Hey You,
Can you feel me there – with you, still?
Or is it you who is here, with me now, as I write us this letter?
I get so mixed up with time. What the past is. What the present and the future are.
Sometimes, I don’t believe in time at all. Except to say everything is happening at once, moments echoing and overlapping across an inter-dimensional, single lifeline.
My younger self… I write this letter to you.
A boy in bed reading, reading… dreaming.
I see you beneath a small lamp, books lined up behind you on a single-bed shelf.
At night, after you finish reading, you switch the radio over to the SW bandwidth and eavesdrop on radio phone calls from boats and ships; or you tune into a late night AM talk-show from a priest who hears out the stories of drunks, abused women, survivors, battlers.
I know you picture your life ahead, the man you will be… and here I am like a ghost, holding close your spirit – a hundred miles and half a century away.
I’m a man, sending a letter to the boy who made him a writer… my dreaming-reading younger self.
Your mother is teaching you the alphabet. You trace dots with a pencil. ABC… then DEF… capital letters.
You form the letter ‘C’ again – trace it… and with just one stroke downwards, as your mother guides your hand from the base of the ‘C’… it becomes the letter ‘G’.
This magic is never forgotten. She loves you.
CS Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe tells you that this world is connected to other worlds. You just have to find the right wardrobe.
Your single-bed bookshelf overflows with sentimental selection.
They are objects as much as experiences, markers of a journey.
Volumes of Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts. Cryptic wisdoms seep through these comics, humour and melancholy, a story of childhood as a misfit gathering.
Another children’s book… writ in quasi-Shakespearian language by the author Howard Pyle. It tells the story of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.
It’s coloured green and brown like the trees of Sherwood Forest. The Robin Hood book is an odd thing, thick and big, a hardback, but light as a feather. As if the book could float out of your hands.
The story ends happily at first, then brutally and sadly in an epilogue, Robin Hood’s wrists slit by a betrayer, left bleeding to death. His last act is to shoot an arrow and request to be buried wherever it lands. You think this is what you would like too.
You are becoming a teenager and your reading is accelerating, deepening.
Your habit of dreaming yourself into books and the lives of characters is likewise intensifying.
You’re already writing stories of your own, excelling at composition in primary school, devastated that high school teaching of English turns its nose up at writing stories in class.
No matter. This business of writing is becoming a kind of secret life for you anyway.
You lift ideas and phrases from what you read, melting in your own life and feelings… you stand beside Aslan, the lion in the Narnia snow; you make yourself an outlaw in the dark green forest; the language of rock n roll lyrics impresses itself into what you do… the glam-rock poetry of T-Rex’s Marc Bolan, your Electric Warrior; the frontier American psychedelia of Neil Young as he stands On The Beach.
Complex works invade your mind at every turn.
James Joyce’s Dubliners, intensely Catholic like you, wreaking of incense and Latin prayers, repressed desire and mysticism.
Edna O’Brien’s novels The Country Girls and The Lonely Girl repeat the themes of Ireland and religion you have a Catholic connection with. There is a photo of a very young Edna O’Brien on the back cover of her first book – when you read it, you think you know this girl-woman and that you and her can escape and be in love together.
You read Catch 22 in less than three days at age 15, so hilarious and suddenly frightening as Yossarian walks through a hell-scape of Rome at night in World War Two. You love Joseph Heller so much you read his next novel immediately, Something Happened… but it is too adult and the story of a man who irresistibly absorbs the nervous tics and failings of others just by spending time with them is a concept that bothers you.
JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye… Holden Caulfield is voicing your apartness. When he sits on a carousel and watches his young sister and is so happy he almost begins to cry, you do cry.
You veer again into heavy reading with Albert Camus’ The Plague. Another book at age 15 that is deeper than you can grasp. It is a gift from your auntie, a nun, and your cousin, a priest, both of whom see something in your literary obsessions. You plough through it, but it is hard going. So dry and ponderous. You don’t like it, but it imprints itself on you anyway.
All these books gather into a library on your single-bed bookshelf. You turn off the reading lamp, listen as usual to the radio and fall asleep. The dreaming that happens, it’s like a wavelength.
So that is how you turned me into this thing that I am now. By reading and dreaming… through the writers you loved, the ones you related to, you imagined me into life.
The funny thing is… as I am writing back to you, I am also trying to dream myself onwards and write ahead to my children in some tomorrow land that defies time.
The writers we connected with are friends. Sages, mystics, rebels…
You know what he says, don’t you? Camus? He says:
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
So this is my letter to the boy within me – and to my children – and to all the writers I love. Some creation story traced and written between and by us all.
Yours sincerely…
Mark Mordue lives and works in Sydney’s Inner West. He is the winner of a Human Rights Media Award and the Pascall Prize for Criticism. His writing has been published across mainstream, literary and counter-culture media. He is the founding artistic director of Addi Road Writers’ Festival and editor of Neighbourhood Paper. His books include the biography Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave, the poetry collection Darlinghurst Funeral Rites and a recent collaboration with artist Jon Cattapan entitled War at Home.
Substack: https://markmordue.substack.com/
Photo credit: Hugh Stewart