What are you doing here?

A celebration and an invitation

I wake in a foreign country, in a scrap of forest in the middle of nowhere, beside a love I’ve known only a decade. How did I get here?

Iona, June 1984. We have gathered for a week of retreat, to ponder our stories as women. We eat, cook, clean and sing together, walk the island, ending at Dun I, Iona’s highest point, only three-hundred and thirty feet above sea level, but from here we can scan the whole of the island. North to the White Strand of the Monks. Martyr’s Bay to the east. Columba’s Bay to the south. The Bay at the Back of the Ocean to our west. On the way up we’ve stopped beside a rock pool, Tobar na h-Aoise, the Well of Age. Washing in it is supposed to restore youth, but I’m twenty-three, believe I’ll always be young. Still, I splash my face with the cool water.

Our guide reads the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel, running for his life after challenging the powers of his day. There is neither peace nor his god to be found as he encounters raging wind, earthquake and fire on the mountain. But a low whisper, a still small voice, calls him to leave his cave, his face covered by his cloak. And the question:

‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

We often think of memory and the writing of memories into memoir as ‘events’. Even when we recognise that the mind plays tricks, that we misremember dates and times, that one memory from twenty years ago will remind us of another five years ago and then pull us back fifty years… even when the events are triggered by a scent or a view or by dipping a madeleine in tea that to fall into a trance-like state… they remain central to the genre.

Certainly, events figure large in memoirs, but by themselves a list of events, even those that are strange or extraordinary soon become tedious unless there is some sense of meaning… one that the author is searching for a constructing, one that the reader can intuit without being beaten over the head with it.

Events happen in time. Meaning is the narrativising of that time by the bodies we are. And such narrativising shifts our perspective — when we write memoir, at least of the kind that is not a list of celebrity happenings and name-dropping, we take a view of our past. And in doing so we change our relationship to it. Writing memoir is both a stance and an encounter — with the creature we construct ourselves to have been. Not that I’m suggesting it’s a duplicitous process of creating some performance of our lives backwards. It might be. But more interestingly it’s a very human act of pattern-making, often in response to a question that will frame the meaning we make. And often in pursuit of truths that are deeper than anything literal can ever be. Questions like:

What are your doing here?

Choose another question and the kaleidoscope of memories will settle on a different view — another that is ‘true’, yet also shifting.

I’ve come to Zaragoza with A. to research a novel that includes the elusive Ben Haddaj. It’s a labyrinthine place where I get lost on every trip to the market, certain that the streets move overnight. The city buzzes with treasures — an amphitheatre of the former Roman city of Cesaraugusta and the Aljafería Palace, Ben Haddaj’s home.

We visit on a blistering day, sit under trellised arches listening to water tinkle along irrigation channels into a pool, finches celebrating their nests in the plump orange trees, fruit hanging like Christmas tree ornaments. We marvel at the Great Hall and courtyard and I leave A. photographing exquisite white arches while I cross the north portico and stand in the doorway of the tiny oratory, where once Ben Haddaj worshipped.

Alone in the tiny mosque’s cool dark shadows, I imagine Ben Haddaj making his last prayers as a Muslim before boarding a ship to Jerusalem, a place he would never reach.

There is no clear record of Caliph Ismael Ben Haddaj. Was he a prince or a vizier or perhaps nephew to Vizier Hasdai of Córdoba? Was he an alchemist or a myth? And what has he to do with me?

What are you doing here?

How do we choose our question as memoirists? There are probably a thousand answers to that, but for me the thread has everything to do with haunting. Those memories that arise over and over, that are nudged into the body as though I was feeling them for the first time by dipping my hand in a pond-weedy stream… by the scent of sweet, sticky brambles amidst earthy, green bracken on a blazing hot day without shade… by the trickle of water in a rose garden perfuming the day… by chords of Bach on an organ in the stony cold of sacred building where light is filtered through stained glass…

We are bodies in time. Time is the medium we live in. In The Scent of Time, Byung-Chul Han considers that we are living in an era in which we experience time as fragmented events that don’t connect into a meaningful narrative of life. Instead time appears frenetic and marked by dyschronicity, that is, the

experience of a time that is whizzing without a direction.

When time is unmoored and narrative starts to fragment, how does it effect us, as writers, as humans, as people trying to connect to all of life? It’s a wrecking ball, surely. So how can we change our perception of time to allow ourselves to find meaning and to be at home?

We anchor it in particular moments that seem to burn brighter than others, that seem more significant. In At the Heart’s Farthest Edge, I talk about these times as cusp moments.

Since moving from North Wales to Brittany in 2020, I’ve revisited moments so small, so slight, they might have vanished unnoticed. None of them were inevitable, but here I am in this forest, on a patch of earth that I am not indigenous to, yet feel is ‘home’.

What are you doing here, Jan?

Virginia Woolf called the moments that haunt us ‘shocks’ and contrasts these moments of illumiation or epiphany that stay with us with all the stuff we don’t so easily recall, that doesn’t flash to mind and move the body, the ‘cotton wool’ of life. In Moments of Being (posthumously collected autobiographical writing) Woolf writes about how moments of intensity

have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence

Time folds. The past becomes not so much memory as the present, moments that call us into being.

I reach… the idea… that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; […] we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Many of you are life-writers — in poetry or fiction or essays as well as memoir. You will have your own shocks or cusp moments or ‘flashes’ (as Nabokov called them). You will have your own questions around which you organise the forking paths that life has taken you along.

And in those cusp moments is the living, beating heart of a creature. That’s what we come to memoir for (in whatever genre it appears). We long for encounter. We long to meet another who is like us and unlike us, who will fill us with wonder and stretch our notions of what it is to be alive. We place our hand over the hand in ochre on the cave wall and say, I’m here too, with you across millennia. We read the novel of someone whose life is utterly different and recognise a fellow creature, another body in time. It’s this that makes us care.

Further along the path, my skin beads with the wood’s humidity, oaks lean in. The river, iron-rusted, flecked with foam, lollops seawards, singing. And I slow… every pore drinking in chatter of birds, forest and river, mugwort calling me back to this forest, asking again —

What are you doing here?

On Friday, in a café-bookshop in a forest in Finistère near my home we had a local launch for At the Heart’s Farthest Edge,

On Tuesday June 23 7.30 pm (UK time) there’s an online launch and you are so welcome to attend. It’s free and you can register to attend here — I’ll be the person answering: What are you doing here?

Find your copy of At the Heart’s Farthest Edge: