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Much, much harder than I thought to redraft the Funeral into third person. Tried to do it without naming the me character; replacing every ‘I’ and ‘me’ with 'she' and 'her'. Might not have been so bad but the work is monster heavy with lady-characters so I ended up tied in knots trying to make it explicit who is being referred to. Bit of a pickle. My friend who's hot on syntax was helpful in her critique of the original first-person piece. She said the narration was confusing sometimes because of all the characters; she’d had to go back and start reading again. I think that effect will be amplified in the redrafted third-person version. She added that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because it indicated there are plenty of interesting characters to write and she suggested I make the paragraphs smaller. I quite often need to go back to sort out characters when I’m reading, especially if two names start with J or something. Sometimes I have to draw the matrix around the characters; although mostly I don’t bother because I’m indolent and I think it’ll all come clear in the end. But I do think I’ll have to make my writing more lucid; maybe by allowing more time to introduce each character and to stop trying to be economical with words.
I watched Pan’s Labyrinth on Friday; I’ve taken this long because the reviews and friends who’d seen it spoke about a particularly violent and unlikable scene. I resolved just not to look when it was happening; I did look, but only sideways. Pan again, only it was a faun really and del Toro has said that the faun in the film is not Pan (Wikipedia) but used in the title so that English speakers would not confuse the faun of the Spanish title, El laberinto del fauno, with fawn, as in deer. Do they think people who opt to watch subtitled films are daft?
The film reminded me of my eldritch list, weird stuff that makes me feel funny, paintings of the Tower of Babel; waterwheels; Poll na bPeist; mazes; all those structures amongst the trees on the hillside at Rivington; clockwork anythings; ziggurats; Celtic heads; migraine; hedgehogs; warts (look what's happened there, JK Rowling obviously made her list a while ago)
Last week the lecturer talked about second person. As I understand, second person pronouns and verbs are used to refer to the person addressed by the language in which they occur. And I couldn’t see me managing that. But then someone’s redraft started out in third person and ended in second person. As in, ‘you made it’, which was very effective, because of course we do speak to ourselves all the time. I was reminded of a funny poem entitled, ‘Didn’t see that coming’ that one of us wrote. When I look back at it it’s written in first person but might work well in second.
There wasn’t time to critique the work of my competent friend and I this week. I’m calm because I’ve been here before and it all comes out ok next time; although we’re back to poetry next week; all comes out ok the time after next, then. Anyway, I’ve realised now that critiquing is competitive too; the who’s-most-insightful-stakes, so if you’re astute you can show off without even being vulnerable.
Out for a birthday meal at the weekend; I noticed the man across from us had a relatively new hair transplant, if that’s what it’s called. I told El (after she’d eaten) because she’d have been livid to have missed it. Of course my friend, Auntie Pam wanted to know what I was saying too. I swore her to discretion and we both examined the Sicilian painting on the wall in the opposite direction whilst I told her. "That man has a hair transplant." It was fine, moments lapsed and then she said, “That reminds me I'm going to the hairdressers next week, roots and perm otherwise it’s as straight as straight.” All the time that poor man must hear conversations about hairstyles and hairdressers striking up around him, and yes I know it was my fault this time. I was reminded of taking my dad for a hospital appointment. I’ve been told by a friend who knows about child development that diplomacy and discretion are some of the last human attributes we acquire (you walk a three year old near a one-legged man at your peril) and amongst the first we lose. My dad would never knowingly hurt anyone but it was like sitting in a cramped waiting room with a three year old. “He doesn’t look a bit well does he?” and “deaf bugger” when someone failed to hear their name being called. A slightly swarthy man with a stethoscope tiggered, "they want us to face all the beds to Mecca you know". "Who said that?" he tapped his Daily Express. If anyone slightly worthy of comment enters or passes I’d try to distract him with something in the Express or on the wall. A very fat lady walked by; she was attractive and well groomed and I thought the risk had receded but her companion entered close at her plump heels. She was a rather messy chubbier version of her sister. In Alan Bennett mode I’d made it that the spruce lady was accompanying her ill messy sister for an appointment. I held my breath, my dad had already been warned, two beats, then in steady clear tones,
“Remember Lisa? Now she was a big woman”
Me hissing, “Dad!”
