Cindy Brandner's Blog, page 4

The Most Healing of Pleasures

I am one of those rare persons who rather likes winter. For one thing I face anywhere from five to seven months of it each year, this is Canada, after all, and for another winter has a certain grace to it that I revel in. Winter is that rare time in our modern world where it’s permissible to slow down, to turn inward and contemplate self. January to me is that time of inward turning, the holiday madness is over, and there’s still a long stretch of dark and cold and snow to get through.

I seek beauty in January, in the pages of picture books from long ago- a personal favourite is the ‘Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady’. This book always makes me long to learn how to draw, or to have been blessed with that ability in my fingers from birth- alas, it was not to be. I often peruse paintings- I’m a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites and find their lush canvases and retreat to mythology feeds something in me this time of year. But what I most look forward to this time of year is the retreat into the world of books.

The literary scholar Harold Bloom states that reading is the most healing of pleasures, that it returns you to ‘otherness’ either in yourself or in friends- those old friends, or new that exist between the covers of books. I never consciously thought of reading as healing, but I was struck by the word when I read it in Bloom’s book ‘How to Read and Why’. I realized I have often fled to books in times of trouble, in times of sorrow I tend to hide between the covers of old favourites and seek sanctuary there. Those friends never fail, even when, or perhaps especially when I know the exact line that comes next, the bit of description or the next adventure I will fall into with them. Neither television nor movies (as much as I love some of what they offer) provides healing in the way that words on paper do. There is a list that I consider my ‘White Night’ list. Those books you reach for when it’s 3 am and the world seems a dark and lonely place. Every true reader has such a list. The first such book that went on mine was ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I love ‘Alice’. I first read it this time of year, as my original copy (long lost now) was a Christmas gift when I was eight. I have always understood the magic of reading from the first time I could string a few words together. I think most of us remember that moment in our lives, when suddenly pages in a book weren’t just a jumble of print, but suddenly those bits of type became a story, and the story became something we could enter, a magic portal, the doors of which remain open our entire lives. Reading ‘Alice’ was one of those pivotal moments in my reading life though, where I slipped so totally through that portal, or down that rabbit hole as it were, that I never truly returned. I’ve been an ‘Alice’ addict my entire life- if I was only allowed to take one book with me to that mythical desert island, it might well be ‘Alice.’ I read it over and over when I was eight, until my father worried I was developing an unhealthy obsession with the book. He may have had a point, as I still am obsessed even if I’ve cut the re-reads down to once a year.

Bloom also states in his book that we read to feel less alone, because friendships wax and wane with the seasons and because life goes awry despite the best laid plans. We read to understand ourselves and our fellow man, we read to fall in love, we read to escape, we read to learn and better our own minds, but mostly we read because it is so damn wonderful. Falling in love with a book is something we never forget and we often wish, with the best ones, that we could erase them from our minds and read them for the first time again, much as we might wish to see an old lover through fresh eyes once more.

My own White Night list includes Charles Dicken’s Bleak House, L.M Montgomery’s Emily books, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles and her superlative House of Niccolo, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Leon Uris’ Trinity -my favourite standalone novel of all time, and sometimes, I admit, I turn to the very familiar comforts of my own characters.

So this winter as you deal with ice and snow and long nights, turn to that most healing of pleasures and read, read because you’ll make new friends or visit over tea with old ones, read to be haunted by the visions of other men, read to fall in love, read to heal the soul bruises that the last year has put upon you, read to step once again through that magic portal.

As for myself, I’ll be down the rabbit hole, at a Mad Tea Party, looking for that one clean cup, and in the process restoring, as the Mad Hatter once said, ‘my muchness’.

The Boys in the Band, Or If I Had a Time Machine…

   The other night I watched an episode of ‘Lewis’- you know the British detective show that takes place in Oxford. Partly I watch it for the locale, Oxford is stunningly beautiful after all, and the show highlights that very well. Plus the show is a descendant of ‘Inspector Morse’ and I loved that show, mostly because of Morse and the wonderful portrayal of his alcoholic, music loving, beauty yearning self by the actor John Thaw.

But I digress, I’m here to talk about a whole other set of British men. This particular episode was about a group of young students and revolved mostly around two, one autistic and a wildly talented artist and the other a girl who was brilliant at ‘making stuff up’. She was obsessed with the poet Shelley, so I felt an instant affinity with her. After all I make stuff up too, and I have long been in love with the Romantic poets— the big ones— Keats, Shelley and most of all Byron, the original bad boy, the rock star of the early 19th century. The first one maybe— his was the madness of celebrity as we understand it now. At one point in the show Inspector Hathaway refers to the three princes of the Romantic movement as ‘the boys in the band’. I loved the analogy, because it was who they were in many respects— they were the Beatles of their time.

During the writing of my last novel I read a biography of Shelley by the incomparable Richard Holmes, I lived, loved, cried and died a little with Shelley for the space of two weeks. Holmes  admitted that he had begun to write cheques with the dates from Shelley’s time rather than his own, during the writing of the book, and that after the book was done he was suicidal for a bit, almost drowning himself because he felt so lost once he could no longer live in Shelley’s world. I understood because even in the reading I had imagined myself so thoroughly into Shelley’s universe that I didn’t want to be in my own. It’s not that their world was some enchanted sphere either, Shelley’s life was very messy, and he was a complicated man, both cruel and incredibly kind, both crazy and perfectly horribly sane. He cleaned up the messes left behind from Byron’s emotional entanglements, but Byron often returned the favour by cleaning up Shelley’s financial woes. They loved each other, they hated each other, they frustrated the hell out of each other, in short they had a real friendship. In that book Shelley rose up whole through the pages and I came to know him as a man, as a failure, as a poet, as a husband who was often careless and absent, as a person so weighed down with grief that death might have seemed a relief, when it came for him that day in the Gulf of Spezia.

