Penang, Malaysia, November 2019

I.

The Stop

Now I’m not saying that writing is like sitting at a bus stop but let me just tell you something that happened the other day: I wound up at the bus stop. Alas yes! – there again. To be fair there was the rain. Since I’d set out it had transformed itself into quite the vigorous treacle you see, and it had done this quite suddenly, meaning that though for a while I persisted in pounding pigheadedly on beneath my flimsy peach-coloured umbrella, or rather slid and skidded, my flip-flops flicking debris up the backs of my legs, it swiftly became plain that whether I liked it or not I would be required to reason, so to speak, on my feet. I say ‘so to speak’ because I sat down of course. Yes, once I was there I sat down, this I admit, and I did this even though the bus stop hadn’t been where I had been meaning to get to, not initially. No: not at all in fact.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The point is that having concluded that it was impossible to move with any grace through such a scrim, I resigned myself to remaining where I was. To carry on like this would be madness, I thought, as I looked out from my seat beneath the narrow shelter at the curtain of rain. And so I shall have to make do here for a while.

The Charge

Of course I had no idea how to approach this task. A ‘statement’? Of myself?

The Stop

I should mention that I was not comfortable – neither with my resignation nor with the bus stop seat. The two discomforts conflated and for some time I found myself with one foot wedged awkwardly inside that old, fruitless rabbit hole called Ire. My bottom was sliding back-and-forth atop the two inhospitable steel poles you see, poles which someone at the Rapid Bus Company had evidently decided made for an adequate passenger bench. Oh it was very distracting, feeling so uncomfortable in body and mind simultaneously. It was the sort of TPR – ‘Total Physical Response’ – we’d been encouraged at the school to incite in the bodies of small children whilst teaching them to read. TPR was necessary because, it was said, when the mental experience is mirrored in the material experience, meaning is seared most deeply upon the memory. It seemed a reasonable enough premise at the time, and I recall wondering whether we were capable of knowing anything at all unless it came via the physical world. An important question, no doubt – though don’t ask me why. Most of the things I deem to be important I have difficulty accounting for you see, and I do my best to put things I can’t account for, aside. Forgotten, but not gone: story of my life, as they say.

The Charge

A ‘personal statement’ then. But I protest: just what is this person you speak of?  Which parts of this self do you want to know? Which parts are appropriate to tell you? Which parts will it be advantageous to show?

Yes, it is difficult to know what to write for such things. I sidle up to the task in much the same manner as I approach a crossword: filled with the knowledge that as soon as I have a clue to solve – as soon as I actually attempt to write – my entire vocabulary will empty out of my head. I stare glassy-eyed at the page. What is this life I am meant to tell you about? My past disintegrates before me, like the surface of one’s own skin held under close scrutiny. Am I even a person at all? I may as well, I think, be writing about the moon.

The Stop

It was only yesterday you know – me sitting there in the rain, staring at the cars going by in their orderly fashion and trying not to think about the abyss beneath choreographed vision.

The Charge

One does one’s best you see – of course one does one’s best. Not to want it, that is; not to want such a brazen, irresponsible sort of want, the sort of want which the world tells you it is squarely impossible to successfully, happily or even sanely realise.

The Stop

By then, the fog had become so thick it was almost impossible to see. It penetrated me all the way through and for a moment I thought, It’s quite possible of course to die of grief –

but only for a moment.

The Charge

Yes, a very reckless want indeed, all told – and so I tell you again, I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be sensible, tried to be shrewd; I’ve tried teaching, have tried trading that is upon parts of my being which I thought could be harmlessly peddled (lesson: regardless of the sometime satisfactions and enjoyments of teaching, there is no sale which does not erode). Writing is, in other words, the desire I’ve tried for thirty years not to have.

When I say ‘not to have’, I mean not to acknowledge. This is the same thing in my delusional universe. Since what is unsaid, what is unseen –

one has one’s partitions you see. Of course one has one’s partitions. Don’t say you don’t.

