Poetry resurrects me

"I tried to take the train today.
Stepped into a vacuum full of
shadows, old romances
And completely missed the station
All together.

You sang Lou Reed into my ear
Until laughing, you forgot the words
And I had turned away.
Five minutes later,
‘Sunday Morning’ started up again.

I told you that if I died I could only be revived
by poetry, so

You used to carry a crumpled, faded
Postcard of Keats ‘Faery Song’
In your left back pocket;
‘In case of an emergency,’
You said.

The world was never big enough and

Sun dripped afternoons went by unnoticed
As we poured over maps and glossy pictures,
Planning dreams and fancies: London for the Sex Pistols,
New York for the Velvet Underground and
Norway for no reason at all.

We were the Sid and Nancy until

One day, on the corner of Redfern and Glen where
You turned to me and asked me
If I’d ever loved:
For some reason I just shook my head.
I couldn’t catch your eye.

Now I sit on those single seats on trains
With no whispered song to soothe me,
Nor poetry to revive me should I fall.
I’ve been to Norway and saw nothing there
At all.

On the solitary linoleum that is one stop too far,
I see you, fleeting, and then you’re gone and I am all alone.
Let’s go back to that corner, on Redfern
And in the twilight
Question me again."
-- 'Moth,' Between Currambine and Perth


There are certain people whose vision takes my breath away: one is Tennyson, one is Guy Gavriel Kay, and one is a girl I know only as 'Moth.' There are more, but these are the ones I have up on my wall - they are the ones that inspire me daily. It is very important, I think, to have inspiration that lasts. Fortunately, they are there.


FAITH
Chapter -

Her name was not Faith.

Theresa Michaela Farrier was born on the Ides of March to an English father and French mother, and – in her mind, at least – she should have been called Faith.

In all fairness, she was probably right: her elder sisters, twins, were named Hope and Charity by their father on a pious whim. With him dead, three months before his third daughter’s appointed arrival date, his wife had decided to bury his traditions with him. That he had crashed his car into an overpass in Paris at 120mph, stone drunk and high as a kite while on ‘jury duty’ only made things that little bit easier. His sixteen-year-old lover had escaped the passenger door with a few cuts and bruises.

Given that his business trips over the years had been lengthy and frequent, ‘Faith’ would probably not have been the most appropriate of names for the child he had never known. The Virgin Saint, Theresa would comment dryly, was not exactly the most inspired namesake either.

Whether she felt some connection with her absent father, or just found it easier to love an imaginary character than the mother she had, Faith embraced her misplaced name with an almost religious fervour. It made her mother cringe, but she simply would not answer to any other name; probably the pained look its mention caused was more than any other the reason she kept it up.

“I may have been born and named in bitterness,” she would say, stretched out among the wild weeds in the French countryside, “but I was conceived in faith. That’s all sex is, isn’t it? Faith, hope and charity.”

I was still young enough to be uncomfortable talking about sex with anyone, let alone someone I could almost – almost! – imagine trying it out with. She was never uncomfortable about anything: she just had faith in herself and whomever else she was with. She was Faith; she took her name and nature very seriously.

**

If I had got my way, I think I might have just about been able to walk out of Dr. Isaakson’s office and never see her again. She frightened me: not only did I feel guilty for hurting her, as if I owed her something, but then there were her eyes, her face, her voice. In all of ten seconds of knowing her she had felt too serious, too intense, and the same voice that was telling me to find her and spend every last second with her was screaming in the other ear as well. Get out! it yelled. I have never yet figured out which piece of advice would have been best. It is not surprising: when it comes to Faith, I have only ever received conflicting advice, even from myself. Especially from myself, I should say.

Which side I would have followed was never to be known: I was not given a choice. The moment she had recovered enough to walk, Faith set about finding out who I was, where I lived and anything else she could learn about Patrick Kilgallen. You probably don’t recognise the name. It’s not the one I wear nowadays.

