33 abandoned stories

Movie of the week, because  I don’t know

This week’s post, along with the upcoming 32 or so, is inspired by a photo editorial roaming around the internets, showing pictures of 33 abandoned places around the world. I found it through Etgar Keret, another writer I’d like to write like…like whom I’d like to write..with which…  From his Facebook page, after I had read his book Suddenly a Knock On the Door from cover to cover, and took on board his suggestion that a story or script might be written about each place. It will be as much an exercise in imagination as an apology to the stories, ideas and poems I’ve abandoned, especially lately, due to lethargy and solipsism. It seems appropriate in the year after the apocalypse.

As much as I’d like to skip to the train depot one, I’ll follow the article’s order, so here is number 1.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-33-most-beautiful-abandoned-places-in-the-world

Christ of the Abyss at San Fruttuoso, Italy

Padre Antonio wrung his hands in the vestibule and shuffled his feet before reaching the pulpit. When he looked up, it was just as he expected. Hardly anyone present. The two members of the congregation were trying to hold on to the last bits of the miracle, and Padre Antonio didn’t know what they expected him to do.

Weeks ago, he was awoken at the break of day by his curate, asking him to come outside. In the garden, the fisherman’s moustache twanged with expectation; he explained that he and the other fishermen had seen something from the boat. At first, they had thought it was a large fish, but there could never be such a large fish in these parts, and the shadow didn’t move, even though they sat in the quiet dawn for an hour, staring at the water.

“Was the shadow bigger than your boat, Alessandro?” Antonio asked him.

“It was bigger than two boats, Padre.”

Antonio looked into his eyes for signs of inebriation, but they were just as sober and frightened as they had been minutes ago.  At the gate he met the other fishermen and a crowd that had formed from the village, and they all set out together for the shore as the sun came up. Alessandro was told to bring someone on the boat with him and go back to the spot where they had witnessed the shadow. Maybe things would become clearer in the light of day. Antonio waved to the boat that drifted on the clear water and turned the see the whole town congregated on the beach, looking at him expectantly, some wringing their hands. He made a decision and felt the sun’s warmth embrace him.

“Figli miei,  I ask that we, gathered here on this most blessed day, bow together and give thanks. I had a dream during the night that San Fruttuoso del Sottomarino came to whisper in my ear, as I sat on this very spot, that he would bless our town by inserting a statue of our Lord within our waters. That our sea may be blessed with an abundance of fish, that our trade with our neighbours might soar, and that our textile industry might take a new turn for the better, all its workers happy in the new prosperity, contributing to the well-being of our happy village. I ask that you join me in prayer, that we give thanks to San Fruttuoso for a new age of prosperity and productivity for all.”

When he lifted the veil of his eyelids, Antonio looked on a sea of faces rejoicing, and he joined his palms together peacefully.

“But Padre, how do we really know San Fruttuoso put a statue of our Lord in our waters?”

Antonio went up to Felipe, the bar-owner, and smiled into his calm eyes, then placed a kiss on his sylvan forehead. Alessandro’s boat headed back towards the shore.

“My child, we must believe. If we believe in the statue at the bottom of the sea, San Fruttuoso will bless this wonderful village, and give us all that we desire. Our saint appeared to me in a dream and brought to me the vision of what this statue will bring, and San Fruttuoso doesn’t just go around placing statues underwater, volente o nolente.”

Antonio went to meet the fishermen, and locked eyes with Alessandro.

“And did you see our Lord underwater, my son? Did you see his arms outstretched amongst the fishes?” he smile-shouted.

Alessandro gazed at the happy crowd, who seemed distracted and wasn’t paying as much attention.

“Yes, Padre, I saw the statue of our Lord. And more fishes in the sea than I have ever seen in these thirty or so years I’ve been a fisherman. But Padre, how did this happen?”

And Padre Antonio put his arm around Alessandro’s shoulder and explained about his vision, and they all went to Lucia’s cafe to celebrate with gelatto.

From that point on, the village prospered, and its citizens became productive and successful just like in Padre Antonio’s vision. With the extra prosperity and productivity, they built three more churches, one big one, and two not so big ones. Eventually, they became too busy  exporting their textiles to neighbouring countries, and cultivating their fish delicacies for the growing number of tourists to go to Lucia’s cafe, or Felipe’s bar, or hang out at the beach making dresses or sweaters for their sweethearts. Or even fishing. They began importing fish because the fishermen were tired from all the fishing, so they began working in the numerous new churches, making San Fruttuoso del Sottomarino relics and accessories for their houses and for the tourists.

