I don’t think reading Dark Places is helping really

Today I am tired, because last night after we got home from the swim and the meal, I watched Survivor (totally sucked in by the Russell narrative and hoping he doesn’t get voted off, like, for ages), then, when I should have gone to bed, I started ranting at the mister about things which I dare not mention, that dare not mention thing being one of the problems really.

Or, to put it more succinctly (which I’m sure the mister wishes I had done last night): you don’t have to be stuck in a lift to be feeling claustrophobic.

It’s true, I need to get out more

A while ago in internet terms, there was a post on Spike, the Meanjin blog about the site forgotten bookmarks, which I promptly visited. I liked it a lot. It’s the kind of blog that I love, feeding as it does, the social eavesdropper, collector, lover of books, librarian and general internet addict in me.

But even as I loved it, I found myself feeling unsettled by the postcard highlighted and transcribed on Spike. The one that was found in The Remains of the Day. I tried to write a comment on Spike at the time, but couldn’t get the words quite right so deleted it (as I so often do, I’m crap at commenting, I really am).

The discomfort I felt, however, kept following me. I would say it haunted me. I even dreamt about it one night. My discomfort had nothing at all to do with the general idea of putting these treasures on the internet. Like I say, I love the site. My discomfort was to do specifically with that letter.

Having, as I do, time on my hands to engage in emotional over-analysis, I have been doing some thinking about why I have been so affected by this particular postcard.

Probably, I’m more sensitive about things and artefacts and mementos than I might previously have been. Having, within the space of twelve months, co-ordinated the cleaning out of my grandfather’s house when he moved into aged accommodation; my family home after my father died; and my own house when we moved over here, has left me…well, let’s just leave it at sensitive for now.

In the last six months, I’ve been writing a bit about how it has been, what it means to deal with so many things, things that quickly translate into memories and artefacts and mementos. I’ve been fiddling it all into essays which will hopefully weave themselves into a book. Through that, I’ve been doing, as I’ve said, a lot of thinking about the rights and wrongs, the shoulds and the shouldn’ts, the oughts and the ought nots. The ethics of it all. Topped off with some postgraduate research into ethics and life writing. So, that’s affected (affecting) my thinking too. While the thinks that I’ve thought about life writing don’t automatically transfer to this situation, some of those thinks do.

Now in the end, I did leave a comment on the Spike blog, to which Jessica replied that I have raised an interesting point about privacy and ethics. I guess my comment over there does seem to be specifically about privacy, but actually, my discomfort goes deeper than simple privacy. It is more to do with the rights we do or don’t have to tell other people’s stories. Certainly, privacy is an aspect of this, but it is only one aspect.

Life writing cannot avoid the telling of other people’s stories to a greater or lesser extent. Each writer will need to decide whose stories, and how much of those stories, they are allowed to tell, and that decision will be affected by all sorts of factors (journals and books and essays filled with such factors if you are interested, let me know, I can point you at some good places to get started).

So it is with this postcard. Do we have a right to this postcard, its contents and the story it tells? My simple, general answer would be that yes, as a society we do have a right to such things and my simplest arguments in favour would be that we are all enriched, we all learn from them, there is more good than harm generally done.

But this particular postcard? Why is this troubling me?

One crucial issue is, I think, the time. It is dated 00. That’s 2000, barely ten years ago. In internet years, ten is a lifetime, but in stories of loves lost and found, ten years might not be much time at all. If I were a player in that story, if I were him or her, or if I were the person now wearing that ring, I wonder what I would think if I came upon that postcard on the internet?

And then I started thinking not so much, ‘What if that were me?’, but, ‘What if I were the custodian of that letter?’

If I had come across this letter in my father’s things, would I share it with the world? Possibly – probably – I would share it with my closest friends, but not with the internet. So if I can think of circumstances under which I might not share it, then wouldn’t they stand for a stranger too? Don’t we owe more benefit of the doubt to a stranger simply because we have even less chance of knowing their ins and outs?

All of these are interesting questions, but they are intellectual, theoretical questions and don’t explain what it is that is specifically bothering me. Why did I dream about that postcard? Why do I care that much about its publication?

It took me a while, but I finally worked it out. The real reason this particular letter is gnawing at me is because when you are left with someone’s things, you could quite easily become the custodian of such a letter.

You could easily become the custodian, but not even know.

