Come Fly With Me
On the Fears & Benefits of Writing
I used to be scared of many things. Flying was one of them. Take-off and landing to be specific, which didn’t make the interim hours much fun. Queuing to get on and off aeroplanes also made me tetchy. And the strange portable connecting tunnel you have to wait in sometimes, suspended high between plane and terminal, that looks structurally unsound from the outside and feels cramped inside – that was a problem.
I really really dislike those tunnels.
My Dad once said that he never queued in them. As an engineer and (latterly) a pilot who feared nothing but owls and my mother leaving, it was a sure sign that avoidance of aviation tunnels was advisable. Admittedly, he was an ill-tempered man who flew a small helicopter and didn’t queue anywhere ever, but no matter. He was equally right about the dangers of fair rides and Saville, and had an inexplicably large stockpile of PPE years before a pandemic he never lived to see, so I still maintain a sensible concern about the few things he was wary of.
Well, sensible nowadays. Not always, in the case of those tunnels.
I’ve almost missed flights trying to look cool, calm and collected at the gate when in fact surreptitiously dodging the dreaded tunnel queue. Unsurprisingly, arguments have ensued as I have scuttled onto the plane at the very last minute, departure thus delayed whilst I’ve attempted to ram my hand luggage into full overhead lockers to the collective disapproval of tutting passengers, my own glaring contingent included. This is bad travel etiquette.
Stupid tunnel.
Then I went travelling. Global escapades require a great deal of flights, including hair-raising excursions on lurching little prop planes which make commercial ones with their tunnels seem like a breeze. I subsequently emigrated to a ginormous country-continent requiring so much regular flying to get from State to State that I had no choice but to overcome my foibles just to do my job. Hallelujah, I was cured.
Or so I thought.
Unless you’re a successful, famous professional writer (and maybe even if you are) publishing your work is not dissimilar to flying. It is a metaphorical shift of self from one state to another and it requires dedicated mental focus to keep a plethora of little worries at bay.
If you’re any good you’re bringing people with you to enjoy the ride and still be there wanting more when you get to the end, even if it sometimes takes a heroic suspension of disbelief to still feel there is a sense of romance or originality in the whole damn thing.
To really buy the metamorphosis.
As a endeavour, creative journeys are all too often wrought with anxieties, tunnel-vision and parental hangovers. Think too much and fears abound. Fears of unlikely events involving you and lots of faceless people you will never really know.
You shouldn’t care what they think of your baggage, sentence structure or boarding strategy. They would never suspect you have a soft spot for an enjambment, a penchant for cockpits or views of a cloud plateau from above. That you’re the only living adult who adores airline meal compartment plates or that concertina plane tunnels give you the willies. These peculiar things are abundantly clear in my case, but not so in yours.
So why care?
It comes back to the state-shifting. In both situations, the creative and the actual journeys, we render ourselves vulnerable. It is difficult for us not to be fully in control of the vehicle, or opinions.
There is no secret to how I overcame this with the former. I absolutely LOVE travelling. Even for overseas business trips, I get excited by the thrill of discovering new places.
No such luxury these days, yet I had a few headachy hours in muggy Cambridge this week packed with tourists and University Open Day families bashing everyone in the face with backpacks. And still, the small joys of elephants and iguanas carved in stone buildings, the scent of pistachio gelato, the slippery sensation of a punt sitting low on the water, dappled sunlight reflected on the underside of bridges… the brief vignettes were enough.
Once I learned to focus on the destination and view the flight there as not only a means to an end but an integral part of the entire discovery, I trained my mind to automatically associate flying with feelings of anticipation instead of trepidation. Now, just being in an airport makes me want to board a plane! And although I don’t queue in them, I can walk calmly down those tunnels without turning into a maniac.
And so it has become with writing.
For many shy decades before I began publishing online, I filled notebooks, postcards, the backs of anything I had to hand in the moment with scribbles of my compulsion to write. My phone has thousands of notes. But the thought of anyone actually reading any of it was so uncomfortable that even other amateur writers’ work gave me the shivers.
Now I can’t get enough, I have to discipline myself to read more and write less!
I don’t worry about opinions because largely this is such a gloriously generous and supportive community but also because I ddon’t promote my writing to people I know! Lazy but true.
Those who do know me in writing will know that I generally write poetry. I am not at ease with prose. So I hope you will excuse me when I make occasional forays, as now.
It’s not that I think I am an exceptional poet, it is that poetry strikes me as a potentially swifter and more elegant vehicle of expression with greater brevity. As this piece proves, in fact.
Poetry is the flight to my prosaic crawl.
