Flotsam and Jetsam

Flotsam and Jetsam

She had spent the day clearing out, for no particular reason, though the day in itself encouraged hiding indoors: it was grim and grey and rainy out, the latest in weeks upon weeks of stormy days that winter, and a good enough reason to stay indoors with her thoughts and her books.

Some of the stuff was years old; a lot of it not even hers, but it always seemed to fall to her to clear up, even to clear up other people’s messes, large and small. Maybe it came with the territory of the eldest child. She had finally arrived at the corner cupboard in the basement store-room. There was an odd assortment: books that had belonged to her late father, which her mother had kept after his death, and which were subsequently packed up when her mother died, six years later. Most of his books were neatly packed into storage boxes which still inhabited an upstairs landing, almost twelve years later, but some had washed up here. Never enough shelves in the house. It is passing strange to find oneself not only clearing out relics of one's own life, but relics of other people's too. Like emotional archaeology. At the bottom of it all, she wondered if this recent interest clearing out stemmed from a decision, not consciously made, to move on. Or was she moving out?

She composed a mental inventory:

One pair of wings, dried up and faded, from a butterfly that was trapped in a window long ago. Three deep blue glass beads, recovered from a pilfering toddler. Two pale blue satin rosebuds, carefully stitched on, to be worn, out of sight, on her wedding day. The ghost of a silver sixpence, in the form of a newer five-pence piece, now obsolete itself.

A piece of quartz. This made her smile, having come to the unavoidable realisation that she had, perhaps unsurprisingly, mothered another magpie, so that they now returned from seaside trips with four pockets bulging with delicately-pink oyster shells, rainbow pebbles, and other treasures impossible to leave unclaimed.

Books, reappearing in some unknowable order:

-Mollie Keane, a second-hand copy, but whose?

-Michael Ondaatje (she remembered how she had wept at the film, at the tragedy of a love that refuses to die).

-Assorted books on chair-making, property of her hobbyist father.

-A book on the Georgian architecture of London, given as gift when she left her job there to return home.

-A travel guide to Brittany and Normandy, relic of holidays by ferry with small children. Odd, as this last week, she had been remembering them, reliving driving through sleepy French villages on hot afternoons, and wishing for the feel of sun on her skin. A reminder of being a family that is no longer a family, but nonetheless a family.

More surprisingly, a clutch of books on industrial research methods and cost analysis. Together with a recently-discovered notebook, she gauged that her late father appeared to have attended management school at British Rail in the London of the late 1950s. She was surprised that the revelation had only come lately, for how else could he have returned from London in the early 60s to mysteriously take up a senior management role in a local business? Does anyone ever really know their parents, or is the life they live before children essentially unknowable to their offspring? Dance-dresses, dinner-suits, amateur musicals, all-night dances at the Curragh Camp, Sunday morning expeditions to Borough market in the mysterious long-ago.

Assorted baby paraphernalia, which now seemed to her like exhibits from some strange folk museum she might once have visited.

A collection of golf trophies, her mother’s, for she herself was of the school that considered it a good walk spoiled. She blamed this on her mother rather ambitiously counting her in from the tender age of seven or so. She always wished for home and a book, not a seeming eternity trudging after a golf-cart and the incomprehensible chatter of her mother and friends. As a young woman, she had laughingly abandoned games halfway round the course, leaving her mother in the company of the unfortunate young man who was subsequently introduced in the clubhouse as 'A’s current boyfriend’. Her mother was right, of course, he was sent packing soon after. Worse than a fair-weather golfer, she was. In this she took after her father, who had once famously landed a hole-in-one, presumably much to the chagrin of his companions-at-arms. Perhaps he felt that once that was done, there were no more Troys to burn, and he could go back to his records and his books, his woodwork and his music.

Cochineal, vanilla, coffee flavouring. The baking gene had skipped a generation, to her daughter, the magpie.

Baby mittens, a single tiny shoe. She had no idea if they had been kept as mementoes, or with the intention of handing them on, though she might well have put them there herself. She thought a moment of how she and other industrious professional mothers –the stockbroker, the purchaser, the solicitor- with children of similar ages, had passed things on to one another: cots, clothes, buggies, toys. Some people have odd ideas of privilege, and what it entails. Always a relative concept. Slightly younger couples she knew appeared to think they had a monopoly on sustainability, though it always struck her as a particularly narrow, po-faced, and joyless version of the creed to which they aspired, with their knowingly distressed but ruinously expensive clothes. She could see no virtue in making one’s own jam, or baking, with an entire professional life to manage in addition to a family, though her mother had been expert at both. Maybe she did think like a man at times. But sharing things, passing them on, if they were made to last? Country girl to the last.

