Wonderful Words

So here we are, at the beginning of a fresh new year. Let’s start it artfully with a bit of poetry. I found this poem in Cate Kennedy’s collection The Taste of River Water (Scribe, 2011), and it has lingered in my mind. It’s called ‘Makeover’.

The one certainty is that whatever you want to reveal
will be covered in lead-based paint.
When you apply the heat gun
it smells like the fumes could kill you.

Sometimes you find your eyes fill with tears,
your head spinning with nauseating stars;
after a while your hand aches
just with scraping.

Re-entering the room,
you stop in your tracks
think: is this it?

Occasionally your hand (the muscles remembering)
will sweep over it gently
and there will be a residue, flakes of paint.
You’ll have to live with it now.

So step back and get it in perspective
get a hammer and nail and hang a picture there
or just keep banging until
you knock your way into another room.

Is there natural light?
Could you make a home here?
That’s the question you will ask yourself,
standing ghostly with plaster dust
absently swinging your hammer, a great new idea
suddenly occurring to you.

Much of the beauty of poetry lies in its inspired use of language, but its potency also resides in its capacity to offer us a slantwise insight into the world both around and within us. That’s how this poem is for me. While it is ostensibly about the process of home renovation, I read it as an analogy for writing.

It begins with the idea of what we want to reveal. This is sometimes clear to us when we write, but it might be buried in convoluted expression. At other times, we know what we hope to disclose, but we’re terrified of sharing it. And then there are times when it is only by burning away the “lead-based paint” that we can discover what our writing is truly about.

Whichever version of this may be present for you, working through it could cause your eyes to “fill with tears” and your head to spin with “nauseating stars”. Your hand—and sometimes also your heart—will ache with the scraping.

Later, when reading back over your writing, you may well wonder “is this it?”, and of course, you will still feel under your fingertips the slightly gritty bits where your words are not as poetic or precise as you’d like. But if you’ve taken the adventurous step of sharing what you have written, then perhaps you’ll just “have to live with it now”.

It’s this next part of the poem that I like the most: the advice to “step back and get it in perspective”.

Whether in our writing or our lives, it is through dedication to details that we are able to create works of artistry and delight. However, keeping our attention fixed on minutiae can cause us to miss the broader context. In this case, it could be that some deft decoration will improve your outlook. Or, as the poem suggests, the composition that currently leaves you feeling less than inspired might be the starting point for something new.

The question at the crux of this—of the poem, of your writing, and maybe even of this year—is “Could you make a home here?” Could you, after pursuing the exacting and exhilarating journey of creation, regardless of your satisfaction with the outcome, go through it again?

Of course you could.

How else can you honour that “great new idea / suddenly occurring to you”?

What is your interpretation of Cate Kennedy’s poem? What other poems speak to you of the pleasures and difficulties of writing? What great idea—old or new—will guide and inspire your work and your words this year?

Sometimes words find us in unexpected ways, falling into our minds like light piercing through the gloom. It happened like that with this poem, which was shared with me by a dear friend. Now I am sharing it with you.

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run —
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.

Before these lines arrived in my life, I knew little of the poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska. I have since peeked briefly into her world and am keen to explore it more. This poem, ‘Life While-You-Wait’, has been translated from the original Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barańczak. If you enjoyed it, you may wish to listen to Amanda Palmer reading it on Brainpickings.org.

For me, the poem offers an interesting mix of warning and reassurance. “Ill-prepared” as the speaker may be, there is an acknowledgement here of living as a privilege. The role to be played, although unknown, is owned, and guessing “on the spot / just what this play’s all about” is what each of us must do in our own ungainly way. We go along, improvising unwillingly and tripping over our own ignorance, much as we do when writing a first draft. The difference is that these “Words and impulses” can not be edited or taken back, and “the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness” become the stuff of which our lives consist.

Fair or not, we can neither rehearse nor repeat a single day. With the set so strong, the props so precise and even the “farthest galaxies” alight, there can be “no question”, as the poet insists, that “this must be the premiere”. Life is indeed what happens while we wait, hoping and holding out for the ‘right’ moment and a sense of readiness that will never come.

We do not get to see the script for Friday ahead of time, but we can choose either to fear or to embrace that fact. If we cannot exchange the role we play, then we must simply act it as best we can. Although doubtless riddled with “happy histrionics” and “hayseed manners”, my own performance is made up of what I have managed to scratch together. Like you, “whatever I do / will become forever what I’ve done.”

These final lines linger in the mind, but whether they are encouraging or devastating, reprimand or reminder, it is up to you to decide.

What are your thoughts about this poem? Which images or lines reach you most deeply? What poems have you felt compelled to share?

For all its beauty, complexity and nuance, language is at times sadly inadequate. Certain experiences fall beyond words. They render us inarticulate, unstitching us from meaning and annihilating our ability to share the messy reality of our lives.

Depression is one such experience.

In a talk given at last year’s Hay Festival and later broadcast on the BBC, author Matt Haig spoke of the way depression, and its vicious accomplice anxiety, can detach us from the world, and more critically from ourselves. This is what happened to him. At the age of 24, his world splintered and disintegrated as he tumbled into the precarious realms of mental illness.