Shortly after I read the book, a dear friend and I exchanged e-mails on what we would pack to spend a summer in Italy with Byron and Shelley. I imagined my trunks, leather with brass handles, the carriage I would arrive in, the dresses I would bring, what I could not live without from my own time (I spent some time wondering how to rig up a hot shower and wondering how long it would be before I stopped jonesing for my one can of Diet Coke each day). I imagined in detail what such a summer would be like, how we would roam the Tuscan hills, drinking wine amongst the poppies and sunflowers, eating olives and whether or not bringing a modern toothbrush along would signal to my Romantic men that I was no ordinary woman. But mostly in my daydream (which lasted for a few months), I just listened, listened to their ideas, their words, because these men were the pinnacle of the Romantic movement. They were ahead of their time, and part of a social movement that changed the way we all view the world now.

I wanted to understand what Romanticism was really about, and so I read many definitions of it but this was one that struck me:

…a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.”

That definition spoke to the heart of Romanticism, at least for me, it explained to me why we are still so fascinated by them and their work so long after. It is because they speak so eloquently, and yet so rawly, to the human condition- unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals. Hence the term hopeless romantic. I should know, I am one, after all.

While in Italy in July, I visited the Keats Shelley House in Rome- it was the house that John Keats spent the final months of his all too brief life. It was a tiny slice of England right there by the Spanish Steps. It ended up being my favourite spot in Italy, despite the glories of Florence and the seductress that is Venice. I had seen the David, Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’, Brunelleschi’s Dome, the hills of Tuscany- but it was the tiny bedroom of a tuberculotic English boy that struck me at my core. What had he not lived to tell us, what words had died with him, or was he only meant for that brief space? For flames that burn high and hot so quickly, must needs die down quickly too. Of course they all died young, and perhaps that is why we still love them so, human nature is odd that way. We don’t quite revere the men who managed a long life and a happy marriage in the same way.

Dead poets, it’s hard to imagine they matter some days in our technological warp-drive world where everyone is looking to the next thing, the next distraction, the next hit of the entertainment drug. But I think they matter more than ever, because they can stop us for a moment and deliver us back to our selves, the selves that we want to be, our better natures, they speak to the yearning that we sometimes think we alone experience. They speak to our souls. Because their words can still stop me now, two hundred and more years later.

My love for these poets is not so rare, women will always have a love for the bad boys—right now half the world seems to be in love with a variety of vampires and werewolves.  But me, I’m with the boys in the band.

This isle and house are mine, and I have vow’d

Thee to be lady of the solitude.

And I have fitted up some chambers there

Looking towards the golden Eastern air,

And level with the living winds, which flow

Like waves above the living waves below.

I have sent books and music there, and all

Those instruments with which high Spirits call

The future from its cradle, and the past

Out of its grave, and make the present last

In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,

Folded within their own eternity.

Our simple life wants little, and true taste

Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste

The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,

Nature with all her children haunts the hill.

The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet

Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit

Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance

Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;

The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight

Before our gate, and the slow, silent night

Is measur’d by the pants of their calm sleep.

Be this our home in life, and when years heap

Their wither’d hours, like leaves, on our decay,

Let us become the overhanging day,

The living soul of this Elysian isle,

Conscious, inseparable, one.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Measure of My Dreams…

In the entrance of my home as soon as you come in the door, there are three pictures facing you. One is of my grandmother, circa 1968 (my birth year as it happens) in a jaunting cart in Ireland. The next is of a mural in Belfast, depicting Mother Ireland, long red hair flowing down her back, looking out over her green fields. The last is the one above, though it’s been blown up and had the light post removed. The mural above is in Belfast as well and depicts women picking potatoes in the fields during the Famine. Yes, the potato famine. I keep the photos there because all three, in some respect, represent my history- where I came from, before I even was, what my family and people endured and in the end, I believe, triumphed over. The photos remind me too, that I am blessed with what, to my ancestors, would seem a soft life indeed.

Potatoes were the stuff of life, literally, for the Irish of that time. Their diet in the main was potatoes, milk, butter and more potatoes. I can only imagine the horror when the crop failed- not once but three times, turning black and liquid in the fields. The Famine was a watershed moment in Irish history, it changed everything and is the main reason the Irish are scattered so broadly over the face of the earth. To try to encompass the tragedy of it is beyond the mere power of words. It is the dividing line in Irish history, all that came before is pre-Famine history. What came after was unprecedented.

Long ago, I read about Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and his belief that we carry the memories of our ancestors within ourselves, of our entire species actually. I believe that to be true, that in some aspect we carry those memories and experiences with us, always. It accounts for many strange instances of deja vu, or of knowing something that you have no prior experience with. For me it would explain why I feel like Ireland is the home I left long ago, and wasn’t able to return to, except for visits that never last long enough.

My own family didn’t leave Ireland until well after the Famine- some sixty years after. I don’t know how they survived it, though it’s likely many of them didn’t. On one side at least, they were farmers. Reading about the Famine was a watershed moment for me too, in my studies of Irish history. It made sense of so many things, it made sense of the Troubles in some respects. Perhaps what is most tragic about the Famine is that it was entirely preventable- there was enough food in Ireland to feed her people several times over, but it was shipped out to England on a regular basis, guarded by army troops to keep away the starving.

