Such an interesting phrase,”Moving Home”. You don’t really move your old home to a new place (unless you have a caravan or a home that can be physically relocated). Instead, you take the objects from the old home and reposition them in the new one.

I recently sold up and moved out of where I had lived for almost 15 years. Downsizing, many objects were donated to charity and I only brought those things with me that I believed might help me settle into my new space. The same objects pretty much had also traveled back from my apartment in New York, so this is their third relocation.

I went back to see the old place empty. Nothing there except floors, walls, ceilings, doors. Empty space with nothing to remind me that it had indeed been a home for myself and my daughter for many years. Faced with such blankness, I even found it difficult to conjure up memories.

Brian Dillon comments, in his book In The Dark Room: “What gets repressed as we prepare to go, is not the space itself, but how it felt to live there. The house is only ever what we make of it, and remake, from day to day…”

By fortunate chance, I picked up Sam Johnson-Sclee’s Living Rooms in a bookshop near my new space.

“The spaces we separate out for living in are valuable only when they appear to have always been vacant and waiting for their new inhabitant.” Johnson-Sclee

Johnson-Sclee also speaks about what we leave behind:

“But there is always a trace.”

“The things that remain are clues: dust, scratches, Blu Tack marks…”

Although I believed that I thoroughly cleaned the space I just left, I do wonder what trace of me—apart from memories—remain. I will never know.

I was lucky to have an overlap between leaving the old and moving to the new. The new apartment was empty initially and for a few days before I relocated, I spent time there in the evenings, bringing a cushion and a candle, sitting on the floor, considering the space. Feeling my way into it, in a sense. I liked those times, the easing from a place of mild terror (what have I done) to that of contentment (this will be ok). Undoubtedly, this reassurance was helped by the view of the city from the 6th floor apartment.

I love the cityness of this perspective—the scale of size and significance, me within the largesse of the metropolis and yet also on the periphery.

“…you arrive in the empty rooms, accompanied by nothing except a contract proving your right to be there. Standing with all your cardboard boxes around inside an empty shell…What to do? How do you find a way to affix yourself to this carapace and make it your home?” Johnson-Schlee

Now, my stuff has mostly been unpacked. I am surrounded by the familiar, apart from context and view.

“Fabrics, furniture, picture frames, plants, and textiles: what are all these things? The objects and designs of the interior are protective charms that fortify us from the world outside: they are the nesting materials that we use to hold ourselves in place inside the unwelcoming shell of a commodity.” Johnson-Schlee

And that’s exactly what in essence this new space is. A commodity. A necessity for shelter and safety and warmth.

I have never been a nester—unlike my daughter who is. To some extent, I wonder if the end of my marriage subconsciously killed of any innate “homemaker” instinct that I might have had. Then again, I don’t remember ever nurturing fantasies about what my dream home might look like. So maybe that gene just passed me by. I think my daughter would attest to my lack of nesting skills—she totally supported selling the place where we have lived for a decade and a half, somewhat surprising from someone more invested in memories and the tangible objects of such memories.

I often wonder about the point of most of my objects—utility and beauty/joy are probably the only attributes that I rate. But they are pretty much all ultimately and essentially props to our fantasies, no? “…the dream of a world beyond the conditions of everyday life.” Johnson-Schlee.

Take plants, which I started to accumulate recently: “Pot plants embody the will of life to exceed its container.” And sofas: “Sofas create a state of super-position between life and death.” Johnson-Schlee. Maybe that’s stretching it a little, but it’s intriguing to consider.

Johnson-Schlee makes a further interesting point: “After all, every object that we encounter is the product of someone else’s labour. Hidden inside our homes is a powerful truth: our lives depend on one another; we live because of the work of others.”

For years after leaving Ireland, when I said “going home” I meant returning to my homeland. I haven’t done this for some time—refer to Ireland as home—probably since my parents died and the family home was no longer that. I have many memories and can still walk from room to room in my mind. Unlike Brian Dillon, I never saw it empty but I did see it totally reconfigured—and unrecognisable to me—when my sister completed a pretty major transformation.

So here I am, looking out across the rooftops and cranes, feeling my way into and embracing this new space. I am grateful for it, for somewhere I can walk into (and out of) at will.

I seem to have a transient/nomadic take on life. Hence I have gone from home ownership to home rental.