Felipe was sitting alone at his bar, waiting for Fidelma, listening to his records. Nobody came in anymore, and he had nothing to do, but sit around listening to records, occasionally going fishing by himself. He got up from his stool and shut the lights and went outside, just as Fidelma was coming in.

“Where are you off to?” she asked him.

“I’m going to go see this statue that our blessed saint has put in our waters. Maybe have some visions of my own, you know?”

Fidelma tried to keep up with him on the shore, telling him he was being silly, and to come back. But Felipe was already taking off his clothes, and went into the water with an LP he had snatched on his way out of the bar. Something to lean on, in case he got tired swimming. Fidelma watched him go in, and swim until she couldn’t see his shiny back in the moonlight anymore. She sat on the sand and waited, then she lay down and waited. When she opened her eyes, the sun was shining and her feet were wet. Felipe hadn’t returned, but she didn’t cry because he didn’t like people crying. She found pieces of algae that she began to weave together, and waited a bit longer.

Felipe didn’t return the next day either. At the end of the week, they held a wake at the bar, and avoided the church for a while. Fidelma opened up the bar at the end of the month and some of the kids in the village came in to learn weaving and listen to music.

Years later, some travellers were scuba-diving off the coast of San Fruttuoso, looking for the lost underwater statue. They found the ruins of the old city, and fishes swimming happily around some sort of moss-covered vinyl.

Landscapes and renditions

Comedy/Food/Travel film of the month – comedy hero Maeve Higgins whose Irish Times column warms the cockles of my noggin

 

The month started off innocently enough, entertaining American tourists at Captains Bar with resident troubadour Neil Thomson, then Hugo Chavez went and expired on my birthday, I was further initiated into the local comedy scene, with at times surreal effects -like speaking about jam and death to an audience comprised of three people on a couch, during the course of which night the headlining act dangled from the chandelier (I think) – and I rambled Holyrood Park in the spring snow, bellowing my rendition of “Stormy Weather” in preparation for the jazz club’s singing night, only to be met by a  group quietly enjoying the scenery.

My friend from Oxford encouraged me to write a piece for Europe & Me magazine, of which she is an editor, so I’m including it here, as  I’m far too busy being a down-and-out lassie to make new observations. Except to say that the best place to hear Fats Waller and Hungarian folk is in a cathedral after mass, as I discovered in the tremendulous St.Giles.

 

Foibles of Freedom

“Placelessness and rootlessness do not create contentment, but despair.”

–Paul Kingsnorth, Real England; The battle against the bland

Upstairs the Waverley Bar down the cobbled path of Edinburgh’s High Street, a group of storytellers meets every month to share tall tales and true adventures. The patchwork, shadowy room is conducive to gather-round-me-children revelry. On my first encounter with the place, the featured guest was raconteur Andrew Steed, who told a story of reincarnating Robin Hood as a teenager and foraging with friends in a north England forest, only to be found and struck down by rangers, the Sheriff of Nottingham and his deputy. He changed the end of the story so that Robin and his merry friends stood back and laughed while a branch reached out and lifted the sheriff up in air, and then they made their daring escape. The epilogue to the story was that we have the power to change and create our own stories, and that we mustn’t limit ourselves with what we perceive our stories should be.

I set out to do just that a couple of years ago, to brave the unknown in creating my own story, when a particularly strong wanderlust hit me in my fairly cushy, busy existence in Vancouver, Canada. While freedom and how to go about getting it had been a main source of anxiety for a while, the notions of belonging, in that I didn’t feel I did, and national identity, had been pestering the noggin, and I ignored them – except to resign myself to the fact that I couldn’t really belong anywhere and I couldn’t really claim any national affinity. Instead, I would belong everywhere. I would be a traveller without having to conform to the constrictions of a homeland and a home. To drive the point home, I would occasionally mutter under breath that line from the ending of The English Patient, where the nurse reads from the dying man’s scrapbook, “We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps,” imagining myself to be saying it to a passport officer or government bureaucrat, sufficiently smugly.

Originally from Albania, that long-suffering piece of Balkan land struggling with its own boundaries and identity, my family immigrated to Canada when I was eleven. Had I misplaced a bit of identity, maybe related to Europe, along the way that I’d never got round to recovering? It could have sparked my need for self-exile. Whatever the case, I never felt compelled to return to my country of birth, and felt more of a tourist when I eventually returned for a visit. Only an anthropological interest in our rich folklore remained. I went to Ireland instead.

