Sometimes, I open the notes app on my phone and tap a few words, or a sentence or two.
Sometimes, those notes are banal reminders, often of things I then forget about (Section 18: hare shirt - 500. Section 18 suitcases).
Sometimes they are observations of things I found striking in some way and hope I might possibly use or adapt for something, somewhere, sometime (The dusky-pink-trousers man’s daughter thinks the bloops and bleeps are shit. Dad - I think she’s asking - do we have to listen to this?)
Sometimes they are ideas for pieces of writing I invariably don’t get round to. (Piece about pronunciation of Llanelli by Transport for Wales recorded voice).
Sometimes they are quotations overheard from the radio or a podcast (The unfinished way people love us - Kate Bowler - Everything Happens).
Sometimes they are snatches of creative writing or phrases of potential poetry that I think I might use at some point (Beauty is not something to behold but something to be held).
Sometimes they are reminders of things I have seen or heard and want to find out more about later. The most recent of these was taken at Hidden Notes festival in Stroud, watching the documentary film Ryuchi Sakamoto: Coda. My note from that reads:
Yarn Wire - sticker on Nakamoto’s door
Perhaps twenty more times and yet it all seems limitless
Yarn/Wire, I later discovered is a musical quartet based in New York where Sakamoto lived. Must check them out. The second line of the note is part of an extract from Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky which was adapted for the screen by Bernado Bertolucci with Sakamoto providing the music.
Referring to him just as ‘Sakamoto’ feels somehow inappropriate, even though it’s the convention. The documentary intimately follows him in his apartment and home studio, creating new work, brushing his teeth because his cancer treatment means he is immunosuppressed and needs to be scrupulous about avoiding any risk of infection, reminiscing about past work. I feel I come, in a sense, to know, him, Ryuchi, even as I know that this is now, in reality, an impossibility rather than merely vanishingly unlikely, since the cancer, seen in pirhouetting medical imaging at the start of the film, ended his life earlier this year.
He is a deeply attractive figure in the film. I would like to have been friends with him. I imagine the other lives I might have led that might have thrown us together. If I hadn’t had sunburned shoulders that summer, which made the raised blood pressure from blowing a cornet too painful, perhaps I would have stuck with it and become a fellow musician involved in one of Ryuchi’s many collaborative projects. If I hadn’t taken against my physics teacher and rejected the relentless science bias of my grammar school and left it to focus on English at an FE college, maybe I would have become an oncologist or radiographer and found myself on Ryuchi’s treatment team. If I’d stuck to that early ambition of being a writer rather than waiting until now (when it feels as though it might be just a little too late) perhaps I would have been a music journalist, writing Ryuchi’s definitive authorised biography, or the screenwriter of a film that he might have scored. Or an environmental activist, leading an NGO that Ryuchi would support (one of the first sequences of the film features him playing a piano damaged in the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the tsunami tidemark visible across its gloss black side).
Or, perhaps, I could have been the maker of a deeply moving documentary about the Coda to Ryuchi’s rich life in music and environmental activism.
I am attending the festival, watching this film, with my friend, Donald. We used to be colleagues, seeing each other on a more-or-less daily basis. Now we live some 250 miles apart and this is the second time I’ve seen him in the past year. How many more times will we meet up?
Perhaps twenty times and yet it all seems limitless
The passage from the film from which this quotation is taken appears in the documentary, and the segment segués into Ryuchi quoting it himself. Back home, I look it up:
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
The words resonate even though no such afternoon from my childhood comes to mind. And even though I suspect I haven’t yet seen the full moon rise as many as twenty times.
and yet it all seems limitless
A week passes, then two, and various endings to this piece are started and deleted. One hangs, as unformed as a poem, nascent in a drop of ink held on the tines of a dipped nib. Then at last, simpler than I thought it could be, it is released:
and it is limitless, for we are fathomless drops, drawn trembling, glistening, from an inexhaustible well.