A new blog collecting prose poetry here.
1.
We
pass through innumerable fleeting and unreal places in
the course of a lifetime of dreaming. I am haunted by a handful of
these locations. Their particular impression, and the longing for
them, returns to me from time to time. In the daylight hours, I
think of the impossibility of ever seeing them again. In rare
moments of lucid dreaming, I wonder if they have been preserved
intact, so that I might revisit them, but I don't believe that I have
ever done so successfully.
The
attraction of these places is difficult to convey. In the context of
the dreams themselves, they are unexpected discoveries, because they
are adjacent to real places to which I am extremely familiar. I will
be walking in the countryside near the house where I grew up, or in
the small town where I went to school, and suddenly discover a place
whose existence I had no prior inkling of. That was, I supose, the
primary source of their fascination: that the small and well-trodden
everyday world should reveal an unseen aspect of itself, an
impossible hidden dimension. Beyond that, the places themselves were
entirely undistinguished and ordinary; but the unlikelihood of their
existence, and the novelty of their discovery, infuses them with an
air of revelatory beauty, and fills me with a rare and indefinable
sense of contentment.
Then, of
course, I wake up, and the mystery of the anomalous location
evaporates. By day, the world is fixed and intransient, like the
unwinding of an implacable destiny; in dreams, it becomes playful and
miraculous, like a fleeting respite. A handful of those evanescent,
imaginary places have remained with me, retaining their melancholic
spell over the course of many years. The details have dimmed over
time, but the impression retains its haunting efficacy, its firm
placement on a map of interior geography. At once opaque and
crystalline, as maddeningly indefinite and undeniable as all our truest
apprehensions of the world, those places which never existed
sometimes show the greatest tenacity in refusing to pass away.
2.
Closely
related to the nostalgic longing for places which never existed is
that for places which once existed, but now are gone. These, too,
are often meagre and unremarkable in themselves, but have acquired an
ineffable glamour owing to their presence in our childhood. Time,
like the spatial world, assumes a fixed form wherein the way forward
is increasingly paved with the hard gravel of paths already travelled;
but the way back is barred by an insurmountable barrier. So the
places which remain on the other side assume all the poignancy of the
loss of our pristine and unjaded childhood senses.
I
remember a little shop on the main street whose window was pressed
with the packaging of various cheap toys and trinkets. I stood many
times with my mother, gazing at the toys, and imagining the interior
of the store as a dark, almost solemn place, presided over by a quiet
but kindly old woman who moved only at the behest of pointing
children's fingers. I also recall with peculiar fascination an
arcade on that street. It was an airless and foreboding concrete
corridor with no adorments to indicate its function. Stepping into
it felt like going underground, and even then, out of time. I
remember its barbers, where I sat with my father and my brother. We
listened to the radio, and watched the men working and chatting
tersely with tired, distant faces. My eyes always drifted over to a
painting on the wall - Emile Renouf's picture of a little girl rowing
a boat with an old fisherman - and instantly I felt the salt-water in
my nostrils, the icy chill of sea wind, and the kindly, wordless
warmth of the fisherman. Next to the barbers, there was a bookshop,
and the only the thing that stirred my imagination in the arcade –
a little table in the centre of the store where brittle, faded old
comic books were laid out like drying flotsam.
The loss
of places has a peculiar poignancy, which sometimes pierces our
hearts in a way that the loss of people does not. People become so
familiar to us, so ingrained in our minds in all their complexity,
that it sometimes feels as though we never really lose them. They
are gone, and yet they are there, composed of the same insubstantial material by
which we carry the sense of ourselves from one day to the next. But
certain places that we remember, old meadows and woodlands buried
under concrete, shops enveloped with the musk of vanished days, they
are gone forever. All that remain are their impressions, their
precious haunted outlines.
3.
In their
youth, people exist primarily in the present moment, and if their
minds should wander, it is always to the future that their thoughts
hurtle. As they get older, the present loses its intensity, the
future becomes an object of uncertainty and dread, and it is to the
past that their daydreams increasingly tend. The past becomes imbued
with the magical embellishments of art and the hypnotic cadence of
music; it acquires the sweet, irresistible frustration of
contemplating an unattainable, impossible beauty. There is,
however, a different kind of nostalgia which can afflict people at
any age. This is perhaps not nostalgia properly speaking at all; it
is the feeling of never being quite native to the soil of one's own
time, of being an exile from some familiar clime irrevocably lost to
memory's raccous swells and slowly receding tide.
For this
type of person, the present has a kind of indistinctness, a lack of
elegance and form, even a fundamental emptiness, in comparison to
some prior era. For many of these temporal exiles, there is a
specific period which they have adopted as their distant and
longed-for homeland. For others, all past times alike exercize a
narcotic thrall over their imaginations; there is nothing so diminished
and colourless as the present instant, and nothing so lustrous and
abundant as the irretrievable totality of a past time, evanescent and
eternally vanquished.
Some
particular periods, just as some individuals, are subject to this
foolish and perverse proclivity for wallowing in the past, and ours is
such a time. We wander in our dreams through places that once were,
and now are gone, and places that never were, seeking some sense of
ourselves which cannot be found in our febrile, insubstantial and eternally
vanishing present.