The Stop

Because no buses were coming by, I had nothing to look at but the passing traffic. The cars continued to pulse along with depressing regularity. Every now and again however one would zip by with such ferocious haste that it would shower me with soggy filth. My spectacles were soon covered in tiny clinging pustules of water, like a thousand inside-out quarries made of glass. There I was, strangely bulbous and cavernous both, sitting where I wasn’t supposed to be. I felt like a barnacle, and like a pockmark. I felt like the hole in the doughnut.

An unnameable loss was gnawing at my heart. Had I always lived like this?

The Charge

All of which is to say that no one in their right mind wants to become a writer. All of which is more strongly to say that I am, nonetheless, compelled.

There comes a time you see when however long and hard one has struggled along that much lauded road named Repression, struggling will no longer do.

The Stop

The fact is you see that I hadn’t meant to stop at the bus stop – have I not made that clear? It was not meant to happen. I had been fully intent on walking to the mall, and if intentions are anything to go by then let me tell you that’s what they were. Honest to God I really thought that’s where I was going, all the way to the mall that is as well as into it because just what do you take me for, I may not look like the brightest crayon in the box but I know as well as any that there’s no point in going to and then proceeding not to go into, no, such wanton circumnavigations are totally uncalled for when it comes to this life. They said it and they always said it and so I know it very well you see.

The Charge

By the way, did you know that alfalfa is the most perilous ingredient in the kitchen? This is the sort of fact that one does not intend to acquire and which, once acquired, one never forgets. I was informed of The Alfalfa Threat when in training for my first proper job, at Pret a Manger, and instantly it became a part of the intricate inner litter which I carry with me wherever I go.

There are many dangerous things you see, but it is the most innocuous-seeming which express the greatest hazard. You know – like caffeine, say, and Sensible ambitions.

The Stop

I was adrift, emptied. I put on my silence and commenced to wait.

The Charge

Yes, most of what I experienced working at Pret I’ve forgotten, but not The Alfalfa Threat. Not that, and not either the endless stream of faces which hurtled towards me when I was at the till. Behind each face choices were being made you see, and I knew this because these choices found tangible form on the counter before me. A BLT and a Love Bar, I’d pronounce, surveying the deposited bounty and waiting for the signal of assent to flicker in their eyes. There is a whole world behind your face, I would think, as I looked back up at the customer. And – as I stared at the ones who followed – behind yours and yours and yours. It always made me feel a little dizzy.

The Stop

Thinking about doughnuts was better than pockmarks of course, yet it continued to depress me. When I tried converting the doughnuts to bagels it didn’t help, so I turned my attention once more to the immediate and long sodden surround. There was no one else out on the street. No one walking that is; everyone who wanted to go somewhere had decided to do so in a car. Since I had no car of my own, nor any interest in acquiring one, getting anywhere required that I get into someone else’s. This was distasteful to me, and not only because of the cost. Dimly I felt that whenever I caved in and requested a ride there was, beyond the overt fee, another, a subsequent, meta-fee exacted, but just what this meta-fee was I was hard pressed to say. No, whatever it was, I did not like it. I’d rather trip through the rain, I thought. I’d rather not get to places. Not to the sort of places they were going to.

The Charge

It is the start of another winter and I am writing again. Only this sounds odd to me: I set the sentence down and regard it with an eyebrow raised. I wonder whether there is not something about the concatenation of beginnings with winter which is fundamentally erroneous. Winter. Win. Ter. Winter? How can anything begin now?

               But surely the question is absurd. It amounts to this: I am casting doubt on winter’s capacity to begin itself. Of course winter can begin itself.

               Summer has ended but life goes on: winter begins. Winter is itself a life form. A curious, in-turned life form. A magical, mysterious one; an obscure one. A vague form from on which spring, in her turn, depends.

The Stop

 I mean who needed places, really. Besides which, wasn’t the bus stop a place as good as any other?