I still believe that it was what she didn’t learn, rather than what she did that piqued her curiosity. Not that it ever needed a great deal of piquing. What she found was that I was fifteen, and living with my great aunt and uncle on the edge of town, every summer since I had been a baby. What she could not find for the life of her – and what must have driven her inquiring soul absolutely wild – was anything else. I had no close friends, no confidents; no-one knew my history, parentage, even where I had been born. The only piece of information she got was from the good Doctor, who betrayed what he knew without the faintest qualm.

“Irish by birth,” he told her when she accosted him outside his house. “I looked him over before he was even a year old, the first summer he was here. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to get from him – not even you will get into his medical records!”

To be honest, I was surprised he held back on that: she had ways of making a person do things, not all of them particularly conventional. Or nice.

My address, however, would have been enough for her; the twinkle in my uncle’s eye was rather more amused than usual the day he told me what he had never had to in fifteen years of having me in his house. Strange to think: he never would again, save once.

“You have a visitor,” he said.

The names in which we hide

"Sometimes it seems that I don't have the skills to recollect,
the twists and turns of plots that took us from lovers to friends,
I'm thinking I should take that volume back up off the shelf,
and crack it's weary spine and read to help remind myself.

I am waiting for something to wrong,
I am waiting for familiar resolve;
I am waiting for another repeat,
another diet fed by crippling defeat;
and I am waiting for that sense of relief,
I am waiting for you to flee the scene,
as if you held in your hand the smoking gun,
and on the floor lay the one you said you loved.

And it's strange:
they are basically the same,
so I don't ask names anymore."
-- Death Cab for Cutie, Expo '86


I write in pencil, but will never erase words; do I need to remember things that are wrong so much? They feel like the most important ones, sometimes - there must be a reason they are wrong. These days, no-one needs a reason to be right.


FAITH
Chapter -

When they are nervous, most boys will fidget incessantly, driving everyone around them into a state of complete distraction; I was the opposite. I sat stone still and silent in Dr. Isaakson’s waiting room, my eyes reading the pattern on the carpet again and again. Deep wine red, square then line then curve then square then line then curve – I still remember that carpet. It felt, not surprisingly, like there was blood everywhere. I was fifteen, had spent every summer of my young life in the French countryside, and I had never seen an animal – not even a chicken! – killed; it strikes me that my great uncle (or more likely my great aunt) understood a little more about me than I ever realised.

Whatever the reason, I felt sick to my stomach as I sat alone in the big front hall of 22 rue d’Alimonde, waiting for something bad to happen. I was convinced I had killed her, or that at the very least they would amputate the leg; I suppose it must have been the stricken expression on my face that helped the good doctor to take pity on me; short of the poor thing lying on his couch, I don’t believe there was a more wretched-looking child in the whole district.

“You’re Mme. De Francois’ nephew, aren’t you?” he said with a sigh – I think it must have been something of a trademark – lowering himself slowly to sit beside me. His English was flawless; I could only nod dumbly.

“You look absolutely terrified, lad! Don’t worry yourself so much – your young lady-friend will be just fine.” His bluntness was a tonic; long into my adult life I would appreciate this man for his ability to offer the truth, unadorned by never cruelly.

“The gash on her leg was deep, but not particularly dangerous.” He spoke to me softly, but as though I was an adult. “No major arteries, no big muscles: with some rest and a little, she will soon be as good as new. Would you like to see her?”

Of course I did not; his tone did not ask the same question his words did, however. With his arm around my shoulders, I ventured into the room, feeling guilty and several years younger than I was. I was entirely unprepared.

When I struggled to explain the moment to my mother, a long time later during one of her lucid periods, she offered me the only decent explanation I have ever been given.

“Guilt and love are emotions that stay with us longer than any others. When you are young, they burn themselves into you even more than normal. Mix the two, suffer them when you are most vulnerable, and who is to say it will not snare you for the rest of your life?”

I stood staring at her for a long time in silence, the darkened room shaping itself around the two of us, intimate and stifling.

