Thursday February 17th 2000
“Man is, in general, made up of contradictory qualities.”
James Boswell (on Johnson’s character)
Saturday February 17th 2018 A song thrush sings in the branches of the great elms that stood near the house where we lived until 2020. All the elms have now been felled.
Thursday February 17th 2000 [continued]
Two magpies sit with poise and natural grace (then suddenly disappear) in the great horse chestnut (where the woodpecker rattles), which rises like the giant right hand of an Indian dancer, opening in a spiral beyond the new houses away to my right outside the window. The two birds had positioned themselves with the joy of unconscious design, one almost atop the branch that would be the middle finger and one towards the tip of the thumb.
My surprise and intense pleasure is in the way their black and white is so intensely one and the other, a clean piebald precision against the sheet of broad-flagged blue behind them and the tree. How poised and pen like their black tails, one moment as firm as a plastic moulding, the next quavering for balance like a tightrope walker’s pole.
I look again as another, or one of the same birds lands in the branches. I realise that from head to tail the magpie is black, white, black, without compromise. And how the white shines in the sunlight and how the black defies perception, a loss, a gap, and then to prove me wrong the great broad head dips beneath the wing to nestle and preen in its oxter (a word I discovered this morning), in that action of all birds that is so bird-like, humorous and endearing, showing how that which appears negative may be supremely positive.
The green grey branches are evenly lit by pinky sunlight. This morning the character of this wooded urban landscape – with its broken glimpses of walls, an elegant eau-de-nil chimney with faceted sides and bevelled mouldings rising from the foliage next to a bright citric evergreen, a roofline delineated by the white soffit of the eaves above coppery brick, the terracotta of roof tiles – is determined by the flood of yellowy pink sunlight through it, pale peach. In the far high heaven an airliner, like a tiny silver bead draws a pencil thin line of white, whose dissipation follows at a discrete and constant distance.
Suddenly, there’s a grey-blue blur and a pigeon wheels across the dimensions turning on its final approach right in front of me. Next to the tree in which the magpies no longer sit, a wreath of dark olive foliage piles like clouds. At the horizon the darker green tuft of a Scots pine stands sentinel.
Beautiful day. Sun very warm. Outside a little bird sings cheepy-cheepy-cheepy.
The rabbit’s fur is warm, he snuggles to my touch.
Thursday February 17th 2000 [continued]
I’m worried about my son at the moment – partly because of what’s happening at school. Also because he’s very pale. He’s seven.
Sitting in the bath the other night he makes up his own metaphysics
A few days previously he had said to Rosy that he had a dream where he tried to kill a friend by pushing him down a lift shaft – ‘Do you think that’s to do,’ he asked Rosy ‘with the ups and downs of life.’
Roughly this is what he said to me:
The day that Rainbow (the cat who died on New Year’s eve) was buried he saw a shape rise up outside the window, a kind of grey shimmery shape. It was Rainbow and he was saying thank you to Joseph because Joseph looked after Rainbow better than his brother did.
Suddenly there was a flash and Joseph was in this other world where there were lots of cats and other animals and his great-great-great grandfather.
Then he heard a voice and it was the voice of eternity, of all life that’s ever been and it said to him ‘You are special.’
'It also said ‘Solve Within.’ ‘I don’t really know what that means,’ he said, ‘do you?’
Then there was a rather confused conversation.
I said it must be nice to have the voice around.
He said, ‘It’s not around, you can’t see it and if you do see it, it means you have to go back to the beginning and if there’s something you have to do when you get a grade, (he suggested this meant something enjoyable) and if when you go back you get a bad grade you have to do it all again….?
It was strangely touching, as if he is battling with something. School work, probably…
Thursday February 17th 2000 [continued]
I reconnected with my the draft of my novel The Reward of Delay1 after all the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks – I feel confident and happy about the way the work is progressing and it’s partly because I feel the characters lead me to it, Samuel especially.
Trying to get the balance right is really difficult. Writing as prayer, as contemplation of truth.
The process of editing – the challenge I have faced since last June – has been like gutting a fish. Within my draft is a skeleton, another story, that belongs to the consciousness of some of the characters, that is somehow in their heads but doesn’t belong in the book.
So slowly and carefully I think I have been trying to fillet it out – stopping when I feel I may be making a mistake, laying down the knife when I feel too great a risk is involved, stopping to think and work out – work out the shape of the skeleton and where the knife may lift this piece of bone but leave the valuable flesh.
With the backbone of this other story removed, it then became clearer that the barebones of Dr Johnson’s story must also be removed, all cod philosophy and faux morals, to be replaced if at all by character and event.
There remain some large bones, like those of the hake hidden in potato.
I danced a swirl in the kitchen at the thought – I’m nearly there.
Well done for sticking with it, well done for resolving difficult creative problems – or at least for trying to.
I got wrecked on Proseco and Jamesons – I drank a toast to myself . Well done for sticking with it, well done for resolving difficult creative problems – or at least for trying to…
Then my father rang to say my lovely godmother Nancy G died on Monday…
All photos ©John Davies
