The Laundry and the Lake

I am on Olkhon Island in the middle Lake Baikal. It is a dusty, arid island populated with small wooden Heidi-esque cabins, skinny cows and their calves and yet more of those roguish stray dogs I'm growing attached to. Beyond that is the green and blue expanse of water that is Lake Baikal. This island, the lake, are stunning, they are a poem to Siberia, such an inhospitable often unchanging and, perhaps for that reason, unsettling landscape suddenly made beautiful.

I'm in the process of unscrambling all my work here now so I feel lucky to have arrived somewhere so peaceful. I feel overwhelmed by all I have seen and experienced over the last 20 days, as though all those notes, conversations, images are on a rag-bag jumble at the bottom of my bed - a tumble of tights and knickers and long sleeved jumpers that won't unravel themselves. But of course it my job to unravel. So I'm thinking of it as I would on a day to day basis, focus on one thing at a time and decide whether I need that knowledge or if I can discard it. Make choices. For writing is all about, perhaps mostly about, those choices - what I choose to put in, and even more so about what I choose to leave lying in a heap at the end of the bed.

I'm trying to think about it like this: when I'm walking down the street, I am dimly aware of the pavement slabs, the sound the leaves are making, how cold or warm the breeze is, the colour of cars passing, a child crying for something in the distance, how my feet feel in my shoes and…well, I think we see the point, the list could be infinite. But of course while we can function while processing all of this stimulus we would go mad if we tried to bring each and every part of the world around us into sharper focus. So instead I look at maybe one or two things at a time, a crisp bag dancing on the wind in the gutter, a chalk mark where someone has written a lopsided G, the dappling of the shadow of leaves next to it.

 

My job is to pull certain aspects of the material I've gathered here into sharper focus. To sort through them: a pile to keep and pile to be, not abandoned, but shelved for a later time. Sometimes I'll wrangle with myself over a specific thing but if I have to wrangle too much it means I'll be forcing it into the text and ultimately I (and the reader) will know there's artifice there, a bit of clever-clever, and there's nothing worse is there?

So, a big task ahead of me but I'm ready. And when my mind starts spinning as though I'm trying to pull everything into focus too quickly I will go and stare at that great lake, focus instead on that. Then I'll return to my pile at the end of the bed and hunt for the things to keep.