Air

-    ‘That’s air to you buddy, inhale and keep at it.’

Air is what we call it, and air is what we get.
I’m fond of the royal we.
It takes you places – to the supermarket, to the drawer, to the fiasco.

I’m fond of the fiasco, aren’t you?  Small delicacies of hot air, that’s one way to put it. Failure is another. It’s something you can total in your mouth, a car-wreck that dissolves over time into a debacle of tastebuds.  Unfortunate passengers peep from the lips, and scoop up the dry flakes of lip ice, craving moisture, and they stare down the throat, one after the other, looking into the airway for the things to come.

It’s been a while I have to admit. I try and keep a neat profile these days, after my last escapade – which was also tied to the bus movie (‘Oops! I’m sorry. I just made you miss your bus’) and the sequel in which I starred as an extra waiting in a very long line, busting, just busting, to go to the loo.

The follow-up film’s called ‘Four Parts Air’, and from what I can tell it’s about one man’s struggle with his God’s struggle, which escalates into a race, a bewitching tie and two distinct toots of a motorcycle horn. One man rushes out of the house, gets on the bike and drives off, raising his hand and bringing it down fast like a whip.

I was in the bit at the horse meet. For six days I stood desperately in line.

What makes this ‘real’?

By the time I finished the first version of the ‘Mitchell’ exercise, I think I’d already begun to anticipate the inversions I was planning. I didn’t necessarily incorporate them, but I did clarify my images in anticipation of turning them upside down. This is why the first is stronger, it is clearer in its progress, and is not so burdened by ‘ending’ or of tying things up at the end. There are small endings throughout.

The second version is quite nonsensical. I’ve been thinking about what Tina wrote to me in response to the last paragraph in Leaving Home, how it works poetically, but is also very real. I read ‘Life: Field Research’ to my friend Susie via Skype and her response hinged on the image that I started with, of the hands. There was something in this that she carried with her throughout the poem and it was through this that she traced her path. I really liked the way she described this kind of progress, path finding and reconnaissance.

In a way this situating of an image prepares the reader to flick back to the beginning once they have finished the first reading, maybe even just lightly, to glance at this initial image and identify why it was there, whether it leads in the right direction, or if it’s altered slightly on second look.

I’m always drawn to surreal images and word play, because of the disregard for logic they prompt, though not even I believe this neutrality and it is the logic that emerges anyway or via the reader, that makes the process interesting for me. I’m becoming more interested in bracketing the surreal or heightened poetic. To explain it’s kind of like how James George installs humour in his characters dialog and lets loose with language in his descriptions of the characters environment infused with their consciousness of it. So that’s one way of looking at it.

Part of what I’m trying to clarify is this sense of completion for the poem if I’m doing a monologue or a dialog piece, in prose or poetry. When is it finished? At which point has it conveyed enough so that the reader can comfortably glance back to the start and get their bearings, test their instincts and impressions, and feel like they already know the poem enough to ask it or themselves questions.

The ‘Mitchell’ exercise allowed me to write without making too much of a distinction between me as writer and reader, I was leaving myself clues and cornerstones which I could pivot off and return to. Cool.

So I got stuck again

So I got stuck again and then was reading this in the IIML newsletter:

“One excellent metaphor per page is much much better than eight fairly good metaphors on a page. Watch out for adverbs, don’t use them too much. Don’t write a character according to your first thought about how the character should be, because that’s probably a cliché. Take the cliché and turn it round. A bank robber shouldn’t be tough, mean and scarred, they should be gay and Welsh. That’s a good fresh bank robber. Sam Goldwyn said, “What we need here are some brand new clichés!” Invent brand new clichés.”

- David Mitchell

Desperately trying to go cold-turkey from weekly exercises I coudn’t help myself and like a wimpering pathetic adict I made up my own:

Write a poem and then turn the images into opposites/alternatives.