And while the scope of the Famine is beyond words, a writer must always try. I wrote the following on a weekend, when I was holed up in my attic working on something else. This woman stepped whole from the shadows of my unconscious and took me over for two days. I stumbled down the stairs at the end of it and said to my husband, ‘I wrote something, though I’m not sure what it is.’ I felt that way because I didn’t actually feel I had done more than take dictation from this woman, I had the feeling she was reading the words over my shoulder as I wrote. I had the feeling they were her words, and not mine in any fashion. I still feel that way, these many years later. I do wonder, sometimes, if she was an ancestor of mine and I am carrying her memories within me, taking them forward, and sharing them in what way I can.

copyright 2012 Cindy Brandner

It was the whole breadth of my experience. Fifteen square miles of soil and wee cottages. The townland, the baile of my youth became the expanse of all my years. You will think I was an ignorant peasant who knew not how to want more. You will smile at my simplicity, spare me a moment’s sorrow and forget. But I tell you- the measure of my dreams was the span of a world entire.

I’d like to tell you my story, but first you must understand my landscape. Will you come? Will you look through history’s kaleidoscope, knowing that the passage of time distorts vision and makes the dead seem small, even toylike. As though we existed in dioramas, the sort found in folk museums.

I will not bother with the name of my village, for it no longer exists on any map or even as a ripple caught in the traces of living memory. Its roots are there in overgrown stone foundations and depressions in deep grass that were once cart tracks and paths made for feet to fly along.

There were twenty-one homes contained on three hundred acres, but that is merely a note for the historians. You couldn’t see the baile until you were almost upon it, it merged with the countryside in an organic manner, a small huddle that contained a wealth of tangled relations, loves, hates- in short all the salt of life. Even our memories were scarcely personal, they were communal, shared, transformed through the tellings and re-tellings.

But I think, in the beginning at least, I was different. I wanted all my thoughts for myself, I clutched at memory like straws of salvation. The fire that was to ruin me was burning in me even then.

From the day I was born I could hear the grass grow in the fields. It was I, afterall, who first heard the potatoes in their death cries. When people spoke I saw the colors their words left behind. Some said I was a changeling, child of the fairyfolk, but they said it with fondness and indulgence. Later they would mutter from the corners of sunken mouths that my mother ought to have left me on a hillside to die. I cannot disagree that, in the end, it might have been better for all concerned had my mother done just that.

Can you define the moment that changed your life, that put your feet on the path to heaven or to hell? I can, though the moment was small and consisted only of five words.

It was the hedgemaster who showed me The Word, who stirred the embers in my chest into a consuming blaze. It was myself who sacrificed all to that fire. How was I, who thought hearts were sexless, to know that words were not for women? For words sang to me, ran their relentless tunes and dirges through me like knives. I was cursed with the desire to set them down, to carve them with the perfume of ink into the flesh of paper.

But paper was a feast, and ink unheard of.  So I set my words in soil and rock, cut them into tree bones, wrote them with blood let free from my wrists and ankles onto rock walls and wooden tables. Later I would open those same wrists in an effort to stave off death. I think those cuts were cursed though, that the fire that burned in my blood, poisoned others.

     The Word was contained within a small blue-bound book, frayed about the edges. It was the architect of my disaster.

The hedgemaster was a fine strap of a man, with a voice that could draw blood from the wind. Would it have mattered had the Word first been spoken by an ugly man with grated tin for a voice?

What words, you ask, could cause the downfall of a life barely begun? Five of them, written by a tuberculous Englishman. Ironic that it should be an English poet that led an Irish girl down the road to perdition.

‘…And her eyes were wild…’  Five words and I felt a desire that left me without breath. I was possessed, obsessed, filled with an unholy need for those pages. The man who’d written those words knew me, I felt it surely.

I slept with the hegdemaster for that book. Are you shocked? Don’t be, for who can measure the madness of such a desire? Who can say how these passions become twisted when invested in the body of a woman?  He’d spoken Keats to me, and unlocked the door of my cage, that was all the seduction I required. He took me down amongst long grass and dusty bluebells up by the old oak where the townland couples courted. Behind closed eyes I saw the rainbow of the words I would soon possess. My terrible greed cost me dear though. For when the hedgemaster moved on, he left more behind than the Word.

My son was born under a sickle moon, to a mother bewitched by the Word and a father who did not share his blood. I married the boy next door so as not to bring greater disgrace upon my family than was necessary. He was a good man, with a broad back and a kind heart.

I never lied to him, I told him about the Word and how it burned within me like a holy flame. How to hold it back was to let poison free to gnaw my insides. I thought, fool that a young girl can be, he understood. Even when I realized he did not, I thought I could have my words in the dark of night, in the bones of trees, bits of soil and spilled blood.

But God, it seemed, had other plans for me and mine.

I remember the night it began. A fog, the color of iron, came rolling down over the

hills. It was a vapor, thick and creeping, pouring itself into crevices and hollows. Into the cup of leaf and vein of soil. It seemed as though Death had breathed out over the land. In the morning there was a fine white dust on the potato stalks, their hardy necks bending already under the lethal touch.

We didn’t understand at first. No one ever understands when they are face to face with disaster. It had come so quietly afterall. On hands and knees we scrabbled in the dirt- only to find despair. We didn’t know that was to be the season God abandoned Ireland. He didn’t show his face again for many a year. He left us with four mouths to feed, and no food with which to do it. I hated Him, and yet understood the impulse to run away from such need.

