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Authors: Alan; Sillitoe
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metaphorically or otherwise, of that erstwhile friend of mine who flipped on the gas-taps, I have to ask sooner or later: âWhere do I begin?â
It comes as something of a shock to realize that I have already done so. The path to truth is well advanced, though little has been said. The mists of uncertainty show how far and wide I have strayed, but broken vision is a promising phenomenon, in that the fabulous can be perceived in it, something that never comes from an open sky or a precise landscape. When all things around stand out bright and clear, there is little possibility that oneâs own personal truth will take shape.
The first stage is over when the taps are tightened in a clockwise direction. One can act when the maps are burned, the plans forgotten, when schemes have disintegrated, and the obscuring particles close in. One does not get an inch closer to truth by the age-old tactic of self-murder. To end life out of despair means that one hasnât even started to sift the galaxies of truth-dust.
One can talk continuously for fifteen hours, and cause whoever listens to commit suicide, but still not touch the central core of boiling fire, nor its periphery, though oneâs whole life-story might have been through the wringer.
Yet out of this mist a story of sorts may be forming itself, a personality emerging from the amniotic fluid.
21
The fluid is gritty, covers a vast area, and goes deep. Sometimes it floods my mouth with a foul taste. But I wonât indulge in autobiography, that flagrant telling of my own flat tale. I refuse to write the Madmanâs Guide to Europe, or compile a history of the Hundred Years War in ninety-nine pages, though if I scribble about my grandparents and their children I cannot be forced into birth for the crime of going back on my word.
The reliability of these sentences is more uncertain than any map, and are only to be used with extreme unction. But caution is a bad dream, a high-waisted lady with a withered bust holding in her left hand a flower for Miss Midnight. Is a desire to tell the truth merely a wish to burn oneself prematurely out?
At dusk the grey-white belly and wings of a house-martin flits by the window. The young are being fed in their mud nests under the eaves. Once you leave home, youâve got no home: all of them fly south in the autumn, though next year they will return to the exact places in which they spent the summer, except those who die on the way.
Just as each of the numerous families of house-martins is different, to judge by their talk and their coming and going, so can every person say, âOurs is a unique family because there isnât another one like it.â That may be the only good point about such miniature para-military dictatorships in which the head of it is imprisoned even more firmly than the rest, though he at least has the dubious pleasure of wielding power. But until the New Age dawnsâand its approach has not yet been reported from any distant planetâthe importance of families can hardly be overrated.
I know more about the antecedents of Mary-Ann who married Burton, than my other three grandparents, though the information came to me only when both Burton and his wife had been dead twenty years.
A woman from Leeds wrote me a letter saying that in a certain novel of mine she had been struck by amazing coincidences that related to her own life. It turned out that the grandfather described in the early chapters resembled a relation of hers called Burton, who she used to visit with her mother as a child, and also later in her teens.
She described Burton, her motherâs uncle by marriage, as a tall, thin, dour man who seemed to have a cast in one eye and was always called by his surname. His family lived in fear of him and, being a child, she also was terrified of such a man.
The last time she saw him was in the late 1920s when he went to Leeds and stayed two nights for the funeral of Mary-Annâs
It comes as something of a shock to realize that I have already done so. The path to truth is well advanced, though little has been said. The mists of uncertainty show how far and wide I have strayed, but broken vision is a promising phenomenon, in that the fabulous can be perceived in it, something that never comes from an open sky or a precise landscape. When all things around stand out bright and clear, there is little possibility that oneâs own personal truth will take shape.
The first stage is over when the taps are tightened in a clockwise direction. One can act when the maps are burned, the plans forgotten, when schemes have disintegrated, and the obscuring particles close in. One does not get an inch closer to truth by the age-old tactic of self-murder. To end life out of despair means that one hasnât even started to sift the galaxies of truth-dust.
One can talk continuously for fifteen hours, and cause whoever listens to commit suicide, but still not touch the central core of boiling fire, nor its periphery, though oneâs whole life-story might have been through the wringer.
Yet out of this mist a story of sorts may be forming itself, a personality emerging from the amniotic fluid.
21
The fluid is gritty, covers a vast area, and goes deep. Sometimes it floods my mouth with a foul taste. But I wonât indulge in autobiography, that flagrant telling of my own flat tale. I refuse to write the Madmanâs Guide to Europe, or compile a history of the Hundred Years War in ninety-nine pages, though if I scribble about my grandparents and their children I cannot be forced into birth for the crime of going back on my word.
The reliability of these sentences is more uncertain than any map, and are only to be used with extreme unction. But caution is a bad dream, a high-waisted lady with a withered bust holding in her left hand a flower for Miss Midnight. Is a desire to tell the truth merely a wish to burn oneself prematurely out?
At dusk the grey-white belly and wings of a house-martin flits by the window. The young are being fed in their mud nests under the eaves. Once you leave home, youâve got no home: all of them fly south in the autumn, though next year they will return to the exact places in which they spent the summer, except those who die on the way.
Just as each of the numerous families of house-martins is different, to judge by their talk and their coming and going, so can every person say, âOurs is a unique family because there isnât another one like it.â That may be the only good point about such miniature para-military dictatorships in which the head of it is imprisoned even more firmly than the rest, though he at least has the dubious pleasure of wielding power. But until the New Age dawnsâand its approach has not yet been reported from any distant planetâthe importance of families can hardly be overrated.
I know more about the antecedents of Mary-Ann who married Burton, than my other three grandparents, though the information came to me only when both Burton and his wife had been dead twenty years.
A woman from Leeds wrote me a letter saying that in a certain novel of mine she had been struck by amazing coincidences that related to her own life. It turned out that the grandfather described in the early chapters resembled a relation of hers called Burton, who she used to visit with her mother as a child, and also later in her teens.
She described Burton, her motherâs uncle by marriage, as a tall, thin, dour man who seemed to have a cast in one eye and was always called by his surname. His family lived in fear of him and, being a child, she also was terrified of such a man.
The last time she saw him was in the late 1920s when he went to Leeds and stayed two nights for the funeral of Mary-Annâs
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