(no subject)
As still as a Hawick night. I'm walking alone past the school, on my way to the park in the fall of twilight. Through the windows are classrooms; books, posters, little worlds that a new generation are living in. When I think back to primary school days and how much time must have been spent there, I remember from it very little. I suppose I must have learned much, I can read and write after all, add up and subtract in a fashion, but so little is remembered now. When high school had run its course I imagined I would embrace a new freedom, a whole world, no more 5 day weeks in a classroom. It was a baited trap however, with 5 longer days in an office. Some would still want homework, some would want your very soul. You might travel, as I did, an hour and a half each way every day, and spend that un-free time thinking about what you might say at the latest management meeting, or what you might write as a personal development goal for the year ahead. You'll have no support in achieving it of course, and so it won't be done; not that it matters because you didn't want to do it in the first place. The cows are grazing with their heads down and do not look up as I go by, but their calves all do. The inquisitiveness of youth, the wide-eyed taking in of all that passes by. In time we mostly become like the cows, and our lives speed up as a result, become a train hurtling through a tunnel, only faint glimpses of occasional lights, ignored, uninterested. We will not live like this, my love. Tomorrow I am seeing you again, in my excitement I have added in more and more to the planned day and now in the fading of the evening before I wonder if I shouldn't have maybe paused and tried to do less. There's a balance to be found in the middle, too hectic a life may pass just as quickly, and I want only for this time we have to last as long as possible. Two ducks land on the glassy river like a bi-plane, breaking the quiet of evening, and I look at the outline of trees, think of how unconcerned and untroubled they are by the meaning of their own existence.
I am driving to you. The towns tick off automatically; Selkirk, Galashiels, Stow, Gorebridge, Newtongrange, then to the bypass and the interchange of motorway systems, A720, M8, M9, M90, and finally the bridge. Who would have imagined we would have our own little corner of the Ferrytoll, that I would come to love a multi-storey carpark because it is our point of intersection? "We are going to Edinburgh... we are going to Stirling... we are going to Falkirk..." These are your songs of the mystery tour, and I enjoy the enthusiasm and watching you work out the options. I like it best of all when you settle on something that is incorrect, and sometimes I think about how I might alter the route to make it seem like your thoughts are correct before pulling away and leaving you to start a new puzzle. Today though we are reasonably tightly scheduled, about as tightly as I'm likely to create. Life with you is not about the rush from A to B, it is to savour each moment.
I savour this moment. We are aboard the Bo'ness & Kinneil Railway, being pulled by a steam train. We are pressed together in the carriage, hands interlinked, the smoke is blowing back through the bushes that line the route, and when they break is outlined in shadow on the grass. It's not a scenic line really, but it doesn't matter. Nothing much really matters, and as I watch the smoke I reflect that there's nowhere else I would rather be; that's not on a steam train in Bo'ness, you understand, but to be wrapped up with you.
I had actually forgotten the connection. You mentioned it when we were standing before the scale models, when the tour guide had said the two Kelpies are called Duke and Baron. "I named him", you whispered, and then I remembered. Your dad had bred him, one of his many Clydesdales down the years, and you had chosen his name. Many years later he served as the model for Andy Scott for the left-hand, head-down Kelpie, the largest equine sculptures in the world. Sometimes things just seem to work out and all the stars align, as the guide explains that today we will be going inside the Duke sculpture. The light is bright and blinding, a blanket of cloud serving only as a kind of strip light across the horizon. "And in here is where Duke left us a present" the tour guide is saying, and I expect to turn to find a dung heap, bizarrely preserved and venerated, but of course I am wrong. It is one of his horse shoes. When you go over to touch it I am just in pieces. A daughter, a horse, a departed father, lines converging like the giant dome of the thing itself. It is joy, it is sadness, it is recognition and reflection, it is the power of emotion and of life itself, all coursing through me and out of my eyeballs where I attempt to check its progress with rapid blinking. It is unsuccessful. I circle around, point the camera upwards as if doing so might tempt the eyes to re-absorb their water. In Tranent you do not show emotion, except maybe anger, or defiance, or defiant anger, or angry defiance. It took you to allow me to feel my feelings, to let them come and to let them be, to understand what each is and why it is there. I have always been someone who holds themselves back from life, who pulls back from experiencing the full raw force because it seems too overwhelming. I have been a prisoner to that, but you have set me free, you have taught me how to feel.
You feel, of course. You feel so much, and I am so proud of you for that. At the film's end you stand up and I think you want to make a sharp exit and start to head down the steps. Finding myself alone, I realise you are only letting the other two people in the row out, and you are retaking your seat. You sit, we sit, and then you cry, and I hold you, and I think what a wonderful, amazing person you are. To have such depths of emotion and to face them, let them wash through you, to paralyse, to raise. You are free. I am free. We are free, here together, in Falkirk Cineworld. Maybe it's not the place you might choose for such moments, but after all why not? When you are truly free then you can be anywhere and experience anything, you are open to life and life is open to you. Before leaving I catch sight of myself in a bathroom mirror, and I think back to a younger self. What would that younger version think, would he like what he saw, would he look forward to becoming the me that he saw reflected back? I feel that he would. And what of the future? What do I think of the still older me that will one day look back from another mirror? I cannot see, I only know that I feel I will like him too, that he is going to live out his life in all the ways he had always dreamed. He did it. He made it. He experienced true love and fulfilled his purpose in the universe. I turn from the mirror, and take another step towards filling his shoes.
