August: a trip across Scotland, a book festival, a series of impressions

(and narrative is a lie)

Train at Euston to Glasgow, in Glasgow the bus to Fort William, on the banks of Loch Lomond the ferns are vibrant in the wet, impossible to think of anything other than Lorca, at Tarbet, mountains shrouded in mist, think about climbing one next year, and hit Glencoe, rock faces so alien they could’ve formed in space, remnants of an ice age long thawed, and everywhere tourists with cameras around their necks, deeper into the highlands a growing annoyance that anyone would think to call this landscape a wilderness, as if it’s not been shaped by conflict, displacement and erasure, and instead is simply as an absent God intended it to be, hardly anyone cares to remember how sheep became more valuable than humans and the Highlanders were scattered, taking with them their names, leaving their language behind; the next morning, wake to fog clearing on the loch, balls of rain on the car window, and it’s north east to Inverness, a circuitous, accidental route to the top of another mountain where I teach for the week; with a head full of 14 projects I set the fire to take the chill of the morning after a walk in the pines, the air alive with their scent and the sensation of being watched; turn and there they are - how many eyes, I don’t know, how many antlers, I don’t want to find out - I have not been watched by deer like this for years, not since I lived on the farm, they are knowing animals, I can’t ever hope to know what they do; on the final night, bagpipes, whisky, haggis, a well rehearsed performance of Scottishness, and we applaud, all of us gathered there by what - a love of language perhaps, a feeling stories and the telling of them might save us, or maybe just to make us human, none of it’s that deep, it’s life and death and childhood scars and love and loss, just life and the things that happen in it, a certain texture; we’ve come from Scotland, South Africa, New York, Seattle, France, Australia, together for five days before we disperse again, something special about the fleetingness of it, the it’s there and then it’s gone-ness.

After, I take the train down the east coast. I have a pilgrimage of my own to make. Stop in Edinburgh, curse the tourists, a second train to the borders. The edgelands, the debatable kingdom, a buffer zone of sorts and where I came from, and although I’m only half everything - half South African and that dividable still into fragments of Europe, and half Scottish, wholly nothing - it’s this place that shaped me the most. The light, the rolling hills, the heather on the moors, purple now, the predictable sheep and the arable fields, the endless monotony of the type I often now crave, later that week, I will talk on stage about how insulting it is for people to call places like this the middle of nowhere, because it’s always somewhere to somebody; and places like this, they show you how big the world is, because life is both there and elsewhere, in ways it never is in a city, where everything is simply just there, all the time. Scarcity creates a propulsion of its own.

Spend two nights alone, walking, writing, thinking. I’ve come to remember my grandmother, who died 12 years ago. I go to the pub we liked to visit and it’s a relief when the maître d’ remembers me only as the doctor’s grand-daughter, all the other appellations falling away like dead skin, my memories seem sure and certain until I set out to walk to the bookshop in the next village and there’s not a pavement along the road although surely and certainly there was and it’s a significant detour halfway up a hill, along a decommissioned road where I walk thinking of the apocalypse before I arrive at the village two hours later than I thought I would and there are inclines where there weren’t and granny used to say I could drive these roads in my sleep; just how long have I been sleeping for?

Too soon it is the train to Edinburgh, another change in another station toilet and game face on to the Norwegian consulate for drinks and later the Future Library announcement and mountains, hills, rivers, recede; I am back where I was born, spending days in the exact building thanks to the book festival’s relocation to a repurposed hospital and I cannot have misremembered this city, although two days later I’m lost again, having forgotten the ways streets join, and the week becomes quickly lost to conversations between Booker nominees and chairing Tommy Orange and knowing I’ll marvel forever at Wandering Stars and El Anatsui at the Talbot Rice and wanting to leave with at least two pieces and Ibrahim Mahaba making me think what America’s built on, the filth of the dream, and being underwhelmed at Do Ho Sui - technically brilliant but wearing influences that clearly wears thin, and also, just too much - and catching up with old friends and dinners and walking borrowed dogs and losing sunglasses somewhere and forgetting I planned to work and swim and not sit at kitchen tables doing what barely passes for work, and tutoring from floors and behind good’s entrances, and pavements are too full of tourists with nowhere they need to be and I am sharp elbows and my thighs hurt from the incline of the streets, talk so much that by Saturday my voice is hoarse, and on Sunday, Rachel Cusk talking about how she finds narrative actively repellent, and it’s such a statement I need to think about it but it’s a relief too at the end of a week exalting books to hear someone grapple with them and the expectation of narrative; this month has been impression only, a series of them, flung hard, which is how life is, the narrative comes later, making it both an imposition and a falsehood; ah yes, the lying writer says, here’s the beginning, the middle, the end of the thing, when really there’s just the thing and its impression; narrative imposes the horror of the pseudo-profound knowing voice and the uptick at the end, exposing also the self absorption of the first person, thinking this today after tennis played early, rosemary, olive, thyme in the warming air, the vivid green or was it blue of the court, the ball’s steady beat as we found our rhythm, working after and thinking of the sublime and the necessity of the impressionistic in both experiencing and capturing it, narrative keeps it at arm’s length, as it does the truth, which is maybe why we like stories, not so much because they truly make sense of an experience, but they enable us to make our own version of sense, allowing us to continue to dress the lie as a universally acknowledged truth of three act structure and plot when instead, it’s all just impressions, both their sensation and the mark they leave. A story is a safety net, a place to put the past, a way to bind it between a cover, to stop it biting perhaps, but don’t mistake it for truth, that lives somewhere else less knowable, beyond the realms of telling.