(Ah, but apparently not: I would not be telling anyone I’d spent my afternoon at the bus stop you see).

The Charge

It is the start of another winter and I am writing again. Again the sentence rings untrue because it is not again. To the extent to which againness indicates that has been a desistance, that is an intermission and a subsequent resumption, then no, this is not again. I have always written. I have not stopped writing. And yet – somehow this not the same. I am different. Being different, my writing is different. My writing is different because I have claimed it as my own, have acknowledged it as the centre of my being. As my way of being.

Writing is, in short, no longer adjunct to my life. Or: what has been adjunct has become my centre. Or: what seemed to have been adjunct was always my centre, I just didn’t know it.

The Stop

Speaker One: What did you survive to be here?

Speaker Two: How many times do I have to tell you? – when I am at home, I am not at home. Besides which, there’s always a bit too much to look at, wouldn’t you agree? I stalk the perimeter. Call it ‘survival’ if you wish.

The Charge

It is the start of another winter and presently I am in Malaysia visiting my mother and so, though I am keenly aware of winter wrapping itself swift and thick around the British Isles, blowing leaves into the nation’s gutters and mince pies into the nation’s guts, it is not in evidence here. Here, the landscape is diffuse, slippery, and cut with tropical storms. The sky darkens to the shade of a badly bruised plum circa four in the afternoon, and by five fiendish forks of lightning reliably appear, cracking the purple hide into broad, dripping pieces. The skies let rip and I wait indoors – except when I don’t. But I’ve said all this already. I’ve sort of said this. Frequently I am out in the rain you see.

The Stop

Understand, I was nowhere. I was not at home and not at the mall and I was at no place at all. I was inside the liminal nowhere and inside this nowhere I was shrouded in the vapours of despair (I confess I do err on the side of the dramatic).

The Charge

Landscape is truer than you: the writer’s creed, perhaps.

The Stop

Yes, they said it and they said it often. In this life if one has a goal one has to get to it you see, to get to it and then to get into it, that’s what they say, that’s what they’ve always said and if there’s anything’s harder to shake than said sayings, please do let me know.

The Charge

Jung said that everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation[1], which is to say that when we see, we see ourselves.

Why else does one write? Writing is the attempt to pit the narrative of our own experience against that of the world. No, that’s not what happened! we think, as we listen to the tale of another.

Jung again: the personality desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. In other words: things leap out.

What leaps out?

– the gorgeous intense unmanageable overwhelming life-affirming excess, the excess and the excess and the elsewhere and the excess, which is to say humanity’s great flatulence, which is to say the flesh, every flesh, inscribed with a surplus, which is to say the thronging multitude innate to even the most apparently singular of beings, which is to say the clamorous sentience expressed by even the most apparently inert –

for try as they might, the things you see, the things, they just cannot contain.

(And yet they contain).

Which is to say that everything spills.

Which is to say that I see the secretions.

The Stop

The bench underneath me continued to bother me. It was possibly the most inhospitable bench I’d ever sat on and, since I’m from London, that most notoriously hostile of cities when it comes to all things Stray, that was saying something. I wasn’t bitter, just stating a fact.

               It wasn’t London however. No, it was Away you see, and it was Away because my mother is Away and is to be so permanently and though for a while I’d tried to be Away with her that had long worn thin so this time I was only visiting. I didn’t want to be Away any more.

The Charge

It’s the leapings you see. Blame the damn leapings. They’re why I’m here, writing this, to you, now.

It’s been eighteen months since I resigned from my job as an English teacher; I did this in order to devote myself to writing. During this period I have written a book-length work written, as Olga Tokarczuk said of her novel Flights, in the manner of a ‘constellation’. I have sent it to a few small presses and have received some interest, though no final takers as yet.

One toils on. It is a new world. It is the toil of drawing breath.

The Stop

Aways or otherwise it didn’t make much difference in the end, for I’d long concluded that everything was always Elsewhere, for some reason you see I’d found that nothing was ever just where it was, where it seemed to be, which is to say that everything was always a pointing gesture and was always therefore evading my grasp.

