The citizens of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had a prescribed rest/nap time every working day, between 3-5 p.m. We, the children, were not allowed to play outside or make noise, there was not to be any drilling, knocking or slamming doors, and we could not drop in on each other, as was our habit.

These two hours were called ‘house order’ in the meaning of being ‘orderly’, and not ‘to be ordered’, though in reality we, the children, were ordered not to go outside. If we did go outside and make noise during the designated hours, disgruntled neighbours emerged on balconies or descended the stairs in slippers, hair messy and mouths billowing with rage. They yelled at us to go home, or threatened to call our parents, who were already napping. This was how I used to sneak out and go down to the park during house order time – I would wait until my mother and father were in their post-lunch slumber, father snoring up a storm, mother letting out brief put-put-puts of air, like a fishing boat.

I had many plastic toys, but what I loved best were the dolls my friends and I made out of discarded ice lolly sticks. We drew two dot eyes and various expressions to make different characters, and dressed them in sweetie wrappers, which we diligently collected at home, on the street or around rubbish bins. We made lunch for the little people out of crushed leaves and grass, mashing the ingredients with stones and pond water and soil. When I descended to the park outside our block in the forbidden play hours, I would play voicelessly, mouthing the dialogue between the little people. Daddy sometimes shouted; mummy shouted back. The children sat in a corner, quiet. When mummy and daddy left, the children ran around causing havoc.

I had also made a little people stick that was Comrade Tito, our country’s president and our hero. I used the Comrade Tito little people figure as an instant tranquilliser, something that made the room fill with love and justice and peace when nothing else worked. Because this reflected our real life – Tito’s image was a call to our best selves. Between us children, if someone was accused of telling a lie, it was considered worse – in our street code and hierarchy of honour – to falsely swear on Tito’s life than on our mother’s. Tita mi, was the seal of truth on anyone’s word.

 

* 

‘I’m a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, an intimate land condemned to amnesia,’ Eduardo Galeano said. Remembering, reminiscing, conjuring up, reviving is also what we, the former Yugoslavs, do; our lives, as we knew them, were yanked away from us in such a swift, violent way, we are left to turn up the soil of our memory, hoping to make some sense of ourselves through what we find. And I, like every other Yugoslav, have had to examine the veracity of my memory, of that memory. I had to look at which part of that country, that ideal, was true and good, and what was oppressive and false. And although there are varied, often opposing versions of the same historical event, one thing has persisted throughout my readings, analysis and conversations on the subject: that Yugoslavia’s ending, in bloodshed, cannot be its only legacy, the only lesson we take away from its existence. It is too one-dimensional, too easy, for Western Europe to dismiss Yugoslavia, with its ethnic hatreds, corruption and oppressive politics, as a mere example of Balkan savagery (as I once heard the Conservative politician Alan Clark describe it on BBC News).

The memory of Yugoslavia can teach the countries of the liberal West a crucial lesson in the 21st century, as fascism is once again on the rise throughout the world: that noble ideals – be they of Socialist brotherhood and unity, or of democracy – are easily proclaimed in theory, but even more easily betrayed in practice. Yugoslavia is an urgent example of how socially progressive potential is wasted when it is laid upon the old structures of supremacist, patriarchal domination. As Audre Lorde writes: ‘Advocating the mere tolerance of difference […] is the grossest reformism. […] Only within [the] interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate’. And in Yugoslavia, just like in the US, UK, EU, and the rest of the ‘developed’ democratic world (a terminology the West owns and applies as and when necessary) the social structure relied on a hierarchy rooted in inequality, domination and the preservation of privilege. The Yugoslav Socialist project cracked along lines that also exist in the imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchies of the US, UK and the EU. The politics of patriarchal dominance, nationalism and the preservation of privilege became overt, the language of division and hatred was normalised, and the media were in the service of formalising and affirming all of those messages. Fascism and the far right are once again legitimate political options across the world – this is nothing new. Liberal democracy is a myth, just like how in Yugoslavia the concept of brotherhood and unity was a myth – because the fascist within was never rooted out. The global social unrest of June 2020 stems from the same place where most of the social revolutions – or attempts at revolutions – have come from since the end of World War Two: the struggle to right social injustice. It is meaningful that one of the most resonant ways to make a political statement in the June 2020 riots in the US has become to loot corporate chain shops – to damage the embodiment of capitalist power – because political power is in the hands of corporations, and is therefore as undemocratic in the West as it was under a one-party communist government. In capitalism, people and objects are interchangeable, and often objects (or rather, capital and property) are more valuable than human life. Violence against objects, statues and private property rattles both conservatives and liberals more than the regular, systematic violence against living, breathing human beings.

 

* 

I grew up with the ideal of Yugoslavia, as it was taught to me at home and at school. Along with every other Yugoslav child turning seven, I swore an oath to the Union of Yugoslav Pioneers, which was a kind of communion-with-the-cause ceremony, that saw us repeat the words: ‘Today, as I become a Pioneer, I give my Pioneer word of honour, that I will work and study diligently, respect my parents and the elderly, and be a loyal and honest friend, who honours their word. That I will love our self-managing homeland, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, that I will spread and develop brotherhood and unity, and the ideas that Comrade Tito fought for. That I will appreciate all the peoples of the world who want freedom and peace.’ It was considered a great honour to become part of the Pioneers, and most of us took the oath seriously.

It now seems quaint and nostalgic, almost cinematic, to imagine or indeed see the photographs of us children, red kerchiefs tied around our necks and blue envelope caps with a red star on our heads, our parents proudly snapping our toothless smiles. I often think back to that oath, and I wonder what we might think now if our children said those words in unison in our ‘modern world’? Would we find it banal, embarrassing, oppressive, naive? How have we come to believe the neoliberal global narrative of abstract individual happiness, in which we search for happiness, pursue happiness, have happiness indexes? How have we adapted to and come to accept the conditions of capitalism, racism and systematic oppression, where the poor are poor because they are not working hard enough?

 

* 

As a child I loved to lie down on the grass and watch the canopy of trees above. There was a union on my street, a love union, really, between a linden and an oak. The linden grew in a garden on the left side of the street, the oak on the right, and their branches stretched above the garden walls and bent towards each other, their leaves touching mid-air, mid-street, making an arch of pink and yellow flowers, and they perfumed the air with gentle affection. They held hands, but never went any further towards each other, for they knew that the light and the air on the opposite side was already needed and taken.

They say that trees are alive; not just in the way that can be observed, with the leaves growing and falling off, but that they are alive with families and communities, and that they are intelligent. I read this in a book. Trees, it said, work together. When they are friends, their branches grow as far as they can to touch each other, as if with fingertips.

