Archives for posts with tag: Memories

Moving Home

February 25, 2023 //
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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.

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Categories Home, Memory

The Bell Jar…50 years later…

February 19, 2013 //
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It is 50 years since Sylvia Plath published her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, originally under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in 1963. The book has never been out of print. The front cover has seen many guises, however, with the current one above, and that from my copy purchased a few years ago, below:

Irrespective of the cover, the content remains reassuringly the same. I have read it probably 5 times, not because it is a great novel, but because there has always been something essential about it for me.

If you have not read it, I truly recommend it. I am not about to summarise the plot or the background, but I will draw your attention to the title, a bell jar signifying entrapment, being kept within, imprisoned:

‘To the person in a bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.’

Thus reflects Esther, the main protagonist in the novel, as she leaves the asylum in the last chapter, and realises that forgetting is not an option: memories are a part of her, ‘my landscape.’

When Esther first arrives at ‘Doctor Gordon’s private hospital’:

‘What bothered me was that everything about the house seemed normal, although I knew it must be chock-full of crazy people. There were no bars on the windows that I could see, and no wild or disquieting noises.’

There was no going back after Esther’s experiences, from what she had witnessed and lived through. She could not, as her mother wished, dismiss it all as a bad dream.

This is not a book whose passages you memorise, but there are some that resonate and stick:

‘The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.’

CQ

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Categories Literature, Madness, Suffering

Becoming our parents…

January 22, 2013 //
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Another gem of a Christmas present was a subscription to The New Yorker. The first issue arrived last week, and there is so much of interest that several days later I am still reading it, and this week’s issue is due tomorrow…

For now, I want to mention an article by James Wood on Becoming Them: Our parents, our selves (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_wood).

Woods reminisces, movingly, of Sundays when growing up, mostly the rituals and the boredom, but also memories of classical music, which his father was passionate about, but perhaps his children suffered from composer overload at an early age…

However, years later Woods discovered himself a passion for classical music, which persists in his forties. Perhaps this, just like the gesticulations, the little phrases that creep in as we age, not to mention the physical reminders, are part of the ‘plagiarism of inheritance.’

Seeing my parents in myself traumatised me around 10 years ago. Now, I am much more accepting of it. When I first noticed it, they were both alive. Within recent years, both died in relatively quick succession.

Woods suggests that we ‘mourn them [our parents] only haplessly, accidentally, by surviving them.’ A friend of Wood’s challenges this view and believes that the real point is that we become our parents, taking on their gestures and habits once they have died.

A preservation of past generations, but not as in ‘they live on in our memories’, more in terms of those before us continuing within us in an unavoidable physical (and social) sense. Utterly rational when you consider science and DNA, not to mind ‘nuture’, but…

Thus, you potentially mourn your parents by becoming them. This feels more than a little weird to me (but may also merely reflect my own mourning processes, or lack of).

But Woods moves onto another interesting point. if you can mourn your parents by becoming then, then surely you can also mourn them before they die. This I get. As I child, I (shamefully and secretly) wished that my parents died together in a car accident. The thought that one would be left alone, forever grieving and sad for the other, felt unbearable to me.

As I grew up, and left, I dwelt less on the fact that my parents would inevitably die. Old age arrived, and with it a world for them that became increasingly smaller, and exclusive. In latter years, I never seemed to find a way into this terrain.

Woods challenges Larkin’s line about life being first a thing of boredom, then later replaced by fear, suggesting that fear comes first.

I am not convinced. Boredom seems to me the prerogative of children, and, from what I have witnessed, fear, if and when it appears, and this is of course by no means universal, can escalate as both time and worlds shrink.

CQ

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Categories Ageing, Bereavement, Death and Dying, Families, Grief, Loss, Memory

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book…

November 19, 2012 //
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Hearing about the imminent arrival of a new meningitis vaccine, I thought immediately of one of the best books I have ever read.

I bought Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (Michael Rosen & Quentin Blake, London: Walker Books, 2004) a few years ago, mainly as a way of exploring the meaning and expression (and alrightness) of sadness with my daughter.

