Bruce Nash's Blog
February 3, 2024
Introducing Rose
Dear Reader of 'All the Words We Know'
Welcome to the world of whatsitsname. A place of forgetting and remembering, of language deficit and the love of words, of powerlessness and indomitability, of fear and laughter and heartbreak and joy.
Welcome to Rose.
Rose is a woman in her eighties, resident of an aged care facility where her friend has died in mysterious circumstances. Rose’s life may have been reduced to the confines of her bed, her wheelchair and her walker, but she is infinitely larger than her limitations. Hellbent on understanding the sinister goings-on around her and overcoming the dangers that threaten her, she first must find a way to access her memories, at the lost centre of which is the truth about the great love of her life.
All the Words We Know is, at its heart, a story about how we make sense of the world.
Some years ago when my own mother went into care, I can say with reasonable certainty that I wasn’t thinking about getting a novel out of it.
Nevertheless. The setting proved irresistible. When I asked another resident how they liked living there, I was answered with some outrage:
‘Oh no, I don’t live here! No, no, no, I’m only visiting!’
That, I suspect, was the spark for this book. Then when I sat down to write, Rose began to speak. Not my mother, not anyone I knew, but a force of nature with whom I could only do my best to keep up. It’s no great exaggeration to say that the business of writing this book was a matter of turning up every day to find out what amazing thing Rose would say or do next.
In the end, this novel will live or die on the strength of Rose’s voice. I hope you enjoy her, as well as the Fellow Who Doesn’t Live Here, the Nice Boy Who Mops the Floors, the Angry Nurse, the Scare Manager, Rose’s long suffering son and daughter, and all the rest.
All I know about writing is to try to follow what’s alive, and lose the rest. As far as I am concerned, Rose is very much alive. Anything else, as Rose would say, is whatsitsname.
Bruce Nash
All the Words We Know is published by Allen & Unwin.
Welcome to the world of whatsitsname. A place of forgetting and remembering, of language deficit and the love of words, of powerlessness and indomitability, of fear and laughter and heartbreak and joy.
Welcome to Rose.
Rose is a woman in her eighties, resident of an aged care facility where her friend has died in mysterious circumstances. Rose’s life may have been reduced to the confines of her bed, her wheelchair and her walker, but she is infinitely larger than her limitations. Hellbent on understanding the sinister goings-on around her and overcoming the dangers that threaten her, she first must find a way to access her memories, at the lost centre of which is the truth about the great love of her life.
All the Words We Know is, at its heart, a story about how we make sense of the world.
Some years ago when my own mother went into care, I can say with reasonable certainty that I wasn’t thinking about getting a novel out of it.
Nevertheless. The setting proved irresistible. When I asked another resident how they liked living there, I was answered with some outrage:
‘Oh no, I don’t live here! No, no, no, I’m only visiting!’
That, I suspect, was the spark for this book. Then when I sat down to write, Rose began to speak. Not my mother, not anyone I knew, but a force of nature with whom I could only do my best to keep up. It’s no great exaggeration to say that the business of writing this book was a matter of turning up every day to find out what amazing thing Rose would say or do next.
In the end, this novel will live or die on the strength of Rose’s voice. I hope you enjoy her, as well as the Fellow Who Doesn’t Live Here, the Nice Boy Who Mops the Floors, the Angry Nurse, the Scare Manager, Rose’s long suffering son and daughter, and all the rest.
All I know about writing is to try to follow what’s alive, and lose the rest. As far as I am concerned, Rose is very much alive. Anything else, as Rose would say, is whatsitsname.
Bruce Nash
All the Words We Know is published by Allen & Unwin.
April 6, 2020
A Little Magical Thinking
A Little Magical Thinking
Early in the morning I take my kayak out onto Wallaga Lake. Something I do, and would do more often, if not that what I most often do early in the morning is write. But this morning is unusual. This morning, as I push out from the shore and into the lake’s timeless reflections, I have something with me. At my feet, tied in a bundle with string, is the typescript of my newly completed novel, An Island in the Lake.
I am a novelist, and I am deeply, deeply superstitious. That’s a pejorative, of course, but I feel no shame. When it comes to my writing I am always on the lookout for an omen, never above an augury or a portent. At the very least, writers need to keep their spirits up if they’re going to get their writerly arses onto their writing chairs, and a little faith that something magical might happen when they do. It’s commonly said that if you want to write you must read, and of course it’s true. What they don’t tell you is you may also spend a fair amount of time reading the auspices. From the Latin auspex, one who observes the flight of birds. I do quite a bit of that, as well.
I’m not alone. There’s a long tradition of writers using the language of magic to describe what they do. All the tropes of inspiration, of scenes and characters that come to life, beyond the control of their creators. Of words that come in a trance, the author seeming to transcribe from something like divine dictation. Of literary works that never die, of creations that keep on creating, infinitely. There’s a fair amount of bullshit spoken about this, but still. The literary vocation would scarcely be thinkable without magical thinking.