So when I look at that postcard, I’m not thinking of all the boxes that I bundled up in my grandfather’s and father’s houses and took to my own. But of all the boxes I bundled up and gave away.

Wednesday

I get this email from this mister, and it’s the best email he’s ever written me, and I email back and say, ‘I hate to make hay from your misery, but can I blog that?’ To which there has, so far, been no reply.

But I suspect that’s only because he’s sleeping. Stay tuned for a guest post from the mister.

Not sure what to read next

I was trying to think, while I was reading Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, what it was that kept taking me back to the years (wonderful years) that I spent in New Zealand.

The Piano connection was easy. Look at the cover. The sand is not black, but in so many other ways it evokes The Piano to me. (Coincidentally, the first movie that my father and I sat through together after my mother died).

But there was something else, and everytime I picked the book up, this feeling sat there with me, but I couldn’t pinpoint where this feeling came from. Until finally, just this morning as I finished the book, the connection clicked. Heavenly Creatures of course.

And now I have a hankering to see that film again. I know in a general sense what it is that keeps me thinking about this book and then that film and then this book again. The friendship between two women, two girls, a girl and a woman. But I must see the film again before I comment too much. Though goodness knows when that might be, not sure the Abu Dhabi Virgin Megastore stocks such things.

I lost myself in Remarkable Creatures in so many ways. It reminds me that I should have told you about my visit to Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicans where the librarian showed us all sorts of treasures and we went to the library and I just breathed in those books, and there was a first edition of Darwin. I should write more of that day and I shall.

Anyway, my copy of Remarkable Creatures is filled with marginalia and passages with asterisks, but none so asterisked as this, Elizabeth Philpot’s solitary walk ‘along Great Russell Street past the British Museum’:

While I did so often enough in Lyme, I had never actually walked down a London street alone; I had always been with my sisters or brother or friends or a servant. In Lyme there was less concern over such conventions, but here a lady of my station was expected to be accompanied. I found myself being stared at by men and women alike, as the odd one out. Suddenly I felt exposed, the air around me cold and still and empty, as if I were walking with my eyes shut and might bump into something.

Because just two weeks ago, I walked that very stretch of road and I remember that as I walked my brain felt refreshed, my body liberated for the very reason, that I have, just recently, felt the way that she describes.

It’s still hot and humid, maybe that’s why I’m not thinking clearly

One thing I am working on at the moment is a series of essays on such fascinating subects as me and the things that I think while I’m busy being me (Oh, so you mean you’re writing a blog? No, I do not mean that, please shut up brain and let me write).

Partly because of that, and partly because of other reasons, I have been reading a lot of memoir and autobiography. I’ve always loved that kind of writing, that kind of book (Do you think maybe that’s why you like blogging so much? Look, I don’t know who you are, but please do shut up and let me get on with saying whatever it is I’m about to say).

Last year, I started a short course in ethics, and did lots of research and writing about ethics and life writing. I find this an endlessly fascinating area to explore, particularly because I think there are almost as many answers as there are writers. More answers than that even, because each person who reads that writer creates another answer and so on. I think that if I’d done as my teachers had suggested and paid (why do I want to write payed?) more attention to that statistics stuff in Maths I that I would be better equipped to explain to you how many answers I think there are in the questions of ethics and life writing and so forth. Though of course, I do think there are some broad and general conclusions about how we should or should not approach life writing.

One specific area I have been looking at while I’ve been doing that research is performance comedy as life writing. I was messing around with that research a bit more at the end of last week, which led me, by various circuitous paths to be comparing Craig Sherborne’s Muck with Judith Lucy’s The Lucy Family Alphabet. No, comparing isn’t the right word, but looking at them in the context of each other and in the context of the other forms that each uses and has used to say the same and different things.

This led me to wonder once again about which form/platform/format I should use for saying what it is I want to say. You see, some of it is firmly rooted in the essays, some of it is sneaking into my fiction, and some of it is leaking into my show as I rewrite and tweak it for possible production in Adelaide.

So now I’m back where I so often seem to be. In a pickle, and I find pickles paralysing, and it’s no coincidence that we now have a nicely vacuumed floor and probably by tonight I’ll have the kitchen sorted.

(So, look, I don’t mean to bother, but this ‘right form’ you’re looking for, it wouldn’t be blogging, would it? Oh, don’t bother me now, I’ve got vacuuming to do).