It is one thing starting a new life in the first flush of omnipotent ambition, when the constellations are laid out in tempting rows, awaiting your pleasure. Another altogether when the breath of discord, disappointment, disillusion has fused through your veins, and discoloured your blood; leaving, in its sooty passage, a black choked chimney.
But gradually, through sheer stubborn persistence, in the jaws of your unwillingness to move, stale repetition of once-upon-a-time thoughtless motions, forever widening the gap between it and you, in matchstick stages; a fragile pattern emerges, with no foundations, the semblance of a floating name, barely distinguishable in the enveloping mists, and as ephemeral. All your instincts long to crush, to pull down to the ground, to trample on, this skeleton taunt, feebly etched in the sky, and as wavering as an infant's first pothooks. But as often as you do - and my vision was precariously on the verge of submersion - it means starting all over again, from the grinding beginning.
Slog, plod, shuffle, shamble: boot by blunt-toed boot, dragging the convict's clanging chains, round and round the trodden yard. And so it goes on: up, for a gasping, breathing spell. Down, for an eternity of drowning. The trouble with drowning is that it is always too temporary; never lasts long enough; and oh, the tearing awakening! The never, never agains. The solemn vows, the hell of the hook that fishes you out; the ardent protestations of eternal abstinence.
As to the methods of drowning, there are, broadly speaking, three main categories: drink, drugs, sex; or all three together; though they are apt to obliterate each other. Drink: I must talk fast, or drink will be talking about me; it is either good or bad, and when it gets bad, lay off.
Drugs: one of the few vices I have not dabbled in, owing to lack of opportunities; except for the bliss of sleeping pills, which I wish would prolong night into day, and day into night.
Sex: a distastefully more ticklish subject, on which I am sure I have no right to speak, not that such a small consideration will stop me plunging into it up to the quivering nostrils. I can never determine, first of all, what sex, if any, I am; though I am led to believe there is no doubt, in some people's minds, as to my super bitchery. I should prefer to call it pitting of wits, in cases of dire necessity. I have the overdressed townsman's gaucherie, when he is conducted round a farm, up to his knees in dung, and prods the pigs' pubic backs, with a mixture of hysterical affability and distaste; when I am brought, battling as usual, face to face with this very singular, slightly farcical, occasionally nice; and, once in a blue moon, unselfconscious, strange phenomenon. It is so hard to keep one's mind on the matter at hand: it keeps wandering off; into the larder in search of something tasty to eat: busily planning a new incomparable dress; or merely gazing detatchedly at the heaving disconnected object getting so puffed up over so insignificant a pussy trifle,as far away, intimately, as the legendary goat-legged satyrs. It is most tantalizing; and not an effective antidote.
I am afraid I have lived too long in this flat, sour, watery country, which suffers from a chronic indigestion of the emotions: they get stuck so far, in a tight ball of heartburn, and unconditionally refuse to be shifted backwards or forwards without an earthquake of change; to be able to respond in the approved manner. Hence the predilection of the English for going abroad, and taking an emotional loosening-up course; to liberate that precious ecstacy which has to be bottled and boxed into words and poetry, in their own grim homeland. No doubt creating our noble traditions, etc.: but not such enormous fun to live among.
The brute facts are, whether you like them or not, and nobody gets drunk on the smell of work, that sweated labour is the only authentic builder. All the intervening diversions or dissimulations only serve to put off the necessity of picking up the humdrum tools yourself; brush, broom, shovel or pencil; and fashioning an object out of your own muddied dregs; even if it is no more than a fumbled one-eyed potato.
That is why I am so sceptical of the holiday abroad convention: 'Just lie in the sun, dear, and relax;' how easy to say; but as soon as ask me to relax as ask a cork bobbing in the tempestuous waves to give up its futile efforts and sink tranquilly to the bottom of the sea.