Trees do the work of sharing naturally, while humanity seems to need steering. As a child that was the function of the mottos that were drilled into us, to teach us the value of working together – under the watchful gaze of Marshal Tito. We were often told that the first road leading into town was paved when Marshall Tito announced his first visit. Before that, the roads were dusty bare ground, trodden by mules and wooden clogs. In honour of Tito’s visit to the town, the local youths were sent to the hill above town, the hill facing the direction of the newly paved road, to spell out in white chalk rocks – dug out from the earth around the city, the rugged earth that brimmed with nothing but stone – we love you tito. The sign stood there from the 1960s until the war, where it is now written we love you bosnia and herzegovina.

Each classroom and each official space in the country had a picture of Tito on the wall. On my first day of school, as pairs of students sat in rows of desks, the teacher came in to class and announced: ‘Children. Some of you may have heard of God, and that he exists. Well, he doesn’t.’ He then went to distribute chocolate bars, one per child. No more was said. That same day, we read a story about two boys who fought over who the Tito was gazing at from one of those pictures. Each was insisting ‘me, me,’ until the teacher came up and said, ‘Don’t fight. Tito is watching over us all.’ Just like God or Santa are omniscient and omnipresent, so was Josip Broz Tito.

In his photographed presence, school children were not to wear hats, nothing that would cover their heads. We were not allowed to chew gum, because that was both rude and stank of rotten capitalism, something that lived outside of our borders and bore a fiendish mix of fascination, fantasy and loathing.

We were raised on films about brave partisans who traipsed snowy mountains for liberty and got so frostbitten that they had to cut off limbs, with nothing but homemade brandy to anaesthetise them.We bit our lips as the movie soldiers applied army knives to each other’s purple toes; this was not censored for children – it was the past we were meant to be proud of, part of the history that we were taught is solid, like the monuments that were built to honour that history. We were to understand that it is not easy to be a hero(ine), but that peace and freedom were worth fighting for, even if the price was death.

 

* 

I was four years old the day that Tito died, and it was on the same date, exactly thirty years later, that I gave birth to my daughter. All of my family members remarked on the fact that her life was delivered into the world on the same day that our great leader’s had been extinguished, and we all took it as a good omen that she would have a strong, forthright and just character and good taste in clothes.

When she was three years old, I moved with her to work and live in Bosnia after twenty-one years in the UK. While we were in Bosnia, my elderly aunts and uncles, my mother, our neighbours, came to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. Some of them made trips across town, others across the country, for the day. They brought gifts and food and smiles and their warmth, and each time, as the evening drew its inky curtain across the sky, I listened to them reminisce about Yugoslavia. Their golden years – they had lived in Yugoslavia when it was in its prime. It was the third year of hearing the same stories – my uncle’s favourite incantation of the time Tito and his wife, Jovanka, came to the restaurant where he worked, and he served them, and I imagined his proud moustache twitching in synch with his bow tie and his Adam’s apple – that I understood that what they were doing at these gatherings was a kind of group mourning. But it was also the opposite of mourning – if mourning is meant to be followed by an acceptance of loss, a letting go and a facing of one’s reality. This was an attempt at conjuring, at remembering all that had been lost – perhaps in order to test its reality. These elderly people seemed to be both reminiscing about their lives and to be holding them up to the light of collective memory because they were not sure if they had ever really lived these lives they spoke about. They spoke of the fact that they had all had jobs, homes; how one knew what was what; the cities were well looked after; the environment was kept clean – ‘We were proud of our country!’; and how the Yugoslav passport was something you would never be ashamed to travel with. ‘Tito held a glass of vodka in one hand, and a glass of whisky in the other’, was, and remains, a common expression for the way Josip Broz handled Yugoslavia’s international relations during the Cold War. ‘Even if he embezzled money, as they say, he at least gave some of it to us, the country’s citizens – today these criminals that run the country just take everything for themselves while the country sinks deeper into poverty,’ was another oft-repeated sentiment in the post-Yugoslav years. These were the people who had fought and lived with certain convictions and values, all of which were deemed to now no longer either be relevant or true. They were the embodiment of the denied Yugoslav ideal; they remained physically in the same place where they had lived and built their entire lives, but their country – its boundaries, its population, its values – was gone, had vanished around them, and something different had taken form, something in which they no longer felt at home.

Wherever one goes inside the former Yugoslavia, one comes up against the past. It is a past that is dismembered and fragmented – what philosopher Boris Buden explains as ‘an ubiquitous past [. . .], a past that is more current than the present and more uncertain than the future. A past that everyone is invited to judge, to recall, understand and (re)create on their own, individual terms. A past that is not really a dimension of actual time, but is in fact, a cultural artefact.’

As I looked and listened to the incantations of my elderly family and friends, their bodies hunched over with the years and their heads adorned with colourful, tiny party hats that my daughter had administered to each family member to wear – which they did, dutifully – I realised that they had nothing to cling onto for their sense of reality except for that past.

Back in 1990, when Yugoslavia was apparently undergoing an ‘economic transition’, the word ‘democracy’ was bandied about with great fervour, promising a healthier, more enlightened way of living, of governing our society, making us more like the Western world. But the truth is, the ensuing war and chaos notwithstanding, the democratic process that was brought into the countries of the former Yugoslavia failed to deliver anything meaningful or progressive, landing these countries instead with neo-colonialism and the harshest aspects of capitalism.

Yugoslavia had free housing, and housing came with a job. There was very little private property and the land belonged to the country’s citizens. There was free healthcare and free education. The economic order was based on the workers’ self-management model that aimed at a democratic approach to labour practices. The infrastructure of the country – roads, railways, river dams etc. – was built through youth volunteer actions. The literacy rate went up to some 80 per cent from what was a largely illiterate population. Yugoslavia was one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, a movement of the so-called Third World, which stood as an alternative to the countries locked inside the Cold War division; it was a peaceful movement consisting of the newly independent, post-colonised countries across the African and Asian continents (it still exists, but is now largely ignored). Yugoslavia was its only European member. As a region that had been colonised for centuries – first by the Ottomans then the Austro-Hungarians – and whose first incarnation was a monarchic union with a massively impoverished, peasant population, it understood only too well the importance of maintaining its independence from the imperial powers of the political East and West. The Yugoslavs could travel freely, and many worked abroad, across Africa and Asia. Equally, students from African and Asian countries in the NAM came to study in Yugoslavia. Back in 1997 I came across a Sudanese man in London who spoke fluent Serbo-Croat. He recalled his days as a student in Belgrade with joy; to me it seemed impossible that anyone foreign might live there again, save for the well-paid aid worker. ‘Why did the war happen?’ he asked.