I cannot explain the weight of hunger to one that has never known more than a moment’s growl in the belly. Hunger consumes, it eats you alive. It crushes you when it is not merely a question of where to find your next meal, but a matter of knowing there will never be a next meal.

When the British came to burn it down there were holes in the thatch of our cottage, for my husband no longer had the strength to patch them. The soot-soaked rain streamed in brown ribbons upon us all, but we no longer had the means to care for such small discomforts.

I know it sounds wretched to you, but I could see the stars through those holes. Do you understand- I could still see the stars.

The landlord offered us one passage on a ship. Redemption for one, damnation for the rest. We sent the hedgemaster’s son.

What price redemption? The landlord only wanted the Word, some pages with ink you may say, a small price to pay for the lives of your family. He might as well have asked for my soul.

Did I give it to him? Of course I did, but after I saw my son safe on the road that would take him away forever and always, I stole it back. It was my soul afterall and who can count the cost of such a thing? For my sins my husband took the blame- my husband died, tied to a flogging pole in the village square. Back stripped down to the bones. He ended hating me. Do not blame him. How was he to know he’d married a woman who contained within her the madness of congealed quartos and stifled sonnets?

Our first daughter was carted off to the foundling home.  I never did find her, though I tried, please understand that I tried. I walked two weeks amongst the lice and dirt and small throated cries to an absent God, that infested that small corner of hell. The flux took my youngest boy while I was gone.

The baby was the last to die. I count upon the clicking of my unfleshed fingers how long since she departed and find I cannot separate the days, they swarm together now in a mass of unending misery. I remember how she looked though, like an odd fever dream, a translucent angel. Her bones laying against folds of blue skin like long shafts of pearl. Small mouth rimmed in green from the grass I’d fed her.

From my son there is no word. I pretend not to know his fate. I write long fanciful letters in my head from him. I imagine him drinking milk and honey, walking on streets paved with gold, in a new world.

And so here tonight under a sharp-faced moon, I remain.

I do not know why I cannot die. The cuts from which I nursed my children on blood do not heal well anymore. I pray to a God I no longer believe in that I’ll take infection and die. I pray for the fever to come for me. I have not been so lucky as others for I am still alive. Perhaps I am cursed to walk this earth forever, cursed to live when the very grass in the fields withers black with sorrow.

Do not look for me in the history books, you will not find me, there I will merely be one of an impossible number. Don’t search amongst the rollcall of poets- unlike Keats all my words were writ in water. I will tell you where to find me.

Follow me up the hill, the one that stretched its toes down to the edge of the townland. Up through the long grass to the twisted oak, where couples once courted and young girls lost their innocence amongst long grass and dusty bluebells.

Dig beside the stone that looks like a folded child. A foot down it’s waiting for you to find- shrouded in the homespun I took from my husband’s back, before they tied him to the post.

Has it survived the years well? Is it moldy? Have the dead poet’s words bled across the pages, can you smell the copper tang of the blood of those who died for it? Handle it carefully as you turn the pages, give it some small respect before you move on. For it is all the measure of my dreams.

Fifteen square miles, the span of a world entire.

 

My Russian Love Affair

Long ago I had a book of fairy tales, much read, worn and much loved. I don’t know what happened to it, lost in a move, put in a box and never retrieved perhaps. I couldn’t tell you anymore the tales that lay therein, except for one by which I was so struck that I read it more than the others, read it until it was imprinted on my heart and mind. This was the tale of Baba Yaga, and I think it was then, between the covers of that red cloth-bound book that my Russian love affair began. Something of the Baba Yaga’s tale- that old wild hag, flying in her cauldron, living in her chicken-legged house, spoke to something deep in me. Many years later, I would find out that the other half (the half that wasn’t Irish) of my family originated in Russia, and stopped in Austria for a few generations before making their way to America.

I grew up during the latter stages of the Cold War. In every Hollywood movie in those days, the Russians were the villains. Communism was the great evil that threatened all our lives, I even had a gym teacher who spurred us on by telling us the Russians were watching us, judging our weaknesses, assessing our flaws. I kind of liked the idea of it. To me, Russia and her people were exotic, foreign, unpredictable. I remember the first time I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance, or heard the news of his defection, or saw pictures of Nureyev—was there ever a more Russian looking man than Nureyev with those Tatar cheekbones and haughty air? Russians seemed to hold some terrible ancient secret within them, you could see it in their eyes, something ineffably tragic. I was in my teens by then, and it was all terribly Romantic.

In college I took Russian Literature, and I fell in love with a whole other aspect of that great and terrible mistress. I reveled in the pages, thick 19th Century novels when authors wrote books that were elegantly paced and broadly canvassed. I imagined myself into the pages of Anna Karenina- the balls, the gowns, the gently steaming samovars, the manners, the rules and the breaking of those rules by one woman. I sweated out my guilt with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, in my college studio apartment where the taps dripped endlessly. I whispered the names out loud from those books, those of both place and people, for Russian names have always been a deep, rich perfume to my tongue. I ached with Zhivago and Lara in their ice palace, years later, and realized that if you prefer a happy ending with your books, you don’t look for it in Russian literature.