Is it the dark roads that eroded that feeling, the two hour journey home? Is it the following day, walking alone on a former railway line? Back here, I do not feel free. I have not learned how to live here, alone. I hope to never have to. Yet I must for a while, and I must find something better than this emptiness while I do. I miss you, of course, and I feel that I don't want to do anything without you. And so I have nothing to do, except live out time, serve out a sentence, count down days until the time when next I will live. Candles burn in the black blanket night and Hawick is still again.
I am driving to you. The towns tick off automatically; Selkirk, Galashiels, Stow, Gorebridge, Newtongrange, then to the bypass and the interchange of motorway systems, A720, M8, M9, M90, and finally the bridge. Who would have imagined we would have our own little corner of the Ferrytoll, that I would come to love a multi-storey carpark because it is our point of intersection? "We are going to Edinburgh... we are going to Stirling... we are going to Falkirk..." These are your songs of the mystery tour, and I enjoy the enthusiasm and watching you work out the options. I like it best of all when you settle on something that is incorrect, and sometimes I think about how I might alter the route to make it seem like your thoughts are correct before pulling away and leaving you to start a new puzzle. Today though we are reasonably tightly scheduled, about as tightly as I'm likely to create. Life with you is not about the rush from A to B, it is to savour each moment.
I savour this moment. We are aboard the Bo'ness & Kinneil Railway, being pulled by a steam train. We are pressed together in the carriage, hands interlinked, the smoke is blowing back through the bushes that line the route, and when they break is outlined in shadow on the grass. It's not a scenic line really, but it doesn't matter. Nothing much really matters, and as I watch the smoke I reflect that there's nowhere else I would rather be; that's not on a steam train in Bo'ness, you understand, but to be wrapped up with you.
I had actually forgotten the connection. You mentioned it when we were standing before the scale models, when the tour guide had said the two Kelpies are called Duke and Baron. "I named him", you whispered, and then I remembered. Your dad had bred him, one of his many Clydesdales down the years, and you had chosen his name. Many years later he served as the model for Andy Scott for the left-hand, head-down Kelpie, the largest equine sculptures in the world. Sometimes things just seem to work out and all the stars align, as the guide explains that today we will be going inside the Duke sculpture. The light is bright and blinding, a blanket of cloud serving only as a kind of strip light across the horizon. "And in here is where Duke left us a present" the tour guide is saying, and I expect to turn to find a dung heap, bizarrely preserved and venerated, but of course I am wrong. It is one of his horse shoes. When you go over to touch it I am just in pieces. A daughter, a horse, a departed father, lines converging like the giant dome of the thing itself. It is joy, it is sadness, it is recognition and reflection, it is the power of emotion and of life itself, all coursing through me and out of my eyeballs where I attempt to check its progress with rapid blinking. It is unsuccessful. I circle around, point the camera upwards as if doing so might tempt the eyes to re-absorb their water. In Tranent you do not show emotion, except maybe anger, or defiance, or defiant anger, or angry defiance. It took you to allow me to feel my feelings, to let them come and to let them be, to understand what each is and why it is there. I have always been someone who holds themselves back from life, who pulls back from experiencing the full raw force because it seems too overwhelming. I have been a prisoner to that, but you have set me free, you have taught me how to feel.
You feel, of course. You feel so much, and I am so proud of you for that. At the film's end you stand up and I think you want to make a sharp exit and start to head down the steps. Finding myself alone, I realise you are only letting the other two people in the row out, and you are retaking your seat. You sit, we sit, and then you cry, and I hold you, and I think what a wonderful, amazing person you are. To have such depths of emotion and to face them, let them wash through you, to paralyse, to raise. You are free. I am free. We are free, here together, in Falkirk Cineworld. Maybe it's not the place you might choose for such moments, but after all why not? When you are truly free then you can be anywhere and experience anything, you are open to life and life is open to you. Before leaving I catch sight of myself in a bathroom mirror, and I think back to a younger self. What would that younger version think, would he like what he saw, would he look forward to becoming the me that he saw reflected back? I feel that he would. And what of the future? What do I think of the still older me that will one day look back from another mirror? I cannot see, I only know that I feel I will like him too, that he is going to live out his life in all the ways he had always dreamed. He did it. He made it. He experienced true love and fulfilled his purpose in the universe. I turn from the mirror, and take another step towards filling his shoes.
Is it the dark roads that eroded that feeling, the two hour journey home? Is it the following day, walking alone on a former railway line? Back here, I do not feel free. I have not learned how to live here, alone. I hope to never have to. Yet I must for a while, and I must find something better than this emptiness while I do. I miss you, of course, and I feel that I don't want to do anything without you. And so I have nothing to do, except live out time, serve out a sentence, count down days until the time when next I will live. Candles burn in the black blanket night and Hawick is still again.