With age I have lost all fear of death. I could never after all be condemned by any celestial court, because when it comes time to plea, I will yell: "Innocent your honour!" at the top of my lungs. And when asked to elaborate, I will say: "When I look in the mirror I do not recognize myself. How then can I be guilty, when I am not even me!"
Already I pretend to be a ghost, and whenever I am beset by the disgusting and exasperating urge to write, I walk around this quiet home, this heavenly hell I have created, and I look at each thing. Slowly and very carefully I look at each one, while solemn theme music (as if my life were no more than a movie) plays in my head.
There are creatures beyond the reach
You see the urge to write disturbs me, it always has. How unfortunate to have things to say, yet absolutely no one to whom one wishes to say them! What tension this creates! And the best way to calm down is to spend quality time with inanimate objects. To spend time truly seeing them.
And seeing, as any respected critic - however loathsome - will tell you, is an art all of its own.
The crucial thing - I cannot stress this enough - is to pretend I am not here! You absolutely have to look at things as if you were not there - as if you are doing so in an unoccupied house! Because things in an unoccupied house have an entirely different feel to those in an occupied house. It's as if things in an occupied house know they might at any moment be moved, or used, and so they resonate the air - oh so subtle - of expectation! They steel themselves against change. While objects in an unoccupied house (say a holiday house standing empty at the coast) are truly at rest. It is for this reason that they gather dust that much more quickly.
(By the way, it is not so very strange to think of oneself as a ghost while still alive. The only difference is that while alive you are a ghost in a body, while later - simply a ghost.)
So I wander through this house, looking at things, and I feel them looking at me. This may sound absurd, but I don't think it's untrue. We ghosts have little use for poetry. I have in my life felt a greater intimacy with inanimate objects than ever with animals or people. Plants also I have felt close to, but Inanimates closest of all.
It has happened in my life that I meet someone, and start befriending them, but then discover some wonderful thing in their house (an old family photo or a cracked, and particularly characterful windowsill), and end up forming a far closer relationship with that - so that my friendship with the person becomes a necessary sacrifice made in order that I might spend more time with the beloved Inanimate. I realize that this might come across as strange, but then I'm no longer particularly interested in how I come across -another great perk of aging - and therein perhaps lies another reason for my apparent absence of things about which to write: the absence of audience. I wish to write (two dimensional talking) and yet there's no one to whom I wish to say anything. Except such remnants, life-tatters, as: "how much is the bread?" or, "when will they deliver the paper?"
- Peter van Straten
Post new comment