Russia—the very name was a dark, rich perfume upon his tongue. He had never been able to bring himself to call this country by its official name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. No, she was Russia, indomitable and cruel, much like the nature of her own people. She was mysterious, dark, and unfathomable: from the far west where the city of St. Petersburg still hung like a sugar-spun fairytale of European architecture, European manners and European decay, a city of water, stone and sky, Russia’s own Venice; to the east, Kiev, its outlines laid down in white marble and etched upon the skies in airy domes, so beautifully constructed they seemed like teacups awaiting the discerning tongues of angels on high to drink their exotic depths.

When I began the third book of my Irish series, I didn’t realize that I was about to steep myself in Russia for years, with every aspect of her history that I could get my hands on, with every book about modern Russia—Russia since the fall of Communism, Russia as the new Wild West, where there are no rules by which to guide oneself, a Russia that was no longer a great power. But still she was Russia, indomitable, mysterious, alluring, and as harsh a mistress as any man might fear to have. During this time I also discovered Russian folk tales in all their richness, and shall I say, bloody-ness.

He knew the old Russian tales and understood quite well the Russian need for blood and bones and caves and cold dark forests, for bears that governed great iced lands and deformed old women with spiteful wisdom gnawing at their gaunt frames. He understood the peasant that lurked under the most sophisticated of Russian veneers and so gave these tales earth and grain and hovels dug into hillsides. He told of a great Mother who slept in such silence that even a spider’s weaving might be heard within it, and when that Mother awoke it was with torrents, twisting roots and smoking soil.

During the writing of the Russian sections I began to drink my afternoon tea in the Russian fashion- with a dollop of vodka in it to ‘cheer it up’ and a bit of jam by the side, rather than sugar.  There is nothing quite like drinking a delicate china mug of lavender tea, cheered with vodka, partnered with raspberry jam, while the snow drifts down outside your window and you dream of St. Petersburg in the 19th Century and Vladimir Vysotsky plays in the background, his voice like deep rich coffee spiked with- what else- vodka. I fell in love with Russian poets- Ahkmatova, Blok, Pushkin, Pasternak, and the one that I still read regularly- Joseph Brodsky. (I daydreamed about taking his classes at Columbia in which occasionally his good friend, Mikhail Baryshnikov, appeared).

You can’t read about Russia without encountering tragedy of a sort that both takes your breath away and boggles your mind. To this day the numbers that died under Stalin are unknown, estimates range anywhere from a few million to 25 million. But those are numbers, it is when you read the personal accounts that it hits home- like the story I read of Misha, who after his mother and father were taken in the night by Stalin’s secret police, walked some 1700 kilometres across some of the most unforgiving terrain known to man, to find his sister. When he arrived at his sister’s door she turned him away, afraid that she would be tarred with the same brush her mother and father had been. Twelve years old, likely near to starving, Misha turned and walked back into the night and out of the pages of history. He haunts me to this day.

And then as it was wont to do in Russia , winter came once again. The cold was so severe that breathing hurt and talk was unthinkable. Words would surely freeze and fall to the ground before ever making the journey to another’s ears. He had heard tell that the natives believed that each winter all laughter, tears, words and stories fell to the ground and froze, only to be awakened by spring’s thaw, when suddenly the air would fill with chatter, laughter, gossip and tragedy, a cacophony of humanity borne on spring’s gentler air. But what this ground would have to say was likely more than any human could bear to hear. For in what tone did blood and grief speak?

Fragments and tendrils of the people who had once walked here, lived here, died here were left behind. You could feel their ghosts walk in step with yours, like a shadow that you could not detach from yourself, until the time came when you wondered if you were seeing through your own eyes or viewing a vanished world through theirs. To be here was to live in a place apart, to feel as though you inhabited a planet out at the very limits of the solar system, where the sun’s warmth could not be felt and there was no home other than this.

There wasn’t any aspect of Russia that didn’t fascinate me, that doesn’t fascinate me. To this day I follow the blog of an intrepid Ukrainian female motorcyclist who regularly biked through the strange and haunted wastes of Chernobyl. Her pictures of those wastelands, became a sort of metaphor, for what Russia once was, but is no longer. The incredible re-growth of plant life there, the return of animals that many thought were extinct, seems a metaphor too, of the Firebird that is so prevalent in Russian folk lore, of a country that will rise again, become something new, but something that is still, at its core, Russian- indomitable, mysterious, hardy, alluring and eternal.

If you listened long enough in the great silences such a land held, it would speak to you—of its past, of its future and of all that had sundered it. Russia speaks to him of the great horsemen that once swept her plains, and the armies that even now marched by the hundreds of thousands across her frozen heart. She tells of falling stars that laid waste to the abundance of her bounty and the rifts in her body where enormous stores of water, the largest in the world, are held. She speaks of her peasants, her shamans, her priests, her emperors and queens, her poets and musicians. She whispers of the long iron girders that trace her spine for the distance of seven days. She speaks of the empty spaces in her soul, of the migration of dancing cranes and herds of reindeer. She speaks of her amber hair—seductively, her pearls, her minerals and the rich, loamy fertility of her plains. She tells him the story of all her peoples: the haughty, mysterious Slavs; the silent Sibers; the earthy Ukraines; the Balts and Turks and Tatars; and the Yakuts, whom she claims can walk through hordes of white men like smoke and never be seen nor felt. She tells of the thunder of foreign troops who have come again and again, and of the vast silence of her winters that have inevitably defeated her foes. Her voice is as dark as a terrible perfume, as she tells of the secret police and the fields sown with the blood of the forgotten innocents. She speaks in contradiction and secret languages that have not been spoken in hundreds of years. And under all her words, her seduction, her coldness, her heat and succor, he hears her heart—the great, thundering heart of Mother Russia. And he hears that it is a heart forever in the process of breaking.

