerating song, a depressing lament, is lifted by the strings, the joined-up shouts, the catharsis of those candid lyrics and the way they break into chorus, so loud:
And all you can hear is the sound of your own heart
And all you can feel is your lungs flood and the blood course
But oh I can see five hundred years dead set ahead of me
Five hundred behind, a thousand years in perfect symmetry
The song swirls with the clutter of contemporary culture, our fraught politics and virtual addictions; but it draws towards the deep time of the sea, the abyssal possibilities fringing Britain with mist and grey. What could be a desolate song of dwindling spirit, bursts into that thumping, rousing chorus and the release in that, the release so strong. Waves crashing ahead of you, the splash-backs spitting your face with salt tears so that just to stand there is to have a conversation with the sea, with what hurts in the Earth and might hurt forever in you, but that's okay. An inhuman empathy; the human washed out of language.
Why is it we need the sea to look 'just like the edge of the world'? Why is we need the horizon of apocalypse ahead of us? Does love always require the threat of the ending; does death have us thinking of forever beginnings? There is the question of translation. Are we all, like Charlotte Smith's 'lunatic' (she must be forgiven for her eighteenth-century lack of political correctness) just muttering in our pain to the sea? Who will hear us? In Emily Berry's poem, 'Picnic', communing with the sea is like the kinds of communication you do in therapy. Trying to pick out the pieces that make up the story of the sea, the pieces that make up the story of grief, then 'polish' those uncertain feelings before 'a man in a room', whose ahhs and mhms are perhaps no coherent than the whispers of the sea. Sometimes we just need someone—something—to listen. Sometimes we just need to listen.
Susurrations of the tongue and throat, the vowel sound sweetening eeeee. Sea, sea, sea.
At the brink of most existential crises in my life, I revisit the sea. Summer 2016, I got a train to Cardross then walked a couple miles along a busy road, wildflowers growing in the verges past a cemetery, to Ardmore Point. The smell of the brine was like a drug: this vague area where the River Clyde becomes Firth and innumerable fragments of quartz are washed up on shore, residue of the sea's mysterious industry. I looked across the water and I suppose I saw Greenock. There is so much of the jagged geography of westerly Scotland unfamiliar to me. The northness of names I have loved since childhood, the west coast forever of fishing villages, port towns, places of old time and tiny ruin: Luss, Arisaig, Applecross, Ullapool, Stornoway, Uist, Portree. A new indulgence in studying maps, mostly for a vague sense of where blue meets green. I have started to worry about sea levels. I keep a vague memory of my mother's old home in Twickenham, where there are plaques to mark places where the river burst and flooded as high as the houses. The fields near my father's house in Ayrshire become so easily sodden with water, a sunken valley where sheep sometimes drown. A favourite childhood memory is the single night we camped in Arisaig, and I'm sitting on a rock snapping fizzy laces between my teeth and watching a lurid strawberry sunset. Still I am filled with such sugary imaginings. The sand was so smooth, in the last light it seemed almost a mirror. It didn't matter that we woke to torrential rain, with that sunset still within me.
I open my sky-blue edition of W.S. Graham's (Greenock-born) New Collected Poems and find 'Falling into the Sea': 'Breathing water is easy / If you put your mind to it'. I think it is maybe a poem about dying, about the changes in the body, scary at first, a metamorphosis you adjust to: 'Breathe / Deeply and you will go down / Blowing your silver worlds'. It is a plunge through new emotions, learning how to float in the bubbling eternity you have blown for yourself. Is this a dream? Is this a survival guide for the drowned? When you arrive on the 'sea / Floor', Graham suggests, you will encounter a 'lady' from 'the Great Kelp Wood' who offers you good British hospitality then 'asks you / If you come here often'. How many times do we pretend we are mermaids as children, harbouring some hope of adoption by the elements. I spread my dreams on the sea like butter on a scone, the way they glimmer in the light then go. Are we recalling some anthropogenic trauma, deep embedded blue and sea green in our genes? In every deja vu there is a song, a half-remembered line with a context long forgotten: 'Go down to the sea / And tell me what it is that you wanna be' (Swim Deep). The sea is possibility, maybe; summertimes and sweet jangly, insouciant indie. Singing the greys, the blues, the self in crisis. The backdrop to so many of our deepest conversations, the murmurings melodic. The backdrop to perfect silence. When things went wrong in our house, we'd drive out and take long walks along Maybole Shore. We often didn't talk; it was the wind in our ears and the kicking up sand and the smell of the salt that cleared the air, that did the work of unspoken feelings. There was the night two friends and I took vodka down Prestwick Beach and talked our lives out and embraced in the drunken rain, the spray of the water. It was so cold it burned the blood from our fingers, but we didn't care. We were so fucking pure.
Ten minutes listening to Drexciya in your living room and already I feel subaquatic again, 8am on a Sunday. Remember, we came from the sea. Our bodies are so much water and salt; we can hardly process any more of it. Crisping the lisp between here and there and what might drown. I was still a teenager when I sat by the harbour and twisted pink thrift into the plaits of my hair. I'd weave this space into a novel someday, the pain of the land sloshed up in geologic process; again the erosion, the sense of two worlds coming apart as a gaggle of teenagers stand lost in the waves, on the rocks and in water. It would all come to an end this way. I guess the bad techno thudded through every staccato chapter, the fault-lines of pointless dialogue. On a whim, I titled the whole thing West Coast Forever. Its universe was jagged, familiar and strange at once, self-destructive to the point of indulgence. I wrote it because I missed the sea, its harshness. I gave my twin protagonists eyes of green; two halves of what could be. I wanted to think about all the ways we are wild once, to try not to forget it. The sea is a lore we pass onto our children. The rocks we are not supposed to swim beyond, the orange buoys that mark the danger. The lives lost and loves found, the glitchy repetitions; the sand that thickens our mouths like overripe fruit, our words purpling and furring.
Then there are gentler lagoons, bays which float out and away into grander blues. Clear and liquid lyrics, drizzling like moonlight or syrup over some wide and distant surface, the panoramic sea. The finger-plucked acoustic soothes and tells us what to do in its melancholic verse. Cat Power's 'Sea of Love', Julie Byrne's 'Sea As It Glides'. I am obsessed with how these songs might sound, crackling and passed down to us over a ship radio, the edges worn away. The uncertain rasp of tuning in. I think of 'Above the road (Skies of Blue)' by Fionn Regan, or Johnny Flynn's 'Heart Sunk Hank': antique and between times; recordings on a Voice-o-Graph; all white noise and sparseness, the yearning words. When I was twelve, I spent four days on a little fishing boat, bobbing up and down the Sound of Mull, between Oban and Tobermory. I lived off a Pepsi cup full of pick'n'mix sweets for the most of it, my sugar levels spiking like the rise and fall of the tide around us. Back then, I rarely noticed the wax or wane of silver and night, flesh and bone, blood and milk; I was only just learning to treat my body in cycles. There were very little times in the journey when we couldn't see land, but Oh the loneliness when it went away.
When the mist came and there was only the greys. I used to play this game as a child, embracing my Pisces moon, thrashing through the waves and swimming out so far that someone on the sand would be shouting me back, roaring my name. I rarely cried; I dealt with my emotions that way. I liked that fort-da play of presence and absence, testing boundaries; the idea that I might disappear and become something other. The running against what resisted. I liked the way the waves licked my arms and thighs and stung me, the sand in my pores still flaking away later when I stood in the shower. The body catches a taste for the other world. It unravels.
All weekend I've been listening to Frightened Rabbit, 'Swim Until You Can't See Land', trying to heal the torn-apart strings of my heart. Ways we deal with loss, chasing the source. Some kinds of plunge are stilling, others sweep you up again and you're back to before and the shock of it. You think you are okay but then again the sting behind your eyes, like somehow you let the sea in. This song will always feel new to me, a tune coming fresh out of hurt and to burst into something else altogether. There's the rolling bass and energetic strums and the way the mood changes easy as weather between brilliant and bleak. I watch a YouTube video of Scott Hutchison singing an acoustic version in some courtyard; you can tell it's spring from the two fire tulips that grow beside his bench. It's spring like it is now, spring before the sunshine and colour felt wrong. There's a helicopter flying overhead, so you know the world goes on and there are other bodies drifting into distance. And I miss him. I miss him.
