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If you write, you'll spend a lot of time involved in apparently unconnected activities. Although 'activities' may be too grand a word. Other people don't tend to notice much external action going on. You may spend long periods of time, for example, gazing out of a window, or even staring at walls. But outside the window, there are trees and really, you are seeing faces in the patterns of the leaves. Inside the room, there are moving splashes of light and shadow made by tree branches in the wind.
And I also recall one particularly fascinating face on a chair - definitely of Chinese origin, with an enormous high head-dress, some kind of Mandarin-type figure, or even one of the rather fiercer Buddhas one comes across. Also it was red, denoting lots of energy. The eyes were small round dark apertures. The nose hooked over from the centre of the face, down to the bottom. This made the mouth slant upwards to one side. There was a fierce determination in that face. O.K., so I'd thrown my red T-shirt on the chair before I went to bed, but it still made a stunning face.
As well as detecting faces both inside and outside the house, there are also the lengthy tasks of remembering conversations, exploring more territory of the grand design of humanity upon the earth, seeing further into the exciting purposes of why we are here, thinking of various things that have to be arranged; involving letters and phone calls to people. Possibly writing a list of the same, which will promptly get lost, and then thinking of what to wear to some special event two weeks in the future. Finally there is the very popular - dreaming of foreign climes. This could take a great deal of time, especially if there is an actual possibility of visiting one - there are the arrangements to be made, what to take with you and imagining what the place will be like.
It will of course, be the ideal place to write and may well be the setting for part of the next novel. Wrapt in blissful contemplation, you forget that the food will be so wonderful, the wine even better, there will be several people you look forward to seeing and talking to and as you walk slightly unsteadily from cafe to restaurant to bar, trying, with less and less success, to understand the fluent but curiously garbled English of one of your companions, the whole aura of Rome with its narrow cobbled back-streets and the exquisite street-lamps leaning outwards from the walls, catches you up in a wave of euphoria.
You realise the next morning that you cannot remember one word of what was said and not one single street-name of where you had been. 'Fat Chance Novelist' you think, in headlines. Alternately, 'Slim Chance Novelist' - for as the Resident Companion / Muse / Housekeeper pointed out recently, these both, curiously enough, mean the same thing.
Of course, the future does not always have to follow the past so slavishly but you have to admit that there's a strong possibility. At the end of the much-anticipated stay in hot foreign clime, the only written record of it is more likely to be restaurant bills, occasional scribbled directions and a long list of phone numbers from adoring fans (well, one can always dream!)
In short, such trips abroad are best written about after the event, when memory mixes more freely with imagination than it ever did even in Wordsworth's wildest dreams. In the country of metaphor and mind, map-reading has a fluidity and ease that does not always translate into the physical world. But - tant pis. Or I should say - tanto pisa, as it's Italy I'm going to. Although this could of course be alternatively translated as: “I've had enough of Pisa. My feet hurt from walking its hard pavements. My neck aches from trying to see the squint tower that was so badly built, probably expressly for the purpose of repelling tourists - can we go to a restaurant / bar / back to Rome now please?” In fact this phrase was probably invented by Romaphiles as a short-hand way of asserting the innate superiority of Rome over any other Italian city.
So - memories of hallucinatory vividness may drift through the mind when back home, but street-names may form acute, obtuse, oblique or even gauche angles to the memories they are supposed to label so precisely. An accurate eye for detail, this is part of the writer's craft. And it obsesses me. So - I can remember the colour and the style of coat or shirt that someone wore. I can see people vividly in my mind's eye, but I sometimes find that in that way of viewing, some subtle metamorphosis takes place. Not that it matters you may say. Writing is about the imagination, but the trick also is to pin it in a visible and tangible reality, linking it ingeniously with the actuality out of which it was born.
Fiction must have ancestry, a kind of family tree of the imagination, distinct Stages of Growth in Metaphor Formation (capitals that one). Not because anybody else says so, but because it hooks me into stonework, burnt rooftiles, those leaning lanterns, the slow procession of the water in the Tevere, the typewriter (local name for a grandiose and little-loved building in the Piazza Venezia), the sewer covers in the streets with SPQR on them (much as you'd find METRO on the Paris underground) just as we learned in school in Latin classes, the Senate and the Roman People still going strong.
But most of all because I like the gritty feel of stonework against my fingers, or the smooth, damp feel of whitewashed plaster. A lot of memory for me comes through the fingertips as well as the eyes; the fabric covers of old books, dry warmth of wooden shelves, the plastic covering of the steering-wheel, too hot to touch, the scrapey feel of smooth goatskin stretched across a drum, the bumpy-rough, cool feel of orange skin, flower petals so soft your fingers sink in them, and the shiver of energy that runs through your arm when you dip your fingers in a marble font at the entrance to a church.
But whatever origins are touched in the transformation of images into words, there is something of a time-lag, a composting of memory and it's that, or so it seems to me, that gives writing its richness and its power. It's that connecting with the strata of experience - mmm, that sounds good doesn't it, almost good enough to eat - the strata of experience mixes up the layers of memories and delivers them, like any good take-away restaurant should, right to your kitchen table - a pizza of a story, a penne con fungi e polenta of a chapter.
So that when the Resident Companion asks me what I'm doing, wall-gazing, I say I'm composting. Oh, composing, says he of the musical fluency, his words drifting down the hall as he shuffles his way along it, edging past bikes with dangerously-angled handlebars, guitar cases, baskets of shells, dried moss and dropped scarves (dragged from people's necks in passing) and bookcases with potted vegetation on top, trailing innocent green arms that turn into Venus fly traps whenever an unwary digit gets too close.
'No, composting' I say quietly to the now-empty room, made even more attractive by the cup of tea placed within arm's reach by the Resident Musician who, as well as keeping the whole show going, also has to pad and purr (his phrase!) his way around me, obedient to my every whim.
Or pre-writing, if you prefer - I like that phrase. Right now, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, half of which is covered with jars and bottles of sauces - brown, taco, worcestershire, cranberry, mint, redcurrant and harissa, olives - mixed, green and black - spices - cinnamon and nutmeg - a jar of strawberry jam (with moulding contents), two candlesticks, a basket of fruit, covered with old leaflets and more scarves, a half-empty bottle of wine, a bottle of whiskey with an inexplicable half inch left in the bottom, a bunch of keys and a bodhran stick. The other half is cleared for working on. Only two empty cups, a packet of tobacco and cigarette lighter and the clear few inches showing a red table cloth, with a red specs case on it and a red phone.
And on the fuzzy glass, which forms part of the back door, there's a pattern in the top left hand corner, which has been there since it was put in several years ago. I don't know what it's made of, some kind of putty or glass glue, I suppose. But it makes a lovely picture. It's about six inches square and shows a rabbit rising up out of the waves; its long ears cocked up, its forelimbs extended and quite a wicked expression on its face really. For in its extended forepaws it holds a long gun. This gun is not pointed at me, I'm thankful to say, but at the bag of pegs hanging from the door handle. With the result that all the pegs I put in the bag have mysteriously vanished. Shot to smithereens I suppose.
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