Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: Read‎ (2130)

And there's a terrific bit, after the threat from the Nazi artist, when it occurs to Lara that she exists in this old lady's mind alongside the one

And there's a terrific bit, after the threat from the Nazi artist, when it occurs to Lara that she exists in this old lady's mind alongside the one-armed pianist and that terrible Stephanie woman, and hundreds of other people who Lara knows nothing about, most of them dead, and then it hits her that of course it's the same for everyone - we have no idea who we're living alongside in the minds of the people were met. We're keeping strange company, every one of us. This isn't the only world we live in, the one that's around us, the one we see. We're characters in hundreds of different worlds. All of us.

If you talk to Viv, she'll probably give her theory an airing. That huge row with Lily, the screaming match, Viv thought it might have been about Curtis and Karolina. Or Curtis and someone else. Most likely Karolina. Perhaps Katia was laying into Curtis and Lily wasn't having any of it. Standing by her man. Has to be pointed out that Viv didn't much care for Karolina. And Curtis had broken up Katia's first family, don't forget. Made her father miserable for years. So Viv put two and two together and made five. She has more of an imagination than me. On the subject of Karolina, I've said all I have to say, I think.

..because you can't see the back of your own head. You think because you're you, you've got access that other people don't, because they're on the outside and you're on the inside. But on the inside it can be darker than outside. And you're too close to what you're looking at. Like having your nose right up against a picture. You can't really see it.

Portrait #68
In May

This is the portrait of a day in May. It is the portrait of a day that was close to exactly two months after the day that was fo

Portrait #68
In May

This is the portrait of a day in May. It is the portrait of a day that was close to exactly two months after the day that was for celebrating women. The women's day had been the one when the almost daughter had found Oksana in the corridor and upside down on the chair. It had been only two months, close to exactly, but the two months had been broad with the outdoor gymnasium, the stationary bicycle, the forest, the graves, the dirty sofa and the handcuffs, the haunted site and the silhouettes with chalk, and the fences. And the painting, and coloured jewels and beads, and paper bags and questions to take with the vegetables. This is the portrait of the almost daughter waking and feeling upside down. She was upside down and not in a chair but in her bed, and she knew that she would never be not upside down and positioned the old way ever again.

This is the portrait of who she used to be. She was a daughter - or rather she was almost a daughter because that was just the way things were - and she had always known what kind of cursed place she lived in, to a lesser or greater extent at different times. She knew broadly, for instance, that her own mother's grandmother had been sent to the region from a better, cleaner city, in the west of the country and years ago. This was where the story ended: this great-grandmother was dead now and had always been dead, thick in the layers of mothers and past things. She had always been dead but did have something to do with the other woman who lived alone and had no family to visit her on weekends, so that the almost daughter's family came instead.

It's the gratitude that comes from the knowledge that, here I am, walking around with a tiny piece of Congo in my hand, as if it could make up for

It's the gratitude that comes from the knowledge that, here I am, walking around with a tiny piece of Congo in my hand, as if it could make up for all the Englishness I loathe. Here I am with my mobile phone calling you to tell you that I've just been eating wild blackberries the size of plums beside the Kingsmill factory ..... that the dog just caught a young, violet pigeon and l'd had to finish it off with my own hands in front of a male cyclist who seemed unfamiliar with death ...... that I'm not sure for how much longer I can continue to avoid flying because I'm missing certain people so much my heart aches, that I'm sorry I got cross about the ladder to the attic and, yes, you're right, it doesn't matter anyway, that this is just a message to remind you to rub some of that Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream my mother gave us for the dog's paws into your elbow

They cannot admit to themselves their hatred of children, for that would amount to confessing a hatred of life. But this is exactly what they do hate, the exuberance and uncompromised delight of the wobbling baby, the toddler circling in gleeful triumph around the listless, ironic adults, who sit decomposing on the sofa.

When we enter this state of becoming a child, of course, how can we not meet again our own childhood coming towards us, how can we not have it again, the gift of our own childhood too, from the child we play with, the child who speaks to us.

That was ages ago, six months at least or perhaps more. I am losing track. There is so little to hold on to at the centre and so many tangled threa

That was ages ago, six months at least or perhaps more. I am losing track. There is so little to hold on to at the centre and so many tangled threads stretching out in all directions. I follow one thread and it breaks. I follow another and it leads into a precarious landscape where there are no instructions, no signposts. I make contact with strangers. I try to be polite and hope they will like me enough to answer my questions.