Easier to walk away, perhaps, to move my objects elsewhere, should I one day choose to leave this borrowed space.

Rain

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Raymond Carver

I read an interview with someone recently who was asked whether or not he had regrets.

I can’t remember his answer but the question made me consider my own thoughts on the matter.

I don’t often look back. In fact, a colleague recently commented on my resolute looking-forward-not-back life perspective. It was an astute comment. I tend to erase the past once it has happened (both in my mind, where possible, and definitely in my obsession with not holding onto stuff that serves only as memories of the past). Why I am like this would keep many a therapist busy. I have my own multilayered interpretations that are only interesting to myself (and actually of increasingly receding interest even to me).

Anyway, back to the intro point. I have been wondering about my regrets.

My answer surprised myself. I don’t regret my life choices in terms of career, paths (and people) chosen, things I wish I had done, places I have not seen…

But I do regret the times I have been unkind. Such unkindness must have been hurtful, and probably made someone’s world, maybe even for just a few moments, a sad and lonely place. Maybe I overemphasise my importance in the lives of others. Yet, I do remember occasions when I could have done so much better for the other.

Allied to this are the times that I may not have been exactly unkind but I was not been kind enough. Didn’t go that extra distance when I could have done.

The wisdom of middle age (“I can see clearly now the rain has gone”) allows me to witness the joy kindness can bring to others, as well as to myself, both as a giver and a recipient.

I don’t have Carver’s confidence about reliving my life in exactly the same way. I am grateful that I can stop and think about how I might do better, and actively and consistently contribute a bountiful share of kindness to the world.

I find this poem by Danusha Laméris beautifully moving and uplifting.

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Danusha Laméris

We have another chance, a chance to be kind, and to be more kind.

Dawn Revisited

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.

Rita Dove (1999)

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

from Days, Philip Larkin

As we proceed with the easing of lockdown here in the UK, I am thinking a lot about time: how I have spent it over the past months, and how, as I emerge from my cocoon, I might henceforth conduct my “one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver, The Summer Day).

During this year so far, my perception of time seems to have fluctuated between a sense of days racing by, and weeks where time slowed, almost paused, suspending itself, and my life.

It’s a strange paradox, this sense of time creeping by, especially in the dark days and nights of January and February, alternating with a pressing sense of “running out of time”. The “time of our lives” is what we are all here for and busy devoting ourselves to. And yet, how much energy do we devote to time past and time not yet arrived rather than the now of our lives?

The novel A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki opens with:

“My name is Nao, and I am a time being.”

“A time being is someone who lives in time.”

We are all “time beings” but perhaps not always consciously so. To some extent, lockdown has encouraged a focus on the present, the future having broken free from any control we might hitherto have thought we had over it. The consequent sameness of the lockdown days as one rolled into the next also created a sense of time blindness or disorientation. Some mornings when I wake up, my first thought is, “What day is today?”

I asked my 22 year old daughter if there was anything positive she could say about her experience of lockdown. “Time,” she responded, “a sense of having more of it.”

Of course we don’t. Time is in itself—on an individual level at least—ultimately finite. The only handle we might have on it rests on subjective (and often delusional) perception. But my daughter’s sentiment does nonetheless resonate. In my pre-COVID life, schedules were busier, often overwhelming, and time seemed elusive. I have to some extent enjoyed the sense of less-filled time over these past months. I seem to have no problem devoting any empty (ie non working) minutes with pleasurable and rewarding activities. I am also aware, and this does at times bother me, that there is little focus or direction to this delightful idling, apart from a seeking of pleasure and a feeding of curiosity. And so time has passed, pleasantly for the most part. Is that ok, or “good enough”?

Perhaps not. From A Tale for the Time Being:

“If you don’t have clear goals, you might run out of time.”

And Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Gone, Went (a time-considered title, surely):

“Time is meant to pass, but not just that.”

And also Annie Dillard: “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I return to my opening question: how might my experience of time spent over the past months inform how I might henceforth live my life?

I have no answers. Like Richard Hawley in the lyrics from his song Time Is, I currently reside at a place of questioning, hovering as I do in that liminal (and idling) space between my now and my future:

“What is it that you are wanting
And what are you hiding?
Do you know where it is you’re going to
And hoping to find there?”

