notes from a lighthouse
occulting and sea eagles
Latitude 57°51.527'N Longitude 005°48.713'W. Elevation 37 metres. 6 hours drive from home.
I have wanted to stay in a lighthouse for years. Not all of this is related to my borderline obsession with the film The Lighthouse; some of it is pure idiot romanticism.
There are precious few lighthouses to actually stay in these days, and of course all of them are achingly remote. The one I am writing from is run as a b&b, with a little self-catering hut attached; the lighthouse was automated in 1986 (the year I was born) and so the buildings were sold. To get here required almost a full work day of driving, with the last eight miles or so being a sheep-laden single track and the last three miles being a pothole-riven tightrope with three bridges that you’d think twice about walking over, let alone driving across. Having had plenty of forewarning, and having fairly often been the only driver in a car full of people navigating farcical rural Scottish single-track roads, I managed okay; my standard coping method is to drive myself to distraction over something before it happens, so that it turns out to be not so bad in reality. The older man who arrived at the same time as us clearly hadn’t done this ‘training’ so genuinely looked like he might have developed PTSD.
This lighthouse was completed in 1912. It got electricity and indoor toilets in 1962, at which point the treacherous road was also installed. It is apparently one of the last classic-design manned lighthouses in Scotland, and is painted in a way that I have come to realise is distinctly Scottish: whitewashed with yellow accents. If you’ve been to Neist Point lighthouse on Skye, you’ll know what I mean. The name of this lighthouse means ‘smooth point’ in Gaelic, referring to the gentle slope of the rocks down into the water. However, this gentleness didn’t stop an American liberty ship coming ashore here amidst a blizzard in 1944, during which the lighthouse keepers and others only managed to save 15 out of the 65 people on board.
The sea is terrifying; the sea is full of death. I know these things. I have spent enough tine on (or realistically off) a surfboard to know that a fear of the sea is totally logical. I have friends that have almost drowned on beleaguered boats. And yet, I remain convinced that I would do well on a ship, on a voyage of several months. There is something that convinces me that I will learn something about myself by staring down the vast expanses of the ocean. In the meantime, I find myself in spots like these, and I let my mind wander, and succumb to the splintered, engulfing feelings of the current moment, and I try to breathe. This post is written in the spirit of that process.
From our beautifully kitted out little hut, there is a landscape window that looks directly out onto the Minch, the strait that separates the mainland from the confusingly named Lewis and Harris, which despite its protestations is only one island. This sea is home to the mythological ‘blue men of the Minch’, who follow in the tradition of the Blue Man Group in being largely incomprehensible and ludicrously twee; these blue men, who I’m afraid are incredibly gay-coded, apparently twirl about in the water like porpoise, shouting lines of verse to sea captains who are then tasked with completing the verse back to them. Surely poets are the last thing you’d want swarming in a body of water.
(Here I remember being on Anglesey with my best friend and her family: we looked out onto the sea as she tried to coax her three-year-old into remembering the name of the creatures they’d seen in the water a while before.
“What did we see? P… P…. Po….”
“Polphins!”)
My partner and I have come here to celebrate our eighth anniversary; we have actually known each other twice as long as that. Here are some things we are good at, as a couple: making and eating car sandwiches. Maintaining friendships with people very far away. Racing each other down stairs/across a short flat surface with no warning. Talking about films for hours after seeing them. Making each other increasingly more left wing / becoming politically obsessed with more obscure or specific movements. Keeping a steady supply of homemade kimchi and greek yogurt in the flat. Taking the piss out of each other. Rolling with life’s punches. Knowing the worst things about each other and loving hard anyway. Criticising bad theatre. Making sure the other has something delicious to eat. Supporting and encouraging. Doing the chores the other can’t stand / will never think to do. Creating a home that people feel welcome in. Choosing wine. Enjoying the moment. Making ourselves laugh.
Things we must never, ever try to do together: DIY.
A few days before we came here, talking about birds, the poet Josie Giles told me that if you see a bird and think huh, is that an eagle? it’s a buzzard; if you see a bird and think JESUS CHRIST LOOK AT THAT, it’s an eagle. Driving the last part of the nerve-testing road to the lighthouse, we passed an enormous bird sitting on a rock, and said JESUS CHRIST LOOK! It was, indeed, a sea eagle, subsequently chased away by a ballsy crow.
Inspiration is a funny thing. Since before Orpheus Builds a Girl came out, I have been vaguely working on a novel set around these parts. Novels sit in the back of my head, building their own little nest, magpie-ing from real life until they are ready; this is one I tried to hatch too early. It exists currently in a half formed and spotty manuscript, unsure of what it is, slowly deciding upon itself as I go about doing other things. I am almost certain I will have to rewrite it from scratch. On my better days, I am up for the challenge.
Inspiration strikes almost as soon as we are in the hut, looking out, seeing birds and waves. You can read a dozen books to feed the nesting and nothing quite sits; you can bring yourself to a lighthouse and ten minutes later you’re furiously restructuring the whole novel, having had a realisation about what was wrong, who was wrong, what wasn’t working, etc. You can cloister yourself away in an office for a month and get nowhere; you can stare at the sea for half an hour and have an epiphany. The creative process is as slippery as an eel, and just as saline and disgusting.