A flowered shoebox full of cards from her 40^th birthday party. It had been a big bash, in the glory-days of the Celtic Tiger. Sometimes she wondered if they had been personally responsible, people like her, being given to small madnesses like taking off to Dublin, pre-children, for sessions in the Shelbourne Bar, seventy miles away, on Friday evenings whenever they took a whim. Or house parties where people only drank champagne, in the late ‘90s. It sometimes puzzled her at the time how she found herself there, for she had started out a quiet, shy studious girl. There were cards from friends, family and professional acquaintances, many of whom they had socialised with, few who were coupled-up that she now spoke to at all. Such is the lot of divorcée and divorcé. People presume, perhaps, that you will devour their spouses whole, or give them notions of independence, not realising that the one spouse who led to your being divorced was probably quite enough to put you off for a lifetime after. There were caterers, gifts of champagne, the lot. The only dry Saturday after a summer of wet weekends. She remembered too that she had ordered sparkling red wine, and that the suppliers had sent white, to her great disappointment, but much too late to rectify, as they were in Dublin. Her best friend had told her she looked skinny, high praise indeed, which was the unintentional result of a week with a chest infection and a sick toddler in the run-up to the party. She was about to wear her customary black, but thought it made her look ill, so at the last minute she chose a sheer flesh-pink silk top and jeans, with an unlikely (for her) pair of satin sandals. Unlikely, because sartorially, she had always strayed on the blue-stockingish side. Looking back, even this late-breaking femininity in dress seemed at odds: maybe it was the result of motherhood, hormones, God knows. During the evening, her four-year-old son had thrown as many bottles of cleaning products as he could find out of the downstairs bathroom window, aiming sagely and presciently at the head of her bank-manager. It made her laugh, then and still. A younger friend was escorted home early by her much older husband, who cut in on a pas-de-deux with a Toilet Duck. The night, which by then was the morning, ended with her singing along to Janis Joplin, atop a raised flower-bed, wearing a rather excessive Mongolian lamb boa, ostensibly against the chill of a September dawn, her pink satin heels sinking backwards into the soft clay. Her brother’s camera jammed as he tried to capture the moment. She was glad of it. Some things are best just remembered. Or forgotten.

A sympathy card penned by the young librarian at the college library of the outreach campus where her mother studied for a degree in her 60s. She was awarded a diploma, and later, an honorary degree, weeks before her untimely death, their first graduate at degree level. It was horribly poignant; she herself was newly pregnant with her second child. Death has no respect for anything, not even new life. Then there was her stumble at the funeral: the reading was from Ecclesiastes ‘To every thing there is a season’. She loved it, had chosen it herself. She had not rehearsed, being a confident reader. The line ‘a time to be born, a time to die’ stopped her dead in her tracks, tears welling up, the pregnancy not yet announced publicly. Otherwise she coped, played the organ, typed the hymn sheets, took care to include prayers and readings in Irish, as her mother would have expected, though she left no instructions. She had no idea from whom she had inherited the stiff upper lip. It was a false friend, at any rate: you don’t get over things by ignoring them. Bad memories lurk, and reach out and pull you down unexpectedly unless you hunt them down in their hiding-places.

Later in the day, an entire sideboard drawer full of cards and letters, mostly from when she had lived in London. The one that struck her most was a postcard from a flatmate in Fulham, her landlord. It was written in the most perfect script, almost like print, sent from the south of France. She had all but forgotten him. He was, she now realised, one of the best photographers she had come across in more than half a lifetime, but worked in a dead-end clerical job at one of the biggest and most notorious London bureaucracies of the time, leaving his desk early every afternoon to go drinking with his workmates. He was small, almost no taller than her, prematurely bald, pudgy. A colleague who had moved in after her told her that Andrew had thought her ‘wonderful’. She wondered, at the rate he had been drinking, if he was even still alive now.

On the day that was in it, other objects floated to the surface as if by their own volition: sitting in plain view under the sideboard, perched on a box of her ex-husband’s CDs, the fruit of another recent excavation, was the book she had been reading the week she gave birth to her younger child: Stephen Hawking’s ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’, with no reference that she could discern to certain lady mystics with whom she had more recently become acquainted through the agency of another academic. Two roads converged in a wood, and she still did not know where she was going, she thought ruefully. These days she was more content to let the ebb and flow of life pull her along, but still paddled furiously and mostly invisibly below the surface.

