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Just Write: Week 3, 3rd Feb – Part 1

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I have divided week 3 of my writing group/class into two sections, principally because the homework task from week 2 turned into a relatively long piece. We were given two lines of a poem selected at random and asked to write for 5-10 minutes each day using it as a starting point, progressively building on the previous day’s writing.

I’ll make my own comments on it, as well as update on the rest of week 3, in the next post. For now, here it is – the opening line is taken from the aforementioned poem fragment.

……

The ghost of a woman, her body overboard laid, in the waters around

Katsu muttered the words under his breath as he stared at the reflection in the pooling water beneath the steps. It had rained heavily last night and the city now glistened, the sun radiating back from hundreds of puddles that dotted the streets each time it found room between the clouds. He disturbed the surface of the water with his foot, just a light tap to send ripples racing towards the edges, and the reflected figure slipped from focus, breaking apart and reforming, undulating, until finally he could see only black.

He looked up at the steps themselves, at the source of the reflection. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t anyone anymore. The bomb frozen shadow etched forever into the concrete wasn’t his mother. There were no features to discern in that dark silhouette beyond a leaned-on walking stick but it didn’t matter. His mother hadn’t used a stick but that wasn’t how he knew that it wasn’t her. She hadn’t been here. She’d been on the river just as she was each day. She’d been on the Motoyasu river right before it boiled.

The ghost of a woman, her body overboard… he murmered again, turning away from the steps, and continuing on towards the river.

……

Yuri Mori hurried down to the boat, jostling amid the throng of women making their way towards the river. It made no sense, she thought, to live in the city and take this trip every day, down to the factories. Why didn’t they just move everybody down there, down towards the harbour ? Nothing made much sense to Yuri anymore.

A woman in front stumbled and fell to her knees as the crowd moved forwards. Other women pulled her to her feet. She looked down at her grey overalls now scuffed from the dust on the ground and raised her hands in mock dismay.

“My monpe. My beautiful monpe. However will I find a husband now ?”

“You are lucky Aiko” shouted another. “Now you have an excuse to visit Fukuya Store”

There were some weary laughs from those close to the exchange and the steady procession towards the river renewed. Yuri didn’t laugh. A year ago perhaps she would have. Defiant and proud bringing her son into the world and naming him for victory.

She shook her head, refusing to think of him, and pushed her way forwards towards the boat again. It must be eight o clock by now and she did not want to be punished for being late.

……

“Kats !”

The call brought him to attention and he pushed himself upright in his chair.

“Thankyou Mr Anderson, that will be all.” Katsu’s English professor turned his gaze from a grinning Mr Anderson round to Katsu himself.

“Mr Moore, nice of you to join us again. Now, please, if you would, read us the passage on page nineteen”.

Katsu looked down at his book and began to read: “Give me the splendid silent sun…”

“No Mr Moore”. He was interrupted. “Much as you would all learn much from Whitman we won’t have that pleasure until next semester. Something more contemporary to get you started. Page nineteen please. It begins ‘the ghost of a woman, her body overboard’ “.

Katsu flinched at the words and began to shake his head slowly. A memory pinched him. He couldn’t quite grasp it, half remembered and hazy, but the words troubled him deeply. He knew that they would be painful to say.

“I can’t… Not that passage. Please Professor. Someone else ?”

“Mr Moore, this is not a good day for you, is it ?”. The class laughed. Someone called out “Look out Sir, maybe that Kats has lost his claws” and the class jeered again. “Please read the passage”.

The words swam on the page before him now. Ghosts and women and bodies. He felt a rush of embarrassment, of shame, on realising that tears had formed in his eyes. Angrily he pushed them back with his thumb and forefinger.

“Read it Kats” sneered the student next to him. The class took up the chant “read it, read it, read it” as the Professor half heartedly gestured with his palms for them all to calm down.

Katsu abruptly pushed his chair back from his desk and stood up, the chair legs scraping across the floor and quelling the mocking chant of the other students. He rubbed at his eyes again.

“Katsu. My name is Katsu. Katsu Mori. And I will not read this thing for you”. He glared around the room before running for the door.

……

The boat nosed out into the river belching diesel fumes. Yuri stood at the stern, as she always did, and watched the city start to slip away from her. She scarcely noticed as the boat sounded its horn to signal its departure, lost in her own thoughts. Her world – their world – was full now of sirens and horns and klaxons. She vaguely remembered the all clear sounding out just an hour ago. A cacophony of warning for a catastrophe that never came.

