First Things First

Too fast again - past the side road and the weather is the same, not so warm and not so wet but pleasant enough. I dream of these things - how all of it might just vanish and we'll all be happy again. Each day she has these dreams and nothing makes it better. What do we have outside this that makes the text bearable and real? Of course we have nothing, no back-story, no character, nothing that is not manufactured purely by the author. That would be me then. Oh so fast. I do not feel comfortable. It seems like I am two people today, one thinking and one acting but never at the same time. I am back and asleep each night, imagining unpeopled places - little, quiet woods like this place, with their unheard skyseen, the white noise of the moor winds pushing through them like an absent-minded caress, or the gentle patter of rain that never reaches the warm depths of the centre-most clearings. Places like this have not changed for thousands of years. Look at a map and it seems we have this whole country under the yoke of cities and roads - but fly over it and everything we humans make shrinks to nothing. The roads - marked as half-a-mile wide on the maps - are lost under the shortest of inclined trees, indicated by hedges and greenery rather than by tarmac and white lines. And all these cities, towns and villages merge with the marching expanses of countryside, forever defining this country, this familiar home, as belonging to the earth and not to humans. For years, since the ancients waded ashore from the sucking marshes that once were the channel, this has been our country. And never make mistakes. I will miss my father when I go away. I need to take something of his to keep me happy. I will steal some records and keep them nicely through all my moves, through all those garrets I imagine living in. Here is me in a high window, looking out over my new city, a record playing and the rain hitting the window with a patter of pathetic fallacy, an identified intelligence wrought in inanimate elements by complexity and chaos into some new being, a new collection of pure thought and longing. It is me that longs to go back home, leaving these studies of things I think irrelevant, leaving the new friends, the dramatic lovers, the unfamiliar concepts that a reverse Diaspora brings in this collection of strangers. I love something; all alone up here I must love something just to keep from packing it all in but I cannot decide what that is. The room beckons and repels all at once, calls to me that this is all I've ever known, but I remember so long ago being young and excitable, running with my father over the hills and the moors, just me and him and no one else to interrupt us. And I remember his routines and obsessions and his anger, never at me but somehow always for my benefit and protection. I remember his records and what he told me about them, all the tales of drunken musicians falling at the feet of wanton women years ago when the banks failed and the dust took over. What that dust would do for the gentle rain that falls around me now. And now I feel rent from him, split away from the only person who ever meant something important. All these suitors at my door are simple noise from the floor, failures against the real deal. Still the rain falls, bringing me back, rocking me over the edge of reminiscence, back and forth between the then and now, from the outside to the inside, back inside the text, when everything I write is defined by everything that I experience. I am my own character; I am manufactured as much as anyone, dreaming of myself and how to make myself out of nothing, out of the failures stretching back to my first memories, a long unbroken line of evolving feelings and emotions, broken by loss of love, raised high by new things, new thoughts and ideas. Sometimes I would think I had found the secret of the universe, a fleeting vision of why everything was right. But I worry that these moments are like Scrooge's indigestion, more the interaction of chemicals and nerves that anything real beamed in from God or other outside elements. Anyway, I am god in my own story, my own creator, building a universe in a lunchtime, this very hour, a god of all things I know, the god of the god I imagine stretching back in huge self-referential loops to the big bang of my own creation, the moment I was born, or at least the moment of my first coherent thought, a bright diamond of something unimportant save for being the first. I have broken outside the text, back and forth over the borders of the writing and I am my own author.