“At my lowest point, in February 2000,” he says, “I stopped believing in words. Until then, I hadn’t realised that the act of using language is an act of faith, but it is.”

Let’s just think about that for a moment. What does this mean?

Faith, in one definition, may be considered as the belief in things not seen without evidence that they genuinely exist. Depression itself is a thing that is largely unseen, not only because it emanates deep in the secretive domains of our bodies and minds, but also as a result of society’s continued difficulty in adequately acknowledging it. When we are depressed, moreover, we are often conscious of a lack of recognition, either from those around us or through the unsettling experience of becoming strangers to ourselves.

Words, too, are in many ways intangible. Sure, we can see them written on the page and hear when they are spoken, but words are only ever symbolic. They represent the elements of our lives without actually being them. Yet it is through words that we are able to connect, express, explain, delight, beguile, advise, entertain and learn.

Such acts are a profound part of our humanity, but conditions like depression can distance us from their significance.

As Matt Haig says, “You have to believe there is a point of there being words and that they can offer real meaning. Normally, this belief is taken for granted. But when your mind crumbles to dust, everything you thought you knew suddenly becomes something to question.”

Pitched into such doubt, it is ironically words themselves that may offer some salvation. At least, that is how it was for Matt. First through reading and later through writing words, he gradually became more able to manage his illness. In his case, it was fiction that provided a kind of map.

“If you think about what a story is in its most basic form,” he explains, “it is change. A character starts somewhere, either physically or psychologically, and they end up somewhere else. When you are depressed, you feel like you are trapped inside an eternal, unchanging moment.

A belief in the possibility change can be problematic for those who are enclosed in the unforgiving grip of mental illness. The reality that was previously known gets shattered so utterly that suspicion is cast on all former certainties, as well as all future prospects. Where in such wreckage can one even begin to discover the courage or means to rebuild?

For some, one aspect of that answer may be words.

Part of their magic is that they allow us to take our minds elsewhere – into different times, other places, new perspectives. They give us an awareness of alternative ways of being, which may be kinder, braver or more steadfast than we can otherwise manage to be.

However faltering or insufficient, words also make external what might otherwise be an entirely internal experience, thus affording us the potential for connection – whether we ourselves are the ones drenched in anguish or stand as those willing to bear witness.

This is not to say that it is easy. Nothing with depression is easy. Nor can words alone provide an entire solution. But for some people, they might help.

In his book Reasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig writes that: “Words – spoken or written – are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.”

Through the small but valiant act of using words and making these vital connections, we may start to assemble reality again. Whether by writing or reading, we are granted the chance to leave behind a certain kind of mind so that we may create another, “similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.”

Or so I hope.

If ever, like Matt, you stop believing in words, I encourage you to do whatever you must to find your faith in them again. Begin, if necessary, with the words of others. Read books and poems. Listen to speeches and conversations. Then, when you can, scratch words into a journal and voice your truth to whoever will listen. Allow yourself to imagine the possibility of change.

Eventually, maybe, with patience and persistence, you will learn to trust in the wonder of language and in yourself again.

Do Matt’s words resonate with you? To which writers or texts do you turn in harsh times? How do words help you?

It stretches before us, crisp and unsullied. Poised as we are at the start of this bright, shiny year, we are free to imagine without hint of disappointment all the wondrous things we might experience, witness, learn and achieve in months to come.

Although I do not make new year’s resolutions, I do try to hold a hopeful approach at this time. Perhaps that is why the following lines felt so resonant to me. They are from ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney.

‘…The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

These words are spoken by the ghost of James Joyce to an uncertain Heaney who is here both poet and protagonist. In the poem, he makes a pilgrimage to Station Island, a site on Lough Derg in Donegal that is sacred to St Patrick. Along the way, he encounters and engages with the spirits of a number of significant figures in his life, with writers like Joyce among them.

This injunction, to “write for the joy of it” and “Cultivate a work-lust”, is found in the concluding section of the twelve part poem. It is a final, fierce denial of the poet’s disquiet that reads to me like a rallying cry for all those who quaver before the page. The words urge a certain audacity and a readiness to accept both the role and responsibility of being a writer, despite any lingering misgivings any of us – Heaney included – may have.

Later in the poem, Joyce speaks again, telling the poet:

‘… it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

I am indebted to David Fawbert, whose excellent website on Heaney’s poetry not only gave me some insight into ‘Station Island’, but also advised me that an “elver” is a young eel. It is a bewitching image, and an apt one too. Those glimmers of movement, the flash of something beneath the surface. That’s what writing is like, with words and ideas flickering somewhere, perhaps in reach, “in the dark of the whole sea”.

As we enter this new year, I add my own plea to the voice of Joyce in this poem. I invite you to decide it is time to swim. Find your frequency and seek out those subtle gleams. Then, equipped with grit and grace, with courage and wonder, “Take off from here”.

Go and strike your note.

Do you set an intention for your writing at this time of year? Do you have a favourite poem or quotation that inspires you to write? What feelings do Seamus Heaney’s words stir in you?