“My Writing Life”
...while up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump,
or waiting to write a poem...because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”
To
give voice to something intimated and felt but not real
yet, to give voice
to the ‘world to come’ and to be driven to be its emissary, to hear a
strange music that is composed of half-formed words as if down a long corridor
in time and place but still deep within the mind, to wander, at least some of
the time, in an often-desolate landscape of both loss and promise
and want to describe the solitary creatures that hide there, to walk among
ruins that almost seem familiar but somehow must have been forgotten and to
want to name them:
...when Poetry Bus
graciously asked would I fill in the title for “My ‘Writing Life” all this
flashed in front of my eyes...instead
of the years of darkness and poverty, whether wandering the streets or in attic or bedsit, or worse, for one born in a desperate country at
a desperate time (the 1950’s) and not seeing
much change despite all the cheap money (the 1990’s).
All
this...instead of the lonely nights tapping the lettera 33,
in different cities and places, mostly frequented by gifted rejects and
malcontents of the world of normality, the paper piling high and years later
the same paper dry and yellowed and the paper clips rusted through.
Likewise
this voice is the steadfast vision that surfaces, in place of
countless days in cheap cafés and even cheaper public bars, talking,
endlessly talking, or the long bus rides halfway across continents (to
Lawrence's New Mexico, Gatsos' Athens or Charles Haldeman's Hania) with the writing half decipherable months or
years later, and
the truly gifted ones you meet on the road because of this both
blessed-and-cursed-writing-connection, the deluded ones, the damaged ones, alongside, of course, “this
writing life”’s casualties, the ghosts of all the dead
poets carried in the backpack: Mayakovski, Kerouac, Berryman, Sexton, Plath, Alfonsina Storni, Paul Celan, all leaning
over your shoulder, and with their consummated
pain added to your own, tearing to shreds
every draft you compose in fire and blood, in drunkenness and despair, the first to the last!
...Instead
also, of the years having people look at you as if you were a bit mad yourself,
(a peculiar mixture of brain-damage, idiocy, and demonic possession),
alongside the poverty on rent-day, constantly running out of cigarettes, the
liver, brain and stomach damage from cheap alcohol, the pills, legal and
illegal, weed, powder, and cooking sherry, the people asking you what you work
at and not having an answer, those complaining of being unemployed when you see
it as one of the few gifts left in this chicken-factory-of-a-life, the
rejection letters, the wasted postage, the debt you will never repay...finally
the poets that never got to write their poem, like joe dunne or billy holmes or
dinky dunne, or who wrote its soulless need on their arm in a savagery of anesthesia
and self mutilation, dead on pubic transport or in back alleys or in council
flats where the neighbours could hardly read and cared even less...
...despite all this (and more) it is this deep, silent,
half heard voice in the head and its promises to make sense of
life and death and the uncountable losses that pile up in between, that came to
my mind as well as lost in the distance once standing as a child in a
barren-cold, simply cruel, landscape and seeing in front of me the long lines
of magical books in the public library and when that being was
murdered, years later, by a so-called Education-System, leaving one memory more
easy to recall now waking to an adult-world (often without even a shred of
decency to offer a human being): standing outside the new bookshop in an
average-conservative-church-blighted Irish town at 15 and seeing a hundred
promises of a better world in its windows and better still going inside and
seeing a whole bookcase filled with poetry books that you could hold and open
and journey in and out of realising there were other ‘mad men and mad women’
desperately hoping and dreaming in this world where it is good business to
murder for money or country but a sin to sing or cry out in joy or pain or
passion...
...and
while some people argue that angels do not exist, the ‘writer’ or ‘poet’ part of me
knew back then and knows now they do or did or will, because in the best of
words (as in the best of worlds) each of us are summoned to make a better world
and without a set of plans or a god or even a single politician that can be
trusted anymore, words words words
become the guide for those lost in this desert: an unborn-self, the
not-yet-born promise that darkness will give way to light.
...And even if, looking back at these fractured
pieces of "my writing life", this collision among the contradictions (collision
of mind-and-body, of truth and
conformity, of rent and creativity, money and
freedom...) I have failed miserably at the task,
which I know I have, at least I can know that in my own “Writing Life” I struggled to be true to the Voice back–then and back-there and in-there and for a
moment, among the regrets and the pains and the often unbearable losses that
life gives birth to there was, and still is, hope.
For what it’s worth for a “Writing Life” (that is, a pen, a page, an old Olivetti typewriter, or a keyboard,
along with this inner urge to speak): it’s just another part of the mysterious
terrifying journey from the darkness and despair of this ungodly silence we
come out of/inhabit-within, through the dance of words and language, making an
endless revolution of our struggle to meet and greet and embrace each other in
the "world to come"...this world waiting to be born...all
worth our summoning or singing-of or sharing-in or commingling-with, at the
threshold where we stand now: the threshold of this New (Dark) Age where books
- (and any “culture” that offends the smoke and mirrors and ruthless profit of
this all-powerful-superficial-Celebrity-World we have inherited) - will be
diagnosed as terminally ill, and all that will be left is the Voice
inside, yours and mine, to keep our dreams and our revolution alive until we
realise what it is to be a human being...
“...Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for
friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.
But you, when the time comes at last
And man is a helper to man
Think of us
With forbearance.”
séamas carraher
(Published, January 2015, PB$, Ireland.)
[1] Miller Henry, 1963, Black Spring, Grove Press, New York, p.26
[2] Brecht, Bertolt, 2006, Poetry and Prose, The Continuum
International Publishing Group
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