Perhaps too much questioning only serves to distract from the challenge of bearing witness to our “time being” lives through a conscious awareness of the now…

Some final (and perhaps enigmatic) words from one of my favorite poets, Czeslaw Milosz:

“It is true. We have a beautiful time

As long as time is time at all.”

from A Mistake, Czeslaw Milosz

I did a wonderful poetry course recently, on solitary spaces (Coffee-House Poetry). A particularly relevant theme for these times, but solitude is generally either central or just slightly peripheral to my field of vision most of the time. The challenging thing for me right now is that the solitude hasn’t been of my choosing. Hitherto, the solitary place was somewhere I willingly and gladly chose to spend time.

Here are some of the poems I during the course.

Untitled

I

In my room on the nineteenth floor I

no longer look down, but up. And fly.

II

That hour when all the city’s noise fades

and I yearn for the non-muted life.

III

It has been four days now since

I saw the mouse. I miss him. Or her.

 

On never waking up

I don’t hold with dreams.

But I remember this one, even now, many years later.

The apocalypse happened.

You and I were oceans apart and would never meet again.

We continued to connect in the cyber world.

Onscreen, I could see your face.

And hear your voice.

But I could not touch you.

Could not reach out and feel the warmth of your skin.

That hand.

Those freckles.

 

The heart breaks and breaks and breaks

“Where all the ladders start”

WB Yeats

 

As I place a foot on the first step

I pause and look to where I’m going

wondering what it might feel like to arrive.

It was a dare, no?

A test of sorts.

And a trick, too,

every ladder leading to another.

 

Here, I am

Too little has been said

of the door, its one

face turned to the night’s

downpour and its other

to the shift and glisten of the firelight.

from The Door by Charles Tomlinson

I don’t have a fireplace, but the power of Tomlinson’s words resonates. My door demarcates a space, both physically and metaphorically, and the shutting of it announces my entry into somewhere safe, certain, and unchanging.

Here, I am alone and untethered.

Since leaving early morning, I have spent the day with others. Now, I—gladly—return to aloneness. Yet am I truly alone? I am not with another person for sure, but I am with me. I am totally present to myself in this sanctum, this liminal space, akin to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “intermediate space”, where yesterday has vanished and tomorrow has not yet emerged.

This place of pause is my refuge. It is where my solitude is a choice and a preference.

As soon as I enter, there are rituals. I take off my shoes, change my clothes, and shower. As if all of the outside must remain there and not contaminate this inner world. I choose some music. A record, because I love the physicality and deliberateness of placing needle on vinyl to create sound, and the necessity of flipping to continue the joy of listening.

It is a minimalist home. Lack of clutter intensifies its reassurance. Recently, I bought a mirror. Floor to ceiling. As I walk by, I catch a glimpse of my movement in the reflection. Witnessing myself, I stop, and whisper “Oh, hello, there you are. Welcome.”

 

CQ

Home

Two years ago, May 1, 2018, I moved from London to New York. New York is an exciting city, full of possibilities. Every day there feels like an adventure.

The move marked my first time living alone. It was an interesting, slightly scary, and ultimately liberating challenge. With no one else to please, I had almost complete freedom setting up my home in my new city.

All my life, or so it seemed to me, I had dreamt of living in a New York style loft. It took me a little while to find this dream place. But I did eventually find it in Brooklyn.

I took my time setting it up, determined to minimally fill the space, and only with things that I loved.

chair

It was stressful at the beginning, getting my head around how another country functions and operates, but it was fun, too, creating something that had my stamp on it, a spatial environment where I felt safe, happy, and hopeful.

I even commissioned some art work—the artist was given the remit to imagine me in different environments that reflected my life and desires: the sea, my veganism, and movies. And thus the triptych that I love was created.

Art pieces

I eventually also got a cello and a piano. The space began to feel complete, even more so when I hosted regular recitals in my home.

416

My daughter visited me in New York, and I travelled back several times, either to Newcastle where she is studying or to London, to see her. But, it bothered me throughout that we were living on different continents. A few months ago, I had a nightmare that the apocalyse happened and she and I could never meet again. And so, when COVID-19 arrived, it felt as if my nightmare was about to come true. In March this year, I hurriedly left NYC, leaving everything behind, anxious to be back in the UK while that journey was still possible.

