Paying Attention to Small Things

I am interested in small things because they ask for our full attention. I am interested in small people in small towns because they seem to represent most of us going about our daily lives. George Eliot knew this, and even if we live in London, or Manchester, Newcastle or Birmingham, we surely work our way around a daily circuit of small things. In daily life we prefer to travel the same paths because our geographic wiring only runs so far; we can only navigate a set number of streets. We read signs, but we can't read too many before we become overwhelmed. Change is difficult, and new signs can be perplexing and confusing, because humans struggle to rewire their semiotic brain. We prefer to invent our own set of private signs and symbols, or at least alter the signs we inherit. 

Outside the doctor's surgery Greta Clement confronts a new and ostentatious sign and wonders what on earth has been let into this most delicate of spaces: the doctor's waiting room, the doctor's office. All sorts of private matter as it turns out, requiring kid not rubber gloves. People go to the doctor or to see the nurse to speak of private matters; to share their wounds. As Greta sees it, the sign is a misleading distraction, unnecessarily flashy and superfluous. She is immediately suspicious of the showiness of the medical credentials she sees emblazoned on this new white board. The board upsets Greta’s understanding of her local space, her hometown. This is not the place she knows practically off by heart. 

Pond Life is a kind of thought experiment based on the mapped memories of place I have of the town I grew up in. For a while, my mother worked as a cartographer in a local government office; according to my aunt she was working for the Secret Service, no doubt one of several tall tales emerging from an unwell mind. Still, it adds a certain kind of potency to the mapping life. A map is an obsessive document, as is memory, and I can still recall the order of the streets I roamed around as a child looking for an exit; they are a kind of role call or liturgy which I still find calming. 

Place names inspire stories, and names set out in a certain order inspire a story-map. My characters map themselves onto the place in which they find themselves, where I have landed them, where they reside as characters in a small town. Citizenship requires knowledge of a place, and my characters are citizens in the sense that they know where they are and what they are doing; they bustle about with elect purpose until certain mental currents send them off along an unpredictable route. This is Greta Clement again on her way to the library in search of some facts on the Victorians. On the way she meets Mary Braithwaite who appears to her as a witch; it only takes a sun beam striking down upon a hat through the trees to make this happen. Suddenly, Mary's hat is strangely elongated; it grows in front of her very eyes. This is Greta's peculiar form of vision, her fairy tale distraction. Distraction is a modern malaise, but it can also be a source of renewal and transformation depending on what distracts you and where it takes you.  

As a child, I was always distracted by accoutrements: the things people carried, what they wore on their head and feet: hats and bags and shoes. Accoutrements are the beginning of character. Charles Dickens taught me this, as did Grimm's fairy tales. We know people by their hats, and a hat leads to a brow, a nose, a pair of teeth, a smile -- an encounter. What, I wondered, did people carry in their pockets; this was another level of knowledge I did not have because pockets are private spaces and unless you ask someone to turn out their pockets, as a policeman or teacher might, you will never know what lurks inside those crevices. 

People are difficult to manage; humans are sprawling creatures waiting to turn into monsters. We need rules and containment; predictable and familiar routes and habits to stop our ideas running away with us. Human beings can only manage a certain number of friends and acquaintances before or after the extra load of family; and this, I sense, is how real community works. It is the same for writing. To state an obvious fact: I can only write well if my attention is focused. The crystalline lens behind my eye must focus the sharpening light; must catch the taut crystal shapes and hold them in place, as Mary Braithwaite does when she anticipates her night-time vision. Conditions for visions are everything. Mary's floret-shaped bedroom lamp is essential to creating the right atmosphere, and atmosphere is everything for a writer. It is why we write: to lose ourselves inside a small sphere that asks for our full attention, that is our attention. It is also why we read: to feel the pleasing texture of our consciousness directed at a subject as it expands and contracts beneath our gaze. Attention is a ripe form of being, and the philosopher Simone de Weil reminds us that at its best, rich and full attention is a kind of prayer. Fully directed, our consciousness can ripen and plump up the writer's words, improve their subject. We paint pictures together: reader and writer, writer and reader. 

George Eliot reminds me of this when she speaks, metaphorically, of her own writing and reading lenses:

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of customs. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.

