It’s October, October means Ray Bradbury

 

“He had never liked October. Ever since he first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.

But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.

There would be no spring."
― from "The October Game" in Long After Midnight

I was deeply saddened when Ray Bradbury died in 2012, part of my childhood died too. In my sadness I was thrilled to see writers such as the lovely Joanne Harris (who I also greatly admire as a writer who captures the essence of the human spirit) write with such love about him.

He was, in my opinion, incorrectly classed as a science fiction writer, but he wasn’t particularly. His short stories, especially in what might be considered his “pulp” era, in the 40s and 50s were masterworks of fiction, ahead of their time in both pathos and sometimes unsettling darkness.

He wrote about the human spirit, kindness, love, tragedy, adversity. He made you feel. Made you love his characters, root for them. The fact that his protagonists were often in fantastical scenarios or worlds, was secondary to his craft. And his craft was the poetry in his writing and the fullness of his characters.

I’ve read lots of “tips for writers” over the years, but when I write, I think of it in terms of a reader, what do I want to read? I don’t (usually) want to be left feeling cold, I want to be engaged. I want to read about people I care about, people I feel empathy for, people, who even if they fail, (because life is like that), I know that even with their flaws, their intentions were good, even if their actions sometimes were not. I am a child of comic books, of clear boundaries between good and bad, as I’ve grown older I’ve learn the hard way, there is no black and white in life, just different shades of grey. In a book though, you can create a world of your own. Sometimes these worlds are fairy tales, and remember fairy tales are often dark and bloody, but also sometimes these worlds are steeped in reality, of sadness, violence, or even the mundane, where someone plods through life, but dreams of something better, of true love, of breaking out of monotony, of fame or infamy. All of these types of stories appeal, because they concentrate on people and the anguish, joy, love and missed opportunities of their lives.

Bradbury captured that, the inner darkness, but also the light. There is always hope in his stories. Mostly…

The quote above came from a book I haven’t read yet, I saw it shared on social media, and thought “wow, I wish I wrote that” (I don’t have a highbrow alternative to that statement!). But it’s true. There is something tragic and beautiful about that passage which engages me, wants me to read more. So tonight I bought the book it came from, online, second hand, because it doesn’t appear to be in print.

Which leads me onto my favourite Bradbury Book, The October Country, a selection of dark, borderline psychological horror stories. October is a funny month, it’s the kiss of winter, the sleep of summer. I went for a run and saw the gold of dead leaves slowly falling from the trees and felt an ache of that loss. That soon the darkness will come, the remaining flowers will wither, the days will shorten further, and I will feel the gloom of the season. The October Country is a book for Autumn. I will read it again. As I often have.

I wrote above that there is always hope in his stories.. mostly. Well the October country has some deeply unsettling stories. Like Skeleton, where a man becomes obsessed and terrified of the bones within him. Or The Man Upstairs, a really quite disturbing story of a child’s detachment from reality and how he can moralise committing a heinous crime.. or was it a crime? The Veldt is a masterpiece, exploring technology yet to be developed, but also childrens’ propensity to explore, sometimes to their own detriment or those of their loved ones.

But there are also lovely gentle stories, like the Homecoming, which has the most heart wrenching ending, I wrote a little more about it here. There Was an Old Woman, who refuses to die, even when Death pays her a visit. He gets an earful. And the Emissary, about a bedridden boy who explores the outdoors through the adventures of his faithful dog.

Bradbury had depth and feeling. In one of his later collections, he was in his late 80s I believe, I remember a story he wrote about a mother who lost her son in an accident, but knowing her son had donated his heart, made it her mission to find the recipient. All she wanted to do put her ear to this man’s chest, so she could listen to her son’s heartbeat one last time. So simple yet such a beautiful premise. It made me cry.

Thank you Ray Bradbury, for helping me read, and making me want to write.

The secret in the book

 

A book of poetry has sat on my shelf for twenty years, I didn’t know about the secret inside it. Sometimes the books themselves have a story.

1937.

It took nearly eighty years for her gift to reach me, her hand written pencil strokes, folded up and slid into the water stained poetry book.

The one she originally had written it for, possibly had left her, or died in the war, or was not all he promised to be, a sweet heart no more.

Maybe she discarded it in pain, threw those words into the darkness, water damaged by rain and ending up in a box or a cellar,

Gathering dust and damp through those quiet dark years, then appearing, pale and dulled by time, surrounded by other dusty discards,

unloved and shoved together, in batteries of loose categories, on that shelf marked “poetry”, in that now closed shop on the steep high street hill.

It was then, decades later, that I caught her book, it arced into my arms. When I bought it, I was poor, the few coins I had, I used to rescue it.

I lifted the sad little thing from the shelf and took it home for a moment of pleasure. A smile is worth the money in your pocket,

a cursory flick through didn’t reveal the secret at first, but I got my smile, and though I was hungry, I was momentarily happy.

And after that first night, the book sat unread, on my shelf, for two more decades, and still those words, the dead woman’s words,

her copied favourite poem, longhand, on love and longing, spoken when she was in the spring of her life, youthful and red lipped, lay hidden,

Secreted, folded and unread on the Children’s Hospital note paper. But tonight, I opened her book and it fell gently to the floor,

Carefully I unfolded it, and I read it, and I was filled with her sadness and hopes for life,

I wonder what her laugh sounded like, I wonder whether she loved, whether she was happy and beautiful,

Nurse Jones, thank you, I got your gift, you poem, and though I am a stranger and we are separated by time, I love it.

© words and photos. Mel Melis 2015. (apart from the words of Nurse Jones and her hand written poem by Dinah Craik, from A Life for a Life, 1859)

I googled the words, turns out it was this beautiful prose by Dinah Craik from her 1859 novel, A Life for a Life

By Dinah Craik

    Oh, the comfort—
    the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—
    having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
    but pouring them all right out,
    just as they are,
    chaff and grain together;
    certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
    keep what is worth keeping,
    and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

Sunset

The trauma, gasping, born,

pulse pounding, louder than the land,

behind the eyes,

the churning heartbeat, constant, a memory,

heard through liquid,

seen, felt in the womb, secure

in the dark, when the water baby

first opens her eyes,

red is safety, red is mother,

red is sky at the top of the hill,

red is love, the warmth of the sun.

 

June 1st 2012, Mel Melis ©

 

Running helps with inspiration. It’s a form of focus, the physical aspects, although sometimes painful, take care of themselves. The pain and burning of lungs and muscles touch something ancient which takes over. The sound of my own bursting heart a metronome, a discipline to follow, the plod of feet, the gasps of breath. It’s consuming. It allows the mind to contemplate, to calculate, to wander. I don’t know, maybe it’s some sort hunter gatherer thing which switches on, something missing in modern life which we all need to do. I crave that solitude and near exhaustion up on the hills.

There was a prize to my run, I was running to the top of Pegsdon Hills, I knew the sun was dipping below the horizon. I could sense the light was a beautiful orange/red as I ran in the shadow of the long hill, on the wooded path. The chalk steps were steep, I haven’t conquered them yet, I’m not fit enough, I stopped half way up and wheezed, my legs burned and wobbled, I could hear my pulse and heart raging, blocking out all other sound, but I stumbled on, upwards, to be bathed in the suns orange light.

In retrospect it’s a bit contrived, but at the time it felt powerful. As I weaved my way through the ankle breaking rabbit holes and scrapes, through the squat hawthorns, their white flowers covering the thorns, pressed and wind battered against the hillside, I thought of childbirth. The experience of the run talked of this to me. From darkness into light, the trauma, the pain, the blinding bewilderment at being thrown from your secure environment into this new world.

But what a view.