Magical Thinking. Another pejorative. Infantile. Irrational. Deluded. A cognitive misstep characterized by mistaking coincidence for causality. Typical of the beliefs and rituals of what used to be called primitive peoples. Redundant forms of enlightenment discredited by The Enlightenment. And yet. Associative thinking, sympathetic magic, the intuitive power of performativity, acting as if the acting out of something makes it true. It’s wired in. As has been suggested by some analysts of pre-industrial belief-systems, perhaps the difference between them and us is largely idiomatic. Perhaps it’s about the way we talk about magic, rather than any real difference in how we believe in it. Perhaps the way an Amazonian Indian accepts the wisdom of a Shaman is not so different from the way we accept the arcane knowledge of an Astrophysicist.
Or there’s Freud and Piaget. Projection and egocentricity. Phases in childhood development that we grow out of. Projecting our own mental states onto the world. The infantile delusion that what you yourself feel and experience is the same as what everyone else feels and experiences, and that these things can be directly transferred. And yet. Imagine being capable of imaginative empathy without it. Come to think of it, imagine imagination itself. Imagine metaphor, symbolism, analogy, metonymy, all the rest. Imagine art.
I’ll admit to being a fair way along the spectrum on this, since as well as a writing every day I also have a daily look at the Tarot pack. I know, I know, but try and stop me. The symbols, the reflections of deep archetypes, the beauty. It may be what someone has called the Magician’s Folly, and what someone else with less poetry has labelled the Representativeness Heuristic. But when I look at the Tarot, when I meditate upon the Hanged Man, the Page of Cups, the Magician and the High Priestess, the Nine of Pentacles, I intuit a kind of magnificent reality not unlike what I find in great poetry or the stories of The Dreaming, and very unlike what I find in Fox News or Facebook.
And when I look at Wallaga Lake, and mother-mountain Gulaga rising above it, when it’s impossible not to see the abiding aboriginality of this landscape, when I consider the indigenous understandings that I can never claim to understand myself but can always somehow dumbly feel, then it may be just that I’m guilty of magical thinking, but I won’t apologise for it.
So at dawn I paddle my kayak to a place that I have long held in my mind’s eye, all through the writing of An Island in the Lake. My mind’s eye. Reminds me of the Satin Bowerbird that lives in my garden. The way his eye darkens to the deepest indigo as he matures into his mania for collecting and arranging his precious blue objects. I am always making metaphors, creating and collecting associations, abandoning myself to intuitions about the interrelatedness of things. Discovering patterns and designs. Or imagining them. And if there is a difference, it is of no importance to me. I will create the world by what is beautiful to me, what grows in my mind’s eye as the blue madness grows in the bowerbird’s. The madness that drives him to lay out his treasures in patterns around his bower, in the faith that this is how to make the world conform to his essence, or himself contiguous with the world. Of course, the bowerbird is dreaming of a mate, as I’m dreaming of a publishing contract. But he is also, surely, making an assertion, not about himself but about life. If only that he and life seem to be the same, which even if it isn’t true, is perhaps the only truth that he or I can ever know.
I reach a stretch of shoreline made secret by a curve of sandbank and oyster-crusted rock and shadowed with a fringe of Casuarinas, and I haul the kayak up onto the shingle of a million shell-bits. Everywhere here there are old middens crumbling back into the water. I take my parcel and walk a few steps to the nearest Casuarina. I remove the string from the manuscript and place the unbound pages on the ground at the base of the tree, between two hardy-looking tufts of lomandra grass. I look at the pages. I wish them well. I go back to the kayak and I paddle away.
Time and weather will do the rest. An Island in the Lake will age to mulch on its little island, will curl and soften with rain, will blow into the lake with the winds, will be used by sea eagles for their nests, will travel and disperse and rot and vanish into the landscape.
Call it a primitive form of self-publishing. Call it litter. Litter is what some would call self-publishing, perhaps.
Months later I receive a call from a publisher to whom I’ve sent another copy the manuscript. Enthusiastic and eager to publish.
I know, I know. And yet.
Early in the morning I take my kayak out onto Wallaga Lake. Something I do, and would do more often, if not that what I most often do early in the morning is write. But this morning is unusual. This morning, as I push out from the shore and into the lake’s timeless reflections, I have something with me. At my feet, tied in a bundle with string, is the typescript of my newly completed novel, An Island in the Lake.
