Looking Back
Amelia Pagram
I can’t put my finger on the tension, she is the fairy whisked away into blades of grass that you could have sworn you saw a rustle in.
I can’t put my finger on the tension, she is the fairy whisked away into blades of grass that you could have sworn you saw a rustle in.
Chiesa di San Lorenzo, WW11.
Kammerstein, Germany, 2022
(Population: 800)
She was best described as a dignified woman. It was hard for her to speak, as she didn’t have very good English, but she was always listening, a gentle smile playing up the corners of her mouth, creasing the wrinkles that tell a story of many years of happiness. At attention. You can tell a lot about the kind of life somebody has lived from their wrinkles. I tried my best to include her by mirroring that smile back to her, a silent acknowledgement, bridging the space between us. Cup of tea on the lips, sitting on the bench with backs on the wall heater, knitted slipper-socks on. She made plenty of pairs. After all the pages were read and the cheese was sliced for dinner, the spokes of wood that weave in choreographed pattern are the best dance partner for an old woman. Arthritis joints told the piano no, and eventually the keys forgot their sound. Contact becomes a distorted echo, and the maple begs for rest, creaking joints up the stairs every morning is hard labour.
the passing of a moment,
caught for a second longer
atmospheric ripple
and
She tells herself if the words stay locked in the prison of her mind that they don’t exist, you can create your own reality, stare at yourself and practice mindfulness, go to church every Sunday, pick your flaws apart, buy a pack of cards with An Inspirational Quote For Every Day of the Month, paint out the grey hairs in your bathroom with packet dye so you get that job and brush aside the ones that fell out into the corner, clean them up when the pile gets big enough to notice. Sweep them under the rug until you trip on the bump and when you fall your ankle is just as twisted as your mind and then you’re too old, too tired, and there’s no more left to give.
He was the spriteliest 82-year-old man I had ever met. When he spoke in his mother tongue, the words splattered out of him, German inflections filling the sound of your ears. You could tell he still remembered what it felt like to be a small child, to embrace enthusiasm. The world never snuffed that out of him. His mind was still full of clarity. He told me a lot about how to do the thinking, how to translate the ideas out of the thinking and into the words. He reminded me of Santa Claus, carrying the baggage of so many years of stories. His broken English no barrier for his life force. Each gift a tale of a different time, passing on the knowledge, the how of things.
Fleeting in its return
a glance and nothing more
until it comes around again
and
The thinking might be where the tension lies between myself and the writing, the moment of interest. It’s all about the tension, the tension is what people want to read. I just can’t put my finger on the tension, she is the fairy whisked away into blades of grass that you could have sworn you saw a rustle in, she’s gone. I want to be a writer, but I can’t find the time. She disappears into the microfibre cloth I use to wipe the stove; she is the stubborn sesame seed chasing me around and around the grate. I’m making a living and the making is all the living I’m doing.
Birds gather on the windowsill; kettle steams the room, and the condensation thickens. It’s an escape from the frosty winter for little birds struggling to start their days, their shadows fade and flit the more the kettle boils and the window condensation is a heater for their small taught bodies. They want to come inside and taste the coffee that she filters for him every morning. It is his responsibility to unlock the doors to the church and light the candles at 6am sharp, ready for any services they might hold that day or simply to breathe life into the old structure - for the townspeople to see community reflected in the shadow. In the evening he will return and blow out the candles, lock the doors, and ensure everything is orderly. Every morning and night, dawn kissing the snow boots that trade out for the slipper-socks she knitted for him, a territorial exchange. Coming home to her, 56 years of marriage, a hello and goodbye never missed. Complacency was long lost to them, they beat it down the postcard hill and it rolled in the door of a newlywed couple, festering in the corner until it became big enough to notice, for tears to shed over.
rain falls until sun shines
evaporate and rise
rise and fall again
and
It’s the waking up and going to sleep of it, the start and end of it but there is always another start, another end, start and end, they are in a disposition of simply being, they are, they will, they continue to be. Complacency finds a home in between the blades of grass, the leaves buried beneath snow, the snail crushed, and the gaze of a man replying to emails on his lunch break, suit on and tie fastened. Come to the youth group behind the church where I grew up and we can all sit around in a big circle linking hands, say that’s how you reject modernity and embrace tradition and it’s the fingers interlocked with the girl beside me that shut the outside world away. Knuckle barrier works a charm. Hearing him get up to light the candles at the chime of bell I heard the work of community, religion bringing purpose to his life, religion bringing structure. He was in it on his own terms. Tradition works for him; it was made for him.