I was a Canadian citizen six years after emigrating from Albania, but never developed an attachment to the new homeland. It may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy; after a few weeks in Ireland on a working-holiday visa, I felt at home because I imagined I would long before I’d decided to go, visions of it looming in my mind: reading Joyce when I could muster the courage, gorging on comedy like Dylan Moran’s, avoiding going out on Fridays because of the Celtic Connection programme on the community radio. I was going to be a poor poet in Dublin’s streets, like in the folk songs, and hang around village bars with fishermen, making vague references to the crops and the high seas. After I’d been in the country a few months, I found a copy of Pete McCarthy’s McCarthy’s Bar in a hostel, another soul struggling with his roots. Raised in England, he spoke of feeling the ancestral connection to his Irish roots as a form of genetic memory that drew him back to the homeland. What genetic memory drew me, who had never touched on the Emerald Isle before this? My identity was being created anew, piecemeal, comically initiated in bureaucratic work in Dublin, the pubs where portraits of Kavannagh, Joyce, Yeats and Wilde look on the characters they’ve created and been created by, peacefully meditating around Lough Gill in Sligo, the joy of getting a seat by the window in the bus’ upper deck, the pathways and coastline of West Cork. I had identified with Ireland’s landscape and its people, so it would serve as my adopted homeland and its story would weave into mine.

As a result of which, I felt homesick for the first time in my life when I had to leave last year. I was reluctant to diagnose myself as such, as the concept of home was still nebulous, and chastised myself for wrong sentimentality. If I was going to be free there couldn’t be any overbearing attachments.

Reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England recently, I realized it could be that I had deprived myself of a landscape. Kingsnorth laments a gentrified world,that a continuous connection with our landscape is essential to identity and happiness, and we create our stories from that connection. A lot of cultures learn their behaviour based on the prescriptions of the anthropomorphised nature around them – the Athapaskan people of Alaska avoid certain foods and monitor their noise levels to appease the glaciers. By writing my story in rootlessness, am I depriving myself of the tools of storytelling, namely the connection to a landscape? Furthermore, in a globalised world, the effects of gentrification have made it difficult to uphold cultural characteristics, making the whole thing more confusing. Kingsnorth talks about the difficulty of preserving a place’s idiosyncrasies in the face of mass production and convenience; there is really no England, or Ireland, or Europe any longer, so national and continental boundaries are blurred as it is. It could be all in my mind, that little pub by the sea where I felt so at home, the chats around the fireplace, the patch of land I camped out in after bidding the donkeys goodnight. I might have found the same atmosphere anywhere else in the world – was I confusing the ideal with belonging?

A bit of consolation or affirmation comes from other travellers, wandering souls like myself. While we are facing one of the biggest socio-economic challenges, on a global scale at that, we are on the cusp of the bellest époque where it has never been easier to be a citizen of the world. Students have many opportunities for transferring to universities on the other side of the world, maybe ending up with a new permanent home, volunteer projects in disadvantaged, exotic nations attract a mass of middle-class youths in a way I imagine Delta blues musicians did white art students in post-war England, troubadours and labourers rely on the international currency of storytelling to make a home out of a tent. And irritating passengers on trains repeat the mantra of their travels, that of “finding themselves.” The trend of leaving a comfortable life and heading off with a rucksack seems to be more predominant than I thought, whether people are searching for a home, or choosing not to have one. A globalised world means global citizens. It helps that travel writing has become as great a fetish as the food network.

The thing is, wanderlust can hit anytime. Like Larkin wrote in “The Poetry of Departures” about feeling at home,

…that helps me stay

                             Sober and industrious

                             But I’d go today…

Having strong inclinations to it might mean I wasn’t built to have a homeland anyway, so the problems of not belonging to a landscape remain, possibly forsaking bits of identity for freedom.

At one point, mired in nostalgia for my briefly adopted homeland, I sat in bed trying to come up with cunning plans to return permanently and join a permaculture initiative with an adjacent jazz bar and writer’s club. And I remembered the self-exiled Dutch septuagenarian I met on a bus from Sligo to Galway, whose account of his life and move to Ireland thirty years ago, ended in the summation “Yes, but now sometimes I think, maybe it is time to settle down.” Then he added what I expected him to, “But there is still so much to do and see.”