Noticing

One day, last summer, we decided to have a wander around the woods at the back of Camperdown Park. Isobel drove us there. We left the car near the woods and walked by a dilapidated duck pond. Its’ water was yellowish green with algae. A few wary looking ducks sat by the pond staring at us. When we reached the woods, it was cooler, and everything glowed in darker shades of green. Our footsteps were silent on the rough path, and we could hear but not see birds cheeping. High above us was a two-tone jigsaw: bright patches of blue sky amongst leafy patches of green.  Looking up, we saw dozens of stars of sunshine through the top leaves. We listened out for every song from the invisible birds. Whenever one song ended, we listened out for the next one to begin, and it always did.

We were only a few minutes into the woods when a thunderstorm darkened the sky. We got soaked as we ran back down the path to the car. We drove home to change out of our wet clothes. Outside the window of our flat, the brightness of the blues and greens in the sky and in the garden diluted to grey.

After Isobel fell asleep on the bed, and after our cat curled up in a perfect circle beside her, I went through to my desk to write. Behind me, rain pattered lightly on the window, but I was listening for other sounds. I was listening for the special sounds of words to tell me about our walk on the long path. I knew if I could hear the music of the best words, I would know what to write. I have learned a few things about writing over the years. Things like – you should never strain to think of the right words, because if you strain, you’re not really listening, and you must listen, as we listened out for the next bird song in the forest: calmly and expectantly.

Does listening for the right words always work? No. Other sounds around you, perhaps in a busy café, can become too loud for you to hear words telling you about a memory or a story you want to write. Even in a quiet place, the mind-chatter of your own worries may get in the way. But, if you’re lucky and you’re not too stressed, you may hear words whispering, or even chuckling, and then the words take you back to a green expanse of forest which feels  exactly the same shape as calmness and hope. All you have to do then is write down those words. If you do, as I did, you may notice the tiny noise of your pen nib writing, as rhythmic as raindrops pattering on leaves, like the raindrops I saw falling out of the vast forest space where invisible birds sang, and each bird’s voice was as bright as a cat’s eyes.

And, I remember at one point when we were walking on the long path, I was looking up at the trees, and at the leaf patterned patches of sky, and then one, two, three very small raindrops fell into my right eye. And I knew those bright raindrops had already told me the words I would need later to say what happened. I knew I didn’t need to worry about words, I just needed to watch as the first raindrop and then the next and the next splashed into my eye. They must have been tiny drops, because they felt so faint, just a gentle touch, as if the sky had sent down a polite messenger to tell us to go back to the car, go home, because a lot more rain was about to fall. Or maybe the messenger was a bit of a joker, and it didn’t want to give us enough time to get back to the car, so we had to run. But that was okay, because we were laughing as we ran through the rain and the puddles.

As I sat at my desk, writing about our walk and about the downpour and running to the car, I had a peculiar feeling. I thought I’d heard something strange, but I did not know what it was. So, I listened to the sound of raindrops behind me on the window, a sound which is so familiar to me that, at first, I thought there could be nothing strange about it. But I kept listening, and I noticed there was something strange. If you listen very closely to the sound of rain pattering on a window, you may notice something unusual. Instead of hearing many raindrops, and you know there’s a lot because you can see hundreds falling and vanishing again and again out of the greyness, you only hear a small number, perhaps three or four raindrops at a time, repeated over and over, like tiny talons thrumming a little tune on the windowpane. Listen the next time you get the chance. The rhythm may get faster sometimes as a gust of wind blows the raindrops faster, or it may slow down as the wind ebbs. Either way, it’s not the sound of hundreds or thousands of raindrops you hear, it’s just a few. Try it. Listen closely. I’ve heard rain on windows many times in my life and I’ve always found it soothing, but it was only that day when I noticed you do not hear all the raindrops hitting the window.

When I notice things like the sound of raindrops on a window or invisible birds singing in a forest, I sometimes wonder if I’d notice so many ordinary amazing things if I didn’t have words to talk or write about them.