 

* 

Why did it happen, indeed? In the Bosnian Oscar-winning film No Man’s Land, one of the jokes in this war comedy is about the perennial question ‘Who started the war?’ The joke, I think, is that it is a question with no real answer, or that it has many answers, depending on whom you ask. In other Bosnian jokes regarding the beginnings of the war (for later on it was hard to find anything funny at all), there were always references to a group of friends making claims about the superiority of their own ethnic group, each claim being more banal than the other. And indeed this reflected real life: in my own family and school, with the sanctification of nationalist, fascist rhetoric, adults and adolescents extolled their own national group over the rest – but always over one in particular (Serbs against the Albanians, and the Bosniaks, Croats against the Serbs, etc.). People one had previously shared a perfectly reasonable time with started to make statements about their historic supremacy, the dirt and unkemptness of the other, their many children, and the rest of the racist tropes that are always in good supply. In other words, difference was made visible, and was seen as negative. The difference was also always economic, religious, cultural, linguistic, and in the case of the Roma, racial. The ties of kinship came apart – but the question remained, why?

It may be easy to blame it all on the existing enmities between the Serbs and the Croats, and all the others who had fought against each other previously, but there was a parallel truth too – that all these people had managed to co-exist, intermarry and build a functional society for nearly five decades. I myself was born as a result of this unity, between a Serb and a Croat, though I prefer not to think of myself in this way because these categories were not what I was raised with and I do not identify with them.

I think the answer to the ‘why?’ lies in the very make-up of the Yugoslav system, a system that can be clearly paralleled to many other countries in the world today where fascism is on the rise. In Yugoslavia, the Slavs were the superior ethnic group, with the Serbs and Croats taking a firm priority – and this superiority was posited against the Albanians and the Roma – non-Slavic people, who speak non-Slavic languages, and were firmly kept in designated social roles. The Albanians were to be found mainly selling cheap cakes and street snacks, working menial jobs; some were in the jewellery business, if they were wealthier. The Roma took barely any part in the established professional sectors, lived in slums, collected iron and paper, or begged and sold second-hand goods. The Albanians were looked down upon as second-class citizens, and the Roma were racially abused (both these groups are still viewed as inferior and suffer abuse). We had ethnic slurs for both the Albanians and the Roma, which were, and still are, used in everyday speech in reference to them and in order to insult someone we might see as having the characteristics of these ethnic groups.

Yugoslavia’s very name means that it is a land of the ‘Southern Slavs’ (Yugo-refers to ‘jug’, which means south). The supposed inherent superiority of the Slavs – cultural, linguistic, social – enabled the resurgence of Milosevic’s Serb nationalism against the Kosovar Albanians, and unlocked the door to the chaos that swallowed the region, working like a domino effect of death, setting off the Croats’ own supremacy against the Serbs, the Muslims, and so forth. In other words, despite our proclamations of unity, ultimately we did not face – and get rid of – the fascist within. The very term ‘ethnic cleansing’, used so often in reference to the war in Yugoslavia, is a fascistic phrase, since the idea of cleansing is in most other contexts used with positive connotations.

 

* 

Ever since I moved to the United Kingdom in 1992 I was told that Yugoslavia had been a totalitarian state, that we had been indoctrinated, brainwashed, unfree, undemocratic. I was told that Britain’s citizens were free of indoctrination, that their brains were unburdened by propaganda, that the British were democratic. But everywhere I looked, I saw class privilege, industrial poverty, racial discrimination, and patriarchy. The only full freedom I perceived, was the freedom to shop, seven days a week. The country that thinks itself the most free in the world, the US, was founded on slavery, one of humanity’s worst crimes, and it was the European colonial powers that made this possible. None of these countries have faced or reformed their social foundations to reflect and right this injustice – if anything, by exporting the West’s version of democracy, which only exists insofar as it is in service to capitalism, the legitimacy of global social injustice was cemented.

Looking at fascism today as it spreads across the world, we see Western nations living in the myth of democracy. The myth of democracy has been exported to the rest of the world as one big advertisement of the desirable Western lifestyle. What this myth omits from reality is that this lifestyle can only be sustained if we ignore its foundations, i.e. the fact that its historical wealth was built on the profits made from feudalism, colonialism and slavery. The Western world was self-destructed in World War Two by the ultimate supremacist desire: to conquer the world and exterminate Europe’s non-whites, the Jews, the Roma and the Slavs, among the many others seen as undesirable. The lessons from World War Two were, as John Berger says in Ways of Seeing ‘cultural lessons half-learnt.’ Capitalism, already inherent in colonialism and therefore in fascism, became the shining beacon of the post-war West, and ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ became its bywords. Both of those ideals – of freedom and democracy, ideals we should indeed pursue – were thus perverted. While I am firmly in favour of the existence of a European Union, one cannot but feel cynicism when thinking of the fact that the countries that are at its founding heart are all colonial powers, and many of their World War Two governments supported and collaborated with Hitler’s Germany. It is unsurprising therefore that fascist ideas were recycled into capitalism’s democratic values and exported to the rest of the world – the ideal of (white, Western) beauty and superiority, competition, and above all, (purchasing) power as the index of human relevance. Beneath all these, white supremacy and sexist patriarchy were alive and well, and are unabashedly embodied today in world leaders such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro, among others.

 

* 

After the declaration of the end of society and history in the 1980s, when individual power in democracy became emphasised, the ideal lifestyle became defined by one’s endless dissatisfaction with one’s own life – as separate from society – followed by the drive to accumulate more. Again, Berger sums it up by saying: ‘Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for what is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.’ In other words, our freedom in the West, especially since the neoliberal wave that has swept the world following the end of the Cold War, only extends insofar as we are free to purchase – we are to follow that one ideal, and never stray from its path.

The democratic Western world was meant to erase its existing and bloody differences, apparently making war a non-option because free trade would remove the need to try to invade and pillage other nations. But the Western world is the industrial world, and depends on the maintenance of dominant global structures of cheap or free natural resources and labour from countries that were previously colonised, all of which translates into the supremacy of the white world. And just like the fascism local to Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups was able to flourish when placed against the non-Slavic (less human, poorer) Other, the West’s fascist resurgence has been made possible with the introduction of the poor non-white migrant who threatens to shatter its democratic myth by landing on its shores. One must not forget the speed with which money was raised for the reparation of Notre Dame, while ‘compassion fatigue’ set into the European consciousness at the sight of so many drowning migrants who are expelled from their own lives by the poverty and war wrought on by European colonialism.

