The Ashen Bough

The Ashen Bough is to be the title of my next novel.  I am not participating in National Novel Writing Month as I did last year, as I want to spend a long time on this book and not feel compelled to rush any of it by an impending deadline.  It is inspired by a dream I had as a child, in which my favourite boyhood tree turned black and gnarly and starting spouting rotten, severed heads and nasty ravens cawing at me.  The dream stayed with me and comes to me when I am feeling low.  I wrote a blog about it last year, when I was feeling particularly bad, and which roused some alarm among my friends and family.  This year I wrote a song about the Bough which I debuted at a gig at The Spice of Life a couple of weeks ago.  The song went down well.  All I currently know about the novel is that it will begin and end with a sullen child looking at the aforementioned tree of utter dread.  The remainder of this blog consists of the lyrics to the Ashen Bough song, the blog post I wrote a year ago (I'm all better now) and a picture I drew of the dream in order to promote the show I played.

The Ashen Bough (Song)

The Ashen Bough is such a sorry sight to see
You'd never make a lovely table out of this dread tree
But nonetheless, atop a barren hill, it stands in the cold
And it may look dead but it keeps on (it grows and it grows)
And the red glare of dusk flickers 'twixt its twigs
And it coils and it yawns and it starts to spout things
As the little baby me stands and stares in despair
Out pops a rasping, ragged raven and six or seven severed heads

Then the raven flaps its wings and it sounds like a laugh
As the seven severed heads turn to face it at last
And at once the bough breaks and, one by one, the dead heads
Start to wobble and to fall and they land at my legs
So the little baby me takes a sullen step back
But a black imposing wall stops me dead in my tracks
So I look back at the tree and I think that I know
This Ashen Bough is the last sorry sight that this sick world will show

All the severed heads on the Ashen Bough
Try to scream at me through their useless mouths
Dead eyes!  Dead eyes!  Trying to make their pleas
All the severed heads trying to laugh at me
Seven severed heads on the severed head tree

The Ashen Bough (Blog post from January 2014)

