The Hottest Day.
How best to be remembered.
It’s the hottest day of the year and I am out with my son. He is 6, it is 7 in the morning and we are out early in the hopes of burning some of his tireless energy before the day becomes too hot to move. He is cycling and making motorbike noises. I am a distant figure behind him. We are tethered by an invisible cord of responsibility. Somehow, despite the vivid colours of his overwhelming internal world, somehow he has learnt to stop before crossing roads and wait before turning corners out of my sight.
Often when I’m teaching screenwriting I unpack my pretentious theory about the different audiences who watch and the different subjects that they watch when they do. I won’t go into it all now but my argument is that when you’re writing there are 4 distinct audiences in your head, each simultaneously engaging with 4 different subjects. It’s a theory I have no recollection of forming. I found it in an old notebook of mine, in my own handwriting but with no memory of writing down. It dates from the months following my mum’s death and is written in the kind of archly rigorous and slightly demented language I tend adopt in periods of depression. Perhaps I am 4 authors as well, each fighting for control of the pen.
In this theory my 4th audience is history (or perhaps History with a capital H). The idea being that whoever else you are writing for, you are also writing to be remembered. I feel a little ashamed of this, though I don’t think it’s simply egotism. All of us are inspired to write by writers, we want to make films because of the films we have seen. What most see as a statement, we take as a question begging a response. All art is a conversation with the dead.
My son didn’t want to leave the house so early in the morning. I floated the idea of cycling in his pyjamas but he’s not his sister so rather than seeing this as an exciting defiance of social norms he was outraged. However he did get on board a mission to buy football stickers and, as I’d hoped, now we are out, motion has taken over and he is lost in the act of living at speed. He hurtles down the pavement, a cannon ball I have fired into the future. He will not remember this.
This heat is exceptional. Today we will break the record of 1976, the scorching summer my mum always spoke of with revolted horror. It must have been worse then, in an age when the shops that sell football stickers didn’t have air-conditioning. She knew this temperature only once in her life and I feel strangely comforted to finally meet her ghost here in the oppressive fury of 37 degrees. For her grandson though, this wild boy she never knew would exist, this heat will be normal. This is now the temperature of his childhood. He won’t remember 7am in June, travelling at the speed of dawn with his father and other ghosts watching from the shade.
Writing to be remembered is the only thing more pointless than dying rich. It helps you none to expire amidst a fortune but, however worthless the achievement at least you know it was achieved. Of course some artists do get to feel like they have carved their name on eternity, though most must know how others have thought this and been rapidly forgotten. I have recently heard critics presenting wild revisions of Mailer, Greene and Updike who, for better or worse, were all eternals when my mum still had eyes to read. (To be fair, she hated two of the three but their books still lined our walls). A wildly successful writer recently admitted to a friend of mine that they had asked each major AI platform for an opinion on their work. Most of the magic mirrors dutifully reported this writer was the fairest in the land but one was more circumspect, whereupon the author began uploading their five-star reviews to try and change the AI’s response. A room full of awards and still they could be thrown into a spiral by the bad opinion of a jumped up speak-and-spell. There are no writers in heaven. Perhaps it is easier to accept your forgetting.
Fucking Shakespeare. Stood over the grave of his son he didn’t know his luck. 500 years of adulation that would never reach his ears. Alas. Late to the party, do scribblers today even have that much future to be remembered by? As the air-conditioning finally fails and our great grandchildren burn in their shelters will it be a boon to my hungry ghost if it is my words on their lips? Maybe.
When my daughter was about 18th months old I got sick. Once your parents are dead your days are all numbered anyway. I remember pushing her buggy along the street, my mortality biting at my heels, thinking bitterly of all the hard devotion I had poured into this baby and how, were I to die soon, I would be a tragic blip in her existence. She would say how sad she was to never have known me. She would look for my reflection in her eyes and invent stories of what I wanted for her. People would console her with stories of the invisible love that I gave her. What had been so real, so hard, so vital for me would be forgotten by my companion of those long lullaby’d nights of bottles and dancing. But not forgotten. Not remembered. But not forgotten. There is a difference.
Another idea that comes up frequently in my writing class is that of collaboration. How the most important collaboration a writer has is with their audience (all 4 of them). How the real skill is not to tell someone your idea or show them how you’re feeling but to entangle them with a story that makes them have your idea for themselves. This is not to be forgotten as in lost, it is to be unremembered but not forgotten as childhood is. Forgotten like the early morning of the hottest day shooting like a blissful canon ball through the streets.
If you’d like to know all of my theory of 4 audiences and 4 subjects then my screenwriting course returns on August 28th, booking details are here but do message me with any questions about how it works.
As I’m writing about ghosts again, I thought I’d share once more the short film Chris and I made recently where I got to exorcise, or at least, exercise, some of mine.