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The Plough And Orion
Rich Butler | | | | | |
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When I was thirteen I told my English teacher I planned to be a
writer. He didnt exactly take me seriously and I cant blame him. At that
age I wasnt interested in words and their meanings; for me books were
like deserts, dry and devoid of any real life. I didnt believe that a
string of odd shaped marks could describe the way the seashore smells
first thing in the morning, or the way a caterpillar scratches as it
inches itself inexorably across a leaf. I wasnt a very good student. I'd
spend the lessons staring bleakly out at the hills. Those hills seemed
like mirages to me. They seemed to shimmer in front of me, all dark and
tempting. They were the Welsh hills, the hills of my Grandfather, and of
his fathers. They seemed timeless, eternal. I used to imagine dinosaurs
striding over them in the days before the scars of telegraph poles and
barbed wire fences. I'd stare at them all day trying to pick out the
lonely houses of people I knew and the tumbling streams by the long soft
grass. There were tiny villages lost in those hills, with churches the
size of garages and strange vowel-less names. It was a foreign world to
the grim refugee camp of a school in which I spent my days.
The only time I really loved school was when it rained heavily
and the water would lash angrily against the window panes. I'd watch the
individual drops as they descended the panes, deflected by and curving
around invisible objects, competing with each other for speed and then
slowing down, joining. For a moment they'd kinda embrace each other,
then they'd split and be lost, like lovers losing each other at train
stations. I always imagined that this strange imitation of life was what
should be in art galleries; not dreary imitations of landscapes which
told you nothing, but the lonely dance of water on glass. Those days I'd
wait for lunch time with even greater anticipation and when it came I'd
sit alone in the old art block; steaming up the windows as I watched the
fierce droplets attack the puddles, and the way the puddles absorbed
their anger and grew, engulfing the areas where other children played
and talked. When the rain stopped the air seemed new and pure, as though
the stale boredom of the playground had been washed away, and Id often
miss my lessons, just kinda sitting there and breathing, all happy and
warm inside.
But despite my lack of interest in school and reading I was
serious about being a writer. I still am. Maybe one day Ill achieve it.
Then, it always seemed an honest profession, perhaps the only one where
a lonely, hopeless dreamer like me could work and be honest to himself
and the world about what he was. I saw the way other people absorbed
those funny marks on the pages and the way books affected them, and I
wanted to influence people that way. It was kinda like I wanted to tear
open my heart, pour it on the page, so others could see that I existed,
that I was real. I wanted to somehow express that tremendous awe I felt
every morning when I opened my eyes and saw the blossoming world around
me, and realised that all that time I had been asleep, unconscious, the
world had been continuing around me, people had fallen in and out of
love, others had died or been born. And so I decided to write.
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