And the water is taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I have is a body adrift in water, salt and sky
Collapse again and again on the anaphora, the swirling, thirsty water. Who gets to wash up, who is vomiting their life and drying out on the sand and who presses a cool palm to their raging forehead? Why do we have these fantasies of saving someone from the sea? Is it a primitive fear: that we will lose everything we know that way; our life's loves and possessions dragged away, river to firth to sound to sea. I flick through my Instagram stories this very morning, and my brother is filming the sea with his phone: an hour ago, ten seconds of grey-licking waves. He's somewhere far away, I don't remember—Bali, maybe. The sea is a trip-hop ballad, a rippling distance in which the ambient sounds don't save me from thinking. The sea a great wash of the late 1990s, a millennial curve at the turn of distance. I think I think too much. Didn't they worry, before 2000 came, that every system would collapse on zero? Didn't Emily Berry describe the sea's wee ripples as glitches? I long for the tidal flats and the drag of scavenging gulls in the skies above, howling some song that would save me. What are they hungry for, the circling birds? Arthur Russell is telling me to jump off the platform again; in the glimmer of that cello I can hear the echoes of a seascape blurred, pixelated to grey but alluring still. I plug myself in, deep in the chasms of sonic escape; here it is all wave and wave of shoegaze. The sea glows red before I sleep.
We need to break the waves, we need to break our minds. There's a cleaving in there, hard as a diamond but liquid if you breathe deep enough the cold salt grey. It's the saddest summer of my life and where was that aeroplane when I needed it, soft and sweet. Then neutral, oh so neutral; in all oceanic tang the lingering metallic taste. Do you miss me. I miss this. How blue the sea was from the air, so clear! One of maybe five songs I can play on guitar, the simple chord progression kills me still. How close his vocals are to the mic, that loudness an unabashed roar, a unified sound. My guitar strings are so old they sag like kelp strung across rocks deep below and in that looseness there's a release, a new feeling. A lyric embrace which is the voice rising from platitude in earnest acrobatics and disappearing in a brass solo. The sway of the rhythm, I'm realising now, is a bit like the buoyed-up feeling of being on a boat, or watching the waves side-to-side from the land and finding your body a little seduced by the back and forth. Who is there on the shoreline, who waits? Before it gets dark, when we are still the sweet notes and the swaying trees. Little cross rhythms, a minor key and so far apart in our shadows and secrets. Ocean rain. I won't say the name, I won't say anything.
The sea is a darkness we hold under our tongues. Sometimes when I think of it too much, I see myself as a siren. But Oh the cost of screaming in the night. Elizabeth Fraser in 'Song to the Siren', haunting and flawless: 'Here I am / Here I am'. The way her voice curls and shimmers, like a whirlpool coming into itself upon shipless waters, swallowing those foolish enough to break their bodies on the sea—'Oh my heart / Shies from the sorrow'. In what lick of tide may we assert ourselves. I flip up the lid of my laptop, see the screen, and all is a glorious ersatz blue. A whole thalassic core of thought.
Berry again: 'If a person standing still watched another person minutely moving would it / seem after a while as if they were watching the sea?' How do we hold who we love in our vision, crawling at the brink of distance, disappearance? Why do they always become the sea? Why is there ever this scattering, and can that alone be the work of elegy—the between the between, the breezy, the needing?
Let go, for eternity
is too much with us
& not
with us yet.
—Francesca Lisette
Author mariaxroseCategories analysis, commentary, creative writing, environment, literature, memory, music, nature, personal, photography, poetry, reflections, seasonal, UncategorizedPosted on May 20, 2018 May 20, 2018 Leave a comment
Days of Scene
There was a brief period of my life where I was obsessed with Chicago. I thought all the best music came out of Chicago (maybe I could name three bands). It had a specific molten quality in my mind, like everyone there was never quite present but always dissolving at some point into the walls or sidewalks. There were basement clubs and people drank lager lager lager, a nod to cool Britannia, or else they swilled actual Liquor. I actually had no idea what went on in Chicago. It was possible everyone smoked in dingy bars and went about listening to jazz, feeling miserable. Did it rain much? All I had to go by was a Fall Out Boy lyric: 'I've got a sunset in my veins / And I need to take a pill to make this town feel okay'. I was thirteen and still didn't know what Seven Minutes in Heaven meant, let alone Sophomore; the spidery long titles made me feel Poetic. I was convinced Pete Wentz was the Bard of his generation. I still hadn't seen any live footage of him goofing around onstage. I mostly thought of him in dark corners, sweeping his fringe aside, scribbling lyrics. Too much got spilled on the internet. I couldn't believe when I found out he only played bass.
Wasn't there a gimmick with one of their albums, where you got special tarot cards if you pre-ordered?
We used to stand on tables, chairs and cabinets back then, to get our selfies. Back then, they were prosaically named Profile Pics. You had to aim for a good mirror. The visible flash, you thought, was just a sunbeam addition to the general ~aesthetic~. You'd comment on each other's photos, pc4pc. Like, Hello! It was good to get your legs in. Stripy knee socks or gauzy ripped tights. I wanted to wear a watch round my ankle like the lady with the white pumps at the party in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I put rubber bands round my hair, dying it semi-permanent blue or pink, trying to get 'coon tails. I backcombed with a religious zeal, scrunching as I walked to maintain the buoyancy. Hairspray wafted around us; a flammable aura of considerable permanence. There was an imperative to asymmetry, to looking a little like a lamppost. We all wanted to be skinny, we wanted the biggest hair.
I grew addicted to the bright, popcorn guitar licks. The sugary vocals. They spoke to someone that wasn't me; there was this constant apostrophe of the lost girl, the lost boy, the key to a locked diary. I felt like a year would pass and I'd slip into these narratives, grow tall, smelling the gas of those cigarette lighters my friend used to rig to make the flames a foot high.
I don't blame you for being you / But you can't blame me for any name.
There was this corny idea of the rock show, everyone bobbing their heads in time. It was basically prom without the couples and expensive dresses. We all dropped weight for it, we all found a sweat in the rhythm and heat. When I got sick, I watched Kerrang! TV for hours, probably still playing my Game Boy or something. They'd show FOB videos more or less on repeat. I waited up for my crush on MSN, gossiped with friends; maybe there was something in that cyan-coloured comic sans font he used. We drank Jolt Cola cut half and half with Glen's Vodka. An electric shandy, six times your daily recommended caffeine. Running down the beach. Emoticon wars. Back then in the middle of nowhere, a text was like a radar signal sent from the deep.
2018, I try gifting my cousin's baby daughter with a Hello Kitty hair clip. She doesn't get it.
I wrote all sorts of pop punk lyrics all over my Sports Direct trainers. I like to think I turned up to gym class with these crappy white trainers, each one adorned with My shadow's the only one that walks beside me. My teacher looked me up and down with disdain. I imagined she listened to Meatloaf on the car to work each day, wolfing tuna sandwiches. She said my trainers were too 'flat'. She dragged me out the library, where I was often skiving; she made me play badminton for hours. I liked to reach and aim, slam something delicate and thin to the ground. That was kinda how it felt being in the world, trying to fly out all light and free, then some dude with a bat just whacking you back down, crushed and moth-like. Playing badminton felt vengeful. There were spiders in the showers of the changing rooms afterwards. There were kids in first year who would throw golf balls over a fence to hit us. If they smashed a window, we'd get the blame. Some of us stole fags round the back of the gym block, looking out at the Carrick Hills.
Walking the crossroads was my favourite escape. I liked the bit that unfurled into greenery, sheep, rolling hills. Sometimes I'd be climbing Kildoon, sitting by the falls. That was learning to breathe again. When a lorry came, I felt the rush pass through me like a terrible swarm of ghosts. I was rattling.
There were diet pills you crushed with pro plus, sipped with diet coke or JD.
In The Virgin Suicides, Lux writes the name of her crush on her underwear. This is a false start, by any means. In writing we only possess a shard of some other self. It's only ever temporary. The shape of ribs, a smile, the cut of your bangs or hipbones.
Imagine writing a name now. Keats Keats Keats. Each iteration a tiny seed.
Sometimes I liked to just lie on the concrete.
In town, loitering is our ontological condition. We exist for no other reason. We browse but never buy things. Some of us sneak lip glosses, necklaces, bars of chocolate beneath our sleeves. I had a friend that could even steal booze and pills. I've saved up my daily lunch money just to get here on Saturdays. In Burger King, we kill time and snort vitamins for kicks. A year before the haze of legal highs set in. We are so young.
