Rooms

"We cover the universe with drawings we have lived" - Gaston Bachelard

There is a little game played by cog-psycho disciples which is designed to get you thinking about cognitive load. It goes like this: think of the house you grew up in, count the windows and, at the same time, hum the theme of your favourite TV show. The objective is to illustrate the difficulty of balancing different thought processes simultaneously. It's a valid exercise, but what the architects of this 'game' don't realise is that there is another process being channelled at the same time which involves the part of my brain that is concerned with being uncool and cogitating over which tune to hum. At the risk of being uncool, what should it be? Breaking Bad or The Sopranos? Unfortunately, just like the moment in Ghostbusters when Stantz conjures up Mr Stay-Puft, I was unable to separate the imagined space of my council house semi from the memories that inhabits its mind-rooms; suddenly, from the phantoms of the past, Mike Post's theme tune to Hill Street Blues began to play in the jukebox of my mind. If it wasn't Hill Street Blues, then it would have been the bob-along simplicity of the theme from Soap. So no Twin Peaks or Red Dwarf - the urge to be 'cool' was swamped by other associations, and the rational part of my brain simply surrendered to the onslaught of memory. 

The memories evoked by rooms and by the dwelling places of our youth is entwined by the experiences therein. In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard talks of topoanalysis, which is "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives" and that memories of our houses, our homes, "[furnish] us dispersed images and a body of images". I am unable to think about the childhood home without this onslaught of images; the floodgates of the mind are rent asunder, splintered, by these spaces of the past and the torrent of memory rushes in: "And of all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us". 

I've been reading Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Not a Novel' and in one of the essays therein, 'Literary Role Models', she writes about the texts that have affected her, tales of transformations she has read in Grimm, Hoffmann and Ovid, for example. What is interesting is that, in may instances, she does not go into great depth about the tales themselves apart from the odd quotation here or image there. Much of what she discusses is sparse paraphrase, key moments. What I enjoy about this essay is that way that it skips across different stories, books, musical pieces: she attempts to catch the 'mood' of the thing rather than its reality. The fact that she recalls images ("a tress of long, strawberry-blonde hair that flies through the room" in one of Maupassant's short stories, for example) fills me with some reassurances. I who sometimes forget the details of a book even as I put it back on the shelf!

"Those are images that I absorbed through the language, but language was only the instrument that transferred then from one head to another, what arrived in my head and remained there was the image, the force or feeling, the shock ... Some books haven't left any concrete turns of phrase in my memory, I nay have even forgotten the authors, but they have taken hold of me, they live on to this day in my feelings, in my eyes, in my ears" (Not a Novel, p.53).

Indeed, just as the rooms in my childhood home on the Wrens Nest estate evoke the sound of Mike Post, so the house of words that we inhabit for a while leave us with their residual mood, the ghost of a scent, a tangential event, a place ...

I remember a book entitled 'The Ghost Diviners' - I don't recall the author and don't want to Google it either, it's irrelevant to this piece - but I do recall fragments of the cover image, two children, seated on the ground, perhaps a spectral face looming over them. I remember it was a hardback book that I borrowed from Dudley Central Library: I am unable to remember much of the story although I do remember the central idea of two children 'divining' for ghosts and that I was moved to have a go at this myself. 

And libraries. I remember, as a child, visting the library every week, and even now the scent of books, the lignin, cellulose, decaying paper, fills the air around me as I write. An early teenager, borrowing The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Invisible Man from the library. Everyman Classics editions - I can see the yellowed edges of the pages even now. Were the covers pale blue or grey? With the former, I can recall the tiny print, the fine paper, the sense of being part of something eternal, the empathy for Quasimodo, unrequited love. And Wells' tale? I've read it again since then, but from that first reading I recall being fascinated by the scene when the narrator describes the processes and experiments that lead to his scientific breakthrough. The effects of water on matter and, somehow, how it affects the transparancy of solids, and how I experimented with paper under a running tap. I am no scientist. 

I remember Leon Garfield's faux-Dickensian novels - Smith, The Ghost Downstairs, The Devil in the Fog - and being drawn into a world of spectral mists, London rooftops and uncertain lineage ...

I possessed a Bancroft classics edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. As a young boy, not even ten years old I'd imagine, I wrestled with the words, words such as 'incident' that seemed ubiquitous in the contents page, but more than anything I recall the frontispiece image of a top-hatted man leaping over railings, the sort you see outside a house in Harley Street, an image I copied time and time again in my sketch books. Later, as an adult, I found a copy of the book in a charity shop, and I am transported back to the rooms of my childhood. 

I found solace and escape in these books (and many others - why, even now, Alfred Hitchcock's 'Three Investigators' comes to mind and then the book people coming to school, ordering books, waiting ages for them to arrive...). I recall the rooms I read them in, the light falling through the windows as I turned the pages. Often, the television was on, entertaining others in the room (I had no 'room of my own') but I closed myself off from that world to enter another. 

And even now, as I inhabit these spots of time, I am able to see how lonely I must have been, or perhaps how anti-social! An invisible man, out of place, a dreamer, a boy of uncertain past, a dual personality. I am a ghost diviner, searching the landscape for a presence and some meaning. 

Even as I walk through the rooms of the memory-house I find the remnants of the past wrapped in ink and paper. And all along they tried to tell me something.