The Essayist's Notebook

I want to note an essay that has been crystallising in my head for over a month now. I simply want to record how these things happen. I will probably write and publish the essay in about three weeks, in early November, but for now I want to note its emergence.

It began over a month ago while I was sorting wood in my barn; selecting, grading and organising oak beams and planks. Some of them are incredibly ancient. Others were felled locally about twenty years ago and have been steadily maturing, waiting for use.

It made sense to shift a few boxes. They contained old notebooks and old writing, some dating from the days of the National Council of Labour Colleges, others my own work from the 1970s through into the 1990s. I picked up a small sheaf of loose-leaf pages and there, on the top, was Mayfleece. I remembered working on its cadence, trying to capture the correct tidal rhythm. The poem took me back to Chaucer and the practice, in my Lower Sixth year, of speaking Middle English. From there I found myself thinking about my encounters with Fingallian in Skerries. Half-formed notions about language and expression drifted into thoughts of Arthur Young and his extraordinary skill for observation and reporting, qualities the poem itself had required.

Then, suddenly, I was interrupted.

“Thinking about that second word? You could do better.” Surprisingly, it was not any of the characters just mentioned, but Montaigne himself, perhaps emboldened by the walls of the barn, walls older even than he.

I have taken copious notes since then, even to the point of recording myself thinking about my own thinking. As I write this note, I have a vague notion that I might create a conversation between myself and Montaigne, using it to illustrate the progression of the thought while simultaneously narrating the process of its emergence. That would leave three voices speaking at once: Montaigne, the self being remembered, and the self doing the remembering. We shall see.

This is already promising to be a complex essay. Not for the reader, but for me as the writer. Integrity demands that I remain faithful to the evolution of the thought and to the trail upon which it has led me. In those early reflections, Montaigne was already questioning my bon foi over the choice of that second word.

Through the barn door, only metres away, can be seen the architecture of conflict and the blazon of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

“There's a woman who knew the value of a word,” says Montaigne. We banter. Bacon and Locke enter my head. Henri IV appears when I rebuke Montaigne. Arthur Young returns, bringing multiple threads with him. Young observed this land: the triangle stretching from Henri's Pau, across to Eleanor's influence in Bayonne and north to Montaigne's Bordeaux. Four different perspectives, and my own, upon the same political, cultural, agricultural and governance landscape.

All of them, somehow, bring me back to my choice of that second word in the poem.

It began because I thought I could use this possible revision of Mayfleece to illustrate yet another aspect of why, as writers, we write. I had already sown the seeds in A Fragment Of History, in a post for writing.ie. Yet somewhere along the way the essay seems to have acquired purposes of its own. I am genuinely unsure where it is taking me. I suspect I will not know until I click Publish in November.