In any moment, we can all connect in our minds one thing with an almost infinite number of other things. To take perhaps an obvious example, we could notice – that blue flower over there in the garden, swaying in the gentle breeze, looks exactly the same as dozens of its friends, all blue, all the same size and shape, all swaying slightly in the breeze. Yet, a moment or two later, we look again and notice – all the flowers are different, slightly larger, slightly smaller, and three or four over by the tree have lost a few petals, perhaps brushed away by a dog snuffling and pushing past.
We see, we do not see, we see something else. One tiny dark spot in the sky suddenly becomes a starling, one of a swirling mass of dark spots, all connected to form a murmuration of starlings, swaying and dancing around the sky like a vast creature of disconnected connected dark spots.
Sometimes, I’d say no more than that. I’d not have time to write more, and I might send the words out into the world as a ‘fragment’. I’ve done that sometimes, with very small bits of writing, but no one seems to notice them – perhaps they are just too small. This time, I can say more, because I have time. Think of the smell and taste of a cup of coffee, early one morning in the Muffin Break in Dundee, sunlight filling the tables and chairs with the kind of silent hopefulness we always wish for in a morning. And suddenly many other café days glimmer. Or, I think of other quiet moments at college or school, days when anything felt possible. Or, it is very dark, but there’s a glimmer at the curtains, perhaps white moonlight or, no, it is a glow from yellow-orange street lights, and in the distance the dream-dragging drone of a car, and connections to other times flutter like orange butterflies, and you notice, in the café, a woman has just walked by in a bright orange dress. You notice the moment, but in a moment, you notice other moments, and you’ve no idea why – running along the beach at Broughty Ferry, or seeing a starfish in a rockpool, the water dazzling with sunlight stars. Coffee smells. The deep wood smell of an old desk, a dog barks, and a motorbike roars in the distance. The connections multiply. Each is only a breath or a few breaths long.
Several years ago, I was trying to write poetry, and I wrote in a journal, where I tried to understand what I was doing. ‘My poetry comes out of the sights and sounds around me. Sitting in cafes make me write like no other stimulus. There’s no end to the people and situations which can turn into words and patterns of words. Ideas – about time, love, fear, hope, death – creep into and around the concrete imagery, like ivy around a house. I feel the past and the future emerge from the flow of words.’
I still have moments like that, often in cafes, or walking through forests or along a busy street in Glasgow or gazing out of a train window, when I’m travelling through the countryside, noticing a thousand shades of green, and I see a horse in the hazy distance and suddenly I am on a horse, for the first time, in Skelleftea in Sweden.
Over the last few weeks, I have thought a lot about Time. I wondered if I could write a book about time travellers, and if I did, what kind of story would it be? I had a glimmer of an idea that travelling in time is like the act of simply imagining different moments, and I wondered if that connection gives me a clue as to how I could write a novel about something utterly fantastic but also so much a part of our everyday lives, that we all know about it.
When I write these fairly small essays, I do not have space or time to develop a long story. It’s not what these RAINSHINE pieces are for. If I can reflect just a few bits of the world and a few shiny ideas, that’s enough. In some of my short stories, I can do more. And, in a book of short stories or a novel, I have the time or space to write deeply about different people and their lives. Their moments become days, weeks, months and years. How a man survives being homeless, sleeping in a derelict building which was once a college, or how a group of misfits in Dundee are all connected to one another through time-travel, but I will need a few hundred pages to show how that happens.
The homeless man sleeping in the derelict Dundee college is a character in a short story I wrote a few years ago. As I write these words, that story is being printed in a book of short stories, called Days of Hope, and very soon the book will be on sale. It is my first book, but it will not be my last.
The group of Dundee misfits, connected by time-travel, are not fully formed characters yet, but they will be, and they will have their adventures and tell their stories in a novel I will write, called The Time Travellers.
My many millions of moments of writing in the past are connected in many ways to this week when finally, I can start to reach other minds through a whole book, just as I have reached other minds through small essays, like this one, or through a short story in a high street magazine, or a poem in an anthology, or articles on a website or in newspapers or magazines. Nothing however feels exactly the same as writing a whole book and seeing it sent out into the world. Making a thing which can become a series of moments experienced by many people.
Before I start time-travelling, I have other places to go in my writing journey. I have begun work on a second book of short stories, called DAYS OF STRUGGLE. It’s also set in Dundee and is about people struggling against fascists. I also have other books planned.
I wondered what to call this piece. I started with ‘Time & Writing’. Accurate, but a bit dull. So, I asked the universe for a better title. And the answer came back: A future is born. Yes, that seems better. That’s what it feels like.
Harvey Duke
