Open the Curtains
This is an online book, accompanied by original music, about life and death and the liminal space between the two. It is part fantasy but rooted in reality. The story revolves around the experience of one person, Tim, and his lifelong struggle to come to terms with the shocking loss at the age of five, of his father. It seeks to tease out universal questions around the nature of living, as we all do, in the shadow of the reality and mystery of death. The book picks up three narratives from the outset, and the unfolding story bounces between present and past. On the one hand, the adult Tim who is climbing a fell in the Lake District and gets gripped with vertigo; on the other, the boy Tim, nicknamed ‘Tip’ by his father due to him knocking, dropping or tipping things over. His mind secretly runs amok, as he attempts to deal with the unbearable shock of his father’s death. There is a third level of narrative – the teenage Tim, awkwardly navigating adolescence with one eye on the testing realities of home and school, the other on the horizon – to which he is drawn by strange, powerful intuitions.
The three levels of the narrative are reflected in how they are introduced: Tim high up a Lakeland peak, unable to get down; Tip, the little boy apparently stuck inside some kind of cubicle; and the teenage Tim struggling with worries about homework on the way back from school while his gaze is fixed on the top of the trees and church where his father’s grave can be found. There is also a contextual portrayal of how Tim and his family cope with the sudden loss of his father: the shock… the emptiness… the attempt to stoically carry on… Then, over time, how the impact of early loss and the resulting complicated grief affects Tip’s experience of life as he passes through childhood and adolescence, capturing his rocky teenage years, and into adulthood – a shadow which colours his connections with other people and the world around him: in sometimes difficult, but also enriching and profound ways.
This unfolding story inevitably intersects with that of the present day Tim. His relationship to family, friends, and self, seems to be coloured by a sense of something unexpressed, but what? There is a theme of an archetypal good vs evil struggle across the book which the bereft boy experiences alone while he drifts to sleep each night, trying to find his Dad and bring him home. The journey moves from underground to other worlds …which may or may not be real… from up in the sky to a journey into ‘another England’ to fill the gaping hole inside him created by father’s departure, a vacuum which threatens to swallow him whole. This vacuum is reflected in the way the now middle-aged Tim teeters on the brink of psychological disintegration, and his partner threatens to leave him to his madness. Both narratives coincide in a dramatic finale. Can there be a kind of resolution, a new settlement between Tim and the ‘meaning of death’ , or will all be lost…?
The focus of the book overall, as indicated, is a meditation on the nature of loss and what that closes down, but also what it can open up, in terms of powerful inner experience – both traumatic and enlightening, debilitating but enriching. It is about what happens when the psyche of a child is laid bare and exposed to the un-digestible reality of the death of a parent. This ‘big theme’ is explored and played with, via a storyline which will hopefully engage your imagination and stimulate reflection on your own experiences, and efforts to make meaning from death and loss in the context of the post-religious, individualised and globalised culture we inhabit.
The story is high on narrative and description of vivid experience via an engrossing, and disturbing storyline, complemented by instrumental and vocal music composed and performed by Phil Goss to accompany each chapter. It is part trip into the imagination and part reflection on ‘what lies beneath’, and how that can impact on the living.
Summary of the first two Chapters
Chapter 1: Gripped
The story opens with Tim, a middle-aged man, wrestling with powerful feelings and memories and now gripped with vertigo near the top of a peak in the Lake District, staring at the sky. He slumps into a faint and seems to drift off into the past.
We are then made aware of a young boy who seems to be trapped – and we are inside whatever he is stuck in with him, struggling to breathe… The narrative then switches to Tim as a teenager. He also is looking at the sky, as he walks home from school with friends. His deep intuitive capacities, tortured self-consciousness and a little about the tragedy which lies behind these, are touched upon. Then we are back with the older man who is overcome with vertigo and passes out near the top of the Fell. Finally, we are back with the little boy who still seems to be trapped and is very scared…
Chapter 2: Beneath the ground
(This chapter will be available in March 2021)
The chapter begins with adult Tim, as he comes around and begins to make his way down the mountain path. We learn a little more about what he is searching for as he battles with his vertigo. We next meet teenage Tim again and witness his awkward dealings with family and school, and learn further how vulnerable his defences are to emotional assault as well as how open they are to stimuli from beyond the ordinary senses….
This takes us back to the 5-year old boy, nicknamed ‘Tip’ because of his reputation for tipping objects over. He is searching, like the older versions of himself. But he seems to be underground and finds himself in a lighted corridor; he follows the burning lamps on the wall further and further down into the silent earth…
Phil Goss©2020