“Why are you staring at me?” she asked drowsily, and I could tell her grasp of the present was already slipping. I did not have an answer.

“Why,” the girl repeated, sounding more curious than in pain, “are you staring at me?”

I did not have an answer.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. It didn’t even register that she was speaking English. “I’m sorry about your leg. I was just…” I couldn’t think of what I had ‘just’ been doing; I went back to staring.

Dr. Isaakson laughed quietly, and I realised his hands were still on my shoulders. “I would guess,” he offered, amused, “that you were just turning a corner at the wrong time. I would imagine you both were. It is an explanation,” he continued thoughtfully, “that applies to a great many things in life.”

It would take me a great many years to remember those words, to recall what he said in those moments; for the longest time all my memory contained was a pair of brilliant, aggressive grey-green eyes framed by a tangle of insanely thick chestnut hair. When, however many decades later, I remembered his voice in that scene, I was perversely sad: it feels to this day as if I have let go of something very important by doing so, instead of gaining it.

“I’ll take her home,” Isaakson said kindly, filling the silence. “She’ll be perfectly fine with me. You run along: I’ll phone your aunt and explain everything, not to worry.”

Maybe misunderstanding the awkwardness, he steered me deftly out of the room, but was forced to pause on the threshold when she said, “boy! What’s your name?”

“Patrick,” I said, and – because fate or God or whichever demon attends me has never, ever given me a choice when it comes to her – “what’s yours?”

In that moment she smiled, and somewhere too deep to put it into words I understood that there are corners and then there are corners, and from this one there would never be a turning back.

“Faith.” The smile never left her lips. “Je m’appelle Faith.”

Fever Dream

"Some days, like rain on the doorstep,
she’ll cover me with grace in all she offers.
Sometimes, I'd like just to ask her,
what honest words she can’t afford to say, like:
I want your flowers like babies want God’s love,
or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come."
-- Iron & Wine, Fever Dream


I write
like,
like,
a hamster on a wheel:
weary-never-souldestroying-ending;
all heart - till it bursts - and no
resolution

?


FAITH
Chapter -

A life is – if one is foolish enough to begin making sweeping statements about ‘lives’ – only truly exotic to those who have not lived it. I have no doubt that, as fascinated as we are by the noble savage in his wilderness paradise, or the dark and earthy Feudal English peon in his hut, each of our varied and colourful subjects would wonder just what all the fuss was about. Perhaps it is their ignorance that is part of our wonder, for who can comprehend a life so removed from the normal seeing itself as just that – the norm.

I was an ordinary boy from the east coast of Ireland, spending his life between strangers in a London boarding school and foreigners abroad, alternating between lonely and lonely and never once feeling that loss. An unremarkable boy turned into an unremarkable teenager and should have turned into a wholly unnoticeable man. But, as all remarkable people do, I turned one unremarkable corner on one unremarkable day, and met the people who would turn the boy into the man into the legend.

It was not a corner I meant to turn; maybe it was not even a corner that, given the choice, I would turn again. But I am a remarkable man, a man who stands out in the company of remarkable men, and before they entirely butcher my history, I should like to have a stab at butchering it myself. The grubby fingers of historians and – worse! – biographers leave dirty stains of genius and nobility over the story of the boy who became the man who became so many things. But we are not born, not truly: we become.

Before you let them convince you that I was born of some modern-day miracle, then, before you let them tell you that I sprang fully-formed and divinely inspired from the mouth of God, let me tell you how an unremarkable boy turned a corner he had not intended to, and a wholly unremarkable life unravelled in an instant.

This is the story of the boy who became the tapestry of a legend; it is the story of the weavers; it is the story of Faith.

**

It is my firm belief – though she tells me it’s nonsense, she blushes when she thinks about it too long – that she was daydreaming about a boy. God knows there were enough to be thinking about, even in a sleepy little place like Bezons: Michael with his flashing white teeth and relentless French charm; Jean-Paul with his startlingly long, raven-black mane of hair; a tall, forgettably handsome young man whose name – predictably enough – eludes me. This was France! If a girl could not find a trim, dashing young Gallic stud to occupy her thoughts, well – she must not have been trying very hard.

