the little birdthat whistled shrillfrom the nib ofits yellow bilclass="underline"
a note let goo’er Belfast Lough — a blackbird froma yellow whin.
Whin, you said, we have that word in Yorkshire too. The whinny moors of Yorkshire. Somehow it’s not the same as gorse, is it? No, I said, we speak a different language to the Southern English. And I went on to say that this was the first piece of writing — apart from practice runs — that I’d ever done on a typewriter. I wanted to see how it might look spaced out in regular type, for all that it had originally been done with a goose-quill and oak-gall ink.
I’d bought the typewriter, an Imperial Portable, in Woolworth’s in 1972, Saturday 4th March, to be precise. For some time it had been a custom for three or four of us to meet for coffee on Saturday afternoons in the Abercorn Restaurant, just across the street from Woolworth’s. Paul Nolan would be there, we’d gone on Civil Rights marches together in the late sixties — 1968, the year of revolution, we saw ourselves as Belfast equivalents of the Paris students. And in 1968 we thought the thing would be over in a matter of months, things would change for the better, and everyone could get on with living their lives in a just society. Little did we know. Four years later we’d meet in the Abercorn and talk literature and art and politics, wondering where it was all going to end. It wasn’t a regular date, but most Saturdays there’d be a casual gathering. Anyway, on this Saturday, as it happened, I was so engrossed by my Imperial Portable, excited by the prospect of trying it out, that I gave the Abercorn a miss. And so, for one reason or another, did my friends. Most Saturdays we’d be there; this particular Saturday we were not. At about four o’clock I was just about to board the bus home, the blackbird poem was in my mind, and I was visualising myself pecking out the words on the unfamiliar keyboard, when I heard an almighty explosion. The IRA never claimed responsibility for the Abercorn bomb that killed two young women — they happened to be Catholics — and injured more than seventy; but it was widely accepted that it was indeed the IRA, and it was one of the atrocities cited today as commentators cast their minds back over the years of the Northern Ireland conflict.
So the typewriter saved you, you said. The Imperial Portable. Who knows? I said. Maybe my father and mother saved me, when they taught me Irish. Maybe the Irish monk who wrote the poem saved me. Maybe the blackbird saved me, as it sang in a whin bush eleven hundred years ago. Maybe the worm it had just fed on saved me. When something terrible happens, everyone has their story about how they were saved — they’d forgotten their passport, and had to turn back for it, and so missed the plane that crashed a matter of hours later, how their bicycle had a puncture, if that splinter of glass had not been lying on the road at that precise spot, had the drunk not smashed his empty bottle on the pavement the night before, had the landlord not served him that last bottle to take out, why, they’d have been cycling past the scene of the explosion at about that time, they’d very likely be blown to bits, how they had a premonition, and decided to take the bus instead of the tube, how in hindsight they now knew what that dream they’d had two weeks ago meant, how in a vision they’d seen blood run down the glass of an aeroplane window, how they’d got drunk last night and called in sick that day, this or that random or purposeful interference with the normal pattern of their lives, tiny blips that become meaningful under the pressure of the extraordinary event, and so a series of coincidences, or what now seem to be coincidences, is made into a narrative that makes some sense of what is beyond normal sense. But the stories only skim the surface. Who can say what circumstantial chain lies behind our actions, and our thoughts? Yes, you said, I often think of that, when I think of how my mother died. Because in many ways it seemed so unnecessary, so gratuitous. But then it is always difficult for us to imagine why someone should take their own life, you said.
As the noise of the helicopter dwindled away into the distance I heard a blackbird singing in the garden of Ophir Gardens, and I wondered what went on in the blackbird’s mind, as it broadcast its lovely aria of loops and spirals, whether it merely delivered a territorial claim, or if it too revelled in the beauty of its song. I was still in that heightened state which sometimes accompanies lack of sleep when your postcard arrived, and it took me only a matter of minutes to recognise the source of your message. Only an infinite present. It was, again, a reference to Yves Klein. On 9th April 1951, he was in Madrid when he witnessed a display of American supersonic aircraft. They appeared like silver knives in the blue sky, he wrote in his diary that day, and traversed the hemisphere in a split second. Soon time will be conquered, and then we will no longer have past nor future, only an infinite present. I am determined to put all that I write, as well as all that I say, in the present — a perpetual present, said Klein. Later, when he presented his monochrome blue paintings to the public, he responded to accusations of charlatanism by saying, In the atomic era, where all material things can suddenly disappear — blasted out of existence — leaving room for only the most abstract things imaginable, one might be permitted to recount the following story, from ancient Persia:
One day, a flute-player began to play only a single continuous note. After he had repeated this performance for some twenty years, his wife suggested he might profitably listen to some other flute-players, who produced a range of sounds — high notes, low notes, notes in sequences, and so on — that might perhaps be more interesting and melodious. To this, the flute-player replied that he should not be blamed for finding the one note that others still sought.
And it sometimes occurs to me that all these letters of mine are but an attempt to discover one note, the one blue note that might explain why you did what you did, why you left me the way you did, because the more I think of it, the more inexplicable does it become to me. More inexplicable than it was then, for you were wholly guilty to me then, and so I burned your letters, because I wanted you to be dead to me. But little by little your postcards have begun to change all that. For you are very much alive, and I wonder what made you choose this card, of Barkston Gardens Hotel, Earls Court, London, a photograph taken at noon on a summer’s day — the trees are in full leaf, the sun almost directly overhead, as I can see by the shadow of one of the parked cars — a scene of almost spellbinding banality. Yet there is something eerie, almost sinister about it. It is noon, yet the street is deserted. Out of curiosity I looked up the hotel on the Internet, and I see it is still a going concern, though it is now described as being in South Kensington, which I daresay is more fashionable than Earls Court. But this place looks like a location for a noir spy thriller, photographed at a time which must long predate our relationship. As you know, I am not expert in cars — I didn’t drive when I knew you, though I did learn, after my father’s death — but, apart from the venerable convertible parked in the right foreground, the cars have a mid-1960s look about them. Let’s say 1965. And then I remembered your telling me that your mother ended her life in 1965 in an Earls Court hotel, that she had been saving her medication for months, that she had booked herself into the hotel for a weekend, that she had said goodbye to you that Friday morning as you left for school — no, she had kissed you, something she kept only for special occasions, you thought it strange at the time — and had taken an overdose later that night. She was found the next morning when the maid came to do up the room.