The preceding week had also seen a slew of old photos posted on social media by her cousins, of her mother’s family as young men and women. They were a handsome family without doubt, and wore it with ease. There was a photo she had not seen before, with her mother as a witness at her older sister’s wedding, showing a startling resemblance to herself at the same age that she had not seen before, her mother’s face youthfully soft and apprehensive. She was used to the slightly older and more confident version in photos of the time, with cheekbones on which you could have balanced a china cup and saucer. The eldest sister was widely held in family lore to be the beauty, but now, to her eye, this beauty appeared to be of a time gone by, dark and high and severe. Her mother’s was more accessible, and as for the next sister, who rarely got a mention in despatches-how pretty she was, with her sharp, clever, face and her pointed chin! And the youngest, posed in a school team photo…well, she was the putative model, sent to Dublin at sixteen to a model agency, only to be hastily recalled when her mother heard that she was ‘going to cocktail parties with black men’. This always amused my mother, who felt that the fear of coloured gentlemen of dubious morals for once outweighed that of the demon drink. They were all beautiful, by general standards. And they had turned up in her timeline with no advance warning, taking their place in the parade of her life, it seemed.

She pondered on what it is that ties you to a place: was it people, memories, possessions, or plain old duty? The lie of the land itself, that old Irish call of dúchas, hardly to be understood, but to be heeded silently and without question? Perhaps more than anything, this was what drew her back unrelentingly, to the walks by the river, footsteps trodden and retrodden over the decades, since she first walked there as a child of three, on visits with her grandmother and aunt to the lock-keeper’s house a half-mile below the bridge. It was hardly friends that detained her, for none remained, all washed away in the recession that had preceded the current one, called by necessity and sometimes ambition to other places, other shores. Ending up here had never been part of her own plan, but she had ultimately been driven by duty, and the financial exigencies of others. The house perhaps, for it had grown into her, and she into it over the years, so that now when she was finally free to go, she felt most at home. She had been handed the keys of the kingdom, and when she looked about, the thought of now parting with familiar faces made her sad; who, though never close, had become the warp and weft of her everyday existence; the people who had known her from before she even knew herself, who knew also her family and their history, and whom little surprised, in all likelihood. Life in the country might move slowly, and with that comes a tolerance for people and situations than unfolds over decades or even generations, and a depth of knowing and understanding, with no need for forgiveness, that would no doubt surprise the superficially tolerant city petit bourgeoisie into which she had married, and lately unmarried. There was some comfort in that.

Lastly, an old floppy disc, subject penned on the side in her mother’s sprawling hand: archaeology.

Razzle-dazzle 'em....

Razzle-dazzle ‘em….

It is a demonstration of how far I’ve travelled in the last four years that my instant reaction to an article on academic writing is to write. Not a complete rebuttal, because as a designer, I don’t really come from that world, but have been required to inhabit the periphery at least. I have to confess I quite like it there.  As an architect, drawing - our tool for expression- has a specific purpose, which is to communicate, whether that involves the communication of a concept, a model of a complete building, or technical and construction information. If you fail to communicate with drawing as an architect, you’re on a hiding to nowhere. Being obliged to write an entire PhD has transformed this architect into a writer, and initially an extremely reluctant one, through painful adaptation, to the point that nowadays, some of you have to endure my latent hypergraphia (pedantic joke warning) on a regular basis. I write things down in order to better understand them, and that applies as much to my academic writing as to anything else. If I ever manage to make any sense of the last ten years or so of my life, there’s at least a novel in it. To those of you who would wish to write me into a novel: best get to know the story first. People’s stories are seldom what you imagine them to be, though that is half the fun in writing fiction. I suppose it rather depends on whether the intention is Tolstoy or Jilly Cooper. Please not Anita Brookner, for I would sooner die.