So up next is the ‘exercise’, Versions 1 and 2.

p.s. that thing about limiting the metaphors, might not be so generative in poetry, a bad metaphor can work wonders…though it would be an interesting proposition to debate one day if we all get really bored or run out of biscuits – eek, what a thought!

Life: Field research

Set yourself small tasks to start with.

- Take a long walk with gravity

take a hand, two if you think it’ll help;
no need to be modest at this point in the game.

Exercise anything inbuilt – lizardry, skin-changeability -

if you don’t have a chameleon you should get access
to one, even if its just a t-shirt,

this proves very near to winding up human.

—

Set yourself another small task.

- Take on extra blood

Become fuller than when you started out, you know blood,
how in your hands it weighs more at the end of a walk
than it did before, and you raise each palm up, strangely
upwards, you might be tempted to sniff the heaviness
for a chemical change, like you would the inside

of a dish washing glove; for factors like finger-room, powdery glue,
the innate ability to simply look at something sharp
and take on fluid through the hygienic barrier and
its pink or lemon or unnaturally sky blue law.

—

Now you are ready to take things to the next level.

- Take up information at the speed of light

Some say it’s the things that sink in the slowest that
get us in the end, but I say jumping

to conclusions really cripples us, the way we let ghosts tag along and
pull them abruptly into our glands when frightened,
allowing them to freely circulate chronology
and secrete all the men and women we never knew we possessed, like snow-drifts,

ruining the carpet, the children, especially that image of yourself you once formed an intense friendship with – even though you don’t talk anymore it hurts, as hurt makes transparent our strangers, our promenades, our Christmas lights, our jogging shoes,
our wet areas, our inner plankton that is the only froth
at the mouth to gain the respect of others.

White
stains pick their teeth, these claws we keep
inside ourselves for when light changes
and we have the means to retract them all the way back to times
immemorial.

—

You know it; you’ve made it to the big STUFF.

- Take what’s left into your hands

Life: Summation of shadows

Think Big.

- Take a smoker’s jog with indignity

take a foot, one more if you think it will get you going;
essentially be exultant at this point in the game.

Sit a couch-potato on anything supernatural – rocket science, skin imperfections;

if you don’t have a damaged good you should get access
to one, even if its just a leg in board shorts,

this proves very near to winding up historically human.

—

Set yourself another bubonic task.

- Take on extra silence

Become whinier than when you started out, you know silence,
how in your ears it thins more at the end of a whisper
than it did to start with, and you prick each lobe up, strangely
upwards, and you might be tempted to blow
an ear drum, the inside of a cave dwelling;
there are factors like finger-painting, sticky fire,
the innate ability to look at something rounded
and take in stone through the earthly tumour
and its ochre or mint or natural blood sucking bylaw.

—

Now you are ready to take things down a notch.

- Take hold of the lame foot of darkness

some say it’s the things that erupt the fastest that

get us in the end, but I say blocking out half-heartedness really cripples us, the way we let humans tag along and shove them gently out if our bloodstream when joyous,
allowing them to chain themselves or electrocute small things,
and suck up to all the boys and girls they knew they abandoned that time in the heatwave,

leaving you to clean the dishwasher, the grownups, especially that image of bought tomato sauce you once formed an intense friendship with – even though you don’t shut-up anymore, it’s orgasmic, as orgasms make unclear our familiars, our short walks, our casseroles, our tea-cosy’s, our dry areas,
our inner hoot of owls, this being the only leak, like the tummy button, to gain the indifference of others.

Black
clearings hover in their skin, these pads we keep outside ourselves for when darkness acclimatises and we have the short-straw to insert, like official sponsors, all the way this time, the dreamed-of colonoscopy of ever expanding eternity.

—

You know it; you’ve made it to the nitty-gritty.

- Take the conundrum from under your feet.

Two books

I’ve just finished Hummingbird by James George, and before this Acts of Love by Susan Pearce.

