Time for a quickie ...

Waiting for an old friend to arrive for lunch so no time other than to say I found this little poem yesterday while I was working. No, really, it was work - research in response to an evaluation brief for a national literature project:

... a creative investigation of ‘place and its accrued layers of meaning in the twenty first century - whether personal, aesthetic, social, historical, political, ecological or spiritual - through a number of artistic commissions in a variety of media, contexts and environments across the UK. It is anchored around the importance of ‘place’ to the enhancement of identity, belonging and creative possibility in life and art, both individually and collectively.

(Arts bollocks some have called it.) It involves the work of a number of writers, artists and photographers including W G Sebald and that chimes so well with my interest in the legacy of war, families, loss, identity, stuff. And going to see I Am Love this evening. How exciting is that? Not exciting that I might win the tender and get to do the work but that there are people out there who are involved in this work and, tangentially, it comes into my sphere. And to be invited to the party is nice too.

Here's the poem...

Who lives only for oneself
Deprives others of oneself
Deprives oneself of others
Atrophies and dies

- Jan Werich.

Balliamo?

This today because sometimes life is harsh. But despite its harshness it's beautiful too as, inexorably, it goes on. Dancing, prancing madly onwards like the slightly sinister Waltz 2 from Jazz Suite by Shostakovich. For me this music evokes waltzing marionettes - or the dancing mechanical doll from The Tales of Hoffmann - or even the twelve enthralled dancing princesses unable to stop.

In life new dancers join, others retire; sometimes with grace, sometimes flung madly out on their tangled strings. One thing for sure, until our music stops we must keep dancing. So in this glorious season as we smile at familiar spring flowers breathing gentle sweet renewal, and even before the warmth of the sun chills on our faces, we feel immediate nostalgia for our loss.

Separation

It’s Easter and notwithstanding personal feelings about organised religion it lends itself to a timely celebration of Spring with all its sense of renewal. The family is still happy to reunite around food, around the table and around Granny. Family.

Tilda Swinton talking about the making of a film about family: I Am Love, with Luca Guadagnino describes this about the film; the lonely journey and the relationship of love to loneliness, as:

‘…the last great taboo of modern western civilisation. Capitalism is built on the idea that one can go out and buy another scented candle and get less lonely somehow. But I think the deal is that you are fully lonely, and the sooner we accept and embrace our loneliness, the healthier we are. And that real love has nothing to do with that romantic idea of oneness, of distracting and healing each other from our loneliness; it’s about witnessing each other as individuals and saying: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’

As Swinton says, ‘finding any sense of individual identity is always rather challenging’. So while Guadagnino sees the idea of the energy matrix going through every family as a control issue (well, being Italian one can understand that!), Swinton calls it inheritance. Whatever the legacy, there will always be one. Even the abandoned child creates a parent.

In talking to R about family we get onto the subject of blank spaces in our backgrounds, blank spaces that emanate from cultural alienation, born from seismic historical shifts leading to pan-European migration. In describing the personal impact of these shifts it’s impossible for me to lose sight of the fact that much of mainland Europe shared similar experiences during the last war.

And so we sat in comfortable surroundings listening to Granny tell us about her youth, when, as a teenager crossing Italian farmland on her way to ride her uncle’s horse, she was fired upon by a passing German aircraft. Being seventeen, young and naïve she had no idea what was happening until she later described the green leaves falling from the trees above her head as she ran through woods. She tripped and fell accidentally, the aircraft flew off. Needless to say her wild roaming was quickly curtailed as she received the wrath of her family’s fear. More than sixty years later she recalls how, in her youthful innocence, she said, ‘But why would they want to kill me I’m just a girl?’

Why indeed. Youngsters, who just want to have fun, maybe go garlic picking with their friends in the woods, a trip away from mundane village life, a lark in the woods. Why would anyone want to kill them?

Then R recounted his grandfather’s flight from Czechoslovakia as a seventeen year old boy entrusted with the care of his three younger siblings, the youngest of whom was only a toddler. To England he came and set about finding work and raising his family. His parents did not survive the war.

Then there came the story of Mrs W, a woman I only knew as my parents’ friend. She had a number tattooed on her arm and her husband was so tenderly protective of her. She was a naïve teenager once, living on a Polish farm with her family the day soldiers came to take young people for forced labour in Germany. How did she ever recover from the sight of her mother cleaving her two sisters to her side as she herself was pushed forward? The last words she heard her mother utter were ‘take this one’.

How can we ever know these people, our parents? Their separateness from us is so vast; it is created by them for what parent would want to pass the burden of such pain to their offspring? And yet they do. In every denial of their own painful experience they distance themselves from their own created selves. In every protective carapace they manufacture for us to wear against the world, they distance themselves from their own created selves. When they were young they didn’t know they could be victims that would experience the shock of isolation in a perilous world. But they thought they could stop it happening to their own offspring.

Our own children don’t tell us the things they know will hurt us but we know anyway, we sense their pain with a parent’s instinct. As we instinctively sensed our parents’ discord. But not knowing the nature of the injury our role is to stand by helplessly and wait until they feel whole enough to come to us. Maybe food surrogates for feelings, the physical manifestation that says, ‘I see your hurt and I cannot heal it, it is your labour alone but take this nourishment, it is all that can pass between us in safety right now.’