Listening as Thinking: On The Night is Long..…
Click to listen to full EP of The Night is Long
I’ve always been interested in the way that different forms of writing feed one another. The way that lines in books can become hooks for songs, and verses can become stories that are shared around the fire, sparking new ideas even within the most exhausted of minds. Different vines of creativity entangle and spread, feeding and nourishing, connecting all of us imaginatively somehow.
At the turn of the year, a friend of mine challenged me to write a song a month using an alternative approach to writing. Instead of ‘living inside’ my songs during the creation of them, reciting lyrics into the air when out walking the dog, or being the friend who cancels to spend entire evenings with her guitar, or the one at the dinner table lost in another world, I was encouraged to surrender to my subconscious and to create from a state of ‘flow’ rather than from a place of control. In other words, set a timer, pick up my guitar and welcome whatever my fingertips and voice put on the table. This at first made me feel uneasy but given that my writing well had recently dried up, I was keen to explore new ways of mining for material.
In adopting this approach to writing, what I discovered is that the mind becomes an aerial, tuning itself from one frequency to the next until it finds something that’s clear and interesting. I didn’t start any of these songs with a particular melody or lyric in mind. I simply turned the pegs at the end of my guitar until the strum sounded satisfying, fumbled my fingers into shapes until they found a chord to push off from, then allowed my voice to collect and bend and disregard little twigs of notes and assemble them into a melody with words that nested neatly within the soundscape.
At the time of writing the songs, I wasn’t entirely sure what they were about. In fact, it wasn’t until I became the listener, reflecting and analysing the songs later, that I found what wasn’t obvious. As though I needed to be patient until the songs could enter the room through the stereo speakers and command the entire space in order to understand the deeper message. I think of an artist stepping back to appraise the entirety of the canvas for the first time.
In this period of reflection, as the room filled up with song, I found my mind darting from memory to emotion to place, and this inspired me to return to the moment of composition, to write about the process. The whole experience has been a complete reversal of what I usually do. Where instead of something that I read or write informing the song, the song has served as the catalyst for the creation of something else.
Click to listen to the track ‘She Let’s Go’
There’s a small cardboard box the size of one of those cubed tissue boxes you get in the supermarket. Bright pink with a white sleeve that slides over the top, patterned with printed butterflies, each of their colourful wings splayed. They lie flat and motionless, despite the air all around constantly whispering ready when you are. When I tug the sleeve upwards and off, hints of stale jasmine and sandalwood and ylang-ylang puff towards me. Inside there are five small packages, each with five small handwritten notes. Just a glimpse of his handwriting quickens my blood. It’s so neat and precise. When he left I erased his number, threw my duvet in the bin, avoided streets and places where we’d been. It’s been over a decade now and yet each time I pack my life up, the butterfly box comes with me. A reminder that my heart can still flutter.
There’s an old gnarled tree in the carpark next to my house. In the mornings when I sip tea, I can see it through the glass, over the heads of the lavender, between the slats to the right hand side, just beyond where I usually park the car. I’ve watched it through the seasons, dying then coming back. At times I wonder how it still breathes, tarmac and concrete packed in around its roots, and trodden on over the years. In the winter, the tree feels like a stranger standing out there, alone in silence, cold and shadows. Yet each spring, buds swell and skins thicken and the branches become abundant with green, and just for a while, the tree nods and sways and bows, as though saying everything is as it should be. It leaves its sap, warm and baked on my windscreen. I really don’t mind. I quite enjoy the reminder; it is enough.
When the nights shrink back and the sun sits low in the sky, the tree’s leaves will drop, one by one, until every crooked, knotted, twisted bump of its body is exposed for all to see. It will let go of the very things that once gave it energy to preserve itself for the next season of life. Like a visible, vulnerable, essential exhale.
*
Last weekend I was on a yoga retreat on a small island, west of Mull. There were thirteen of us, some friends, most strangers. When we arrived, we were asked to plant a seed of intention for the days ahead. We ate meals of organic vegetables, offered one another silence, circled together for yoga. When we breathed our hands upwards from our toes to the sky I imagined my body to be the trunk of an old oak tree. And when I couldn’t hold myself any longer, my body hinged and my hands swooped downwards and I sighed my dead leaves to the ground.