Be that as it may, she obviously was not expecting a tall, sandy-haired Irish boy to walk around the corner and stab her with a pitchfork; as she joked later, always with with a slightly pained expression, “so few people ever are.”

There is very little defence for carrying a pitchfork like a jousting lance; I never attempted one. When my great uncle, amused and exasperated, asked how a simple delivery for his garden could go so badly wrong, daydreams of being a knight on horseback carving his way through enemy legions did not seem particularly… helpful. We were connected by an errant pitchfork and by our daydreams: one day, when she is not expecting it, I will ask her whether her daydream came true or not. For her, it should be a fairly easy answer; that mine did, and how – those are slightly more complicated.

At the time, however, all thoughts of knights and lances vanished remarkably quickly, as can happen when you are faced with a screaming girl, bleeding heavily from a hole in her thigh where you have just stabbed her. I caught her – more out of luck than skill – as she sank to the ground, sobbing and swearing violently in turn. Had she been entirely clear of what was going on, I think she would have punched me in the face; as it was, she accepted by guiltily solicitous arm while she held her leg and cursed magnificently.

By now a crowd has gathered, which in England would have terrified me. Here in the small and slightly more understanding world of Bezons, however, it was a gentle crowd, the kind that sent for doctors and parents and sympathised with good-natured clucks of worry. “Did you hear about Canon Richard’s daughter?” they would say later, the right notes of concern and laughter in their voices. “It looked painful, poor lamb; the boy’s face was a prize, though, he looked more afraid than she did!” It is not to say that small-town people are naturally kinder, but maybe that, away from the dull grind of the city, they have less demands on their kindness. Whatever the reason, I felt slightly calmed and enveloped by the ring of watchers, as if knowing that ugliness was as foreign to their spirits as snow to their gentle, rain-cleaned land.

The doctor, his practice only a few houses down, was on the scene shortly, muttering with worry and binding up the impressive gash on her leg with cloth and bandages.

“What,” he said sternly when the bleeding had slowed, “what exactly were you doing impaling yourself on a pitchfork?” The crowd laughed and began to disperse slowly, the show over; with a sigh, as if such children taxed his Hippocratic patience severely, the Doctor motioned me to follow. He was a very tall man, with enormous hands, but when he picked her up carefully to carry her back to his surgery, it seemed somehow to be the most consummately caring and gentle action I had ever seen. Much later, looking back on her petit body relaxing slowly into the broad expanse of his chest, it occurred to me that anyone, with enough study, can become a doctor, but being a physician, being a healer is a gift from God given only to a few; not all of them are doctors.

The world according to...

"Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."
-- Leon Bloy


I read A Prayer for Owen Meany again today, something that just seems to happen every now and then.

It always feels like it's pulling my thoughts apart, conclusion by conclusion. I just can't win against myself when I'm reading that book.


LOSING THE SIGHT

In the blue-gray hour just before sunrise,
I am standing here beneath a lamppost
with an umbrella and a gray trenchcoat,
wishing I had some sort of cigarette.

god dammit, man, it's only
a fucking
lamppost.

Go to bed.

Faith

"I miss you;
I miss being overwhelmed by you,
and I need rescue.
I think I'm fading away,
but I keep thinking that you'll wake me up with a whisper in my ear,
I keep hoping that you'll sneak in my room.

I miss you;
I miss talking all night long with you,
and I need this to find a way to your home.
My love can you hear me?
Have I been hoping loud enough, wishing hard enough,
can you see me when I'm asleep all alone - alone.