Compassion, the core value of Christianity, the religion that informs the moral norms of the Western world, repeatedly shows up as relative, conditional – and thus inauthentic. In the place of religion, in atheist Yugoslavia, we had the cult of Tito, who shone as the beacon of all that was considered compassionate and just. But our sense of compassion and justice, if it is to be true, must come from within – it cannot be guided by an external authority – and crucially, it must be practiced without discrimination.

 

* 

It can be said that that the ideal of Yugoslavia was a myth because Tito was a myth – a mythical Father who ‘lead’ the nation the way a parent might lead a child. Our moral compass was calibrated by his, our desires directed by him. Ultimately, Yugoslavia fell apart because we did not face and correct the way we saw each other; we were meant to be equal, united, kin – but not if your community was poorer than mine, if you spoke a language that did not resemble mine, if your customs were different than mine, if your skin was darker. All dominant, hierarchical, supremacist systems depend on their survival by pitting themselves against a threatening Other, and then by subjugating them, in the name of some kind of ideal. The Western world is facing its fascist crisis again precisely because it has never dismantled the illusion that it lives in a democracy.

It is not an indulgence of the left to imagine what social order might look like in ten, twenty years across the globe, or to think that humanity needs to do better, that it needs to face its prejudices, its divisions, its myths, its exploitations of the other, in order to improve. This is a matter of urgency, for all of humanity. James Baldwin said that it is not too much to wish to become a truly moral human being, ‘and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible’. But we must first reconsider our social and moral myths, and we must look past official history books.

History, in its wider, official sense, as a political narrative that serves as each country’s propaganda, is always, to a large extent, a lie – the UK teaches about slavery from the point of view of abolition, rather than of the monstrous crimes of colonisation and mass murder of the millions of captured Africans, on which Britain’s wealth, class privilege, politics and the very foundations of capitalism, were built and still stand. It is immensely important to recognise how we are taught, and view, our past – as a nation, a continent, a people – in order to justify the crimes of our nation, our continent, our people. We must look at how we justify wealth and poverty, historic oppression and exploitation. We must find ways to see the other as an equal.

And how do we do this? It is crucial to face our own prejudices, myths and ultimately, our own inner fascism. We must understand the damage it does to the other, and therefore to ourselves. It is not ‘human nature’ for the fittest to survive, to accumulate, to deceive, to be cruel and murderous, as we are lead to believe when capitalism is presented to us as the only viable option – it is a part of ourselves that we must face and examine and get rid of, individually and societally. We must look at examples in history where people have come together to help each other, to build for the improvement of all, where we have fought together for the rights of others through love and compassion. Love and compassion are also inherent in human beings. The future of the world is, and always has been, in our hands. James Baldwin said it in 1963, and I shall conclude by repeating his words, searingly relevant as they still are: ‘If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!’

 

Photograph © Alise Sabanova

The post The Fascist Within appeared first on Granta.

Poetic Form Fridays are made to share various poetic forms. This week, we look at the schuttelreim, which is a German couplet form.

The schuttelreim is a German poetic form with the following guidelines:

• Couplet (or two-line) poem or stanzas.
• The final two words of each couplet exchange initial consonants (see example below).

There are no other rules for line length, poem length, subject matter, etc.

*****

Play with poetic forms!

Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a schuttelreim:

For Your Thoughts, by Robert Lee Brewer

If you offer a penny as some sort of mind fee,
I’ll dart in and out of intentions until you find me.

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(Note on the example poem: As you can see, “mind fee” is reversed to read “find me” by swapping the “m” and the “f” of the final two words in each line.)

Learn the two steps to build writing ideas for fictions, including how to put them into action and enter the Dreame Writing Academy Competition with $100,000 in cash prizes.

My name is Caroline Miller and I am an editor at Dreame. I would like to share a good formula that is often used to help writers build ideas. Dreame is a leading reading platform that provides writers with opportunities to present their work. Over the past 18 months, my colleagues and I have helped writers earn more than six million USD, and some of them have earned as much as $90k a month as millions of readers have read their fabulous stories.

The Formula: The formula has two distinct parts. Those are 1) Finding Sparks and 2) Building Ideas. A spark is a flash of inspiration that provides writers with original writing material. A spark births ideas and ideas flesh out sparks. Ideas are the functional building blocks that make a story a story. A spark can come to a writer at any time, whereas an idea requires careful consideration and thoughtful arrangement.

Formula Part 1: Find Your Sparks

Writing a story is like planting a big tree. The first thing you need to do is find your seed/spark. The seed is the thought or flash of inspiration that made you want to write in the first place. It can come from a previously developed character, a myth that you’ve heard, an exciting conversation that you’ve been a part of and the list goes on without end. The more seeds you have in your mind, the less likely it is that you’ll have a mental block. Of course, sparks won’t pop up like magic. There are many different ways for an excellent writer to find sparks.

Find sparks from your imagination. Observe your daily life, and harvest sparks from the things you see, do, and think. They may come from your dreams, an epiphany that you had while watching a movie, or a random idea that you had while talking to a friend. These sparks may be quirky, but they can be great material for writing. Keeping a timely record of these things will help you write.

You can also collect sparks from the books you read and the movies that you watch. For example, you may encounter a classic plot or be introduced to an interesting character when reading one of the trending stories on Dreame. These sparks are practical and can be instructive as well.

Find sparks from your own life. You can find these sparks by looking at people (a sexy neighbor or a doctor’s cousin) and events (a quarrel between friends).

You can find sparks on the news and social media. A recent event is one example. Carefully write down the things that impress you, and you can use them in your writing.

Formula Part 2: Change a Spark Into an Idea

When you have a spark, you need to turn it into an idea. Before introducing some tips, let’s take a story called Diving Into You as an example. When the author, Amelia David, was asked how she got the idea for this story, she said:

“One day, when I was browsing the web, I happened to see the romantic story of a famous athlete Iker Casillas Fernández and a journalist Sara Carbonero. Then a spark came to me: why not write a story about a sexy athlete and a cute female journalist? They work hard in their way and have witnessed each other’s low ebb and success. There were some misunderstandings between them but finally, they fall in love.”

She continues “I decided to make it a story on Dreame. I have kept asking myself some questions like: what kind of story is this supposed to be? What is the tag of the story? Where does the story happen? And what are the main characters’ personalities like? After figuring out this question, I got a picture of my story.”

There are also some tips writers can follow:

Set a Background: The background is the foundation of the story. The background should include:

• Time: Many romantic stories happened in contemporary society, so writers do not need to spend a lot of time explaining today’s social environment and rules. But if you place your story in the past, the future, or on an alien planet, you must give your readers a clear picture of the time in which your story is taking place. Describe the landscape. How do people think? What are the political and economic rules?

