Memory

The butcher bird flew on to the fence, and watched us as we pulled out weeds. The roses didn't seem to care much about the riff-raff that surrounded them, the cobbler's pegs and sticky milk plants and thistley things. A moth appeared, fluttering on the surface of some newly exposed soil, and the butcher bird swooped for the morsel. Our friend Cameron also watched us, commenting regularly on how he must get down into the garden sometime, but not right now. His memory is unravelling, leaving sentences all over the earth in front of us, released again and again because Cameron can no longer remember what he's just said. We all sigh. The butcher bird cocks his head.

The dream

The dream involved someone wrapping their arms around me from behind. I did not know who the person was, or why they were hugging me, or if their intent was good or evil. Usually this sort of dream would involve me never finding out the identity of the person. But then usually the dream, which I refer to as an anxiety dream, features a wall and I would be walking along beside the wall until I reached the corner. Around the corner was something foreboding, something bad, but I never knew exactly what, and I could never see it. No matter how far around the corner I looked, the fearful thing remained just out of sight. This time, I looked around and saw the person who had grabbed my torso, and it was a female, with her eyes closed, but she was no one I knew. What was different was the fact that I could see her face, and she was unthreatening. There was no fear.

The cello

The cello was 274 years old. I had never held anything that had lived that long. The sound that came when its guardian played was robust, but I couldn't help thinking how easily the object could be damaged. If it was damaged, though, the music itself would not be, for it could be played, and made to live again, from another instrument. Maybe it would not be so venerable, but the music would still come. It's not the same for humans. When the body is done and gone, the music of that person is gone also; children and work may be left behind as memories, but no new tunes are created ever again.

For really big mistakes

He gave me a hot pink eraser, a giant one, with the words 'for really big mistakes' printed on it. Good, I thought, this is appropriate. Now I can go back and rub out all of those ridiculous things I said to various people over the last four decades, and say what I should have said. All those embarrassing goofs in public, all the insensitive comments, and even the bad fashion days, bad hair days, and bad days. The whole lot, gone! One big pink eraser applied; badness gone! Could I do it with bigger things? Parents? Lovers? Friends? Lend me your past, I shall erase it!

When he read

When he read a book, the words swam. He'd read and re-read a paragraph, but the meaning would elude him. He'd read each word, examining it and not moving to the next one before he'd thought yes, I understand what that word means. But by the end of the sentence, the combination of word-meanings had slid away, and there was no sentence-meaning in its place. It was a blur, a blank, a smear of text without hope of comprehension. He went on, saying to himself that the meaning would come, he just had to swim through the words to find it.

The photographs

The photographs I dug up that time were old, black and white, small size, eaten at the edges some of them, blurred or faded, and had writing on the back. But not all of them had writing on the back, and that was frustrating. There were no names, but some people were identified as 'mother', 'father', 'uncle', and so forth. Places were always identified, which was helpful, except for the fact that I had no idea where these places were. St Michael's Mount? I made a note to look it up, as well as all the other names. 

Review of Architectures of Possibility by Lance Olsen with Trevor Hodge

Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing is not your average book about writing, which may be suggested by its title. Lance Olsen is interested in creative writing as a ‘series of choices’, whereby to ‘write one way rather than another is to convey, not simply an aesthetics, but a course of thinking, a course of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another’ (13). He’s not interested in the ‘Balzacian mode’ of writing, a term introduced by Alain Robbe-Grillet to refer to the works of nineteenth century authors like Honoré de Balzac who preferenced realism, here defined as a ‘genre of averages’ (11). Rather it is writing ‘as a possibility space where everything can and should be considered, attempted, and troubled’ (13).

Review continued at M/C Reviews.