“What? I’m only saying”
Nobody looked, at us or the fat sisters, but it was perfectly clear to everyone in the tiny waiting room what had prompted the memory.
I’ve been thinking about ideas of beauty - hair transplants, makeup, tattooing, intentional cranial remodelling, breast implants and stuff and I’m finding my standards are a bit on the double side, what a shock.
Ellie had a birthday. We’ve magnetic lowercase letters and (curiously) magnetic shopping list words on our fridge. They’ve only ever been used to compile amusing and generally mucky comments and phrases. A boy at the party was standing looking at the fridge and asked El what ‘dnos’ was. She was stumped and they stood together heads at an angle looking at, and repeating the word for a while. Finally, and presumably in frustration, someone else came up behind them, reached between their two inclined heads, swivelled the word till it read soup, and then testily swivelled it back again.
Submitted our first drafts with commentary and thought about theme. Called my bit funeral and I spoke to a friend about what I was preparing; I described the different components, Jimmy Woods digging graves, the death and funeral of my friends' mother, the tune September Song and wearing a remembrance poppy. He asked if I was calling it September Song, he plays gypsy guitar and he has four versions of it on his ipod; that in itself seems extraordinary because I think I imagined I was one of the last two people alive who knew the song. I've never considered calling it that but I didn't know why because it does encompass ideas of the past, my father and time running out. Thinking about themes make me realise that I'd stuck with funeral because it is literally (is it literally?) at the funeral where all the components converge. I'm feeling a bit giddy and excited about changing person and seeing what happens to hand in next week. I was pleased that the lecturer made us work with someone different this week because it’s useful to have a change of perspective. And it’s diverting to speak to someone else.
Someone called Jo Marchant was on Start the Week on Radio 4 on Monday. She spoke about the Antikythera, a calculating mechanism dating from 70 BC that was recovered from an Aegean shipwreck in 1901 by pearl divers. The device links the technical calendars used by astronomers to the everyday calendars that regulated Greek society. Its intermeshed toothed wheels represent calendar cycles; by turning the wheels users could distinguish the relationships between astronomical cycles to figure out the relative positions of the sun and moon and forecast eclipses. It’s a complicated but it’s unlikely to have been a one-off. It made me think about the althiometer in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials. When Jo had spoken others on the panel expressed astonishment that whoever had made the device hadn't made something Really Useful, 'they could have made a alarm clock'. Jo replied that within the context of the times the maker had made something Exceedingly Useful and that first century BC Greeks would have no use for a clock, alarm or otherwise. This made me think about two things, an anthropologist called Evans-Prichard who studied the Nuer, who are/were Sudanese pastoralists. He reported that they did not have any expression equivalent to time which meant that they couldn’t speak of time as though it was something actual, it didn’t pass, couldn’t be wasted, couldn’t be saved and couldn’t be made up. I’m compelled by the notion that we invented something as stressful as time and I wonder what we do or don’t do now that will appear incomprehensible to future generations. I suspect that building substantial great structures to the glory of a god that we’ve made up might be one thing, but of course it’s just as likely to be something that seems wise and reasonable to me at the moment. I very uneasy about the common assumption that putting children from the age of four or five away in schools from 9.00 till 3.00 every day is a kind or sensible thing to do.
I went to Crail this weekend to visit my mother in law. Crail is a very strange seaside town in Fife. On my last visit the man in the museum directed me to a petrified Carboniferous tree trunk on the beach. I was completely overwhelmed by the sight of it, it’s huge and unbelieva
ble. A few weeks later my daughter Ali went to visit her Granny and then went in search of the fossil tree trunk. She couldn’t find it so asked a likely looking local. He said he thought it must be in the opposite direction because, ‘there are only rocks that way’.
