Watching my hand swell and colour over the past few days, waiting for my finger operation, in a state of codeine-induced stupefaction (n.b not totally awful) I’ve needed something to read to distract me from the dull throb of my poor blue digit and gloomy thoughts of the plates and pins that will be inserted into it tomorrow.
It’s been a long time since I read anything that isn’t research for WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN. My codeine concentration span, however, wont allow me to retain much information before I drop into a vague blurry daze, and anyway trying to resume reading my research materials will just frustrate me and remind me that of my temporary ‘stuck’ state, that I can’t ‘get on’ with the project properly till I have some use of my hand again.
I used to hoover up fiction but I stopped a while back , probably when this project got going. As a result I’ve no idea what to read. I’m a fussy reader at the best of times, prone to literary snobbery, difficult to please.
Lucky for me, I found Hilary Mantel’s memoir “Giving Up The Ghost” (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featu…) in a charity shop at the weekend. I grabbed it off the self and knew I was in good hands. I love Mantel. Her prose – dark, blunt, no-nonsense, mischievous, makes me feel elated. I recognise her voice, like a very old, half-remembered friend. Her book is the tonic I need. She writes, near the beginning of the book, an amazing sentence about her childhood which stops me in my tracks and makes me fold the page over:
“The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines”
Hilary, I am too! This is why I constantly collaging, using and re-using photographs of myself as a child; adding real and found and fictional parts of homes and family members, arranging and re-arranging – in a constant search for meaning, to try and finish the sentence of childhood.
Does anyone ever finish it? Or is it like homework that’s too hard – and will sit in a drawer somewhere, waiting till you find the answer?
