GOING TO THE COALFACE

Andie Lewenstein

Originally published in Roselle Angwin’s Writing the Bright Moment

I have in my mind an ill woman who never leaves her house. She has been there so long, she says, that it is part of her body. It is in a cul-de-sac and seems to be in permanent winter. Even in the summer, the back room where she lies is dark with the shade of poplar trees that press around the house. The light hurts her eyes. Near her is a loom on which she weaves an abstract woollen picture – grey, green and blue – but she can only sit for fifteen minutes at a stretch before she has to lie flat again. Reading makes her dizzy and she doesn’t watch TV or listen to the radio. She looks out of the window at a patch of sky between two trees.

“I look at cloud shapes,” she says. “There’s always something new. Yesterday a camel came. Today a giant with a rucksack on his back and he turned and looked at me. The clouds speak to me, the rain too. I look at the drops on the window pane. I listen to them.”

Brian Keenan, held hostage in Beirut, in filth and darkness, is unexpectedly given a bowl of fruit and finds “the world recreated in that broken bowl”, his soul restored and named by the colour orange.

Where all systems fail, poetry begins. Is essential.

I have in my mind a scene from the film “American Beauty”. A teenage boy has filmed a white plastic bag on a stretch of asphalt by a brick wall. It is caught by the wind and begins to dance. Looking at the image caught on film, the boy says, “that’s the day I realised that there was this entire life behind things and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid.” In the spaces, in the margins where we think that nothing happens, such epiphanies occur.

New writers are often encouraged to keep a notebook in which they regularly “freewrite”, covering as many pages as they can with whatever words come onto the page. I have noticed that my students are often enthusiastic about this practice at the beginning, encouraged by the flow of words that come like water from a tap from who knows where. Then the doubts come, along with a disabling self-consciousness because so much notebook-writing is “just about me and my boring life and complaints” – about how the car broke down, the child was off school with a cold, there was a queue at the supermarket and the library books are overdue. No epiphanies here.

But words on paper are the sine qua non of the working writer and whoever you are – seasoned author, beginner, teacher of creative writing – you have to go to the coal face, inspired or not. You present yourself, as a priest does when saying the Office, whether or not there is a congregation and with no knowing how, or if, the Spirit will move, to write, perhaps, something like this:-

“Today all I can think of is that when I looked into the mirror this morning, I saw that my eyes were the melancholy sloping down at the side kind of eyes and I had never noticed before how much they slope. Had a headache and more lines on my forehead and wished I had eyes that turn up at the ends, then I would look happy and people I don’t know wouldn’t tell me to cheer up. I lifted up the corners of my eyes with my hands to see how it would look, then I pulled back the skin on my face.”

As I pushed the words out an image came to me of a woman about to give herself a facelift, and I wrote “A face like a new canvas, ready to begin afresh and telling no-one anything,” and then the title of a Jeanette Winterson novel: “Written on the Body.” I looked at what I had written, underlined the words I wanted to use and began again:

“This morning I lifted up the corners of my eyes. I had a brand new face, like a new canvas, ready to begin afresh. This morning I took a scalpel to the loose skin around my eyes and the fallen flesh around my mouth and underneath my chin. I cut neat lines around my face as though preparing a piece of fabric for the making of a new garment and I pulled and pulled at the fabric of my soon-to-be-new skin until it tightened around my eyes and nose and mouth and shone with a new possibility.”

As I worked on, there she stood: a woman, Lady Macbeth-like in her resolve, on the

verge of a facelift, a breakdown or a breakthrough. The end result was a poem I called Facelift:

Today I lifted up my face.

I took a scalpel to the skin around my eyes

and the fallen folds around my mouth.

I cut a line around my jaw as though preparing

a piece of fabric for the making of a new garment

and I pulled and pulled until it tightened and shone.

I sewed it into place with needle and flesh-coloured thread.

I cut away the old skin.

It fell away without fuss, there was no trace of blood.

With my tight new skin I am clean and strong as a virgin

who has never been scorned by a lover, nor given birth

to blood and membrane or looked at the sky night after night

and watched her hopes grow pale with the shrinking of the moon.

It is morning, and my new face is a canvas on which I will write

the only story that will ever be told.

I have buried the old skin deep in the earth.

It is not connected to anything

and has no mouth to speak with.