No-one Knows This About Me, But…

I’m pathologically incapable of writing a happy story, but some people do know that…

It gets awkward, when everyone else in your GCSE literature class is writing about holidays and parties and evenings on the beach, and you’re composing an epic about relational decay. Hmm.

What people tend not to know, though some might possibly guess, is that I’d pick the rickety bridge over the crashing rapids, any day. Give me the narrative arc shaped by trauma, underpinned by uncertainty, in danger of being swept away by a stray tide at any moment: that’s where the life is, for me.

I’d always choose structural infirmity — with all the thrill of the lurch as the floor gives way; over bricks, mortar and shored foundations, any day.

I’m mixing my metaphors terribly. And so far all anyone is succeeding in learning about me is that I have a penchant for using twelve words when three would suffice.

But, you know — I think — it is in metaphor that we can find ways to express that which we might not yet be able to put into words. Sometimes it is said that all the stories have been told, all imagination is spent, ‘nothing is new under the sun’ … but I can’t believe that.

So, perhaps this is what nobody knows about me.

Perhaps it is the thing I’d like everyone to know about me.

Hopefully, it is the thing that — if you squashed down all my prattling verbosity — would still resound clearly.

It is that I am searching for new shapes for language, new spaces where stories can be told. There are so many stories that need to be told. And I’m not just talking about the big things, the unmentionable things, the things that feel unspeakable and shocking. I feel like there are a thousand small details that we overlook, that we brush under the neatly-piled carpets of our lives, that we squash down: the monkey in the box, on a shelf, stored high in a room we forgot how to access. These things matter.

My hunch is that metaphor holds the key. My suspicion is that it is figurative language which gives us the freedom to stutter and stumble and lurch like my unsafe floorboards, while we find our voices.

I started by saying I’m incapable of writing a cheerful story, and it is sadly true, but I still want to access beauty and colour and the iridescent shimmer of a soul coming alive. Language can do that. Metaphor is vital, here. I don’t have all my sentences sewn up, but in these explorations I find an interface where redemption and uncertainty can co-exist. It is woefully crass to suggest that art always brings beauty out of struggle, and I’m wincing at the suggestion, as I write this, but sometimes I feel like it is all we have.

The stairs of this house may be long-condemned, the floorboards wormed, the window panes jaggedly shattered; but if you cling to the splintered bannister and edge up slowly — the view from the space where the windows were might just take your breath away.

(image source: https://cached.imagescaler.hbpl.co.uk/resize/scaleWidth/743/cached.offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk/news/OMC/Bridge-2018011210065135.jpg)