• Scene: Scenes not only give the story space but build a kind of atmosphere. Readers have different expectations for different scenes. As an example, in Diving Into You, when the hero and the heroine are in a bar, readers naturally expect to see some romantic interaction between them. It is different when they are in a sports stadium. In this example, readers want to feel the passion that comes from sporting events, and they expect to see the hero win the championship.

• Background Story: This is different from the main plot. The background story describes what happened in the past. It is helpful to explain how the characters developed. A good background story will help the reader fully understand the characters’ emotions and motivations. Having a background story makes story characters more believable.

Design the Main Characters: When you design your characters, consider three dimensions: appearance, personality, and social connections.

• Appearance: sex, age, figure, clothing, the color of their hair, posture, habitual actions, etc.

• Personality: moral standard, ambition, temperament, attitude toward life, abilities, etc.

• Social connections: class, occupation, education, home-life, religion, race, nationality, etc.

A person’s appearance, personality, and social connections should be mutually consistent. The characters in a book should be diverse. Each character should have his or her unique characteristics, which must be a composition of elements from the three available dimensions.

Determine the Tags of the Story: Romance stories have many tags to choose from. Different tags will affect plot-setting, character-designing, and the emotional tone of a book. Amelia David, for example, chose “Opposites Do Attract,” “Independent,” and “Confident” as the tags for her book, Diving Into You.

“I don’t want my story to be too sad,” she said. “I want it to be full of strength and hope. I like protagonists with different personalities and family backgrounds. Stories of similar people are easy to get bored with, while differences are more likely to produce conflicts, plots, and love.”

You can access Diving Into You on Dreame. The story has been well received by Dreame’s readers.

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July 2020

I finished this essay in early January, a few weeks before Covid-19 was appearing regularly in the news. I was superficially familiar with the family of viruses having spent the previous three years attempting a crash-course in epidemiology as part of a research project. Slowly working my way through ‘disease literature’, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1351) had seemed a timely end-of-decade read for the reasons I lay out in the essay below.

Reading back under lockdown conditions, I have new questions about the fragrant garden frequented by the brigata – The Decameron’s young, wealthy Florentine narrators – and the privileged means by which they were able to escape the contagion of the city. Boccaccio’s description of wild animals’ newfound boldness in the wake of the plague, freed from the threat of hunters, recalls the widely-shared images and videos of wildlife ‘unleashed’ during our current pandemic: goats and deer cruising deserted city streets, fish in the glass-clear canals of Venice.

Among the many news articles I have found harrowing in recent months are those predicting – and later confirming – the rise in domestic abuse cases under lockdown. For many women, the conditions that both catalyse and enable their partners’ violence and coercion have been dangerously amplified. Speaking to The Independent in October 2019, the domestic violence charity Refuge reported that around a third of the women they support have also experienced financial abuse at the hands of current or former partners. And for those who have escaped financially abusive partners prior to lockdown, the pandemic’s heralded economic downturn has, in addition, exacerbated consequent anxieties regarding security and wellbeing. In such times, the misogyny built into the architecture of social life in The Decameron does not seem so far away. Perhaps that is why I still find myself circling back to the wild retreat of the Doe, and Fortuna – the ‘fickle’ goddess of flux and change.

 

* 

In the last month of the decade I find myself reading Boccaccio’s The Decameron for sanity. Almost everyone I know is in a state of profound political grief, my friends and I are sick with the realisation that the entirety of our twenties will have been spent under a Tory government. I am four months on from leaving a relationship, and trying to navigate the resulting financial abuse which detonates my inbox on a weekly basis.

In between teaching poetry to undergraduates, tearful conversations with friends, talking to lawyers and worrying about rent, I sit down with The Decameron. Writing in the still-smoking aftermath of the Black Death, Boccaccio witnessed first-hand the effects of the disease which culled the population of his native Florence by half. By 1349 the epidemic was in decline, Boccaccio was thirty-six and had just lost his father. He started work on The Decameron in media res, long before the dust had begun to settle.

The Decameron follows a ten-day jaunt taken by the brigata, a group of ten Florentine men and women aged between seventeen and twenty-seven, who decide to escape the city’s contagion by fleeing to an idyllic rural villa. Once installed in their new environs (miraculously replete with servants who prepare their meals and rooms) the brigata decide they will pass the time and entertain each other by telling stories. Each day one of them is crowned king or queen, whose privilege it is to choose the topic of the day’s tales. A variety of rituals accrue around the telling of these stories, which unfold in the villa’s fragrant gardens. Over the course of their stay, each day’s ten stories tally up to a dizzying total of one hundred tales, giving The Decameron its name.

For a book whose characters come together to escape a plague-ridden city, there is surprisingly little to no mention of disease; it’s as if – through the vertiginous volume of stories they share – the characters are lulled into forgetting the circumstances that brought them together. In his introduction, Boccaccio addresses the reader directly, imploring forgiveness for his use of the plague as narrative conceit; he explains that there were no other credible means by which he could get his characters out of the city and into a setting where these stories could unfold:

You are to look upon this grim opening as travellers on foot confront a steep, rugged mountain: beyond it lies a most enchanting plain which they appreciate all the more for having toiled up and down the mountain first.

The plague is a narrative wrecking ball, a colossal trauma that cracks open the book’s characters to remake them as conduits for tales of fate and fortune, threat and injustice, supreme happiness and abyssal despair. The lives played out in the hundred stories of The Decameron are buffeted by the gales of Fortuna, Roman goddess of fate, luck and fortune. Some live good lives and are variously rewarded or punished, others cheat and lie, some kill for vengeance or for love, others are killed and come back from the dead. Some lose everything, while others gain the world. The characters that make up this brigata inoculate themselves with these narratives like homeopathic doses against the loss of life and social order brought about by the plague.

In the days and weeks I spend with these stories, I find The Decameron no less homeopathic (or hair of the dog, a phrase deriving from a fabled cure for rabies) in its ability to allay or distract than it was seven hundred years ago. Between its characters I locate fourteenth-century accounts of gaslighting and coercion passed off as run-of-the-mill business as usual. The stories are unsurprisingly laden with misogyny – as well as unusual depictions of female agency – but there is something about the mundane ubiquity of pettiness and aggression that fortifies me against the present. In reading on, I come to identify the source of this fortitude in the figure of Fortuna.