Acts of Love had a tone generated by the way the characters are realized in the narrative. Pearce didn’t confuse the ideals of the characters with who they were. In one way this made the characters feel distant from me initially in the book, but it allowed a later freedom of movement for their own agendas to come to life, to visualize the attempts alongside the accidents that construct their journeys. Realizations came from a tension between intention and action, reflection and response.

Hummingbird’s quite different in tone, though, like Acts of Love, in which there was a uniqueness to the ‘dramatic’ (non-Gothic in feel somehow) progression of the story, it’s like walking into a cool room after having sat in the sun for too long – something alternative sinks in. George infused the dialog of his characters with humor and puns, however his descriptions and the inner lives of the characters were beautiful, rich and intense, shaped in the limits and evocations of his choice of language. For example, the image used to evoke the relationship of Jordan and Kataraina, a leaf with jagged edges, each a half of the leaf, unable to see each other from opposing edges, all of each other, but somehow bound into its whole by a spine.

I don’t know why I’m so interested in people occupied with design at the moment, but I’ve been a bit stuck with writing the last few days so I’m going to write a series of three poems along this line of interest; one loosely based on the coin designer of the first NZ decimal range of coins, My James Berry, the design of a suit featured on Stuff today which mimics the effects of old age and will give you a taste of what its like, and a mystery third…

First Kiss

You know what I mean, right? Though perhaps yours looks a bit
different? Once I dropped something from very high above the
lake. Weeks before I’d asked myself, what thing would fall into the
centre there and turn the rips of its falling into one unabashed
wave? Long, unbroken, immaculate even, at the tall of disturbance,
touching all shores at once.

Historically, many mouths, as many as can fit along the water’s
edge, wait for the pressure of that wave, salt-less to salt-less lips,
winded windpipes, many mouths gargling instruments with
breath inside, something that’s been practiced there before, but
definitively fresh; a thud of gum, impromptu flavour, air’s
spearmint, just as softness plummets to the core of the stomach,
accidentally setting off an abdominal heart-beat.

So it came to me, the form of the lake’s object; it must be able to
latch and unlatch, knowing the kiss for what it is, it’s coming
and going peer-pressure. To know it, is to know the shiver-touch

murmur nearer than blood.

This dual-patience has befallen and so sand blushes, water
wishes me more than wet. I’ve seen the body curl, it did so all
over the bay. I couldn’t help it, and still it won’t tell me how it
came to be there in that way.

All I know is that its inarticulacy is centred, and when I shove it
over, as in a test of strength, it tingles and sucks and risks the
occasion all over again.

To truth or not to truth

Watching American Idol intermittently as I write this I thought it might be a good opportunity to talk about some cool quotes by Jorge Semprún in Interview with Lila Azam Zanganef in The Paris Review, Spring 07, Is 180. His take on writing ‘truth’ via imagination in literature looks at how you can inhabit perspectives that aren’t your own, to generate a truth which is.

This seems relevant to notions of point of view I’ve been exploring in recent writing but also to things we’ve talked about in class around writing with characters or speakers that are from different backgrounds than the writer.

Semprún operated for many years before and after WW2 as a communist double agent in France and Spain. He was interred at the German labour camp, Buchenwald, towards the end of the war and it took him 20 years to reach the point where he could begin to write about his experiences. In the interview he talks a lot about being in the camp, though not being Jewish, and how he deals with writing of his experience, and how ‘truth’ might be communicated and achieved in literature.

“This is where literature begins: narration, artifice, art – what Primo Levi calls a ‘filtered trust’. And I believe ardently that real memory, not historic and documentary memory but living memory, will be perpetuated only through literature. Because literature alone is capable of reinventing and rejuvenating truth. It is an extraordinary weapon, and you’ll see that in ten or fifteen years, the reference material on the destruction of the Jews or Europe will include a collective of literary testimonies – our, possibly, but also those of younger generations, who have not witnessed but will be able to imagine.”

A memory that must reinvent and rejuvenate is something that’s key to communicating a human presence in poetry I think. What are the implications for writing what you’ve no experience of?