‘Self-catering’ to me suggests a complete absence of cooking items in a kitchen, a situation which would justify the penny-pocket sliding tin of pretentious salt that I had only narrowing avoided purchasing the previous month (my equally-pretentious friend succumbed. I immediately envied him). This ‘self-catering’ spot, though, is run by someone who takes food incredibly seriously, and it shows. There is proper flaky salt in a little salt pig. The olive oil is extremely high quality. The cupboard is stocked with all the things you would actually need to cook, and there is a hob and an oven but no microwave. Your first night’s meal is prepared for you—an absolutely gorgeous ribollita, which is one of the perfect ‘I’ve arrived’ dishes, especially if you top it with parmesan—but you are also provided with fresh bread, butteries, eggs, Scottish cheeses, milk, yogurt, local honey, jams and a fruit plate. Chatting with the lovely owner Susan, she finds out we are big on food and asks if she can make us a sun-dried tomato and black olive farinata; yes, you certainly can. She arrives the next evening with a hot bowl of Persian-style cabbage with turmeric that will kick the tits off you, and later on the still-warm farinata, which is so much food that we don’t have to cook. When she finds out it is our anniversary she brings a gift over. This is ‘self-catering’ done by someone who simply cannot help hosting. I love it. It feels uncomplicated; these days, a rare thing.
The general things of the world are strained beyond painful. Today is ten months exactly of the worst horrors in Gaza. How normal it has become to open your phone and see unadulterated footage of the most awful things you can imagine; how normal it has become for those people to relentlessly suffer. And closer to home, things falling apart. I cannot look on social media without feeling quite genuinely ill at the state of it, the constant, endless bickering, the perpetual saying, the sick performance of everything that we have all been taught to do. The appearance of doing one thing or another better than everyone else, being more moral or more cynical or whatever is available to one-up your peers. The fundamental disorganisation, the fragmentation. A milieu of people very sure that almost everything is wrong, and with no clear path to do anything about it. Barely a handful of politicians that represent your views. The guilt that comes from turning it all off and having a glass of wine as you look out across the sea, feeling that you are doing nothing. But knowing that everyone else is also doing nothing, but louder.
I read the draft of this post to my partner, who unexpectedly admits to having seen the Blue Man Group about twenty years ago.
‘Was it awful?’
‘'[pause] I wouldn’t go again.’
I am not the first writer to have stayed in the lighthouse; the delightful owner tells us about another author who wrote some of a book here. I wonder what it would be like to spend two months of winter here, what it might be like to drive that road in icy conditions in a very old Mazda; the novel I have been mulling over for a few years is set near here, on the coast, so it would make a lot of sense. A large part of me wants to remove myself from society, to try and extract myself from the heaving mass of discourse. But I did go slightly mad over ten days alone in Anglesey a few years ago, trying to write, so my confidence in my mental stoicism is not high.
For the last few weeks I have been in a creative slump. What I mean by this is: I have been completely overwhelmed by things unrelated to actually writing, difficult to solve, not my problem but also entirely my problem. What I mean by this is: I have tried to have ideas and none have come. I have tried immersing myself in brilliant writing, to be inspired, and have felt only discouraged. Though I have read a lot of anti-work leftist writing, I am unfortunately the kind of person that just loves to create, to produce, to complete things. When I’m not writing I make yogurt, I crochet. I draw, I paint, I photograph, I decorate, I have recently made a small rug. I feel unmoored when I cannot work on things. The frustration of a creative slump is distinct and obscene.
(I say I am in a creative slump. When I can be more objective I can see that the following things are true: I have just finished editing a novel with copyedits done this last fortnight. I write 4000-8000 words here per month. I am in the middle of ghostwriting a book. I am in the middle of editing a 900+ page nonfiction book. I have just spent a week hacking a story collection to death. I am reading the work of others to chair them. I am mentoring an early career writer. I am painting and drawing. I am cooking every day. All of this is creativity.)
(And off the back of this I think about the material conditions of most writers - the need for work, the constant pressures to earn, the need to tackle imperfect things, the political duty, the falling pay, the responsibilities that many of us have to support others around us, the intense privilege of 'just being a writer' that so few of us really have, the cost of living, the discourse around everything, which so often ends in snideness - and I wonder if this is very conducive to artistry at all? No, I don't wonder that: I know it isn't. None of us are doing the best work we can, because the vast majority of our time is the Other Work, existing, struggling, worrying.)
A social media post alerts me to the fact it is ten years since I (first?) came to Edinburgh for a wedding, amidst a breaking relationship and after six years of enjoyable but aimless wandering around the world, and met almost all of the people I now think of as my closest friends. By the end of the year I would be living here, leaving the endless humidity and noise of Central America behind. In the decade I have lived in this country, I have learned often and changed a lot, but one specific skill I have acquired is this: I can build a really decent fire.
There is a beach, clambering distance down from the lighthouse. It is comprised almost entirely of perfectly smooth rocks, like giant pebbles, bigger than my feet. Purple, blue, white: a Millennial colour scheme. Sheep wander down from time to time, looking for something elusive. Strewn between and across these rocks is seaweed that looks and feels like latex; thick between the hands, pale beige, strong enough to pull taut and relax. You could genuinely make clothes out of this.
A few weeks ago I attended a talk by an artist who was experimenting with plants on a Scottish sea loch. She was astonished to find that by burning horsetail, she made glass. I think of my marine biologist friends, of which there are several, formerly working on amazing things like algae, or corals, or wave power. People who want to tackle the big problems of the world, to preserve and care for the things we have. All these projects and willing minds amazing, and underfunded. I tell myself that the rage that we all feel, as misdirected as it might currently be, is energy, is potential. There is so much stuff for us to seize. Right there to be worked with, and not taken advantage of.
you write beautifully Heather, thank you
I think I’ve been to that lighthouse! If it is the same one, I remember the road up to it is absolutely terrifying; a cliff with lots of jagged rocks below.
I’ve read some stuff that suggests creativity is difficult when our bodies don’t feel safe in the world— like it’s hard to get the playful bits of ourselves to turn on when we’re bracing for something awful all the time. I don’t know if that’s true, but it has certainly felt that way to me