 

 

 

Like many Roman deities Fortuna is a palimpsest. She subsumed her Greek equivalent Tyche, goddess of luck, fate and fortune, and gained allegorical currency in medieval literature following her appearance in Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy (524 CE), which personifies her through another personification, Lady Philosophy. In The Consolation, as elsewhere, Fortuna gets a bad press. Her association with flux and change (her name derives from Vortumna, she who revolves the year) often led to her being perceived as fickle, moody and truculent. Machiavelli deemed her two-faced, while Ovid described her as a goddess ‘who admits by her unsteady wheel her own fickleness’. ‘Unsteady wheel’ refers to the goddess’s rota fortunae or wheel of fortune that she is often depicted with, steered by a gubernaculum – a ship’s rudder – in one hand, and holding a cornucopia or horn of plenty in the other.

The unruly coupling of Fortuna’s ability to offer abundance, symbolised by her cornucopia, and the volatility of the gubernaculum, which can throw any traveller off course, are perhaps why Fortuna is so easily made into allegory’s ‘bad object’. There is nothing meritocratic about the chance winds of fate; devotees of Fortuna must submit to flux, contradicting virtuous narratives of earning one’s way into heaven. Unlike the majority of medieval depictions of Fortuna, Christine de Pizan grasped the radical and transformational powers of the goddess; in The Book of the Mutation of Fortune (1403) Christine is changed from woman to man at the hands of Fortuna. Writing from the vantage point of this metaphorical transformation, Christine is able to critique gender inequalities by laying out everything now available to her as a man that had been denied her as a woman. As Barbara Newman comments, Christine’s miraculous sex change postulates that ‘identity is shaped not only by birth, but just as much by random chance and political circumstance.’ Fortuna as pseudo-goddess is an existential force that cuts through the bonds of society, upending hierarchy, order and status quo.

In The Decameron, Fortuna – anglicised to ‘Fortune’ in my translation – is more abstract force than figure. Intangible and yet, like wind, discernible by dint of her effects: the vicissitudes wreaked on the mortal lives in each of the book’s hundred tales. Boccaccio wrote about Fortuna in later works, demonising – in the familiar vein of other medieval writers – her burning, threatening eyes and cruel and horrible face. While the misogynist overtone of medieval attitudes toward Fortuna reinforce a view of women as fundamentally capricious, changeable and deceptive, the gendering of Fortuna falls in line with the tradition of personifying virtues and vices as female. When the eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison first noticed this, he explained it as a side-effect of grammar, stating that abstract nouns in many romance languages (including Latin) take the feminine gender. Revolved by the fickle wheel of vernacular, abstract concepts accrue form and figure, leading to the feminisation of fate.

It’s no wonder that in a book written in the midst of an epidemic the figure of Fortuna is so predominant. Like the plague, Fortuna is capable of upending societal order, striking down the wealthy and indigent alike. The Decameron is not so much deflection from the epidemic as transference; by immersing themselves in the book’s cyclicality of narratives, its deluge of beginnings and endings, the constant turning of Fortuna’s wheel, the narrators might be immunised against the apparently random cruelness of the Black Death.

 

/ 

‘The random developments of Fortune are no easy thing to bear, indeed they are an affliction.’ So begins the sixth story of The Decameron’s second day, related by Emilia, the second youngest of the brigata. Whether the strokes of Fortune are lucky or not, Emilia says, we should never be reluctant to heed them, because we can learn from the lucky strokes and take comfort from the unlucky. She tells the story of a Neapolitan noblewoman, Beritola, who resided on Sicily with her husband, governor of the island. They lived happily until one of their enemies was crowned King of Sicily, whereafter her husband was arrested. Heavily pregnant and penniless, Beritola fled with her eight-year old son to a nearby island. There she gave birth to another son, whom she named ‘the Outcast’. All three boarded a boat with the intention of returning to Naples, but a strong wind carried them to another island, remote and uninhabited, where Beritola decided to wait for more favourable winds to take them home.

It was on this island that Beritola broke down. Each day she left her two sons to play by the seashore, and withdrew to a cave to grieve everything she had lost. She became so absorbed by her lamenting that one day she returned to find her sons missing: she saw a pirate galley on the horizon and realised they had visited the shore and taken her children as spoils. This second trauma is too much for Beritola to bear and she faints where she stands, succumbing to gravity and sleep.

In reading, I find myself resisting the interpretation that Beritola’s grief-state was responsible for the loss of her children. If she had held back tears and gritted her teeth making sand castles on the beach, the pirates would have taken her too – or worse. Her withdrawal was also her conflicted survival. When Beritola wakes up on the beach she retreats to her cave, where she sees a doe leaving the entrance and heading into the woods. Inside the cave Beritola finds two fawns, only just born. The sight of them thaws the edge of her grief; she gathers the fawns to her and begins to suckle them, her breasts still swollen with the Outcast’s milk.

Emilia tells us that the fawns suckle at Beritola’s breasts as they would their mother’s teats, and that from then on they make no distinction between their two mothers, animal and human. Beritola settles down to live with the fawns and the doe, with whom she develops a kinship. She ‘reverts to a state of nature’ and becomes ‘swarthy, lean and hairy’. Later in the story, Beritola returns to society with the two fawns and their mother in tow, and is thereafter referred to as ‘The Doe’. By various exploits of Fortune, The Doe is eventually reunited with her human family, who live happily (and wealthily) ever after. Emilia – or Boccaccio – neglects to mention what happens to the fawns and their mother.

The story compels me precisely because I wish it could end halfway through. The second part, concerning the strings Fortune pulls on to return The Doe to society, to reinstate her as Beritola the noblewoman, seems more like a misfortune. When her bonds with society are broken Beritola forges alternative languages of care, nurture and relation. Perhaps I can’t help but overinvest in these fantasies of retreat and insularity, for The Doe to stay on the island with her new family, for her human identity to gather moss. To resist the closure of return. But such fantasies cannot be left unchecked: does the island function as a mythic idyll, unspoiled by hierarchy, in which interspecies love might elapse without obstacle? In becoming The Doe, does Beritola leave the burden of human dominance behind her, or by loving the fawns does she also domesticate, contaminating them with her need?

 

/ 

Narrative has its own needs and ends. Tragedy exiles Beritola to the island, while the narrators of The Decameron live out a self-imposed exile beyond the city’s bounds. Beritola finds interspecies solace; the brigata console themselves with narrative. The cyclical nature of The Decameron’s stories bring about faux-closure that the plague has ridded them of.

Like the desert ascetic Mary of Egypt – traditionally depicted as a ‘wild woman’ whose long, unkempt hair hides her nakedness – Emilia spins a tale of female ferality that disrupts the social order and nuclear family. Through suckling the fawns Beritola also resembles Potnia Theron, the mistress of animals, a popular motif in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. Usually depicted as a female figure flanked by two animals, the connections between various cultures’ Potnia Theron imagery is unclear, making the mistress of animals not so much an individual as a clade of associations and affectations.