Semprún writes “You might object, and you would be right, that there is no need to actually experience a concentration camp in order to ascertain the existence of good and evil. You can ascertain in other ways of course, in the most banal portions of our everyday lives, but the camp, because it focuses all experience around the constant risk of death, renders visible what is ordinarily more faint – that a human being is free by definition, that he has the freedom to be good or evil in every circumstance.”

At the least there must be some connection, perhaps at the level of ‘human freedom’ as Semprún mentions. But is this enough? What if we come at it from the other way – that it’s difficult or impossible in some way to write about ones own experience, or a historical situation.

Further to this, the truth of the matter depends on what you are trying to communicate and how you think your reader will experience it. For Kafka the worlds of his books perpetuated their realities and the various forms of logic and communication in these realities. The world of the reader is the unreality. So in this respect reality takes imagination on the part of the writer and reader, and unreality of the writer or readers world doesn’t require imagination. This is quite a simple reduction of things but it serves to raise a point. That in our current situation we also need a bit of imagination in our world of unreality and less imagination maybe in any realities we create. Hmm, not sure about this but lets carry on.

Imagination is always going to be involved in an account, details are not enough in themselves, poems are not lists, or explications in the form of cause and effect. I think there is something in communication at all times, the moments of control and lack of control, that’s somehow key to human experience and that memory via the imagination can best communicate this in poetry. This is more valuable to writing than any kafka-esque pro or cons argument about imagination.

You can speak from somewhere you’ve not been, and in doing this the responsibility of your freedom in doing this still stands. You must find someway of acknowledging your limits of perspective, while challenging historicizing reductions of human experience.

It reminds me of the notion of home regarding the writer and reader, the environment from which each take up their role. Usually it implies a bracketing from ones life, at the same time as there must be a means for this bracketing to be feasible – one must feel at home when one reads or writes. This is something that came up when Kate Duignan talked us, and that line in one of her stories say’s it really well; ‘we see faces we never knew the adults possessed.’ The children were at home but experiencing it in a way that’s entirely new to them.

This leads me to the next thing I want to relate here; “The gaze of others will cause me…to appear” – that’s Semprún again. In relation to exceeding ourselves, while also maintaining a responsibility for where we come from, it seems there is a need to negotiate point of view. The quote above suggests bearing witness to a new point of view allows the initial view to appear. In the case of writing, inhabiting multiple perspectives, what is the course then? In a way it could be that the views that you create will look back on you, they will inevitably cause you, or the speakers view in the writing, to appear.

I want to experiment with this in upcoming writing – what makes it possible for us to exceed our expectations, our own limits and boundaries, but also be shaped by how these perspectives appear (in the world). This comes back to dignity, that dignity is appearing and being prepared to be seen by others – to appear motivated by individual freedom and a more common freedom, the common ground that underlies all human experience.

I will end with two things: One by Semprún and another of a discussion on music with my flatmate.

Semprún – “Later I found that when I referred to myself as you, as in The Long Voyage, I was able to convey more objective sense of my experience. I observed myself as my own double – not as the actor, but as the witness of my own life.”

Talking music – When we were all talking in class the other day about Christian Bok, I began thinking if his work as akin to a joke to the ear, that the joke was carried in the sound of the words, rather than narratively, perhaps through accidental meaning too. I was wondering if there was an equivalent in music so asked my flatmate who is a bassoonist. He spoke of a few composers who interpret existing composers work and draw out humour or absurdities. At the end of our talk we got to the lasting jokes of the human race and really at the end of the day nothing beats farts – in the words of my flattie ‘farts are funny from the day your born to the day you die’ – Amen. I’m sure this insight would have livened up the recent lecture on philosophic aesthetics, no end.

What does rapport have to do with aesthetic ejaculation?

I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about the FHSS Seminar given by Kendall L. Walton today and some thoughts on the writer/reader relationship.

