Tombo-en
First published in Gutter 25 (Spring 2022)
The 60th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death (Feb 11th) seemed an apt time to share this essay.
On the first day of my summer vacation, buoyed by sunshine and good intentions, I took my laptop and coffee pot out to the garden and considered the palette of files on my desktop. I always have a number of projects on the go at one time, meaning I have a work in progress that fits whatever mood I’m in but this day, the first day of the holidays, nothing grabbed me. I sorted a garden-suitable playlist, rubbed mosquito repellent into my exposed skin, and watched the dragonflies float and dart.
Wildlife loves our garden. It’s home to armies of lizards who occasionally invade the house when it rains too much. A family of pheasants wander through like royals inspecting a new hospital. There’s some small mammal—a stoat of some kind perhaps, or a raccoon—that shits on the balcony during the night, a dirty protest at something or other. But these tend to be nocturnal, or at least stage-shy. During the day, it’s the dragonflies that fascinate me, oblivious as they are to my presence.
Perhaps it’s the word, dragonfly. A strange name for something so small, a word that sounds like a stage direction from Game of Thrones, or an oxymoron, welding together the largest and smallest airborne creatures in one word. It has been associated with the devil, colloquially called the devil’s darning needle according to one website, though I can’t really imagine that was in common usage. The Romanian name translates as devil’s horse though if the Satan can comfortably sit astride your average dragonfly, perhaps he’s not that scary after all, a puckish fool rather than the stuff of nightmares.
One of them, yellow and green, almost neon in its sheen, alights on the top of my laptop screen and settles, preening. I am caught between wanting to relish the moment and to capture the image so I can enjoy it in Wordsworthian tranquillity later. I fight the modern urge and sit still, watch its eyes swivel around, its long body flex, its wings quiver. Dragonflies are, QI tells me, the only insect that hunts by anticipation, by deploying an instinctive understanding of trigonometry, predicting perfectly where their prey is going to be and charting an intercept course. I remember trigonometry from school and sympathise with this dragonfly enjoying a rest. I know the feeling well.
One of the first pieces of prose I ever wrote was called Dragonflies Trousered. I say “piece of prose” because calling it a short story would be a lie: there was no story, no plot, no characters, barely any point. Calling it a prose poem would be to cast a spell of grandiosity with that vague descriptor. It was a piece of prose that at the time felt like a manifesto, like something experimental, avant garde, something new and ground-breaking, for me at least if not the world. It wasn’t, of course, it was a string of paragraphs that all too clearly showed off my influences while ostensibly covering a recent trip to the coffee shops of Amsterdam. I was a student at Aberdeen, and the piece was included in one of the Creative Writing Society’s annual anthologies. I read it at an event in front of Alan Spence and that memory still makes me cringe.
I don’t know why it was called Dragonflies Trousered beyond the rhythm of the thing, the play of syllables that appealed to me. There was nothing in the piece about dragonflies or trousers, just derivative pap about drugs, freedom, creativity, Plath, Joyce, Kerouac and, if I remember correctly, the Manic Street Preachers. The lyrics to Faster appealed to the teenage me as a model for how to show off and, lacking originality, I mimicked.
Plath was a huge touchstone for me at the time, the poetry mostly, but I went so far as to read, cover to cover, the massive anthology of her letters like a character in a Dan Brown novel searching for clues to the holy grail. In my third year at uni a friend and I drove to Hebden Bridge where I sat in front of Plath’s grave and wrote a poem that had yew trees in it. I know. My copies of her four poetry collections were stolen from my secondary school (a school which no longer exists so, retrospectively, I feel I saved them and wish I’d taken more) and I poured over them during my adolescence, writing my own, horrific, angst-ridden juvenilia under their influence.
You see the kind of teenager I was. The two most important writers to me for years were Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Wurtzel. Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation lay beside my bed and I read it cover to cover multiple times, often turning back to page one from the final sentence. It spoke to me, not because I was on Prozac (I wasn’t) or had issues with drug and sex addiction (I dabbled in the former while only imagining what the latter was like), but because of her brutal, unashamed honesty. Plath and Wurtzel both wrote openly about their depression. They didn’t hide it, they didn’t disguise it, they didn’t make self-deprecating jokes (well, Wurtzel often did but that seemed to throw the honesty into even starker relief when the jokes stopped), they were upfront. This is how I feel and it’s fucking horrible.
For years I wondered why it was these two writers who spoke to me so clearly, why it was female American writers in whose words I found echoes of my own internal world and the beginnings of a language and a voice through which I could express that. Why, as a teenage boy, could I not find a more reflective mirror? The answer, I realised later, is clear: because at the time few men wrote with honesty about depression, anxiety, or loneliness. When male writers did tackle it, there was a veil, a disguise. It was hidden behind humour, behind masculine posturing, behind an embarrassment that Plath and Wurtzel didn’t feel, or could overcome.