Under a strong, microscopic lens, even tiny hairlets turn into an entire world of narrative competition, a circuit of angry activity, producing cause and effects. Mrs. Cadwallader hairing around in her phateon is the writer and the reader looking for her material, 'the sort of food she needed.' Busy Mrs. Cadwallader brings her own interpretation to bear upon that 'play of minute causes' she finds beneath her roaming microscope. 

As a writer, I must generate my own 'thought and speech vortices,' to generate my own eddy (from the Latin, vortex, an eddy of water, wind, or flame; whirlpool or whirlwind).  A writer must assert her will over her creations, but her creations snap back with wills of their own. All the characters in this small town I have created are trying hard to create eddies: to pull and tug people in their direction; to win friends and influence; to lay a claim to their own significance. To be big fish in a small pond. 

Words and things create eddies once they are attached to a person: the sway of personality, the will of one character over another. Miss Cull lifting her broken glasses over the counter to Mr. Jarvis the chemist, and Mr. Jarvis receiving those wobbly lenses, is the beginning of an eddy. The direction of flow suddenly changes as Mr. Jarvis begins to whip and stir up his own eddy, his focussed obsession with fishing, which is another metaphor for finding material. Eddies come and go as our will for life falters; and so, Miss Cull sneaks off to the cinema to top up her flow of passion; to cover herself in silvery light which generates a source of atmosphere and glamour she does not have at home. This is also the writer looking for her muse: that silly moon-faced man with his high forehead Miss Cull mistakes for God. 

It is also Mary Braithwaite at night beneath her lamp with her notebook out; Mary watching the image of Dorothy Fortescue moving across her bedroom wall. The notebook and the wall are material accomplices in Mary's night-time screening. Her thoughts gather more readily between narrow dimensions: bed to wall, wall to bed to notebook. To create, you must be, to some degree, limited: reduced, experience some degree of privation -- a word that haunts Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece Jane Eyre. Atmosphere (and gothic atmosphere especially) builds from confined spaces. See all the great literature that has been generated inside prisons. See Sylvia Plath inside her Amherst kitchen in 1956 yelling lines from her beloved dramatist John Webster (you will if you read her Journals). See her great kitchen revenge drama, her poem, 'Lesbos,' that arises from this bellowing: a miniature chamber piece, a Jacobean play. 

I learned to create atmosphere by reading poetry and plays, by rehearsing and performing words out loud. It is how Sylvia Plath learned to create the static electricity of her own dramatic poetry: by reading The Duchess of Malfi aloud to herself. She needed Webster's words to set her lyrical and visual imagination on fire; to strike a match to the playwright's words and carry them towards her own harbour. 

Webster's world of clotted cursing was the perfect place to start. Every character that walks onstage brings with them a thick egg tempera of words that, when spoken out loud, generate layers of presence; a three-dimensional world of sensory feeling: people inside an intense capsule of time and space calling and responding to one another through potent, poetic words. This is drama's dynamic, phatic atmosphere, and it begins with small couplets of dialogue; tiny refrains that hang from compressed visceral images: body parts. Here, the lips of the cardinal from which his oracles hang as described by Antonio, the Duchess's beloved:

ANTONIO:

Last, for his brother there, the cardinal,

They that do flatter him most say oracles

Hang at his lips; and verily I believe them,

For the devil speaks in them . . . 

And later, in the same speech, we come to the image of the Duchess herself through the image of broken mirrors:  

Let all sweet ladies break their flatt'ring glasses, 

And dress themselves in her. 

Broken mirrors and dresses throw us into the fairy tale world of Sleeping Beauty. Sylvia Plath would have liked how quickly this form of picture-transport works; how soon we are immersed in the dressed body of the Duchess whose magnificent reflection breaks mirrors. This is also the magnificence of the artist’s subject, their muse and source of inspiration. All artists are obsessives, and in order to create, you must be fixated, in love with your creation. 

Soon after this image of the mirror, Antonio declares he will encase the Duchess; enfold her inside a picture so he can hold onto her, as we all long to hold onto our past, present and future; to lose nothing we have experienced at all within the precious stuff of memory:  

I'll case the picture up; only thus much;

All her particular worth grows to this sum, --

She stains the time past, lights the time to come.