A little under a year ago I put myself out there in a way many of my friends weren't expecting and like wolves sniffing the wet blood of a fresh wound the brains on legs pricked their ears and cocked their heads and, like wolves - bloodlust substituted for throbbing urgency to promote superior intellects - they pounced on me.  Casual remarks about the recently translated Iranian existential tome they've just ploughed through, or the YouTubed lectures of esteemed liberal journalists I might not have heard of.  The offhand remarks about the ballet excursion, the "cinema that shows proper films" and the little-known cafe round the back where anarchic, youngblood writers read their political one man dramas and sip espressos well past midday.  "You should go there Joe, incidentally-" They continually try to intellectually one-up me because I've done something.  Appreciation is dead.  People who have had no interest in fiction writing or literary critique are suddenly literary editors when I dare to wax excited about my next book.  From my announcement to the death of time, the ability of my contemporaries to like or dislike something has ceased to be.  You now have to prove why you are a more esteemed authority on the enjoyment, or more accurately the critical analysis, of the work.  "Wait and see, Joe will crumble and go back to talking about The Simpsons.  What's he doing writing a book?  He hasn't done the research!"  Have you ever woken up with striking, stabbing pains about your gut, crippling lethargy and a headache that makes you realise you've never really had a headache before?  Ah but have you woken up knowing exactly why you're feeling that and not remotely surprised apart from in light of the fact that you have woken up at all?  Why do you ask?  Oh, you don't.  It's little surprise given that I wrote a character well known to be based on me, a character who attempts suicide twice and all of my friends and family read it and not a single one asked me if I was okay.  That I put out a blog detailing a real life suicide attempt and the crux of the interest garnered was a couple of facebook likes (are you liking my misery, or the quality of writing and if the latter, why the hold up?).  Every day a new niggle gets my mind racing to that thought again.  Depression used to be its own motivator for the unthinkable, but what now?  I anticipate my lasting, post-mortem reputation as a selfish man, as is the legacy of self-murderers, and that puts me off.  But when you wake in the dead of night virtually choking on your own self-loathing, misery and hatred of being, when the living motive of sparing loved ones of trauma is clouded by the trauma you are already heaping upon yourself, is it really that selfish to wish to opt out?  I stand on the windowsill attached via leather belt to the ceiling, and I must blink images that make me smile into my mind's eye just to muster up the urge to untie and step down.  There is Jade and she loves me and tells me I can do anything.  She is never cynical, never undeservedly cross and she always thinks of me even in her own times of hardship [sic].  There are my friends who make me laugh and do not emit loud, smelly intellectual burps when I try to confide about my next literary endeavour.  But they're not here at the moment, and I'm flaking away from the rationale that it is not their job to be there for me every minute of every day.  Why can't I appreciate or help with their problems?  Why am I only interested in myself?  And oh there I am refastening the belt and teetering on the ledge again.  Round and round and round she goes.  I feel the rancid, festering loathing, the leathery black loss of childlike innocence bubbling up and eating away at my guts and my red eyes see only quivering claws where once they saw a big exciting world.  A gnarly, scorched oaken bough coiling out of my mind upon which sits a rasping, ragged raven, demon-eyed and fluttering malevolently at the little boy who tries to peer in to explore.  And the dead tree winds and grows out of my howling mouth and from its leafless branches grow rotting, disembodied heads which groan and ask for help but they are asking nobody.  Between the jagged twigs the red light of dusk flickers, the collateral of a descending red sun that burns but does not warm.  It is not the night that I reach for in this pathetic fallacy, for the night is peaceful.  I can reflect in the night and I seldom look worriedly over my shoulder as I walk through the night among the shadowy spires of London and the still, sparse parks stretching out and breathing deeply as they recover from a long afternoon of being raped by tourists.  It is the day and its transparent, false hope that gets me as I try and make a straight path through the belligerent crowds of smart-phone zombies who'd sooner take a lamppost or double decker to the face than wait another twenty seconds to read their precious Instagram notification.  The meandering march of the zombie hordes - sallow faces planted firmly down at their shimmering touch screens (the extensions of their minds - brain in hand like the Ood from Doctor Who) is a sickening sight but if I'm the only one actually looking up to see it then is it really a problem?  And if I'm the only one suffering from my suffering then is it really a problem if I take the only straight path left available - the straightening of the falling rope?  But the last hurdle is physical pain - a pain I am (slightly) less familiar with so how about that gnarly, blackened tree with its demon sun and howling heads be replaced by a slowly sagging willow, lilting delicately to the ground as Autumn approaches and the skies darken with the grace of a landing jet plane?  I took an overdose for you.  This is what I've read about those who take the medicine in one hand and the whisky in t'other and close their eyes to their favourite songs and fall into a deep sleep with that scenario imprinting on them forever.  Not an escape of immense pain and damp-eyed anguish which leaves the macabre hanging corpse but a drastic coma - a passing as close to one of natural causes as my hand will allow.  "He went peacefully, in his sleep.  He took several dozen grams of codeine and seventy centilitres of Jameson's whisky to go peacefully but the important thing is he went peacefully." But that ever-pressing oversight of mine which the cod-intellectual wolves like to pounce upon slaps me with a cold wet flannel and I wake up with a start.  RESEARCH, JOE.  YOU HAVEN'T EVEN DONE THE RESEARCH!  Came the morning, it didn't work.  That's not nearly enough codeine to do you in, all that will do is corrode your liver and constipate you for a few days.  Idiot.  And now I'm that nerd from The Breakfast Club who tries to shoot himself with a flare gun.  Laughter erupts in the detention classroom of my mind and I'm annoyed I still have to work.  It's not my birthday anymore, either.  And time passes and I slink through the daily grind with a quiet embarrassment and maybe the world is a sentient being because after this I'm blindsided by decent days in double digits - things are going well, I'm plucking nice, new memories out of nowhere and not even thinking about... thinking about... thinking about... wait a minute.  No, it's fine.  I can get on with my work, go for a nice walk around historic London and fall asleep with the full intention of waking up.  Then I can talk about it (or, best I can manage, blog about it) as an event from the past but I've done the same before later relapses and in the back of my temporarily optimistic mind I know that I'm one gruff encounter or condescending comment away from hurling my collected memories into the fire and reaching for that leather belt again.  Time will tell.  At least I've done the research this time.

The Ashen Bough (Artist's Impression)