All our talk is just procrastination. I watch you try on neon sports jackets in TKMaxx and it's the best best thing.
In Chicago, they had a scene. Sufjan sang about it on some movie they showed, eventually, on Sunday TV. Little Miss Sunshine. I'm not saying I identified with the nihilist son, but…I wished sometimes it was acceptable not to talk. The less I ate, the less I spoke. That was liberating, I suppose. I was in love with the place, in my mind / In my mind.
There was the Easter holidays we played football down the Low Green every day, the last time in that year I remember being truly happy. All sorts of drama happened, breakups and makeups, and we watched it roll out from a distance. Smoked occasional menthols, hid under climbing frames, spun each other round in the night till we were dizzy. I never once grew tired of waiting at train stations. I had my iPod, my violet-lined eyes, my dreams.
We walked along the river sometimes, deep in the foliage, and joked about places you could get away with having sex in. We counted the bottles of Buckfast, watched out for insects. Nothing seemed alive in the undergrowth.
At school, there were never any practice rooms free so we sat on the floors of corridors, playing our shitty guitars. 'Californication', over and over, following some half-arsed tablature. The solo to Robbie Williams' 'Angels' (how joyous I'd be if I knew ten years on a friend would make a vapourwave remix). I had no time for it–I was never coordinated enough for those licks and chords–but having the guitar in front of you was a kind of protection. You could talk all nonsense and pretend to passing teachers that you were doing work. As if they understood the mysteries of music. Regularly, the tech teacher would ask me, whenever I came to school with my trombone, if I was carrying a machete, an AK47. I nourished a kind of inward, low-level fury. Sometimes, they'd drop pennies at our feet for a laugh, as though we were busking. I wondered about all that copper and metal: where it went, eventually.
We wrote a song that ripped off the chords to 'Brain Stew' and my amp blew up someone's boyfriend's laptop. On weekends, there were sleepovers and we'd stay up till the wee hours, breaking apart massive bars of Cadbury's Caramel while chatting to folk on MSN, Chatroulette, the laugh track of Friends or Father Ted in the background. There were only two buses home a day, and the rhythm of my Saturdays and Sundays was governed by that. I liked arriving home, sleepily, forgetting I once had a routine. It was wholesome to lie on your bed, listening to Mogwai, slowly sinking.
Occasionally, we went swimming.
There's a MySpace still out there with all these photos, histories stripped of context. Many of them are in sepia, owing to some new effect I'd discovered on my phone. It was a slide-up phone, designed for playing music out loud. It was like I wanted every memory to be always-already history, taking those sepia pictures. You can't tell our age, except from the expressions, the thinness of our wrists. It wasn't that we were innocent as such, it was just that we didn't care at all. It was written on our faces, this not caring. Soon to be fun, let's see.
Every lyric iteration of html inevitably fades. What minimalist temple I had designed, stamped with diamond symbols and Crystal Castles mp3s, has since crumbled. It was probably a rip-off anyway. Wanting to look like Uffie, wanting to be cryptic, aphoristic. Coveting emotions as metaphoric fruit. All those bulletins, midnight reveries stolen from time on the family PC, are deleted. The endless, self-questioning quizzes. We learned more about ourselves, about each other that way than we ever did in a PSE lesson at school. We trod a dangerous line, exposing our confessionals. Last time you cried, last time you kissed someone, who do you trust no matter what? Sometimes it bounced back in unfortunate ways.
This has been said / So many times that I'm not sure if it matters.
Kanye calls his kid Chicago. He has that song 'Homecoming', with the cute piano riff, a monochrome world. I get a kick out of every library book that was published in Chicago. I have no idea what it means. The pages are dull and yellow, the text swims in a sepia sea. I can't listen to those albums again without feeling some predictive force, a face from the tarot. It's like every fast food ad has a burger that looks identical to the last, as though every diner uses the same stock photo database. All our desires grow uniform, in the envy of hair and boys and all consumables. Circling back. Do you think about me now and then?
In Ayr, there are twin roundabouts bordering the station. I always got lost, trying to drive through both of them smoothly. I always came back round, caught in the westward trajectories of the next, the lights from Morrisons carpark smouldering into a school night sunset. Mostly I miss the booze and the dunes, the clandestine sense of just being there, cutting about in front of the ocean. Cutting out time as a fact of the water, the light; sirens cloying the air behind us.
Author mariaxroseCategories analysis, beauty and style, commentary, creative writing, culture and media, fashion, literature, music, personal, reflections, the body, time, video gamesPosted on May 2, 2018 Leave a comment
At the Turn of the Hologram Clock
[written this morning on the back of a terrible, asynchronous dream]
Returning to the town would entail a strangeness, of that she was certain. She knew the old walls, the grocers, the station store; knew how little they would have changed in the time she'd been away. Knew the same faces would glide by, new lines etched upon their skin but otherwise utterly familiar. She knew that deep dread would rise again, a sense of everything closing in. The square with the trampled flowers, the narrow streets. Even the trees, her mind's flicker arborescent since 2015. The elms with their slender memory. The autumnal glut of rowan berries, so many beads of red. She knew the pavements where once she lay down, drunk on honey and love, orange and whisky. Blood vessels burst in her wide child's eyes. Funny, she had never really been in love here. There was a boy once, but he was distant, deranged, slightly drugged. He rarely came down. All his thoughts were the gasp of a moonshine desire and his body was sullied with need, magnesium deficiency. He watched her always with a twinge of curiosity.
Back then when she ate, her veins rose like snarling vipers and she was ashamed. She ate to forget him.
All this gorgeous reverie was an incense stick piercing the soil, a night in the park, a stolen July. On the swings they sat, listening to the rhythmic glitch of the crickets. The space between them was ten years; ten years in which she had grown, her face bloomed like a rose. He learned a glossary of drugs and offered her his alien vocabulary. Eventually they lay on the tarmac, the moon encased by the skewed geometries of the climbing frame. Its colour and rust, the slow shed of its millioning flakes.
"This will be us in the future as we were before," she murmured.
She had been running for hours to get here. Dropped the knife in a stranger's garden, when she knew she was clear of the worst. She thought of that flat in the city; its musty smell, its entrapments, crumbs of cake. Her other half had kept her there, pierced needles through her flesh till she wept and bled. At the bus station, pleading with strangers for change, this place had seemed the single possibility. The town, the past; a promise in miniature.
She thought of the chestnut mare in the paddock south of the housing estate. Whether it was still there. She called him from a payphone; he had the same number, still lived with his parents. She thought of crooked ladies paddling around the health centre, swapping ill-informed platitudes on the state of the nation. The man who sold cigarettes from a van, emitting that scent of lust and vanilla ice cream whip.
She felt sick.
"We're already who we are," he replied.
"It's not enough."
Her body was constellated with pin-point scars. She let the straps slip down her shoulders, rolled over to face him. Something passed in the shadow of his eye, a midnight cloud; he was silently tracing the trajectories between each star, that map of her skin—sleeveless, arterial, easy. There was no ending to anything.
"Your eyes are like…" she wanted a meaningful statement. They had been here before. "Like summer meadows, emeralds. Freckled, sparkling, something. You're so lovely." She wanted a cigarette.
None of this really came through. Her words were transmissions, little shivers. The ground was so cold beneath them and soon they were falling, the black of it catching on the skin of their teeth. The past was there, alive in each blade of grass; singing its secret elegy, eerie in the leaves. It was so easy to slip back into sweet paralysis.
"You're not as thin as you used to be," he said, by way of breaking the dream.
"But I'm less solid," she answered, turning through smoke, maybe to kiss him. For he was different now, and so was she.
Author mariaxroseCategories creative writing, environment, literature, memory, naturePosted on July 17, 2017 Leave a comment
ONE need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
It seems silly to write about one's love for a house. After all, houses are inanimate things; they can't feel or think, can't love you back. It's a bit materialistic, a bit capitalist perhaps, to love one's property. Still, houses aren't just houses. We are brought up in this world to experience ourselves through things. Not only is this the sociological and psychological consequence of living in a world where we define ourselves through the symbolic order of possessions, but it is also the personal, lived experience of assigning meaning to that which surrounds us, the structures and spaces in which we spill our being. What's more, the very act of dwelling is charged with the problem of desire. We constantly pursue ownership and control over that which we occupy; constantly assigning possession, marking territory. As Karl Marx said, 'the felt need for a thing is the most obvious, irrefutable proof that the thing is part of my essence, that its being is for me and that its property is the property, the particular quality peculiar to my essence': we are, through and through, the things that we own, desire, lose. Maybe it is our seemingly irrevocable need for things that dooms us to a certain emptiness, a loss that prevents the fulfilment of the self.
