Not sleepwalking

Sheltering at the back door.

My last post was a bit show-offy. I made it sound like I’m living a fantastic creative life like that other On The Road guy, whatsisname … Jack Kerouac, and being a Really Serious Writer who is prolific at the drop of a proverbial diphthong. This is not the case. While there have been moments of dizzying progress, this has not been the norm, and is probably nobody’s norm, which is what makes these creative instances so enticing. I’m guessing there’s dopamine involved here too, so often a culprit (see the chapter entitled ‘Can You Fix It?’ in Writing on the Road.) These moments certainly keep a writer going, but chasing after them is like trying to catch soapy bubbles in the wind. Writing is often fun and daft, gripping and otherworldly, but also gritty, painstaking, annoying and, well, ordinary and daily-grindish.


The secret road I looked back on.

Neither can I deny that in this wandering life there have been moments of excruciating personal pain, frustration, self-loathing, doubt and fury. I’m fairly sure this is not how people imagine life in my little van and that everybody believed my last post, didn’t you? And were you jealous? Aren’t I leading the idyllic life of a perambulatory writer? Don’t I have uninterrupted time to focus, uninterrupted vistas, uninterrupted dreamtime? Beach walks, the absence of deadlines and responsibilities, wheels to remove me from unpleasant situations/views/noise/smells/people? So how can it be awful? And, frankly, why don’t I just go home if it’s so tough? Nobody’s making me do this. There isn’t even anyone telling me to go home when I’ve had enough. Or to stop whinging.

But this is partly the point. I’m not just wandering geographically or even imaginatively, though obviously I’m doing both. I’m also wandering about in my gut and connecting that gut to the natural life of the place that I’m in. And the natural world is cruel beyond belief. Life is cheap. If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’re a goner. And there are no second chances. But it’s also constant. Have you noticed the way the sea is still raging at 2am. No? Raging. In the dark. I can hear it from the cliff top at night, or the layby, or the carpark, or the campsite. The wind is still roaming around the planet too, fuming one minute then just hanging around to see what we’ll do the next. Everything is being conceived, rotting or dying with no regard to night-time or the need to rest. And I am no different. I might be asleep but my lungs are still on the go, blood moving around, cells deciding what’s poison and what isn’t and directing molecules accordingly, and thoughts, images, ideas, possibilities all being put through the sifter that is my brain. I never stop either, and neither do you. I bet some of the thoughts you have are as dark and scary and not nice as mine. And alone in a campervan when I’m writing about the horrible things we humans do to each other, this can be extremely useful and productive, but also quite difficult. And like I say, there’s no-one but me to tell me to stop, or show me how, or distract me.


Restless in perpetuity.

Someone asked me at the beginning of this years’ extravaganza of campervan trips (I’ve actually lost count - I may be up to eleven since April now) why I need to keep moving. People often ask me this and I rarely have the same answer twice. I guess every trip is different. Today’s answer is that I want to experience everything I see, do, think and feel, and everything I hear about or encounter directly and to the greatest degree so that I can get closest to the truth (if there is such a thing), understand it better and write about it accurately. Both inner and outer. I therefore have to minimise input and be selective. I can’t hear the voice of the modern-day slave in my story if I’m listening to Boris barbarities. Boris Johnson is not in my book. He is therefore, on these trips, an irrelevance (and arguably elsewhere too). I can’t hear the boom of the waves if I’m lost in the petty dramas of my own family life (sorry guys). But I can write the very real dramas of my imaginary characters if I can temporarily swap their anguish for a booming wave, a grand vista, or a clump of swaying grasses, and thereby calm myself enough to go back into the dark world of torment I’m creating for them (or indeed my own dark world of torment – we all have one of these, don’t we? Do we?). This is the closest I’ll ever come to living through what I’m doing to these imaginary people. Being able to move regularly from one experience to another and back again seems to allow me to go deeper into every encounter, thought, feeling or happening, or to notice when I don’t and wonder why.


Dusk falling before the storm.


