There are a few good comments on the previous blog entry, describing the experience. Well worth reading.
Last year I had had a VERY hard week leading up to the marathon, too many late nights, and I was drinking then, also. I was hardly what you might call"prepared and rested". On the Thurdsday I started at 0500 in the morning, writing prompts, checking, setting up. I intended to go to bed at noon thru to 16:30 but then a guest arrived.
I started writing at 17:00 to keep one writer company and kept going until mid-afternoon Friday when I just had to cat-nap as I'd been feeling sick as a dog!
Eventually I wrote 25 pieces in the official marathon, another 12 in the practice sessions, 9,733 words and 5,881 words respectively. My own writing was mixed in with admin and rah-rah emails and I am sorry to admit that I barely got round to submitting any of the stories.
The mind does some VERY strange things when you get really tired. Very late in the marathon I felt "empty" or blocked and one prompt was "Gazunda" so I wrote this, just to say I'd done SOMETHING.
A gazunder goes under the bed
The pilla gazunda yer ead.
The blankie you chew
Goes on top of you
Or you catch cold and then you are dead
But no sooner did I do that than I remembered something, my father crying, about fifty years ago, and...
DROPSAt night, on the bare boards of the deserted girls' bedroom. The father, the son, light a candle, kneel, and pray to ghosts.
The boy does not fully understand this new order (nor really does the boy understand, that is feel, what it means to pray) but he has been taught well, trained to appear pious, to lower his head, to mumble. This he does.
The boy is aware, aware that probably his father is crying, but he must not look, he will not look, he cannot look. But to his grave he will take, dust, feathers, and tiny drops, tiny tears, a fear he will never explain and never quite lose, a mixture of love for his dad and a sense of betrayal by that same dad (father's do not cry) that will meld together, foam up, and destroy his own far off marriage and marriages, long into the darkness.
This is all I have, the one memory, salt water, it could be sweat, droplets exploding on a dusty bedroom floor (and we are talking fifty years ago) but still, when I am defined, those tears, two, three, four, one, are me and mine, they were muddy fingers as I was tossed and turned before the kiln.
What else comes? A damp, swollen terrace, and my mother's shakehead sister, superior, the warwidow of means (for this was their house, their house, even if the toilet was outside, a frozen crackpath away, and the gazunda, the potty, went under an iron bed). To hold a fat china pot now, is to feel the warm urge to piss largely, to swell up and need to fill the bowl, raucous, steamy, faintly delicious. Only as I write this do I realize that close-in, close-up, near to the self, that smell is rich, brown, personal, not urinal pissair, not stink, but dark, wholesome and luxurious.
Am I defined by body fluids, by drips and drops half a century dried?
It would be obvious, and crude, to discuss the steering of fluids in terms of semen or those juices that facilitate love, but they shape us, the animal us, at a deep and true level, as our undercurrent, the wind in our sails, the current that carries us.
But what of a tear, a lispspit moment, a cough, an embarrassed eruption of wind? Have worlds changed on the cusp of a fart, things not been done, loves untrothed, badges not awarded through embarrassment?
I fear the fact of being alone, because my father dripped tears, because my father, holding in, sent me to the priest to beg for a candle, two, and please, father, please bless them both for they are important.
My son has shiny teeth, is tall and well-liked. He is not me. Yet he has seen a jellyman for a model, a lost man, a man curled up and foetal, been there to the sound of crashing doors and spittlefeed foulness.
If asked, if counseled, he will not remember, but it isn't what we see, it is the low currents, the tendencies, the weights and pressures that make us. Perhaps great men rise above such things, or grab them like hot wires or dismissed stings (when squashed are ordinary) and by sleight of mind flip pain to motor. Perhaps, but I am not these men. I am ordinary. I am not heroic. I cannot grasp the nettle.
I did not, tonight, expect to remember such things; the smell of brown piss in a blobby pot, of cheap catholic wax burning, or a man's tear that took a century to strike.
600 words
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