Going on from the last comment I made about a voice in a poem being composed of a scale of imperatives, that shape the reality of the world the voice inhabits, I feel I need to do some thinking about interplay between fiction and non-fiction or autobiography in what I’m writing. This is important when considering where the voices will draw their worlds from. It is also important when considering how the reader will be able to recognize and participate in the worlds of the voices.

Thinking more about the dramatic monologue lately I think where I speak from is becoming more of a focus in the writing I’m doing. Obviously it is how this position manifests in the writing that is of interest here.

Wikipedia describes the dramatic monologue as:

‘A type of poem, developed during the Victorian period, in which a character in fiction or in history delivers a speech explaining his or her feelings, actions, or motives. The monologue is usually directed toward a silent audience, with the speaker’s words influenced by a critical situation.’

So the speaker’s words are influenced by a critical situation real or imagined. How does the writer inhabit the critical situation? How does the reader inhabit the critical situation?

About the FHSS Seminar given by Kendall L. Walton, ‘the world’s leading expert in philosophical aesthetics,’ today, I have to say I was disappointed. Not by his core philosophies but where he was directing them and where he chose to situate the limits of his work in relation to readers and poets, and musicians and listeners.

In his paper entitled “Poets, Personae, Thoughtwriters” he set out a comparison between ‘speech writers’ and poets to emphasize that once the poem inhabits the reader, the poem ditches the poet. Poets invariably arrange poems for use by readers – the poem first and foremost belongs to the world of the reader.

To explain, poems end up in the voice of the reader, a reading voice, a thought voice of the reader, however you want to put it. Poems can be spoken at a wedding, be recited internally, be memorized and they are realized in the context of the readers world. Thus once the poem inhabits the reader, the poem ditches the false position of the writer as key to the poems mobility (that’s how the poet is like a speech-writer in Kendall’s thinking. The poet prepares the poem for work in the voice of the reader).

In this way it is the reader who socialises with the speaker in the poem, the words used, and employs them in their everyday life. The reader can engage the poem in many ways by imagining they’re the speaker, refusing to empathise with the speaker, using the speakers words as a succinct exemplification of thoughts or feelings they have but can’t express etc.

Granted some of this is a bit suspect, but if you keep in mind that his aim is to emphasize the place of the reader, that poetry perhaps is centred on relationships across readers, rather than having the writer at the center then his aim is justifiably contemporary.

A key area of discussion in recent years in the visual arts in NZ has been around ‘relational practice’. One way to understand this is that relational just means an emphasis is placed on the viewer of the work of art as the key to activating the work. The artist then is on an equal plane as the viewer, the artist is there to facilitate participation in the artwork, and importantly the artist doesn’t know more than the view. The viewer has a bit more power in this respect. Unfortunately Kendall L. Walton didn’t relate his work to the recent approaches in the visual arts that articulate a participatory involvement of viewers and the arguments that have arisen around this.

Kendall mentioned another contemporary method of understanding a work of art, though did not outline his negative response to it in relation to his ideas of the reader. He stated that thinkers have moved from locating the meaning or true experience of the work of art from the intention of the creator to having the meaning/experience/mobility imbedded in the work itself. The work perpetuates an experience of it that doesn’t rely on the subjectivity of the author or reader.

To illustrate the problem I can identify in the limitations to an aesthetic navigation of poetry through the reader alone, that seemed present in his paper, I will tell you something about ‘ejaculation’.

And what place does ejaculation have in this I hear you ask. Well, writer and Anglican priest, George Herbert, (April 3, 1593 – March 1, 1633), related his verse to a process of ejaculation, which in the ecclesiastical sense, suggests that the believer is the conduit for the word of God. Ejaculations were pure inspirations, rather than representations of inspirations. In a nutshell it removed human involvement, specifically the writer, from the sophisticated inspired verse.

There are many interesting interpretations possible here, but back to Kendall. I thought there was some part of his argument that seemed to update the position of the writer-as-conduit of God to the more contemporary, reader-as-conduit of the poem.

