I remember… I remember… I remember an inn Miranda and a highwayman who came knocking at its door, under a new moon shining wi’ the twinkle, twinkle little stars that looked down on a land where the Jumblies sold sealing wax and cabbages and kings asked queens, who asked the little serving maid, not to go down to the end of the town for marmalade and a bier, which great lords will carry…
Oh where, oh where has my childhood gone? With its breathless words of verse and worse that tumble and fall in rhythmic joy, like a comb through the tangled curls of memory. Whose lines are as knotted as the memories that weave new poems about a childhood I imagine I lived; and perhaps I did. I will never know, for what is memory except imagination labelled real.
The Scissor-man went Snip! Snap! Snip! and daddy was gone. That most definitely happened, exactly like that. There is proof in artefacts, in death certificates and the gap where he should have been.
Or the glorious technicolour holidays which my sisters and I piece together in a tapestry of conflicting times and places and people and words. And somewhere, beyond the cracks, enough consensus lurks to say—I lived this. The ski-jump and the corsets, the oompah band, the crowded train and puppets on a string. When for me, earth had nothing to show more fair than Michelangelo’s David, or the Milky Way stripped naked by the desert air.
But what of the Sandman, trusted to care, who woke me to strange and terrifying games that played hide and seek in my memory for thirty-five years until, in fragmented snatches, they flashed back in technicolour cinemascope? What really happened to a terrified child, who left her body and thought she was dead and gone to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who had repeatedly failed to bless the bed that I lay on. Who is to know, now he is dead and gone and there can be no consensus to agree upon?
I so needed to be healed and meditation was the weight of pleasure that held me like a dream in a world of imagination lived real. A time when the inexplicable was inscribed on the soul as indelibly as a stylus scars wet clay.
And later, when somewhere between the heart and the need, God was elided by other lovers and became an apostrophe; did I simply imagine that I loved them and they loved me? Was that live-long minute true to me, all that heaven allowed? And when it altered, as it alteration found, did I forget with one what I remember with another, until the past has become a thing of chance?
And what of all those forgotten moments that have created me? Can leaps of faith and imagination span the gaps of my identity and make of me some fragmentary whole? Can other people’s words, in lines of poetry, fathom the unfathomable where past and future memories resonate in an eternal present? Or is it, that like all time, I am unredeemable?
Isn’t that exactly what you want to know as you flick through titles on your phone, or run your finger along the spines of books on the library shelf. If it was just as simple as saying, abc. But it isn’t. And there are plenty of snobs out there who will tell you, that good books must be literary, so you can dismiss all other books. Just as there are passionate advocates of genre fiction that can drone on about chapter and verse and talk it up to the status of genius.
I have a memory—which is, after all, only imagination labelled real—of being less than six weeks old. It came to me many years ago in the cradling that is approaching sleep, when we let go the reins of the world and sink into the hidden spaces.
Do you write longhand or on a computer? Or. Do you write in the morning or at night?
Cutting away all that dead wood, snipping off the excess leaves and twigs that were so necessary at the time, just in case some disaster happened. Paring it back until the whole majestic structure makes sense. The structure becomes the beauty on which the leaves and fruit are given space to breathe and be seen in all their glory. A gardener cannot afford to be sentimental. Rip it out, chop it back, clear the space…
Salatheel 