That was why they’d sent him away. He will be safe in the hills they’d said. It’s your duty. Japan must have men for the future and you must work for its present. It is the right thing, the honourable thing, to do.

He had been barely a year old when the military police prised him from her arms, tears running freely down her face.

A distant “burr” pulled her back from her thoughts. She raised her head to locate the sound, different to the usual, abrasive aural interruptions to their days, and picked out a lone plane in the sky. Just a speck in the distance. But coming closer.

……

“What’s your name child ?” asked the tall man in the long coat. He didn’t look like the others. He was American, Katsu was sure of that, but he didn’t wear a uniform like the ones he’d seen on the streets coming into the city or the ones in charge of the boat they’d taken him on.

“He can’t understand you. We only took him in today.”

“Another from the hills ?” said the tall man.

“Yes. Far as we can tell he’s been there for six or seven years. The farmer didn’t want to give him up – he told us we were taking a good worker.”

“You think he was mistreated ?”

“Perhaps. Life in the hills is hard Mr Cousins. Life in Japan is hard but we can support him here and educate him. When you go back tell them about Katsu – tell your friends about him and the ones like him. That is what we use the money for.”

Cousins bent down to look more closely at the boy. His face was dirty and he carried scratches and bruises; perhaps the kind of scratches and bruises any eight year old boy might wear. Perhaps. He gently pulled the boy’s face up, lifting his chin so that the Director of the orphanage might also see. He raised his eyebrows by way of question.

“Beatings are common Mr Cousins. The man who had him was no worse than many in the hills. It is difficult for you to understand how it has been since the war. For some the sense of shame in defeat was too hard to bear and they took it out where they could.”

“He had no family at all ?” asked Cousins.

“None that we can trace. The farmer says he was taken from his mother when he was very young. He was given him by the police. It happened a lot, to keep the children safe.”

“The mother ?”

“She was in the city” said the Director. “We don’t know where but she must be dead. What was it the farmer called her ?” He paused, thinking. “Yurei. Yes, that was it. Yurei.”

“Her name ?”

“No, Mr Cousins. Yurei. It is not exact but in your language it means ghost”

……

The women on the boat gazed upwards at the plane high overhead.

“Another one ? What do they want with us today ?” said one.

“Don’t worry Miyu. Look how far away it is. Those cowards don’t bomb us from up there anymore”. It was Aiko who spoke, her overalls still dusty at the knees from where she’d slipped over.

“Perhaps they are bringing you your new monpe Aiko” laughed another woman.

“They are taking photographs I expect” said Miyu.

“Yes” said Aiko. “Photographs of us beautiful Japanese women in our fine clothes ! Their American women are too ugly for them !” She looked up at the sky, leaning back to present her dirty monpe, and gave a broad smile. The other women laughed and joined in with Aiko’s clowning, posing for an imagined photographer’s flash.

Yuri looked up the boat, turning her eyes away from the receding city, and briefly allowed herself a smile at her fellow women. Temporary respite from thinking of her lost son, her little Katsu. She clung to the hope that the war would soon end and she could take back her child.

It was her last thought before the world turned white, the boat was thrown from the water, and she and the women were burned to ash.

……

Katsu Mori leaned on the railings and stared down into the depths of the Motoyasu, the first time he’d seen it since leaving the refuge on Ninoshima all those years ago. Light danced on the water rippling against the wall of the jetty as the sun broke cover. The river was choppy here, continually broken by passing boats. Katsu shielded his eyes, raising his hand to his forehead, as if to try to see past the shimmering surface.

What had he expected to find ? There were no answers here. He wasn’t even sure he knew what he was looking for anymore, just that he had spent his life dislocated. A ghost. Perhaps not quite a ghost. Ghosts were the souls of the dead that were unable to find peace, he thought. He lived but he lived with the nagging, restless displacement of those orphaned by the bomb.

A cloud overhead rolled across the sun dimming the twinkling lights on the water. Katsu gazed down, his own reflection now visible, staring back at him. A woman’s face appeared in the water next to his own, smiling up at him; a quizzical, concerned smile.

“What do you see Katsu ?”

Katsu looked up from the water and turned to his wife.

“I see my home Asuka. I see home.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder and, together, they looked back down at the river, back down at their own reflected, ghostly faces. A plane taking off from Hiroshima airport climbed above them and they watched its silhouette in the water before the sun reemerged and it disappeared in a dazzle of lights on the waves.