The old Lacanian equation of desire as relying on lack. Maybe we love things more when we lose them. We start to think if we ever really had them in the first place; we question the possibility of possession altogether. In the void we clasp at meaning, like a baby blindly seeking nourishment.
When I was just three years old, my parents, my brother and I left a cramped cottage in leafy, small-town Hertfordshire for a three-bedroom, two-garden semi-detached house in Ayrshire, Scotland. Land of agriculture, Burns, Buckfast and teenage pregnancy. My first day at school, a couple years later, and I did not understand why everyone kept saying aye, still thinking they were making bizarre expressions of the first person pronoun, rather than simply saying yes. Ken was another strange one. Scotland was foreign and I was even more foreign. I spent most of my childhood trying to grapple with my Englishness, working out who the hell I was and what's more, who did I want to be? Toning things down to avoid being bullied…but really, deep down, did I want to be different from anyone else? Slowly, the older I got, I felt the bright Scots words trickle into my vocabulary: hanek, gads, glaikit, wee, Ned, jakey. When my cousins visited, I found myself wishing I had the purity of that sweet, Hampshire accent, instead of my own brand of weird hybridity. When friends at school made jokes about Scotland's superiority, their hatred of the English, the need for their country's freedom, I felt that wavering sense of otherness, an instinctive need to protect my 'origins'. As a child, England meant family; it meant going home and being 'free'. Days out in the summer holidays to the sun-sparkly cities of Brighton and London; the suburban beauty of Milton Keynes in autumn. I liked how I was the only one in my primary school class who wasn't born in Irvine hospital. When you're a kid, you kind of like to be special.
Maybe it's terribly ironic that I would grow up to become a pretty staunch supporter of Scottish independence; someone who works in a whisky bar and identifies more with the social milieu of Kevin Bridges' standup than that of Austen novels, who cut their teeth drinking Frosty Jacks instead of White Lightning, who fell in love with a wasted seaside town instead of London, and spent inordinate amounts of time listening to endearingly miserable Scottish folk bands over whatever was 'hip' in Hoxton. When did the change happen? At what point did I stop mourning my lost English childhood, with its (probably false) promise of sunny summers, middle-class comforts and extra bank holidays? It was long before I started to associate much of England with the heartlands of UKIP and Brexit, long before I realised that Scotland did things differently (socially and politically) to the rest of Britain, and that this was a very good thing.
I guess part of it was realising I didn't really belong in England either. I couldn't play the cool and demure English rose, not all the way. For one, with the lack of sun up north, my naturally blonde hair faded, and I've now settled on a Celtic shade of copper red. Back then family members would point out queer things I said, like when I relayed stories about folk 'battering' each other at school, or how it was 'pishin'' it down with rain, or my periodic and derisive expressions of 'haneck' whenever anything unfortunate happened. My brother and I would amp up our 'Scottish' banter whenever we were down south, cracking jokes and putting on our rough Ayrshire accents the same way any Brit does abroad. I started to realise that I sort of loved the strangeness of Scotland: the Ceilidh dancing we had to learn in P.E, the pervasive aura of folktales, of haggis and kelpies; bottles of Irn Bru that I was forbidden from drinking as a kid, the stern broad Scots of the man on the tape who announced the beginning of every French Listening paper. I wasn't sure how well I fit in, but I liked it anyway. It started to feel like home.
Home. The year before I left for uni.
In my hometown of Maybole, there is a strict policing of difference. The smoke plume of neds at every bus stop will be the adjudicators of any risqué fashion you choose to indulge in. If you wore black and a slick of thick eyeliner, for example, they were sure to enquire whether you 'shagged deed folk'; if you wore a miniskirt you were a 'wee hoore'; if you were a guy who had slightly long hair you were a 'poof'; skinny jeans made you – perhaps the ultimate insult – 'an emo'. In our school, there was the Mosher's Corner, the Farmer's Corner, the Smoker's Corner, to name just a handful of territories whose policing often bordered on the militant. In first year, I witnessed a friend being shoved headfirst into a spiky hedge because he tried to 'invade' the Farmer's Corner. At the Mosher's Corner, which took a couple of years to gain full acceptance, you were pelted with stones by bored and angry first years, or scolded by irate P.E. teachers, who had to pass through the area and always liked to pull you up on inane details of uniform. Don't tell me I can't wear my stripy knee socks to school when that guy's cutting about in a tracksuit.
In the midst of this battlefield of identities, is it any wonder I loved my house? The one place where I could be whatever I wanted? Whenever we had to write our address down at school, I relished scribbling down the house name, Daisybank, with all its pastoral resonance. Compared to all the places I have lived in Glasgow (room such and such, flat 1, 2, 3 etc), having a house name is a proper luxury. It was on the road to Turnberry Golf Course; ten minutes walk from the Ranch caravan park. I had a pal who owned a dairy farm nearby, and the woman a few doors down bred collie dogs. For some reason, we always seemed to live beside ministers. In a way, Maybole is the epitome of rural quaintness: it is famous mostly for its former glory as a cobbler's paradise, for being the meeting place of Rabbie Burns' parents, for having a relatively crap golf course, a sixteenth-century castle and once upon a time a couple of lemonade factories. You're ten minutes drive from the sea and surrounded by vibrant green hills studded with pretty villages. The air is fresh and the water tastes great. There's even a train line.
Still, it's difficult to appreciate all that stuff as a teenager. I started to dream of Glasgow as this mythical solution to all my problems: a place of cosmopolitanism, where people read poetry, played in bands, and didn't care what anyone thought of them.
It was only when I moved away from home, got a flat in the city, that I realised the extent of my weird sense of belonging to this silly wee town where technically I had no roots.
The last time I properly cried was the day I said goodbye to Daisybank and Maybole for the last time. I paced round the empty rooms, hearing the silent creak of the floorboards, memories passing by me as fleetingly as moths, leaving me with this overwhelming sense of grief. It was like saying goodbye to the entirety of childhood, the last eighteen years of my life, all at once. Unlike most people, we didn't move around much and this was our home all that time, through thick and thin, good times and bad. I realised how protected I had felt by the presence of the house, its strong sandstone walls, the elaborate latticework of memories that had wove themselves into every structure, every smell and texture and object.
I sat on the train back to Glasgow, staring at the late summer scenery pass behind me, feeling like I had severed a limb.
I don't know what it is that made me feel that way. Maybe it was the garden: the pond we made with water reeds and frogspawn pinched from the lake at Culzean (the pond in which at my sixteenth birthday party, my friend lost his Buckfast bottle), the faint scent of the lilac tree and its treasure trove of bluebells in May, the memories of bonfire nights, Easter egg hunts, performing original plays; the August weekend when a friend and I climbed the rowan tree and picked every red, gleaming berry – each one to our childish eyes as precious as a ruby. Maybe it was the peace sign my Mum's ex-boyfriend mowed into the front lawn. The lingering whiff of failed baking experiments that still haunted the kitchen, popcorn burnt to the bottom of the pan, bowls dissolved in liquid heat, vague explosions in the oven (the door of which had to be constantly propped open by a chair). The mice that lived in the piano, the washing machine that shook so violently we had to put a brick in it.
Maybole Golf Course & The Memorial monument. Winter 2014.
The bike rides up into the Carrick hills; the hysterical impersonations of bleating sheep, chasing chickens and pheasants off the roads. Feeding lambs in spring, horse-riding and jumping off hay bales. Long walks with friends, where we deconstructed the universe as the sun bled its final light behind the Kildoon monument.
The summer we painted the wall of the den at the back of the garden, purple and orange, and I got black floor paint, thick as molasses, on my brother's leg. He was about six and it didn't come off for weeks. The concrete steps I fell down once and grazed my side so badly I could hardly move. The cities we drew with chalk on the patio, until the rain came the next day to wash them away again. The nights of mild teenage trauma, when I crawled into the space beneath my bed to calm myself down. All the people that came and went, who knocked on the back door or else rang the bell at the front. Afternoons alone in the corner of my room, hunched over chord sheets and trying to play Paramore songs on guitar. Parties with gin served in secondhand teacups, with contraband vodka smuggled in Coke bottles, with the perpetual background flicker of my frozen iTunes library, which everyone cracked a shot at.
