As you probably gathered, On The Road
has fallen distinctly quiet for some time now. I haven't been in a
particularly good place to write; personally, nor other-ly, let's
say. Even a sentence which I don't want to bin immediately simply
cannot be conjured like a rabbit. But hope has returned favour (for
me at least and less so for you) as I would appear to have re-found
The Place.
The Place (noun): a place where I
don't write, but the words come to me.
In the last couple of years I've had
the fortune that The Place was easy to find. In Japan, it was the
train between my town, Shiroishi, and Sendai. Every other day I took
the train to the city for some kind of social call and, when I wasn't
getting a head start with a train beer or two or nestling into the
seat drunken dozing, I was writing. The first time I took the train
from Shiroishi into Sendai I was with a girl; also recently moved to
Shiroishi, also Asian, also called Jenny. The road into Shiroishi had
been undeniably less stimulating, we burned tarmac in my supervisor's
car, passing small concrete boxes and road signs which my hangover
ignored. (cheers guys, you know who you are). That week as I settled
into the country life, I became increasingly aware of how small Shiro
is. Coming straight from a massive city (the Glasgow metropolitan
area has a population of 2 million), I was rather bored. Jen and I
decided that what we needed was a bit of human interaction. The week
we arrived was also the week during which one of the biggest
festivals of the Tohoku region was taking place. Straight after work
we jumped on the first train to the Tanabata festival. Jumped is
perhaps the wrong verb to use here as the linguistic ordeal of buying
a train ticket was a definite hindrance. But soon enough we were
sitting down on a train. If you have ever watched Hayao Miyazaki's
Spirited Away (if not, I don't like you any more), you probably
remember the seating plan on the train. The seats are not arranged
like an ordinary train in the UK, with short rows of two or three
seats on either side of the carriage, separated by a gangway.
Instead, the seats in some trains in Japan are set vertically along
the carriage. Not much seating space, but clearly more efficient for
a game of sardines. As the train departed we saw pieces of the
village we would soon call home. Tiny cardboard houses and rusty
ramen signs suddenly gave way to a river riding east, rice paddies
populated by hungry cranes, and the hills which bordered them,
breathing damp mist.
We passed in unbroken silence.
Of course, as I became better aquainted
to the scenery and the respectability of train beer, I became less
bewildered on the train. Yet the serenity remained, and became the
backdrop for at least 70% of the poetry which I wrote in Japan.
But not all train journeys are quite as
productive for writing. The journey from Sendai to Nagano for
example. Clocking over 11 hours on local trains, I didn't even write
a limerick. Neither did I write on the tracks from Tsuruoka to Shiga
(in 2 days I racked up 20 hours of train time). I did, however, write
a response to an article about being a guilty 'flyjin' foreigner in
post-tsunami-quake-nuclear disaster Japan which was published in the
Daily Yomuri. On my phone.
The Transiberian too, despite the
ridiculous journey time. I managed only to craft the bare bones of
the idea for a play which I have yet to write. The difficulty being,
it just wasn't The Place.
Thinking back to Paris, I had so much
artistic competition. It was complete immersion; from the ghosts of
writers who had starved on Rue Montorgueil, to my contemporaries who
arrived on a dream of little more than a 11m2 studio shared with a
stray cat and too many coffee grounds. The last flat I found myself
squatting in (thanks again Love, I miss you so much), I spent most of
my time in some kind of stupor with film makers, travellers,
painters, philosophers, bartenders, and chefs. And a lecturer of
economics. That's perhaps why the writing was effortless. The life I
had there lent itself well to writing, I was permanently stimulated
by my bizarre life as a penniless, homeless writer.
The struggling artist. Some clichés
are just true.
