Unloading the burden of juvenilia

At the twilight of another lost weekend, the highlight of which was last night's visit to the Soho Bar (to be written up another day this week), a little reminiscence of an earlier period. Clearing through old files this afternoon, I came across a folder of documents I had forgotten - thumbnail sketches for my first, shortlived, and only serious escapade into creative writing.

I have wanted to write properly from my first reading age. Reading and writing were my only distinctive talents at school - I out-read everyone in the school, my mother having to buy new books for me as the school ran out of material for me to read. As a graduate student (5 years ago), I spent a lot of time writing things that weren't really anything to do with what I was studying. At the time of my writing, I felt sincerely (and I still do, although with less certainty) that I had at least one good novel in me, and with the time I had on my hands there was no reason to delay a first attempt.

I had the spines of the plots, but wrote only about 50 pages worth. In my mind, it was to be an entwining of multiplicitous strands: an examination of death and human transition, a creative reflection of how family as a structure handles that transition, with a macro plot about the implosion of the world - an apocalyptic event to catalyse the characters' vergent perceptions of the deathly. OK, so translated into layman's language, that means a moody, emotional drama combined with a disaster story, - ultimately not too distant from the cheap throwaway Hollywood movie plot that we like to sling mud at. It was also hopelessly immature, totally lacking in originality but strangely un-familiar too, even in its plainness.

I realised this after a couple of months, and destroyed most of the stuff I'd written so far in disgust. Only these abrupt sketches remain. I regret this petulance now - it was, at the time, a fucking big deal and even now I am forced into a re-evaluation. Re-reading it now, I haven't changed my mind about the immaturity, and it is largely an unrefined piece of crap.

I recognise that I chose a topic I had no right to take, but at the time, I was musing heavily on how death affects and evolves families. There was a bit of death around the family at the time, and it made me think a lot about changes and how family overcomes this (or doesn't in some cases). This was also a time when I believed all my grandparents to be deceased, little knowing (as I do now) that my father's mother is very much alive.

Anyhow, I'm sharing some of what was saved with you - let's call it a "letting go" now that this means nothing. I'm happy to accept I can do so much better, and I'm not embarrassed by juvenilia anymore. For what it's worth, here are the fragmented residues of my creative adventure in creative writing:

from "Sweet Harmony" (experimental title)

In the year leading up to his death, I asked my father what it was like to have the foresight of his own end.

It was a question that had gnawed at me since that Sunday morning in January when, freshly doused with New Year blessings from morning mass, he had marched purposefully into the dining room and given us the news. Bella and Bart held hands as they absorbed the meaning of his words; I sat rigid, gripping the arms of my chair. With the bright Winter sun splashed across his back, he had glowed like an archangel, a herald of fate embossed against the fire of divine tidings.

It seemed to me a terrifying state of knowledge, the awareness to measure the end with such exactitude. That life could be reduced to calendar planning, to a resignation of oneself to an irrecoverable deficit of time, the penance of an irredeemable series of mistakes. It appeared to me the despair of measuring the erosion of a coastline, all the while knowing when the cliff will collapse and be reclaimed by the jaws of the sea. My father had lived in ignorance of the abrasions the cancer had wrought against his liver, without an awareness of when the cliff would falter.

* * *

‘Doesn’t it scare you, not even a little?’ I asked.
‘No, not at all. Fear of death, my love, is the emotional reserve of the living. My death is an event that has already taken place. Once you learn to dismiss the possibility of the miraculous, and say “I am already dead, really”. If there is any fear about the whole business of dying, it is bereavement, and bereavement is what happens to those left behind. I came to understand that most when your mother passed. For her loss, I was not prepared. Secretly, we all dupe ourselves with the instinct that life cannot leave without our express permission. But that’s not how it ends up working. I’m lucky, comparatively. My death is a certainty anchored in a calendar accuracy. So, you see, I have already grieved before the event – I want you to do away with it also, even before the event.’

An answer reasoned upon, a prepared answer as only the academic seasoned by many a seminar is capable. He said nothing further on the subject, the question was never asked again, and after a while accepted its terminally unanswered state.

* * *

Bella and I had never known our mother, neither as a personality nor as an icon. As young children, we had not missed her, rarely allowed her into our lives, although our father was forever making reference to her. It was as though he felt he could speak her into presence, declaring her beauty so it could appear before us, repeating her words so that her voice would usher forth from the emptiness and we might hear. At age 14, we went through a period of intense longing for her, (‘a delayed period of mourning’, Dad had called it). At that age, whenever he spoke her into being, we would memorise and trap the images like butterflies. Hoarding our harvest of father's wistful stories, we would take creativity upon ourselves, and developed a secret, shared imagination of our mother's being.

Inevitably, after a few months of expansive fantasising, our sculpting of spirit and flesh peaked and soon reached its end. Our intense imagining on the suppleness of locks or the fineness of her wrists... dwindled into tacit acceptance of the finished article. Our mother had been shaped into completion as an artifice of our minds, a synthetic memory; there was no more marble to chip away without defecting the article. Thereafter, she returned to the ghostliness of our infancy, and hovered quietly in the recesses of our twinned minds.

Now, burying my father, I thought again for my mother, and looked for her in the shadowed veils of the church. In my mind, I had liked to think of funerals as the haunt of ghosts, the weeping of unwitting mourners felt silently by the benign spectral presence of the dear ones deceased…

* * *

...I noticed that the room had succumbed to a deepening darkness. The candles around the room had begun to expire. The flames quivered, convulsed then, one by one, imploded into ascensions of pale wisps that arched up and dissipated into the heavy, empty evening.