“Do you have a desk?”
(Anon)
>>Warning: the following text contains an excessive amount of footnotes.<<
My Wednesday starts much like my Tues(1), with a jaggy(2) of sound from the window. I make coffee slowly(3), break fast, and look inwards. This last’s an act of Sleight of Mind, Phase 3 of the writer’s Ocular Occupation: 1 Eyes open, 2 Look outwards, 3 Look inwards. (You can call it “The Looking Thing” if you want to sound more Anglo-Saxon, but a certain sort of Mensch is jazzed by Latinate words(4). You know who you are.)
The jaggy happened during Phase 2 — opening the window to Redstarts, Sparrows, trams, and cars, the sun on my face, the scent of Linden and tang of fume in my nostrils. With 3, I’m off to find me some Gewisse(5). With ample research and three drafts of a novel set in the early 7th century CE, it’s not that hard a task. I see the clay-rich fields, see the river, see the halls and hardy folk. I follow one to a hearth and hear German daytime TV. Jarring.
I pop back into the real world, close the windows (which additionally keeps out the fag smoke), and look inward once again, leaving a little of myself hovering around my hands to record what I see “over yonder”.
Time passes in intervals of hours, if I’m lucky. If not, I’ll pop back and forth, that millisecond marathon over 1400 years and 1200 kilometres (Foxley to Leipzig) which is, frankly, exhausting.
I tell myself I’m the moon of my own tides, but I’m not — it’s the city and its pull. So in that way, the modern moulds the past (in more than one sense).
I’m not lucky.
Like a seed in a tooth I can’t stop tonguing, the city wants its way. Petulant brat. Fine. It’s shoe-donning time.
I amble over to Steinplatz under bright skies and walk to the west end where the lion that guards the door of the house across the street looks out over the play park. I’ve seen it yawn before, heard deep roars at sunset the way I once did in Marwell Zoo. It doesn’t look at me now. I’m less interesting than the old 19th century mages that used to pass beneath it to some well-lit, tome-rich suite of rooms.
This, of course, is make-believe, but when you’ve borderline hyperphantasia, the “make” part’s merely a prompt.
I pass the oval window by Heinrich Schütz Platz, the trees of the park reflected on its dark pupil. Here there’s an actual wizard’s head, with more souls ensconced on the walls besides. I can’t tell you how my mind begins to race when I walk past(6).
The balconies are gorgeous. Plants fill many and sit sipping carbon from the air. I have to smile at the sound.
I wander down to Fichte and pass a woman perching on her windowsill, reading a book. It’s not one of mine, but maybe one day.
One day I walked past the corner of Shakespeare and Bernhard Göring and saw a young couple, he with his bike set upside-down, at work on the gears, and she sat beside him, reading aloud from an e-book. It was like seeing deer in the early morning — you can neither believe, nor avert, your eyes.
I’m caught in the current of imagination and drawn north-west, old buildings and byways blending with birdsong and bark as I drift. I wash up in the music quarter on the corner of Haydn and Schwägrichen, right by the house with the most amazing arched and iron-wrought balconies. Bankers and lawyers occupy it in the real world, but I dream myself in.
I’ve a library. I’ve a desk. I’ve a chair. It’s heaven.
Slightly less divine’s the number of times I’ve been asked “Do you have a desk?” when I tell people I write. (This is the second most popular question. The first is “What do you write? Krimis?(7)” I’ve even had questions about what kind of chair I sit in, or whether I use pens like some eccentric anachronism. (I use a Faber Castell 0.5 mechanical pencil.)
By the time I get back to my desk, the city’s fallen silent. We’ve been in each other’s air long enough. I return to Foxley, far in the past, and look for Cyneburg, the hero of my tale. She tells me it’s time to make dinner.
—
(1) And MonSunSat, all the way back to Thur.
(2) Jaggy: opposite of smoothy. A blend of disquieting ingredients, unwillingly consumed.
(3) Boiling water’s a bean killer. Got to wait for that kettle to cool if you didn’t splurge on a variable temperature model.
(4) Not me. “So why foreground it then?” you might ask. *Shrug* It’s a cadence thing …
(5) The people who would later be renamed the (West) Saxons.
(6) I can, but I won’t. That’s for another project.
(7) Krimis — crime thrillers. Germans ask me this, and often. The answer’s “No”.