Just Write: Week 2, Jan 27

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Second week of my writing group / class kicked off with our homework from week 1. We had been asked to think about an item of clothing from childhood and what it meant to us and write a short piece about that. Here was mine:

It was a black shirt. Just a plain black shirt.

Except of course it was so much more than that. Since I’d seen that Sisters Of Mercy video on Top Of The Pops it wasn’t just a black shirt anymore. It was a new identity. It was freedom. It was rebellion. Still quite a polite, “no, actually, I don’t think I will take those posters off my wall and no I haven’t done that History course work yet” kind of rebellion if I’m honest. But, nonetheless, rebellion. Sticking it to the Man. Sticking it to him by sitting in my room listening to doom laden bombastic music. Goth music. In my black shirt.

With that black shirt I could stalk the streets of the West Country, maybe in a long trench coat, quoting Poe and Coleridge, my raven hair lustrous beneath the full moon. Like that guy in the Sisters Of Mercy… Look at him in the video striding through a post apocalyptic wasteland in all that leather. All that leather, and his black shirt, with just that similarly clad dominatrix for company. That could be me. That could be me in Plymouth. That could be me, in Plymouth, in my black shirt.

I’ll have to wait for some of the stuff obviously. Dying my hair seems like quite a big step. Can’t really afford any leather and I don’t know any dominatrixes. Dominatricies ? What is the plural for that anyway ? Whatever, I don’t actually know any women as such so, I guess, it doesn’t really matter what the plural is. I suppose I don’t really need a trench coat either; I’ve already got that ski jacket. It’s reversible – so, practical but quirky. You don’t see many Goth’s skiing though.

But I could memorise some poetry. And I had that black shirt. That bible black shirt. See, poetry. The black shirt was working its dark gothic magic already.

I only wore it once. My mother washed it. Not washed it so much as boiled it really. It came out an insipid washed out grey and shrunk to a third of its former size.

Now it was a grey shirt. A tiny, grey shirt. No one strides through a post apocalyptic wasteland in one of those. No one even strides around Plymouth in one.

Best do that History coursework. Maybe take a couple of the posters down.

I actually had a couple of the bits for this already in a previous post – way back at the start of writing about 42 records in my second entry about “This Corrosion”. The stalking the streets of the West Country paragraph is lifted from that and I think I started there and then worked the rest around it. I liked this one and it came out pretty much how I wanted – tonally I think it works reasonably well although it should perhaps concern me that I still find that “voice” relatively easy to write in some twenty five years later…

The bulk of the class was dedicated to looking at characters and playing around with unusual or quirky traits that might lift characters out of cliche. We used a variety of professions as a route into this and then wrote about one. So:

He started to straighten his tie, catching sight of himself in the mirror outside his office. It was loose, top button undone. He turned his face to examine his profile and ran his hand across two days of greying stubble. His hair was unkempt and his eyes were shot with blood.

It had been like this since Grace had left. Emotionally immature she’d called him. A child. She’d raised their children already. Didn’t want to raise another one. What was it she’d said, he thought ? Incapable of expressing himself ? Something like that. Perhaps he should talk to someone about it she’d yelled at him that last time they’d seen each other. A professional she’d sneered.

He left the tie. Thought about straightening it again before, finally, taking it off. People liked casual now anyway. Less intimidating. He was sure someone had told him that. Maybe it had been Alice but he tried not to think of her now if he could help it.

He looked away from the mirror and toward the door with its familiar sign. William Rogers: Psychiatrist and Marriage Counsellor. 

This was more of a mixed bag for me than the homework piece. Having started the exercise looking for ways to render characters as non caricatures I feel a bit like I fell into a great big “psychiatrist with own emotional problems” sized cliche hole. I don’t mind his inner dialogue though and I threw the Alice hint in quite late (if there can be a quite late in the space of ten minutes) and it does provide a bit of a tease. I have also noticed that I seem to write in quite short, staccato sentences a lot. Like this. Particularly when I’m on the clock. It can be effective. But also a little wearing when over used. As here.

All of that self flagellation aside it was another highly enjoyable couple of hours. Some of my fellow class mates came up with some great character sketches and it’s fascinating to hear just how many different directions twelve people can go given the same jump off point.

