Last night I had trouble sleeping. The cause? I started thinking about the first few months of my post-university years, time spent in the splendid south coast city of Chichester. The job I was there to do is essentially unimportant now — other than it proved to be the two-year foundation for me to go on and pursue the completely wrong career for the next 30+ years! Mine was a pursuit motivated by the promise of above-average salaries rather than personal fulfilment — and there’s a lesson for our younger readers right there!
For the last fifteen years or so I have been desperately trying to redress the balance.
What came back to me in the early hours — comprehensively and unbidden — were a selection of events during that time in Chichester which, by and large, occurred outside of work. It was like watching a montage of incidents, high- and low-lights replayed in black-and-white against a backing track of elevator music.
You’ll be wanting some detail…
There was the remarkably striking girl I first saw in a café and who I had two further close encounters with (in a supermarket and a disco) but did nothing in terms of approaching her and declaring undying love… The late-night party we had to watch the the LA Raiders against Washington in Superbowl 18… A walk in Devon with Anne (the sister of someone I worked with)… Drinking in the pub after work with Jonathan, Dave and someone whose name I just can’t recall… The party at our house where a fight broke out — and I managed to hook-up with a friend of the person I was really interested in… My time as a union rep, my appointment unashamedly triggered as a means to engineer a brief liaison with the rep I replaced, a stunning lady who was at least 15 years my senior… Saturday mornings when I’d play two hours of badminton and then an hour of 5-a-side football…
You get the general drift. Even as I was trying to sleep this morning (and then later on, once I’d woken up) I was struck by how busy and eventful those few months had been. And I couldn’t fail but mark those ‘turn left or turn right’ moments which are the inevitable consequence of living a life.
So why ‘schizophrenic’?
If you’re like me there are episodes in your past which you’d happily live through again if only to make a different decision, to see how things would have turned out if you’d gone the other way.
“I believe we have two lives: the life we learn with, and the life we live with after that.” — Glenn Close to Robert Redford in The Natural
To my mind Glenn Close wasn’t wrong, but there are subtle variations — including the wanting to go back, to re-live, to make it ‘different’ i.e. learn those lessons in real time and then apply that learning instantly.
Not possible, sadly or otherwise…
If you’re a writer however, you’re blessed with a kind of superpower, an ability which actually gifts you the opportunity to return and re-live — though on the page rather than via the whimsy of some new or alternative reality. Consciously or not (and I suspect more not than consciously) writers live their lives as if they’re in a play of some kind, as if they know — somewhere in their boots (or through a door in the back of a wardrobe!) — that we do possess the ability to revisit, dissect, re-examine. And to do so as often as we want.
Take two of those examples from my first few months in Chichester as quoted above:
“There was the remarkably striking girl I first saw in a café and who I had two further close encounters with (in a supermarket and a disco) but did nothing in terms of approaching her and declaring undying love…”
…was turned into a story, ‘The Bay Tree’, (in Secrets & Wisdom), and of which I’m very fond and where there was a different ending.
“A walk in Devon with Anne (the sister of someone I worked with)…”
…became the basis for a novel, A Pattern of Sorts, where things turned out better — and then dreadfully worse.
My oeuvre is littered with re-tellings and re-experiencings, with attempts to answer the question as to ‘what might have been’. And not just what I have been through at the sharp end of experience, but what I have witnessed, seen, heard and felt. How could it not be? How could yours not be?
“I believe we have two lives: the life we learn with, and the life we write with after that…”
Is that not a more apt quote? Our normal self is the one who enjoys and endures the day-to-day experience, but our other self — the schizophrenic writer half — is the one who harvests that experience, filters and sifts it, always on the look-out for the nuggets of gold.
And every day has the potential to be a golden day for the writer — for example, of turning a bad night’s sleep into something more worthy. I don’t see how we can’t believe that opportunity is always there for us, a true constant.
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