How do I write? From a feeling, usually of loss or lack.
How do I write? From a feeling. Always from a feeling, usually of loss or lack. Most writing is elegiac, a compensation for lack. The world is so noisy; I find it all so loud now. I want to write towards quietness, inwardness, soul retreat. Leaves turning upwards when no one is looking.
Why are all the women I know, clever women, so concerned with looking? Being looked at. I have always hated being looked at, which is not the same as being seen. When did we decide being looked at was being loved when you can look and look and never see?
Chameleons wear their camouflage to hide from predators, to stalk their prey. Who are we preying upon? The ouroboros consumes herself. Slowly chews herself up from tail to head without once looking up to see what she might consume instead --- the leaves of trees, sweet pollen falling upon her needy gills.
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Henry was the quieter of the two. No one would have known the depths, and perhaps Henry no longer knew what he felt, only that Dorothy wasn’t around like she used to be. Her shape was missing from the chair, her soft impress. Dorothy spent a lot of time looking out, looking away.
Women like Dorothy should be seen in profile - painted - Dorothy should be painted. She was one of those women, still and surrounded by roses. Petals falling idly, skin breathing deeply, tiny drops of sweat on her brow. Hair pulled back behind her ears, tied at the nape of her neck neatly. Dorothy always wore an old-fashioned look, although those times were over; but Dorothy wasn’t, she was only just beginning.
Henry had suggested the painting. Why, Henry, why? For posterity, for reckoning, Dorothy, because I would like to see you around the house. Dorothy smiled and let him have his way.
The painter was local, from one of those villages up in the Downs. They are terribly pretty, Henry. Yes, dear, they are, and then they both went silent because it wasn’t clear why they weren’t living up there – behind the hills – tucked away. Only that it was tradition that Henry inherited this peculiar house stuck on the corner by the roundabout; the large green circle filled with flapping yellow flowers. Irises, too tall to be sensible; really, they should start again, but Dorothy was too weary to engage with the civic scene. Ladies sipping coffee chanting lists of flowers that wouldn’t be battered by the wind. Pansies, gerberas, ranuncuulae, all too sweet and short. Something more regal, that’s what you want for the centre of town, for the roundabout opposite the Manor. She never said that, of course -- that they lived on a roundabout -- they were grander than that.
Dorothy looked out and noted the men filing in to measure the beds; they seemed so far away. Egypt, Africa, somewhere on the map they’d learned at school. Chunky blocks of places covered in pink; they’d coloured them in. Bodies sweating beneath the sun, she couldn’t look for long, and the painter wanted her to turn this way Madam. This was a commission after all, Henry’s commission. She turned back from the window and cupped her chin.
(From POND LIFE, a work in progress)