The natural world is the leveller, the constant, the reassurance that while everything always changes, the laws of nature don’t appear to. The seas may be rising, but they’re rising in accordance with the straightforward rules of the behaviour of chemicals, energy, temperature and life, and the interaction of all these. The perpetual nature of this is jaw-droppingly beautiful, and so is its expression, for instance the giant waves here outside the van on the beach in Kintyre as the storm gathers, the bees still bumbling with apparent ease amongst the purple knapweed, the gulls, quiet for once, hanging out peacefully together at the shoreline, the vast ever-changing sky.

I do love my life at home, and I love my work as a therapeutic counsellor, but after a while I notice I’m tired, physically and emotionally, as if I’ve shrunk or at least my battery has. Then I get homesick for what I would call the ‘real’ world and feel I can’t sustain the depth of my engagement with the life around about me, or in my writing. I need the sea, and some impenetrable brambles, and a sky that hides the islands it shone brightly over five minutes ago, and I need the existential nature of all this and myself in order to avoid sleepwalking through life and to be fully present with myself and clients and writing. Here at the shore or in the mountain, where there is less human interruption, I can have that experience of being present to the fullest I am able, including those people I do meet, without shielding or filtering. This would be overwhelming in a city but is nevertheless a way of being I need to hold close and bring home with me.

P.S. I do have friends, family and a social life and respond well when spoken to, so if you see my van, stop in for a cuppa.

Update - Upgrade - Upended world.

This little beaut is Hot Water Tracy, so named for her number plate, which I guess I’d better not tell you. HWT has not caused any hot water situations so far unless you count the trial first night in March this year when I discovered how easily duvets fall off narrow benches in the middle of very cold nights. Otherwise all is spectacularly well.

For those of you who’ve read Writing on the Road and seen the pictures or were lucky enough to climb aboard at events or by the roadside, HWT has the same basic layout of two benches and a kitchen area as Vanessa Hotplate, my thus far most beloved campervan, another Romahome. But HWT’s interior feels more spacious because it is open to the cab. No more fumbling along the outer flanks to reach the back door. Just hop between the seats and keep the heat in.

I have opted for luxury now and routinely turn the benches into a bed the width of a kingsize and the length of the width of a kingsize. Such comfort, as long as I sleep diagonally. (There is a foot extension thing stored at home for insisters on parallel lives.)

And it turns out dearest Tracy is made of magic. In the four months since my first proper trip at the beginning of April, I have been on nine writing trips. This is extraordinary. To put you in the picture, the last van was simply not suitable, not an office on wheels with a convenient scullery kitchen, but a cramped space in which something always had to be moved before you could get at something else. It even had bars at eye level between windows and no toilet (gasp). Consequently, there were few trips and even less satisfying, writing-focussed ones. Add to that a temporary but extremely demanding day job and you can see why a psychological thriller full of human atrocities was not getting written. But bless my previous employers, they fired me (for all the right reasons). So I was left with lots of time on my hands, a perfect van and a novel to write.

Nine trips later and I finished the first draft, then the second draft. And lo, I looked and much of it was good. There have been poems, several, often written while writing the novel. Simultaneous writing. There’s a new thing. Weird. Perhaps I have two brains after all. Some of it was good. Some not so good. Often hard to tell which was which. More on these later. Phew!

But boy does this writing on the road malarkey work.

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."

The title of this post is a quote from a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, the American Beat poet. I often start workshops or events with it and then a couple of years ago finally enshrined it in the poem below.

FOOD

An evening walk
To shake off work and home,
I strode unpeopled streets
a moon huge above
the hill our house sits on.
It spread its silver coins for those
who chose to lift them.
I filled my pockets
and brought home dinner.

They think I’m there all day for them
and want to chat.
This gets no writing on the page and only
feeds me greens and wine
when what I need is word protein
spicy flights of fancy
the sugar of phrases falling
in surprising ways and
book borscht with feta metaphor
that turns what I produce a vibrant red
and frightens me
then makes me laugh and
feeds the world.

With this nutrition I could forgive
those proper Charlies who want a piece of me.

Verily I say unto you:
the world is made of stories
not atoms.
Words are the food of life
and nothing else matters.