I am an indefatigable sort however and so I so like to try to grasp it. It feels important to give the Elsewhere my attention you see. Where else are you going to put your love?

Desire is defined by what you do not have. Do I repeat myself? – when I am in a place, I am never quite there.

The Charge

If there weren’t all these leapings, there’d be no literature. There’d be nothing to see, no art, no poetry; there’s only be contracts, formulas, shopping lists. Words would refer to discrete things or isolated events; there would be no patterns, no hiddennesses, no undertows, no in betweens; there’d be no need to go to that room and decipher…anything.

The Stop

Plain as day the bus stop was not a place anyone was meant to stay. In fact it was not a place at all. Not one of the placey ones. I got the message you see; don’t think I didn’t get the message. I always do get the message you see, whether I heed it or not. For the pertinent fact was that I was meant to be somewhere else, both according to the Rapid authorities and to my very own intentions. But I was not somewhere else: I was there. Yes I was there and I was there and it was there that I was. And I was powerless to change it.

The Charge

One should not over-think things, I know. Yet I do not wish to compose what will be both a saccharine and disingenuous testament to my ‘Lifelong desire’ to be an author and to my ‘Always having wanted’ to write. This leaves me with a problem: given this, just what am I to write?

The Stop

Looking down I noticed that the bench poles had been painted a long time ago. The paint was matte and an identical shade to the unadulterated metal beneath it, the only difference was that it was not as shiny as what it housed. I knew the hues were nearly the same but not quite the same because the paint was chipping off in copious quantities, creating a jagged, lustreless archipelago atop the shiningly underdog steel sea. The bench was like a creature caught in mid-metamorphosis: what looked like simple desecration was in fact a sort of entombment.

The bus stop was plainly very poorly maintained. It wouldn’t look so bad, I thought, if it hadn’t been suffocated in paint in the first place. But then I also knew that I only appreciated the shine because of its patchy, peeling pall.

Picking at the edges of an islet with my first finger, a dull flake wedged itself between my skin and my nail, reminding me of my some of my more favoured ex-students, who had also happened to be filthy. To be fair they hadn’t been filthy at all, simply bare. No nail polish, no make up, no iPhone under the desk – these exterior omissions become marked once they’re teenagers you see. These best students had not appeared to care about the usual claddings. They’d been simple of dress and subtle of perception and superior of expression.

Sometimes they’d even carried books! I hadn’t resented these students; don’t think I resented them. I’d loved them. They’d been shyly excitable, subdued amidst their peers but luminous on the page, and I would take care to write considered appraisals at the end of their work, scrawling lengthy comments in the margins which they’d subsequently ask me to decode. Ah! That had been the best part of the job. A few of them had kept in touch with me, and one had recently signed off an email with a pleasant paragraph citing my ‘kindness’ as a teacher. My kindness: well, that’s something, I thought. That’s something.

(Of these students, I recalled being impressed by the encouragement they’d received from their families when it came to their artistic endeavours. If only I had, you see. If only I had. If only I had had. But I shall stop there: it is an ugly thought. Bitterness is always unbecoming).

The Charge

I have begun work on a new novel. Its structure is designed to resemble the colonial subject matter with which this novel is to deal: several threads, some contemporary, some historical, shall be interwoven in a brutally fragmentary manner. Each narrator shall be constantly broken into, shall be interrupted mid-tale. Stories shall be picked at, hijacked; an element of one fragment shall be plucked and re-diverted by the teller of the following, to his own usurping ends.

The Stop

It’s just that he said, you see. And the other one did as well and the other –

and to be frank they all did and the wretched, the most wretched thing of all, is that I trusted them and trotted along down their neat little path.

I sat and the cars went by and the cars went by and what went by was the cars.