So I wait and I wait,
and I run myself in the same old circles,
and I sit and I stare,
and I run old scenes through my tired head,
of the days that we laid on our backs and said 'forever';
Was that the best I'll ever be?"
-- Sister Hazel, Best I'll Ever Be


A time ago, I promised a friend that oneday I would write a relaxed story; that is, one that I didn't push or struggle to write, one I didn't agonize over or worry about, but just let flow if and when it felt like being written. No pressure, no stress, just the pure joy of creating.
I promised a very, very large amount of things at that time, virtually all of which I have broken; this is something to do with the desire to fix that. And, yes, I realise that you can never really fix that past, that isn't the point - it's more to do with fixing the balance of things. I think perhaps that when you break a promise, you're forced to carry it with you until you deal with it, redress the wrong. Not that leaves much room for grace, of course; do I believe in grace?

I suppose I write to find out.


FAITH
Chapter -

I broke faith on a grey and gold Tuesday night at the end of June; despite my best efforts, I have never quite been able to fix it.

My great uncle, quiet and kind with a stump where one leg used to be, had a saying: just because it ain’t broke doesn’t mean it’s working, he would say, clumping his thick wooden leg through meticulous rows of cabbages and sprouts. We would meander on our way with destructive joy, knocking poles and cold frames over at random down to where the garden met the road, and more slowly back up to the house, straightening and tidying as we went. Only once did he elaborate: when a person’s too happy with what they’ve got, they’re apt to let it alone until it rots, he said slowly, as I lay on my back under the enormous sunflowers and thought of ice-cream; how it dripped down you hands and onto your shoes unless you ate it as quickly as possible. There’s a time for enjoying, and a time for tearing down, just so things are better. I took it to heart, and it never failed me, save once – as always, it is the exception that haunts you.

The French countryside filled my summers with spiders and earthworms and sun on sun on sun; I was a little brown savage, to be found running along dried-out ditch beds and through the June-tall field of wheat and barley, if I was to be found at all. Bezons-sur-Beuvron was like the playhouse of a very strange child, stuffed to the top with the wonderful and the strange and miracles to marvel and disgust and lead a teenage boy a long, long way from home. It’s a dangerous business, going out your garden gate, the old patriarchs sitting by the square would tell me, laughing at their own wit. Take the road one way and you’ll be home for dinner; take it the other, and you’ll dine with strange folk among columns and fountains and music. I spent weeks and months in the furthest nooks and crannies of the abandoned quarries and ghost-ridden old castle ruins further and further from home, but I never did find them; later, much later, when I finally got around to reading Tolkien, I was surprised that I still had enough innocence to feel cheated. There are ghosts of comfortable old men in the square now too, still chattering amiably, their aimless talk and wheezing laughter stirring up dust on the war memorial. I might consider going back and challenging them, demanding answers and reasons; thinking about it, they’d probably just tell me I haven’t been looking hard enough.

Thinking about it, they’d probably be right.

There were no elves or faeries in my story then, but by the time I was fourteen I could walk to the next town and make it down the garden path with the sinking sun at my back; before my fifteenth birthday I had ranged all the countryside for miles and miles, often wandering back in just as the birds were waking up. It was the idyll, the life that people write books about, the one they spend all their lives wishing they could get back to. For me, the spell was much more distant; twenty, fifty, a hundred years on there are no sun-drenched afternoons or green and gold sunsets down country lanes the haunt my memories – only people have that right, and they have made sure they exercised it to the full.

Solitude in those days was a habit and a joy. I was not a lonely child, but the French of a adolescent English boy was never going to help me make friends; every summer for years I was someone to play football with in the street, someone that girls giggled at behind their hands and boys clapped on the back every now and again. How can I describe the infinite pleasure of not being forced to socialise? Nowadays the langauage barrier is a weapon, a tool I can use to distract, attract, tantalise, but even then it was my crutch, my excuse and my refuge. How many times during the school year in the rainy suburbs of south London I wished I could merely shrug blankly and let smalltalk and pleasantries slide over me like the sun or the rain; only background noise. Je ne pas parle beaucoup de Francais became my anthem of self-reliance; they say that a person, especially a young child, needs as much social activity as possible to keep them healthy, but to this day I wish I had kept my anthem closer to my heart. Perhaps the two are linked; perhaps they have always been linked.