Memories are made of this

When I look back to my childhood, it is in indistinct shades of grey, punctuated by regular splashes of colour. The colour is foreign in every sense, it bubbles with life and laughter, and its colours are pine green, lapis lazuli and Umbrian red. It rises around me in mountainsides and lakes, gilded churches and marbled mosques, lace-making and lederhosen. It is rich with the viscous heat of the nightly promenade and the smell of pizza and chicken in a basket. It is the sound of the oompah band and Puppet on a String, it is Europe in the 1960s.

Even now, somewhere in Southern Germany, there is a lake of brilliant crystal blue, as clear as the laughter in a baby’s eyes, and cold as ice. But the young man who ploughed ripples in the water on that day, now sports a belly and ripples his keyboard. The steps still wind down towards the harbour in Napoli, crowded by the houses which lean in above them. But the old lady, shrouded in black, now lies buried in some equally crowded ground. The market in Old Istanbul probably still bustles its wares down by the water, the peaches still three good, one rotten in the bag. But the wily stallholder now sits on the steps of his daughter’s house and worries his beads with sun wrinkled hands. The boulevard in Isfahan that welcomed you from with desert, no doubt still does, but probably not with shocking green abundance; war and fundamentalism have clothed Iran in plainer garb.

And so it is with memory, it is real, but not populated with reality. I could go back and see the lake, if I could find it. I could walk again around the streets of Florence. But I could not stand, innocent, drowning in David’s beauty as I did then. I want to know that once I did this, ate that, or marvelled at some architectural grandeur. I want to feel that I had a life rich in experience, to hold it in to myself, to possess it, to indulge in it. But I can only know it as I know, that I have walked the halls of Pemberly with Elizabeth Bennet, and fought the good fight with Harry Potter.

These are the things …

These are the things that have proved more valuable than my friendship – a washing machine and a television.

These are the things that are more important than my wellbeing – what other nameless faces will say

These are the things that are more valuable than the lives of countless men, women and children in faraway lands – two four wheel drives and a new kitchen.

These are the things that are worth more than the mental health of thousands of our neighbours – 300 spin doctors and a big fat public pension.

Who am I to demand your interest?

Who are you to demand mine?

Nothing and no-one, except you see me and I see you, and in that seeing there is the acknowledgement of humanity.

Words, the conduit of life

I was first awakened to language at the end of a game of Scrabble that I had gatecrashed. The actor, whose name now escapes me, but whose beautiful face, rests in partial lines in my memory, quoted a line from Hamlet, “and dawn her russet mantle spread”. I was 19, at drama school doing stage management and he must have been 60 and working as a director at college. What followed was a simple pressure for meaning, a few minutes of a standard exercise.

What colour is russet?

Red

What sort of red?

Dark red

What sort of dark red?

Red with some brown in it.

Where is it in the sky?

And so we continued for just a few minutes, and the pauses before the answers grew longer as that dawn spread before me. I can still see it now.

But the revelation lay not in the picture that was created, but in the process of creating it. Pressing through the surface tension on which my rational consciousness skated like a lightweight water boatman and claiming the seething depth that lies beneath. Out of which rises up all that I call myself, including the unfolding of language: words, the conduit of life.

Listening to Jackson Brown 2015

The past is alive with music and music is alive with the past. The taste of a whole way of living: the smell, the touch, the greasy feel of the seventies. Sliding through the cloying, rich smell of resin, hanging like incense in a room filled with reclining bodies and pots of tea. Speakers the size of ships, throb with the bass. The rock pulses through you like the heartbeat of a time. Giggles about nothing and the guitar screws it up. You lean over and wonder if you’ll be able to make it feeling this wrecked. The music wraps around you and stereo is the sweetest word in the universe. Soft, wet lips that taste of sugar and tobacco. Sensual hands slide inside the clothing that never quite comes off.

Hidden memories

Hidden memories push against their walls
Time imprisoned
They reach out across my life
Touch me with tentacles of forgotten sensations
Heave as swell against the sea wall
Threatening to break up and over
To swamp me in the real-time of their existence
Morning dawns and they have ebbed
Leaving an impression that once I knew more

The silence of reality

The core of me is silence.  A profound stillness that is thick and filling, which rises up to my mouth and spills out in feelings and words.  If I sink into it, I lose the edges of myself and release outwards, gently held in an infinite womb of potential.

That silence is reality, it moves me around this physical world, it knows what is beauty and rolls forth to embrace the hot redness of a flower or the grace of a spreading gum tree.  It dwarfs my thinking brain, which skitters across its surface like a windsurfer across the ocean.  When I am not connected to that silence, my thoughts think themselves so important, so real, so relevant. But from within the silence, they are the annoying buzz of the fly around your face.  Everything is held within that silence.