The Charge

Current character assembly: Sir Francis Light of the East India Company, who founded Penang Island in Malaysia in the 1700s; the Eurasian wife of Sir Francis Light; a mixed-race anorexic young woman living in contemporary London; the immigrant mother of this woman; the leader of a Buddhist cult in which this woman’s mother is a member.

The Stop

The mist had thickened and a veil had fallen over my memory. Where was I going? Where had I meant to go? All at once, I could not for the life of me remember.

The Charge

It is sometimes said that pain has no language. That’s the efficiency of it – it is why, when induced in us by another, pain is an exceptional means of control. We are simply unable to say what has been done to us. Pain closets us inside its box of muteness.

Perhaps it is true that love doesn’t have a language either. I love to write: what a redundant phrase, and yet it is the closest I can get if I am to tell you my reasons.

Some reasons, you see, cannot be told. In language, they can only ever be orbited.

The Stop

There was only that moment: my wet feet, my steamed-up spectacles, my head bent to stare at the tiny ferns pushing their ways up between the cracks in the pavement, whose leaves were freighted with water. The dark light of the storm, closing in. Dampness lurked in the air and it smelt strangely of smoke, though there was no perceptible inflagration. The landscape around the bus stop was bleak indeed, nothing like the sorts of paradisiacal vista that are thrown up when you Google-image this country.

The Charge

Now that I’ve altered my existence so drastically, now that I prefer sitting alone in a dim room to any other activity (agony though this joy frequently and simultaneously is), now that I wait all day long for the moment when I can do this, and indeed guard this usually nocturnal window fiercely, as though it by itself were capable of furnishing me with the very fundament of my being, and its absence of vesting me of it, now, that is, that I’ve acknowledged the necessity of that room, of going and sitting in that room in order to experience everything I’ve already experienced once all over again, simply that I may do so on my own terms, because how is a girl to possibly participate fully in the live event, in the event as it’s happening when that event is so full-to-bursting with all that surplus energy not to mention when it’s seething with what’s beneath, how is a girl to do this and simultaneously to remain centred, other than obliquely – now that all of this, I cannot believe, cannot for the life of me begin to comprehend, how I managed for all those years, the doing of otherwise.

               How did I live?

               Once you lift a corner, the palimpsest lying supine beneath everything is revealed.

The Stop

Whoosh and splash; splash and whoosh. Trundle and rattle and groan. Hiss hiss hiss. Hikkety hiss hiss. The cars were travelling on the only road there was. There was only one straight road hugging the coastline you see: everyone had to use it, unless they went off road entirely, which was frankly impossible in a car unless you were on a suicide mission. On the one side of the tarmac was the brute fact of the sea; on the other side only wild, uncultivated land, the craggy hills of the interior, the jungle. Who knew what you found there.

The Charge

Show not tell: the old adage I was forever obliged to peddle my students. I didn’t tell them that ‘tell’ is sometimes fine. And I did not tell them that ‘tell’ is sometimes, quite literally, impossible. Did not tell them that containing and yet not containing is the paradox of literature, and its beauty.

The Stop

Of course the cars were going towards the mall. I knew they were because that was where everyone went to. The mall was the place to be. It was where the shops and the restaurants and the bars and the bubble tea kiosks were, and it was where the cinema was, and the Cold Storage supermarket which, for as long as I could remember, had lacked illumination inside its ‘C’ and which I therefore referred to privately as ‘Old Storage’. Old Storage was the only reason I ever went to the mall. It was the only good reason for going, in spite of the fact that I always hated it as soon as I was there and it always took me twice as long to get out as I anticipated. Once you were in Old Storage, you see, it wrapped its tentacles around you.

The Charge

If I didn’t always want to be a writer, what did I want? In the beginning…

In fact if there’s anything at all I was conscious of wanting it was the want to want what everyone else wanted, as well as the want to want what certain others wanted me to want. I wanted, that is, to want to be a banker, to want to be an NGO, to want to be a consultant of some variety; I wanted to be someone who worked in a suit, someone who rushed out to Itsu for their lunch every day, someone who walked purposefully in stilettos, someone who shopped at M&S Simply Food. Perhaps it sounds like a caricature, a cliché. But then received wants always are, aren’t they.