(all the italicized sections are excerpts from my book Flights of Angels, and are copyrighted under that aegis.)

And so back to Ireland…

It’s that magical time of year again- autumn, children back to school, apples hanging heavy on the trees, mists in the morning that don’t clear off until ten. For me it’s also the most inspiring time of year, something in autumn’s landscape always speaks to my writer’s soul more clearly than the other seasons. It’s the change in the light, the depth of the sky, and all the changing colours in the woods- the ambers, scarlets, browns, golds, the silver beading on an abandoned spiderweb, the soft decay of reeds in a pond.

This time last year, I was finishing a book, now I’m starting in earnest on a new one. Which means I will strive to make my quota of two pages every single day. It’s always intimidating, this beginning of a book. I don’t know a writer that doesn’t question if they can do it again, pull off what seems impossible when all you have is notes and random snippets and other than a historical framework, no exact notion of how this story turns out. I’m only fifty pages along and this new book has already thrown me a few curveballs- ones I’m not certain I’m happy about.

Beginning a book though is exciting, all roads are open, and I don’t know where the various pathways will take me or what mad adventure the characters might decide to embark upon. I love all the little details that come into play, so that I get to know each character a little better with each chapter in each book. I love the strange little factoids that always come my way during the research process, things that become small vignettes in the books, or even just a thread of crimson in the overall tapestry of the story.

What I do know about this book is that most of it will take place in Ireland, unlike the last one which was divided between Ireland and Russia. There will be storylines set in the US too, those are already in development. I know one section takes place in Venice as well. Hmm, I wonder if I might have to make another research trip? I’m excited to be back in Ireland, in my mind leastwise. There are times that the imagining part of writing is so immersive that I forget where I am, which is a wee bit dicey when I’m out and about walking.  I see every book in terms of an element- not sure why, that’s just how I see them in my head. Exit Unicorns was earth, Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears was clearly, water. Flights of Angels was the air book and In the Country of Shadows is going to be fire, it will be interesting to see what that actually means in terms of the writing itself.

Strangely, I have finished the writing of every book in November. I don’t plan it, but it just seems to work out that way. So here I sit wondering what I will have on my hands three years from this November- yes, that’s the goal, to be done in the fall of 2015.  My battered copy of J. Bowyer Bell’s The Irish Troubles sits at my right hand still filled with stickies from the last book’s research. And so the adventure begins.

For those of you who read the blog but don’t visit my FB page- my latest novel Flights of Angels won a Global e-book award for Best Historical Fiction. I didn’t realize how much I wanted the book to win until I was watching the webcast with my heart racing as my category came up. It was nice to have the acknowledgement, I must say.

Discombobulated in Venezia…

When you dream of seeing a particular city all your life, a strange dichotomy occurs when you do at last arrive there- for there is the city you dreamt of all those years, and the actual city. The dream city is always a little ethereal, a little too perfect. For instance it’s not usually hot as Hades in your dream city, nor do you have a little thing called the Venetian Pestilence. (yes, I named it myself, but you’re allowed to do that on vacation when you feel like you might die in Venice).

Venice…just the name alone conjures up magical images, like a city in the clouds, made of something less substantial than other cities, less substantial and far more beautiful. Long ago, I set a section of my ongoing story in Venice, and recently I realized it fits into the storyline of book four (on which I am currently working), then the offer of this trip came up very unexpectedly. Synchronicity is a beautiful thing, and when you recognize it, it presents itself fairly often in life.

Venice, however, was slow in presenting her magic. First of all there was the horrible cold I had caught somewhere along the way. You know those kind of colds that make you feel like you are separated from the rest of humanity by some strange invisible bubble, that makes it impossible to hear or communicate properly with the world. Secondly, there was the unsettling feeling, from the moment we pulled up to the wharf in our water taxi, that I had most definitely been there before, and that things didn’t look as I remembered them. It was annoying more than anything, like someone tapping on your shoulder endlessly, yet when you turn around no one is there. The minute you turn back, they continue to tap.

Venice thoroughly discombobulated me, so if what follows seems semi-incoherent, I am blaming it on La Serenissima.

Walking through the Doges’ Palace in the grip of a fever, with sweat beading on me like I was a tubercular poet about to die, I crossed the Bridge of Sighs and suddenly couldn’t breathe. I had to rush off the Bridge and then rush through the prison cells. I had that cold hand on my shoulder that made me certain I had been there before and not under happy circumstances. Later, I am never certain what to make of such feelings- only in the moment they are so very real, and I have always been a believer that there is so much more in this world than we can understand with our first five senses.

At night, Venice is a city of ghosts. The tourists have all long gone to bed, except for a few of us stragglers and all there is, is stone and water, and a city that knows her glory days passed long ago. Walking, the sound of your steps echo off the stone, get swallowed up in the water and your heart beats faster and faster. It’s easy to become lost in Venice, it’s expected that you get lost at least three times on any given walk. At 2 am, the charm of this lessens considerably.

Yes, ghosts, they seem thick upon the air of Venice. And it was in Venice that I heard bells ceaselessly ringing one night though my friend couldn’t hear them at all (bad Italian cold medicine? The beginning of tinnitus?). I thought it was a phone in another room that someone just kept trying to ring through on. But it went on for hours and it was starting to drive me a little mad. Somehow the bells just seemed a part of that feeling I kept having of having been in Venice before, and half expecting to run upon some former version of myself around a corner. Time feels more malleable in Venice, as if the change of element from the familiar earth to that of water, gives time the slip.

