Lately I have walked the iron shore.
I write this now at night, walking and typing, an act I dislike but that is necessary in order to engrave upon the screen these words before they fade or are snatched by someone else. I am making my way home, haunted by a voice in my ears as the evening—a blessed evening so warm that it threatens to be the last—slips across my skin, the solace of summer that will soon be lost to the fading of leaves. I glance to the people that pass, their smiles etched with an ease that is beautiful and real, and as I write all I can think of is how earlier, in the hours when I should have been listening to talks on science and all the things my job description describes, my mind could manage nothing but to repeat seven specific words: Lately I have walked the iron shore.
What shore? A shore of iron, or something more?
It is the start of something, I realise. I have been writing here long enough to recognise when an embryo of story has been fertilised by certain words. I know when I must incubate myself around its nascent and translucent form, to wait patiently for it to multiply and divide into the story that it wants to be. I have come to understand that I cannot write unless I know and see the start. The correct start, that is. One that broods to be born. Nothing else matters—no end or midpoint or arc or goal.
Lately I have walked the iron shore, following its crusted pebbles and lime-soaked sands…
These words want to play out, though I do not know what they are. Such is my melancholy this eve, and like the diversion that this introspection has become, on my journey home I make a detour: under the twilit moon, I kneel beneath the morsel tree1, selecting from its scattered and sparse fruit and seeing played and reflected upon each surface the many things of which I wish to write.
Here are some such morsels.
My chronesthesia has gone. That is not the correct term, I suspect, but it is the only one I have. When I awake at night, having no knowledge of the time, my guess as to the clock’s hour is wildly wrong. I stare with blurred eyes at the faint glow from my watch, confused by the arrangement of the hands. I awake early, or late, but never on time, and I wonder when this sixth sense I once possessed will return.
Lately I have walked the iron shore, following its crusted pebbles and lime-soaked sands, aware of the island that is sometimes there.
The cockatoos are back. They attack the trees that line the street. I do not know what seeds they seek or why it is the dawn when they must be sought, but they watch me as I pass, their sleek white forms shifting from foot to foot as discarded gum nuts2 rain down like hail upon a tin-lined roof.
In recent weeks I read the short story collection Nostalgia, by Mircea Cărtărescu. I adore this Romanian author. Solenoid remains3 the best book I’ve ever read. I think about it daily, as you may know. (Part of the fascination here has been in reading and tracing the snippets and phrases that, either directly or through the mutation of time, would eventually land within the opus that is Solenoid.)
Nostalgia contains five stories, published (censored) in 1989 and then properly in 1993 and finally translated into English in 2005. These stories are, I think, related and interlinked, with the strange narrator of the fourth story detailing at one specific point a direct reference to the first story, eliciting—for a few brief moments—a dizzying sense of uncertainty as to what you have just read. The works become more hallucinatory, more intense and mesmerising, with the final piece, the epilogue, a story about an architect who becomes obsessed by the sound his car horn makes, shifting from the mundane to the strange and grotesque4.
I will quote two short passages from the fourth story, a piece about the sleep state of REM, something that is attuned to the beat of my heart.
Others see in REM a kind of a kaleidoscope in which you can read all at once the entire universe, with all of the details of each moment of its development, from genesis to apocalypse.
///
Look at this album with old photographs from the last century. It contains my answer to all the problems in the world, all the problems of history. Look at all these people, these girls, the children in these pictures. They’re all dead today, all of them, to a person. There is not one survivor among the millions of humans born a hundred and fifty years ago. What nuclear weapon can compare to this, exterminating time, time that takes no prisoners? What are conflicts, what is the struggle for power compared to the meticulous, calm, even gentle victory of time against everyone?
—Mircea Cărtărescu
I could go on. But I won’t. To experience and enjoy Mircea’s writing is finding within his prose something personal and poetic.
I have been experimenting by adding audio narration to my recent posts. Thank you to those who have listened and offered feedback. I’m not sure it is something I will always do (this post is devoid of any voice), but I have enjoyed the process and will certainly continue to add where and when I can.
Lately I have walked the iron shore, following its crusted pebbles and lime-soaked sands, aware of the island that is sometimes there. Lately I have walked here before…
Jo and I have watched a considerable number of films since the start of the year, some new, some old. It’s more than we usually manage in such a space of time. Nosferatu, Anora, Poor Things, Ju-on (The Grudge), The Substance, The Secret in their Eyes (2009 version). I’m sure I’m missing a few more. I bold Anora because that is by far the best so far. Strong, emotional performances, a twisting plot and believable dialogue, and an ending that was raw and real. You may disagree, but that was how I felt about it, and such is the joy of film as an art form.
Lately (I have walked the iron shore), I’ve been thinking about something important. I want to do something here, though I find myself hesitating. It’s something I’ve been thinking about in the days and weeks since the start of the year. Let me draw this out further by prefacing it by saying that nothing will change. Nothing restrictive, in any case.
I am going to—oh if only you could see me grimace—turn on paid subscriptions.
I’m doing this because if I am to be honest with myself about where I want this to go, where this potential future can lead, then I have to throw myself at the prospect that someone—you, perhaps—would want to pay to read my words.
Things will remain free, but I haven’t yet decided whether paid will be purely there as an optional “Support SLAKE” etc. thing, or that the occasional post will be offered as a bonus. Or something different.
When I started SLAKE, I was resolute on giving it at least a year before considering anything but being free. It’s been two years now (that milestone drifted silently by last month) and so now, perhaps, it is time. There is something special about this year. Jo and I both sense it, and her perception of the thread of fate—that subtle strand woven by Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—far exceeds my own. It feels right to try, is what I mean.
Those are all the morsels I selected. Some must remain on the tree to ripen and grow and offer sustenance to someone else.
Lately I have walked the iron shore, following its crusted pebbles and lime-soaked sands, aware of the island that is sometimes there. Lately I have walked here before, light in step and knowing that there is where you are, across the sea that haunts the land set deep within my eyes.
Buccellam fictitium. Had to really dig hard to find that.
OK, so I do know.
A graphic novel adaptation by Junji Ito would be quite appropriate, I feel.
What are conflicts, what is the struggle for power compared to the meticulous, calm, even gentle victory of time against everyone?
—Mircea Cărtărescu
This is strangely consoling to me. A gentle victory--I like the way that sounds.
I’m glad you’re going paid, Nathan. It is time!
A beginning is so important - and that's a doozy! One thought follows another, whatever note you strike sends you down a different path. Can't wait to see more of the "sometimes there" island.