And now, May 1, 2020, here I am in London. The lease on my NYC apartment has just come up for renewal and I have declined. There are too many uncertainties and it feels as if London is where I need to be, at least for the medium term. Working remotely throughout these past couple of months has proven how possible it is to do my job from here.

I miss my place and my space. In due course, I will sort out accommodation in London, but it won’t be my NYC loft. As someone who isn’t particularly attached to material things, I wonder why I feel so sad at the thought of never again seeing the home I created there. It’s a kind of grieving, which of course extends beyond the physical construct. I am missing my life as it was, the routines, the people, the interactions, the stuff that tethered me.

Solitude isn’t such a problem, although up to now it was of my choosing rather than being imposed. In this current liminal space of suspended time and eerie quietness, I hover and fluctuate between acceptance and rage. I also bask in nostalgia but try not to succumb to it. This is a new world, there will be a new order of things, and I need to let go of a past that is already approaching the quality of an illusion.

As always, I have been reading Larkin. This poem seems particularly apposite.

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft

 

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

 

Philip Larkin

 

 

 

IMG_3521 (1)

I took this photo in the room where I currently spend most of my days. Hopper’s Automat hangs on the wall facing me, while behind is a window with bars. I sit equidistant between both. I love Hopper’s art, something about the melancholic aloneness. His work has always spoken to me, now more than ever. I watched a documentary on his life on youtube—a commentator stated that in Hopper’s paintings, time is elongated, stretched, contemplative, a sense of time slowing down.

In the current lockdown situation, I have been considering time and its meaning right now. The days pass quickly, which surprises me, but at the same time there is a slowness to my life. I seem to do things, particularly reading, at a different pace. And I like that—it feels as if I am more attentive, somehow, that life is more consciously deliberate. I was reading a piece in the New York Times by Olivia Laing. She reflects on time and its current meaning:

“Most of us are perennially short of time, and now we’re left hanging in it”

For me, it’s not a bad place to be hanging. But the sense of uncertainty does challenge. I am not in the country where I normally live. I do not know when I will see my daughter next. I do not know when I will next touch someone. Will someone I know and love contract the virus, and suffer? When will this end? Will it ever end?

There are so many unknowns. Before all this began, I thought that I had reached a place where I was relatively ok with the not-knowingness of life. But the pandemic challenges this, and me, on so many levels. The future is indeed unknown—it always was, really, and we mostly collude with the illusion that we can to some extent predict, and even control our futures.

My daughter finds solace in the shared experience that we are all going through (albeit to hugely varying degrees of suffering). I agree, the corporate nature of the pandemic—no one can escape its impact—is reassuring.

And then there is also hope. It’s too soon for me to think about the end of this, when and how we will emerge from our physically isolated worlds. And what that world might look like. But in the meantime, I am optimistic. Mainly about humanity and the acts of compassion that I observe daily. And the new connectedness that I am experiencing with friends old and new across the globe. People are what matter, they give life its greatest value, meaning, and joy.

And on the note of hope, from Derek Mahon:

Everything Is Going To Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate

the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window

and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?

There will be dying, there will be dying,

but there is no need to go into that.

The lines flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight

watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.

 

CQ

 

 

I have always loved politics. Growing up in Ireland, all things political were very much embedded in the fabric of the nation. Both nationally and locally, I felt very much involved in the political landscape (although I railed against its parochialism at the time).

When I later moved to London, where I lived for more than 20 years, my interest in the machinations of the English political scene took root and grew exponentially.

In 2018, I moved to the New York. Again, I became interested in and fascinated by the country’s political world. How could I not? How we make, and break, worlds and communities, how we strive to create a more just and equal society, how we struggle to hang on to the physical world that we all inhabit—all such fundamental and essential things to spend significant amounts of time considering, discussing, and acting on.

In the past, I have mostly acted by exercising my right to vote.

A right I no longer have.

In the USA, as a non-citizen, I obviously cannot vote. In the UK, where I have a home, I am also not a citizen and therefore cannot vote there, either. In Ireland, I remain a citizen but I do not have a place of residence and thus, no vote.

So, I have watched both recent UK and Irish elections as a bystander, and will soon do the same in the US. This does not at all dim my interest in politics, but it does make me feel just a little invisible and powerless.