Speaking of time slips, Venice is where I met Marco. Marco who swore that I had been in his bar three years before, and got a little irate with me when I assured him I had never been in Venice before in my life. After a few hours of him asking me why I refused to remember our previous meeting I said perhaps it had been three hundred years, rather than three and that we were caught in a time loop- to which he replied ‘cie, like ‘Terminator’. So even in Venice, boys are really just boys. He was vehement enough that I started to wonder if I *had* slipped into some strange time/space conundrum, and simply couldn’t recall having visited before.  He made me angry with his certainty, because he was, like the city, discombobulating me with that certainty.

Venice hides behind a façade of masques and fancy dress, she does not give you her soul, but she takes a piece of yours, whether you want her to or not. The only section of the city in which I felt utterly peaceful was the Jewish section-I could have happily whiled away a summer in its confines. It was quiet there, unlike the rest of Venice. Hot and still, with the soft lap of the canals against ancient stone. The Jewish quarter was once the Jewish Ghetto. A place where Jews were not allowed to leave from sundown to sunrise for over  two centuries. Oddly, it was a place of peace, still in the afternoon heat, but like seeing a slice of a real city, not a confection for tourists.

That day was the one on which I found Jamie’s palazzo, grey and quiet, behind wrought iron gates, almost hidden in drifts of golden honeysuckle. I had been looking for it, and knew it the moment I saw it. Those moments, as a writer, are like stepping for a time into an alternate universe. In my writing head, I spent the rest of the afternoon with His Lordship, seeing the Venetian summer through his eyes, understanding its particular poetry through his thoughts.

Like the contrary soul she is, Venice gave me a perfect golden moment on my last evening there. We stepped out into St. Mark’s Square, the sun gilding all that beautiful white stone and the lagoon a dazzling azure beyond. A band was playing ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ by Ennio Morricone- one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed and one I listened to endlessly during the writing of my last book. To hear it played there in that place was the sort of moment you dream of finding in the city of your dreams.

In the end, though she threw me off guard, I did indeed love this city of moonlit glass and decaying stone, this city of ghosts and music and echoes and fallen angels.

In Venice, I concluded, the ghost that haunts one is oneself.

When in Florence One Should Eat Roses…

When in Florence, one should eat roses-small, sugared petals of them that melt in your mouth and somehow seem suited to this old city, which is both artistic and austere, both an enchanted fairy land of floating lights at night, and a tourist mecca that overwhelms the senses. Here there is a bridge of gold, a duomo that drove its creator mad, and sugar spun delights of both architecture and art, of living statues and breathing history.

This is the birthplace of Michelangelo, the home of the Medicis, the burgeoning flower of the Renaissance. The hotel we stay in was once the servants’ quarters for the Medici family- the family palazzo is just up the street. There’s an old tunnel, with its entryway now bricked up, through which servants once went on cold winter mornings, and masters sometimes moved to hide their assignations with the lesser orders from the world. Now there’s a 12th century wine cellar where we drink a lovely Chianti and eat something that tastes good, but of which I am certain I do not want to know the provenance of its ingredients.

Here in this city lives the David, one of the greatest sculptures of all time, and despite having seen his image a thousand times he’s still a breathtaking sight. I could spend an hour just looking at the vein in his neck- this statue is a wonder for a good reason. It seems wrong to call him a statue, for he seems alive, bigger than life really, as if he might move off his pedestal and stride out of his rotunda to find a modern day Goliath to slay. I love that Michelangelo never believed he created his pieces, but rather that they already existed and were only waiting to be released from their marble prisons.

Throughout the trip I wanted to travel back in time, I wanted to see these cities at the height of their power, their glory, I wanted to hear the swish of skirts and the soft slip of Florentine leather on the cobblestones, and hear the cry of the peddlers. But as I lie on my bed in this servants’ house, I realize that sounds don’t change much through time, for below my shuttered window there is a woman singing to a baby in an effort to soothe it, there is music and the clink of wine glasses and laughter. And during the day I saw artists everywhere, and surely they do not change so much, regardless of the century. They were chalking the Mona Lisa upon hot cobblestones, painting sunflowers which are ubiqitous in this region, and yet still beautiful, and etching scenes of old Florence.

This is a city of art, first and foremost, students come from around the world to study here. Here is housed one of the world’s greatest collections of Renaissance art- so much beauty that one feels overwhelmed, the senses saturated in both the canvases and the names- Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Tintoretto and last, but never least in this city which still bears his stamp in its piazzas and walkways- Michelangelo.

It is here that I find traces of characters, both real and imagined, from my favourite series of books- Dorothy Dunnett’s incomparable House of Niccolo. There is the triptych of Thommaso Portinari, here the former dwelling of the powerful Strozzi family, there a statue of Cosimo Medici. I imagine Nicholas here, tall and dimpled and plotting his next move. The books come alive on a different level for me, despite my having read them so many times before.

Florence is not a city one gets to know quickly, I suspect. This is a city of old manners and formalities, where your parcels are beautifully wrapped in stiff paper and siestas are rigorously observed. Florence, one senses, is a grande old dame who knows herself well, who understands her bones are still those of beauty, and holds her skirts with a delicate hand, a perfect cameo at her throat and a fan held demurely, yet flirtatiously, under her umber eyes. She will allow you to know her by degrees, as you earn it, as she sees fit.