Re-reading it now, I am again struck by its wonderfulness, by Rosen’s ability to convey sadness so meaningfully in few words, and which is so imaginatively enhanced by Blake’s drawings.

The book arose from Rosen’s grief following the sudden death of his 18 year old son Eddie from meningitis in 1999. Primarily about his sadness over the loss of Eddie, it also includes the loss of his mother, as well as loss in general as part of all our lives.

Rosen challenges pre-conceptions. The very first image is that of a grinning Rosen. Below the picture he writes:

‘This is me being sad.’

‘…pretending I’m being happy.

I’m doing that because I think people won’t

like me if I look sad.’

On page 3 we are introduced to Eddie:

‘What makes me most sad is when I think

about my son Eddie. He died.’

We see images of Eddie as a child, playing and happy, and then a blank panel, where Eddie should be:

‘…he’s not there any more.’

Although a hugely personal book, there is much here that is generalisable:

Sad is ‘anywhere’, ‘any time’, ‘anyone’:

‘It comes along and finds you.’

And much that is positive:

‘Every night I try to do one thing I can be proud of.’

‘I’m sad, not bad.’

‘Everyday I do one thing that means

I have a good time.’

Rosen also remembers the good times, and shows the power of memory to make loss bearable, and the act of remembering even potentially joyful.

An absolute gem of a book, on a topic that is corporate and universal and touches all our lives.

CQ

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Categories Art & Suffering, Death and Dying, Loss, Memory, Suffering

The Kingdom at Soho Theatre…

November 5, 2012 //
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Lasting just over an hour, this three man play by Colin Teevan leaves much to consider. I am still considering, and although I am not altogether sure that I grasped all the various meanings and layers, I gained enough to make it a thought-provoking experience.

The three men – Young Man (Anthony Delaney),  Man (Owen O’Neill) and Old Man (Gary Lilburn) – are together on stage throughout, digging, and talking, and telling stories, the secrets of their lives gradually exposed and shared as the shovels do their work:

‘Let the shaft glide through your hand – ‘

The play feels rooted in an Ireland of a certain time (The ‘Kingdom of Ireland’ ceased as such in 1801), when young men headed off, ‘making something of yourself”:

‘I take the road eastwards towards the sea,

And England.’

England here equates with London, Kilburn and the Galtee More in Cricklewood specifically, and perhaps predictably.

‘Pints are drunk that night,

And the talk is mighty.’

Also unsurprisingly, the Ireland left behind, we learn as the stories unfold, is one rife with incest, rape and murder. It is also the land of tinkers, of shrines, and, somewhat ironically, Our Lady of Succour…

The Old Man teases us with a riddle at the outset:

‘My mother is my father’s child,

And my mother’s son my father,

If I believe this is no lie,

Tell me stranger who am I?’

The correct answer is ‘a good Christian’…

Violence, blows, suicide, self-inflicted blindness…tragedy suffuses the narrative, with more than a hint of a Greek tragedy prevailing.

In the end, there is no sense of redemption, no sense that truth makes a positive difference. An ambivalence towards the very notion of stories appears in the opening scene, as the talking begins:

‘Go on believing, if it helps,

Telling yourself stories,

If it helps put down the day.’

Leaving Ireland has solved little, the past in the end remains inescapable:

‘I look around at them,

Their battered boots and breeches, worn out braces,

I look into their hungry, cowed faces;

These are not the pride of Hackney, Haringey or Hull,

But the lost sons of Kerry, Cork and Donegal.’

The Old Man’s comment that:

‘One road’s the same as another, when you’re digging it.’

made me think of Seamus Heaney’s poem, Digging (Death of a Naturalist, 1969). Here, Heaney initially describes the tradition of digging in his father’s and grandfather’s time, before concluding:

‘But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

the squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.’

We dig, in our own individual and unique ways, to get at a truth, which feels intuitively worthwhile and valid. What we unearth, about ourselves and others, may not however be what we expected or hoped to find.

CQ

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Categories Memory, Suffering, Theatre, Uncategorized