The first session of the new course was on Wednesday evening 1 October 2008. There were ten of us. I don’t think I really had any particular expectations of what the others would be like, other than I vaguely imagined they might remind me of me. They didn’t, and like Alan Bennett’s mother I immediately started to construct unfounded biographies and backgrounds for them.
We spoke about our childhoods with reference to a particular place, item or feeling, say a den, a bedroom, toy, pair of shoes, pet, school friend or fear. I thought about Elizabeth Stevenson. I could see her but I couldn’t retrieve her surname until I was driving home. Recollections were so vivid I could feel some of them as if there were my own; the sensation of wearing see-through jelly heels with a marble stuck in the waffle sole, my shoulders tightening with the naughty camaraderie of hiding a playtime Lego construct in the books so it wouldn’t be wrecked. Talking to others broke my own memories open, someone spoke about their terrifying bedroom curtains and I was reminded of a paisley pattern sofa fabric that I used to travel along the interweaving pattern of in my mind. We all had frighteny ceiling plaster monsters and most of the people I spoke to had doting detailed den memories; garnering scraps of rough textured corrugated iron to make a roof between two huts; the scent of the grass roof that camouflaged the den. I used to furnish mine with great big shiny new hinges from my dad’s shed; I’d pretend were books and I remember sitting ‘reading’ and at the same time crumbling cut-off scraps asbestos (yes really), it has a lovely silky, talcy texture when you rub it between your fingers. I wonder if there are denpeople and non-dentypes, I still like hideaways a lot but know children who’ll say things like, ‘smells funny’ or ‘what if there are spiders in there?’ or ‘but I can’t stand up’. Surely dens weren’t meant to be palatial anywhere but in your head? I also wonder if dentypes grow up into shedpeople. On the drive between Lancaster and Liverpool as a child I was enchanted by the allotments we passed at the side of the Ribble in Penwortham. A bit because they always seemed to have bonfires on the go, but mostly because of the raggedy range of sheds on show; a recycled boat wheelhouse, cabins with curtains, huts with extensions; people sitting outside their sheds enjoying a companionable brew; proper shedpeople with no fear of spiders or self-important expectations of being able to stand upright all the time.
What stayed with me from the first session of the new course was, that a lot of us remember stuff very intensely from when they were about six, that we were all subject to horrible fears that, in theory, could have been easily ameliorated by the presence of our parents, (in evolutionary terms I’m sure babies or children are not meant to be left to sleep on their own) and that a lot of us think that the world is a more perilous place now than it was when they were young. That last worries me enormously, partly because I just don’t want it to be the case. For one thing, as a nominal grown-up, I’m responsible for the world as it stands today. For another thing I just don’t think it can be true; there have always been seemingly irrationally cruel people who abused the power they had over others. Records from children who spent time in homes or residential schools during1950s and 1960 often contain harrowing accounts of terrible vulnerability, casual bullying, and terrible, terrible cruelty. When I was about eleven and, it transpires very naïve, my parent’s decent chamber of trade friend invited me to look around his coffee bar during its winter refurbish. It suits me now to think that my mother dismissed my description of his attempts to wrestle with me, ‘don’t be silly, he wouldn’t do that’ or ‘don’t be daft, he didn’t mean anything’. But I suspect now that I didn’t tell her; I wasn’t so young or naïve that I didn’t realise that that brief scuffle and what it didn’t actually lead to was deeply shameful. Sadly I imagined the shame as mine and not his.
The last thing that stayed with me from Wednesday is the significance of the combination of person and tense on the emotional impact of a piece of life writing. I went to an outdoor concert at Houghton Towers once. After one tune the conductor turned to the audience and apologised that one part had been slightly off-key. My friend Steve swivelling in his garden chair, eyebrow raised, and said to me, ‘how on earth does he know that?’ which was exactly what I was thinking. I feel a bit the same about combinations of person and tense, I’ve a good bit of work to do on grammar I can tell.
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