That deeper gust of longing

Dreamt last night that I was in an old hotel on the banks of a  grey lake, standing in the passage lined with coats hung from wrought-iron butcher’s hooks, trying to overhear a conversation between Marcel Proust and  his mother who were in an adjoining  room with the door nearly closed. It was hard to hear what was being said because someone in the hotel kitchen at the end of the passage was chopping lengths of taro and cucumber with a  blunt knife, thudding down on the  wooden chopping board like a crazed metronome. Proust’s mother was speaking English with a  French accent and sighing heavily between sentences. Then a slim white cat with grey eyes sauntered into the  passage and began to wind around my calves,  purring loudly, so I gave up trying to eavesdrop.

How Proustian! How indicative of a lack of sustained focus, my inattentiveness, trying to  take in three different scenes and sounds all at once. Last night I settled down by lamplight  to go on with the first volume of Proust (Swann’s Way) and after a few  moments I got up and went over to a bookcase, took down a Claudine novel by  Colette and  then Lyndall Gordon writing about  the women around Henry James. Then I began thinking about the 19th-century hedonistic nomad Isabelle Eberhardt who  escapes  respectability in Switzerland to become a  depraved cross-dressing kif-smoker and wanderer in North Africa, to be drowned in a  flash flood at the age of 27. And all the time, piling up books next to my  armchair,  I was wondering about intense and claustrophobic family relationships, how we flee them and  yet cannot forget or  let go of them even from continents away. Forgiveness can be a  fairly simple matter compared to forgetting.

So then I put all the books aside, lay down, turned off the light and fell asleep.

Later this week there will be a funeral, the death of someone who had come to stay in the village and  found himself cheated of time. Passing from the hallucinatory twilight of  morphine into coma and then death, slipping away as the dying so often do, when  family had  left him briefly, the anxious beloved faces turning away, the respite from their grief perhaps. Time to slip away..

From Anne Carson’s poem Wildly Constant

Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.
Before leaving the library
I turn off the lights.

The glaciers go dark.

Cotoneaster and  pyracanthus berries turning a vivid orange and scarlet,  signs of autumn on the horizon. My fluffy little white  dog (Chloe)  is moulting in feathery  clumps that roll along the  floor like  dusty  pale moths. On my desk, there is neatly stacked piles of completed work. Reference material to be  stored away or returned, drafts that can be thrown out, copies of submitted final MSS. Now I am free to begin all over again, a new project, another  pleasure that will become ordeal soon enough. For now, the relief of empty space.

Interesting if controversial article found here in New Republic on  whether or not rehab works. Oddly conflated with 12-Step programs and the efficacy of AA, but raising a few penetrating questions.

“The idea of changing the life course for people with severe, recurrent forms of addiction through a time-limited intensive transformative rehab is a fatally flawed relic of ancient times. What other chronic disorder do we treat that way?”

Ilse Bing Chair on the Champs Elysees 1931

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