To not have a say in the (democratic) world that I inhabit is actually kind of tragic.

CQ

 

IMG_3293

A trilogy of masterpieces.

I have previously shared my thoughts on Patricio Guzmán’s first two documentary films in the series—Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button. The final one, The Cordillera of Dreams, has now arrived in NYC movie theaters.

Guzmán was present for the screening of The Pearl Button I attended in London back in 2016. He mentioned then that his next film, the third in the series, would focus on the Andes (Cordillera de los Andes), the mountains that rise above and delineate the inland border of his beloved Chile.

Guzmán left Chile in 1973, following the coup that marked the beginning of Pinochet’s dictatorship. The Cordillera of Dreams, similar to the others in the trilogy, is a philosophical reflection and meditation on the director’s estranged homeland (he has not lived there since his 1973 departure) through the lens of both landscape and history. We do not see Guzmán throughout the documentary but his presence is keenly felt through the self-narration. The cinematography—predictably sublime—moves between the majestic mountain peaks and valleys of the Cordillera and the tragic footage of the violent struggle experienced by protestors during the Pinochet regime. The mountains appear as both protector of the country that they overshadow and powerless witness of the atrocities experienced by the nation’s people.

The Cordillera of Dreams is infused with metaphor and anthropomorphisms. Guzmán states:

“Santiago receives me with indifference.”

I left my homeland by choice rather than necessity, yet I think I understand what Guzmán means. The Ireland that I grew up in is almost recognizable compared to the one I witness today from afar. When I do return to my homeland, I am no longer part of its fabric, my presence in a sense immaterial and superfluous.

Guzmán interviews writers and artists who remained in Chile throughout its turbulent times. I am in awe, not only of their courage in staying put, but also of the depth of the connection they maintain with their homeland. Although he left Chile so many years ago, The Cordillera of Dreams is indeed testament to the fact that Guzmán himself has also never truly strayed far from his beloved country.

 

CQ

IMG_3206

I went to the Strand this week to see André Aciman—of the Call Me By Your Name book (and movie) fame—having just finished his new title, Find Me.

Aciman is a very entertaining, funny, and generous interviewee. Find Me is in parts a playful read, which was to some extent mirrored by my experience of its creator in real life.

Find Me is not a sequel to Call Me By Your Name, at least not so in the strict sense. Aciman teases us by not allowing Elio into the narrative until Part 2, which starts almost midway through the book. Oliver reappears much later, almost at the end. Aciman shared the fact that, particularly in Call Me By Your Name, he was not that much interested in Oliver’s character. Aciman tends to focus almost exclusively on the very few central protagonists, those peripheral to the narrative remaining shadowy and ill-defined. Take Elio’s mother, for example. In Call Me By Your Name she is sidelined and pretty featureless. The movie changed this, developing her character and giving her more of a role in the storyline. Aciman was, and remains so in his new book, more interested in Elio’s father, and thus Find Me opens with him (Samuel, named as such in the movie but not in Call Me By Your Name), and in fact gives him the largest protagonist share of the narrative.

This opening section—called Tempo—focuses on Samuel’s encounter with a younger woman. As Tempo suggests, time is a dominant theme here, and persists as a thread throughout the book. Early on, Samuel states that “…life and time are not in sync.”

He continues:

“None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time. because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.”

I am fascinated by the concept of time, how we measure our lives by it, and how time delineates—and seems to control— a one way journey from birth to death. I agree with Aciman—time is not a useful metaphor for how we perceive our lived lives, yet it one that is omnipresent.

Aciman proceeds to “play” with the concept of time, and how it shapes the lives of his characters. Part 1, for example, focuses mostly on just one day, and then the immediately following days. In Part 2, we have traveled a few years to arrive at the timeline, remaining there for a matter of days. Obviously much has happened in the intervening years, but there is a strong sense that within those deliberately chosen days, these hours are where life truly takes shape, determining its owner’s direction in the years thereafter. So yes, life and time are indeed out of sync.

As in Call Me By Your Name, music is a dominant theme throughout Aciman’s new book. He believes that music, and the arts in general, do not change our lives, albeit the joy they bring. An imaginary conversation takes place between Oliver and J.S. Bach in Find Me:

“Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me…Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’ve neglected or cheated, or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life.”

