‘The past of writing becomes the present of reading, even if three hundred years have passed.’ Siri Hustvedt
Even yesterday can become today and a week ago, relived as if this very moment when we write.
And as she writes elsewhere in her book on the death of her beloved husband Paul Auster, ‘Even if childhood is terrible, we are unwilling to wrench ourselves from it.’ we cling to it. Not only do we cling to the horrible aspects, remembering events as if they are still happening, we cling to other memories, ‘the land, the house, if one was raised there long.’ They grow in our imaginations as if we still view them through our child’s eye view.
Witness a small child first practising hand eye coordination, as they pluck at a small speck on the carpet.
There was a brown bear in my dreams this morning, a big furry Canadian bear ready to give chase and elsewhere a pond loaded with fish. They looked as though they belonged in the deepest recesses of water though they were close to the surface. They too were brown but also ugly with shattered skins as if made of stone. They remind me of the figures in Kelly Boesch’s work, surreal ugly and gloriously beautiful at the same time. Such is the stuff of dreams.
I’ve been in contact on Facebook with a great uncle, Jos Spekman, son of the brother of my grandmother, Jac Spekman, and therefore my mother is his niece, which makes me his niece too, and he my great uncle. But he is younger than my mother his niece, and I have trouble getting my head around the familial lines. As you do when families are large with many children ranging in age across two decades.
So, my second eldest brother, the first to have a child in my family, has a daughter who is almost the same age as my youngest brother, though at least as her uncle, he’s still older.
Jos is now 89 he tells me. From photos on Facebook, he looks nothing like this. In my family especially on my mother’s side we have bursts of longevity.
All her siblings were still alive into their eighties. We cannot claim the same in my generation, as my second eldest brother died last year and he had not yet hit eighty but he was almost there.
Generational patterns can be fascinating but not so much as the small details of day to day life. I’m at a loss for words this morning. Swamped as ever by the immediacy of my every day and the presence of a painter who is reconstructing the walls of our hallway damaged through repeated rain leaks that needed six different tradesmen before we finally fixed the problems. And in the meantime, in places in the hall way the paint has cracked, it’s underlying paper peeled off after layers of paint since the early 1900s and in places turned yellow.
Now at least, the walls are resealed and a first layer of paint applied. But it’s a long slow process and the preparation takes more time than the actual painting which goes on effortlessly if the preparation, the sealed cracks and undercoat are applied well.
The worst of it all yesterday when he shaved back the places he had patched and left a fine layer of dust everywhere. He used a machine for the purpose of his sand papering and the fine dust particles float through the house even after we kept doors closed. Its grot lines every surface.
I am not much of a duster at the best of times.
I leave dust to build up behind cupboards and in places too high to reach.
It never bothers me though there are industrious people who shift their dust weekly. To me dust is like autumn leaves. They pile on year after year and as much as you can move some along, turned them to compost much of it remains.
I prefer a sense of tidy untidiness to pristine clean. Pristine clean leaves me anxious in a way that is paralysing.
I have never wanted to live in a Vogue house. I have never wanted to live in a mausoleum, a place of the dead.