Writing on Air

The trees have lost nearly all their leaves, and so you can see more and farther now: the slopes and angles of hills, the rocks emerging. Now that the Sycamore has lost its leaves, I can see through my window, for the first time, a small steep field high up on the opposite side of the valley bounded by tangled hawthorn and a dark ravine, sheep teetering confidently around its terraced edges. The grass is still green, the birds are still piping and trilling, but gradually everything is fading to black, white, gray. There's a seriousness in the air today, the first touch of frost, fifteen hours of darkness already. Honeymoon's over. No more romantic dreaming. Now we have to learn to really love it here - or not.


I walked along the lane today and passed a field with a tree full of crows - scores of them flying up and around the top branches, landing and taking off again, cawing and flapping.  In the same field, below them, more sheep, heavy and solid, munching steadily away. I was struck by the contrast: trees and crows all sharpness and noise:  twigs, claws, beaks rattling and clattering; the quiet  slow sheep, lambs growing in their bellies.



Something about this scene, that moment walking, catches a mood, a tone, that begins to explain (at least to me) why I've come here, what I think I'm doing in this place. As I was walking I was thinking about writing this blog post - how I would put down here exactly what I felt, tell you what I saw - not just the tree and crows and sheep, but that other thing that I understood  . . .  knew . . . but here I struggle to find the words, language fails me and I have to stop and call on a better writer. Virginia Woolf called these experiences Moments of Being - a moment when you are fully conscious, when you catch a glimpse of your connection to a larger pattern, a hidden reality behind the opaque, cotton-wool surfaces of everyday life. I'm not really religious in any conventional sense apart from a few excursions into meditation, I haven't been able to believe in anything god-like or heaven-like since my twenties, and I'm fairly sure that when you die the lights go off  and that's all folks.  But the tree and the crows and the sheep, the sharpening edges of hills as winter comes closer, all speak another language to me: a language as ordinary and simple as daylight, the strange language of being alive.

Of course, such moments happen in cities too, even in Manchester where pragmatism, plain speaking and down-to-earthness are the principal exports. There are trees and crows in cities, although probably not many sheep. It just got harder and harder for me to remember. Maybe it's something to do with the wide sky or the newness, the loneliness, being a stranger in a strange land. If so, the more I embed myself in this place, the more it becomes familiar, ordinary, then such moments will disappear and I'll forget again. Maybe.


One more thing about the tree and the crows. Every morning I can, between 9ish  and 12ish, I try to sit down here and write. I'm working on two projects: beginning a long-planned non-fiction (book/blog/website?) about Manchester itself; and a novel, also set, partly in Manchester. I also write this blog (so far, a lot of it about not being in Manchester - bit of an obsessive theme developing here, n'est-ce-pas?). Very few people ever see even a tiny amount of what I write and have written - I'm not complaining, much of it isn't ready to be inflicted on the world. I just keep on doing it, writing myself, this world I know, into time and space before it all goes, before I go.  But here's the thing (as Siobhan Sharpe (aka Jessica Hynes) says in Twenty Twelve): All this writing is somewhere now, not just the small amount of published stuff, but all the rest. Stored in some half eternal cybercloud or something, somewhere, nowhere. It's like speaking to the wind, like writing on air.    

The bare tree branches silhouetted. Dark twigs are pens, pencils, charcoal scratching. The crows are letters, black words. An unreadable, untranslateable language written on sky.