George Mackay Brown is one of the more well-known writers of Orkney and is perhaps best known for his novel Greenvoe which is dotted with understated phrasings. “Scots do wrong to call the devil by half humorous names such as Auld Nick, Sneckie, Prince of Darkness and Clootie.” (107)
C3PO and R2D2 on Sanday Roadside
“She was said to be a beautiful young woman, though rather lascivious. The principal light keeper was very solicitous.” (196)
Olivia de Havilland in Captain Blood (1935)
“Go to hell away from here, you faggot,” said a voice from the interior. “Horse-face, bugger off. Don’t relieve your conscience at this door, Away, you centaur.” (180)
A number of years back, an influential agent took interest in novel, My Bad Side. He had his reader review the opening 50 pages and gave me advice on changes to make, which I did. I received a follow-up on moving the back story to a later stage. I questioned this idea, explaining the benefit of where it was. That was it. I was out.
A year or so later, I pitched him my new book, Anori. “Not for me.” The one time an agent had taken an interest in my work, a one-night stand as it was, I hadn’t done as I was told and was cancelled. I’ve thought back to this moment often and wondered what might have happened if I had complied. What success would I have reaped? If only, if only…
Today, hundreds of indifferent rejection emails later, I feel something coming, some long-awaited breakthrough, not with them as much as me. I’ve made it somewhere, not a revelation as much as a state of mind, I suppose. Probably the booze but more of a clean sure hike up, getting to where I can see where I am. Which is here. Nowhere else but that.
My latest opus, The Vanishing Pill, will be ready in the spring.
Why are you here? Ask yourself that. What is the purpose? Where do you belong? I try to write like that. And then I don’t like how I feel when I go too long, my head thick, nothing working, done and lost. It seems like life isn’t worth it at that moment.
It’s not complicated to get my energy back, my brain back on its stem, even if it doesn’t feel like that. I walk and eat. And then I am new again, that clarity of purpose back inside, thinking I just came here to find the answer.
And this is it: We go fast on the roads we know and slow on the ones we don’t.
I gleaned a couple of basics from Anne Lamont’s book of writing advice,Bird for Bird. First and foremost, writing “is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work.” (7)
She also goes on to state that many readers “buy into the simplistic concepts of character and plot because it is much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality, as reality is unforgivingly complex.” (104)
These two essential ideas aside, she does miss how the nucleus of the process is in the marvel of entering another realm, knowing something there and chittering at the edge of that, loving the moment for as long as it might last.
In other words, it’s essentially about having the etching tools and a place to set up.
They came charging down from the far side of the field, all looking very excited, heads up, faces tight, eyes wide. I stopped, curious if it was really me they were coming to see. They surged up to the stone wall, the bravest and blackest at the front, their shiny noses out. “I don’t have any food.” I held my hands up for them to see. “See? Nothing.” They gazed back, their excitement intensified.
Maybe I was the first person they had seen in days. Maybe they were just lonely. “Beautiful day, isn’t it? The sun might even come out.” They were affixed on me, amazed at everything I said and did. “You must be very content here, knowing there is no abattoir on the island.” They waited, bunching up closer. “The key is to always stay here. Right?”
I approached, and the nearest wheeled back, causing a mass but brief wave of panic. I had my hands in the air again. “It’s fine. I promise. Just a nose scratch.” I tried again, and they moved back again, the nearest jumping back and forth between his fore and hind legs like a toy. I waited and they waited too, some looking off, perhaps thinking another better of me might arrive soon. I offered my hand and they bounced back again. “Well, then…”
I continued my walk alongside their wall, and they followed until they came to the corner of their field and huddled there in a great mass. I stopped and waved. “I’ll see you soon.” They stared back as I continued along, both of us a little lonelier, and then I met the pigs.
I will clean and organize. I will rearrange again. I will watch the cows intently and see if they are grazing or lying down. I will think about what it must be like to have only those choices. I will clean and organize again.
I will look at the clouds and seek out brightness on the horizon. I will plan the rest of my day and the days to come. I will think of what it is I must do except for the thing I must do.
I will write other things. I will work on bits of dialogue. I will outline a new idea. I will edit that. I will write this thing. I will do anything if it’s to keep me from the thing I know I have to do.
And then I will strike in a moment! My confidence will be true. But brief. I will look at the cows again. I will organize again. I will realize all of the things I could have done if I had only known better. I will realize I am too tired to get it into now and wait for the coming day.
I will be fresh then. I will be ready to really go at it. Of that I am certain.
Canada’s Nobel Laureate author Alice Munroe is now being judged for her complicity in her second husband sexual abuse of her then 9-year-old daughter. “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?” (Rich as Stink)
Munroe’s short story collection The Love of a Good Woman collection offers compelling prose and narrative choices along with confounding character psyches that cannot be ignored in light of these revelations. “Her whole life was liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.” (Save the Reaper)
Society tends towards judgement, which of course is not the purpose of writing and certainly not Munroe’s fictional world. “You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try for sanity’s sake to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind’s cries are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass.” (My Mother’s Dream, 374)
I joined a tour at a Single Malt Distillery in Scotland and made the mistake of admitting that I was driving. The young woman looked at me queerly and repeated the question. “Are you the driver?” I admitted that I was and was informed that I could not partake in the tasting at the end of the tour. Instead, they would give me the to-go kit.
