Balance

even seasons

Dear balanced reader,

The equinox has passed so we are touching the guide rope that leads into black, long nights and short days. We stand at the cave entrance, torch in hand, ready for our journey into the depths. This is our annual winter spelunk.

The leaves are reddening, moulting, and spinning into drifts. Soon we’ll be able to kick through piles of their rustling corpses, smiling at the sensory fun.

I’m away quite soon to sunnier climes — the Sitges Film Festival (or its full name: Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya) in Barcelona where I’ll be on a jury and gorging on speculative films (as well as Spanish food and… possibly… wine?) I’ll experience the discombobulation of walking off a plane into what is summer weather by Irish standards after going through the ritual of decanting my scarves and gloves. I will adjust!

I have not travelled as much as I would like in Europe because for many years I bounced between the USA and Ireland. I was always facing West not East. In the last decade or so I’ve roamed about more on the European continent, admiring their (usually) excellent public transport systems and the people’s linguistic facility. I was once on a jury for a Belgium comic art competition and one of my fellow jurors spoke five languages. I can barely strangle out a couple of French phrases before becoming red-faced and tongue-tied over the pronunciation. It makes all attempts to communicate a trial. This is something I’ve been working on in the past few years, thanks in part to Duolingo. How else can you learn without embarrassment? It is part of the process. Deciding I’m okay with sounding a bit foolish is a start.

It’s not helped by the fact I have an odd form of dyslexia (or a learning difficulty, I’ve never bothered figure out the exact problem), in which words don’t jump about exactly but I find them almost impossible to break down to sound out. Words exist, miraculously, in my mind as entire structures, not as compound pieces glued together. Each has a shape, and I reach for them instinctively as I write.

I’ve always been a terrible speller. I remember one teacher informing my mother that I had a high ability for reading and excellent comprehension but a poor grasp of spelling. She hypothesised that my mind was rushing on to the next word and wasn’t paying attention to the spelling. And that is partly the problem.

I lean heavily on spell checker, but I have memorised a lot of words. Yet, when I know a word and can’t spell it, I often have a comical series of interactions with the spell checker where I make increasingly wild guesses and it returns wrong suggestions with an amicable air. I swear at it and it shrugs. We would make a whimsical odd couple in a sitcom.

This is not helped by the fact that for me — when writing prose in particular — any old word will not do. My brain requires a specific series of words in every line. I think of it as tuning in to a particular frequency. Errant words throw off the hum of the sentence, the vibration of the paragraph, and the story’s entire chorus.

I remember describing a character as having ‘kerosene-red’ hair and no one understood what I meant, but it was utterly clear in my mind. I gave up on it during a round of edits, but now I probably would just allow the weirdness to remain in the story. Maybe there is one person in a thousand who will get what I’m trying to communicate. Editors, bless them, sometimes forget that texts are allowed warts and whorls, just like our ordinary skin.

We are cautioned about throwing off the reader with something too unusual. Yet, I often stop and re-read sentences or paragraphs of work I admire. I roll the words around in my mind, savouring their flavour. Sometimes you’re happy for your reader to push forward to the next plot point, and on other occasions you might lay out a little cheese and wine buffet on a table by a sun-dappled orchard where they can pause, inhale the aroma of the text, and devour it.

‘Ripe’ by Maura McHugh

For this week’s Substack I decide to do something a little different and produce a few short poems with a supporting image. All of them are inspired by the Equinox and this moment of pause when the days and nights are balanced, before the relentless swing to the next apex.

In today’s wellness culture balance is something that’s often touted as the goal. Overall, it’s a decent objective, because anyone who lives during a chaotic period will quickly disabuse you of any romantic notions about it being a creative spur. But balance is only achieved through experiencing motion. A ship on an even keel, even in calm waters, is able to adjust to the rhythmic pulse of the waves.

‘Pendulum’ by Maura McHugh

I produce all the images for this Substack myself. I love combing through the immense catalogues of public domain art online to find suitable accompaniments to my writing. I’m constantly inspired by the treasures I unearth, and regularly I am beguiled and derailed by the biographies of dead artists.

I imagine their days and years painting or creating work, sometimes centuries before I was born. Did they fathom that one day I could display their piece for a new generation? Will someone do the same for me in a distant decade?

Will my words be served up by algorithms to entertain AI in the next century?

Hello, future. I lived and thought and wrote.

As much as we crave certainty in life it has a habit of wrecking our expectations. You arrive at your work meeting, girded with the detailed explanation you’ve worked out for the past week in your head, which has been endlessly rehashed in the shower and on the commute, only to have the boss accept your proposal and you sit down with a mouth full of anticlimactic ashes.

Yet, the one time you do the minimum you are grilled about the minutia. Funny enough, you survive both situations.

Of course we need to prepare for presentations, pitches, panels, discussions, interviews, etc. Yet there’s an art to arriving with confident ease and a loose grasp on the material.

Change is the beating heart of the cosmos. We must pirouette to its melody.

‘Scales and Clock’ by Maura McHugh, photograph by anonymous

The above image was a gift from the search engine, called ‘Scales and Clocks’, photographed by anonymous in 1949, and in the Harvard Art Museum collection. I wrote the accompanying piece in response to the image.

I have often worked this way, and it is known as ekphrasis or ekphrastic writing. What a gorgeous word (I had to look it up as I have not memorised its spelling). It was first used around 1630–40, from the Greek ekphrá(zein) ‘to describe’ and also ek- ec- + phrázein ‘to speak’. ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats is an off-cited example.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
         When old age shall this generation waste,
                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Thus came to us two of the most quoted lines about the essential nature of creative work.

‘The Townley Vase’, a Roman marble vase (krater) of the 2nd century CE, now in the British museum.

October beckons! I’ll be back next week, but I hope to send a wee travelogue from Barcelona the following week.

I may find it a struggle what with the line-up of films, good company, and fine food. When I have such good fortune, I pause, appreciate the present, and say: thank you!

Before I go I must mention this fantastic anthology, produced under the supervision of legendary Irish journalist/broadcaster, Anne Doyle, called Tales of the Otherworld. It is out on the 28th of September from Gill Books.

It features my story, ‘Faith & Fred’, which was originally published in the Cursed anthology edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane.

In Tales of the Otherworld I’m in the talented company of writers from the late 18th Century up to the present day.

It is a pleasure to see a publisher paying attention to the enduring legacy of Irish supernatural fiction, and acknowledging those who continue to work within the tradition.

Adéu — as they say in Catalan!