Cantabile, in a singing voice

I was asked yesterday – by email, as part of a series of set questions on reading and writing – how I go about writing. It is odd to be asked such a personal question by someone you have never met; it is odder to be asked within an email with all the questions italicised. There was something about the italics that made the whole business stranger. (L‘étranger the French say: the stranger. I was that). My job was to try and make myself less strange, something I have to do everyday in order to be. Don’t we all? The only way I know how to make myself less strange (‘odd’ my colleague once told me, ‘you are a very odd girl’) is to produce a voice, one people might listen to. It is the only way I can override this odd form of questioning; the questions that have little if anything to do with you. The questions always asked of a writer.

I’ve done this sort of thing before, once for a big Italian newspaper, and I thought then, how odd this is. What a strange way of going about describing your voice and where it comes from; how it is you clear your throat.

                My friend sent me some of his piano practice yesterday: a recording sent through his phone, recorded by his phone. He was practising a piece by Beethoven, (Op Famous let’s call it because I can’t remember, and I don’t wish to consult my phone). Cantabile he explained, by text; ‘in a singing voice’ I say back -- by text – as I told him I heard the sound of the piano clearing its throat at the start of the piece: the faltering start.  The piano, the fingers, they feel as though they are stumbling over rocks, small rocks, rocks with crabs hidden beneath, which the player half-knows and is wary of; there are warning signs: Do not Tread on the Crabs, Do not Tread on the rocks, There are Dangers Here -- and so the fingers are tentative and wary. I could hear the gaps in-between, the fumbling to feel, the clearing of the throat, the searching for voice.

                Voice is felt before it is heard; it comes from the body. Cantabile must also mean that: an embodied voice; a singing body; somebody singing.  I have just now cleared my throat to remind myself what it feels like. I can hear a voice emerging from inside my head. I think it is my teaching voice, or part of her is here.  But still, I must clear my throat. I haven’t spoken to a soul today and it is already noon; it is what I do to write. I don’t speak for several hours. I go inside my head, my body, perhaps my body first. I read for a short while in immersive bursts (I don’t stop until I feel that click inside my head that comes when you go underneath the water, the tug and tow of linguistic life, that moment when you are swimming through sentences without thinking about what you are doing). That is deep relaxation, because reading is also rest.

 From my reading emerges an image, or a sense of an image. Something half-seen, half-heard, partly understood. When I begin to write I don’t quite know what it is I am writing about. When I begin to write a book, I don’t quite know what I will be writing about. That sounds odd in the world we live in where everything must be known beforehand. The students I teach insist on knowing the theme first, and the set questions to the theme which they have already been told are important. A writer cannot do this: they cannot spot the theme beforehand. Themes emerge, or patterns, as I prefer to call them because patterns are more submerged. Theme is for the marketplace, for the syllabus, for sales, and that is someone else’s job. I don’t think anything I’ve written has ever had a truly coherent theme. Experience is always inchoate, as is the world of language and song. Ralph Waldo Emerson said this much more eloquently than me.

                I believe I’ve now cleared my throat. How did I get here? By reading. This morning I read to the end of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago which is a frighteningly familiar book. It is full of East End dialect, 1890s Cockney. I did not grow up in the East End, but I grew up around people on the make. People making something from nothing, from their voice box.  A lot of it was bluster, rough talk, swearing rather than singing. Still, there is something familiar about the language and the deeds: the language comes first, the cocky threats, the verbal swaggering, which eventually turns into criminal action – theft, burglary, street fighting, murder. And in between there is a lot of crying; the book is filled with crying. Arthur Morrison describes and re-describes the sound of thirteen-year-old Dicky Perrot crying, and then his sister, Little Em, and their mother, Hannah. Crying is the chief refrain, the sound we are asked to hear, to imagine, again and again.

I think that is what I hear above all else: the rising pitch of flowing tears, not in cantabile but in desperation and rage; a sound smothered by the oppressive walls of the Jago tenements. That is the image I cling to: those high, stinky walls that Dicky Perrot cannot climb over, cannot exit, can never leave. Now I see him trying to assail those walls by his grubby, broken, ripped nails and he slides down like a rat into the gutter; and the wails breaks through the crumbling brick walls: Dicky’s, his mother’s, Little Em’s, his father’s, hanged the day before in high dudgeon.

For Laura, who continues to sing, even when she sometimes loses her voice.