William Wordsworth's autobiographic epic The Prelude contains a section in which the young Romantic poet steals a boat and oars his way out into the middle of a lake before having to double back as a terrifying mountain 'upreared its head' with 'purpose'. It's a classic piece of blank verse and details the poet's ongoing struggles with 'darkness', ' solitude' and the 'trouble' of his 'dreams'.
I had a similar experience yesterday, where nature itself conspired or desired to present herself as uncanny and darkly unfamiliar.
And, yes, I'm aware how ridiculous this is going to sound.
Leaving the security of our campsite, we trekked through fields and footpaths until, beyond the flat furze of a haybailed farmscape, a wood approached us. Stepping towards its shadowed perimeter, I suddenly became aware of how rapidly dusk had fallen. Inside the wood was a canopy of rustling unknown, a blackness that stretched through an army of trunks and trespass. Something innate and primal seemed to stir within and without. Obviously, it sounds bloody childish now, as all bad dreams must. Ancestral fears of lurking, rival tribesmen. Sam Raimi horror films at too young an age. All of the above. A door in my head swung open and let in unsubstantiated fears that briefly overpowered me. Stepping into the woods, of course, proved them to be entirely free of skulking Romans. But the sense of something foreboding remained all night, until, later on, around the campfire, I received - almost prophesied by my previous mood - two pieces of bad news.
The first was the death of Martin Amis. I've read a lot of his work and, as a young man, loved his early novels (in a piece of cyclical and celestial coincidence, I read The Rachel Papers at a campsite). In latter years, I've become more snobbish about him and can see his flaws in clearer terms, but when you've read a large proportion of a person's output you've seen inside their mind to a degree and I felt, in a pretentious way, as though I knew him. The debate about whether he was past his best is a moot point - he was - but the thrill of reading those younger fictions as a younger man can’t be rowed back on. For twenty years he was the Rolls Royce of the literary world and fundamentally incapable of writing an uninspiring sentence. The later controversies surrounding the selling of The Information and the infamous godawful badness of Yellow Dog, and even the political commentary that reared its head in his journalism, don’t diminish those formative triumphs. He was built to be a writer. Literally, built; his father was Kingsley Amis and he was educated at Oxford. He was as easily hateable as he was readable.
The second piece of bad news I’m keeping to myself. I don't normally talk about my mental health here, and I'm not about to launch into a full-blown symphony now - plenty of people have it far worse - but it hasn't been smooth sailing recently. Something has been - ahem - Amis. In many ways, the follow up piece of bad news far eclipsed the information that a rich literary idol had fallen from his perch. At least, as far as I’m concerned. If hell is other people, as Sartre claimed, then depression is partly an inability to deal with things that are out of our control, namely other people’s decisions, or lack thereof. My evening's second slice of misfortune, however, has strengthened my resolve to do something about the literary dark woods I find myself in. I’m regaining control.
If that sounds like a cryptic place to end things, rest assured it's simply borne from a genuine intention to remain professional, but I'll be coming out of those massed and ill-lit trees soon and - along the way - hopefully regain Wordsworth’s ‘troubled pleasure’ of adventure, before the dark mountains over the horizon stole youth’s furtive joy.
Onwards.
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