Train Music

This summer has been one of the most anxiety ridden, purposeful summers of my life. In fact I would say in terms of sheer terror and ambitious drive it has been the very pinacle of summertime industry in all of my experience. I've spent hours and hours, a hundred now, in this small blue box of a room. I love this room. It is square, it is the same blue that makes you think of a baby boy's first jumpsuit, it has a fire place stacked with books and files, three windows and two doors, and four desks, each of which is laden with books and papers, laptops and mac computers. There is a white board, and this is an important point to make, that whiteboard is the greatest source of solace and encouragement any inanimate object has ever given me, but it is the simple fact of its location that encourages me most.This blue box has been my supposed Shangri-La, the hallowed place where the post graduates reside. In my undergraduate imaginings I pictured the clever Phd students alternating between furiously banging out witty tomes of great import and sitting about drinking coffee whilst debating the best foods for the hungry minds; authors, films, coffee, food, authors, blogs, websites... It is all true.

This old building stands at the edge of the world. Or at least it feels that way, though there are more buildings before the shore, and now the great hulk of the jutting entertainment centre. Then there is the harbour and the headland before the open ocean, and then nothing until the ice at the bottom of the world. Just miles and miles of ocean, sharks, whales, gulls and fish. Between this old fortress and the great distance lies the scar of industry: the railway. It carries the shuddering engines that convey the wealth of the west to the world at large, the engines shunt and shudder as they near the port; some say the noise is pollution, to me it is as comforting as the whispered sympathy of an old friend. With the windows of the blue box open to the world the noise rumbles through as a train rattles into the port, a wonderful cacophony of sound. We don't complain here in the blue box, we wait for the noise to pass, or we speak louder, or strain harder to listen, but we don't moan or whinge at the trains' music. Perhaps that is the nature of a port town, some people say it is the price we pay, and some remind us  that the trains and the ships gave our town life. I don't sleep without it. I've lived on the hill above the port long enough to know the sounds of my home. I've lived in other places, by London's motorways and in the English country side, but those nosies and silences seem empty to me. The yelping of foxes in the night would keep me awake during the British snows, and the rushing of cars on bitumen would haunt my sleep in the palid London summer. I'll leave, soon I think, and when I lay at night in the city I'll wish the whine of passenger trains was more gutsy, and I'll wish the tooting cars would boom like a ship's farewell. I'll teach my dreams to create the railway noises and I'll stretch my mind to remember the train music.

This summer will end soon, one day it will be the summer I spent in the blue box, learning to write and learning to read. It seems like such an elementary area of study but, essentially, that is what I do. It has been my launching pad, it is pointing me toward the road leading right out of Small Town South Coast, this summer has been making my future, and soon I will take to the road, but I think the train music will eventually call me home.

Cleaver meet Clavicle: Tragedy and Beauty making sweet music

I've always had a subtly skewed perception of feelings and emotional dealings. This is not because I don't understand them, or because I don't respect them, I think it is largely because as a child I read too much or perhaps not too much, but so much. Obviously a great many people read a great many books; all the time every day there are thousands upon thousands of minds reaching into the great swirling keep of words building sentences and paragraphs, building and tearing down new worlds, breaking hearts, disapearing and awakening. Every day the world is set alight with literary musings and imaginings.

 My great literary love is tragedy. Not in a Shakespearean sense, but in a selfless way. I think great writer, with great ideas and mastery of emotion could create a tragedy in which it seems there is no other course of action but the tragic. And somehow this great writer has created characters that are courageous and gracious enough to carry out the course to its  end. By that end the reader sits on whatever perch the have perched upon clutching this fateful tome and gasping ugly, ragged breaths wishing there were another course, some other way in which the tragedy may have been averted, before realising... the very beauty of the thing, is the tragedy. Recognising the beauty in tragedy, or misery or heartbreak, I think, really has to do with touching the core of the human experience. Tragedy after all is a human thing, it is a word we created for situations that change and define the way we look at the world.

 The draw of tragedy, however, isn't found in morbid curiosity. I think its found in the responses it draws, in the way it is used and shaped by the people experiencing it. Heartbreak for example is an ugly, traumatic thing, but I've found that some of the most wonderful and heartfelt things I have heard spoken have been in response to heartbreak. It is because of my own heartbreak that I came to discover the value of the tragic. I first experienced heartbreak the year I turned twenty, it was of the typical kind, girl met boy, fell in love, boy broke up with girl, girl cried for two days straight and then proceeded to eat an army's share of oven baked chips for a week, then girl resolved to win back boy. My own response to that experience was to deny the logic that the original break up was based on. That is the tragic beauty of my experience, I was utterly convinced that because girl loved boy, and boy loved girl, everything else shouldn't matter. This, in itself, is a ridiculous assertion, because anyone with even an iota of sense knows that love simply isn't enough. A truth that the romantics and the classics tend to deny to the very feet of their being, but there it is.

So girl resolved to refuse to let go of this first love, and being the determined little soldier soul that she was in her youth, she succeeded in winning back boy. This scene was repeated three times in the space of two years, and each time the misery and chest related pain was worse than the previous occurence. It is only because girls get smarter as they get older, that after two and a half years girl took a great big cleaver from the kitchen, she swung it unceremoniously at her own sternum, cracking open her own chest she reached in and pulled the bloody, squirming, pumping heart free; she severed the paraphenalia that attached it to her body and threw it on the kitchen table before her. Girl watched it wheeze and shudder for a moment before she raised the cleaver again and dropped it.

Now this is obviously a somewhat stylised account of what happened, but the effect was basically the same. Months of misery followed, nights of tear soaked pillows and all of that. But what I discovered was that after a while I started taking the best memories of the previous two years and playing them over in my mind. I found that the tragic massacre of hearts that had occured since those memories were made, cast them in a new light. The memories were sharper and more beautiful, the letters I'd kept were sweeter, the pictures seemed to be happier, and the moments of pure heartbreak were also sharper. It was those moment of dagger-in-the-chest pain that reminded me that as long as there was pain there could be other things. I suppose it could be likened to the experience of a person suffering suspected spinal damage, the first moment pain shoots up that person's leg there must be some sort of joy just knowing that that hideous pain is an indicator of a functioning spinal cord.

Seven billion responses to tragedy, seven billion forms of pain and seven billion companions for misery are the clearest indicator of seven billion living beings. My fascination with tragedy has nothing to do with morbidity, it has to do with my simple fascination with life; anyone can write about love, but what of the other bits? The reality is that girl doesn't always get boy, boy sometimes dies, girl sometimes dies, boy sometimes thinks girl is too dorky, or chubby, or fake and the same can be true in the reverse. How boring would life be without the tragic stories? We can't all be Elizabeth Bennet after all.