the things that wouldn't last

Outside it is snowing and the trees look like broken umbrellas and it’s that odd kind of light which looks old, somehow. And that is how I always think of the light in photographs – old – as though the light will never look that way again and that is why, here in the study I share with P, the walls are bare. I won’t have photos on the walls. I cannot think that the light will never look that way again, when I write.

D’s office wall is covered in photos of himself, his friends, family, travels. He keeps them there to remind himself of who he is, where he has come from. I would feel crowded out by them but D is a cameraman. He thinks in images. Without them he is lost.

There was a time when, feeling a little lost myself, I took to taking long walks with a borrowed camera. It didn’t matter that the resulting photos were disappointing. The motive was the seeing; the walking around and the seeing. I saw huge, spiked jackfruit in the market, a man in a wheelchair inside a van - his mobile workshop - fixing broken electrical goods, a black cab all smashed up, the underside of a tree – the leaves like washing on a line, a misplaced trolley in the park which seemed as though it were grazing. But I began to feel self-conscious with my apparatus and preferred instead to look at other people’s photographs than to take them myself. That is, until mobile phones came with mobile cameras, after which I took to taking photos constantly so that it became a kind of mania for me – photographing the things that wouldn’t last – the flowers D bought me in Tallinn and the breakfast he brought me in bed from the hotel buffet (I am a big fan of hotel buffet breakfasts – they are the height of civilization, they make me want to fall to my knees and say grace). And D being a cameraman, would also take photos most times, but sometimes, he would refuse to: I want to remember this, he’d say, putting his camera away.

And then after losing too many mobile phones and the photos I’d taken with them, and now no longer spending time with D, I seem to have lost this compulsion to photograph, and the beautiful little digital camera he bought me from Tokyo goes unused. At least it seems that way until I realise that to try to write in the way that I do is informed by as desperate an impulse to record, to frame, to remember.

a writer's writer

There is a space between waking and sleeping when I sometimes feel myself falling into what Douglas Coupland referred to in his first novel, Generation X, as “disasterbation”. Urbandictionary.com offers two definitions of this neologism, the first referring to the voyeuristic thrill experienced on witnessing natural disasters; the second, unintentional physical injury sustained after dangerous pleasurable practices, not necessarily onanistic.

Might I stress that I refer here to Coupland’s definition, which, not having the book to hand I cannot quote verbatim, but as the word – a contraction of disaster and masturbation – suggests, relates to the practice of indulging one’s neuroses by letting the mind explore dark fears relating to the self or loved ones: imagining my dog, if were I to own one, being run over, for example, or my best friend P falling off his bike and being killed; this being the “disaster” part of the equation, with the “bation” bit relating to a healthy mind’s ability to self-heal with consolatory images.

So, in the case of my hypothetical dog, after the image of him laid flat in the road, he is immediately upright and alive, his back legs replaced by those mini-trolleys you see sometimes on maimed dogs and which make you long to know how they cope with running downhill. Or, in the case of P – no backwheel scenario redemption possible in this instance, this being, in my nightmare visions, the way he meets his end - the moment when I step out before a gathering of his friends and family and deliver, through barely held-back tears, the eulogy at his funeral.

This eulogy comprises a single quote discovered in a Joyce Carol Oates essay, Reading As a Writer: The Artist as Craftsman, about the notion of literary influence in writing; or, rather, the notion of seeking out literary influence, the practice of a kind of applied or active reading, of reading, as the essay title suggests, as a writer. The quote is taken from a letter by Chekhov to a friend in which he writes of Tolstoy’s illness:

“I dread Tolstoy’s death. If he died, a large vacuum would be formed in my life. In the first place, I never loved any human being as much as I do him. I am an unbeliever, but of all faiths I regard his as the nearest to me and one that suits me best. Second, when Tolstoy is part of literature, it is easy and agreeable to be a writer; even the knowledge that you have not accomplished and never will accomplish anything is not so terrible, for Tolstoy makes up for all of us. His activity justifies all the hopes and expectations that are pinned to letters…”

So much of my friendship with P is mediated through our reading and our writing; so much so that we often give each other gifts of nice metaphors or lovely phrases. And sometimes, we give each other books. This Christmas just past, I found a book in our local shop which seemed to me the perfect present: an anthology of essays by writers on their friendships with other writers.

I bought the book and wrapped it up and hid it in my room. But I am terrible at keeping secrets: shortly before we were to exchange gifts (his to me turned out to be a jumper from ebay with a hole under each arm), we were browsing together in this same shop when I pointed out a copy of this same book. Wouldn’t that make a lovely present for someone, I said. P sniffed disdainfully. He has a big nose: it was a big sniff.

I unwrapped the book and returned it to the shop which they exchanged for a book voucher. P exchanged the voucher for a book by a writer I don’t much care for.

And Chekhov, I am happy to say, did not outlive Tolstoy.