As an academic writer, I write from a position where my research is genuinely interdisciplinary, so that clarity and communication are critical to the reader. As a reader, I abhor the sort of academic writing which is wordy, self-consciously pedantic, designed (using the word very loosely, and largely incorrectly) to appeal to a very small group of people. In some disciplines, it is close to inevitable. I’m perhaps lucky then, that mine is design research. As it synthesises theory from a number of disciplines - environmental psychology, neuroscience, ICT, in addition to colour and aesthetic theory, I have had very little choice but to aim for clarity in order firstly, to draw out ideas, and secondly, to communicate. One of my examiners is an architect; the other researches systems optimization. If MyRoom ever becomes a reality, there will be collaboration from Applied Psychology, nano-technology, digital media, computer science, engineering….I can’t afford not to be understood. Often when I read guidelines on paper submission, there is an explicit requirement for clarity of expression for a readership from an acknowledged international and multidisciplinary audience. That the research falls into the general area of ‘Smart Design’ may not be coincidental. Perhaps there will be more of this as disciplines converge, and the need to communicate to a greater audience becomes more pressing. I don’t believe in using two words when one will do (unless it makes a sentence sing better), or a long word where a shorter one will suffice, unless of course it’s an aesthetically-pleasing long word. Perhaps I’m lucky in terms of where I landed academically. It could have been specialisation which came with an automatic requirement to murder the English language. But never make the mistake of thinking that academic writing does not serve a purpose: if the spoken work is powerful, and can bring an idea into being, the written word is ten times so. As you write, and especially if you are required to write at some length, ideas and conclusions emerge from what you are writing. Very rarely, and luckily, you read back, and think ‘Did I really write that?’, because it has taken on a life of its own while your attention was elsewhere.

I recently bought a copy of The Experience of God:  Being, Consciousness, Bliss, written by Yale academic David Bentley Hart.  While one might regard the topic as arcane or difficult to define, the writing is beautiful; a model of simplicity and clarity. I’m also at one –well, mostly- with George Orwell, writing in ‘Politics and the English Language’, and when I re-read my thesis having read that essay (with thanks to a certain academic for creating that last-minute panic; you know who you are), I found myself not so bad, though with a slight tendency to overuse of reflexive verbs. Minimalism, and the idea of elegance in design, are key concepts in my own thesis, so that it would have been resoundingly inappropriate to aim at anything other than clarity and simplicity. Sometimes “less is more”, and sometimes less is simply less. So having been architecturally educated in the minimalist canon, perhaps I was travelling from the other direction to begin with. Two roads converged in a wood?

While the New Yorker article makes the point about the necessity for academics to impress particular people, there is something a tiny bit sad about writing that sets out to do that, because it inevitably suffers, as a piece of writing, from the requirement to show off, which is a clear incitement to pedantry, which should really be a criminal offence.

My best academic writing anecdote is from an interdisciplinary ICT seminar where a young mathematician presented a paper on the algorithms he was working on. The audience was almost entirely composed of quite experienced academics. When he got the end, the chair, who was also the project PI, stood up and said “Are there any questions?”There was a ripple of laughter. “No? I didn’t think so’. Razzle dazzle ‘em…..

Another door opens

Bits and bobs......a poem from a very black day, now long past, it seems. As it's spring, it seemed a good time to post it. A waking dream, and a sketch. Come to think of it, there's a working title there.

*Editor's note on Poetry MyArse II: Hyperbole can be subtly deployed. I actually own more than one book of English poetry, my lover was not contemporaneous with my husband, etc. etc. ;-) Poetic licence, I do declare.

Time and Tide

October 7 2013

I walked out, in black like a mourner, my quotidian garb

To get the air, and fell to thinking as I walked, downriver with my thoughts

Not only of what was, but might have been

Like wave on wave yearning towards the highest water-mark

Of equinoctial tide, that night of a full moon, which shines one year in ten

And ever after the waves rush vainly in, but falling short

Ebbing down all the years, detritus of tarnished treasure left behind

Dreams unfulfilled, love lost, and burdens too heavy for the tide to carry more.

What are dreams but aspirations?

Sighs exhaled year on year to dying breath

Mine and yours intermingled, by troth.

I walked that tideline last at equinox, all lost in mist, where sand seemed to stretch 

Into infinity across the estuary

You were not there.

On this most grey of days, I walk again the rivercourse, my birthright

Perusing all that went before and yet may come.

For Winter is upon us, lit only by the solstice cipher of Christmas, and distant hope

Of Spring, remote but sure.

