Brian Kirk's Blog

After The Fall…

(In lieu of a new  year’s greeting)

The Christmas holiday has always been a difficult time for me as a writer. At this time of year there are other, and in many ways, far more pleasant distractions and responsibilities surrounding family and friends. And that’s how it should be. But in that limbo between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve I always get the urge to write something new. However, wanting to write and actually writing are two very different things.

Over the past two weeks I’ve lost the daily habit of writing. In my mind I am always writing, but during these weeks I have not put pen to paper of finger to keyboard. I know myself well enough to know that there is no point in trying to compose fresh material, so in the shadow of a closing door I took to revising. Poems to be precise. I have a large number of poems which, over the course of the past year, I’ve been adding to and attempting to collect in a meaningful way.

To date every attempt to seek a recurring theme has led me up one blind alley after another. I considered simply putting my best ten poems first and naming the collection after the first poem along with the standard appendage “and other poems”. I was never quite satisfied with this. So in these short dark days, in between my other responsibilities, I’ve been re-reading my poems and looking for clues.

The New Year is not my favourite time of year. Not for any particular reason prompted by the memory of a personal tragedy, but simply because I have reached a certain age and at this age all markers of the passing of time have become a taunt to me. I know I have years left on this earth, but not so many as I had this time last year.

All week I dipped in and out of Facebook and Twitter, reading other peoples hopes, regrets and wishes for 2014. At first it bored me, but I suppose the similarity of the posts and status updates was to be expected – after all who doesn’t want success or health or happiness for themselves or their loved ones? I kept reading all the same in the way one does with social media, and after a while my attitude began to change.

We all want to believe that the future will be better than the past, even if there are no grounds for believing so. Faith and hope are innate in us I think. Despite everything that is bad about the world – the violence, intolerance, hatred, venality – we cling to any sign of goodness to allow ourselves to go on living, to go on hoping for a better future. So every year we make resolutions that we know we will never keep. But it doesn’t matter. It gets us over the hump of Christmas and into January, and you know anything is possible then. A new leaf, a clean slate. All the old clichés, you might say, but even a writer can forgive them at this time of year.

Reading the poems I was struck by the religious language used in many of them. The idea of the Fall recurs; that after the Fall our lives are broken somehow, imperfect. This is self-evident, even if you don’t like the biblical reference. The Fall sets the stage for drama and argument, for the transformation of the quotidian into something else. After the Fall we make the best of our bad lot, we go on as Beckett says, because there’s nothing else we can do. Bleak stuff you might think, but it served well enough for Milton and Shelley so it should be adequate for me too.

…This Is How We Live

6 comments