Pandemic: foxes and sunsets and suicide

A couple of months ago, I saw a cat run across the garden with a pigeon in its mouth. I’ve never seen a domestic cat hunt such a big bird. The pigeon was upside down, white underneath. I did not see it being killed, just saw it being carried away.

I see foxes occasionally, once a year. One ran across the garden last week. It tarried for fifteen seconds or so on the wall, as if it were checking something. I was able to get a photo. It was huge - red and grey. Beautiful. I’ve seen it again since. Twice in a week.

I want it to come every day.

In between the pigeon being killed and the fox standing on the wall, uncommon events in this garden, the covid19 pandemic has impacted massively in the west. I recall watching reports from China in January, but of course did not think at all it involved ‘us’.

Now we are all affected.

Nothing feels real. 

Being chronically ill, I am used to spending long spells of time indoors, semi-isolated, but now the whole world is the same. It's getting a crash course in isolation and illness, in an alarming and dramatic way. The stuff of fiction.

Spring is happening, but it's dislocating. Daffodils have bloomed and withered, tulips are opening, the sun is warm if you shield yourself from the Scottish wind, but you cannot ever relax, the dread of this coronavirus is always there.

Six days into the lockdown, the weekend the clocks went forward, I heard my childhood friend had taken an overdose and was in intensive care. He has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The unfolding of the virus and the isolation it imposed was too much for him, he was simply overwhelmed. I had spoken to him four or five times the week before, which made the news of his overdose even more upsetting. Against all the odds, after six days in intensive care, he regained consciousness and after being treated for bacterial pneumonia was discharged to a surgical ward before being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where I hope they will be able to look after him for as long as is needed. 

I remembered that when the clocks went back last October, my friend had called me to say he had  put his clock back at 5pm, in case he forgot. Before  the lockdown he was doing a writing class and I told him I would love to see his writing, and asked him to send me some. He said he wanted  to write a book and I told him writing a book was hard. I might just write half a book then, he replied. His mother has since told me it is poetry he has been writing.

What struck me when my friend was in intensive care and we did not know the outcome was that his mother, a close friend of my own mother’s, had been a huge support in the early seventies when my consultant anaesthetist father had taken his own life, living in the same town my friend and his mother still live in.

My current writing project is a (slow) fictionalisation of aspects of my father’s life. There is an early scene in particular, with withered flowers - hydrangea -  in this friend's garden in the 1970s. The scene has been in my head for many years, real, but now re-imagined in the novella-in-progress (I was delighted to discover a couple of  years ago, this poem by Rilke, 'Blue Hydrangea'). More than ever I've been thinking of the importance of storytelling. I have also been thinking of anaesthetists  as they are suddenly very much in the media – the experts on ventilators, so much needed in this crisis. In a 1960s' Polaroid, my father looks like a poet with his Paisley pattern cravate, drinking beer in Amsterdam.

The backs of my hands are cracked, my knuckles slightly bleeding, I've been overdoing disinfecting, using too much bleach, just so very afraid of getting infected from groceries/deliveries coming in. With ME your immune system is already in disarray, and we simply do not know how people with ME would be affected by covid19. It's too frightening to contemplate, given how unpredictably and aggressively this novel virus is affecting youngish, healthy people with no pre-existing conditions. There is talk in the medical community of how some covid19 patients are bound to develop ME afterwards. (Suddenly ME is respectable, the devastating illness you can get after a virus.)

In normal times, I spend much time sitting at my bedroom window watching birds and squirrels and sunsets. It's restorative, a gorgeous way to meditate and contemplate when you cannot do aerobic exercise. This process of contemplation has become even more important. Everyone is commenting on how much louder the birds are, they can be heard everywhere, surely a tiny silver lining of the pandemic.

Learning to swim in Lahore; Muriel Spark and Kjersti Skomsvold

I recently reviewed Isambard Wilkinson's Travels in a Dervish Cloak, this passage stays in my mind:

Pakistani novelists of  a certain vintage remember a golden era in Pakistan's first decades when Anglo-Indians danced at Karachi's Metropole, hippies spun vinyl at discotheques, Pakistan was advertised as an exotic holiday location and Dizzy Gillespie beguiled a Sindhi snake charmer's serpent with his trumpet. That innocent age, if it ever existed, was dead.

It makes me nostalgic for a Karachi I barely know. We visited in 1974, two years after my father had died. I find myself scraping those memories up, trying to build a narrative (I have a letter that a visiting British doctor staying at Hotel Metropole left for my father who was then working at Jinnah Hospital in mid-1950s). I recall that we stayed in Lahore for a few days in the Intercontinental and that was where I learned to swim without arm bands. A far cry from the swimming lessons at primary school back home, where you would shiver as you were checked in line for verrucas. There was also an earthquake when we were in Lahore and all the dishes shook on the hotel breakfast table.