----------------------------

During wind and rain

On the long, dark, windy winter’s nights, she dreamed, still half-awake, that the house was a ship, its old timbers shifting; cracking and groaning as she rode the waves, high above the storm, in the safeness of her bed. The room was at the south-west end, the weather corner, and faced into the prevailing wind. That wind rattled the sash windows, and sometimes the entire bulk of the old house seemed to shift. The noise woke her on such nights- the howl and shush of the wind, and the many noises of the house itself- but she never cared, knowing she floated in the warmth of the big bed, far above the turmoil. When she had been younger, in the early days of a failed marriage, with the woes of the world upon her, she used often wake with a start, convinced that the gale outside might bring down the entire gable chimney, mentally calculating if a fall from that height would deposit the masonry right onto the bed, which occupied the centre of the wall facing the chimney breast. She could never quite calculate, half-asleep, so she never quite slept.

Somewhere  along the line, she had outgrown such imaginary concerns. When had she stopped worrying? When he no longer lived there? When finally, after many years, she secured a divorce, and the house was finally hers, though it had been her parents’ before the marriage, her childhood home, the house she was brought up in? Was it, rather more mundanely, when she had had the chimney repaired, so that chunks of rotten brickwork no longer crashed down into the hearth during nights of wind and rain. Why only at night? Or was it because she was only there to hear it fall at night? And was the beast within the walls, rather than without, all that time?

There had been many such nights in recent weeks, when one storm followed another, at the height of the solar cycle. She often woke and listened abstractedly, but as much as the sound of the wind disturbed her slumbers, the sound of the falling rain soothed her. Only this last night gone had she imagined the superstructure of the house breaking completely free from its foundations, and sailing away westwards up the street, cresting the great swell of the rising high street, on the beginning of a cross-country journey.

Perhaps it was like the long-ago resolution of the teeth dream, supposedly one of those archetypal dreams. She had dreamt it as a recurring nightmare, in her late teens. Then, in her twenties, having dreamt again the pain of a blow to the mouth, the sweet-salt taste of blood, the horror of spitting shattered enamel and bone, the nightmare of disfigurement, a dream-voice spoke: 'You know you can have implants?', and that was the end of that.

For many years, she had felt the house to be a veritable prison: psychological, financial, even the physical embodiment of an abusive relationship, of unwanted family ties, of remoteness and social isolation. She could not have, for the longest time in actual terms, move away, whether or not she wished to. It was not her choice while it was not her house. And now all that was gone: the prison bars had melted away, so much so  the that the old house had blown, that week, off its very moorings, and sailed away into the night, while she stood at the helm, sure at last of her seaworthiness.

--------------------------

So good they named it twice..... (a sketch)

The town occupies a position at the top of the estuary, at the point where the longest river on the island began the final stage of it journey down to the sea.  In bygone times, it was built at a strategic point, controlling movement further upriver, and well-placed to ward off incursions from the larger kingdom on the far bank. It was a gateway to the rest of the island, a stepping-stone to a conquest. The sea-coast of the hinterland was unguarded, and that was how they had sneaked in, travelling cross-country to this settlement.

The small houses of the Irishtown clung to the side of the steep hill that tumbled down to the water’s edge, but the main street was lined with the large houses of prosperous merchants of other days, and spoke of lost glories and better times. Not much more than half-a-century before, the town had ceded its importance to the new deepwater port a few miles downstream, and on the opposite bank, in enemy territory. The old enmity was played out these days in hurling matches, and county planning, where every provincial town came to boast at least one unneeded mega-shopping complex. That tide had turned now too, leaving empty hulks of unwanted developments scattered like so many shipwrecks, and in the case of the old town here, with its heart hollowed out by careless development on the periphery, so that the grand plaster and timberwork of the grand old houses rotted and crumbled for want of money to repair, and tenants to rent. For much of the town was still owned by absentee landlords, an anachronism these days for most of the country, but not here, in the oldest stronghold of the interloper. For that is how many of the townspeople still saw them, so many centuries later, though history records that they came to be “more Irish than the Irish themselves” and few souls in an island nation can boast other than that they came here from somewhere else.

The steep hills produced a town which to the visitor was full of charm: tiny artisan houses in terraces, narrow winding streets, dotted with old churches, where the remains of the old city wall dividing interloper from native still materialised here and there. It was best navigated on foot, as the steepness of the gradient meant that roads often ended in a cul-de-sac. In the last generation the town had been gifted with a one-way system that provided much merriment to the locals, arising from the frustration of visitors, depending on the temperament of the driver or the urgency of the appointment. From the top of the town, the view of the river was indeed lovely, if one could ignore the brooding behemoth presence of the abandoned fertiliser factory on the western bank.