The Stop

Each car looked a little bit different and a lot the same. Always the way, I thought, obscurely.

The Charge

A memory stirs, a memory lingers. Before the wanting of wants I did not want there was a window. Some mud splutters and spurts and makes small fart-like phuts. A small window, yes. In that window, I wanted to draw.

               Now there’s something similar between wanting to draw and wanting to write. It is, of course, to do with paying attention.

My childhood desire was nothing so grandiose as the wish to be an artist and, though I love contemporary art, the notion of The Concept Behind only swept itself into me later when, as an adolescent, I began reading philosophy (I went on to study the subject at university, having been told by my headmaster, amongst other things, that ‘Only stupid people go to art school’). Drawing, like writing, is about looking-at, attending-to. Attending to what you can see and to what you can’t see; to what people do see, and to what people don’t.

               These days I write in order to show what I can see. To show the elephants in the rooms, and the currents beneath them.

The Stop

I watched the cars go by and go by and go by and I thought about the somatic lullaby which is forward motion. I sat squat like a toad. Yes, it was like a toad that I sat, denied similar satisfaction. I was the unconsoled; I didn’t mind. What was it Anne Carson had said you see? That writers feel the burden of being a subject in process.

The Charge

Ah, if only I could tell you in plain terms! If only it were possible to simply state that I’m not one of those sorts who imagines herself, by gaining admission to the course, granted an automatic ticket to a book deal and bestseller! If only I could tell you, that in spite of and concurrently to this, I can see no other future for myself other than the writing of books!

The Stop

The cars did not look like Beasts, but they looked more like Beasts than anything else. Watery raiments extended horizontally in their wake, embodiment of their heft and implied might. Hallelujah! was, I felt, the proper response upon beholding so formidable a machine. It was not, however, my response.

The Charge

Many are the lost abandoned failed enterprises. Many are the lives chosen. But one, just one, is the life not chosen.

The Stop

They say that the standard of truth in the sciences is replicability: in this case, the cars were very much True. According to this same standard, I presumed, I would be deemed False. I was a wrongness, an anomaly; I was a vagary. A vaguery. I chuckled to myself, and then frowned.

I thought about another Anne Carson poem, in which she compared the words ‘soul’ and ‘sole’. The people in the cars, I thought – their feet never touched the ground.

The Charge

Sometimes my mother tells me: You have poured a tonne of concrete over your little green sprout. I know: I am thirty-six.

The Stop

Eventually the rain stopped and I got up and I trudged back home, or rather to the home which was my mothers’ and which I would soon be leaving. I didn’t mind.

I didn’t mind because I was used to it. I had always gone back and forth between his and hers you see; I had measured out my life on Well Street Common, traversing the space between their houses. One house had rice and one had chips and one had a very Normal looking father and one had a very Exotic looking mother and so on and so forth and ya ya ya and sometimes one does talk in clichés because sometimes one does live them and well, there’s always the line you see. ‘An English father and a Chinese-Malaysian mother’, that’s what I would say, what I will say if you ask, but what I won’t say is that there’s always the line and what I won’t say is that I’m always on it and what I won’t say is that to be perfectly candid, it appears to be just where I most like to be.

So honestly, that a plane ride now exists between their houses makes little difference.

II.

meaning is the river

of voices. meaning

is the patience of the moon.

meaning is the thread

running forever in shadow.

girl girl wake up,

somebody calling you.[2]

III.

I hesitate, and then I forge ahead: I have spent too many years hesitating. I must write. I must go in the proper direction, finally. I must go toward the ache.

To paraphrase George Eliot: it is in the silence that we should to start. Not in the roar.

For it’s true: I want to be a writer. As syrupy as that sounds. As forbidden.

[1] Carl Jung, ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’

[2] From ‘shadows’, Lucille Clifton