I think John Craske had untreated diabetes, I say. 'Could you describe what it would have been like for a very poor person to suffer from that condition in the 1920s and 1930s, before the development of insulin. He might also have had a benign brain tumour, but I suppose that's outside your field.'

John Craske lived very close to Roughton Heath where Albert Einstein was staying in a wooden hut in September 1933, I say, and then I realise I don't quite know how to continue with this line of enquiry.
I know it has nothing to do with the man I am writing about, or at least only indirectly, I say to the circus woman I met by chance in Great Yarmouth, but have you still got your grandfather's diary entries, from when he put the Elephant Man on show in London?'

I suppose the trick is to trust the process and to not mind when you reach a cul-de-sac of one sort or another and to not get in the way when things seem to be going well, even though you don't know where they are heading.

I kept seeing it in terms of an embroidered tapestry and that made il possible for me to jump to different sections and fill them in, before returning to the central line of my story. I had written the three chapters on einstein quite early on; they stood together as a little group and I toned them from place to place, looking for where they might best fit.

‘So what are you writing about, love, in your book?’ Edie said. ‘I’m writing about my early life mainly–teens and twenties. That and my mother, you

‘So what are you writing about, love, in your book?’ Edie said. ‘I’m writing about my early life mainly–teens and twenties. That and my mother, you know. It’s really since she died,’ I said, ‘and going through all her stuff . . .’ ‘Oh, that’s so touching,’ she said, ‘it must bring memories flooding back.’ ‘Yes and no,’ I said, not ready to go into it. ‘She sounds such a remarkable person.’ ‘She really was,’ I said. ‘I wonder how much you actually remember, from so long ago,’ Edie said. ‘David’s got an amazing memory,’ said Richard, ‘as you know.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about all this. The teenage stuff is more like writing a novel. I remember places, and experiences, very clearly, but they’re stills, you know, rather than clips. Or GIFs perhaps, sometimes–a head turns, a hand comes down, but you never see what comes next, it just does it again. Besides that, of course, there’s anecdotes, things I’ve been told, that I know I did, even if I can’t really remember them. And no one recalls more than a few words anyone actually said fifty years ago. You just have to make that up.’ ‘A bit of improv,’ said Ken. ‘Because you did write about your acting career, didn’t you, in your first book?’ Edie said, holding my eye to conceal her uncertainty. ‘Well, that was a more general book, about experimental theatre in the Seventies and Eighties–I don’t want to go there ever again. What I’m writing now is more about my personal life–things I really didn’t want to talk about before. I want to write about falling in love.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ said Ken, and Richard gave us an interesting smile as he absorbed the idea. ‘And I want to write about being like I am, but never knowing much about where I came from.’

Richard knows of course that I’ve been writing another book – though not exactly what it is. I seem to need some secrecy, even from him; and no doubt I’m wary of his editorial eye. If I’m home in the day I climb up here under the Velux and close the door, but I’m aware on and off, when he crosses the room or takes a call from one of his authors, of Richard at work in the room below. He’s just started editing a book on the Burmese junta–a curious choice, it seems to me, and clearly very slow work for him. He has tried to involve me by asking if I’ll check the proper names, but I feel the author, who has actually spent twelve years in the country, is much more likely than me to know the right forms.

We are all citizens of the Earth: an ocean world. Whether we choose to acknowledge the blue machine or not, it dominates the planet, regulating how

We are all citizens of the Earth: an ocean world. Whether we choose to acknowledge the blue machine or not, it dominates the planet, regulating how energy and atoms flow around the globe, and setting the scene for everything else. This great liquid engine is majestic and intricate, dynamic and interconnected, with a vast array of life rippling through its swirling innards is far larger than us, and the great rules of ocean physics do not bend to human will. We can pretend to live our lives in spite of the ocean, or we can choose to understand and work with it, and thereby benefit from the natural processes that are in any case out of our direct control. They bring richness and variety, as well a surprises and a degree of unpredictability. That is the beauty of the blue machine.

The eye was shocking.
It was really beautiful.
You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen toge

The eye was shocking.
It was really beautiful.
You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and – what?
Politeness? Indifference? Distance?
I won’t know the word for it till now, years after, right this minute, walking to wherever in the dark and permitting myself to think back to the moment I first ever saw, so close to my own eyes, any horse’s, this horse’s, eye.
The word is equanimity.