Which accounts for my morbid perversity in staying in this moist, smothering, lost bog-hole, stiff with beautiful inertia, romantic nostalgias; and crass lazy people: they are sunk between the worship of pennies and the decadence of initiative. Even loveable people, some of them; but these are the exceptions to the narrow, sly, keen, proddng-fingered, always counting the cost Welsh. Their most compulsive motive is fear: fear of the elements: key the door quick against the thieving night; fear of the neighbours: what will the neighbours say? precisely that; fear of enjoyment: they roll the world round their lascivious tongues with condemnatory gusto.
Death alone is not feared, but courted as a blossoming bride, ardently coveted.
Weddings are tame domestic occasions compared to the impassioned fuss and orgiastic celebrations of a funeral; and whatever worm unsung in begrudged life dies, he is immediately held aloft, before shamed, healthy mankind, as a pedestalled example of unimpeachable sanctity. And if, more gloriously still, he has left behind him a glorious token of his identity and riches, his glory exceeds all bounds.
But there is a pronounced stress and prodding approval on the behind, under the counter and side-door furtiveness. It is the ultimate peak of genteel nicety to carry babies behind; and, as with the figure deformations of fashion, it can actually, by the sheer zeal of aspiring desire, be done, thus obviating the unseemly, crudely unapologetic, almost boastful bulge in front. And if a friend buys a new 'costume', the imperatively correct uniform, preferably pin-striped, or shiny black or 'navy' for all social occasions in these pastoral parts, their first reaction withour a glance at the showy, frivolous front is: 'Let's see the back.'
Here: in this city of lying down lying, in this city of unheard laughter, in this city of deadpan Laugharne, I chose of my own free will, if indeed I had any will at all, to stay. I had not the courage yet to brave foreign intrusions into my damp secluded cave of pampered private dragons. Not the harsh dazzlement of Italy, exposing me, probing into me, telling shameful tales about me: not yet.
I did it, not with any dazzling idea driving me forward, the very reverse: blindly, intuitively, as a sick animal seeks the concealing shade of hedges, the leafy obscurity of ditches.
On my long dreamwalking tramps into marshy estuary wastes, with always a tickling cobweb of moisture forever brushing over my face, I had to fight, with all the snuffed might of my scattered wits, the almost voluptuous desire to lie down. To sprawl onto some grassy sea-shaped bank, cast up, forgotten driftwood, and never get up again. My feet visibly dragged; as though weighed down with iron boots, and my skin shrank and puckered as though with the gooseflesh of entering unknown torture rooms: shrinking with pain is not an invention either; in tuned anticipation of the soundlessly drumming, repercussing blows. My head tossed momentarily above the battering waves, like a horse's frantic mane craning towards the shore that was no longer there; and my bleary, detatched salt-drenched eyes failed to be detatched at all any more.
How far the physical is governed by the mental state had never been rammed into me so brutally before, and the necessity, if indeed there was any necessity in prolonging this tail between the legs of life, of forcing the inanimate body, with steady kicks of willpower, into imitation life.
Had I gone away, as I intended, I could have preserved my reputation of pride and dignity: of the 'perfect Lady', their highest term of praise. Such a one, it can be imagined, stranded alone in a vanishing declivity in the hills among the God-forsaken estuary-haunted barbarians, does not have a large canvas of scope or opportunity, on which to spread herself. I wondered what she was supposed, but it was more a case of permitted, to do, according to their rigid dictates. A gentle spell of desultory gardening, inelegantly stooping in hand-woven tweed skirt, strung about with raffia baskets, chamois leather gloves and secateurs, vaguely weeding the herbaceous border, and clipping at random the rose beds. (Attacking a bed of nettles with a swiping scythe; rustily, bluntly pointing in every direction but the right one, slashing fearsomely at my ankles, at impeding tree trunks, at rebelliously rising fibrous roots, in a fury of lust to down the nettles in peril of death, was more my kind of penance of diversion.)
Or delicate water-colours of detailed split-in-half, botanical plants, or wishy-washy pale blue running waters with anaemic reflecting sunsets merging mauvely into them. And in the evening, whist drives; the could not
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