I can walk but I’m not particularly adept at it. I stumble along, taking too long and drag readers down tangents so that we get side-tracked or arrive late and disenchanted.
As a young, bold, albeit secret writer, I thought nothing of the (some would say, sacrilegious task) of editing down Shakespeare’s thankfully shortest play for a school production I was directing overseas in English as well as three local languages. In doing so, I found myself cutting out more prose than the poetic lines which seemed to flow more with sounds the students were more familiar with. If you’re aware how Shakespeare used different forms of language in context, you’ll know that I was treading a minefield in terms of plot integrity.
I don’t want things to constantly rhyme, far from it. That would force us all to wait in awkwardly dubious suspense and linguistic structure, and we’re back in some sort of dodgy tunnel analogy before you know it.
No thank you.
But there is something innately pleasing about the limited and careful choice of words involved when poetic rhythm is an added consideration. I’m also all for anything that makes the point faster and more interestingly whilst reducing the word count.
This is because I’m hopelessly loquacious, which is a long way of saying I talk too much. It is no exaggeration that people often politely interrupt me or glance at their watches when I’m talking, but I can’t help myself. It stings if it’s a loved one during a heartfelt declaration, but otherwise it is a helpful visual cue when you’re not so good at reading body language. As you meander off in what should be simple conversations, you can palpably sense your credibility ebbing away.
Cue The Poet — the brevity of my alter-ego.
Think poetry and you don’t immediately think sharp, slick, punchy. But if I think a million words and say a thousand, my poet writes a cool ten. There is reassuring precision in curating the few right words in the right order. The dicing and slicing. Cutting out the fluff.
My interpretation of poetry is detached from my muddle or disorder. It is intimate yet distant and in complete control. It is that shift from one state to the other. Each poem I write may have my blue-eyed sensibilities, vivid imagination or feminine sensuality but not the characteristic, Eastern European expansiveness; none of the need to dramatise, justify and explain.
My poet has left that behind and just kept the thrift.
Bar a handful of people, the world wouldn’t recognise ‘poet me’ if my writing was embodied. And I like that very much indeed. It allows me to move amongst words and worlds without inhibition or appeasement. And with the unceremonious freedom of the naked edit.
There is an economy of voice in poetry that is the perfect ruse to my noisy spontaneity. Because a poem is different.
It has poise.
Each word and its position in a sentence, on the page and in the piece overall is carefully chosen. It requires a control which feels masterly and empowering, it yields a unique sense of calm and focus.
People talk of meditation to dispel fear (of flying) and many other things. To calm the mind. I do not find it possible to sufficiently slow mine down to mediate, but I can engage it in meditative activity in which I can tune out and tune into hyper-focus. Writing in one such outlet.
I find that writing - poetry particularly - is a way to connect intensely with oneself in the present moment whilst simultaneously creating an escape portal; one which you can then offer to your readers when each piece is shared.
Then comes the gift of reconnection as each person is taken wherever your words send them. Greater still if they then share that perspective with you.
I mentioned at the start of this piece that I thought I’d permanently cured myself of my fear of flying, together with a gaggle of other phobias, when I built a brave new life for myself in Australia.
Unfortunately the anatomy of fear is not so simple.
Back in the UK a decade later, with scores of countries and probably a hundred flights under my belt, I treated my family to a holiday in the South of France and they went ahead without me. Ostensibly, this was because I had a medical appointment but actually, an insipid anxiety had so enveloped me at that point in my life (for a whole host of reasons) that my then-partner, himself a nervous infrequent flyer, still chose to travel with three energetic boys than endure my crazy reaching fever-pitch at the airline gate.
Alone and able to employ my coping strategies unencumbered by compromising, parenting and placating, I managed and panic was averted, just. Not so on our combined return trip, which turned out to be the last holiday we had together as a family.
Mercifully, the anxious resurgence departed as ferociously as it came, but it taught me a lot about what fear and self-care represent, and how they can affect those around you. It kick-started an ongoing therapeutic expedition that brought discovery I could never have imagined.
Perhaps it is on these voyages — literal and creative — these brief word-filled, word-fuelled flights of fear and fancy, when we reflect where and who we are flying to and from, that we can recognise something within ourselves. Something structurally unsound. Something rare, ridiculous or irrational. Something new, wordless and wonderful.
And although I am not with you as you read this, although you may not know me or recognise me, nor I you, perhaps the laws of poetic justice will prevail and we will share a deeper unity as we shift from state to state, prepare comfort at the end of unavoidable tunnels and humour the queues together.
Until at last we reach
that elusive full
stop.
©️Anna Murzyn | Cambridge England | 4 July 2024