*

Many of us have been giving  Muriel Spark for Christmas because of the centenary of her birth. I've just re-read The Driver's Seat. I read it when I was about sixteen and didn't understand it, I am not sure I understand it any better but I much more appreciate the elegance and construction of this slim,  disturbing novel. And the humour is marvellous.

I just got a copy of Norwegian writer Kjersti Skomvold's MonsterHuman, which is now available in English. I blogged about her a few years ago and read her debut novel, which she started writing on post-it notes when she was very ill with ME. I'm obviously very interested in autobiographical, fictionalised accounts of ME and look forward to MonsterHuman. I see on Wikipedia that Skomvold also studied French at L'Université de Caen, which is a great coincidence as I was studying there in 1982/3 when I first became ill with Coxsackie virus, which later evolved monstrously into ME. We got ill at a similar age though I am a good decade older.

I love the start of new year, a whole new pile of to be read books on the bedside table:

Stairs and Whispers is an anthology by deaf and disabled poets that I have just started dipping into. It looks brilliant.

The world is fucked and books are all we have

The world is fucked and books are all we have. When things are tough, I look for illumination in poetry, nothing has helped, but then a few days ago someone tweeted 'Apes' (1990) by Adam Zagajewski.

 Apes

One day apes made their grab for power.
Gold seal-rings,
starched shirts,
aromatic Havanas,
feet squashed into patent leather.
Deeply involved in our other pursuits,
we didn’t notice: someone read Aristotle,
someone else was wholly in love.
Rulers’ speeches became somewhat more chaotic,
they even gibbered, but still,
when did we ever really listen? Music was better.
Wars: ever more savage; prisons:
stinking worse than before.
Apes, it seems, made their grab for power.

Poem by Adam Zagajewski, from Without End

 *

On my bedside table just now are these:

Last weekend, I read Claudia Rankine's prose-poem Citizen, which is startling and unsettling (for me, more prose than poem, but well worth reading). I often stop books for no good reason and take weeks/months to go back, it may be a concentration thing. This summer, I stopped The Vegetarian a third of the way through and started a thriller (Apple Tree  Yard by Louise Doughty, which I loved). I will go back to The Vegetarian soon (I also really liked the story behind the translation). The Blue Devils of Nada by Albert Murray is a gorgeous dipping-in book of essays and there are some gems there. I will also, of course, go back to James Baldwin (started and stopped for no good reason). Jackie Kay's Trumpet is a secondhand book passed on to me, which I look forward to.

*

The Goldfinch painting by Carel Fabritius has come to Edinburgh (how sad he died aged 32), which prompted me to start my Kindle version of Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning novel - I've had it for two years, unread. I'm 100 pages in and love the plot, but the style is too wordy for my liking. The micro-details clutter the prose, which is exhausting to read. I recall mixed reviews at the time. Julie Myerson was not too keen. Not sure I can stay the course. I think it would make a great film though.

*

A couple of weeks ago, I watched John Berger and Susan Sontag discussing the process of reading and writing in 'To Tell a Story' on Channel 4 in 1983. The discussion was part of a series called VOICES (I don't remember VOICES, Channel 4 had just started and I was at the beginning of the nightmare of what turned out to be ME). Berger and Sontag are so compelling, you agree with both of them even when they have opposing views. Their earnestness almost seems quaint now, but I was struck by their respectful disagreement with one another. They are mesmerising to watch and listen to.

And I have just discovered Scottish doctor, filmmaker and  poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999), what a remarkable woman. (‘Emily’: ‘Emily Dickinson shut herself in a room / And wrote about her pain. / She wrote too about joy’.) You can hear a recording of Margaret Tait reading 'Emily' and other poems  here on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

*

And Leonard Cohen is dead, that is hard to know. Since 1980, I have loved his poetry and his music and his beauty. He was old-ish, I guess, 82, but I have so many folded-up memories that his songs unfold again. 'Suzanne' is mentioned in my novel. ('...and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China' has to be one of the most beautiful lines ever).
 

I cried last Wednesday morning when I learned Trump was elected and I cried again two days later when I learned that Leonard  had died.

The world is fucked and books are all we have.

