On Writing and the Self
Lydia Unsworth
past
moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things
always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
As with walking, there
is only one place from which to begin, that being wherever your feet happen to
be. I rise from the folds of my interior, a consciousness that began as a seed
and expanded into this. Into hands that tap on a computer screen, attached to a
torso that belongs to its environment, a head that is habitual and formed by
how it is received.
My command, if I have
command, comes out of this body, my ability (thus far) to persist. This body
lives with me and I with it. You get used to each other. You familiarise
yourself with your set of limitations, real, imagined, affected, believed in,
and wriggle a little inside your veil of skin.
I am one hundred cats
inside a soundproof cube with a hairline leak. Those cats disagree, fight, both
with themselves and with each other, change their minds, howl, die, come back
to life. I can’t see outside these walls, not with any clarity, not with all
this noise in here.
The exterior feeds in,
becomes the surrounding fields. A whine overhead, a newspaper headline,
advertisements, words of wisdom, the glass shattering in a car window and the
sirens that geyser from the scene. Imagine an already damp cloth sprawled out
across the table, lapping up the spreading sea.
I’m a venus-fly-trap
munching on my own leaf. From the lockjaw of iteration comes a kind of release.
An ability to make certain movements, to walk a person through the rooms of
one’s house and illume the debris.
Curtains of static and
association filter the impressions coming in. You tune the station, fiddle with
the channels. Catch a breath of pure oxygen, a swift in flight past an old barn
beam.
Walls of tiny metal
beads, like ball bearings, rain down in all directions. Each bead carries a
small image, a sentence remembered, a name from the deep. And your body charges
past, heading for the glimmer of light flickering off some stranger’s watch
face as their feet scuff the threshold of the door as they leave. Beads in
disarray, metal fragments reverberate like hail, the birdsong of disruption
falling back into place. A nearly, a helix of just-missed steam.
Everything detours this
way, for a second, a year, a day. And, as with walking, you grab whatever is
within reach. Pick up a pebble on the beach. Pass it from one hand to another,
admire its curvature, estimate its weight. Do you need it? Can you put it on a
shelf? How long should that shelf be?
You juxtapose one thing
with another, like a bower bird lining a nest. You select, compare, reconsider,
throw away. You turn a thing over, pick at it, chisel. A slab of intensity,
finessed, is left to harden. Complete, you step outside, and dance your
ridiculous dance in front of the resultant array.
Lydia Unsworth is the author
of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks & Spoons,
2018) and Nostalgia
for Bodies (2018 Erbacce Poetry
Prize winner). She has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2019 from above / ground
press and Ghost City Press. Recent work can be found in Ambit, Litro, Tears
in the Fence, Banshee, Ink Sweat and Tears, and others. Based in Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter@lydiowanie
No comments:
Post a Comment