Icarus skywriting # 25

The cute cowgirl has gone back to Okie-Cokie land already and is  now in full training and classes. But handsome Dan is still here, successful exams and thinking about next academic year - just like us all. Although they both flew to Oklahoma together and had a blast apparently. Which is good, good to see them getting on so well and enjoying each other's company. Maybe its because they have the same taste in shirts. But its getting to that time of year. The summer is leaving the same way it arrived - with a whisper because it has hardly been a summer at all. And I have been      painting before teaching starts, getting those grubby places sorted out before time runs out and I am out there full pell-mel. Just time to blog this tune which I hadn't heard before, but I rather like it.

Icarus skywriting # 24

Back to work

I haven't stopped working all summer because I have been researching and writing and working through a new project but this non-beach, holiday picture is a truer reflection of life today. But hey ho, its stay to work we go - stay at home working is very productive for me, I get more done in a day in Brighton than a day in Winchester any time. Fewer distractions and everything I need is at hand. Yesterday I wrote three new characters with the nom de plumes (ie their literary names) as Slider, Corkscrew and Daedaluvzus. Where these come from I have no idea but appear they do, without thought. I introduced a character who glided into view and Slider seemed to fit, while Daedaluvzus is a take on Daedalus, not very subtle I know, but as I said at the start, hey ho! Yesterday I bought a new LP by Karine Polwart who is my favourite pop singer of the day. Here she is, very little makes me feel nostalgic but I cycled Salters Road many times and I know it well. I have posted this before but so what, this is my moment of nostalgia for today:

Icarus skywriting # 23

I have been thinking about writing and about seeing because one of my characters is blind. And to some extent we all are. See the crowd at the bottom of the picture, ignoring the wee man standing at the top of the building. Of course not all of us are looking for an Icarus man everywhere we go, but there he is, being ignored again. As Auden reminds us, 

"...the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on." 

Isn't it just the case. Anyway, my brand new character is called Grace and I rather like her impish sense of humour, which is based on her own sightlessness. But that's the fun of writing, seeing the characters becoming something you hadn't anticipated at first and then they shout at you, demanding attention. At that point, you stop talking to yourself and start listening to the ghost of yourself in the shape of an actor playing a character you had previously brought to life in your own image. Uncanny and magic at the same time, it goes on to become normative and normalising - at least it does if the story is to exist at all. Hence the Icarus idea as it travels through the centuries. Me, I am on a southbound train:

Icarus over San Gimignano

Don't jump

And there he stands, aloof and unafraid to be at the highest point of a town full of towers and high points. You will have to look carefully at the figure on the edge of the right hand building but the boy Icarus followed me to Tuscany - is there ever a more beautiful place in all of Europe? But being back means being back to a kind of reality, although I have been writing and the reality is broken up with the imagination which seems to carry a story forward. The story is in my head, unformed and anarchic and there are a number of great characters forming stories within stories and its all very exciting, I think. At least thus far. I have no doubt the self-doubt will cut in but that is for tomorrow. Today, I will write some more and let tomorrow take care of itself as I pluck my characters from a circus spotlight and plunge them into darkness and disquieting strangeness. Freud says, "Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free..." grist to the mill for the fabulist. And as Maurice Blanchot has written, "Those who think they see ghosts are those who do not want to see the night..." Just the place I need to take them - oh the temptations, just my imagination, running away with me...

Icarus skywriting # 22

There is no safe place from self-afflicted injuries, all writers, poets, songwriters, academics put themselves through a regime of self-administered S & M and any moment of innocence is only an illusion. Despite up front self-assuredness, we torture ourselves with our own doubt and worthlessness. And why? We could simply walk away and endure the simple life of thoughtlessness, where a stroll down to the pub for a draft of pleasure would quieten the most restless brain. But contemplation can't silence the thinking, can it? Deleuze said, 'Contemplating is creating...' so there is no rest, no respite, even reading doesn't allow me to step away. And twenty-four hour sobriety makes it even more difficult to manage because there are no forgotten hours and it reminds me that I spend my life not being but becoming, always becoming. I have written 33 books in my life but I am hoping to become a writer one day, I live in a house with 9 guitars, 2 banjos, 2 mandolins and a piano which I can play, but I am hoping to do more with them and on it goes, cookery books on kitchen shelves, poetry books on study shelves, notebooks full of jottings, library books in my bag,Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Six Myths of Our Time: Managing Monsters and on it goes in the becoming quest. Its Penelope's knitting and Odysseus' journey, though I guess both of those exercises came to an end at some point. But then, like them, you start all over again...

Icarus skywriting # 21

A new novel - maybe

And the cycle begins again as I settle down to write a new book, picture right - a tale from a Mallorcan villa, and suspect it will take me the whole of this year to write. But that is good, we all need something to keep us out of mischief. But isn't it funny that when you begin to write, the character you are trying to create talks back at you and decides he or she wants be someone else. That happened to me on the morning this picture was taken. My central character started to write himself, with his own voice and ideas because he began to do things in a 'magic realist' way that I hadn't even planned. Like his way with language - which I will not reveal yet because its still too precious - and I am not even sure I own it yet, its still his! But I have made a start and the good thing with all good starts is the ideas are beginning to tumble after each other - and plot and story ideas are even forming as I write this post. But while I was there I wrote a couple of new songs on the mandolin (easier to travel with than a guitar) and that was a lot of fun. All in all a great trip, good food, wine, sun and sunshine - just the tonic - oh and I swam 700 lengths of the pool over 10 days (I was counting and I swam each of them underwater too - good for the lungs) which has left me feeling fitter than ever. I'm on a roll, goodness, is that optimism I see on the horizon, I thought he was dead, perhaps he was just snoozing. But how did these guys get so old - and yet see how well they have aged along with the song, Love Has No Pride, and I'd give anything, to see you again...