As a writer, I rely upon the sounds of words to suddenly turn into moving pictures; pictures I can watch move across my mental wall. I think through shapes: that case Antonio tells us he will use to preserve the image of the Duchess. Writers must frame their images swiftly before they lose them; before they are blown away on the wind of loose association. Edith Cull's lenses must be fixed properly inside their frames, held steady, because a writer's capacity for creating whim after whim, a whole whirlpool of whimsical whirling, is well known. We long to see new and diverting things, and so we go looking for distractions, because we are desperate for momentum, especially in recent times. But what is it we all long to see, to escape from? 

The ladder Pond Man holds up for Dorothy Fortescue inside the garden wall enables her to see the carnival; to be airborne without having to go anywhere. Pond Man and his ladder stand in for the imagination; but beware, he can suddenly and breezily say 'cheerio' and close the gate on you. The imagination is never a stable or permanent fixture. It wavers, it falls. 

Each of my characters has a holy text they turn to in their attempts to generate stability: a still small voice of calm emanating from a centre -- authority, you might say, which brings me to reading. I don't believe anyone can write without first having done a lot of reading. What are you going to do when you are stuck, in a bit of hole with yourself, bored, lonely, despairing, disaffected? You can't keep racing around in a car or a carriage looking to snoop on others -- the fuel will run out; it is already running out--- which is where the Mrs. Cadwallader approach to writing wears thin. A writer can always find gossip and scandal, the lives of other people to feed off, and I have, we all do. We watch the news, we read the papers, we tell stories and gossip, but it isn't enough. What if we are all suddenly sent indoors to our kitchen tables, our sofas, our spare rooms, our beds? Then where are you going to go? The internet is not enough either; in the end one headline or webpage is all the same. We need the geography of books, their clambering progress. As readers we are all toads longing to clamber from our awkward states of progress. In Pond Life I have deliberately conjure several toads. 

Recently, I have been reading slowly and iteratively, religiously. I read paragraphs of prose repeatedly as if it were poetry. Good prose resembles poetry, by which I mean it has rhythm and music, movement and flow; a force moving in a certain direction towards a climax, a denouement, even if that end point is only the beginning of another end or the start of 

another beginning. Writing, that forward momentum, is carried by voice, and strong voices are irritating and contagious. But a writer must have their own form of contagion. 

In the middle of Lob's Wood, Mary Braithwaite is caught by the contagious presence of Betty Rogers. Betty has a way of speaking which parodies a certain kind of person I knew growing up. Women like Betty got their way and held sway in a world framed around men: the working man's club, the market, the pub. Betty presumes she knows everything about anyone she meets, that she can read them, but unlike Mary Braithwaite she can turn her interpretation into action. She reads Mary Braithwaite's play idea and immediately dismisses it: it lacks the event factor, which is what Betty believes the carnival can bring.

   Spectacle, space, surprise: this is the metaphor of the carnival. Every writer needs an event to fuel momentum and sometimes that event is produced by pure force of will. This is Betty Rogers, who, experientially speaking, is in the ecstatic tradition. She speaks as though she is about to see what she already knows is there. Betty is a believer, she gets things done, she conjures things. She believes in the miracle of the monster, willed revelation. 

Poetry has a similar miraculous tradition, and this tradition or belief system can just as easily transfer to prose. If you expect revelation it will come. Mrs. Cadwallader certainly expects revelation almost every time she leaves the house. I think I live similarly, and of course that is absurd, but we all are. My characters read Middlemarch, The Duchess of Malfi, The Compleat Angler and the Old Testament, as though those texts and their characters, those unmissable, ungovernable voices, were speaking to them directly, willing them on. 

And behind those speaking voices there are several bodies going about their daily business: individual lives moving absurdly about with plans and schemes of their own. And so, there is Cecil Dewhurst waving his arms about in the middle of the main road when the carnival monster breaks down. Cecil’s waving is an attempt to summon a deus ex machina, a divine intervention. Fortunately, in the nick of time, some helpful lads appear. 

Of course, the writer is the busiest body of all, the worst (or best) schemer. Her schemes are compulsive, sometimes monstrous and silly, and often bound to fail. But she must keep trying, and as the French say, essay her way out of a narrow space, a tight corner, a sharp bend. You never know what basket of goodies might be coming around the corner. So keep going.