Closing time: last days in Cardiff, and why I edit

Merlin Gable reflects on seven years spent living, writing and editing in the capital, and on the meaning of leaving

You know the scene. We gather, perhaps in town, no doubt in a pub and no doubt one that has shapeshifted, changed its name and its décor a dozen times over the years: from Victorian finery to sleek Euro bar, to industrial simulacrum, to faux-Victorian finery again (the original stuff was ripped out years ago). Perhaps it’s the beer but I’ve always felt us at the height of our powers there, the battle map of Welsh culture on the table amongst the damp beer mats: one more push over in the corner by the cutlery tin, a strategic withdrawal from the spill of IPA, and the magazine will be printed, the commissions agreed, and Wales will be sorted.

It builds slowly but when it happens, it happens suddenly. A silence at the end of an anecdote where the laughter dies on the stale air, the warm smell of food served hours ago, that lasts just a little too long. The night enters the room and with it the cold mantle of sobriety. ‘I’d better take my leave,’ one of us mumbles, and we tumble out into the air and head in opposite directions. In those moments I’ve felt most like I understood this city: the streetlights bright enough to forget pinholed dark skies; the fumes, fried food, piss and hollering carried by the air. As I walk home, Cardiff feels alive with story and myth. Crossing Canton Bridge, it is as if a ceffyl dŵr might rise unbidden from the Taff. More likely – and more Lloyd Robson – it would be a shopping trolley stalking those muddy banks.

It is hard to say what made me decide to leave Cardiff. ‘I’ve been here seven years,’ I weakly tell people who ask. But really, I’ve been catching glimpses from the corner of my eye – the amber sun clashing with the beating wing of a swan on the lake, the softness of the wet catkins under my feet as I run – that tell me that an ending is coming. Leaving is an aesthetic process as much as it is a practical or emotional one, and, in this instance, the poetic preceded the prosaic in my reasoning too. Earlier, in the pub, I said that I would ‘take my leave’; another choice would have been to ‘make my exit’, for this is what I’ve been doing for some time now.

A few years ago, still in Cardiff, I readied myself to leave a house I had lived in for three years, through the darkness of the pandemic and the ending of a fraught relationship. That house had been my prison – as I’m sure many felt at the time – but also my cocoon, my recovery ward. With everything finally out, I looked around the rooms and felt lost in their emptiness. This place that had felt so cramped at times now was as wide as a school hall. This isn’t a feeling my generation is unfamiliar with: since I left university in 2017, I have moved six times – some will have moved many more. You get used to the anticlimax of the ending of something ordinary yet monumental. But as I cast around that empty house, I felt like I was looking for something, the sort of closure you get departing a friend. And so, without thinking, I started dancing – the house my imaginary partner. One last dance before parting ways, a bow of recognition at the door, and the release of closing it for the last time.

This is what I mean – I, we all, make an aesthetic experience out of leaving, caught trying to make sense its contradictions, of the big–smallness of it. Leonard Cohen brings this wonderfully to bear in his song ‘Alexandra Leaving’. ‘Suddenly the night has grown colder,’ it begins; you force yourself, cruelly, masochistically even, to leave that which is ‘radiant beyond your widest measure’. To leave is, at its fullest, to believe wholly that the left object, place, or (with most difficulty) person will live on fully, independently without you. I still cannot return to my university city, which I felt when there was indelibly imprinted with my presence, for fear of seeing it proceeding gleefully and fully in my absence. ‘Do not say the moment was imagined’, Cohen implores, ‘Do not stoop to strategies like this’. Perhaps Cardiff will be the same. Either way I owe it this valedictory address.

As much as you might want it, there’s no such thing as the last ordinary day. Instead, what coalesces is a photo montage of lastness – a taxonomy of finalities. The last day drinking coffee in the courtyard from the nice, handleless cups I bought in London; the last day walking around Roath Park after work, talking through all the day’s frustrations, dreaming of what we’d do next; the last day the house was perfumed with the puckering sweet–sourness of simmering hibiscus. This time we don’t dance but instead steal away into the night, our cars filled despite all the other trips we’ve done before to move our things, swearing this is the last time we’ll do it ourselves.

