a fresh start
by uzwi
A draught is banging the door between the rooms. Frost is melting off the roof. The central heating has broken down again, in deep mimicry of the economy. I wonder if I can get that into the new book, if what I’m working on is a new book. I read an interview with Ralph Fiennes. He’s talking about moving Coriolanus “to the modern-day Balkans”, wherever he conceives that anti-sublime to be (& to what purpose), but I’m more interested in the way the interviewer locates him: at a “non-place” somewhere in east London, the interview begins, somewhere satnav can’t reach. I blow into my fingers & smell soap. I feel as if I’d like to be in a location satnav can’t reach. Not an edgeland–though I’m re-reading Richard Mabey just now–just somewhere visible on the map but not on the ground. We think of ghosts as haunting places. What if places can haunt places ? I bet they can. I wonder if I can get that into the possible new book, too. Any excuse to open the file & have a look at the shiny incompleteness of it.
Can places haunt places? Diamonds haunt diamonds, so quantum diffraction could surely make it happen at an even greater magnitude:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21235-entangled-diamonds-blur-quantumclassical-divide.html
How does one exorcise a place from a place? The mind boggles…
Places haunting places and places become non-places — thinking of small-town South Africa, that interregnum between borrowed or ascribed identities.
Is England haunting itself?
Or is it just Meryl Streep filming the sequel?
More developments if I can bring myself to look out the window.
Hi Martin. England is haunting itself as EngCo.com, a fast-growing operation based on high interest short term lending to old people who can’t pay their power bills. Meryl Streep’s Cameron is expected to be as lifelike as her Thatcher: that is, somewhat more lifelike than the original.
Hi Louisey, I feel as if we all live in that interregnum now.
I didn’t realize that the ungeography of my experience had a name—it seems an accurate way to describe the inexactitude of my haunting
“…shiny incompleteness…” I am going to hijack this phrase and force it into my head every time I stare at an ‘open file’. Much better than what I usually do: making a growl in the back of my throat that sounds like a body dragged over asphalt.