 

 

 

In the midst of a zoonotic outbreak like the plague, Potnia Theron signifies both transmission and transgression. Her affectionate proximity to animals is also potential contagion and infection. Similarly, Beritola’s sharing of bodily fluids – her breast milk – parallels the plague’s interspecies transmission laid out by Boccaccio in his quasi-epidemiological introduction:

So potent was the contagion as it was passed on that it was transmitted not only between one person and the next: many a time it quite clearly went further than that, and if some animal other than a human touched an object belonging to a person who was sick or had died of the plague, the animal was not merely infected with it but fell dead in no time at all.

Though they rarely mention it in the course of their raconteuring, we know the characters listening to Emilia’s tale are familiar with the nature of this contagion. Boccaccio’s focus on infection across species boundaries pre-empts what we now know about the plague’s transmission; animals – most often rodents and small mammals – are bitten by infected fleas, and then act as vectors who spread the disease to other species. In the case of the Black Death, we know that rats carrying the plague bacillus – Yersinia pestis – arrived in Europe via an established trade route from the Black Sea, on ships carrying luxury goods. In October 1347, twelve ships docked in Messina, Sicily’s main port, and the disease quickly spread across the city and spilled into the countryside as people fled the outbreak. Beritola’s fictional flight from her hometown mirrors the plague’s transmission route through Europe, as the ships expelled from Messina carried the bacillus to neighbouring islands.

Denise Riley reminds us that ‘affection’ is an archaism for ‘disease’; the story of Beritola as The Doe blunts any sharp distinction between the two. The Doe is infected by her affection for the fawns, who might also infect her, and who, by receiving The Doe’s affections might also be infected by the disease of domestication. Never uncomplicated, affection between species is the cup of temperance whose waters run in both directions.

 

 

 

A few days after reading Beritola’s story for the first time, I meet Fortuna in Oxford. She’s taken the form of a doe and stands in a glade of ambergris threads, partially obscured by tall grasses and haloed by golden seedheads and stars. This doe, Fortune (2014), was woven on a jacquard loom by the artist Kiki Smith. Below the high white ether of the gallery space, Smith’s tapestries are the terra firma, each one a dense and intricate chaos of animals, elements, symbols and texture. Long before I discover its title, the composed but alert doe of Fortune is the creature I find myself lingering in front of.

What is the nature of correspondence, of coincidence? When I eventually locate the tapestry’s title I feel a familiar surge of excitement: the adrenal thrill of coincidence. There is no doubt in my mind that Smith’s doe, Fortune, is The Doe, Beritola, buffeted by Fortuna from the human to non-human world and back again. Standing in front of Smith’s tapestry I feel as though Fortuna’s musky scent and cloven hoofprints have led me here, so that I can see the brute serenity in the doe’s expression. A gift of fortitude. Correspondence as a kind of tracking.

 

/ 

 

In Alan of Lille’s mid-thirteenth-century text Anticlaudianus, the figure of Fortuna ‘weeps with one eye while the other eye twinkles’, no doubt intended as a slight on her capriciousness. But the goddess’s split expression might also be read as the hard-won vigilance and resignation of Melanie Klein’s depressive position, an outlook which accommodates the flux of good and bad. Fortuna is far from the splitting of the paranoid-schizoid position, one who cannot allow good and bad to mingle from the same source.

In Anticlaudianus, Fortuna’s daughter, Nobility, reveals the whereabouts of her mother’s abode, described as ‘Fortune’s isle’. Fortune’s Isle is perhaps a cognate of the Fortunate Islands, which figure in Greek mythology as the earthly equivalent of the Elysian Fields: a winterless paradise reserved for heroes. Pliny’s Natural History recounts that the Fortunate Islands ‘abound in fruit and birds of every kind’, and it is perhaps due to its clement weather and fecundity that these mythic isles have often been conflated with Sicily. Beritola’s story begins on Sicily, where she lives in wealth and security – Fortuna uproots all this and deposits her, alone, on a far-flung island. At what point in the narrative does Beritola encounter Fortune’s Isle? Is it the home she leaves or the one she finds?

As the site of both bereavement and healing, Beritola’s island is as ‘two-faced’ as the goddess herself. Beritola loses one family and gains another; she loses one identity and becomes The Doe. Similarly, the island figures as both mythic isle and lazaretto – a plague island or ghettoised port where infectious persons were detained. Beritola resides on her lazaretto, infected by interspecies love and its connotations of contagion and transgression. Later in The Decameron, Boccaccio’s introduction to the eighth day seems to act as a gloss on Beritola’s newfound family:

. . . as they entered [the little wood] they saw deer, roebucks, and other such animals who just stood and awaited their approach, for all the world as if they had quite lost their timidity or become domesticated – the ravages of the plague had given them a respite from the hunters.

In addition to upending society, the plague has also undone and recomposed species hierarchies, as if animals and humans might now live together in harmony. Compelling as this might be, Boccaccio makes it clear that such a state is undesirable, insofar as the narrative eventually retrieves Beritola from interspecies purgatory and restores her to society and the nuclear family. Like the brigata’s idyllic garden, Beritola’s island is both a refuge from civilisation, and its limbo. Perhaps in listening to story of The Doe the brigata hope for a similar denouement, that – if Fortuna’s wheel is willing – they might be able to return to life as it was before the epidemic.

 

 

 

As well as adhering to the conventions of courtly love, the brigata’s garden retreat allegorically mirrors the behaviour of their fellow Florentines back in the city. In reaction to the piles of bodies piling up in the streets, Boccaccio’s introduction describes how certain citizens ‘would go about holding flowers to their noses or fragrant herbs, or spices of various kinds, in the belief that such aromas worked wonders for the brain (the seat of health), for the atmosphere was charged with the stench of corpses, it reeked of sickness and medication.’ The scented sensorium of the brigata’s garden, with ‘flowers in season everywhere’, recalls the fragrant balls filled with herbs and spices – pomanders – that many people carried in attempt to ward off the plague’s malodour.The Black Death rocked the medical establishment and spurred a concomitant outbreak of treatments, panaceas and nostrums. For every traditional doctor who despaired that the plague lacked precedent, that Galen and Hippocrates were no help to them now, several mountebanks would take his place plying alleged cure-alls. For the outbreaks of plague that followed, pomanders became a mainstay for their allegedly preventative faculties. Their form and ingredients varied along class divides, from elaborate globes of precious metal filled with rare and expensive substances, to oranges studded with cloves. Rosemary was consistently popular, so much in demand that it caused an enormous hike in price, and deer musk obtained from the caudal glands of male musk deer was often used to soak rose petals.

