Final Reflection
Chosen Piece of Creative Writing: Daybook Entry Twenty Six: Tuesday April 23rd 2024 (Marking Time)
Inspired by Thomas Hardy’s short poem Drummer Hodge
They were upon them at last. For God’s sake come back screamed the Colonel’s hastily scrawled note to the advance column, who were obtusely unresponsive and chasing glories of their own in the open fields towards the royal kraal. Hodge had been scooped up out of the east end gutter by the servants of empire, eager to escape the squalor of the workhouse and find the kind of fame and glory he’d only dreamt of in the stories of those lucky enough to return from the fronts. He enlisted as a drummer, but it was far from his own choice. Small enough to avoid being in the way of the fighting, but mighty enough to keep time as the army marched to the sound of the guns, Hodge has always favored the fight. The adrenaline which rushed through his adolescent veins as the captain screamed for the volley fire again and again until the spears ran dry.
But they never did. Today they would wash themselves in the blood of a thousand soldiers. A pyrrhic victory bathed in the half light of a solar eclipse and drowned in the tears of widows back home. Hodge had no such family to grieve him. He had always been on his own until the empire saw fit to gather him into the warm embrace of colonial dispute. He felt loved by those around him, even as they beat and berated him in the drill square. Even as the ground shook with the trembling terror of the thousands pouring over the hills in front of the doomed column. Even as the captain ordered the retreat. Hodge, like those around him, dropped his bundle and ran as the hand to hand fighting replaced the slowing rifle’s growl. They were upon them as the regiment began to roll up on itself, and dozens fell in desperate last stands. Back to back with expended ammunition but bayonets fixed, unhorsed, encircled. Their defense marked centuries later by sunbleached cairns where they fell.
Hodge ran towards the guns, unsaddled and unspiked. He saw the captain pierced through the heart as he writhed in the agony of a position lost. The camp was overrun within the hour, and Hodge with it. No-one knew where he would meet his fate, as he hadn’t even been on the official record of service. He would mark time, but time would be hesitant to mark him. An unrecorded death where the drum beat of empire had fallen silent. Eclipsed by the howling victory of the thousands now looting the camp and denuding the fallen. Tearing out their insides in death ritual which would free their souls but haunt those who would return to see what was left the next day. The horrors of war which fueled divine retribution at the hands of the great white queen in whose name it all happened. Uncoffined, Hodge would never find the peace in death which had eluded him in life. His body returning to the earth in the receding foreign field in which it had fallen. Forever screaming, for god’s sake come back.
Reflection:
While the daybook entry from April 23rd offers itself to continued editing and iteration, it is a working example of the habituation and content development approach I’ve been practicing over the past few weeks. It represents a cumulative assembly of many of the ideas initially inspired by Didion’s thoughts on keeping a writing journal, but also reflects a growing sense of place. The daybook entries are a place I have been going every morning, and the writing within them a location I go before my professional day begins. Some begin their day at the gym. I have been getting my reps in at the daybook. Working with the constraint of trying to remember the trace of a dream from the night before, I begin by visualizing whatever remains, usually a single image, and then writing into it. It has afforded me the opportunity to exponentially expand the range of subjects I have written about, as well as afforded me places inside of which to truly experiment with form. They are more laboratory than document.
The piece here, Marking Time, echoes the work I submitted for my mid-year reflection, Those In Coach Were The First To Go. It continues to push on generative experimentation as source material, here the close-up of a dead drummer boy, and taking its inspiration from Hardy’s 1899 poem of empire, Drummer Hodge. My piece gives Hodge more agency and narrative than Hardy’s epitaph, and offers what might have led to the boy’s death on a far foreign field. Borrowing from contemporary accounts of the Zulu War, I have placed Hodge in the center of the battle, and no longer on its periphery, moving him in space and time out of the footnotes and into the middle of a historical account. And while it borrows from some of the compound adjectives in Hardy’s original poem, it also expands upon them to increase the sense of urgency and terror in the moments before his death. The piece is reflective of my daily approach of writing into the traces of dreams, rarely without a plan of where they are going to go until I begin typing. This has characterized stories which have concerned stowaways and those who would help them, what might happen if foreign investment started to buy up America’s declining cities, and even a tale of undersea exploration from the viewpoint of a Soviet dog.
The individual entries, like Didion, are markers in the sand. Sometimes they wash away, but often they stick around, asking to be revisited. With a growing inventory, they are becoming a rich archive of places to return, spend time with, and ultimately write back into and expand. They serve as an infinite library of ideas, where the writer’s road ahead stretches out to the horizon in life-giving cinematic technicolor. In further cultivating the place I go every morning, I am continuing to build upon the habits which have worked well. Silence is important. Coffee is important. A visual starting component is important. All of these need to be checked off first before the train can leave the station. But when it does, it tends to pick up speed swiftly, and the sense of creative accomplishment provided before I begin my professional work day at 9am has been wonderfully energizing. I am more frequently losing myself to the writing. Over the course of the class I’ve built an inventory of almost thirty short pieces (which are being collected at https://www.anthologymatt.com/labs), but which leave me with three challenging but exciting questions going forward:
Which daybook entries are the ones worth revisiting and why?
What form might those revisitations take?
When does the daybook grow into something else?
I can’t wait to find out what happens next, and am excited to have finally built the muscles of writing habit I have been seeking for so long.