On the Tuesday after, we go to Lleuwen Steffan’s gig in Capel Salem, which inspired the famous painting of the old woman, the devil and the shawl. Family pews like sheepfolds interlock within; next door is a cottage whose gentle decay you can witness on Google’s several revisits to the area. Many have processed up here with torches, and I think about the centuries of farming folk and others trickling down off the mountains like the rain to gather here each Sunday after each Sunday. The room fills with electronic drum loops, synths and effects stretching and manipulating the old recordings of hymns, some so rare they don’t exist anywhere else. At the end, we all give money to Gaza. It’s the first evening I feel a sense of ease – a rhythm not just of a life that is working, possessions unpacked, spatulas and pans all located, but one of a life that could be good, easy, and graceful.

Of all the things I want to do, what I most want is to do them with grace. To me, this is the calm ease of action that comes with the balance of perception and instinct – it of course relates to expertise, but also to a pre-linguistic feeling and impulse. I have never found flow states to come naturally, but I have always been able to be conscious of when I am finding the ease of doing something fulfilling, revelling in the dexterity of my hands, the strength of my arms, or the sharpness of my mind.

I don’t find writing like this. Often, I feel like a monk, scratching slowly on thin goatskin, wary of making the wrong mark and growing frustrated with the need to fill up my ink. Editing, however, feels more like swimming – or to be exact like the high rope elegance of an actor suspended by wire above the stage looking down. When I edit, I work in pen or on screen, enjoying the poise of my hands and the feeling of at once working on existing material – smoothing it, chiselling bits out – but also the freshness of discovery, finding things out first, the thrill of knowing the quality of something before anyone else knows it exists, delivering that newness into the world.

Part of that ease, I feel, comes from the fact that it’s something I’ve always known. Editing, so to speak, runs in the family. My father is a copyeditor and my mother a graphic designer. They work well as a pair and although I’ve always admired the artistic, creative work my mother does, it is the editing that my father does that I’ve most always identified with. At first it looks like a different alphabet: the caret mark with a cocked leg referencing you to the margin where the change lies; stet dots under words backtracking on a suggestion as your understanding of the sentence develops. These marks are the chisel and the plane, working the words into their best expression but also allowing you to revel in the distinctiveness of the process.

I remember for a while as a teenager when every Saturday after breakfast my father, in his dressing gown, would kneel down at the bookcase and pick out vinyl records for me to listen to that day, trying to read the cat-claw-shredded spines. I would note absentmindedly the crack of his knees as he rose again, handing me Bob Dylan bootlegs, psychedelic deep cuts and country rock. At the time, it was an experience of creativity and newness as I listened to those albums whilst doing my homework at the living room computer next to the hi-fi. I loved to hold the records between two fingers tense on the edges; in perfect balance, they’d swing gracefully, gyroscopically in the air as I took them from the sleeve to the platter. Sometimes, if something particularly caught my attention, I’d stop work and just listen. Sometimes, the record player wouldn’t register the end of the side, and would keep looping the lead out, and I’d listen to the quiet–loud rustle of the dust.

Nowadays though, I appreciate his perspective more: the curatorial process of planning narrative, exposition, revealing slowly the argumentation of an era of transformational music when he was only a bit older than I was then. Editing lies in this comfortable place between reading and writing: although a very talented writer, it is in this humbler space that I think my father has always found himself most comfortable. The real joy of editing for me is in seeing the birth of an idea and its adolescence, working with the writer to coax it into its best form of life. In this respect, I imagine it’s not totally dissimilar from having a child – the quiet modesty of forming, encouraging, augmenting, in a role largely without credit.

What does this all have to do with leaving Cardiff? I’ve been at the heart of a sort of ‘project Wales’ way of thinking for a decade now, from early forays in my undergraduate writing about Wales from afar, to joining the welsh agenda as culture editor in 2017, and for the past year as co-editor of Cwlwm. In all of that time, I have been in a sense in pursuit of a common enquiry: what do we do with all that is here, with all that is Welsh culture? How do we make sense of where we are, not in the sense of a Wales which is predestined – either positively or negatively – by a heavy history, nor one that is all one thing. Rather, what must we do to describe a polysemic nation, too mixed, too hybrid, too ruined and perfect to be merely singular – a mass free jazz improvisation of culture. How can writing bring out the strangeness, the potential for thinking differently or in a more engaged way, from all of that?