Just Write: Week 1, Jan 20

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Quite by chance – reading a community centre notice board whilst waiting for my daughter to appear from one of her after school activities – I discovered that there was a creative writing group / course running locally. Thinking that it would be something fun and interesting to do in the new year I had signed myself up prior to Christmas and thought this would be as good a place as any to record my output.

So the first session was last week and it was pretty nerve wracking. I am entirely comfortable speaking and presenting in front of people – it has been a large part of my job for a long time – but there was something very different about reading your own work aloud in front of what were (at the time) a bunch of strangers. Albeit lovely strangers as it turns out.

I will type up each week’s work without tinkering. That does mean that some of it will be pretty raw and some of it will undoubtedly be dreadful – most of it is written in the class in the space of about ten or fifteen minutes so it is largely unedited. However, fortune may favour me with the occasional sentence that isn’t half bad. Even if it doesn’t then I can have a good chuckle back at this in my dotage.

Exercise one in week one was to take a blank piece of paper and brainstorm (that’s not politically correct anymore is it ?) five words that you associate with the word “write”. Then to take each of those five words and come up with five additional words for each – so thirty one words in total as a rough and ready mind map.

Here were mine with the initial five words in bold: Escape – Runaway – Holiday – Job – Calling – Dream – Sleep – Romantic – Future – Ideal – Wonderful – Stuck – Procrastinate – Blocked – Choked – Unsure – Blank – Painful – Failure – Struggle – Esteem – Poor – Fear – Communicate – Reach – Stories – Me – Inside – Touch.

Let us not trouble ourselves too much with amateur psychology at this point… (or the fact that I seem to have missed a word somewhere). The second part of the exercise was to spend five minutes writing a short piece that used all of the words you had come up with. So I had:

The holiday was supposed to be an escape. A chance to runaway. The job was going nowhere, career blocked, and she was facing up to thinking of herself as a failure. The dream, of course, had been different. Now she just thought it was romantic nonsense that had filled her head; stories she’d tell herself about her ideal future. She’d thought it was a calling, not this painful thing it had become.

But the holiday, like the job, like everything, had not been an escape. It was a struggle. Of course it was a struggle; she couldn’t escape herself and what she carried inside.

Again, we may not want to trouble ourselves with the amateur psychology. I didn’t hate it, I guess that’s a decent enough start. I didn’t really like the end though as it felt a bit cliched to me even on first writing, let alone on reading back, but for five minutes scribbling from nowhere I thought it was okay.

The second exercise involved talking about our personal bucket lists (i.e. things you’d like to do before you die) in pairs before picking one of them and free writing about it for ten minutes. In this context “free” writing is simply starting to write and not letting yourself stop for the duration, trying to disregard any internal editing process. That latter point is something I find particularly hard but also may be a big reason why I never make very much progress. Anyway, my piece was about meeting Bruce Springsteen:

The great man, as it turned out, was smaller than I’d expected. Not Bono short. Or Kylie short, but still appreciably less tall than his reputation suggested. He was Bruce Springsteen and if he was at all bored of yet another meet-the-fans-handshake-and-a-few-cursory-words then he didn’t let it show.

“How you doing ?” he asked.

Momentarily I was frozen, utterly terrified. I was having difficulty separating the myth in my head – the quasi mystical mythologiser of American dreams and nightmares – from the man who was extending his hand towards me. The touch of that handshake brought me round. His hands were still slick with sweat, fresh from leaving the stage, and the basic physicality of this made him real to me again. Holding it together I blurted out:

“Great set, great set, it’s… you don’t know what it means to me to meet you…”

He responded with a broad smile and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey no problem. Thanks for coming out”.

And then he was gone, on to the next out stretched hand in the queue. The next fervent believer. I watched him go. Definitely smaller than expected but always a giant to me.

Again, I don’t hate it. I do seem to have acquired a habit of pay off lines that might come off as a little too derivative but I did want to give the piece a sense of being self contained, of having a close to it. Not sure why I gave Springsteen the same vocal mannerisms as Joey Tribiani from Friends either… Obviously my short hand for New Jersey. At least he didn’t offer me any “cwoffe”. But I did like the height thing as a way in and he is only 5’9″ ish so it’s entirely possible that I would be struck by that if I ever met him.

And that was week one. It was really good fun. If I’m going to be a frustrated writer then I might as well enjoy being a frustrated writer… and actually write some stuff.