Which brings me to another dominant theme—that of the life not lived. Aciman believes that we all have many potentially lives, a belief that I subscribe to, though it can be a challenging one to act positively on so that we truly realize our lived potentials. Adam Phillip’s Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life comes to mind:

“…one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.”

“We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason — and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason — they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.”

“Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken.”

And this brings me back to Find Me, and its emphasis on not having those regrets, not accepting your life as an elegy to “desires sacrificed”, but about choosing to go down one road, allowing for this to be the wrong choice, and ultimately re-navigating your path.

Find Me is a thoughtful, introspective, and philosophical read. It is ultimately an ode to love, to the possibilities of love, and the richness awarded to a life lived true to such possibilities.

CQ

 

 

 

 

 

IMG_2309

On one level, I see myself as a writer. I am constantly writing something – lists (for today, this week, this month, this year, sometime…), quotes, reflections, mood stuff. When it comes to real writing, though, I think about it too much. So much, in fact, that I think my way out of actually doing any.

So, what has been left unwritten? I have a list (of course) of topics that connect my thinking and my lived experience. I am veering towards personal essays, musings that reflect my day-to-day life, particularly as it relates to, and is informed by, my encounters with literature and the arts.

I have long dabbled in poetry. As a young teen, I won a national competition in Ireland. (Something about autumn leaves, I think. I wish I had kept a copy.) For many years thereafter, I saw myself as a poet. In relatively recent times, I completed a Masters in Creative Writing. My final dissertation focused on the theme of skin and the the poetry I created on the topic. Here are two poems from that time:

Dandruff

I am itching

to brush the white specks away,

to dust the dead skin from

the collar of your coat.

 

But I am a stranger.

You may not take kindly

to the caress of my hand

on your soft threads.

You may be angry, irritated,

inflamed.

Or merely surprised, bemused

by the feel of me,

intrigued by the intimacy of the gesture.

 

That touch, a risk,

born out of nothing more, nor less,

than kindness.

 

Tattoo

You said

I wouldn’t dare,

wouldn’t stick the pain

of scraping, piercing needles.

Forbidden art.

Grey lines

etched on translucent skin.

Wings poised

to take flight.

To break free.

Beak open,

olive branch on offer.

To make peace.

.

This dove

cannot escape.

My skin, its cage,

locked from the inside.

Captive art.

You said

‘don’t do it’.

 

And I did.

 

I have come to accept that I am no poet, and now happily enjoy the works of others rather than write poems myself (although I have not entirely ruled out dabbling in prose poetry).

At the beginning of her memoir Things I don’t Want To Know, Deborah Levy quotes Georges Perec:

“I know roughly speaking, how I became a writer. I don’t know precisely why. In order to exist, did I really need to line up words and sentences? In order to exist, was it enough for me to be the author of a few books?…One day I shall certainly have to start using words to uncover what is real, to uncover my reality.”

I see writing as a making sense, a way of interrupting circular and directionless thinking. Jung said that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate” My words seem to come from some liminal interior space – where truth and reality jostle for position. Putting my words out there is an attempt to ease the tension within. Of course, I could just keep a diary. Which I almost consistently do, but sharing my words, writing with an intended reader is different. It speaks to the other, and gestures towards a witnessing, not merely of my words, but also of my existence.

Wittgenstein said that “All I know is what I have words for.” I get that. My thoughts and words seem inextricably connected, one leading to the other. This interconnectedness is echoed by Lydia Davis suggestion that “maybe the notebook is a place to practice not only writing but thinking.”

For me, writing is both a way to stop running and a way out of the liminal space. Why don’t I write? Stopping, standing still, can be challenging and threatening. And perhaps there is also an element of fear around what might lie beyond the exit sign.

Henrik Pontoppidan:

“But one day, we are stopped by a voice from the depths of our being, a ghostly voice that asks “who are you?” From then on, we hear no other question. From that moment, our own true self becomes the great Sphinx, whose riddle we try to solve.”

To consider the (probably unanswerable) question “who am I?” feels important. Henceforth, instead of endless circular thinking, I aim to break this closed loop and direct the flow from thinking to words to pencil to page.

“Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption.
Echo.

If I’m transformed by language, I am often
crouched in footnote or blazing in title.
Where in the body do I begin;”

from WHEREAS [“WHEREAS when offered…”]

Layli Long Soldier

CQ