Elsewhere

by Warwick Cairns on April 24, 2010

Telepathy, he said: that’s what writing is: telepathy.

I think in my last blog I quoted Aristotle: this time it’s Stephen King. You know, Stephen King of Carrie and The Shining and Misery and all those.

But he wrote this book, called On Writing, which I’ve just recently read, and in it he said that writing is telepathy in its purest form.

And when he said it, when he wrote it, it was back in December 1997 and he was sitting at his desk, under the eave in his house in Maine, and the snow lay on the ground outside. And he had not yet had the accident with the blue van that twisted his lower body through a complete quarter-turn and nearly killed him. Me, I was in bed when I read it, by lamplight. Night-time in my terraced house in Windsor – twelve and a half years on, or thereabouts. Just over three thousand miles away.

And I thought, You’re right there Stephen. Telepathy is what it is.

And you now, you’re where, and you’re when?

For years, if you took the train into London from Windsor, where I live, if you took the Paddington line, from Central station, you’d pass a strange piece of graffiti painted in crude white brushstrokes on a brick wall close to your final destination.

“FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND,” it said, “IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE.”

God knows what whoever painted it was on when they came up with that one; or what they were thinking of at the time. Or why they didn’t paint Baz Woz Ere, or F*** like any normal, self-respecting graffiti artist. Bloody art student or something, probably.

But it’s an odd thought, elsewhere.

Times and places where we are not.

Pretty much all of the known universe is elsewhere, come to think of it, and pretty much all eternity is, save for the little specks of here and now we briefly inhabit. And then we’re gone.

And of course we know that, on one level: we know that the world doesn’t revolve about us and our concerns; and that by and large it is indifferent to them, but still it’s one of the hardest things to get your head around – the world without us.

And how while you’re doing what you’re doing now, and while you’re thinking what you’re thinking now there are whole other lives going on in which you are nothing, and whole other places where you are not, and which you will never see, from the home of the man you pass each morning on the way to work furthermost depths of empty space.

When I was writing my third book, In Praise of Savagery, I found myself thinking about this at what you might consider to be the oddest and most inopportune moment.

I was writing about how, back in the 1930s, the young explorer Wilfred Thesiger and his party were making their way slowly along the uncharted course of the Awash River – a place from which no Western expedition had ever returned, and at a point at which sudden death could strike at any moment.

And I found myself struck by the thought of what was going on elsewhere, and by the coexistence of worlds and lives, each wholly unknown to the other.

This is what I wrote:

If you could look down on the world, and see everything that takes place upon the face of it, and if you were to pull your attention back from the small party camped by the course of the Awash River, further and further back, high above the tangle of trees at the water’s edge and the desert land spreading wide on either side, and if you were to pull back high into the sky; and if you were then to look over to the West, across the land and across the deep and churning ocean beyond, and the boats like toys in the heaving swell, and if you were then cast your eyes up to the North, to England, then as your glance passed upwards you would see, in time, a thin-soiled land of bare, broad hills, where sheep graze in stone-walled fields by thorn-trees bent double by the wind. And in a wide valley in the midst of this land, you would see a great industrial town, with three hundred and sixty huge brick-built cotton-mills – one for each day of the year, more or less – and all working both day and night; and all surrounded by row upon row and street upon street of smoke-blackened slate-roofed red-brick terraces with drying washing hung upon the lines strung across the cobbled yards and alleys between them.

It is spring. It is morning. The sudden rain, having passed, has given way to blue skies and wisps of white cloud, though the cobbles are still wet. And if you listen well, on this day, you will not hear the sound of machinery, as you might on any other day; and you will see, if you look closer, that the mills are still and closed; and you will see also that the streets of the town round about are not as you might expect them to be, and that the walls and the houses and the black iron lamp-pots are decked with boughs and flowers. Here, the white froth of blackthorn, there, the heavy scented hawthorn-blossom; and over the low house-doors you will see birch-branches wedged or fastened there, their rain-shower leaves trembling in the gentle breeze.

Though by the clock the working day has long since started, the streets are thronged with people; and by the gates of this mill here before you, a crowd of mill-girls has gathered, in their thin cotton frocks and their rough, home-knitted cardigans and their heavy lace-up clogs. And they have flowers in their hair: daisy-chains, they wear.

And one of these girls is my grandmother.

And somewhere in the crowds is a little boy of three years old in hand-me-down shorts two sizes too big for him: my father.

And they have set up a maypole in the street, and set a sapling on top of it, and they have hung it about with boughs and garlands

And there will be dancing in the streets of the town

And, just for now, the machines will be silent and in their place the town will move to a different pace, and the rhythm of the seasons and the rhythm of the land and the rhythm of those long since dead will once more assert itself.

For the most part, though, life is the mill and the mill is life.

Ten-hour shifts, three hundred days a year, each girl constantly pacing the floor between the machines, checking her assigned set of spindles for breaks in the thread, to be pieced together by twisting; for depleted bobbins of unspun cotton on the racks or creels, to be replaced; and for the build-up of loose cotton fibres on the machinery, to be cleaned.

Three tasks, endlessly repeated for all your waking hours.

We are all on a journey here, you and I, and have been all down the generations. We’ve been on this journey ever since we put aside our feathers and our flint-tipped arrows and left our homes in the dappled shade of the forests to follow the grassland herds, or else to clear the land and till the fields; and we have been on this journey still in the years since we left those fields for the towns and the cites, and made our lives in the mills, like my grandmother, or in the factories, like my father, or in a suit and tie sorting cheques in the upstairs machine-room office of provincial High-Street bank, like me. And where we are is where we are, and it’s where we’ve ended up.

And most of the time we do not stop to calculate the profit and the loss, or to look back at the way we have come and ask ourselves whether the way we have come is the right way, or whether the distance has been too far or not far enough, or whether it is too late to go back and pick up some of the things we have lost or left behind along the way.

But it concerns us nevertheless.

Warwick Cairns is an author, he lives in Windsor, Berkshire.

Beat will be following Warwick Cairns through these collumns on his journey to publication of new book “In Praise of Savagery”: the true story of a journey into uncharted land inhabited by murderous tribal warriors and ruled over by a bloodthirsty sultan – and the man, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who lived to tell the tale. And the story of Warwick’s journey, fifty years later, to a mud hut in Africa to visit him at the end of his life.