The Epigone:
Parts 1 & 2
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: An ageing Scottish author, having moved to Barcelona to start a new life, regrets that he has failed as a writer. Then he comes across Miriam at his reading club.
Swearwords: None.
Description: An ageing Scottish author, having moved to Barcelona to start a new life, regrets that he has failed as a writer. Then he comes across Miriam at his reading club.
1
I don’t know how I ever got involved. It was a promise I made myself when I came to live in Barcelona. When I just got up and left one day. Stepped out of my former skin self and left behind the man I used to be. It’s the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world to do. I swore to stay out of other people’s lives. I was done with all that. Had had enough of personal dramas and morality power plays. I would just be a watcher from now on. I only wanted to continue on my journey as a writer. And enough time had already been lost. It was all I had left. Perhaps all I had ever had. If I didn’t find my way soon it would be too late. It became a private philosophy. Something to live by. Give my new life a meaning and a purpose. To finally become my true self. The first sixty years had all been a pretence. A farcical miscalculation of a life. Some people are born to participate and others are born voyeurs. Observers and seekers after others’ secrets. The mistake is to try to be something else. Something other than you are. Writers are vampires. Already half dead. Feeding on the living. Outcasts from an ordinary daylight life. Everything they see and hear is torn apart and utterly transformed in their minds. Boiled down to paste and pigment oils and painted out onto the canvas of the blank page when it comes time to let it all go. Yet I have been here for six years now and have made no progress. All my ideas have come to nothing. I am getting old. I am disintegrating. And time moves more quickly and the sands less firmly the further out I venture into the lagoon. And I fear deep down I will never make it to the other side. Never get it all out of me and down onto the page. And all that I really have left is unquantifiable time. One day on Passeig de Gràcia I heard it. The ticking. Everything went silent. The traffic and the discordant voices and the crash and hum of the city. And I was left alone with the slow ticking of the universe in my head. It was like some sort of calling. I saw the people moving in time as they really are. Moving through empty space. Surrounded by darkness and eternity. No north nor south nor up nor down nor right nor left. I was seated in the balcony of the ultimate theatre watching the only true story there is. It was a song of time captured by the living and passing pointlessly through all its players. I could see into the hearts and the heads of all the people in the street. All their secrets and sadnesses and hopes and heartbreaks were revealed to my eye. And all their presents and all their pasts and future fates and furies were whispered in my ear. I was invisible and had been given some great gift of insight. I wandered alone down Passeig de Gràcia and through Plaza Catalunya. Down Puerta del Ángel. The way we all wander nowadays. I sat outside the cathedral and watched all the people acting out their lives just for me. The whole time the clock kept up its steady tick. And then I realised what it was. It was the tick of the old clock in my grandmother’s house. The one that I used to lie awake listening to when I was a child. It was the clock that told me that I was safe then. That there was still and calm in my young life. That all my hauntings were over. That my grandmother would not die and leave me alone as long as that clock ticked in the gloom and the silence of the Scottish night. My brain was trying to ground me once again. To claim me back. Now I can see that even in that I was wrong. For I have been cast out of time. I have no compass or map anymore. Though I think when I look back on my life that there has been a certain art to it all even if I have wasted my talent. I suppose I have to think that to avoid madness. I am left with a deep feeling of shame. Of things undone. Of having wasted my life. A shame and despair for which I can never atone. Which I only saw when it was too late. Yet even in my clumsy way I still have a story to tell. And so I shall start with the girl. The way the best stories always do.