The tour was the same as all tours, something about boiling barley and putting that into kegs for a while, and the tasting began, just me and two couples, none of whom were apparently driving, which was confounding given that the distillery was in the middle of the nowhere.
The young woman, our tasting host, had gone to prepare my to-go kit, and I looked around at the others and realized how silly and naïve I was in that moment. More than that, I realized that I always oscillated from being silly and naïve, like now, to being the very opposite, whatever that was. It was an essential character trait of some kind.
The girl returned with the little bag. “I changed my mind,” I told her. She looked at me quizzically. “You’re not driving now?” “No, I’m not.” She paused, presenting her naïve and beautiful self as she had learned to do. “As long as I don’t know about it.”
I drank all of the tasters and they were delicious. “Goodbye, everyone.” I stood up before the others had finished. “I’ve got to catch the bus.” There was a collective laugh – I was oscillating now – and bought a bottle of special wine cask 15-year-old and took a couple of pictures of highland cows.
It was a lovely evening, some sun flashing out from the clouds at times. The road wound idyllically through the rolling hills, and I came around a corner, maybe a little fast, and saw two round balls in the middle of the road. I pulled to a neat stop and squatted down to examine the hedgehogs, the pair just sitting as they were. I tapped one with my shoe, making it scurry off.
The other wouldn’t move, but balled up where it was, and so I rolled it to the side of the road and continued on to my hotel.
Everybody was talking about the massive pod of Pilot Whales that had stranded themselves on Tresness Beach on Sanday Island in Scotland, but I couldn’t find them.
I had been told which beach and walked along for an hour and realized that I must have got the directions wrong and decided it must be on the other side of the peninsula and crossed the bay. I was lucky because it was low tide, and almost all of it was a sandy flat. Only at the very far side did I have to take my boots off and walk through the water, only calf deep and almost warm. There was a gap in the cow fence, and it didn’t look like a far walk up the grassy hill to see where the dead whales might be. It was easy going at first, just bumpy and grassy, but got steadily worse, until the undulations became severe and the grass as high as my chest.
And then it was all but impossible. I looked back to the bay and thought of going back, but soldiered on, as it got thicker and steeper until I felt almost trapped. I looked to the top and thought there was no way I was getting out of this. The way back seemed even worse. I thought of Joe Simpson’s epic survival tale, Touching the Void, dragging himself with a shattered leg down from the Chilean mountain through impossible terrain and only making it because he focused on what was right in front of him. Just this bit, these few feet, and got through that. And so, that’s what I did, one undulation at a time, glancing up occasionally, avoiding the gullies and thick patches of thorns, until I was at the ridge, and it was only an awkward slide down through the remaining grass and thorns to the beachside.
But there were no whales there. Nothing to either headland. The walking was easier, rocks and seaweed and sand, as I made my way back along the coast, hoping that the dead whale might be just around the corner, knowing they wouldn’t, when the Arctic Terns descended. As small and seemingly cute as these birds are, they are ferocious in defense of their rookeries, squawking and dive-bombing in choregraphed Luftwaffe-like attack. One was particularly aggressive, shrieking its squawks, coming inches from my head. “Back the fuck off!” I waved my hat manically and then my coat, but nothing could stop her – obviously her – until I had rounded the bend.
Exhausted and humiliated, I trudged back up the bay, my boots off again, through the shallow waters, until I was finally back at my car, wiping the wet sand from my feet. Other cars had arrived and a van driven by a young man with all sorts of video and sound equipment. I was in the right place after all. I went to the store for some juice and ibuprofens and headed off again, mounting the dunes, looking down to the end of the beach where there was something now, a truck or a tractor, and tiny dots around that, people, and then the splotches of black past that, what I had thought to be rocks which were the dead whales. I walked along the waterline, glancing up now and again, seeing it all come slowly into view.
The tractor dominated, its flashing yellow light a warning, and the groups of people behind it, huddled together over a body it appeared. The dead whales lay in an ominous long scattered row, some as big as yachts, others as small as dogs, all of them dead, most with their mouths their tongues lolling out, blood around them in some place where the biologists had cut in their numbers – there were 77 in all – or begun the biopsies.
It looked like a Jonestown Massacre, if anything, these creatures having drunk the Kool Aid, swimming with their leader to die nonsensically on the beach.
Looking out into the waters now, knowing that these 77 had been out there and knowing now that there were none was a cause for ennui. Indeed, what is the point in the end? Even the whales understand that. Their penises were most striking, snaking long to a twisting point, looking more like extracted intestine than their business, another bit of flesh to be buried. I watched the biologist saw off one of their heads, and I knew it was time. I had done 22,000 steps and seen what I had come out to see. And it had been bad.
I think I’m awake but not, because I’m thinking things like I’m late for my aunt’s funeral and that I should learn to play piano. I need someone to roll down the window or a Christmas tree, something like that.
I’m bendable or half inflated, a combination of velvet and sticks. I can’t remember. I’m dropping stuff and spilling ice, hitting the call button on the broken PA, and then I’m writing out restaurant recs, and Marcus Aurelius comes to mind, a hose or at least parts of one.
I want to remind myself of the thing I need to remember. One of those new water bottles that everybody has. That’s what I need and how much that actually make sense. I’m processing what makes fashion. If it’s insanity, what then?
