Petit-narcissism. Things processed long after the fact, with much navel gazing. Sometimes the dates on these things are as they were written. Sometimes it was the first draft. LiveJournal for the grown-up years (maybe.)
I do not actually have to do any of this.
I do not have to carry the weight of all of the trying to interpret, trying to understand, trying to contextualise.
I do not have to carry the weight of shame for having unfortunate inconvenient feelings, wishing I didn’t and trying hard to not have them.
I could just let go.
In which Don McGlashan sings “Andy” from Songs from The Front Lawn – the 1989 (mostly) eponymous album from his performance partnership with Harry Sinclair.
It’s an oddly personal song for that era of Don McGlashan’s career in that it’s written as a conversation with his brother who had died when McGlashan was fifteen. The Mutton Birds (for which he is best known outside of New Zealand) often included it in their set towards end of end of their run in the early 2000s. It’s not hard to see why it still makes it into his sets, it’s one of the best things he’s written.
The first few days of Fall having just arrived in/moved back to Massachusetts is a very specific set of feelings. I know this. I’ve experienced them on a number of occasions at this point. There’s a feeling of elation at having just gotten the first load of groceries in to the house from Market Basket and that “Hey! I’m here again!” elation mixed with the feeling of “What the fuck did I just do!?” and the body still being sore from transit and hauling heavy suitcases across the Atlantic. I know that over the next few weeks my body and mind are going to go through all weirdness, and to not take anything too seriously except the need to get good sleep and eat well. Also, drink a lot of hot tea – that seems to help.
This light, these particular trees, this level of humidity: my body and mind still have the instructions stored within on how to make sense of it. How to “do” these feelings. It’s knowledge I was happy enough to leave in the past when I left here last year. It wasn’t from any sense of anger, more from a place of “Well sure, I’ve done that, no need to go back. There’s a life to be having elsewhere”
For the longest while, I didn’t think I was ever coming back as more than a visitor. As I was preparing to leave London, Emma my housemate sang back to me – with some glee, I might add – my own lyrics stating categorically that I wasn’t coming back here. I’m here, I’m present, but I’m not back. This isn’t a “going back” mission. Not for a second.
Yesterday, Sister C and I went for a long walk along the top of the Cliffs of Moher. We parked the van up at the quiet end and walked our way along the top of the cliffs and into the main of Sunday morning by the main carpark on the other side. Sunday morning by the carpark is some experience – a throng of tourists. You can spot the Americans, because they’re usually wearing ridiculous “IRELAND” sweatshirts they got from Carroll’s Gift Shop in Dublin. You can spot the Canadians because they’re usually wearing clothing that announces them as Canadian, lest anyone confuse them with the Americans. The Chinese & Japanese are usually well dressed, and carrying a selfie stick. The Irish look tired and the Germans look unrealistically healthy.
C and I got a few quiet moments by Hag’s Head to have coffee from our flasks and I told C a little bit about what had actually been going on for the past year or so in my life. I told her about how moving to London had actually all played out, and the year-long aftermath. Once the immediate “flailing-in-the-water/what-the-fuck-is-happening” moment itself had passed last summer (in which I needed to reach out to close friends for support, and did frequently), it’s a story I’ve been increasingly reluctant to tell. It’s not a story you can un-tell.
After getting a few kilometres of sea air in and getting through the mass of tourists, Sinéad picked us up. I didn’t fancy the walk back along the cliffs behind all the tourists. We’d spotted 12 coaches in the carpark already, with another two on the way in as we waited for Sinéad. Fuck. That. We were dropped to where we had started the walk and picked up the van to head back down the coast.
Wetsuits on, a dip in the ocean by Clohane was just the ticket. A chance to wash away the pollution of London, and float on my back in the Atlantic and soak my sore neck and back muscles in the seawater. It was heaven, and it felt like a fitting bookend to this era of my life. My life in London had started in earnest with swimming alone in the sea by Långholmen one night last summer, and ended I suppose swimming in the sea here in Co. Clare. Neither of which are in London, I might add. Getting in the water has been an important ritual for me when any relationship or era of life has ended – my wedding ring ended up at the bottom of Walden Pond after swimming on a moonlight night, many moons ago for example – but you can’t give to the water what you’re not ready to have it take from you, and I am not sure I was ready to let go of much off the coast of Södermalm last August. In Clohane yesterday, I’d have let go of the lot and happily. The sea took what it took.
As I type, I’m in the kitchen of my parent’s house. Since the house was painted recently, it reminds me of my grandmother’s house – my father’s mother’s house about a half hour away. It’s the 1950s Ireland gloss white paint on the skirting board and the grey-ish white paint on the walls. There were no colour swatches or Pinterest boards involved here. It was painted to be plain, to sell. I hope-to-god that they sell the house this time. Everytime this house is painted for selling, it loses more of any sense of home. It loses more of our family character, and the memories of Saturday mornings us all sitting around the table with multiple pots of coffee and multiple guests dropping by feels more distant. I’m ready to let that go. No one could call the house ordinary, it looks like a cement ship rather than a house for starters and for years it was painted a deep blue. It was a place to hold court and entertain. Friends from my teenage years still talk fondly about Friday nights spent hanging out on the balcony, drinking, smoking and looking out on Galway Bay – but that’s a long time ago now. That history has been packed away and the house looks, well, dull. We painted it white on the advice of an estate agent to sell it over 10 years ago, and the entire family fell into a depression. The house didn’t even sell in the end.
