February 01st, 2024

On not being a writer, and my living room window

I am not a writer, I tell myself, watching the mist swallow the moor through my window. I like the idea of being a writer. Of growing words like fruit from my lips, sour, sweet, spicy. Of moistening and chewing and spitting them out onto a page, and turning the pulp into poetry. I watch others do this and yearn for such a skill. A collection of stale, rotten words shift uneasily in my stomach, tossing back and forth like a skiff in a storm. I cannot get them out. 

Author biographies have become the centre-piece of my bedtime reading, but all I find are things that I do not have. Things I might never have. PhDs. Decades of experience. Expertise in a niche but compelling field. I wonder if this, is why I am not a writer. Perhaps, instead of I am not a writer, the truth is that I cannot be a writer. I spend days sitting at a cluttered table with a blank page, my pen forever poised like a kingfisher frozen mid-dive. Scanning the topics of existing books, I search for inspiration. The life of a mountain. A treatise on rainforests. The case for rewilding. I, however, am no expert: I cannot tell a wren from a sparrow, I cannot speak on matters of the land with any authority, and I cannot be a writer. All I can do, is stare out of the window and dream. So today, I'm writing about the window.

When I read the word-songs of others I am torn apart. Torn between awe and anger, desire and despair, joy and jealousy. I search for their secret like musk ox hunting for lichen beneath the snow. All at once I am a shaggy hulk, hardened and horned. The snow deceives me, for there is no lichen beneath, no food to sustain me through the winter. Only ice. Unseasonably warm air melted the snow early this year, before re-freezing into a stubborn layer of ice that I cannot break. It is an increasingly common dilemma, one that I have not evolved to negotiate. I am helpless. I am starving. 

Back in Yorkshire, I am more fortunate. I have a fresh loaf of bread on my table and a jar of home-made marmalade ready to glaze it. Everything is so sweet. So bitter. It is a greyscale day, a blend of scars and scree and stratus. From where I sit, there seems to be little difference between the solid and the void. My garden is a field of ash. A colourless, muted,  collage of life and death. Somewhere beneath the ash, a green shoot starts to grow. 

From behind the shield of my window I focus on the scar. It is a darker shade of grey to the rest - somehow more solid, more secure. A scar is a limestone cliff, though it stems from the Old Norse sker, meaning an outlying rock in the sea. Certainly, the scars of the Dales are isolated, enclosed on all sides by an ocean of green. The limestone scar has no etymological relation to the other meaning of scar in Present Day English, as in a mark left on the body from the incomplete healing on a wound. Yet I cannot stop seeing myself in these crags, these gashes on the land where the hillside has been stripped bare. I too, have been cracked, broken and battered. I too, am still here. Like the marks on my body, these are rain-stained rocks, tear-soaked rocks, grazed rocks, doorways to a world long gone. They have been sharpened and softened by the storms of time. I have climbed up them, slept next to them, crawled inside of them like a baby returning to the womb. I have screamed at them, cursed them, worshipped them. It is possible that my window is, in fact, a mirror. 

A herd of belties (belted galloway cattle) weave, dispersed, amongst the medley of sharp scars, loose scree, fallen bracken and coarse grass. Their hooves turn, trample and aerate the soil. As they move across the fell, stomping and scraping and defecating, the cows are spreading the seeds of spring. 

The scene is blurred by condensation on my single-glazed window. Thousands of droplets catch the light and invert it, tipping the world upside down. I want to drink them. When I press my lips to the glass I can taste the lot, an earthy, chalky, melange of dead sea creatures and newborn trees. I still feel entrenched, as I have done for years. No wind can move me. But I start to grow upwards and downwards - slowly at first - in a tentative process of lengthening, stretching, and reaching into unknown spaces. Words rise up in my oesophagus. They are awkward, bulky things. I cough one up. And then another, and then another.

'Do you know', I ask the skies, so hoary and aged in their wisdom, 'why I am stuck?'
​The North wind chuckles lightly in my ear. 
'Stuck?' The skies cry, and I feel mocked. 'You are not stuck!' They speak slowly, as if to a young child who has not yet learnt that words do not grow on trees. 'You are rooted.'