2
I have always taken stories from life. But this time I went too far. I did not extract but implanted. Like a body snatcher who runs out of fresh cadavers and starts to make his own I struck out off the page and inserted a story into life itself. Right there into the middle of the stream. She was just this girl, this woman, who came to our reading club. She was ordinary to look at. There was nothing classically beautiful or sexually arousing about her. It was her interior that attracted me and made me want to become her friend. I saw something of myself in her I suppose. Only after three weeks did she tell me her name. It was Miriam and she had once been a writer. We were reading “The Eternal Husband” by Dostoevsky (my choice) and she had such fresh ideas and insights that she made everyone else feel like philistines in rubber gloves trying to hold this great work of literature in their clumsy hands. She spoke with passion and deep psychological understanding of the book and the writer. It struck me as strange because before we had read “Sin Noticias de Gurb” by Mendoza and she had had almost nothing to say. Just a few cryptically ironic comments. She later confessed that she had studied literature in Buenos Aires for two years before the economic crisis hit and she couldn’t pay her studies anymore and like so many others came to Spain to start a new life. The modern world is hard on artistic people. It doesn’t value or understand them. We are even starting to swim in waters where they are coming to be considered a threat. For their allegiance is not to this world. She spoke about alienation and death and the underground of guilt and it all seemed just a bit too heavy for our little group. Hell, the look on the faces of the others said, wasn’t literature supposed to be uplifting? There was a silence and a shuffling of feet and a looking away. Miriam never came back to the group after that and we went on as before. We read “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”, “Patria”, and “The Girl on the Train” before breaking up for Christmas. I kept going because I was lonely and I needed human contact. Anyway, I was beyond the judgemental stage of life. I suppose it was my loneliness and my need to find a kindred spirit that wouldn’t allow me to forget Miriam. I found myself thinking about her and having imaginary deep conversations about literature during insomniacal nights. Loneliness does strange things to the mind. When I wasn’t working I continued to write. Long flow-of-consciousness or tight camera-eye pieces. I didn’t even send my stories to the magazines any longer. I didn’t see the point. They weren’t any good anyway. The writer had completely abandoned me. I now know that that is one of the biggest dangers. Everything I write now sounds inauthentic and imperfect and mediocre. The universe had sucked me up and spat me back out into the world. The price of authenticity and perfection was too high for me. I could not allow the complete disintegration of my personality into the ocean of time. I wasn’t ready for that. I had to come back to the world. I lacked the courage to be a real writer. I am just a human being clinging to this rock like all the rest of you.
I don’t know how I ever got involved. It was a promise I made myself when I came to live in Barcelona. When I just got up and left one day. Stepped out of my former skin self and left behind the man I used to be. It’s the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world to do. I swore to stay out of other people’s lives. I was done with all that. Had had enough of personal dramas and morality power plays. I would just be a watcher from now on. I only wanted to continue on my journey as a writer. And enough time had already been lost. It was all I had left. Perhaps all I had ever had. If I didn’t find my way soon it would be too late. It became a private philosophy. Something to live by. Give my new life a meaning and a purpose. To finally become my true self. The first sixty years had all been a pretence. A farcical miscalculation of a life. Some people are born to participate and others are born voyeurs. Observers and seekers after others’ secrets. The mistake is to try to be something else. Something other than you are. Writers are vampires. Already half dead. Feeding on the living. Outcasts from an ordinary daylight life. Everything they see and hear is torn apart and utterly transformed in their minds. Boiled down to paste and pigment oils and painted out onto the canvas of the blank page when it comes time to let it all go. Yet I have been here for six years now and have made no progress. All my ideas have come to nothing. I am getting old. I am disintegrating. And time moves more quickly and the sands less firmly the further out I venture into the lagoon. And I fear deep down I will never make it to the other side. Never get it all out of me and down onto the page. And all that I really have left is unquantifiable time. One day on Passeig de Gràcia I heard it. The ticking. Everything went silent. The traffic and the discordant voices and the crash and hum of the city. And I was left alone with the slow ticking of the universe in my head. It was like some sort of calling. I saw the people moving