If I Had a Boat...

I would want to live here along the riverbank with a dog and a wife and write books for a living.

Suspense

He doesn’t say anything else until we have come to an office at the far end of the house. There, he gestures to a green recliner and asks me to sit. Then he wanders around a big wooden desk and yanks his swivel chair towards him. We sit across from one another. On the desk, there’s a small cardboard box between us. It’s presence is a little unnerving to me, especially as he doesn't seem to acknowledge it’s resting there on the blotting paper in front of him. He just ruffles a hand through his mess of hair and says, very very quietly, ‘A young woman waiting in the rain is full of dramatic potential.’

Pictures by NicholasV

‘Is she?’ I say, full volume, and I wait to see if he will smile back. I want him to do with his craggy, handsome face what he forgot to do with his hands—to greet me, to make me feel welcome, to let me know that I am still being seen. Could this be the object of my curiosity, I wonder? This challenge?

‘Have you done anything like this before, Ms Berkeley?’

I am surprised to hear him using the English pronunciation without my having suggested it. Also hearing him using Ms over Miss.

‘Sort of,’ I answer him, growing dizzy again, still unsure what this job was going to entail. ‘I mean, I can type. One hundred words a minute, last time I checked.’

This is a lie. I can type fast, I know, but I’ve no idea how many words per minute. I still hunt and peck, backspacing as I go. Summer school typing classes: the keys of the big hunky typewriters painted over with enamel and the teacher walking around with a clipboard, covering our hands as we took dictation.

‘And you’re an English student, you said?’

‘PhD,’ I tell him. ‘A DPhil they call it over in England. I just submitted.’

He congratulates me then asks, ‘What was your topic?’

‘Nineteenth Century. My thesis looked at the existential significance of orphans in the English novel from Dickens to Hardy.’

I can’t be sure, but I think I see him raise his eyebrows as if this wasn’t what he expected of me, as if this wasn’t something he thought people studied anymore.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You said that you only just submitted your thesis?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, what are you doing back in the States?’

‘Well…’ I shrug. There are any number of ways to tell this particular story and I pick the most impersonal of the lot. ‘I ran out of money,’ I tell him.

The lights are already on in the office, but this man now leans forward anyway—over that cardboard box—and pulls the tiny chain of his desk lamp. It’s the first time he’s looked at me directly. The lamp goes on, and he looks up like he wants to check I’m still in the room. The lampshade is green and his face lights up a little more, but still there’s no smile. Just an openness, like he is lost and waiting there alone without me. It reminds me of what a boy left behind on a school trip might look like.

Suddenly, I feel I want to be the one conducting this interview. I want to be asking my own questions. A few silent seconds pass as I think about this. I slide out of my shoes and secretly begin massaging my feet into his old worn out rug. Then, surprising myself, I say, ‘Can I ask what’s in the box?’

One of Us Misread

He tried to reminding himself that it was a sort of bravery

rather than weakness

that kept him wearing his heart on his sleeve

no matter how much trouble it got him into

but believing this was tough...

Oxford in Blue

Everything blue. The blue of that bulky pea coat I picked up at Salvation Army for no apparent reason. The blue-grey weather, the sound of Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis playing in every cafe I went into at the time. Or all those blue balloons held in an alligator line of field-tripping Japanese children I saw strolling through the park one day. Also the glow of this city’s sky at night, merely a shadow of the day. Also my father’s eyes and that hyponotic blue of the deep blue sea.

Etty

Just a preview of an article I'm writing about my encounter with the diaries of Etty Hillesum:

Readers tend to be either bewildered or deeply moved by her. I've recommended these diaries to many friends who, despite having adored Anne Frank, have come back to me rather exasperated by all the emotional temperature-taking in Hillesum's writing. Others, meanwhile, have found her surreal sexual relationships a little difficult to fathom: Etty wrestling with her therapist on the floor of his office or Etty bedding down with her aged landlord--all while she pines after a personal God and a prayerful life, all while the persecution of Jews escalates outside her window.

For these readers, she must appear to lead a rather mixed-up if not haphazard existence, somewhere between bohemianism and a sort of low-level mysticism.

There are, however, those of us who find in Etty's writing an original and unabashedly human voice. A voice akin to that of her beloved Rilke in the way she struggles to stand apart from history, all while trying to wrangle hold of life in all its earthly feeling. Hers is a difficult balance between trancendent ideals and devotion to the things of this world.



'The trajectory of her journey,' writes Eva Hoffman, 'echoes classical accounts of spiritual transformation; but Etty's pilgrimage grew out of the intimate experience of an intellectual young woman--it was idiosyncratic, individual, and recognisably modern...Her essential existence, she often reminded herself, took place in the privacy of self-reflection, at a desk covered with pinecones, vases of flowers, and books.' [vii, viii]

Hotcoldhotcoldhotcold

Cold autmn weather and fiery indoor radiators. One wall of the room soaked in gold, the other cast in icy shadow. Lying there with you on upon the floor, both of us staring at the skylight, watching the vapour trails of passing planes crisscross the blue. Dreaming up whole continents of warmth.


Photo by Anako

Just a tiny, imaginary thought of peace and love, folded up, and tossed kite-like to the wind.

Blank Pages Before Next Chapters

My computer isn't working at the moment, so this is only a quick post, a passing wave. I'm actually typing this at my friends' while they're away on their honeymoon and as I look after their cat and continue to live out of suitcases...

Early autumn is currently knocking me out, even though I'm currently fighting a head cold and keep having to duck away on street corners to blow my nose. Walking through gold shimmering Oxford this evening, I thought what better way to top off this cinematic, potent beauty than with a film? So I stopped off at the video shop I haven't visited in almost a year and took out Kieslowski's Three Colours: White. When I brought it up to the counter, the twerpy clerk said, 'I've heard this is the worst one of the three.' It was only when I got outside that I realised this was rather like someone saying they'd heard about some parts of heaven where you have to dress more warmly than usual. I mean, who cares if you have to put on a scarf--it's still heaven, right?