Sometimes I wish the world would slow down with me, grind to a halt when I do. Extreme fatigue marred another week. Pain in strange places: sitting in palms like weights of woe; soles of feet as if pummeled and pounded; worst: my brain chafing against the suddenly rugged surface of the inside of my skull. Whenever I emerge my project awaits; threads to pick up and pursue, and I recognize myself again.
The little sailor-suit has stayed on my mind. I don’t know who sewed it where for which child, and while I wished I did it is clear that the lack of information allows me to beat a path on my own memory-trail. That the outfit was made/worn in the 1930s (as per ebay-listing) is significant, even if I can’t be 100% sure. So: Trying to achieve a sense of a life’s span I’m juxtaposing an acquired childhood garment with the tissue-paper shoes I made after my dad’s death. They were pitch-black originally, but changed tint through exposure to light at home and in exhibitions, which I like very much.
I am really not a well-read person, although I may give that impression, and struggle to remember books in detail, but at times a fragment reappears and pricks (like a forgotten piece of shrapnel that travels through the body) and helps me think something through. Greek myths have been with me since childhood, when I was given a version written for young people. I keep returning to them, or they to me. A couple of years ago I read Virgil‘s Aeneid (Aeneas interested me because Cassandra loved him) and what I recall most vividly is that he searched out a Sybil to enlist her help as a guide into the world of the dead, so he could consult with his father. Orpheus, Odysseus – are there instances when women descend into the underworld to commune with a loved one? If I could I would ask my dad about his childhood, about growing up in the thirties, everyday things, ‘normal’ life.
When I’m preparing to write a post I shuffle through my bundles of texts and notes and scraps torn from newspaper articles until I discover a point of entry, of focus. Often enough I fall through a trap door and find myself where I daren’t look. After the radio programme I told you about (post#96) I dropped everything else and started reading David Grossman‘s Writing in the Dark. In his essay Books That Have Read Me he talks about a book his father (who did not talk much about his childhood) gave him when he was eight years old: Sholem Aleichem‘s Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s son (which I in turn yearn to read now). It transported him into the lost world his father came from, helped him imagine his dad as a boy: ‘”Do you like it?”, my father asked. “Read, read, it’s just how things were with us.” And perhaps because of the expression on his face at that moment, I had a sudden illumination. I realized that for the first time, he was inviting me over there, giving me the keys to the tunnel that would lead from my childhood to his.’
My dad didn’t talk much about his childhood, which may very well be a male thing, but it’s probably also linked with the rupture trauma brings, to those against whom atrocities are committed as well as those who find themselves on the perpetrators’ side, actively or passively. And while I write out this sentence I wonder how I can without conflating lessening reducing dishonouring
I also didn’t ask much.
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