GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS

How Do People Say the Same, by Mark Bowles

Prologue

When I was very young, perhaps only five or six, I would often feel, going to sleep, a fullness in my mouth, as though a fruit, a flavourless fruit, was in there; I would also feel, so faintly, a pressure on my eyes, and red and golden squares, tiny, like glitter, like fireworks exploding inside the lids; and I would bang my head on the pillow to get to sleep – I called it ‘dum-dumming’, because as well as banging my head on the pillow I would also chant, only noises not words, as if drumming out some restless spirit, that had risen howling from the bog of the body, so that, after dum-dumming for such a long time, I would lay my head on the pillow exhausted, with the pressure against my eyes now more palpable, and the fullness in my mouth also now more pronounced. I would say that this moment, having banged my head on the pillow, over and over, with my cheek on the cool pillow, with the sensation in my mouth, both alien and naggingly familiar, and the pressure, not painful at all, on my eyes, this is when I felt most me, as if, curled up in a burrow, deep, deep down, somewhere unreachable yes, but also with these strange sensations, whose source I could not fathom, all the way lost in the body. And it strikes me now, too many years later, writing this, that the dum-dumming was a way of flushing out the stuff of the day, all the accumulation of stuff, ridding my body of all that had happened, all that I’d done or had done to me, so that I – empty – might only play host to these sensations which, like the stars, had been there all the time. Yes, there it is, I would think, yes there I am, even though these things were strange and even impersonal. And then there was a certain age, I don’t remember exactly, perhaps eight or so, when I realised, one night, that the sensations were no longer there, neither the fullness in the mouth nor the pressure on the eyes, and that also of course I had ceased to bang my head against the pillow, and I wondered what I had lost, what I had lost touch with, what I had said goodbye to.

2023

— November —

Before we begin, except of course there is no before and one is always already underway – running, falling, slouching, escaping, with a cargo of hand-me-down thoughts and feelings; a fardel of family expectations, sweating inside the outfits of Custom, working out how to be naked again – but nonetheless let’s keep it, before we begin, in the same way we speak of sunset and sunrise and other inaccurate figures of speech, before we begin – let’s speak of events.

I am not saying there are not and were not ‘big events’ in my life, certainly. However, there are Big Events, which is to say events marked as Big by the Social Order, canonically Big Events if you like, such as Marriage and Death and Birth and accidents requiring an ambulance, and then events which are big and yet too diffuse and borderless for the word Big and which pass unrecognised, unheeded, unnamed. And it is true that I would like to stay with these latter so-called events and, if I can, approach them with words, or with tactful, or tactical silence, and at the cost of boredom – yours, I’m talking about, which will be only the corollary of my failure, granted, my failure in insisting – against all Consensus – that it is here, in the vague, unspoken, invisible and/or momentary that the most significance resides. Falling in love, for example, which happened to me in a way that was almost by stealth, and which, therefore could not be captured in some obvious ‘event’, for it weaved silently like Spirit itself, spinning its magic, and the ‘me’ then suddenly gifted this magic thing, a surprised giftee, so beautifully made it was. So yes... some of course have their Big Moments, a stare-and-swoon that took place across a dance floor, such that at that moment the mind and body expanded never to return to the previous shape, and so on, and all these types of encounters and bloomings are arguably overrepresented in Literature, and that’s fine, but I am searching elsewhere.

And I’m not claiming any sort of election, or specialness, perhaps only a kind of lack, a defect, a kind of idiocy (yes!) even. For I have always been the belated recipient of my own experience, if that makes sense, because the me that bobs around on the surface – conversing, working, drinking and thinking – does not always register things that happen below the waterline, emotions that are at first only tremors underwater, and happen only to that sub-aquatic part of me – slow, wordless, unseen or half-seen or seen in shadow or underneath the miracle play of light on the surface. My writing, at the risk of sounding pretentious, a risk I am happy to take all the time, such that it’s not even a risk, involves tuning in or diving down to these underwater movements, to movements which I underwent but only appreciated or woke up to in retrospect. I can’t put it into a story exactly, no, I lack the will, the will to lie, but here’s a series of snapshots, storybits drifting in different directions, short pieces of writing over thirty years, a staccato succession of inner and outer events, so please run them together, rub them together, if it tickles your faculties, and at least the illusion of a single story might flicker across the surface, like in a movie, generating motion from stills.