in time as they really are. Moving through empty space. Surrounded by darkness and eternity. No north nor south nor up nor down nor right nor left. I was seated in the balcony of the ultimate theatre watching the only true story there is. It was a song of time captured by the living and passing pointlessly through all its players. I could see into the hearts and the heads of all the people in the street. All their secrets and sadnesses and hopes and heartbreaks were revealed to my eye. And all their presents and all their pasts and future fates and furies were whispered in my ear. I was invisible and had been given some great gift of insight. I wandered alone down Passeig de Gràcia and through Plaza Catalunya. Down Puerta del Ángel. The way we all wander nowadays. I sat outside the cathedral and watched all the people acting out their lives just for me. The whole time the clock kept up its steady tick. And then I realised what it was. It was the tick of the old clock in my grandmother’s house. The one that I used to lie awake listening to when I was a child. It was the clock that told me that I was safe then. That there was still and calm in my young life. That all my hauntings were over. That my grandmother would not die and leave me alone as long as that clock ticked in the gloom and the silence of the Scottish night. My brain was trying to ground me once again. To claim me back. Now I can see that even in that I was wrong. For I have been cast out of time. I have no compass or map anymore. Though I think when I look back on my life that there has been a certain art to it all even if I have wasted my talent. I suppose I have to think that to avoid madness. I am left with a deep feeling of shame. Of things undone. Of having wasted my life. A shame and despair for which I can never atone. Which I only saw when it was too late. Yet even in my clumsy way I still have a story to tell. And so I shall start with the girl. The way the best stories always do.
2
I have always taken stories from life. But this time I went too far. I did not extract but implanted. Like a body snatcher who runs out of fresh cadavers and starts to make his own I struck out off the page and inserted a story into life itself. Right there into the middle of the stream. She was just this girl, this woman, who came to our reading club. She was ordinary to look at. There was nothing classically beautiful or sexually arousing about her. It was her interior that attracted me and made me want to become her friend. I saw something of myself in her I suppose. Only after three weeks did she tell me her name. It was Miriam and she had once been a writer. We were reading “The Eternal Husband” by Dostoevsky (my choice) and she had such fresh ideas and insights that she made everyone else feel like philistines in rubber gloves trying to hold this great work of literature in their clumsy hands. She spoke with passion and deep psychological understanding of the book and the writer. It struck me as strange because before we had read “Sin Noticias de Gurb” by Mendoza and she had had almost nothing to say. Just a few cryptically ironic comments. She later confessed that she had studied literature in Buenos Aires for two years before the economic crisis hit and she couldn’t pay her studies anymore and like so many others came to Spain to start a new life. The modern world is hard on artistic people. It doesn’t value or understand them. We are even starting to swim in waters where they are coming to be considered a threat. For their allegiance is not to this world. She spoke about alienation and death and the underground of guilt and it all seemed just a bit too heavy for our little group. Hell, the look on the faces of the others said, wasn’t literature supposed to be uplifting? There was a silence and a shuffling of feet and a looking away. Miriam never came back to the group after that and we went on as before. We read “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”, “Patria”, and “The Girl on the Train” before breaking up for Christmas. I kept going because I was lonely and I needed human contact. Anyway, I was beyond the judgemental stage of life. I suppose it was my loneliness and my need to find a kindred spirit that wouldn’t allow me to forget Miriam. I found myself thinking about her and having imaginary deep conversations about literature during insomniacal nights. Loneliness does strange things to the mind. When I wasn’t working I continued to write. Long flow-of-consciousness or tight camera-eye pieces. I didn’t even send my stories to the magazines any longer. I didn’t see the point. They weren’t any good anyway. The writer had completely abandoned me. I now know that that is one of the biggest dangers. Everything I write now sounds inauthentic and imperfect and mediocre. The universe had sucked me up and spat me back out into the world. The price of authenticity and perfection was too high for me. I could not allow the complete disintegration of my personality into the ocean of time. I wasn’t ready for that. I had to come back to the world. I lacked the courage to be a real writer. I am just a human being clinging to this rock like all the rest of you.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.