Men did write about these things, just without honesty. What is On The Road but a cry for help from a man who is unable to say the word help? Kerouac’s characters are keeping misery at bay with drink, drugs, sex and jazz, there is forced jollity, the heady buzz of freedom, the open road, the endless mountains, the roiling sea, where everything will be okay as long as no one actually names their demons. Kerouac drank himself to death at 47 after a lifetime of writing about men who hide from pain. Drank himself to death without ever writing, as Hemingway (another echo) would have said, one damn true sentence.
The men I read–Kerouac, Hemingway, Burroughs, Kafka, Sartre, Kundera–very explicitly did not write about it. They wrote around it, over it, under it. They wrote about not writing about it. A history of literature drowning in alcohol, in metaphor, in symbolism rather than just say, once, help. They are writers at the mercy of shame. Plath and Wurtzel were never so coy.
The thing that stayed with me most about Plath was, ironically, a line in Ted Hughes’s introduction to the Collected Poems that referred to Plath’s vocabulary, “a supercharged system of inner symbols and images,” a personal mythology Plath had—consciously or unconsciously—created through which she could access the core of herself and express it in the endlessly unsatisfactory English language. A language of moons, of yew trees, of flowers blooming wild, of innocent children and overbearing fathers, of borrowed mythology; Ariel, Medusa, Lady Lazarus. Is that how you write? I wondered. Do I need to develop my own mythology, my own vocabulary of symbols and if so, what? I’d look around my bedroom, my bog-standard high school, my Aberdeen suburb and despair; if this was writing, then I was no writer. Now I know: of course this isn’t writing. This is what academics and critics do to writing after the fact.
The dragonfly on my laptop takes off, speeding towards some morsel I cannot see. Another QI fact—or maybe it was on No Such Thing as a Fish—is that during the time of the dinosaurs, dragonflies were the size of pigeons. Something to do with more oxygen in the atmosphere. I tell my wife this fact and she is horrified; dragonflies that big would be terrifying, much more worthy of their association with the devil. I think of the dirty pigeons that congregate outside Marks and Spencers in Aberdeen, mingling with the local shitehawks, and disagree. No dragonfly of any size has ever shat on me. Then I think of the view we saw from a cable car a few years ago–thousands of dragonflies feasting in the thin spaces between the treetops and the clouds near the top of a Japanese mountain, and conclude she may have a point.
When did the dragonfly enter my consciousness? I don’t remember them in the garden when I was an Aberdonian child. They certainly weren’t around when I was at university, or when I lived centrally in Glasgow, Edinburgh, or in Japan. The first time I remember being fully conscious of dragonflies was when we moved to the Japanese countryside in 2016. Yet I drew on the image for that prose piece in 1999. Dragonflies have lived in my subconscious for decades and, despite that piece not having anything to do with dragonflies, I put the word right there in the title.
That piece is, I see now, about creativity and freedom, just not in the way I intended at the time. As a teenager I thought writing was about teaching, for which read lecturing. That writers had something important to say and wanted you to listen to them. I was wrong. Writers don’t write in order to teach (at least, the good ones don’t). We write in order to learn. I am drawn to subjects, stories, characters I don’t understand and want to learn more about. People whose experiences are not mine, whose lives I will never live except in my fiction. It turns out the thing I understand least in the world is me.
Dragonflies Trousered, to unleash the academic in me, is the first step on the road of me trying to use writing to understand myself and somehow, at that early stage, the dragonfly was already folded into the mix. My influences, worn clearly on my sleeve, my manifesto, my hopes and fears about art, are all there in that piece, getting boiled down to that single image, the dragonfly. Plath-like, I was already building a symbolic vocabulary and dragonflies to me symbolise creativity.
The second part of the title, incidentally, is a euphemism for being drunk. Trousered usually means to get a large amount of money by nefarious means, most often deployed in the context of trading profits. However, a theory Billy Connolly put forward states that in Scotland, any word with -ed at the end can be used to mean “drunk”: spannered, battered, trousered. A theory that falls down at the word “fist”.
Alcohol. For all that the honesty of Plath and Wurtzel spoke to me, it was the obfuscation of Kerouac and Hemingway that found its way into my writing. For twenty years I too was coy, too ashamed to name my demons. I learned the lessons of my literary forebears well.
Japanese houses don’t get named—they rarely even get numbered—but I wanted my first and likely only house to have a name. My maternal grandparents’ home had a name, Fintray Gardens, which was written on signs at the bottom of the dirt track that led to the house through the forest I was perpetually lost in, the first line of their address. It wasn’t a particularly imaginative name, since the house had been on the grounds of the grander Fintray House, the gardener’s cottage in fact, and therefore, literally, in Fintray Gardens. Still, it had a name.
My family no longer live in Fintray Gardens but when they left, they took the wooden signs with them. I contemplated calling my own house New Fintray Gardens in tribute and maybe having one of the signs shipped over, then thought again. New Fintray Gardens in the Japanese phonetic syllabary would just be silly and, since it wouldn’t be part of the official address, redundant. I gave up on the idea of naming our home publicly, but in my head I made my choice: 蜻蛉園Tombo-en, Dragonfly’s Garden.