Posts Tagged ‘hope’
the blue swing and the pipistrelles
When I left the house for work this morning I saw Hugo on his garden path, motionless as a plastic replica, arms at his side, legs set apart, gazing fiercely towards the gate.
‘Morning, Fletch,’ I shouted.
This brought him back to reality.
‘Here, you,’ he said, in his usual slightly rough-edged way, ‘someone’s nicked the swing I had there.’ He pointed to the spot near the gate where since time began the blue child’s swing with a broken rope had lingered.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Who would do a thing like that?’
‘I don’t know what this bloody country’s coming to,’ he said. ‘The sooner we get rid of this government the better, if you ask me.’
It sounded as if Hugo was blaming Gordon for the felony. Gordon has children, it’s true, but stealing tatt from Hugo’s landfill, while perhaps not beneath his dignity, is unlikely to be necessary on his salary.
‘So who do you think it was?’ I asked.
‘It’ll be bloody kids, that’s who,’ he replied. ‘Little bastards. They’d steal your granny if she wasn’t screwed down.’ Hugo’s ideas of normal family relations are clearly a little different to those of most other people.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Hey, but kids will be kids, eh?’
Hugo resumed his fixed gazing into the site of his lost swing. Loss can often take a little time to work itself out. Hugo was a figure of abject impotence, like Thor without his hammer. And yet how much, I wondered, could depend upon this blue swing standing at his gate (and not even a white chicken in sight)? Surely it hadn’t been the centre piece or linchpin of some grand design that he was just about to embark upon. How desperately unfortunate it would be if the swing that had rested there since time began had been stolen at the very moment at which its destiny and purpose were about to be realised. Hugo looked bereft, crestfallen, downtrodden, defeated. The swing had clearly been more important than it looked.
As I drove off to work it struck me that Hugo might be a man who knows the whereabouts of every object in the randomly cluttered universe of his property, and that perhaps he monitors the status of each object with perfect diligence. The truth is I would never have noticed the absence of the swing for days if he hadn’t drawn my attention to it. I also sensed that for him the order of things had been almost catastrophically disturbed by the thoughtless mischief of some passing kid. It needs to be said that in all probability the swing now lies on its side on some piece of wasteland in Newsham, its seat finally released and jacked up on some bricks as a jump for BMXers. The lesson here seems to be that no matter how accidental the order is it can come to make sense to someone and be an order to which any one of us might become attached. If such an order is disturbed a sense of anomie or existential dislocation may inevitably follow.
As I went through Newsham I looked around for traces of the stolen blue swing, but without success. I did notice however that the old picture house is no longer Kingdom Hall, but is now the New Hope Community Church. I thought at first that perhaps this was a re-branding exercise, but later discovered that this is a different Pentecostal organisation. They are very active in the Third World, it seems, a territory that in their minds may well encompass Newsham too. New hope is a curious concept. Hope is the expectation or wish that something is going to happen, the return of Christ, for example, or the apocalypse. I guess hope that grows old becomes no hope at all, or lost hope, or even hopelessness. To that extent hope is perhaps always new and the adjective redundant. Hope is always evanescent, which is why it needs to spring eternal, I suppose. For a moment I imagined Hugo sitting by his gurgling pond hoping for the return of his stolen blue swing, gazing with his heron at the pale carp gliding by. I fear their hope is in vain.
When I was driving back into the town tonight I noticed that there was a digger at Park Farm. Some of the out-buildings have already been demolished. When I see a building disappearing I always feel a deep sense of regret if I’ve never photographed it. Some old buildings on the quayside have recently been knocked down and I wish I’d photographed them. I wish I’d photographed the Traveller’s Rest, the Wellesley School and Mermaid Cafe. Photographs don’t stop time, of course. In fact they remind us that time cannot be stopped, that the world has already moved on. This is why they are so poignant. And a photograph is not the truth. You cannot, except in your memory, walk around a photograph, touch the substances in it, smell the air there. You cannot feel the breeze in a photograph as it blows into your coat. Photographs remind you that there is so much more to the world than the visible, and that those things too have gone.
When I got home I discovered that Hugo had removed every extraneous object from his front garden – the pink table, the wheel barrow, the pile of bricks, the rusty toolbox, everything except the green Mercedes, the Alligator with the broken tail. This new austerity is the concrete embodiment of the pain of Hugo’s loss. Rather than risk suffering again the profound trauma of dispossession he is prepared to foresake the kaleidoscopic diversity of the junkyard in favour of barren beds of graded pebbles and a couple of dwarf conifers in terracotta pots. It may be that this garden centre minimalism has more kerbside appeal, as Phil and Kirsty might say, but it is a look without depth, bland and superficial at every level.