It’s easy to feel – I do feel – that despite there being so much happening in the city, it is at once hard to find the newness needed for this sort of thinking. Everything seems the same each time – the same walk, the same habits, the same shops. It’s not the same of course, the million individual stories sit under each person passed ready to burst out like a modernist novel, but the patterns are. The realisation came upon me, before I knew it, that I needed to find different patterns whose language I better spoke.

Cardiff is a place which, for me, constituted the process of curating and editing an identity in which now I instead feel the need to focus more clearly on a process of becoming and belonging. I think that we sometimes conceive of the idea of belonging as a mental process of reconciliation or coming to terms, rather than an enmeshing, or a pluralising of the self around the needs and desires of others and seeing one’s place within a framework where we work together to deliver that. I have long ignored this as a foundational need within myself. It is something that, for better or for worse and with full recognition of my role in causing it, I cannot fulfil as a late millennial forced to gentrify another neighbourhood of a city which does not feel like mine.

In my first article for Cwlwm, I wrote that I believed the Welsh borderlands should be considered not just for ‘its political effects’ but that there might be merit in thinking ‘about how it feels in each instance of its presence’ in the believe that greater consideration of affect – the feeling of the thing – could create new modes of understanding and political realities. If it is not too grandiose a statement, it is in this effort to feel the instances of a place that I am now choosing to invest. It is not as simple as a move from a position of editing to writing (nor do I intend to stop editing), but it is a desire to push myself more clearly and distinctively into a position of voicing, rather than structuring, the inquiries about Wales and about the places and communities that matter to me within it.

Coming from the border, and born outside of Wales, I consider myself to have chosen Welshness. I fiercely defend that choice and the right to have made it actively, joyfully and continually. At the same time, it has suited me to be on the edge – waving, not drowning in Welshness. Bourgeois Cardiff holds that convenient position of reputational and governmental centrality but cultural lightness (notwithstanding the city’s own cultural specificities). Wales was Wales before Cardiff was Cardiff, and moving in that city is moving lighter than elsewhere. For a boy from the borders, not so sure about how deep I wanted to paddle in the hard stuff, that was a good place to be.

Now I am moving from the edge to the centre of a certain idea of Wales founded in the language. (Although beyond my window now is the sea, another edge, looking back at me as I write.) In giving up the editorial position, the high seat in Cardiff, I feel for the first time a real, tangible possibility of being engulfed. Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse sees engulfment as a form of annihilation; his keyword s’abîmer also connoting an abyss. This annihilation is not a negative process; rather, it is the overwhelm of immediate thought beneath feeling: ‘I have no responsibility here, the act […] is not up to me: I entrust myself, I transmit myself’. In many ways, this is the act of faith that I am enacting, leaving the city, leaving my language, and entering an abyss of my own making. The prize, I hope, is the sort of rootedness of which I have increasingly felt the lack in recent years.

Shortly after arriving, we are overcome by a storm – the first of many since. I wake in the night and hear the wracking of the house, the timbers creaking slightly as it is tested, pushed, almost overwhelmed. But in the morning we are still there, and I feel the emptiness left behind in the air filling up quickly with gusty sunshine. The wind is whipping the heather as I walk up the hill in the morning, beginning to be able to nod and smile to the same dogwalkers I see each time. I am starting to know the names of the farms dotted across the gentle transition from mountain behind me to the sea in front and to be able to read their histories in the stone walls that encircle and crosshatch the good land around here. These things don’t necessarily mean anything practical, but to me they are alive with a different meaning: perhaps my old habits, the tracing of industrial remains and of the constant remaking of space that occupied me in Cardiff, can be reused here. It feels like I can bring a common enquiry to a new place, where I can learn new things, not least now truly learning Cymraeg.

Perhaps this what I’ll be giving up: a certain idea of the lone creative, the omnipotent editor, endlessly picking and choosing and shaping a life for myself from the rich fabric of a city like Cardiff. Instead, I’m hoping for an ensemble role as a spinner of something a bit larger than myself. The part that I think I’ll keep: the humble way in which editing presupposes that the answer is already arrived at, that it’s just waiting to be teased out and clarified. To paraphrase, I don’t want to change the world, and I’m not looking for a new Wales: it’s already out there. The time comes, then, to go and find it.

Merlin Gable is co-editor of Cwlwm.