Halloween parties with ersatz cobwebs strung from every surface, bowls of punch and fistfuls of body glitter; dubstep thundering from the upstairs study.
The secret room next door to the bathroom which we never discovered, because you had to knock the wall through. Sometimes, when I was lying in the bath, I liked to think about what was on the other side. What wild and weird stories I could fathom from that dark place of possibility? You could see the skylight in the garden and I thought maybe someone had died in there and the previous owners had decided to seal it in.
Previous owners. It's strange, when you settle so deeply into a house, you think you are the only person to have ever lived there. I remember being about six years old and finding a little plastic doll under the gas fire once and thinking how disturbing it was to think of another young girl playing on the floor of the living room, as I was. The mere thought of her presence could only be a ghost to me, as transient and fantastical as the people on tv.
There was the man next-door who thought we were dirty hippies, but still gifted us with various vegetables grown in his greenhouse, and murmured a gruff hello when we were in the garden.
The long grass meadows out front across the road, where once we made snow angels in winter and walked the dog, where now there's an estate of houses.
My wee bro and I hanging out on the patio. Don't think I have aged at all to be honest.
The home videos from when we first moved in: plastic toys scattering the grubby carpet, school friends garbed in 90s fashion (lilac or orange crop tops, white peddle pushers and velvet hairbands) draped over the ugly, velcro sofa. The dent in the wall from a misfired golf ball; the scorch mark on the carpet where someone dropped char from a shisha pipe. Places on my bedroom wall, behind the plaster, where I scrawled Green Day, then Cat Power lyrics; 'star pupil' and various Kerrang stickers that couldn't be peeled off the wardrobe (also the Metal as Fuck sticker we stuck on the lamp, which I'm sure still lingers, irrevocably); the cupboard under the stairs with the camping gear, the old washing machine and the pervasive smell of must. As soon as you opened the door, you were simultaneously attacked by a falling hoover, a bag of tent pegs and a canopy of jackets.
Whole evenings and afternoons, lost to playing Sim City on the old computer. Waiting patiently for dialup to connect, doodling on wee notepads that my dad brought back from hotels on his business trips. Sifting through stacks of Standard Grade artwork, band posters, electric guitars, music stands, golf clubs, tennis rackets and folders of homework.
I could go on forever listing details. I guess it's the nature of missing something that you link things together, this endless concatenation of memories. You think it would be claustrophobic, living in a small town, but one of the things I've always missed since moving out was the space. You could run up and down the stairs, pretend the floor was lava and jump from sofa to sofa in the living room, stare out the big bay windows not at a yard of bins and more buildings but at the rolling, sprawling countryside. Hear the jackdaws in the chimney, watch the butterflies flutter around the Buddleja, the sunflowers bloom in June after the dying of the tulips. Life had a rhythm; you paid more attention to nature: the creeping in of the spiders in September, the wasps in August that nested constantly outside my mother's bedroom, to the point where her windowsill was a nasty holocaust of their dying bodies.
My childhood home was flawed. There was the icy drafts that blew in through the floorboards, the lack of a shower, the grit that sometimes spat out the taps, the sound of lorries trundling past, the toilet that struggled to flush, the kids out back that belted JLS songs as they bounced on their trampoline. Sometimes the roof leaked, we had to clean the gutters, the hot water stopped working, the carpet always slipped on the top step of the stairs. Somehow though, despite their irritation, these flaws were endearing. It's different, I think, when you own a property compared to when you rent: when you own it, the flaws are just something you sort of live with, rather than demand your landlord to fix. When you explain them to guests, you're only ever semi-apologetic. The embarrassing parts (the Alan Partridge lap dance postcard on the fridge, the broken oven, the cracks in the kitchen tiles which our friends and I used to take apart and reassemble like puzzle pieces, the precarious stability of the garden wall) become something you're sort of proud of. It seems kind of absurd now to think that one time, in the middle of the night, our garden wall literally just collapsed, blasting bricks across the patio and shattering the wooden bench, sending its splinters as far afield as the neighbour's garden.
Maybe it's that shambolic charm that drew me again and again to Dodie Smith's novel, I Capture the Castle, as a preteen. I wasn't just obsessed with the lucidly beautiful voice of the young heroine, her story of unrequited love and the struggle to grow up amidst slightly meagre and crazy circumstances, but also her descriptions of the crumbling castle which her family called home. She describes her first impressions thus:
How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first glimpse – see the sheer grey stone walls and towers against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle stretching towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patch son emerald-green water-weed. No breath of wind ruffled the looking-glass water, no sound of any kind came to us. Our excited voices only made the castle seem more silent.
The image is imprinted on her memory, relayed back through her diary; as still as a flower pressed between the pages of a book, as the motionless water, a reflection of a very specific and idealised point in time, the fresh perception of this place that would become the crumbling though romantic ruin of a poverty-stricken home. It is clear that much of Cassandra's descriptions of the castle are filtered through the discourse of fairytale, though in a knowing, reflexive way, that recognises the flaws of such fantasies. Her sister, Rose, will not be the perfect princess, English Rose though perfect she is; neither will she be the perfectly objective narrator. I just adore the scene when they are drinking outside the village pub: cherry brandy for Cassandra, bright green creme de menthe for Rose, to bring out the russet shades in her hair.
Sitting outside in the comparative paradise of my own garden, I enjoyed the traditional Scottish though equally vibrant liquor of Mad Dog 20/20 to season my youthful palette (unlike Rose, I don't think my choice of tipple ever worked very well to seduce rich and handsome American suitors). I had the smell of woodsmoke in my hair, the wind coming in off the near-distant sea with a faint and familiar saltiness, the taste of health. There's something so lovely about that nostalgia, when you can see yourself outside of yourself, picturesque in your childhood surroundings.
The den beneath the sycamore tree and all its long-faded paint.
In a way, I guess I sort of thought as Daisybank as my castle. We didn't have a mote, or a crumbling turret, but we had a garden of long grass and dog daisies and a steep drive that kept the floodwater out and the crazed night dwellers away (once, my mother parked the car on the road and some random jakes literally tipped it on its side, so she woke up in the morning to it pouring oil all down the street, like it was weeping sadness and blood). It's hard to recreate that sense of absolute safety, of home — where all your memories have long seeped into the walls, where you first wept at a book, kissed a boy, got blackout drunk on whisky. All the birthday cakes and candles, the mean words said and the reparations. It's like the house has witnessed the sweetest and darkest parts of ourselves and god knows it must be a burden to bear those secrets.
It's kind of impossible for me to imagine the house with new people living in it. It's even difficult to imagine Maybole without my family living there. You sort of stay in touch via Facebook pages, you have the odd dream about walking down the high street or buying a roll in the deli or sitting on the swings at Miller Park, but you can't really imagine it just going on being. Like a kind of clockwork village, it stops in your mind when you're no longer there; when your roots are sort of severed. When people I'd known a long time found out we'd sold the house, they talked about it with the almost the same level of sadness and compassion they would on discovering a close relative had died.
It was a bloody good house; I don't think I'll ever live somewhere as nice and homely again – or at least it'll never be quite the same. There's just something about the place you grow up in, a magical and elusive quality. I can start to describe it, the pink and orange light seen from the patio on winter mornings, the daffodils on the kitchen table, steam from the iron, the flicker of Sonic the Hedgehog games on the old television, the space under the desk where my dog used to hide on fireworks night; but then here I am again, slipping back into details. You can't grasp it; it's in all of these things. Like love. It's supplementary, in the Derridean sense that it has no inherent presence or meaning: it's just all the things you try to hold in place for a moment, the mesh of connections and space of interplay that forms, pliably, impermanently, when you try to grasp at the meaning.
Houses are, perhaps, more than houses. Every writer, every intellectual discipline under the sun has spent centuries debating the meaning of 'home', but perhaps houses themselves are equally strange and uncanny. What does a house mean to us after we have vacated it, stripped it of all the stuff that made it personal to us? Can it still be a home? I must admit, I don't imagine myself living in my old house anymore; I can only see it as it was before. I can recall myself standing in particular locations: the feeling of waking up in my bed, or standing at the sink, washing up on a Sunday evening, watching the birds out the window. Yet when I try to think about how it might be decorated now, what the people inside are doing, I draw a blank. You can't picture it like in the the Sims; can't just imagine the drama of the lives within.
