There are those who say you should never discard any of your writing. It may be just what you’ll be looking for some other time. It may spark another idea. Both true, but I’m of the opinion that my cluttered notebooks – not the journals which are, by definition, sacred – rather the random scribble books, the field books, the workbooks, the classroom books – they are basically out-houses, garden sheds, kitchen drawers. They are full of all the stuff that might be useful one day, but probably won’t. And even it if it is, by the time we need it we won’t remember where it is, or it will have started to rot from age, begun to be unsticky or rusty or unravel, or be so wound around by spider webs that really we don’t dare go near it. I know a bit about garden sheds and out-houses and kitchen drawers.
One day, on this de-clutter journey, I’ll attack those as well: the shed (which is technically a garage), the kitchen drawers, not the outthouse because I demolished that already and gave its contents away, but for now I’m thinking about notebooks. I pick up one with a lovely textured lime green cover, embossed with leaf patterns. It’s a beautiful book. Such a shame that the writing within it is not.
I pore over the pages. I should do something with this…and this…I keep thinking, while quite definitely not doing anything with it, and listening to the loud back-brain voice telling me it is too late. That these pieces were of their time and the fact that I didn’t pick them up, that I basically forgot about them, tells me everything I need to know. They were not good enough.
Forget the received wisdom that there might be gems in there. There probably aren’t. And if there are, they came out of the same part of my brain that I will write with again some day. We don’t need to hold onto the pages that just might have good ideas written down, because the really good ideas will nag at us again and again until we figure out what to do with them, and the rest were just not ready, not yet good enough frankly. I love that little word 'yet'...it fills me with hope.
For example, there is a cliff-top walk along a familiar landscape...
The land is exhaling.
Half a year’s inhalation of sun and warming air is now being released.
The fields are shades of fawn and gold and brown.
Ripening, drying out.
The path Adidas-stripes the field, three lanes
moving inwards away from the edge, from the falling zone.
Sand martins swoop.
A cinnabar moth rests on the spent flowerhead of thrift.
Meadow browns are restless, but I was so close
to the white hairstreak when a cheery ‘Hello!’
of a thoughtless fellow walker, chased it away.
Note to all novices: when approaching someone still,
assume they are looking closely. Stop. Be silent.
Wait respectful, until they notice you and wave you on.
~
Elsewhen, there was a quiet Sunday evening, sitting on the beach.
Anglers. Lines cast.
Rods propped on stands.
Nothing to do unless the line jerks.
One sits cross-legged, one lies back
resting on an elbow, the third lies fully back
looking up a the sky.
The tide moves in.
One drinks fruit juice from a tin.
Further along the beach there is a family group of Indian-sub-continent extraction. Young lovers, parents, small children. They walk into the water fully clothed, but not far enough to swim. They do not stay long. Just enough to greet the waves…as if you could do puja in the North Sea.
I throw a few stones towards the water, without knowing why.
Away along the coast, above the cliffs, a lone hang-glider launches into the air.
Clouds began to gather on the horizon.
~
Once, I started to look at photographs. I described what I see…and started to weave into it a story about another wedding completely unrelated…
In this one you are not even present. Your brother and his new wife are surrounded by the girls. Women, really. None of them your friends. You cannot name a single person outside of the happy couple. The bride looks happy. The groom looks as though he’s stumbled onto the wrong film set. All those fussy hairstyles and padded shoulders date it exactly. They all look older than they must have been. Older than you were by more than a few months, older than you feel even now. Her sister isn’t there either. What does that say about anything? You were both there, somewhere in the background, his sister, her sister, in similar dresses, that she thought maybe you might wear again. You kept it just in case, but really? Unlikely. It still hangs in the wardrobe.
~
Another time, another place, another wedding. When someone asked about it, the response was ‘interesting’. Not the first word you’d expect to be uttered. “It was lovely,” they said. “They said their vows, we ate, they did the first dance and then – well – we were enjoying the evening. Someone asked if we’d seen him and it had occurred to us that, no, we hadn’t, not for a while. We looked around. She wasn’t visible either. That might explain it, we thought, and carried on dancing.” After all, when the groom and the bride disappear from their own wedding party, you think happy thoughts. Until she returns. Suddenly she is there. In the background. Like it’s some-one else’s party. And he still is not. Apparently he’d been outside, saying he needed a walk, alone.
Much later he was seen knocking on a door – naming no names– but not the bridal suite – not the Best Man’s room. He was seen knocking. He was not seen entering. Maybe everyone else was still dancing, or had moved on to nightcaps and conversation in the back bars. Perhaps they’d already slunk to their own rooms or called their cabs and left.
In the morning she came down with her parents. Asked if she was ok, she said, “No. Not really.” And left. Apparently, he came down later, still in his wedding suit, looking unslept. Which was also not really ok.
~
No-one ever put on their best clothes and shoes for you. No-one came into a church to hear you make vows you hoped you might be able to keep. No-one could ever condemn you for not doing so, or for the choices you made, because you never promised otherwise.
You don’t belong in the photograph. You never liked the dress, even though you have it still and sort of wish you could shrink back into it and have a reason to wear it again. No-one did your hair that day, and no-one does it now. You’ve given up on cut-and-blow-dry’s. You’ve even stopped the home dyes. You always refused nail polish and make-up.
You left.
From everything you hear most of those people are still there. Some of them are happy. Some of them are not. All of them are pretty much what they always were, only a few others are not and are sometimes sneered at because they have grown. You feel most for the others.
You just walked away. And none of them will even remember your name.
~
Fragments of things that still feel incomplete beginnings of things that I don't know how to finish, which is how we all write. We forget that we don't get to see the famous authors' half-written incompleteness. If I'd been Fitzgerald's or Hemingway's cleaner, I could have rescued things from their waste paper basket, smoothed out the pages, and - if I was lucky - discovered that they also wrote half-finished, go-nowhere, bits of maybe things that they couldn't get to work.
Of course, I might have also discovered that they were, in fact, genii and even their discards were better than anything I'll ever come even close to.
~
There are more scribbles in my leafy book. None of them go anywhere. I discard them all. But the book is only half-used so I keep it: the remaining blank pages will be useful.