There’s something dying down on the highway tonight

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22. Thunder Road / The Promise / Racing In The Street – Bruce Springsteen

“A reckoning with the adult world; a life of limitations and compromises… but also a life of (kind of) just resilience and commitment to life. To the breath in your lungs. How do I keep faith to these things ? How do I honour these things ?”

If writing these posts – writing full stop – is about anything for me then I guess it’s about trying to address Springsteen’s questions above. It’s the questions that I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to answer and the ones that have particularly vexed me in the past five months: where’s the balance between doing what you feel you want to do and what you think you should do ?

The conceit in threading these three songs together is mine. They’re not sequenced in this order anywhere officially but thematically they fit and, recently, I’ve taken to spinning a narrative across them. It may not be the “correct” narrative but it’s the story that the songs tell to me at this point in my life. Those three songs, spanning two albums and three years; a Great American Novel in 15 minutes. That span of two albums, of course, technically covering a third, the set of songs compiled as “The Promise” that, slightly astonishingly, didn’t make the cut for “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” and only officially surfaced thirty years later as part of its anniversary box set release.

The order is important. Opening with the defiant optimism of “Thunder Road” – it’s a town full of losers, we’re pulling outta here to win – followed by the blunt rebuttal of “The Promise” – everyday it just gets harder to live this dream I’m believing in – and closing with “Racing…” which allows for a glimpse of some degree of reconciliation with what life has delivered – tonight my baby and me, we’re going to ride to the sea and wash these sins off our hands.

Max Weinberg sums up the journey Springsteen’s characters (and, by extension, Springsteen himself) make:

“On Born To Run you had the characters saying “baby we were born to run – we’re gonna get out”. In the ensuing three years between Born To Run and Darkness it was made painfully clear: you can’t just run away”

You could make the case to rejig the order with “The Promise” closing the sequence, its yearning, mournful thunder road refrain echoing back to the call of the open highway in “Thunder Road” itself; escape and freedom replaced with despair. That though would be a pretty bleak read and it’s interesting that Springsteen didn’t find room for “The Promise” on “Darkness…”; effectively you could see “Racing In The Street” as the song that picks up the journey of the lovers we meet in “Thunder Road” and it offers hope in its glorious extended coda where “The Promise” offers none. Springsteen almost always offers hope and redemption. It’s perhaps also telling that when he toured Darkness he completely flipped my order, following “Racing…” with “Thunder Road”; a second chance for his jaded lovers ?

“Thunder Road” opens “Born To Run” and is a song I’ve known by heart since I was about 16. I vividly remember sitting in my History A level – the actual exam – having written everything I was going to write about the Reformation and having twenty minutes to spare. So I wrote out the lyrics to “Thunder Road” for no other reason than I could. I didn’t submit the lyrics. My resultant grade suggests that I might as well have done.

It deals, like much of “Born To Run”, in the idea of escape, breaking out of a small town, a small life, for something brighter. Life is still enticing in “Thunder Road”, full of promise, with magic in the night and these two lanes (that) will take us anywhere. There’s a confidence, a certainty, to the male character in the song urging Mary to pick up and leave with him. There’s no doubts here other than the inference that Mary is reluctant – so you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore. An unshakeable belief that heading out on Thunder Road with the windows rolled down, wind blowing in their hair, will lead to some fabled promised land.

“Thunder Road” is a brilliantly constructed song. Solo piano picking out those opening notes, harmonica blowing in the background and Springsteen still in a lyrical phase that’s overtly poetic, overtly cinematic:

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways

Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays

Roy Orbison singing for the lonely

Hey that’s me and I want you only

First four lines and you’re in that scene, there’s a picture in your head, there’s movement, there’s sound, and there’s suddenly two people that you want to know more about. Past those four lines and the song progressively builds and builds, more and more instrumentation joining our protagonist’s exhortations to Mary to come away with him before the band all come in right on roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair – as if the music literally signals that sensation of release in the act. From there it’s full throttle through to the climactic it’s a town full of losers, a heartbeat of a pause, and then the joyous outro as our lovers drive off into the sunset.  

“The Promise”, recorded during the sessions that led to “Darkness On The Edge Of Town”, didn’t officially surface in the version I reference here until the 30th anniversary boxset for “Darkness” came out in 2010 (32nd anniversary not presumably having quite the same ring) although there is a stripped back take on “Tracks”.