Phyl chewed on her pencil and thought about it. She couldn’t tell whether or not Rashida was being entirely serious. But she added a third item to

Phyl chewed on her pencil and thought about it. She couldn’t tell whether or not Rashida was being entirely serious. But she added a third item to the list in her notebook anyway, so that her options as a fledgling writer now consisted of:
1. COSY CRIME
2. DARK ACADEMIA
3. AUTOFICTION

Yet unravelling the events leading to this strange and unsettling night is well worth the trouble; a modern parable lies beneath, exposing the fray

Yet unravelling the events leading to this strange and unsettling night is well worth the trouble; a modern parable lies beneath, exposing the fraying fabric of British society, worn thin by late capitalism's relentless abrasion. The missing gold bar is a connecting node - between an amoral banker, an iconoclastic columnist and a radical anarchist movement.

And what exactly' - he tilts a sports-shoe-clad foot in my direction as he interjects - is the difference between the personal and the political? Where does one draw the line?' Well, that's obvious. I gently shake my head. The personal is anything that affects me. Everything else is political. And identity politics is whatever affects you, but not me. This heuristic has never led me astray. Of course, I don't actually say this. Instead, I pinch my brow into a concerned frown and speak from the heart.

Because of his exposure to the kerosene, at the outward periphery of each of his two eyes, Bruno’s vision periodically degraded in a vertical line. The line quavered as if a zipper had riven the seen world at this outer periphery, riven it and then sewn it back up, but unevenly, and the living parts of the riven world were vibrating, sutured badly, and leaking something from under the sutures—an unseen, untouched absolute. It was at the quavering edges of his vision, he told them, that the truth of the seen and unseen was attempting to break through, to communicate, to coalesce. A critical point, as a terminology of chemistry, he summarized, was that moment when gasses and solids had the same valence. Perhaps the two trembling seams at the edges of his vision were the destabilized place where two worlds were reaching equilibrium, attempting to find balance where each did not annihilate the other. He regarded this tremble as pertaining to the riddle of history, and to a dream of forging a future that did not negate the past, a dream that honored reality without occluding its own verso, its counter-reality.

Something happens and people think, This was meant to be. The random nature of luck and of incident is too disturbing to acknowledge. I’m not the first to know this. It’s in the Bible. Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial. But either people skip that part of the Old Testament, or they never read the Bible at all, and instead they follow their instinct to mythify a sequence of random events and the stream of strangers they encounter in life: Good things happen to them or people they like and they think, “justice.” Bad things happen to people they don’t like and once again they think, justice

When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self ? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.  

… Me, I adhere to my salt. I draw strength from it, use it. I keep watch over my salt, and when it serves me, I keep watch over other people’s salt. I mine my salt, and sometimes, I mine the salt of others. Which is to say: I cooperate with the part of them that they can’t reach, are not in touch with, cannot see, but that sometimes, when I am lucky, I can see quite well.

Most stars, I’m told, are binary stars, and these pairs affect each other profoundly. One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this way the bodies of the stars are formed by the forces of attraction between them, and the closer the relation, the higher the risk. If there cannot be equity, I wonder if it’s better to receive the greater proportion of love, or give it? I wish I knew. W. H. Auden, whose poem ‘The More Loving One’ considers the stars’ indifference to the love of men, wrote this: If equal affection cannot be Let the more loving one be me.

“And did I ever tell you about the laws of Kepler? The first describes how heavenly bodies orbit the sun, and that is the law of ellipses. The second law I’ve memorised as I used to memorise Bible verses when I was young: the semi-major axis sweeps out equal areas in equal time. This means that bodies in orbit move faster and faster as they near the heat of the sun, rushing like a man into his lover’s arms. Then they move past their perihelion, the embrace is done, and they become listless and slow in the dark. Lately it’s seemed to me that you became a kind of sun –  that since you’ve been gone I’ve moved through a world with no warmth in it. But my orbit is closed, and everything that passes will in its time return – so I imagine myself moving again towards some heat and light I can’t make out”

So I told her this: that it’s true that I’ve only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, loving, indifferent, ardent, diligent and careless; full of loathing and wanting, hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence – and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses its amplitude hour by hour. All the while she sat crying in her childish way. And I wanted to console the child I’d loved, and so I told her this: that in the ordinary way we love because we’re loved, and give more or less what we’re given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God – because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. So if you go on loving when your love is unreturned it makes you just a little lower than the angels.

“He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul,, he left his nature in London on the station platform and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage”

It was flanked by a mossy wall, and by a derelict patch of ground known to him as Potter’s Field; its iron gate was fastened with a chain. Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its bricks were pale, its proportions austere: it was a sealed container for God …… This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and round it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world – its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, elections, music and changes of administration – washed up against the green door and fell back, dammed.