The Swirl

And the writers who have freed me

Writing is life, said Jeannine Ouellette in one of the first posts I read of hers. Writing is life?, I wondered. I did not understand what she meant then, but I wanted to. I committed the idea to memory. It joined the swirl.

**

I sit down to write the thing that has been forming inside me these last few days. Though the thing I need to write today has been forming, it does not yet have form. As yet, it exists only in my mind’s eye, where it hangs like an abstract painting in motion. If you hooked Jackson Pollock’s Convergence up to a generator and watched the specks of paint animate and swirl before you, then settle momentarily into this shape or that, then rise off the canvas to dance and morph again, then settle anew, well, that is what the thing I want to write looks like inside me now, just before I sit down to write it. 

Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek, abstract-art on Unsplash

It is so beautiful in this unwritten state that it is almost a pity to write it. I fear my attempt to wrangle this thing into words will kill it, will underserve its innate beauty. Most difficult of all is where to begin. Which part of the swirling painting should I grab first and transform into words on a page? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? This choice feels terrifyingly consequential because, by choosing that dab of violet in the centre rather than, say, the yellow splatter that cuts the foreground, I am giving life to one form of the story while condemning to oblivion all the myriad versions that will never be. All those aborted stories. Is there a place where they go to die? Or do they remain somewhere within me? Do they dissolve into constituent parts and retreat to quiet corners of my mind, so that they might one day be called forth again to join a new swirl? Is a story a finite death? Or are its discarded forms reborn again and again so that a story is, in fact, as close to eternal life as a thing could ever be?

The swirl has been with me all my life. It was there long before I put pen to paper. As a child suffering abuse, the swirl was my escape inward. On the outside, I was a permanently embarrassed and anxious little thing, but on the inside I was all creation and joyful wonder - Alanis Morrissette songs swirled with the poems I read in Bunty swirled with the smell of rainy Atlantic fields.

I reached adolescence without a reliable safe/dangerous gauge and used the swirl to navigate friendship and sex. I would observe the other kids around me, how they touched and spoke to each other. I would turn those observations into precious globules of information and then watch as the globules began to dance. As they danced, they would swirl and flirt, and lessons would emerge from their mating: when a boy looks at you through half-closed eyes, he likes you. When a girl says your bag is ugly, she is jealous. 

Six months ago I could not have written the four paragraphs you have just read. Even as I write about the swirl today, as I externalise this most intimate experience, I fear your rejection: she sounds crazy, she's arrogant, she's so analytical, what a load of self-indulgent navel gazing! But I have learned that I can write despite my fear. Through my fear. Sometimes even with it. 

I have learned this lesson, and so many others, from those writers whose wisdom has penetrated the thicker parts of my shell, and become part of the swirl. Those writers who have helped me for no other reason than being able to, expecting nothing in return. I have at times felt that their kindnesses and insights have fed me, satiated my hungry soul, made me feel understood, inspired and educated me. Their lessons have been an elixir for my writing, but they have enriched my life as well. (Just as Jeannine had said - writing is life).

As the kaleidoscope of this post began to whirl in my mind, it was contaminated by an unwelcome daub of black: will the writers I talk about in this post think me too keen? Is it even kosher to link other writers as you are planning to do? Is this really an exercise in gratitude or are you after something else here? I remembered then Jeannine’s post on Writer Ethics & Literary Citizenship and how deeply it had resonated with me. Be unreservedly generous, she had said. Give it all away. Share, share, share and then share some more.

Jeannine’s post reminded me of why I am here, of my pledge to honesty and the hope that it will connect us. And so, I decided that yes, if I felt in my heart a desire to thank the writers that have helped me, then that was what I should do.

I hadn’t been writing long and had fallen hard in love with it. I was horny for it, all the time. I only wanted to write, and was grief stricken at the realisation that I would have to keep working my day job. I reached out to Jayne Marshall to cry about this. Jayne, I said, I need to write something that the world will fall to its knees for, a dazzling novel that will give me the economic freedom to leave this job and just be a writer! Ay, pequeña, I understand this pain, she said gently. But perhaps it is not you who wants your writing to be profitable. Perhaps it is the industrialised world whispering to you - ‘your art is only worth something if it makes money’. Perhaps it would be best to liberate your writing from that death sentence and write only for the sake of it? 

It is likely that Jayne shared this idea casually and went on with her day, but my day stopped. I reeled. Never had a piece of advice sunk into my soul in such a timely and profound manner. I did, indeed, feel immediately liberated. The swirl illuminated with a new, white light, as when you turn up the exposure on a photograph. I could see so much more now - I could write so much more now.

I began to write more freely. I had unburdened myself of the need to make a living from my writing. But my writing was still heavy. I did not believe it was good enough. I did not believe I was good enough. Not enough was a moniker that had been with me for a very long time, but I was tired of it. At a meeting of my writing group, I shared my first ever poem and told the others I did not know if it even was a poem. I don’t know what a poem should be, I said. What if I think it is a poem but nobody else can make any sense of it? The others had been writing longer than I. They acknowledged my fear, made space for it. Then Robin said ‘The poem can just be for you. It is still a poem even if no one else understands it. It is still a poem even if it’s only for you’.

I can just write for myself? I can just write for MYSELF! The swirl brightened again, golden highlights sprayed across the canvas, they danced and danced. I danced and danced.

From that day to this, I have striven to write for myself, only for myself and always for myself. This is not something that comes effortlessly. I am constantly checking in. Why are you writing this? Who is this for? Afraid it will sound weird? - Write it! Tell them about the swirl. Write more bad poems. Externalise the inexpressible. Try. Do it even if it’s impossible. Always write what you want to write. 

** 

The swirl is a living, breathing animal. It is porous and always under the influence. I could go on and on forever about the writers who inebriate the swirl: 

There is Gary Coulton whose recent piece on undiagnosed neurodivergence fed the swirl while I was thinking about this post about the swirl.

There is Maggie Nelson whose Argonauts grounded my holiday reading and showed me what writing can be.

There is Fontaines DC (these boys are fucking poets!) whose album Skinty Fia embodies Irish generational pain in a way that exactly mirrors the pain that is in me.

There is Beyonce whose fame and glamour interest me none but whose reinterpretation of Jolene moved me in ways I could not have predicted - the country-tinged trilling took me not to Nashville, but back home to Ireland, where soulful women have also always been repressed. (to trill: to rapidly alternate between two adjacent notes, creating a quavering effect)

There is Rita Payés’s and Elisabeth Roma’s interpretation of ¿Por qué llorax blanca niña? which has given me a way to lament, in my adopted language, the childhood abuse that was inflicted upon me in my mother tongue.

There is my mother, who couldn’t love me well enough, but who always tried, and whose very life she has written on mine, so that I might survive better than she has.

**

I hope, as always, that you have found something true for yourself in what you have read here.