I am a novelist, and I am deeply, deeply superstitious. That’s a pejorative, of course, but I feel no shame. When it comes to my writing I am always on the lookout for an omen, never above an augury or a portent. At the very least, writers need to keep their spirits up if they’re going to get their writerly arses onto their writing chairs, and a little faith that something magical might happen when they do. It’s commonly said that if you want to write you must read, and of course it’s true. What they don’t tell you is you may also spend a fair amount of time reading the auspices. From the Latin auspex, one who observes the flight of birds. I do quite a bit of that, as well.
I’m not alone. There’s a long tradition of writers using the language of magic to describe what they do. All the tropes of inspiration, of scenes and characters that come to life, beyond the control of their creators. Of words that come in a trance, the author seeming to transcribe from something like divine dictation. Of literary works that never die, of creations that keep on creating, infinitely. There’s a fair amount of bullshit spoken about this, but still. The literary vocation would scarcely be thinkable without magical thinking.
Magical Thinking. Another pejorative. Infantile. Irrational. Deluded. A cognitive misstep characterized by mistaking coincidence for causality. Typical of the beliefs and rituals of what used to be called primitive peoples. Redundant forms of enlightenment discredited by The Enlightenment. And yet. Associative thinking, sympathetic magic, the intuitive power of performativity, acting as if the acting out of something makes it true. It’s wired in. As has been suggested by some analysts of pre-industrial belief-systems, perhaps the difference between them and us is largely idiomatic. Perhaps it’s about the way we talk about magic, rather than any real difference in how we believe in it. Perhaps the way an Amazonian Indian accepts the wisdom of a Shaman is not so different from the way we accept the arcane knowledge of an Astrophysicist.
Or there’s Freud and Piaget. Projection and egocentricity. Phases in childhood development that we grow out of. Projecting our own mental states onto the world. The infantile delusion that what you yourself feel and experience is the same as what everyone else feels and experiences, and that these things can be directly transferred. And yet. Imagine being capable of imaginative empathy without it. Come to think of it, imagine imagination itself. Imagine metaphor, symbolism, analogy, metonymy, all the rest. Imagine art.
I’ll admit to being a fair way along the spectrum on this, since as well as a writing every day I also have a daily look at the Tarot pack. I know, I know, but try and stop me. The symbols, the reflections of deep archetypes, the beauty. It may be what someone has called the Magician’s Folly, and what someone else with less poetry has labelled the Representativeness Heuristic. But when I look at the Tarot, when I meditate upon the Hanged Man, the Page of Cups, the Magician and the High Priestess, the Nine of Pentacles, I intuit a kind of magnificent reality not unlike what I find in great poetry or the stories of The Dreaming, and very unlike what I find in Fox News or Facebook.
And when I look at Wallaga Lake, and mother-mountain Gulaga rising above it, when it’s impossible not to see the abiding aboriginality of this landscape, when I consider the indigenous understandings that I can never claim to understand myself but can always somehow dumbly feel, then it may be just that I’m guilty of magical thinking, but I won’t apologise for it.
So at dawn I paddle my kayak to a place that I have long held in my mind’s eye, all through the writing of An Island in the Lake. My mind’s eye. Reminds me of the Satin Bowerbird that lives in my garden. The way his eye darkens to the deepest indigo as he matures into his mania for collecting and arranging his precious blue objects. I am always making metaphors, creating and collecting associations, abandoning myself to intuitions about the interrelatedness of things. Discovering patterns and designs. Or imagining them. And if there is a difference, it is of no importance to me. I will create the world by what is beautiful to me, what grows in my mind’s eye as the blue madness grows in the bowerbird’s. The madness that drives him to lay out his treasures in patterns around his bower, in the faith that this is how to make the world conform to his essence, or himself contiguous with the world. Of course, the bowerbird is dreaming of a mate, as I’m dreaming of a publishing contract. But he is also, surely, making an assertion, not about himself but about life. If only that he and life seem to be the same, which even if it isn’t true, is perhaps the only truth that he or I can ever know.
I reach a stretch of shoreline made secret by a curve of sandbank and oyster-crusted rock and shadowed with a fringe of Casuarinas, and I haul the kayak up onto the shingle of a million shell-bits. Everywhere here there are old middens crumbling back into the water. I take my parcel and walk a few steps to the nearest Casuarina. I remove the string from the manuscript and place the unbound pages on the ground at the base of the tree, between two hardy-looking tufts of lomandra grass. I look at the pages. I wish them well. I go back to the kayak and I paddle away.
Time and weather will do the rest. An Island in the Lake will age to mulch on its little island, will curl and soften with rain, will blow into the lake with the winds, will be used by sea eagles for their nests, will travel and disperse and rot and vanish into the landscape.
Call it a primitive form of self-publishing. Call it litter. Litter is what some would call self-publishing, perhaps.
Months later I receive a call from a publisher to whom I’ve sent another copy the manuscript. Enthusiastic and eager to publish.
I know, I know. And yet.