It’s pretty hard not to hear “The Promise” as the extension to the story started in “Thunder Road”, largely, of course, because its chorus specifically references that place. In Springsteen’s words it’s “about fighting and not winning” and lyrically the song is brutally stark: inside I felt I was carrying the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost; all my life I fought that fight – the fight you can never win; something in your heart goes cold; there’s something dying down on the highway tonight. The burning certainty of “Thunder Road” is utterly gone here.

Musically “The Promise” is glorious: rising and swelling piano, guitars, strings and layered harmonies. It’s rich and beautiful and achingly sad. It is utterly astonishing that a song as good as this – good enough for many artists to hang an entire career on – was left on the shelf (as a recording) for the best part of thirty years.

I usually make it to the verse about “I built that Challenger by myself but I needed money and so I sold it” before the song breaks me. It’s a hoary old criticism leveled at Springsteen that he deals too heavily in metaphors relating to cars and highways but if you can’t empathise with the destruction of someone’s dream wrapped up in those lines then you must have a steelier heart than mine. That section gets me every single time. I’m fine… I’m fine… No, I’m a broken man. On a very personal level it also came to represent how I felt about the fact that I’d stopped writing. Had somehow become, in my head, a writer who didn’t write. Of course, a writer who doesn’t write isn’t a writer at all. It’s delusional. Dreams. However, a writer who doesn’t write might never have to face up to being not good enough and, for a long time, that was perhaps the unspoken truth I hid behind.

And then there’s “Racing In The Street”. In my contrived sequence this brings our little story to a close – an ambiguous close but a close nonetheless. The song stands easily on its own, it’s self contained, and largely wraps up the expression of that journey from hope down to despair and then back towards a glimpse of new possibilities that I’ve been trying to articulate across the three songs. The truth is that each of the three should fill a place in this list as, without question, these are three of my favourite songs and “Racing In The Street”, if you pushed me, is probably what I consider to be the finest song ever written. It’s a masterpiece. I get that these things are inevitably subjective but that’s the one I return to again and again and again.

The bulk of “Racing…” is quiet, sober, reflective. The story of a guy looking back on his youth spent racing cars up and down the strip with his buddy; a release from the drudge of working. Eventually he meets a girl, they settle down, life turns a little sour (she cries herself to sleep at night; all her pretty dreams are torn – stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born). Somewhere in their lives they’ve lost their way, he’s become one of those guys that just gives up living, starts dying little by little, piece by piece. It’s heart breaking in how ordinary it is. No dramatic event, just an implied slow erosion of the dreams that brought them together and a realisation that life isn’t as simple as blowing away other racers on a warm summer’s night. Or a realisation that maybe that was as good as life got.

If that was the end then we’re back in the same place as “The Promise”, have told the same story twice: bitter, disillusioned and washed up. But that isn’t how “Racing…” ends. The song turns when it’s at its darkest – it does what Springsteen at his best does which is to offer up redemption and hope when faced with life at its worst. So there at the end, with a nod to the other hopeful dreamers and travellers on the road, the characters in “Racing…” take another trip:

For all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels

Rumbling though this promised land

Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea

And wash these sins from our hands

Tonight, tonight, the highway’s bright

Out of our way, mister, you best keep

Cause summer’s here and the time is right for going racing in the street

The piano then plays the main melody line unaccompanied before each instrument is reintroduced, beginning with – to my ears at least – an optimistic organ figure and then the song stretches out into an extended coda. That most glorious, beautiful coda. To me it always sounds like they’re watching the sunrise, the first rays of a new morning offering up, even if only briefly, a new set of possibilities on a new horizon.

There’s a documentary that was included as part of the “Darkness” boxset about the making of the record (you can see find it cut into small pieces on Youtube if you care to look). In it Springsteen describes the fundamentals of what the songs from Darkness are about and, in so doing, cuts right to the heart of why that entire record speaks so loudly to me:

So you had to lose your illusions while, at the same time, holding on to some sort of possibilities. But more so your illusions of adult life and a life without limitations which I think everyone dreams of and imagines at a certain point. The song that needs to be sung is the song about, well, how do you deal with those things and move on to a creative life, a spiritual life, a satisfying life, and a life where you can make your way through the day and sleep at night ? That’s what most of those songs are about.