I put away my journal, turn out the light and listen to the sounds of Florence, which might be any time at all, for here the centuries truly do melt together. In the dark, time is a false sort of construct anyway. I close my eyes, my tongue still tasting the sugar of roses.

The Enchantment of Tuscany

While we landed in the melting pot that was Rome at a simmering 42 degrees celsius, it was to Tuscany we went to spend our first bit of time. Tuscany is one of those somewhat shimmery fairytale places- just the word conjures up cedars and starlit nights, and olives and lemons cascading down hillsides. Tuscany is one of those places of which we expect much. Well, Tuscany did not disappoint.

We stayed in a villa suspended in the hills above Siena. It was private and beautiful and the views were breathtaking, the food amazing and the hosts gracious. At night I would open the window to the balcony, feeling a little like Juliet awaiting Romeo. It was hot, hot, hot there, which made for amazing skies, strewn by an extravagant hand with the dust of diamonds.

Tuscany is wine and poetry, basilicas and lavender hip high and food that warms your blood and tongue like pepper. It is cypresses that sing in the night wind, and cicadas humming in the evenings. It’s sugar-dusted croissants eaten in the morning sun. It’s winding cobblestone streets in medieval towns and it is fields rolling in the distilled gold of sunflowers. It’s cobalt and golden pottery that dazzles the eye and oil-soaked truffles and wine that miraculously does not give you a headache.

It is 15th generation vintners, that extoll the virtues of wine and oil and vinegar until your head spins with the poetry of it. It is tour guides named Aeoli, whose name I’m certain must mean fierce wind- for he drove the hills of Tuscany like he was exactly that. It is groups of teenagers seated eating platters of pasta in the dipping closes of cobbled streets singing old Italian songs at the top of their lungs.

Tuscany, as you might have guessed, was one of my favourite parts of Italy. I would, like the lovely American couple we met at the villa, return every summer for thirty years, if I had my druthers.

 

La Belle Italia, Roses and a Dying Gaul

I leave for Italy in less than two weeks. I’ve been cramming my head with as much Roman history as I can. To that end I was in the library last night picking up a book on Celtic myth and art- yes, the Celts have a long history in Italy. I like to know what my peeps were up to back in the day, in Rome. I pulled the book I wanted off the shelf, and knocked another off in the process. Weirdly, it was Eat, Pray, Love. I may well be one of the few women in North America who has not read said book. I am one of those perverse souls who, when a book/show/movie is uber-popular will not read/watch it. I chalk it up to the mulish stubborn suspicious nature of my ancestors- if everyone likes it that much, it can’t be good. But I had watched a TED talk with the author of Eat, Pray, Love a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. She was witty, funny, humble and had some ideas on creativity and the muses that I am pondering weeks later. So I’m reading it. I already finished the section in Italy. It’s funny and just good. I am fine with eating crow when it’s tasty.

I read a section this morning that talked about the one word that you feel describes you- not your appearance, or your job or your social status- YOU- your soul if you will. Just the words that come up first, before you censor or self-deprecate or criticize yourself. Mine were Seek and Transcendence. I am always seeking those moments of transcendence, where time stops and the everyday world melts away for a few seconds and you forget your corporeal self, and live in your spirit. We all seek those moments in a variety of ways- in nature, in our children, in the simple play of light across water, in something you’ve seen a million times and never really noticed- and then suddenly you do and it’s never the same for you- it’s been transformed, it has transcended to a different place in your spirit.

The roses are blooming here in Brigadoon. The wild ones, as they do, bloomed first and now have shed their petals in a translucent pink carpet on the grass verges of my daily walk. They remind me of how swiftly time passes- for roses, for dogs (I have an old girl who isn’t doing so well these days) and for, of course, we humans. That’s why we have to snatch at those moments of transcendence as often as they present themselves.

Now to that Dying Gaul, there’s an image of him just below this post. I wanted to post it within the body of the post but WordPress has swallowed three versions of this blog and so I don’t dare try to post the same way again. I’ve seen images of this statue many times over the years, and the impact never lessens, even through the watered down lens of a computer screen. I can’t explain what it is about this dying marble warrior that so pulls me, but he actually makes my heart ache just to look at him. He is on my list of ‘must sees’ in Rome. I can only imagine what it will be like to stand there looking at him in the flesh, or marble as it were.   He makes me think of my favourite scene in the HBO series ROME- where Vercingetorix (leader of the Gauls) is brought in chains to kneel before Caesar. (How ironic that Caesar is played by the lovely Irish actor Ciaran Hinds). I don’t know why I say favourite scene really, because it makes me cry and makes me furious. The first time I watched it I cried enough that my husband gave me one of those sideways looks that asks a question without words. I said, ‘It’s just that someone has always been making us kneel before them thinking they were superior to us.’  He looked at the wild-haired, naked barbarian on screen, looked at me and wisely chose to say nothing. I figure he was either noting the similarities- wild Celt hair and rebellious nature ending in disaster, or thinking ‘what exactly does she think her and her hard-nosed Prod ancestors have in common with this man?’

So I will go to the land of the Romans, the Florentines, the Venetians and seek those moments of transcendence- in the soaring cathedral of Brunelleschi, the bronze lions of St. Mark’s, in a twilight ride down a canal in Venice, in the holding pen of the gladiators beneath the Colosseum and in the eyes of a dying warrior. I will seek those connections where I feel with every cell that I am one petal in one bead on the unending rosary of humankind.

I will also seek it by drinking sunshine (also known as limoncello) and tasting every flavour of gelato I can manage before my Lactaid runs out.

Dying_gaul