Friday, September 26, 2008

The woods are full of wardens

I was never a religious girl. My mother advocated that her children would be told to believe whatever they wanted to believe in. That God existed if I said he existed. My dad kept his mouth shut, never one to push what he thought on anyone else unless it involved a man with a guitar. I learnt on his knee more chords than I can remember. I sat by the window wedged open by a red box full of business cards that I was invariably drawn to because of the colour. If I shut my eyes all I can see is green and that was the garden. This was my dad's first office in my first house I have a memory of. I learnt rock progressions, influences, diverging strands, genres. My early childhood is this kind of haze of trees and my face squashed against car windows and mountains and the sea. My very first memory was with my gran, strangely not from the set of grandparents I was closest to, and we went on a walk round where she lived that's full of these towering fir trees that plastered the ground in needles and smelt unbelievably wonderful. My memory is of cherry tomatoes bursting in my mouth and of red squirrels hiding up in the trees above me.

None of that was what I wanted to say.

I head into uni earlier than I need and come home later than I should. This is because I wander. I can't tell you where anything is in the West End. I can't tell you where you can get a cheap drink and a good seat. I can tell you walls and trees and bumps in the road, benches and bridges and ducks and the foreign section of Fopp and the little back street with BOOKS ---> on the wall and the new bookshop that's opening on Byres Road tomorrow. I can tell you stories about the BBC if we head down that way and how the price of bagels has increased since last year and how we used to loudly shout equations when we cut through the Maths building to get to English Lit. I could tell you stolen coffees during tests and stolen kisses during films. The mildest cases of stalking to kill the time before a class. I set out everyday in the hope of getting lost but my father gave me a sense of direction along with my dark hair, short stature and a cynical slant even he thinks is getting worse. I didn't care about university which is why I didn't apply when I already had the grades in 5th year. I applied when everyone else applied in a sort of 'that will do' manner. I went to one open day after I had been accepted because I'd already fallen in love with the place. I didn't even know where the other universities were exactly and I didn't care. See every day I can wake up and I am me, stuck in my head with everybody else's problems. But I stick a book in my bag and I get away. Cheaper than the plane to Paris or New York or Frisco or Barcelona or St Petersburg. Cheaper than the boat to Dublin or the train to London or Edinburgh or the car ride up to family I don't know on a island. It's easy to lose myself there because there are so many languages shouted over my head it makes me dizzy. In winter in the Hetherington building I could sit and watch a boy and girl frown over their own Cyrillic alphabet. For a few hours in the day none of you matter.

I'm not a religious girl but I took a walk through the park with the sun shining cold Autumn blues and I stumbled into a jam session half-hidden in a bush with a double bass and make shift drums. The preacher girl with long hair tied around her head shuffled along on the bench to make room for me and none of us said a thing. We erased ourselves in an afternoon and it didn't matter that I was floundering. My motto since I grew up was to keep in mind that nothing really matters. But don't look at that negatively because it isn't meant negatively. It's when you hold yourself quiet and just look and think and feel and listen and I mean really listen, you might realise that nothing is certain and nothing is true and nothing is right except that you are in that moment of time. You are this mess of colour on a rushing background, this pulsing breath of stale air recycling the thoughts of everybody. I am everybody who ever thought reincarnated and I am nobody and one day I will stop messing around in the shadows and stay outside my cave.

Every book is my bible and every song my hymn but I'm preaching to myself past and future while my present sits mooning with her face to the sky wishing she never had to come down.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nothing is absolute. There is no absolute truth, no absolute right or wrong, and this haziness extends to the physical rules of reality itself.

As your mother correctly says, it's your decision to choose what to believe in. That idea itself is a belief and has no right or wrong about it. If a celestial beard sits in the sky presiding over all life then so be it in the mind of that person. If Chaos theory is their chosen belief, then why not?

But these views are shaped and moulded in accordance with the living, evolving world that we pass through on our way to wherever it is we are headed. As you say, all books are 'bibles', all songs are 'hymns'. For better or worse, the stimulus we encounter alter our belief in what the world is and what we believe ourselves to be. The immediate world around us is the equivalent of the insane street preacher, only he's got you cornerned down a proverbial alleyway and there's no escaping the bugger.

What he has to say might or might not be interesting but it will change your life in small ways and big ways, for better or for worse. What it all boils down to in the end is how you perceive the world and react to it.

A very insightful blog post you've got here. I suppose I'd better start giving you a little more credit from here on out. Perish the thought.

Catherine said...

Yes! And the way I see it if you find a quid on the ground while the proverbial street preacher is proverbially raping you then it's not all bad.

I am more than a silly little girl, you see. I am a silly little girl with lofty ideals.

Anonymous said...

Sometimes it pays to have lofty ideals; especially if you feel yourself disappearing into a mist of uncertainties and disillusionment. Sure, it doesn't solve anyone's problems out in the real world where people suffer but if it can help a person maintain their sanity and their drive to do something worthwhile (you want to be a writer, right? Share those characters and feelings with the world?) then just do it and if anyone criticises and looks down their nose, just laugh 'cause they've missed the whole point of life and turned it into a dispassionate rat-race and what is the point of that?