Many authors have anthropomorphised the houses in their books. They become characters in themselves, or at least acquire some kind of emotional or physical sensitivity to what goes on in and around them. Toni Morrison, in Beloved, describes the house, from Denver's perspective, as 'a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits': the domestic space is as much a character as Denver herself, it takes on the qualities of and indeed reacts to the events which take place within it. You know that eerie sense of dust settling, of silence and weightiness that falls upon a house after an argument? There's something to it. An ethereal feeling, a kind of knowingness; as if the house itself could somehow be conscious.
Perhaps the most famous instance of an anthropomorphised house is that of the Ramsay's holiday home on the isle of Skye in Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse. Woolf takes a hefty chunk out of her narrative to describe the process of decay that unravels the household in the Ramsay's absence. Significant family events, such as marriage, childbirth and death, are confined to parentheses, while intensely lyrical descriptions of the details of the changing conditions of the household are given centre stage:
[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.]
And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies, the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs. McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.
I just adore this passage for several reasons. It's full of poetic devices which bring the house itself to life: all the personification which renders objects and shadows and light into living, breathing things. The recurring consonance of the l sound which leads us, liltingly, through all sensory encounters; as if we, occupying and flying through the sentences, were as light as air, a travelling dust mote, surveying the situation. L is a flickering kind of sound, fluttering, leading onwards, somehow soporific. A line like this sends tingles up your spine: 'the stroke of the Lighthouse […] came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again'. The sentences and descriptions flit between movement and stasis: the loving caress and the sudden shift of a rock, followed by a hanging, a loosening, a suspension. Everything seems to be swinging, swaying; the material of the house unfolds and unravels like a shawl. The zanily surreal image of the housekeeper Mrs. McNab trying to control the chaos in the manner of a 'tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters' is deliciously both amusing and vivid, conjuring a sense of the beauty of this interplay of order and decay. It's a clashing sort of image, the vibrancy juxtaposed with the dulling surroundings, but the effect is to exoticise, just ever so slightly, the whole scene. We are invited to look closer, as if peering through a fish tank. This is more than just a house laying to waste in its owners' absence. Real empathy is stirred for the house itself: all the ghosts that inhabit the walls, the absence that tears at everything. Objects and noises, the vacant trails where once human footsteps made their passage. Mrs. McNab, in all her matronly cleanliness, is but a colourful fish, pulling itself fleetingly through the reeds. All our efforts to clean up the world, to annihilate its disorder, are perhaps similarly slightly futile.
Throughout Time Passes, Woolf contrasts and holds together opposites: day/night, abstract/specific, growth/decay, movement/stasis, beauty/waste, absence/presence and life/death, to name a few. At once we lament the abandoned house, while also marvelling at the 'power' of nature's 'fertility' and 'insensibility': the way in which dahlias, giant artichokes, cabbages and carnations continue to flourish amongst the house's decline. She might as well be describing the inconsistencies and tensions within the psyche of an actual human character. Time veers between eternities and instances; the sheer significance of a death (here, Prue's) is passed by fleetingly, another stain upon the already well-blotched backdrop of war, a different trauma to the slow, inevitable decline of the house. The writing here is both photographic and cinematic: moving through the stillness of random snapshots to the build-up and unravelling of a time-lapse. Isn't that like life, like memory itself?
'Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar'
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Maybe home is all about the seductiveness of boredom, the comfort of merely occupying space. Maybe its familiarity is what contains an inherent sadness: a sense of loss stemming from that which we cannot regain, despite our close spatial proximity. Like someone you love but who has changed, irrevocably, drifted out far beyond your reach. Like lost innocence and joy, the way we were before we knew certain things; before life happened, in all its terrible narrative beauty. Quentin's reflections in The Sound and the Fury have a degree of universal application. Late summer and early autumn; the turning of the seasons, the fading of the year. We spend more time indoors as the air thins to a coolness; we retreat into the safety of houses. Each year, we think back to blackberry picking in gardens, cooking soup on the stove, going back to school. One of my favourite (and pleasantly simple) opening lyrics, from Stornoway's song 'Zorbing': 'Conkers shining on the ground / the air is cooler / and I feel like I just started uni'. It's details like that that send us home. Reminders that time moves in loops; that constantly we are living through our memories, mixing the strange and new with familiarity. You don't necessarily need a specific physical location to be 'home'. Maybe it's more complex and slippery than that. Sure, I miss Daisybank like hell, but it's the details I miss most, and like everything else, with age they acquire that golden, treacly glow of nostalgia. Maybe I don't need to be Scottish or English or anything at all. I just need to find home. Then I can begin again.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
My wee bro & what was probably my first bike in the kitchen, 1997.
Christmas 2014 in the kitchen
Author mariaxroseCategories analysis, commentary, creative writing, general, literature, memory, music, nature, opinion, personal, photography, reflections, seasonal, seasons, time, Uncategorized, universityPosted on August 27, 2016 August 27, 2016 Leave a comment
'Do something pretty while you can': The Magic of Belle & Sebastian
image source: The Guardian
Belle & Sebastian are one of those bands that give you a warm, fuzzy and nostalgic feeling. As much as they're often lazily attributed to the cultural realm of the 'indie kid' or the 'Glasgow hipster', this neglects the fact of their wider popularity. They are, after all, a band who've been around for over 20 years now. I've played their tunes in the restaurant where I work and witnessed middle-aged folks who look like they're off to a Springsteen concert humming along to 'The Boy With the Arab Strap'. Their songs have popped up on plenty of popular tv shows and films ('I Don't Love Anyone' on Girls, 'I'm a Cuckoo' on The Inbetweeners, 'Piazza, New York Catcher' in Juno – to name just a handful). Like a sweet, familiar honey, their music just sticks to you, whether you wanna spread it on your toast or not. Sure, they get a lot of hate: their songs are cloying, the singing a bit too saccharine at times, the lyrics silly, the sound the same on each album. I've heard them being called 'beige' music.
For me, Belle & Sebastian make pastel coloured music. I don't know, maybe it's a touch of the old synaesthesia but I've always imagined their songs awash in delicate shades of blue and pink, green and yellow and orange – a bit like the colours of sorbet. They're just the perfect summer band. Some bands it's easy to have a colour for, or even a texture: Mogwai are deep deep green and black, LCD Soundsystem are bright, shiny white, Mac DeMarco all denim blue and dirty mustard yellow, Kate Bush is a luscious kind of cherry red, Bjork is all the hues of a pearl, Tame Impala are psychedelic greens and blues and oranges, Aphex Twin is ink black, but sometimes yellow, blue or bubblegum pink. In the same vein, Belle & Sebastian to me are all about pastels, sometimes a wee bit brighter but never beige, except when it's that classy kind of chino beige that you might see paired with a yellow blouse and pink ribbon. I want to be dressed up with a funny hat, a mini skirt and retro sunglasses when I listen to them. Something lilac, a stick of ice lolly. Hell, maybe even rollerblades. I find myself immersed in the stories of the songs; I sort of want to be a character in one of them – a lost twenty-something with her school days long behind her, figuring out how to deal with the world and enjoying living in the city.
Listening to them involves a kind of camaraderie: you're sharing the world with them, with all the voices of each song's narrator; sharing Stuart Murdoch's hazy, romanticised version of Glasgow, the lives of the quirky characters he writes into his lyrics. The musical arrangements in their songs vary between stripped back and fragile, sometimes very much Smiths-influenced (inherently, B&S are an 'urban' band, right?), with pretty melodies adorned with piano, acoustic guitar, maybe a bit of bass ('We Rule the School', 'It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career', 'Dress Up in You' – these are some of my favourites), to zany and fun and maybe even lovably chaotic, with some of the earlier songs sporting surf rock guitars ('La Pastie De La Bourgeoisie') or (in the early days, Cubase-arranged) electronic numbers ('Electronic Renaissance', or, later on, the near seven minute 'Enter Sylvia Plath' which frames its tribute to the late great poet inside a Europop epic), as well as the Beatles-influenced 'chamber pop' (of which they share the influence mantle with Camera Obscura) – see, for example, The Life Pursuit. Their songs are often self-conscious, writing about the importance of losing yourself in books and songs (the final song of Tigermilk, 'Mary Jo', references the fictional book that titles the album's first song: 'You're reading a book, "The State I Am In"'), referencing themselves, other 'indie' bands (Arab Strap being the most obvious), creating this whole dreamworld of literary and musical references which itself becomes the fantasy world of the songs. When you listen to them, it's impossible not to lose yourself slightly to this pastel-saturated universe. It's not just twee; it's bittersweet happiness, nostalgia, personal and cultural reflection – they began making music in the 90s, after all. That's why I smile when I see someone sporting a wee Belle & Sebastian tote bag or t-shirt: you know there's someone else out there who shares that sweet and silly, slightly sad but hopeful little world.