What a weight of responsibility to put on the poor old reader! I mean I thought I was just reading a poem! I at least thought I’d be sharing the load with the writer! I realise God is dead and well the author died a little while ago too, but I thought that was just a way of weening ourselves off silly subjective reductions and veracious appetites for meaning – I thought we were broadening our appetite rather than slimming it down! I’m hungry for words but don’t leave me by myself, I need companionship, I need to feel like I’m in the company of others – God-dam all I’m asking for is a chance to socialise and be reminded that its out there for me at any time – even when I’m at home in my turtle PJ’s sipping a cup of muesli.

Well that’s my rant over, for now. Good on Anna Jackson for challenging his metaphor of the ‘speech writer’ in relation to the poet. I just wish Kendall had risen to the challenge and explicated his position more thoroughly in relation to broader fields of aesthetics.

Right, so the reason I bought this up was to talk about fiction and non-fiction in my writing. Basically I think me and the reader are in it together. Like any relationship (that may last or may necessarily be a fulfilling one-night-poetry-stand) you need to work at it and build up a rapport from the start. You need to establish certain limits and certain places where these limits, given the right context, can be exceeded or surprised.

The speaker of the poem can be imagined or be closer to my own voice and the reader or listener is capable of accepting either so long as they can verify what the speaker is doing there in the poem, and as importantly what they themselves are doing there in the poem. That’s what rapport is I guess.

Flaubert goes fusion

‘I believe that, between us, over the course of those days, was born a very particular kind of affection which is neither friendship nor love but something like a fusion of sensitivities!’

- Gustave Flaubert speaks of his friend Louis Bouilhet, The Paris Review, Spring 07, Is 180.

This phrasing is weird though somehow really evocative. I want to play with it and see to what extent I can relate it to the voices that inhabit a poem, potentially alongside the speaker’s voice. (Different voices that may even constitute a large part of the speaker’s position.)

‘Sensitivities’ could imply many things, though the phrase places emphasis on compassionate consideration that has arisen between the friends that exceeds conventional categorization.

thin-skinned pity
pity-skinned physical
physical-skinned pigment

Just needed to flex a bit of language there before asking this big question: Why not friendship or love?

First some biographical speculation. The excerpt is taken from a passage written by F that he placed in a sealed envelope following the death of his friend. This letter is newly reprinted in The Paris Review, its insides expounded, and another letter, this time a letter F wrote and sent to a second friend at the time of B’s death, is arranged alongside, providing us with a morbid yet fascinating axis of comparison regarding these two modes of memorialization.

You could say Flaubert wants distance from some obligation implied by love or friendship in this description, assumptions of certain limits the words Love and Friendship imply. While there is something almost cold about the ‘fusion of sensitivities’ Flaubert’s enthusiasm carries an excitability that can’t be explained by the intellectual detachment the assertion promotes.

It may simply underscore regard for B that Flaubert’s not found in any of his other relationships. Either way I like the idea that this affection relies on a specific convergence in time, at a particular place, and that there is no guarantee that it will repeat or endure. Still, to consider affection in this way, as something that must be started afresh each time the two meet is also disconcerting as much as it is oddly refreshing. It carries exhilaration for common ground discovered between two people at a particular time and place.

These multiple ways of valuing relationships is something I often write about. This includes the tension that arises through forms of acceptance and conflict. There is some play between anticipation and expectation. Through resistance we find out what we want and what we don’t want. Some preliminary argument seems to take place. We are at the threshold of anticipation and must find ways to proceed. In a way this is like walking a scale of imperatives.

I see the series of voices that are starting to emerge in my writing, as revealing a ‘fusion’ of various imperatives, this is kind of the life-force that drive the individual voices. A scale of imperatives play out along a scale of social interactions.

Leaving Home

Thanks for waiting. I’ll get strait to it, as I know you have other things to do today.

That life stuff I spoke of before I left the bathroom, well, it’s a pretty big claim I agree. It’s not everyday you grow out of your life. It’s not everyday you ask yourself, ‘Am I the right person, at heart, on which to base my life?’