Tiny joys

The world seems abominable at the moment, but I smiled this Easter weekend. I saw two rainbows yesterday, one in the afternoon, a portion, stubby and thick, and one in the evening, a thin huge arc. And today a goldfinch as high on a tree as you can be; starlings that could be female blackbirds until you get close, a chaffinch singing its heart out and two princely beautiful male eider ducks. The world seemed almost bearable again. By the way, a broken rainbow is called a watergaw in Scots.

Five days after the morning after

It seems like months ago we voted to stay or go - I had a tear in the polling booth, it felt like destiny was weighing on you -  a real chance to make a fairer country - but not even a week has passed since the Scottish referendum. Last Thursday night, it felt like Hogmanay, but you didn't know when the bells would be, or if there would even be bells. I sat up 'til just after midnight but had to go to bed, woke up at six, so nervous, saw a FB message from a friend in Australia, saying, I don't understand all these Nos, my heart sank, and I turned on television to see that No had just won. Alex Salmond made a speech. I wept. My mother - I was staying with her for a few days while my stepdad was in respite care -  knew before me - she'd been up during the night. Friday was a day like no other I have experienced: a tangible grief being felt by 1.6 million people in Scotland, while 2 million others were celebrating, or, if they'd voted No out of fear, thanking their lucky stars. Worth noting, again, I think, that many of us who voted Yes - I think almost half - are not nationalists We simply want a better country, a better everything.

But there was  an 85% turnout, which is, in itself, a wonderful thing. Most of my family voted Yes, half of my friends voted No. There were interesting discussions to be had, certainly, but no one fell out.

Of course, the extra powers promised - aka the vow/bribe made to Scotland by a sleekit, panicked Westminster galloping up north when it thought Yes might just win - were instantly clipped onto wider constitutional reform - the question of only English MPs voting on English issues - when Cameron made his victory speech early on Friday morning. When - if at all - we will see those extra powers remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath. As Lesley Riddoch said, we've been put to the back of the constitutional queue.

I read so much before and after the 18th, it has all blurred into one, but I thought this was a good article by Jonathan Freedland, the day after.  Also enjoyed this yesterday, by Iain Macwhirter.  I am gutted we didn't get independence, but the referendum was a fascinating event to live through and I will keep my polling card forever. I do believe that politics in the UK will never be the same again. SNP membership has doubled since the result on Friday. The Greens and Scottish Socialist Party are enjoying increases too. Labour is standing in the corner in disgrace for its part in joining with Team Tory to scare the bejesus out of us if we voted Yes.

My stepdad came home from respite on Monday and my mother asked him what he thought of the referendum  results. He replied, What referendum?  Knocking his forehead with his knuckles, he said to me: My brain is mud. My intelligence is still here, but my memory is not. He had a postal vote, but has no recollection.  Later, as he poured himself a wee whisky, he shouted through from the kitchen, Where is Arran?

I've had a *horrible* few days of illness, classic ME, and was mostly in bed for three days (tweeting from my pillow). Thirty years on, this is beyond a fucking joke. Still, on Monday I had an hour in my parents' garden reading, an Indian summer indeed (though it's dark now by half seven).

The article in the photo is from The Sunday Herald - the only newspaper to back independence - well worth reading, by Paul Hutcheon. And I ordered 'Autobiography of an Unknown Indian' by  Nirad C Chaudhuri after reading Ian Jack's very interesting pre-Indyref article last week: Is This the End of Britishness?  Personally,  while I love some things about Britain - our precious NHS - increasingly under threat - is a gem of gems - I've never felt particularly British. I feel Scottish, emotionally and psychologically, though my outlook by default is international. My mother is Scottish, my late father was an Indian-born Pakistani (I'm slowly exploring my Pakistani side, such as it is, in my current writing project). My stepfather is Danish, my sister-in-law is German. My most meaningful longterm relationship has been with someone not from UK. Moreover, the referendum to me was not about Britishness or Scottishness, or anti-Englishness - the worst accusation slung around by media - it was about fairness and social justice. I knew we weren't going to wake up in Norway, but a Yes vote would have surely given us the template for a more equal society.

 *

I'm home now and desperately hoping the baby squirrels haven't been hurt by the ever-present, prowling gangster neighbourhood cats. And I just love the poem 'The Morning After' by Christine de Luca: here it is being recited by Scottish 16 and 17-year-olds, first-time voters. Indeed, 'there are dragons to slay whatever happens'.

And here are the results in full. But, as Jonathan Freedland above said, 'When close to half the population of a nation inside a union wants to break away, the state of that union is not strong. It is fragile'.

There are, for sure, interesting times ahead.

*Update And this by Gerry Hassan worth reading too.