In a way, they're a band for the underdogs. They cut their teeth on the Glasgow open mic circuit, with its crowds veering between adoration or ruthless indifference. Every Saturday, under the guise of various band or solo arrangements, Stuart and his pals would appear in the Halt bar on Woodlands Road (sadly it no longer exists) – you can read all about it in bass/guitar player Stuart David's memoir, In the All-Night Café, which geekily delves into early musical experiments, the songwriting process and all the crazy moments that brought the band together in their formative year. So yeah, it's worth a read if you're a B&S fan or even just a musician. It's important to remember that the band produced and recorded all their early songs (came together, essentially) at Stow College's now slightly legendary Beatbox course, which at the time was more or less a course that unemployed musicians in the area took to ensure they kept receiving the dole: 'From what I could tell,' Stuart writes of his first impression of the course, '[Beatbox] was a total shambles. Just scores of unemployed musicians sitting around in a dark, airless labyrinth, doing nothing. […] I wandered around on my own trying to work out what was what, while people scowled at me, or just stared blankly into space. A thick cloud of cigarette smoke pervaded the place, and something about the absence of daylight and the lack of fresh air made me wonder if the place was actually a detention centre set up by the government to incarcerate all the people they'd caught using Social Security benefit as an arts bursary' (In the All-Night Cafe, pp. 10-11). This is probably an impression of college hallways and classrooms that most young adults of Generation X or millennials growing up in Britain can relate to: the flickering strip lighting, the apathy amongst both staff and pupils, the sense of suffocating bureaucracy, of life in suspension. And yet out of that dark and maybe even Kafkaesque environment, sometimes the magic happens. People come together and make the best of things – it's inspiring.
For me, it's also inspiring that Stuart Murdoch is actually from Ayr. The only other celebrated artist I can think of off the top of my head that hails from Ayr is none other than Robert Burns, so yeah, it's been awhile since the place has been put on the map, artistically speaking. Belle & Sebastian are usually associated with Glasgow (especially the West End), but for me it's important to remember their humble beginnings. Ayr still has a pretty cool music scene in terms of acoustic nights in local pubs, but there's definitely a dearth of actual decent gig venues, especially when it's producing so many talented musicians through, for example, the well-respected Commercial Music course at the UWS Ayr Campus (see for example Bella and the Bear and the wonderful Shanine Gallagher).
ANYWAY, back to Belle & Sebastian. I wanted to talk about Tigermilk as an example of their oeuvre in general – as the raw, often forgotten diamond. It's their debut album, though I actually came to B&S first through If You're Feeling Sinister, having picked it up from Fopp when I moved to the West End for university and decided a B&S CD was a good way of immersing myself in local culture. Tigermilk reminds me of that lost and lonely summer feeling, walking around the city killing time before going to work, worrying about all the books I had to read before September, the people and things and memories I was in love with, that paranoid and desperate desire to write myself and indeed keep writing. It's a lo-fi sort of album; it feels sweet and magical in that simple way, and you can tell that it marks the moment when the band discovered they had something special going on.
Sometimes the lyrics are a wee bit strange and surreal; the cast of characters Murdoch evokes in his lyrics can be pretty bewildering. The band's slightly surreal vibe is indicated by the cover art for Tigermilk: a black-and-white picture of Murdoch's then girlfriend, Joanne Kenney, apparently breastfeeding a toy tiger. Then take a look at the lyrics to 'My Wandering Days are Over' for example: 'Six months on, the winter's gone / The disenchanted pony / Left the town with the circus boy / The circus boy got lonely / It's summer, and it's sister song's / Been written for the lonely / The circus boy is feeling melancholy'. You're never sure if the characters are metaphors for existentially pained middle-class indie kids (lost in the job market/lost in the adult world circus of mad capitalism??), or actual protagonists in B&S's musical universe. That's the poetry of it – you get to decide. It all sort of makes sense, this girl with spiky black hair nourishing a toy tiger; sure, you can take it as symbolic, but it's also just intriguing and slightly controversial enough to draw attention to a debut album.
One of B&S's unique selling points is the whimsical fictions they weave through their 'brand' as a band. Take, for example, the sleeve notes to Tigermilk: they detail a cute little tale about Sebastian and Isabelle, the namesakes for the band.
Sebastian met Isabelle outside the Hillhead Underground Station, in Glasgow. Belle harassed Sebastian, but it was lucky for him that she did. She was very nice and funny, and sang very sweetly. Sebastian was not to know this, however. Sebastian was melancholy.
He had placed an advert in the local supermarket. He was looking for musicians. Belle saw him do it. That's why she wanted to meet him. She marched straight up to him unannounced and said, 'Hey you!' She asked him to teach her to play the guitar. Sebastian doubted he could teach her anything, but he admired her energy, so he said 'Yes'.
It was strange. Sebastian had just decided to become a one-man band. It is always when you least expect it that something happens. Sebastian had befriended a fox because he didn't expect to have any new friends for a while. He still loved the fox, although he had a new distraction. Suddenly he was writing many new songs. Sebastian wrote all of his best songs in 1995. In fact, most of his best songs have the words 'Nineteen Ninety-five' in them. It bothered him a little. What will happen in 1996?
They worked on the songs in Belle's house. Belle lived with her parents, and they were rich enough to have a piano. It was in a room by itself at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. This was where Belle taught Sebastian to put on mascara. If Belle's mum had known this, she would not have been happy. She was paying for the guitar lessons. The lessons gave Sebastian's life some structure. He went to the barber's to get a haircut.
Belle and Sebastian are not snogging. Sometimes they hold hands, but that is only a display of public solidarity. Sebastian thinks Belle 'kicks with the other foot'. Sebastian is wrong, but then Sebastian can never see further than the next tragic ballad. It is lucky that Belle has a popular taste in music. She is the cheese to his dill pickle.
Belle and Sebastian do not care much for material goods. But then neither Belle nor Sebastian has ever had to worry about where the next meal is coming from. Belle's most recent song is called Rag Day. Sebastian's is called The Fox In The Snow. They once stayed in their favourite caf' for three solid days to recruit a band. Have you ever seen The Magnificent Seven? It was like that, only more tedious. They gained a lot of weight, and made a few enemies of waitresses.
Belle is sitting highers in college. She didn't listen the first time round. Sebastian is older than he looks. He is odder than he looks too. But he has a good heart. And he looks out for Belle, although she doesn't need it. If he didn't play music, he would be a bus driver or be unemployed. Probably unemployed. Belle could do anything. Good looks will always open doors for a girl.
You've got it all here: the playful and ultra twee imagery '(she is the cheese to his dill pickle'), the hint of queer culture and crossdressing that sometimes runs through B&S songs ('This was where Belle taught Sebastian to put on mascara'), the DIY elements, the spatial immersion in Glasgow's West End as a kind of leafy wonderland where people own pianos in airy rooms overlooking gardens. It's honest and cute and totally unashamed, totally uninterested in being cool. Compared with the stylised, rock'n'roll swagger of Britpop, this album (originally released in 1996 then rereleased in 1999) is so refreshing. The tale of Belle and Sebastian is a short story, more than an explanation of the album's lyrics or 'concept'; it's a bit ambiguous, a touchstone for all the other B&S characters who populate later LP – it's perhaps, most importantly, an indication of the band's consistent literary bent.
