getting there

Whilst once again wondering what to write, where to begin, how it will end, where occurs the middle by which I may commence—as it were—the tormented countdown to some kind of conclusion; in what direction I will launch my address, by which I suppose I mean, who will be listening—yes, yes, we have briefly squinted at these questions before, dwelt several times on their impact, in fact I have already perhaps tired you out with them—it occurs to me that writing is like travelling, a journey without end where plots pass like moving landscapes, slipping predictably from this comma, to this ellipsis…

Scenes zip by relentlessly like the back-end of towns: backyards littered with broken swings, bicycles tossed to the ground, thrashing threads of strung out washing and sheds surveyed from the window of a train. Against the rhythmic clatter of train wheels on tracks, travelling assumes a kind of suspended disbelief, neither arriving nor leaving, crying or laughing, whispering or screaming; vista, town, ocean and mountain pass like plots packed with characters waiting to be cast, unfolding like a thousand stories waiting to be told. I love this no-where-ness of transit.

This getting-there of travel is a kind of floatation—the suspension of arrival—and the pleasure is the pleasure of reading not terrorised by foreclosure. Getting-there is so pricked with excited restlessness, like the book one cannot bare to finish, like the narrative, so ensnaring that one has to look up, stop reading, in order to release the delicious pleasure contained within the words so sweetly stitched. So entangling can be its spell that one despairs of the release wrapped up in the last sentence, afraid of the abandonment and the loneliness after the last word is cast, no further page to turn, but the cover left to close.


The suspended fictional world cruises us, then seduces us so completely, in so brutal yet enchanting a manner, that to finish is like arriving, like tumbling—at our destination—from it’s beguiling net, only to dream of travelling-on once more, wistfully into the night, the patina of the city’s dancing lamp-light calling us to suspend once again, and float away to that other place, away to Never-Never land, to The Wild Wood, to the Emerald City, without the muting, dulling anticipation, without the arrest that foreclosure affords.

Mummy, are we there yet?
Mummy, can you tell me a story?
Mummy, can you read it again?
Mummy, I don’t want it to finish.

And as the various combinations of words and characters in our favourite plots never fails to give pleasure so long as they endure, so their repeated telling only reassures and cocoons us, casts its inspiriting world of images, and like our journey, it’s all about the getting there not the arriving. It’s about the writer’s ego-centric pleasure in the bric-a-brac of telling. We don’t mind how often the tale is told, just keep on telling it.

And like the authors of our favourite blogs, perhaps it is not the what they’re telling us that we listen to, but how they get there, the chosen mechanism of their transport, the grain of their voice.

We love getting there; it’s just that we don’t know where we’re going yet.