The Istanbul Review: Issue 5

Delighted that the gorgeous The Istanbul Review Issue 5 is now on sale in Looking Glass Books, a wonderful indie book store in Edinburgh. I have flash fiction in this one. This issue also has writing by Elif Shafak and Lesley Glaister. And the stunning cover artwork - and art within - is by Canan  Berber. The Istanbul Review gives 2.5% of its profits to NGOs across the world promoting literacy.

Six years on, still getting lovely feedback on novel

Almost six  years on, lovely to get feedback from readers of The State of Me: this from Merry Speece in Ohio:

I just finished reading The State of Me and wanted to tell you how much I liked it. I particularly admire your intelligence and sense of humor and your commitment to advocacy. I enjoyed the story (you are a born novelist), and you did a good job explaining the illness ME. I have been ill for more than 45 years. My mother was also ill; I have no memory of her as well.

Full comment is here.


I see that Merry writes poetry and prose.

And on subject of poetry, I came across Rosemary Tonks in an article last week, fascinating woman, I must look up her work.

In love with Robert Hass

I hurt my fucking back - again - this time taking laundry from the basket (the tiniest 'wrong' move can fell you, but you can't avoid it as you don't know what it is 'til too late), so I spent last night eating Solpadol 30/500 and reading Robert Hass. I have fallen for him bigtime, his poetry is splendid and I can't believe I had not heard of him before. He reminds me a little of Lydia Davis, another writer I recently discovered (and love).

'It is good to sit down to birthday cake

with children, who think it is the entire point

of life and who, therefore, respect each detail

of the ceremony... '

Robert Hass,  'September Notebook: Stories'

*

And I can't resist this new review of The State of Me. Always pleased when a reader comments on the writing as well as the (hugely important) message about the illness.

Hell of writing/not writing

I love this quote from American poet Robert Hass:

"It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written".

Now I want to read all of his poems.

Louis MacNeice

I recently read that the poet Louis MacNeice had been sent by the BBC to India  in 1947 to report on Partition. I knew his name, of course, but was not familiar with his work (I don't read much poetry, shame on me!). Tonight, I came across his poem 'Snow' and I had to read it three times, I loved it so much. Now, I want to know everything about him.

The power of narrative (for good and ill)

I am increasingly interested in why we read stories, I think it might make you a better writer if you understand the seduction of narrative (though maybe it is better not to think about these things at all, and just write).  I've been dipping into The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall:  The riddle of fiction comes to this: Evolution is ruthlessly utilitarian. How has the seeming luxury of fiction not been eliminated from human life? My stepdad continues to bemuse us with narratives based on false memories - and what else is narrative if not memory? - he told us at the weekend that he had travelled across India by train in the nineties. He also referred to dinner plates as 'big flats', which is just poetry. I've been horrified at the pre-election violence in Pakistan (my family on my father's side live in Karachi). This clip from a couple of weeks ago is unbearable to watch, capturing a young boy's trauma after a bomb has gone off in Peshawar.  I cannot claim to understand much of the political narrative that is playing out in Pakistan at the moment, but my heart sinks at the seemingly  endless cycle of violence. This is an interesting article  by doctor and writer Qanta Ahmed, who lives in New York. She explores the twisted, nihilistic  narrative that seduces young men like the Boston bombers - there is no motive, just narrative which brings 'meaning' to their senseless and cruel  acts.

Creativity, pain & an owl hooting

In the current New Statesman, TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Julia Copus - who suffers from endometriosis - makes the point that there is more made of the connection between creativity and mental illness than creativity and physical illness. The link with the physical is just as significant, she says. She speaks specifically of the link between creativity and excruciating pain: 'But always after the pain comes the gradual, miraculous release from pain, and with it the sense that my stay in in that strange other realm to which illness transports us is by no means over'. Severe pain takes you to a place where you can think only of the pain and nothing else. From my own experience, the end of the pain would be the beginning of perfection: in my severe days, I used to make atheistic deals with God, please make me better,  I will never complain again about anything. I had almost constant brain tumour headaches/a fist of pain in my spine and when I walked across the kitchen floor I felt I was going uphill. Copus describes how Matisse came to painting from law after a bout of appendicitis. His mother brought him art supplies while he convalesced. He left law and became a painter.

There is also the being ill and observing, as I noted in my review of Kjersti A Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am - you may be too ill to physically write but you can still observe, and shelve the observations away. You have  an enforced stillness, an enforced witnessing, that you simply would not have were you not ill. Many of Helen Fleet's observations in The State of Me are my own,  from those days of  'exile' that longterm illness brings.