'Sebastian was melancholy'. Well, melancholy is probably the overriding emotion on Tigermilk. Melancholy being that feeling of sadness, yearning and inexplicable loss. An indulgent feeling, a languid and probably narcissistic feeling that is almost pleasurable despite lolling around in the negative. Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia (1915[17]) famously distinguishes mourning and melancholia thus: 'In mourning the world has become impoverished and empty, during melancholia, it is the ego itself'. Mourning is about the loss of a specific object, whereas melancholia is a vaguer feeling, a depression with no apparent or obvious source, a swallowing up of selfhood into narcissistic darkness. One of the reason's I really like 'I Don't Love Anyone' is its in-your-face rejection of the Coca Cola style let's-all-hold-hands-and-be-happy version of love, the assertion of personal endurance and the often denigrated value of independence in a world where we're all supposed to follow the crowd: 'But if there's one thing that I learned when I was still a child / It's to take a hiding / Yeah if there's one thing that I learned when I was still at school / It's to be alone'. I was that kid who sometimes liked to walk around the playground alone, making up stories in my head – adults just assume it's because you're being bullied but there's a golden value to imagination and it's easier to forget that as an adult, easy to forget that sometimes you need time out from your friends to be in your own mind.
A lot of Tigermilk is about trying to negotiate personal identity in an often problematic adult world with few opportunities for anyone vaguely creative. It's worth quoting a hearty chunk of 'Expectations' to demonstrate this:
Monday morning wake up knowing that you've got to go to school
Tell your mum what to expect, she says it's right out of the blue
Do you want to work in Debenham's, because that's what they expect
Start in Lingerie, and Doris is your supervisor
And the head said that you always were a queer one from the start
For careers you say you went to be remembered for your art
Your obsession gets you known throughout the school for being strange
Making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay
In the queue for lunch they take the piss, you've got no appetite
And the rumour is you never go with boys and you are tight
So they jab you with a fork, you drop the tray and go berserk
While your cleaning up the mess the teacher's looking up your skirt
We've all known (or been ourselves!) the weird kid obsessed with music, inviting abuse with every strange word spoken. Wear something black, a bit of eyeliner and you're inviting folk to ask you if you "shag dead folk". There's always the one of many that has a whole collection of cool things to say, to contribute to the world, but ends up in retail, in a call-centre, maybe waitressing. Again, Belle & Sebastian are the band of the underdog, the folk (and there are a lot of them) who slog away at day jobs but don't give up on their dreams – whether those dreams involve becoming a star of track and field, a model, artist, musician, writer.
Tigermilk, then, isn't just a melancholy album; there are some feel good moments, such as 'You're Just a Baby', which features handclaps and a nice rock'n'roll beat with a simple, serenading refrain: 'You're just a baby, baby girl'. Fundamentally, Belle & Sebastian are a pop band, and a damn good one at that. Stuart Murdoch recently wrote and directed his own film, God Help the Girl, which more or less demonstrates his near-religious philosophy of pop music, as the character James (fittingly played by the singer from pop/electronic band Years & Years) proclaims:
A man needs only write one genius song, one song that lives forever in the hearts of the populous to make him forever divine. […] Many women and men have lived empty, wasted lives in attics trying to write classic pop songs. What they don't realise is it's not for them to decide. It's God. Or, the god of music. Or, the part of God that concerns Himself with music.
This is some fairly interesting religious imagery coming from a singer (Murdoch) who has always been openly Christian. And of course, the hyperbolic emphasis on music's divine significance here is perhaps a cheeky dig at the ego of the pop star, but it also touches on the importance of universalism for pop. It's easy to consume, it should transcend generations, it should be technically perfect – the satisfying work of a 'genius'. But good pop, as Belle & Sebastian demonstrate, isn't all bubblegum songs about loving your sweetheart – it also has that spark of something else. For me, B&S capture a very specific experience of existential bewilderment in the modern world, combined with the right amount of romance, comedy, storytelling and a healthy streak of cynicism. God Help the Girl is twee as hell, but it's also a loving portrait of Glasgow, of the early days of being in a band, the freedom of summer days drifting down the canal with the world shining bright around you. It's maybe also a portrait of unrequited love. And, crucially, it transforms that cliche, the power of music, into something sparkly and fun as well as serious and uplifting – it is a musical after all. Its ambiguous ending, with the heroine (significantly called Eve – more religious imagery!) finally leaving the city and on a train ride to London where she intends to try and make it 'alone' after her existential rebirth and artistic awakening in Glasgow, is perhaps its strongest point – it's a feminist assertion of personal creative desire as opposed to remaining tied down to the things your friends want.
The protagonists of GHTG: James, Eve, Cassie
Once again, Murdoch puts complete faith in his slightly damaged protagonists; he encourages us to just trust our creativity. Maybe that's why I love Belle & Sebastian so much, because sure, their songs are mostly golden, pastel-hazed pop, but it's not that simple; they embrace that wavering, magical and sad place between warm dreams and cold reality, and represent all the poor souls who live there in that limbo, such as the eponymous heroine from 'Mary Jo': 'Your life is never dull in your dreams / A pity that it never seems to work the way you see it'. And even though such songs are full of melancholy, you're still treated, as in an Arctic Monkeys song, to some brilliant lyrical candy: 'Cause what you want is a cigarette / And a thespian with a caravanette in Hull'. So maybe that's the special element, the thing that makes the everyday divine, that elevates the ordinary into a valid subject for pop music. And maybe, pleb that I am at heart, that's why I love it.
Author mariaxroseCategories analysis, commentary, culture and media, drama, fashion, feminism, fiction, film, gender stuff, inspiration, literature, memory, music, opinion, personal, philosophy, Psychology, reflections, review, short story, Uncategorized, universityPosted on June 13, 2016 June 15, 2016 Leave a comment
It was the summer of being totally numb. I woke up every morning with the sensation of being dragged down some strong gulf stream, warm and foggy and going nowhere.
I smoked cigarettes leaning over the harbour wall, watching the waves curl over the lisp of the sand, gathering in little billows. I worked a job at one of the out of town supermarkets, driving my car around in the day, stacking shelves at night. I worked from midnight till dawn, driving home as the birds sang and the junkies collapsed into their hellhole flats. I sort of enjoyed the boredom, the routine sense of drifting; the way the hours and days just dissolved away. I had a vague sense that something had to happen by the end of the summer, but never paid much attention to prospects of the future.
The doctor put me on these antidepressants, you see. I don't know what they were supposed to be doing, but they made me very numb. I felt weightless, as if my skin wasn't my own. There was an agitation, a twitchiness to my existence. I couldn't help scratching, shivering. I worried the sores that rose in welts on my arms. Every time I tried to eat, I felt nauseous. Only the cigarettes helped.
I was getting through thirty a day, a pack and a half, that summer.
Then I met Oliver. I used to know him, years ago, at primary school. I was standing outside a club, watching the thin blue moon disappear into dark clouds, watching some sixteen-year-old kid throw up on the pavement across the road. Oliver came out of nowhere, wearing this flamboyant shirt, a shark-tooth necklace, his hair wiry and long. I don't know how he recognised me; I barely recognised him. I wanted to melt into the wall.
But then we started talking about childhood. I guess it seemed like forever ago, this whole other world of messy innocence. The games we used to play, running over the fields, throwing clumps of hay at each other. Days out with the school, teasing one another over the contents of our packed lunches. We walked around town all night, waiting for the sun to come up, sitting shivering underneath a slide at the park, sharing a half bottle of vodka.
He gave me his number, refused the cigarettes I offered. Said we should talk again, but he had to go to work.
I never did text him. I went straight home, teeth chattering on the bus, then lay in bed all day, staring at the ceiling. I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about the person who used to run around those fields, laughing and shrieking, throwing wads of hay and falling back into the soft long grass. I smoked so much my room was a grey, tarry haze. At some point I must've slept.
I woke up and the world was brighter, clearer. The smoke was gone. I drove to work and the strip lights of the supermarket glowed in my brain, the colours of all the signs and products seeming ultra saturated, a pleasure to stare at. Everything felt so intense, so real. I guess I was feeling again. It was a joy to just touch things, finger the labels of tins and packets, brush my feet over the vinyl floor.
I'm not even sure I took down the right number. I never did text him.
It was a joy to stand over the bridge on my break, watching the cars pass on the dual carriageway, biting into something sweet, maybe a donut, maybe a piece of carrot cake. I didn't think about falling over that bridge, about smoking a cigarette. I thought of Oliver, of the little girl asleep in the backseat, going nowhere through the night. Falling asleep on someone's shoulder. That sense of safety. I don't remember much else about how I felt, but I know that something had changed, even though in the end I didn't text him.
I guess it was just that in those 24 hours, I'd forgotten to take my antidepressants. For once, it felt good to go nowhere.
(Flash Fiction February prompts: 'nowhere')
Author mariaxroseCategories creative writing, flash fiction, literature, UncategorizedPosted on March 31, 2016 Leave a comment