Click to listen to the track ‘The Hanged Man’
I’m spinning around and round in a playpark five minutes from my house. I’m on an old roundabout—you know the ones made from wood with big slatted skirts and a ledge around the bottom to push off from. I lie with my back flat against the panels, my head skimming and knocking the hard centre bulb, hands clenched around the cold bars, holding on for dear life. A boy from along the road is pushing (his tongue is probably out to the side) the scuffing of his trainer against the concrete becoming harder, my heart is beating faster. Eyes to the sky. The clouds orbit the trees, blur the shrieks and squeals from across at the swings; they twist and turn and turn and turn until they spin off and, silence. And then there’s just me. Me and the big blue sky. There’s something else here that feels familiar. Way up in the blueness. A tug, a voice that isn’t mine. An invisible umbilical cord.
*
They have different meanings when they’re reversed, she shuffled and spread them neatly into a crescent before me.
What, like opposite meanings? I asked
Not necessarily. More like inverted meanings.
I turn the first card. A serene looking man with a halo round his head and beads of aquamarine around his neck, suspended from a tree.
That’s a card a many don’t want to get, she said her sky-blue eyes reaching into me. Not you though. For you, this card is perfect.
*
Years later I’ll sit in a circle with strangers, sage settling into the air. All of us there with yoga mats and refillable water bottles, journals and eye masks. Some will wear multicoloured trousers; most will be tattooed. Wandering eyes finding anchors in the smiles of strangers. Others sink down peering at fingers that fidget with toggles on drawstrings. The fair headed lady with the generous smile at the front of the room will say they have a beautiful way of showing us exactly where we need to go. And three hours later I’ll be lying on my yoga mat staring into styrofoam ceiling panels, the sides of my cheeks soaked with tears and a voice that whispers in me, ghostly and red.
*
The squeals from the swings tornado back from the distance and they fall down on me and my ears fill up—my body slips and bumps against the wooden panels and the boy runs off to kick a ball and my slippery fingers slide on the metal and the roundabout slows… and my head spins and I wait for a few moments to come back to myself. Back to the park, and the lane at the top that I’ll soon walk through to get to the street that my house sits on, where her arms will be waiting, as always, where her arms will be waiting.
Click to listen to the track ‘Rise Up’
When a caterpillar is born, it has everything it needs to become a butterfly. Data stored within its cells, waiting to become unlocked. There will come a time when she is ready for change. Wrapping herself in silk, she will protect her old body as it dies, shielding it from the outside world. When her remains turn to liquid, her enzymes will suck the information required for rebirth. Sip by sip they will take what they need from the information in the cells. Organs, antennas and legs. She will then push herself, slowly, carefully. And when her blood moves into her wings, she will take her maiden flight.
*
They say that the ‘memory’ associated with trauma is encoded cellularly, and unless decoded, can serve as a nucleus for physiological and psychosomatic illnesses. If only memories could be loosened and extracted from the body like bad blackened teeth. Identified, then analysed then rocked and ripped and released from the fibres. An excruciating yet temporary sacrifice for something so imperative for growth.
When I opened the envelope, it wasn’t the news I had been expecting. There, in black and white on thin cream recycled paper, everything began to make sense. The smog in my head, the dragging of the day, the dull toothache pain spreading over the bottom half of my body. All of the pushed down rage.
*
After I had unpacked my belongings, I flipped the buckles on the hard shelled case, a familiar brassy smell wafting up from the dog-eared maroon velvet and I picked up my guitar. The smooth neck cradled in my hand, sharp strings pressing into my fingers. A familiar chord sequence swirling round and around and around until a melody was thrown.
*
At the beginning of the year I took a course. It involved identifying various lies I have told myself, time and time again along the way. Then a prompt to rewrite my life story, with myself as the main protagonist. Now, as I sit in morning ritual, with pillows cradling my lotus position and a pashmina wrapped around my shoulders, I imagine my straight back splitting open and the iridescent, veined, unfolding.
Text and images by Nicola Madill