Gib ein kleines Zeichen

Courtesy of Nathalia Terza

He started with fairytales, these little stories he’d make up for imaginary children, younger versions of himself, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t maybe try doing the same. Just begin with wonder, begin with unformed dreams, and work your way back: this, I suppose, is the first thing I learned from him. I’m not sure if the image is his or mine anymore, but I see my beginning, here, writing this all down, rather like digging in the undergrowth, getting at the roots underneath. Or, just as likely (this one is definitely his) closing your eyes underwater and, in that darkness, sensing the magic play of light, groping for it.

There was something in the walls of the house. I’d only been there a night, maybe two, when I decided there was something creeping through the wall space, in those underappreciated gaps between one room and the next: a flutter along the hallway skirting, a thump inside a cupboard, whispers in the ceilings and hardwood floors. Infrequent but noticeable, these weren’t even sounds so much as sensations, shifts in atmosphere. There was something invisible in the house’s anatomy, I realised, more than just the usual insulation and plumbing, and it was shifting around. It seemed to follow me around the house. I imagined, at times, the wallpaper rippling with goosebumps. I’d be sitting there, alone in this big empty stranger’s house, and I’d suddenly get startled by some little change in the room’s ambience. I’d look up from whatever I was doing (reading, most likely, struggling to absorb words on the page) and I’d wait. I’d wait like anyone does who’s about to be caught. It was like some sort of private seance: I’d stare up at the ceiling or over at the bookcase, just waiting for whatever was inside the walls to come out and reveal itself. I’d sit there listening, and in that re-focussed silence, that distillation of quiet, I always thought I could hear something or someone listening back. Then, just as quick as it had arrived, it would disappear, and the silence would again lose its flicker of personality. 

The first few times it happened, I forgot about it, as anyone would, putting it down to old houses on the edge of the city and returning to my heartbreak, my dizzy spells, my reading, my whole nervous enterprise. But it kept on happening. That invisible presence kept returning, kept sidling up on me unawares. It was frustrating. I’d hear its little noises, my awareness would bridle, and I’d look around desperately trying to locate it—but still, nothing. Just this tight-lipped house, and the tail of a Felix the Cat clock in the far off kitchen ticking away. The eyes, I'd imagine, going back and forth, back and forth.

 Courtesy of Nathalia Tereza

Soulful Resonances

Today I awoke and opened a novel that I completed nearly 2 years ago and haven't looked at for some time. It fell open to page 165, and this was the paragraph I read...

 
He recognised that Susanna's presence was still trailing through him electrically. What he really wanted, now, was to prolong the sense that he was still with her, caught up with her story, that their lives hadn't now gone their separate directions. Her dextrously long-fingered hand had, at one point, slid to him from the opposite side of the kitchen table, helping to emphasise something she was saying, and though she hadn't reached him where he was sitting, she had come close. He could still see her hand there, lying slender and flat before him. It hadn't touched him, but something inside him certainly had been, and was still resonating. He almost felt he had just learned, in remedial fashion, some new style of being-with-a-woman.  (from Transatlantic)

White Nights

'But how beautiful people are when they are gay and happy! How brimful of love their hearts are! It's as though they wanted to pour their hearts into the heart of another human being, as though they wanted the whole world to be gay and laugh with them.'--Dostoyevsky, 'White Nights'

The Upstairs Room

A new play.

I've been busy and, also, taking a breather at the same time (this involved, incidentally, quitting cigarettes and coffee). But I will try and start writing here again, sometime soon. As of right now, all the time I used to reserve for the odd blog post has been given to jumping in rivers, primarily at night.

Little Dreams, Little Earthquakes

Sleep and I have long been in an abusive relationship. We need counseling. We don't communicate, we linger in separate rooms until it's rather late. Nor have affairs with cigarettes and enumerable cups of coffee helped the matter.

Often, lately, I'll awake on the verge of settling down under the sheets, on the cusp of some dream, and I feel myself shaking slightly, My heart racing, my entire body full of little tremors. Like an inability to let myself go entirely, to sink, hanging onto wakefulness with one last digit and flailing above the abyss.

Interesting that people typically reach for the same metaphor--falling--to describe both the act of sleep and those initial, reckless pangs of love. Both can have the significance of a leap of faith, a hope that you will come out the other side complete, intact.

Interestingly, I've don't think I experience these little earthquakes, these trains passing through the tunnels of sleep when I'm sleeping with someone close by (otherwise, they would have surely told me)...

Browsing for Love

The first of two new plays I've written, both of which are being produced over the next seven weeks...As I mentioned last time, this one's about two book-festishists who meet in a bookshop (she works there, he's just browsing) and then fall madly, etc, etc.

The Albion Beatnik, Walton Street, Oxford, from 31st May-2nd June. Tickets are £5.

Starbursts

There are currently two photography books I want (I'm currently rehearsing a play about people wanting books, although the books themselves are just symbols for more oceanic desires). 

The great Hatje Cantz publishers put out a book last year called Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980. The above image by Mitch Epstein is on the cover. Consider it a celebration of Kodachrome that includes the likes of obvious entries like Stephen Shore and William Christenberry.

In the meantime, Hatje Cantz has come out with a new monograph of Fred Herzog's amazing work from the early Sixties, when hardly anyone was doing 'street' photography in colour.

I've been poring over these pages in the Blackwells Art and Poster shop in Broad Street, embarrassed because I can't afford them and I instead have to make due with sitting on a stoop in the photography corner and trying to absorb the imagery.

Incidentally, Starbursts were a candy I rather liked when I was young and it occurs to me now that they might not exist in their original form anymore. Which would be sad. Each cube of taffy was wrapped perfectly in its out color-themed envelope. A little parcel, or present, you could save individually. My favourite, if I remember right, was always the yellows. I wonder, now, what strange and Proustian memories would come hurtling back to me were I to taste one again. Visits to the swimming pool, most likely...Hiding on the playground...All those quiet, sacramental moments we soon forget by never really lose.