In fact it all started so simply – with love, a love. I asked myself just once where do I base my love, that love? Slowly this small thing enlarged, like an animal being fattened for a particular purpose, until I could no longer bear the weight of it inside me. Must I always ensure that I’m capable of housing those core yardsticks that make me, me? Must I be responsible for, well, the soul that makes me, without exaggeration, changeable? Am I capable enough, to bear the responsibility of an internal history based on a series of substantial new beginnings?

What I meant, I soon discovered, was that I didn’t know if I was fit for the designs of love that would inevitable crawl out of me, stand up, grow taller, and break their teeth in, on the very person I was trying to keep out of harms way – me. I found myself picturing the end, my life a plaything, durable, able to sustain moments of intensity, saliva’s right of joy, but all in all, resulting at the peak of pleasure, in nothing more than a blood curdling squeak, squeak.

But to be fair I really need you to come with me, we need to go back a bit further. I had a Mother, and as expected, a Father too. I enjoyed several prolonged conversations with them both, when they were alive. I hardly see my other siblings. They lead their lives and the effort involved allows a distance to spring up between us. In any case being so far apart gives us something to talk about when we do meet by some quirk or other. They generally rise to the occasion and manage to cover an appropriate amount of ground. I see my youngest sister more than the others, on account that she doesn’t work and has little need for distance, as such, or things on hand to talk about.

I accepted a lot of things. I thought that parents the world over said the same thing to get their children to shut up before bed. There was no doubt in my mind that all kids knew of it, who in their right mind couldn’t? ‘Shush, Afghanistan is sleeping’, was to me the most commonplace rhyme in the universe, and if in some moment of lunacy I did think ‘Why?’ or ‘What’, I quickly sat on the need to say it out loud until it went away or I forgot about it.

Questions were a sign of idleness Mother would remind me often enough. Asking one question was one question too many. It was the same with my Father, in a way because; there was very little difference between them, other than the somewhat baffling insistence of a Y chromosome. To question things was by implication to dispute Gods own work, redesigning the inevitable.

Some things, in the end, must be said. When I finally built up the courage to tell my Father I was a fully qualified bathroom designer, he invested all his distaste for human attempts at divine renovation into the protest he mounted against my career choice.

Really my vocation had revealed itself to me incidentally. Once I had opened my left eye in the public library and found in front of me an exquisite, bound publication, documenting bathroom design and innovation over the last 100 years. I at once felt how washing had come a long way in that short time. I sensed I had something to contribute. I never intended to design bathrooms but the very thought of a paradise of grooming enthralled me. I poured over the book for hours. I found myself holding my breath more than usual, for longer than was natural. This is the change Father eventually noticed in me. He was no longer sure where the life he thought I was living had gone.

‘Decorating bathrooms is not work; it’s not the work we’ve bent over backwards to make possible for you. You are my son; in you we’ve deposited our hopes. You’re going to drown them in a bathtub!’
‘Dad, what can I say I am in love. That’s the point.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Not in love with someone, no, but Dad, my life is – it’s not as easy as you think. Bathrooms are complex entities, philosophical in the limits they often force upon you; I must constantly consider space, capacity, functionality – beauty! I can make something from nothing, something lasting and free of sea-shells.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with sea-shells. We have sea-shells and you know it.’

A feeling like dirt crossed my cheek, as he flicked his coat back over his shoulders, the material scratching over me. Though not always in this way, such occurrences, the severity of accidental contact with his displeasure, was how he burrowed into me. In this way he dug, like some vivid, bright-skinned animal that disappeared into my nerves, my muscles, not even letting me glimpse its form. The only trace of its secret work was the powdery dust and small gravely itches that occasionally flew out of me, sometimes managing a small pile, like the tailings building from a mine.

‘Dad I have to go, I’ve got work to do.’
‘Go then. Perfect your so-called perennial toilet. Hating sea-shells, it’s not normal.’

How all of it has changed since then.