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.

Opulence

I have many bodies, professional ones that is, and this weekend I attended the 30th anniversary celebrations for the existence of one of them: Person-Centred Therapy Scotland. When not writing, I work in private practice as a counsellor/psychotherapist. Like writing, it can be a rather lonely occupation, so imagine my delight at being with 70 other counsellors in one giant circle of friendliness.

I find the same comfort at gatherings of writers because I do and feel similar things to both these groups of people. And of course what those two occupations have in common is the need to find the right words and to follow stories in all their glorious or painful detail as accurately and delicately as possible.

Saturday’s celebration was a strange day. The venue was Merchant House, slap bang in the centre of Glasgow. Sitting opposite the extremely grand City Chambers at the other end of George Square, but with a comparatively discreet side entrance on West George Street, the grandeur of the architecture is obvious but dwarfed. It's an ancient organisation of Glasgow merchants, including the tobacco and sugar lords. Its constitution dates from 1605, but it’s been in existence much longer and came to its present accommodation in 1877. The interior of Merchant House lives up to the description in the brochure and is opulent.

It seemed an odd choice for a bunch of counsellor, many of whom deal daily with some of the most disturbed, unhappy or deprived people in our society. Huge dark portraits of well-fed white men hung in gilt frames above our heads. Dark panels lined the lower walls and contained the names and ages of dignitaries who bequeathed ‘100 merks’ or more on their passing in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the dining room there was more gold than paper in the walls. In the Grand Hall, a globe and galleon soared in the highest most central spot above what, in a church, would have been an altar.


Last month was Black History Month. There have been events and exhibitions throughout the country, not least in Glasgow where our slavery history is at last coming to light. Slavery through the centuries and around the globe, including present day slavery, has become the obsession of the writing part of me for the last year. It was difficult, therefore, to view the beautiful scale model of a three-masted sailing ship without thinking of the famous diagram of the Brookes slave ship with hundreds of Africans squeezed together like inanimate cargo.

It was ‘challenging’ to view these benign portraits of men amidst the gold with the empathy required of a counsellor when the writer in me knew that much of their wealth derived from overseas plantations they may never even have visited but which were populated by people who were abducted from their ordinary lives and enslaved. The story is of course more complicated than that and Merchant House continues to do the charitable work around Glasgow it was set up to do. This is to be applauded and encouraged, especially today when banks and badly run capitalist ventures are encouraged in their capricious ways by an equally capricious and irresponsible government.

But actually the history of slavery is as simple as that. People we were abducted en masse, dehumanised and treated with absolute brutality.

We are horrified by the Holocaust of WW2 and wonder how the Germans could not have known what was going on in their back yard. But we humans are a delusional lot. We compartmentalise. Out of sight, out of mind. A tiny drop of sugar in your tea doesn’t mean you’ve lost control of your diet. A wee dram of rum won’t tip you over the edge of oblivion. You deserve that chocolate because you’ve had a hard day. But the abstinence movement that was popular around the 1790s, the first popular consumer boycott of its kind in Britain at least, when women were engaged in the fight against slavery by, as housekeepers, refusing to use sugar or rum from overseas plantations, was a major blow to the trade in human lives.

Today most of the world’s chocolate is harvested by enslaved children and young people working in conditions identical to those on the North American, South American and Caribbean plantations. Knowing this makes me careful I my choice of brand.
It is often the job of the counsellor to hold the different and conflicting realities of our clients, and indeed ourselves. It is also our job to do this with clarity, including not muddying up the waters with our own issues. At times it was hard on Saturday to listen to the discussions of the counselling group while so aware of the source of the wealth of the accommodation. But it is my job, and for me it is also my philosophy as both counsellor and writer, to see with the greatest clarity possible what is really going on around me, or indeed far away.

The reality of the estimated 27,000,000 people around the world currently living in conditions of slavery is a reality which is extremely difficult to contemplate, and less easy to bear. But to be fully human we must see it and know it and act.