Perhaps the most consistent treatment was the ancient antidote theriac, since the plague was believed to act in the body like a poison. Theriac of Andromachus was one of the most complex medicines in the pharmacopeia, containing as many as eighty-one ingredients such as viper flesh and bezoar stones. Andromachus was a physician from Crete who attended the emperor Nero for over a decade, to whom he dedicated an elegiac poem containing instructions for the preparation of theriac. The complex electuary originated as an antidote to poisonous bites from wild animals (theriakos) and was supposedly homeopathic in nature, as it was widely believed that snakes contained an remedy that prevented them from being poisoned by their own venom. Theriakos, ‘of a wild animal’, derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *gwer, which also gives us feral, fierce and ferocious. Greek theriake contorted through Latin, Vulgar Latin and Old French to arrive in fourteenth-century England as treacle, where Italian theriac, sweetened by its honey excipient, began to be marketed as ‘Venice Treacle’. Potnia Theron, mistress of animals, shares this bestial etymological root.

 

 

When the Greek physician Galen used and adapted Andromachus’ recipe for theriac, he wrote that his predecessor had chosen to document the cure-all in verse because it is more memorable than prose. The notion of poetry acting as medicine’s sweet excipient recalls Lucretius’ explanation for using verse to convey Epicurean physics and philosophy in De Rerum Natura, which compares poetry to honey lacing the lip of a cup of bitter wormwood, then used as medicine for a variety of maladies:

 

                                                   . . . I write
Of so darkling a subject in a poetry so bright,
Nor is my method to no purpose – doctors do as much;
Consider a physician with a child who will not sip
A disgusting dose of wormwood: first he coats the goblet’s lip
All round with honey’s sweet blond stickiness, that way to lure
Gullible youth to taste it, and to drain the bitter cure

 

For Galen and Lucretius, literary palatability is the means by which hard truths can be imbibed. Prosodic and poetic features, like the brigata’s cyclical doses of narrative, are supposed to act as the saccharine carrier for what Lucretius terms the ‘bitter pill’ of philosophy. The brigata’s fragrant garden is the world-as-pomander, in which the characters’ sickly love songs drawing each day to a close echo Lucretius’ desire ‘to coat this physic in mellifluous song’.

Except it is too easy to leap to splitting here, to suggest that poetics and narrative are a sugary escape from the bitter scientific ‘reality’ of the plague and its fetters. Like the snakes said to contain an antidote to their own poison, Boccaccio’s use of narrative in relation to the plague functions more like a pharmakon, that indeterminate admixture of remedy and poison. Jacques Derrida describes the pharmakon as an ‘ambivalent’ figurative space, the ‘locus of play’ in in which opposites mingle without being reduced to binary oppositions. Like Beritola’s island that is both haven and lazaretto, and Fortuna’s omnipresent gaze that both weeps and twinkles, The Decameron’s narrative conceits elude the interpretative violence of fixing things as one or the other.

 

/ 

A few weeks on from locking eyes with Kiki Smith’s doe I meet Fortuna in another guise. The new decade has begun, and I am five months back in the city I left over two years previously. That was to move to the other city, a city I knew well because I had studied in it, a rushed and difficult move for the relationship whose spicules I am still trying to dislodge from my skin. The emotional geography (and economic hegemony) of Scotland’s central belt is such that in whichever of its two cities you reside, Glasgow or Edinburgh, the one you don’t live in becomes the ‘other’ city. So much so that when I left my former home last summer and spent some weeks staying with friends, one of them, who has lived in the city for over three decades remarked, ‘That’s the great thing about Scotland. When everything goes to shit in one city you can just hop over to the other one and disappear for a while.’

The summer I left, last summer, marked a year’s anniversary since the Dutch-owned Scotrail franchise introduced a new fleet of electric trains, Class 385 Express, which took the nearly hour-long rail journey down to 42 minutes. When I lived in one city and taught in the other, this journey was my commute. Now I live in the other city and only go back when strictly necessary; the former city is now associated with unpleasant but necessary tasks and meetings – with the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, with lawyers and estate agents, with depositing or uplifting possessions. I notice that as the train gets closer to arriving at this city’s main station, my muscles clench, my breathing constricts. I have even developed a somatic response to the particular beeps and dingles emitted by these trains’ announcements and automated doors. Mostly I find myself staring out of the windows on such journeys, a screen of untouched admin in front of me.

Exactly two hundred and fifty summers before last summer, while looking for stone to construct the nearby Forth and Clyde canal, some workmen found the remains of Castlecary Fort, a Roman settlement built along the Antonine Wall in the first century ce. Among the various votive altars and distance markers they also found a small statuette carved from the local sandstone. It appeared to be a robed female figure with an unusually direct gaze, holding what looked like a horn in one arm, and a wheel attached to a stick in the other. In Castlecary, just a stone’s throw from the artery of the central belt – the Glasgow-Edinburgh main rail line – they had found Fortuna.

 

 

 

I visit the Hunterian museum on a rainy day. I have been to the museum several times before, but for some reason have never been drawn to the exhibition – concerning Roman Scotland – that is straight ahead when you walk in. Instead I have gravitated to corners, where William Hunter’s shrivelled anatomical specimens linger in discolouring turpentine, and bird nests are trapped behind glass. On this occasion I walk straight ahead, eyes peeled for the goddess. When I find her, I have an inexplicable urge to laugh. Perhaps at myself, at the narratives and para-narratives involving this figure I have woven over the last few months.

Fortuna stands snug in her niche, mounted roughly at my eyeline in too-bright uplighting. Her stance is somehow both slant and erect, slouched and determined; the phyllotactic spirals on her tunic and cornucopia run away from each other in opposite directions. I try to make out the two-faced gaze, the weeping eye and the twinkling one, but the red sandstone – which I cannot disentangle from the sandstone tenements I have lived in my whole adult life, in this city and the other one – is too worn away to discern. Behind her, through the Hunterian’s latticed windows, are grey skies and the greyer grey of the hulking university library. I imagine Fortuna’s gaze looking out over the central belt, and I find myself silently telling her that next time I am on the train, from this city to the other one, I will think of Vortumna, she who revolves the year, of The Doe and the mistress of animals, and pay my respects.

 

Feature artwork © Kiki Smith, Fortune (detail), 2014

 

This essay is part of a longer work-in-progress, Lovebug. An alternative version is forthcoming in ON CARE, published by Ma Bibliothèque.

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