After tea I went for a walk through South Beach estate, along Wensleydale Terrace and down Ridley Avenue. I walked back up Waterloo Road and along Renwick Road. When I got home Margaret was on her way out. She was wearing a new green jacket. It’s more leaf green than emerald, fashionably faded. As I drank my cappucinno I heard Hugo banging away at the Alligator’s tail for a while. He didn’t do it for long though. Maybe it was the greyness of the evening. Maybe his heart wasn’t in it.
At nightfall I walked out into the garden. I picked up De Kooning and together we peeked over into Hugo’s world at twilight gleaming on the moose and the henge. At about nine thirty two bats appeared over his pond, flying without rest in apparently erratic trajectories.
‘What sort do you think they are?’ I said. ‘Pipistrelles? And what do you think of the thesis that modernity and existential alienation are inseparable? Do you think we’ve lost forever a world we could call home?’
We watched the bats and the solar lights shone in the gloom.
twenty three clocks that will never chime
I came in from work tonight at about quarter to six. Margaret wasn’t in. I wandered through the house looking for De Kooning.
We have twenty three stopped clocks dispersed throughout the house, the legacy of the demise of The Ticktock Two. Viennas, Black Forest Cuckoos, Napoleon and Westminster chimes, a Louis XVI mantel, eight day Carriages, a Lantern, a Banjo, an American Steeple . . . They arrived one after another, not one of them ever to tick or chime again, not even once. In time, if that expression can be properly used here, each of them found a place on a shelf, a mantel, a wall or a table, and there they have remained, dumb witnesses to Zeno’s negligence.
It wasn’t until after the fall of The Ticktock Two that Margaret began to take an interest in the time that each clock told. Until then each clock had just shown whatever time it happened to be stopped at. But one day this struck Margaret as a grievous and unbearable disorder. Clocks are either right or wrong, she said, and since they are all to be wrong most of the time it was best that when they are right they are all right together. She set all twenty three clocks to read twenty past seven, because she said this was her very favourite time. She felt this unanimity also promoted an enhanced sense of well being in the house, by nullifying the subliminal experience of being forever adrift in a chaotic arcade of colliding hours. She had read somewhere that this kind of dislocation was particularly harmful to the soul.
After about three months or so Margaret came in one evening and reset all the clocks to six o’clock. She said she did this for aesthetic reasons as she had come to see that the dynamic imbalance of the hands at twenty past seven would never allow the mind to rest. The pure verticals of the hour of six, on the other hand, had a serene and grounding effect.
About four weeks ago Margaret grew tired of both serenity and unanimity. She reset the clocks to represent the inevitable temporal succession, deciding upon a strict regularity in the cyclical pattern of change. She set one single clock in the house either at the hour or at half past the hour for each of the hours from twelve o’clock to eleven thirty. This way two clocks would be sure to be right in every single hour of the day. Except, that is, between three and four. Margaret decided that no clock should be set at three thirty, not only because she would have needed one more clock to achieve full continuity, but also because she had always particularly disliked the hour between three and four. She believes it is the most unlucky part of the day.
When I came in tonight I noticed there had been another change: every single clock is now set at ten to two. I found De Kooning curled up on the bed. He got up and stretched and we went back down to the kitchen.
I had a tin of carrot and butter bean soup followed by honey yoghurt. I went out for a walk through the streets. I made my way down to the South Harbour and came back up Newsham Road and through the Isabella. It was dull and drizzling and there was almost no-one round. When I got back Margaret was in. She had been to Brenda’s. She’d had tea there. They had agreed on some initial stock for their new enterprise together. For a moment the spectre of arriving home one night to find eternally immovable deployments of tartan or fluffy pink slippers in every room crossed my mind.
‘I’ve changed the clocks,’ she said.
‘Have you?’ I replied. ‘Oh, yes, I see: it’s ten past ten.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s ten to two, actually.’
‘Is it because you like the ambiguity?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not. No, it’s because Brenda has advised me that ten to two is a very powerful and propitious time to have on a clock face. Look at it: it’s uplifting and empowering. See how the hands remind you of arms uplifted to the sky. Ten to two is the time of openness, readiness and hope. It is a very spiritual time.’
I went into the conservatory. The light was grey and flat. I thought I might begin a new painting. I thought I might use vermillion, burnt sienna and Prussian blue. I thought I might use a broad flat brush on a dark ground.
yammering 