And before we start to begin, let me also say that I’m having a bad day, a day of enmity towards the world and myself, and on another day, I would begin in a different place and end in a different place. And that’s how it is.

Actually, not just a bad day either. Yesterday, for the first time in many years, I was in a trough, a Slough of Despond as Bunyan called it, which of course gave its name to the town Slough, often mocked – by Betjeman, by Gervais – and for good reason, but anyway, that’s where I was yesterday, not Slough, God forbid, but in a great Slough of Despond, wherein you feel like you’re running out of life, if not existence; where you experience, in your actual limbs and chest, the very distinction between life and existence, and feel like you’ve had enough of life but will continue watching in your capacity as someone or something that exists.

Time to call it quits, you think, or rather not think but feel silently in your stomach and nerves, and the stomach especially because the stomach is now being completely re-evaluated in terms of its relationship with the brain and the immune system, and what you feel in your stomach is either a precursor to thoughts, actual articulate thoughts, or a kind of emotional filtrate left by thoughts that never made it into words and are thus sullen and unfulfilled. Time to call it quits, where ‘it’ is life, except this is not a suicidal thought, no, merely a kind of abnegation, ‘abnegation’ – suddenly a beautiful and seductive word where previously it seemed ugly and Latinate, and you say it over and over, peeling it to mere juicy sound, to a glorious shining segment of sound, pellucid and shaped like a pill and you want to swallow, whole, abnegation.

So yes, I thought, it’s like in that beautiful play by Synge, his best in my opinion, Riders to the Sea, where the old woman, who’s lost all her sons to the sea, says with emotion that’s the far side of despair, there’s nothing more the sea can do to me now; to be beyond hope, to have put aside hope. Well, there’s something triumphant about that state, of being beyond, that zone of immunity, from time and life, and that’s where I was, yesterday. ‘There’s no more now that life can do to me’ I intoned melodramatically, in an Irish accent, over and over, as if this mantra were itself a wave from a sea that had wrecked me already, yes, wrecked me already, and I wanted to be like that ancient woman, for whom time had no blackmails left up its sleeve, who was now invulnerable, stood on the shore looking out, knowing she’d reached the finale, knowing she’d come through to that last place.

That’s where I was. But not quite. A part of me wasn’t simply there.

A part of me was waiting. And that part, call it part for now, made me continue, persist, and not succumb to the Slough of Despond or stand on that level shoreline, and stare with a kind of brief unwanted immortality at the sky and its stern and dark grey forehead. Well, it wasn’t a part but a thin layer of self, the thinnest layer, that stays in place even when the pilgrim lies on the floor of the Slough of Despond and wants only to look through the glass that’s formed between him and the world, watching life withdraw to a half-lit creature scuttling back into the aboriginal dark. No, it resists, this thin clear layer, it waits, this layer, for Despair to pass, refusing to quit, and in fact this layer of the self is the only permanent layer, such that I suppose it isn’t a layer at all, if it’s the only one, since all the other selves are not layers but fireworks, or tracts of orange flame in the night, or areas of darkness across the face of the sun, or weights that sink, or delicate feathers that float, or reeds that answer the breeze with obeisance, or stones in the cold current turned pebble smooth by midnight, or inebriate fireflies over the marsh, or perennial flowers dying and blooming, or tenacious plants that cling on through the winter; but yes, through all these selves, accompanying these, it persists, the thin transparent graphene layer, the most lacking in substance and yet most substantial, a thin clear layer, a thread, stretching from birth to death.

I have a bad memory. Absolutely appalling. Some people have a store of anecdotes, stories, ready to go as examples, chomping at the bit, but I think my memories are shy, or cagey at least, secretive, and stingy.

They come when they want. Last week, for example, a very particular image was placed before me, creased but alive. From five years ago.

Simply this. The impression of my tan leather shoes as I walked along the beach in Corfu. Suddenly it was there, in the exact plum centre of my mind. Me, glancing down at the brogues, pale gold in the evening sun, as they crunched on the shingle. Just this. It couldn’t be clearer.

