It’s been difficult in the last month to look for time writing here balanced against writing fiction, which is what I’m slowly but surely making the grand switch to right now. It’s a new challenge for me. I like it. And am practicing with structuralist approaches, which at least one of my writing friends is perplexed by. Because the best stuff is “written into” without knowing the path very well in the first place.
But I get lost still. Finding too many sub plots and strange diversions along the way and then this results in giving up before the path is really set upon. But looking at the way other stories are structured, intentionally or not, helps.
My birthday came and went in April and I think I’ve reached an age where it’s harder to imagine but yet you know you are here, that you arrived somehow, and the only thing for it is to keep pushing on. I was in Paris visiting S. For the event of the birthday and it was a good four days consisting of continuous walking and realizing that Paris never dulls with familiarity. I have asked those who live there if this ever happens to them, if the city loses its beauty with multiple years of walking the same streets, surviving countless riots and strikes, burning under the heat, growing fed up with walking up countless flights of stairs and the answer is always no.
I even saw someone I grew up with, who by happenstance, showed up in Paris to show the city to her daughter who is turning thirteen. So we spent a few hours catching up after close to twenty years of not really being in contact.
Right before I left Dublin to go down to France, I received word that my job might become “redundant” which is how the Irish (and perhaps other countries in Europe) say laid off. They terminated most of the Americans without warning but they have to follow Irish law when it comes to me. So as of now, I’m still employed and I’m waiting to see what they come back with as far as responses to the myriad of questions I asked them during our first meeting. And, yes, the market looks tight right now. Still I managed to squeeze an interview in before I left and I guess the real question is, how will this play out as far as finding another position at the company or accepting severance and shopping myself around with a visa sponsorship in tow.
I’ve been reading plenty in addition to writing. A new discovery is David Searcy via the Travel issue of Granta Magazine. A well done essay that I continue to chew on. And really committing to Beatlebone by Kevin Barry. A real mind bending experience that involves time tears into portals in the middle of Irish fields, possession by strange spirits on a forlorn island off the coast of Galway, and John Lennon’s imagined experience of coming to Ireland during a mental breakdown to run from himself and then, at once, find himself.
I will say, walking my five or six miles a day in the Dublin spring with Beatlebone intoning (Kevin Barry reads it) in my ears does wonders for inspiration and perspective.
“ There is a show tonight in the Highwood, John. There will be all sorts of people to play music there. We must go tonight to the Highwood, john. we’ll breathe in the music and the cold-starred air.
*
And Cornelius has taken down the moon – hasn’t he? – with gleam-of-eye and giddying snout and his touch on the wheel is delicate as the spring, here a soft tip, there a glanced tap for each swerve of the road as it runs the country and turns.
Oh this is the knack of it – John can see clearly now – the carefree life, and he envies him the spring.
And before we know it, John? The summer proper will be in on top of us and the woods will be whispering.
Fuck the whispering woods, Cornelius. Just get me to my fucking island.
But he is snagged again; he turns helplessly.
How’d you mean, about the woods?
Cornelius beams –
There are things we can’t describe, he says.
Go on?
What we see around us is only at the ten per cent level, John.
Of?
The reality.
And what’s the leftover?
Unseen.
How’d you mean?
Well, he says. The way sometimes you’d walk across a field and a sense of elation would come over you. Are you with me?
Okay…
You’re half risen from the skin. the feet are not touching the stones. The little heart is about to hop out of your chest from the sheer fucken joy. And the strange thing about it?
Go on.
That patch of happiness could be floating around the field for the last ten years. Or for the last three hundred and fifty years. Out of love that was had there or a child that was playing or an old friend that was found again after a long time lost. Whatever it was, it caused a great happy feeling and it was left there in the field. You’re after walking into it. And for half a minute you’re lifted and soaring but then you’re out the far side again and back into your own poor stride and woes.
You’d find a sadness just the same?
Or an evil, John. Or a blackness. Or terror, John, or fucken terror, because there’s plenty of terror in the world. Always was and has been.
A soft whisper –
I mean take a look out the window.
A sweep of the arm for the greys and sea-greens of the moonful hills, the pale night as they pass by –
I mean why’d you think I’ve the fucken foot down, John?”
― Kevin Barry, Beatlebone