It’s a difficult journey from the fuck-you exuberance of pulling outta here to win to the quieter contemplation of the compromises required in an adult life, a life with responsibility. In many respects I’m extremely lucky. The compromises I’ve made weren’t ones about relationships – I’m not literally experiencing the journey to disillusionment that Springsteen’s lovers are – or the people I’ve been fortunate enough to spend my life with. No, they were about how I spend my time. How and where I invest my energy. Whether I give free expression to myself. Whether I spend my moments committed to something that I believe in and care about. Or whether I punch the clock and pick up the pay cheque.

Springsteen from the documentary again:

“Life is no longer wide open. Adult life is a life of a lot of compromise… and that’s necessary, there’s a lot of things you should be compromising on. And there’s some essential things where you don’t want to compromise. So figuring those things out… 

What’s the part of life you need to compromise to, whatever it may be, pay your bills, get along, to feed your kids, to make your way in the world ? And then what’s the part of life where there’s a part of yourself you can’t compromise… or you lose yourself ?

The answer to that is probably the key to everything. And the answer to that still eludes me.

It must be the time of year…

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9. December – All About Eve                                                             Nottingham, December 1996.

A short story.

This feels true. It isn’t, of course. I know that. She would know that. The details are all wrong and nostalgia and memory aren’t the same thing. But you don’t know that. All you need to know is that once upon a time we tried again. Failed again.

……

I think it must be the time of year; it had started in late Autumn. Back then we were two chronically shy souls tentatively finding each other; the falling leaves marking our own inexorable falling in love. There was an awkwardness between us, somehow in us, at first which held a certain naïve charm. An innocence. I don’t know, maybe we were just foolish kids. It had ensured that those beginnings had run on from October into December, two months of careful courtship – our painfully slow reaching for each other as old fashioned as that word implies.

So this time of year always brought it back, the magical blaze of the beginning sustained over those months that ran from fireworks to fairy lights – the world alive with lights in the darkness.

It had ended a handful of years later in the same span of months; still those clear, crisp skies, and the aging sun hung low, but now with a snap and bite to the wind. Still discernibly Autumn but withering into Winter.

And now here I was, lost and lonely, reaching for her again across the years, looking for what we’d once had. Choosing to be blind to the reasons why it had failed the first time, the second time, all of the times. I reached for the phone, dialled a number. The brief silence before the dial tone sounded was enough to give me pause and I hung up, put the phone down again, picked up a bottle of cheap red wine and poured another glass.

Eventually I reached again for the phone. Dialled a number.

……

She had stayed for the weekend as usual – it had become our habit over the past six months. She’d even stayed on Sunday night which was less common as it meant an early start for her long drive back south to make it to work on Monday morning. Neither of us could have known for certain that it was our last night together, lying there squeezed together on my single bed. If we had would it have been different ? Would we have made love, reconciled to the end and spending those last moments lost in each other ? Perhaps we’d have talked, spent the time making sure we were right that this was the end, that there wasn’t some way we could make it work that we’d missed ?

I don’t think we’d have talked. We’d never spent our time together talking, never found a way to open ourselves up honestly and ask for what either of us needed. We wrote, that was what we did. Even in those beginnings we wrote to each other, exchanging letters in person, the sender waiting nervously as the recipient read. It was the only way we found to express ourselves. The next day would bring a reply – a conversation played out over days, in slow motion, that might have taken minutes if we’d been able to break the silence. Perhaps we imagined ourselves characters in one of the Austen novels we’d been studying. Maybe we were just foolish kids.

Things had briefly flared again in those last months, occasionally a spark catching flame in the dying embers, but ultimately turning to ash. Picking our way back across familiar ground felt good at first, a small reminder of the rush of being sixteen and falling headlong into first love. But we weren’t sixteen this time. Besides, even when we had been the evanescent rush hadn’t sustained us once that initial thrill had passed. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not denying the truth of what we felt that first time: it was something extraordinary. You only fall first once and we fell so hard we were left gasping for air. But this time ? Could it be taking our breath away again ? Were we just clinging on to the feeling of being in love or were we really in love ? That I even wondered seemed to suggest an answer.

She left before dawn as I slept.

……

When I got up I found that she’d left a letter. Carefully placed where it couldn’t be missed. A letter to say all of things that we couldn’t say. Just like in the beginning, just like always. It was a letter of the future, talking of all the things she would do, all the places she would go, all the dreams she still had. She wanted to move on with her life and was asking if I wanted to come along.

I knew that I didn’t.

I knew but it broke my heart all the same.