I remember one very sunny late afternoon. I’d been busy for several hours working and then shopping, and I decided to rest with a soft drink in a cafe in the city square, in Dundee. So, I bought a drink inside the café, and I took it outside to a small, round metal table. I had no intention of writing anything. I just wanted to turn over a few things in my head about work, and try to unwind. So, I thought a little about work, and I decided that I was finished with it for the week, and I started to read an article about the writer Cormac McCarthy in a copy of New Yorker magazine. I thought the reviewer hadn’t read the novels he was talking about, and he was talking nonsense. So, I put the magazine in my bag, and I began to listen to the voices of people around me, and the sound of fountains like fizzing lemonade, and seagulls crying out in the square. And I watched people wandering by, and I wrote a few words about the things I noticed. It felt like I was writing a kind of antidote to the bad writing I had just read in The New Yorker. It was bad writing not because the critic didn’t know a lot of words, he obviously did, but he failed to notice basic things about what he was writing about. For example, he had not noticed that one of the fictional characters he was talking about was a mathematician and not a physicist. It was like me writing about one of the seagulls in the square as if it was a chicken. If you’re going to write about something, and you want others to read it, you shouldn’t pretend to know what you’re writing about. It’s disrespectful to chickens or seagulls or characters in books to describe them as if you’ve never bothered to really notice them.

I had to remind myself I was in the cafe to unwind and not to get annoyed. So, I let my mind slide back to the sights and sounds around me. The clink of a spoon on a nearby teacup. The blue sky high above me. Then, quite suddenly, I thought:  the thing I love the most about good writing is when I read something, and it seems like there’s no space at all between what the writer is talking about and the words on the page. A flamingo is suddenly there, or a sailing ship, or a dark planet. Sometimes, in my own writing, I think I’ve written something like that. For a little while, a bit of the world steps out of the words. I looked again at the words I had written down, about noticing what was happening around me, and I scored some words out and I added a few other words and then I typed up what was left on my phone.  I shared that on Facebook – not as a story, or an essay, just a fragment of my world.

The scuffs and clacks of skateboarders in the city square mingle with the squeals of seagulls. The sunlight is Mediterranean. Small children and texting mums stroll by, across the big space. Three flapping, spinning boys in white shirts. Three skipping girls in pink. A woman with a broad back and large tattoos chats with a much smaller woman on a bench. The smaller woman’s lips are dark red from drinking out of a paper cup. She looks on the verge of laughing and keeps on looking that way without laughing for a long time. The way she looks seems appropriate, in this place of sunlight, faint echoes of children yelling, and a blessing above us all – of a blue sky and a great white and silver cloud, politely and silently and very slowly sailing by.

I read over those words again and I thought – that’s not bad, that’s quite like what I just saw and felt, sitting outside an ordinary Dundee cafe on an ordinary day, and, come to think of it, even the words I used were ordinary, but somehow, a bit of the world stepped out of the words and because it did, I noticed it as if for the first time.

I’ve long felt that words give me a way to notice things I may not otherwise notice or remember. Things like finding a chestnut underneath leafy waves and opening the little spiky apple-like case, and pulling out a shiny chestnut, and with a brush of my thumb, the chestnut looks as varnished as an expensive table. I don’t want that shiny perfection to fade, but I know it wouldn’t be the same if I tried to keep it shiny forever by varnishing the chestnut. I could take a photograph to try to preserve something of the shiny moment, and I often do, but that only makes a copy of the part of the moment you can see. It doesn’t capture how the leaves under the trees had a deep, wet woody smell that seemed to stretch back for centuries or maybe that was the effect of a slightly smoky aroma from the big fallen branches. So, I suppose when I write, I am trying to save some of those different bits of moments.

When the rain stopped pattering on the window, it suddenly felt quieter in my room than it had ever been before. I moved over to an armchair by the now silent window. Our cat, Nergal, appeared out of nowhere, and jumped up on to my lap, curling herself into a ball. I stroked her, and soon, she was purring loudly, and I felt the sound slowing down my heartbeat.

For a few moments, I tried to think again about words and saving moments through writing and reading, but I felt far too content just listening to Nergal purring to bother about concentrating. Yet, a quiet stream of words continued to trickle through my relaxed mind. And I thought – our words are not only about noticing and remembering. Sometimes, in our minds, words also allow us to accept that all moments fade away, and it’s enough just to be there at the time.

Harvey Duke