The house had been built by his grandfather and will remain a generational asset for many years to come. His 82 to her 73, they were nearing the end of their lives, there was already a discussion about who would come into the house next, who might next become implicated in this family cycle. Who will raise their next generation of children here, grow old and quietly traipse the woods, following an old forest trail around in modern-day pilgrimage, tracing steps. It’s a slow clutch with grief for the reward of an asset to accompany death, knuckles whiten with each year that passes, squeezing the vein.
around and around
touch many places
asphalt
and
The first time thinking about a thing I make the words go around and around and I’m spinning in my mind like a mirror, the words playing out like end credits that roll too fast and before I can grab onto a thought it gets lost in the linguistics, the poetics, how much I put myself into something, whether I want to put myself into it. Whether your eyes glaze over as the words merge into one and the letters turn into obsolete symbols, chiming vibration like a bell does to clock, the first is the only one that matters, echo the rest out of focus.
In the basement, the archives. Bookshelves floor to ceiling meticulously organised in white binder folders, some with names and some with years. It was his life’s work, the big project of recovering his family history. Tracing the lineage of relatives who migrated, had children in other countries, finding ways to identify people like a detective solving a crime, holding his magnifying glass up to find the truth of his blood, hammering the nail in on the right spot like a true expert. Showing us the photos that mattered, and the ones that didn’t. He was an artist with all that solitude, his embodied history, his creative practice was the one of routine preservation. His words knew that it was all about the tension, the tension in between himself and the words, the careful arrangement of images on the page.
tin roofs
brushing the roots of old trees
new soil old soil, time
and
There is a moment in my mind in between the thought and the feeling where the words lie. Trying to clutch that moment is trying to catch that fairy dancing around the circle of mushrooms in your garden, waiting for the right moment and its always gone, eluding, hiding from you. You must tell yourself that it will be there if you try hard enough, the alternative is that you reach your hand out and grab a blowfly, its thousand eyes staring back and reflecting every angle of your face like a satellite dish does to the earth and it’s so real, quivering in between your fingers, it makes you feel sick. Looking at the fly like there’s a hierarchy, a circle of life, like that’s not something we made up to feed superiority.
He took us to Nuremburg. An old man in his city is the best tour guide. We were in huge churches, gothic era, stained glass curving into colour patterns that had seen history move around them for many years, in time, through time. Choir sung us through the door and we sat on the pews to listen, the first time in many years I had felt that stiff back. He told us that the Chiesa di San Lorenzo was bombed during WW2 but was able to be built and restored over time. Almost everything inside the church was reduced to rubble, only the body of Christ remained, nails on the cross for eternity.
we are reduced
in consequences of
actions past
and
History repeats, reflects and we repeat, reflect, the world mirrors itself back to us and we are staring at a reflection of ourselves, reclaim the cycle but you must beat out the fossil fuel giants, burning footprint left a mark like a crater blocking the path, 30 metre drop that will kill you, land on your head, crack your skull. Holy nails don’t screw the head on. Sitting on the pew as a small child and I remembered the sound of echo chants, making circles around time, sound moves but people stay still under the arch of a cathedral, gothic architecture a guise. Father Greg invited my mum inside for a massage and he showed her his tantric sex books, we never went back to that church. He must have thought God was a woman.
Legless torso hoisted, poised on the beam of the cross, only his head, and right arm remained. Elbow to wrist to the joint of his finger pointing down the lineage of the Catholic church, one truth, Jesus raises his arm to Hitler in papal decree, geometric imagery becoming a religious experience, the stained glass a rejection of secularity, primary colour stains create static, cloud your vision, glass runs thicker than usual and you can’t see through it.