Wrestling with Shadows
The external prompt – a voice, an image, a texture – may be fleeting but what sustains it is personal reconstruction. The weave of specific detail is as fundamental to the sanctity of recollection as it is to the novelist. The more intricate, the more convincing. The body is memory’s vault, the imagination where it comes out to play. The power it exerts lies partly in its unbidden re-emergence – immediate, unanticipated – putting it beyond questions of authenticity. Involuntary becomes synonymous with true. But once the prompt sends or pulls us back and we slip through the open door, do we become a part of the mental image or merely an observer? Or to put it another way, whose eyes are we looking through? The reader, writer, and the subject, caught by what a friend of mine calls ‘the ghosts in the basement’, are conjoined in this process.
An essay by Miranda Gold.
A Drive to the Sea
‘But I also think,’ she says, spilling a few drops of coffee on the tablecloth as she fills up my cup, ‘that birds express things about being human. They are deeply embedded metaphors about our longing, our longing to escape, and our gravity and physicality.’ As she speaks, she closes her eyes again and her mouth tightens in deep thought. ‘Because they can fly,’ I reply, ‘and we can’t.’ She opens her eyes again and smiles. ‘Yes, in part, because they can fly.’ I lean back in my chair, yawning and stretching my hands out behind me and then they touch warm fabric and I lurch forwards. I’m not sure what I thought it was or why it frightened me. Katrina laughs and brings her mug down on the table. ‘Sorry,’ she says, as though she really means it. ‘My electricals are very weird in this house.’
On corncrakes and poetry, by Patrick Galbraith