Home or alone

In the same week that I moved from one flat to another, and was, for no reason at all and for every reason possible, crippled by the blues, I read two essays and one poem. All three seemed connected in that they each captured a slightly different fragment of what I was feeling. Homesick, sort of, missing my family, yes, January blues, definitely. I think I was also finally mourning an end to a part of my life I'll probably never return to: meandering through the months at home with only vague ideas about growing up and adult life.

Adult life. I'm doing this now. I've bought my ticket. I'm on the road to adulthood whether I like it or not. I can go home and have Mum cook my dinner and make my bed and I can sit on the sofa and pretend that the journey is over and I've returned. I know, though, that the journey doesn't end. Like our old video player, the pause button will unpause itself after a bit. The idea of staying at home, of committing to nothing, of burying my head in the sand, ostrich-like, reminds me of that oft-tumblr'd F Scott Fitzgerald quote: 'I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone'. I don't want to leave home, but I don't want to be gone.

Maybe this is why the words of James Wood in his essay 'On Not Going Home' were comforting, his talk of:

'the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.'

My first week or so in the new flat was very quiet. I was in the centre of the capital yet I hardly saw a soul. My flatmate and friends were still on their Christmas breaks. The longest conversations I had were with baristas and shop assistants. I had unwritten essays to cobble together and every day I walked from flat to supermarket to coffee shop to library. I was lonely. Those first few nights I would stand at the window and watch the city: the outlines of buildings, the columns of yellow squares blinking on and off, the red tail lights disappearing round corners, the odd smudgy black figure slipping past. For the first time ever I felt no love for it. Just a cold, empty feeling, the emotional equivalent of sirens fading into the distance or headlights glancing round an dark empty room. One evening I downloaded a poetry app onto my ipad, and quite by chance, the poem recommended was Amy Lowell's 'A London Thoroughfare, 2am'. It expressed that cold feeling better than I ever could.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clean and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city;
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

Then Eva Wiseman tweeted a link to a recent piece by Durga Chew-Bose, 'Since Living Alone'. Beautifully written in itself, and even more beautiful to me for articulating the things I really needed to hear, for turning my ear to a more positive idea of loneliness.  

'In those moments,' Durga writes, 'the whiplash of loneliness can impose temporary amnesia. How did I end up here? Had I lectured myself into some smug and quarantined state of solitude? Was living alone analogous to the emotional moat I construct around myself whenever I listen to one song on repeat, again and again? No, not exactly.'

Because (and here I think of my mum again, and how she always tells me that the lows are just as important as the highs) whilst these one-way-plane-ride moments of loneliness and newness are temporarily terrifying, they're kind of good for me too. 'Staying put in my new place all to my own was akin to the emotional clarity yielded from those first few sips of red wine, or from riding the subway after seeing a movie'. When I resurface in the fleshy, noisy, human world of people and lectures and coffee trips and pubs and parties, my skin feels that little bit tougher. I think Durga might be right: 'living alone ... is a form of self-portraiture, of retracing the same lines over and over - of becoming.'


(It's funny how sometimes, unplanned, the things you read link themselves together, hold their hands out to whatever's preoccupying you at the time. It's nice.)

____

On Not Going Home by James Wood: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/james-wood/on-not-going-home
A London Thoroughfare, 2am by Amy Lowell: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/london-thoroughfare-2-am
Since Living Alone by Durga Chew-Bose: http://thehairpin.com/2015/01/since-living-alone

Gates of Eden

This time last year I was submerged in university applications (for the third time); an endless tide of form-filling and hoop-jumping. Somehow I ended up at my first choice. An alternative destination was Manchester, to read English and American Studies. It was tempting, particularly because as part of the application process I was asked to analyse Dylan lyrics. In the end I stayed in London but writing about Gates of Eden was the best hoop I’ve ever been asked to jump through.

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull it glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides

With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden

[…]

The kingdoms of experience
In the precious winds they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got

And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the gates of Eden

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign

Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden

(apologies for the raw, unedited, 4-years-out-of-education state of this:)

'Gates of Eden': a title full of hope and promise of paradise. However dark imagery pervades this song, from the candle’s glow ‘waxed in black’ to the references to a ‘foreign sun’, ‘strangers’ and ‘trials’.  Lines end with verbs such as ‘twists’ and ‘glides’, creating an almost spiky rhythm; rather than a dreamlike flow of ideas the song jumps from one dark psychological landscape to another. Elements of the natural world are personified in the first and second verses; the ‘four-legged forest clouds’ and the sun which ‘squints’ introduce the presence of a greater being, judging the sinful behaviour of the real world.

The tone throughout is mocking and pessimistic. The ellipsis at the end of the first verse indicates Dylan’s belief that the ‘trees of Eden’ do not really exist, or are at least inaccessible. As the verses progress Dylan moves from omnipresence to first person narration – ‘at times I think there are no words’ - showing how personal the subject of the song is to him. Each verse represents an ideal associated with Eden - truth, freedom, love – and Dylan is hurt by the realisation that these ideals are unobtainable. His emotion is revealed through the cynical delivery of his words:  ‘shovel[ing]’ dreams into the metaphor of a ‘ditch’ in the last verse.

Each verse ends with a reference to ‘Eden’, reinforcing the idea of a perfect world. Dylan reminds us this world is unattainable, but that we should remember this or risk becoming complacent, thus contributing to the decaying reality we are striving to escape from. Perhaps this is Dylan’s comment on the failure of the American dream, and it is not Eden which is unreal but the rest of the world, distorted by the devil-like ‘cowboy angel’.

low fi images of last year's December skies

Geffrye Museum, London

The Geffrye Museum is one of those quiet, cultural, word-of-mouth London finds. Inside a row of beautiful eighteenth century almshouses we walked through British domestic history, from the 1630s to the 1990s, rooms laid out in the style of their period, like magnified dolls houses.

I've always been nosy about people, and by extension the homes they inhabit. Studying the facades of houses I passed on the walk to school, exploring friends' homes, lingering in Ikea showrooms. Treehouses, forts, wendy houses. Changing Rooms, Grand Designs, The Sims. Every time we moved house I was in my element, tagging along to every viewing, studying floor plans for hours, drawing up my own. The thrill of a hidden garden flat, or an attic bedroom, or a cellar.

I read houses like books. I want to know everything they say about their occupants. At night sometimes I lie awake constructing dream houses in my mind, but they're constantly in motion, always shifting shape and form.

The Geffrye, then. Paradise for a house-obsessive like me, but attractive to anybody with an interest in how humans have lived and organised their lives, from all kinds of perspectives - historical, artistic, architectural, sociopolitical, geographical. The period rooms are fascinating, and at Christmas they're even decked out in seasonal decorations of their respective decades. There's a reading room, with bookshelves and windows looking out across the gardens. Could've spent all day there. I'll be back.