Tag: Siri Hustvedt

The hyperreal and ordinary days

‘No TV people are the scum of the earth.’

A comment made in a series called Trying, where a couple are competing with other parents to adopt a child in Camden London. The other family in this story enjoy a large and beautiful house, with multiple bedrooms and a tree house at back.

But they do not own a television set, a sign of something off, according to those who compete. 

To me there’s nothing off in not owning a TV, though the idea puts me in mind of the many years ago when my youngest daughter, now in her early thirties, was only three. Her eldest sister away in Germany on exchange and her other sisters were addicted to Home and Away.

One evening with dinner on the table when the elder of the two insisted she could not stop watching the movie at that moment because one of the central characters was about to have a baby, something shifted inside me.

Enough was enough.

In a grand gesture, I pulled out the plug and lugged the beast across the back garden and plonked it down on a bench in the workshop where it stayed for the next decade or so.

My children were mortified and distressed. We still talk about it. My third child bemoaned the fact she had nothing to talk to her friends about when they were going on about the latest episode of Home and Away. 

My eldest daughter imagined on her return from Germany that she’d be able to talk me out of it but to no avail. I was obdurate. Typically, Thoughout our children’s childhoods my husband was the firm disciplinarian, but in this instance I held firm.

My children soon found a solution after they each took possession of a computer and could watch movies on their screens as my husband and I still do.

We still do not possess a television. I see no need.

In retrospect it seems harsh but during the years after I installed the television unplugged in the workshop, my children read more books than they might otherwise. 

Maybe my decision as a twelve-year-old to give up television watching after I decided I could spend my time watching the box or I could begin to apply myself at school paid off.

Till then I loved nothing more than getting home from school to Simba the White Lion, or Robin Hood in his greenwood finest, or Leave it to Beaver.

There was any number of American sitcoms to enjoy even as we tended to stop television watching the moment my father walked through our door.

It’s different these days, it seems with the ever-available presence of the online world. And as Kate Manne writes, ‘We live in a state of hyper-reality that perceives the simulacrum or the copy of the real thing to be more real than reality.’ 

To this end, I can watch endless reams of Kelly Boesch art installations on the screen. The hyperreal people and creatures cavorting the screen in endless impossible ways. They burst into cascades of colour, or overflow with water. The nature scenes of flowers more hyper real than hyperreal. 

I love the effect of watching for those moments as I study the screen, but it has a dissatisfying feel once it ends. I can rarely find a story in any of these pieces, even though often she accompanies her visual portrayals with the lyrics of songs, hers and other peoples’. The songs sometimes hold snippets of story. But I cannot hold onto any of it. just a lingering after taste of pleasure rather like saccharin in your tea, or the artificial taste of low joule soft drinks. 

But then I think of Jeanette Winterson’s advice on one of her Substack’s on writing, ‘Do not confuse product with process.’ These two are not the same and in this world where we have become obsessed with the finished product and urge to produce, we forget the pleasures of the process. 

It’s one of the reasons I write endlessly, not for the product, the finished piece but for the pleasure of the process, of finding ideas words and images rolling from my mind through my fingers and onto the keyboard and thinking.

Like Siri Hustvedt, I can see that memory and imagination are twins. I dig into my memories and before I know it, I’m embellishing the memory with all its holes and gaps in understanding where my imagination leads me. And my imagination also piggy backs on memory. It must be somewhere inside my mind, unconscious and all for it to emerge on the page. 

The dogs are with us this weekend, they too blend with my dreams and imagination. I try to understand their movements, to provide them with predictability and care. And to help them override the impulse to bark whenever someone new enters our house. They are determined to warn people off or in the case of beloved family members they bark out of pleasure at the reunion.

But their barking is so loud it sets your teeth on edge, and it takes time before it subsides, for the rest like now they’re quiet. The small one at my feet trying to slip their body between the folds of blanket I’m using to cover my knees in this cold house. 

The other, a black labradoodle is under their own blanket on the chair behind me. Both quiet for the moment. But there will come a time soon when one or other of the dogs will move closer and address me with wagging tail and insistent snout rubbing into my leg, It’s time now for action. Enough of the indolence. We want you to take us for a walk or at least throw those endless balls in the back garden so we might play fetch. 

What is it with dogs and balls? The game of fetch. Dogs bred or trained from the get-go to undertake their role in life as one of retrieve-that object-and bring it to your owner. The …oodle of labradoodle whose breed for centuries were water dogs trained to fetch from  the water birds felled by their owner’s gun, and the little Jack Rusell terrier cross, bred as a rabbiter or mouser, snout into holes. You see it even now the way she pokes her nose into things.

Beloved dogs who give us such joy, more than the television or the hyperreal online world ever could. 

On dust, familial decay and painting

‘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.