We were on our way to dinner. That fish restaurant right on the edge of the sea. The sea lapping soft at our ankles, the sun sinking into the water. The old man in his red Speedos fishing, an echo of something I could not remember, something in Hungary. We’d left our son with a babysitter. He didn’t want us to go. ‘Go away!’ he cried to the babysitter, screaming the place down. And so, we stayed with him till he slept, and we walked along the beach to the restaurant. Such a calm and beautiful evening. And now, five years later, this impression, of the golden brogues, rises up, with no effort on my part, as if having lost the net of the past, unattached to solemn Significance, like the sky above the Rue des Beaux Arts all those years ago. Not a memory; more a kind of a wound.

Or that citrusy cleaning spray that returned me, through the trapdoor, to Andy Coxon’s caravan, and the sleepover, and we were sat on the sofa beds, with the August sun still strong against the shut marigold curtains, and how his mother came in as we were getting changed and didn’t leave for what seemed a painfully long time, telling me about their holiday in San Diego, making me feel acutely self-conscious as I tried to put my pyjamas on, at that liminal age where the body – the genitals in particular – becomes a thing. And how that whole hazy scenario was the only image that Coxon left me when he emigrated to America. And here it was again, the other day, a pure presence washed clean by forgetting.

Or the old hospital near the childhood house in All Alone Road, and how, for no apparent reason, that memory one day loomed, of the trapdoor into the cellar, where me and Rathbone found what we thought was a body but was in fact a medical skeleton. And although, of course, I remember that discovery, the memory given me – at its own choosing – was of the exact shape and colour of the trapdoor, its faded and peeling white paint, like living plastic, and the underlying dark wood, and the preternaturally shiny black doorknob.

Or today I was sat at my desk when a memory appeared, placed in front of me like a Tarot card for my inspection. But I’m not sure if it’s a memory. That is in fact what’s at issue. A doctor, a gaunt but ordinary doctor. One of many visits, threaded like beads onto the thin clear thread, at the surgery in Pudsey. And she turns to me and says, this doctor, ‘I’m not going to prescribe antidepressants to a sixteen-year-old boy.’ But that’s all I have, that image, those words. I can build no context around it. But yes, it feels like a memory, rather than a dream or a fantasy, both of which have a slightly different timbre: too vivid, almost, or bathed in a seraphic gauze, as Carol said (Carol who I met at Lumb Bank, Carol with her vocabulary of light: refulgent sky, and lucid and limpid. I miss her half-smile and her language of light. And she herself a point of light in the absolute shit, as it was.) So, as opposed to the lurid and lucent quality of dreams, this had an everyday matt-ness and weight. The mind, in its formlessness, presented me with something unmistakably hard and touchable. Something that won’t turn to fog or incandescent dust as soon as the eyelids open. But when and how would I have gone there, when I was sixteen, to talk about depression, when I still lived at home with my parents? How would I have even known what to call it? To be self-aware we need the right words. One thing’s for sure: I wouldn’t have told them. I’d have to have made something up. The recrudescence of gingivitis, just by way of example. The hard brown crust like a shell of rust on my lips, beautiful in another context, such as a rock pool, or posing as moss on an old stone wall, but revolting attached to the body. It’s flaring up, I might have said, I need to see a doctor. And so off I went, using this subterfuge. Coming away empty-handed. Listening over and over again to ‘Paint it Black’ by the Rolling Stones, the inky eclipse of all sunlight, and being reminded of that childhood hymn, I danced on a Friday, when the sky turned black. Who knows? This solitary jigsaw piece on its carpet of darkness. That’s how we, by which I mean the human race, have operated for millennia. The chiaroscuro of mind, as I once put it, to Carol. Anyway, one doesn’t have to rely on memory’s unsolicited envelopes or sensory ambush. For I have the journal, the blue notebooks.

Therein lie all the incontestable proofs. They don’t offer an alternative story; they pick apart all stories, undersea and in whispers. I’ve been reading them backwards. For a long time, I’ve been in the habit of reading things backwards, as the dead are said to read. Some might say it’s to spoil the suspense, the element of expectation, but actually it creates a different kind of expectation... it creates the sense or simply reveals that the present is an appearance that we seek to go behind, that it can, always, be unravelled, destroyed, that it always collapses into the past that collapses in turn forever.

All of which is true.

See for yourself.