Right now, my brother’s new puppy is running amok on the kitchen floor. The pup has no knowledge of Molly, it’s predecessor (for Molly was his dog too) or any of what went on here. Past is past, and it’s irrelevant to the pup. It is nice to have a bit of energy in the kitchen again though. It’s felt empty without Molly. On this trip home, I’ve not even thought about taking a walk out the Flaggy Shore, let alone attempted it. Molly was part of that ritual, and I didn’t feel the need to do it without her. That’s OK too.
I’m about to get an another plane to cross the Atlantic. Last night, I had that old “night before going back to America” feeling. I think that one is buried so deep in the Irish psyche that it’s hard to avoid. This morning all felt calm though, much less burdened by the past. Maybe the swim did the trick.
In November last year, I was preparing for an upcoming recording session, the results of which I’d publicly committed to releasing to the wider world. I had a “long-time unfinished musical business” itch that needed scratching. (If I am honest, I also had an “ego-bruised, post-breakup, must create things” itch. While the need to finally put out some old songs that had been kicking around for too long was strong, there was now an additional need for it to be good. After all, if in my thirties I’m going to put out a record and ask people to listen to it, it needs to be worthy of that request.
As part of good, I had to be able to stand over my own lyrics. This meant engaging with the younger self who’d written many of them and challenging that writer on why things needed to be so angry or immature in places. If that writer was also the performer and it was a different time, I might have been happy to sing words which were rhythmically solid but otherwise unremarkable and a little näive. An audience wasn’t going to see the distinction of time passed since though. They’d see that this performer seemed to have the same name as that writer, and then there might be trouble. I will happily be hung for the bruised and smarting words of thirtysomething me. After all, if they are hangable, then I should know better. In balance, maybe if I’m troubled by something it’s worth being troubled by and is therefore worth singing about. BUT! I do not wish to be hung for the bruised and smarting words of the twentysomething who didn’t have the maturity, the experience or the self-awareness to see nuance.
This realisation led to a somewhat brutal cull of old work. Lyrics went into three piles:
I put pile 1 aside to be kept. I took some notes from the pile 2. A snapshot of the kernel of the idea. I then packed piles 2 and 3 and brought them back to The Burren where I took great delight in putting them into an end-of-year bonfire.
The weight of work that requires finishing is heavy enough without the weight of work that doesn’t merit finishing.
This year, I dismantled a safe and comfortable life in Boston and made a move. I did this in part to try to claw back some sense of self I’d last felt when I was 29. Something that felt lost to me and that I wanted back badly. That I was looking at it through this lens in the first place is because of a habit of looking backwards rather than being present or looking forward. A habit that doesn’t serve me well and one that I am trying to break.
The universe – which speaks like it runs a hardware shop in Drimnagh – just heard “Your twenties, eh?” and went “Jaysus! My lucky month, wha? I’ve been trying to clear out the stock room for an absolute age. I’ve had one ‘ill thought out transatlantic move’ sitting there for god knows how long, and I’ve still got an ‘everyone-saw-that-coming-but-didn’t-want-to-say-it’ breakup leftover from the three-pack I got in for ya years ago! Also, here, will ya get these old songs out of my stockroom for fuck’s sake and record them.”
So, I end the year as a Londoner, and I have a record underway.
(i)
bourbon, pie and talking at your table
up there with the brandy alexander twist at the top of texas
hours upon hours on your sofa in the winter night
listening to songs we both knew in configurations we didn’t
“you’re not broken!” i said
“holy shit! it’s 3am” says you
“if it doesn’t suit, we can say hello another time!”
says you earlier in the evening as i’m running late and apologising.
“there’s no way i’m missing this pony ride” thinks I
and so I made my way down your street in the freezing cold,
riding two buses and going about it arseways on the way.
I’ve been dancing around you trying to get that long in your company since,
with as much innocence and excitement as can be had
over bourbon, pie and taking a chance on conversation
with some strange attractive foreigner you barely know
but are happy to trust.
(from a long list of unsent correspondence from earlier this year)
The fear that takes hold most firmly is not the fear of something bad happening (nor is it of heartbreak). We’ve all fallen into the ditch at times, and with help, with love, with determination have found our way back up out of it. The knowledge of how to do that again is banked in the mind – though no one really wants to go through the experience of falling into the ditch, even when one knows that there is a way back out.
No, the fear that is taking hold most firmly is of something good happening. Of something so good happening that it forces reflection, re-prioritization, human growth, that it forces change. (and the subsequent fear of “Oh, shit – I don’t know if I can handle more change…”). The fear that life might no longer let one retreat back into safe spaces and established (if not entirely fulfilling) identities, because: growth.
The fear of something wonderful happening is infinitely more challenging.
Como tú // Like You
~ Roque Dalton, trans. Jack Hirschmann
Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-
blue landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.