And I'm sure there's more fiction/drama where the central character is mentally ill rather than physically ill. As I said in a previous post (towards the end), perhaps mentally ill characters are seen as more colourful, they are more likely to behave 'badly'. If you are physically ill you are dull and boring, not taking part. Or you die.

There has been an owl hooting the last few nights, at first I thought it was a fox shrieking, but it is definitely twittwoo. I discovered that this is in fact two tawny owls, the female goes twit and the male replies twoo. I love this, I had no idea.

Tagore & Virginia

One of my friends is big on Tagore and when I told him I'm into birds now he mentioned the tiny poems Stray Birds. I dipped in - really dipped in, just read fragments - but found it all a bit sentimental - almost like 326 spiritual greetings cards, the kind you find in New Age shops - though these are translations, so maybe something is lost.

This one's a gem though, number 2:

'O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.'

And I love this, from Virginia's essay 'On Being Ill':

'Comatose with headaches. Can't write (with a whole novel in my head too - it's damnable).'

That's from the introduction by Hermione Lee, I haven't read the essay yet.

Goodbye, Penguin Book of English Verse!

This is why Kindles are good: there is no glue.

I hate throwing out my uni books, but this was getting ridiculous.

Orange longlist & a poem

Congratulations to all those longlisted for this year's Orange Prize, the only one I've read is Gillespie and I by Jane Harris, which I loved (though Victorian novels do not usually appeal to me), it is quirky with just the right amount of sinister, unputdownable. And I will definitely seek out some of the other titles, half the writers are new to me - I love that it took ten years for Madeline Miller to finish The Song of Achilles. Years ago, I very much enjoyed Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, and I've also read her, perhaps, controversial memoir of friendship, Truth and Beauty, so State of Wonder does intrigue me. I almost got it on Kindle, but then read mixed reviews. You should, of course, always try a book out for yourself, only you can know if it's your kind of thing. I've just started The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller. Only one chapter in, but so far so good.

I also link to Miriam Levine's wonderful poem, which brought me to a Lorca poem I did not know, and an opera I did not know.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, a film by Lian Lunson

I came across this 2005 Leonard Cohen tribute  film  via Open Culture.

What a gem, an absolute gem.

The filmmaker is here.

Wonderful clips of Leonard, and my favourite covers are by Rufus and Martha Wainwright. (I also love Antony and the Johnsons' version of The Guests, though not in the film.) 

I didn't know that Rufus and Lorca Cohen - Leonard's daughter - had had a baby girl earlier this year. Can you imagine the gorgeous lullabies she will hear?

And there is this from 1965 - it's like watching a French film, it makes you want to smoke and wear polo necks (even when you are anti-smoking, as I am, I love polo necks though).

Crafty Green Poet reviews TSoM

My tooth which seemed better has been louping since Saturday night so off I go back to dental hosp. Meanwhile, a review of The State of Me from Edinburgh poet, Juliet Wilson, who also blogs as Crafty Green Poet.

A Guatemalan poem

I love this gem by Guatemalan Maya Indian poet Humberto Ak'abal, translated into Scots by James Roberston. The collection is called Drum of Stone. I came across the link in the first place here. Thanks, Twisted Knickers. A fabulous wee poem.

Wee oors

In the heich oors o the nicht
stars strip aff
and douk in the rivers.

Hoolets grein for them,
the wee feathers on their heids
birse up.

Edwin Morgan poem

I came across this Edwin Morgan poem in the comments thread of an article on the riots by James Meek in LRB.

Glasgow 5 March 1971
With a ragged diamond
of shattered plate-glass
a young man and his girl
are falling backwards into a shop-window.
The young man’s face
is bristling with fragments of glass
and the girl’s leg has caught
on the broken window
and spurts arterial blood
over her wet-look white coat.
Their arms are starfished out
braced for impact,
their faces show surprise, shock,
and the beginning of pain.
The two youths who have pushed them
are about to complete the operation
reaching into the window
to loot what they can smartly.
Their faces show no expression.
It is a sharp clear night
in Sauchiehall Street.
In the background two drivers
keep their eyes on the road.

Edwin Morgan

'Untitled', a poem by Angela Carter

Two unpublished poems by Angela Carter in last weekend's Observer. The one I have copied below is not online, only in actual newspaper:

Untitled

My cat
Is the snow queen,
This frigid virgin four
Winters old crooks
Her paw to wash a face
White
As starlight, twice
As cold.
She puts back
her ears like spoons
to listen to the wind
behind her.
She eats
For breakfast, hearts;
For supper, northern lights.

Mid-1960s

'She puts back/her ears like spoons/to listen to the wind/behind her'

I absolutely love that line, just love it.