We don’t want it, I tell him. It’s crap. A dud. Wish we’d never bought it.

Anna puts it on the floor in front of her. She’s breathing so heavily I have to pat her.

We’ve sold lots of them, he says, hardly creasing his smile. No complaints at all. Not one as I remember. He looks around at his colleagues but they don’t reciprocate. You have a problem with it?

It works, but it’s not what we wanted. It’s full of bad news. We wish we’d never bought it. We don’t want it. I took the back off, I tell him. It’s full of bad news. Price increases, strikes, murder, genocide, austerity, bankers’ bonuses. Michael Gove. Terrorism. We want the old one back.

Do you have the receipt?

Anna dives into her purse and surfaces with a crumpled scrap of paper, the name of the shop is still legible. We want the old one back, she says encouragingly. I give her another pat. That’s my girl.

But she’s found her wind now: It was a Bush, you took it in part-ex; not flat like this one, one of the older ones with the huge bulge at the back and the volume knob was broken, half of it gone. It also had some bad news, but nowhere near as much as this one. And you wouldn’t have thought that, this one being so slim.

Ah, they’re slim, the shop guy says, slipping easily into selling mode. They pack more into that narrow space than they ever could’ve imagined packing into the old ones. Progress for you.

That’s what we’re saying, I tell him. It’s full of bad news.

He’s silent for a moment, moves from one foot to the other. I’ll just have a quick word with my manager, he says.

But you can tell him, I say firmly . . .

Her, he’s eager to correct me. We have a lady manager now.

Then you can tell her we definitely don’t want it. Soon as we got it working, almost the next minute, the Pope died. Cardinals with long faces all day, all night. They’re lighting fires and voting for another old guy. After that they tell us we’re eating horse meat and the supermarkets don’t even know they’re selling it. Some old King is getting buried in a car-park. Politicians, the police, they’re all corrupt as hell. They’re threatening more floods now. We’ve had enough.

With the old one, Anna says, we got bad news from time to time. But there were more bright spots, Graham Norton, Black Books, Whatsit and Stacey; we liked that.

He was still there, shifting his weight, not getting to have that word with his lady manager, but not actually with us any longer.

Just tell her, I said. We’re not taking it back. It’s not fit for purpose. The latest thing, it’s got old politicians and rock-stars dangling, people God forgot about. We can’t take any more. We’ll sit tight here until you find the old one.

Between my fits of sleep I thought about you, rehearsing our future, which I knew would be brief. Of course we would sleep together, though this topic had not yet been discussed. In those days, as you recall, it had to be discussed first, and so far we had not progressed beyond a few furtive outdoor gropings and one moment when under a full moon on one of those deserted brick streets, you had put your hand on my throat and announced that you were the Boston Strangler; a joke which, for one with my literary predilections, amounted to a seduction. But though sex was a necessary and even a desirable ritual, I dwelt less on it than on our parting, which I visualized as sad, tender, inevitable and final. I rehearsed it in every conceivable location: doorways, ferry-boat docks, train, plane and subway stations, park benches. We would not say much, we would look at each other, we would know (though precisely what we would know I wasn’t sure); then you would turn a corner and be lost forever. I would be wearing a trench coat, not yet purchased, though I had seen the kind of thing I wanted in Filene’s Basement the previous autumn. The park bench scene – I set it in spring, to provide a contrast to the mood – was so affecting that I cried, though since I had a horror of being overheard, even in an empty hotel, I timed it to coincide with the radiator. Futility is so attractive to the young, and I had not yet exhausted its possibilities. Margaret Atwood.

She is an over-the-hill actress. Time has done a job on her face and her body has moved out of definition. There may be some work in the pipeline, bit-parts, a vague hope on the horizon, but she knows she’s finished. She is standing by one of the speakers shaking her hips to the rhythm. She is absent but her hips are pumping away just off the beat. Her hair is wild, her clothes too young for her face, although you could argue they are exactly the right age for her legs. That’s what happens when you start on deconstructing a woman.

The girls are all in the kitchen dressed in black. The men are there too, sniffing it out. Outside a storm is howling. Thunder and lightening and walls of rain. Strange shadows and sounds inhabit the street and gardens, the alleys and porches. The wind screeches at any semblance of order. And there is nothing to do about it.

Next door the house has never been finished. It has not known completion. Thirty years ago a builder called Colin Beary began with the foundations and erected the outside walls and roof, even got to plaster the sitting room and kitchen, plumbed the bathroom and installed rudimentary electrics. Then his heart stopped and the business went into receivership. Beary’s widow employed their ex accountant to finish the job but he disappeared with the cash. A shadowy figure, he, in turn died penniless and homeless in Venice, though it was said he had access to millions in a Swiss account. He died in the fanny of a Venetian courtesan who had metamorphosed from a Northern novelist once almost long-listed for the Booker. Under the floorboards of the unfinished house there is something unspeakable. Half decomposed. When the kill was fresh there was much blood, but that was another time. The man who had owned and inhabited the cadaver was something big in the church.

Part One of Three:

Part Two of Three:

Part Three of Three:

“It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten. Similarly, while I often give lectures on similar topics, I can never remember, for better or worse, exactly what I said on previous occasions; nor can I bear to look through my earlier notes. Losing conscious memory of what I have said before, and having no text, I discover my themes afresh each time, and they often seem to me brand-new. This type of forgetting may be necessary for a creative or healthy cryptomnesia, one that allows old thoughts to be reassembled, retranscribed, recategorized, given new and fresh implications.

Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives.”

Oliver Sacks

The Stage Manager delivers an opening monologue in which he explains, matter-of-factly, that “the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. … They get weaned away from the earth–that’s the way I put it, weaned away. Yes, they stay here while the earth-part of ‘em burns away, burns out, and all that time they slowly get indifferent to what’s goin’ on in Grover’s Corners.”

In a sensitive and thoughtful piece of writing Natalie Shapero in The Kenyon Review looks at Penelope Niven’s biography of Thornton Wilder.

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires–and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings–the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire–but hour by hour
They fell and faded–and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash–and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless–they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;–a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought–and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails–men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress–he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects–saw, and shriek’d, and died–
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful–was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless–
A lump of death–a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge–
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir’d before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them–She was the Universe.

Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple, “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile or commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possesion, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away. And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world, verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Paris,
February 17th, 1903