It’s Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. It’s raining and the sky is silvery white.
I’m in the rocking chair with a paperback American classic. Over at my desk the computer is streaming some New York saxophone street jazz. I can’t quite place it. Heat has.
It’s great background music to read against. I think of a big park with a small lake I found north of fifty-seventh on the east side. The first time I got brave enough to walk blocks of blocks without looking back.
Eight hundred and two pages. It’s a classic by an American master.
The rain isn’t really rain. Every ten seconds or so a dry pitter patter beat of what will turn out to be water hits my windows. Carried on the wind. Down below me on the streets the precipitation will be imperceptible.
The noise will outshout it. Fresh blustery gushes. The sights will outpaint it in strokes from sharp brushes.
Up here though, even with the windows closed I have come to know these things concerning the potential illusion of my daily perception.
Mundanity aside, I think it’s important to know because it teaches me something beyond itself.
I rock out of the rocking chair on its next forward roll and go to my bedroom to lay a while on my bed. On top of the make. Light streaming in from behind my head. The light up here is fierce on silvery white sky days. Like looking into the sun. I don’t look out of the windows. I either draw the blinds or I sit close up to the windows and get the light working for me. Over my shoulder.
There are two kinds of writer. The one who gets all the natural daylight available and positions it behind her, so her eyes and it are both travelling in the same direction. At the same time, the object of her art - her canvas confection - shines like angels in the Sistene chapel.
Pontelli knew how to work with light.
And this kind of writer. She wrings every last ounce of light out of even the poorest excuse of a dull afternoon through a tiresome and weatherworn English monsoon. She gathers it all together like a child gathering marbles. She rinses and pulls and works that light into some compunction of rays and balls and she gets right on up close in front of it and she says “Now go. Now get to work" and even as she says this you know she's not talking to herself. That she is instructing the gathered-up energy.
And there’s the other kind.
I make food but don’t eat it. Wholesome relationships with food come chiefly out of one’s time assembling it. Learning it. And the kitchen is the best room in the flat right now because the window faces north and emptied of glare the view is the real dish on the menu. Big green skies tumble across Lancashire, breaking into a neat rolling column of blue distant mountains. The Pennines. Rolling like coasters. Almost half the glass is a foreground masterpiece. Constable. Hockney. Turner. Miles of green meadow. Light and deep. Pronounced. The light working for those miles like it works for Michelangelo's angels on Pontelli’s domes and like how it works for the notepad of the writer who gathered all her light up into a ball before she began. That’s what separates Little Hulton church spires from the Singing Tree on the moors above Burnley. That’s what lies between any foreground and background.
Not distance.
Just light. Just different shades of light.
Keeping my eye on Winter Hill and the heights of Darwen I walk slowly and purposely through the flat left-to-righting each window and if I keep my eye on the easiest of eyelines: that Pennine tip against the big green sky, I can follow the range continuously across Accrington and Bolton and Eden and Bamford and Rossendale and each wind farm rotor helps me go running wildly over country miles of barren escarpment. The colour changing fast by the order of the organising cloud formations out of sight, above me.
Silhouetted un-identifiables thirty-five miles out. Farm outbuildings. Follies. Water towers. Edwardian gentry houses. Bluffs of rock.
The lough and the mountains and ruins and rain and purple-blue distances bound your demesne
If nothing else, Betjeman has taught me a new word and even how to pronounce it.
East and east and further east the mountain climbs into a dark question. Leeds. It quickly dips and restores. Snake Pass out to Sheffield. The Moorhead pass. And south now toward the Chatsworth Estate. Denton and Hyde sunk into the late foreground. Submitting to the high country behind them.
And then nothing. The mountain collapses into the Cheshire plains and the land sails off harmonious and all. Manchester airport. Joddrell Bank.
Her husband works at Joddrell Bank. He’s home late in the mornings.
I like walking slowly and purposely around the flat with the view as my companion.
Every single time it’s a completely different experience. I learn something unexpected. I see something new. I see me new.
Do you ever feel that the entire world is really quite small and that you could do anything? Give me six months and I could easily be anyone and do absolutely anything I choose.
I watch a Netflix show and the trailer is showcasing the lead actors downtown Manhattan apartment. For $2 million it looks quite small. A nice little rooftop outside bit, I suppose.
Then I think of it aside of the money. Because the money is nothing. And then I see it anew and it looks quite friendly and quite a warm, happy place to rest your head and write your thoughts out and snuggle up and stretch out big.
Yeah that would be fun for a while.
And I know instantly, deep within my bones that I could write a script that drops and either eat or become the money because that's what they do isn't it and looking out of my windows at the distant curvature of the earth I close my eyes and easily get a sense of NYC just an eighth planetary spin out beyond the Singing Tree. This guy is something to look at. So am I. And you. And all of us.
And anyway what is that? Does anyone really care about that? Surely the money and the body is background noise. Just babble.
All these people accumulating and going deeper into self and ego and accumulating and going deeper still. Nothings ever enough like a whirlpool of need. Insulated in the grabbiness greed of need. But don't tell it! With enough lawyers and smart PR and a hungry compliant global fanbase we can coolify and sell it.
And the psychological distance between what my computer, when it mimics television, is trying to suggest lies between me and the Manhattan jetset ….I want to say it has gone. That it has been obliterated.
But the thing is ...it was never there at all when I woke up this morning and it hasn’t been there since.
I sat through Mass like it was going on around me.
I think they call this vision. You know when you see all this… and the world is small and friendly and all its doors are open to you. And nobody anywhere on earth is that far removed from you or me for that matter as I sit here and type this right now.
The echo of the soft paw thud of the very last key I depress sifting, squeaking, leaking out into the big green world in a snare drum cackled-clatter you’d be pleased to even catch. Come day or night.
And the sky is silvery white.
