Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Happiness. Happiness is finding that you have an extra gas cylinder in your gas locker. Happiness this morning is finding an extra gas cylinder. I swear it is. It really is. I spend a lot of time finding objects that I had lost or forgotten about. There I go back in over the step. And what do I see in front of me? In the entrance to my boat.
but a very groggy hornet. Down the step I go. I need to attend to that. That's the second groggy hornet I have found this morning. It won't do. A drunk hornet on my boat. It's been very warm. I think yesterday it was 18 degrees Celsius and last night it was 14. And I went to bed with a cardigan on and I was too warm. But let me first deal with the hornet. I shall be back.
A reading life, a writing life, with writer and teacher Sally Bailey. So I dispatched the hornet by folding it inside one of my blue cotton cloths with nice ridges around the edges. They're like little tiny sails, my cloths I use to wipe my boat. I attached the hornet to my white, blue sail rather, my baby blue sail, and I folded it in to the sail.
He had no choice, he had to go in. Attached to my sail, I pushed him out the window, but he clung. He clung tenaciously and stubbornly. And there was a little fight between me and the Hornet for a while. Between the Hornet and me. So what I had to do was, I had to detach him from my cloth, my blue sail, my blue square, by, I'm afraid, bashing him rather, with a copy of Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters.
Thomas Bernhard: A devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men. For over 30 years, Regère, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, railing against contemporary society.
So, I shall call my hornet Reger and think of him as a music critic. And perhaps the music I make in my boat made him feel somewhat groggy. That's the second hornet I've had to dispatch by this method. I should write it up. I should write it up. How to rid yourself, I will write up my method.
of Hornet dispatching, but I have noticed that on the back of my copy of Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters, Thomas Bernhard the German writer, B-E-R-N, as in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, Hard, Thomas Bernhard, there is this quotation. "'I hate walking,' he says. "'It seems so pointless to me.'"
"I walk, and while I am walking, I keep thinking how I hate walking. I hate walking," he says. "It seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking, I keep thinking how I hate walking."
"Régère, the music critic who has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, railing against contemporary society, his fellow men, artists, the weather, even the state of public lavatrice." "I hate walking," he says. "It seems so pointless to me." Now, my thoughts are quite contrary to that of Régère. Quite contrary indeed.
and I wanted to think this morning a bit about my relationship to walking and objects. I have to walk now with a push scooter, and it's become an extension of my leg, my legs. My left leg is very weak, increasingly weak, as is my right arm and hand, but I've been wanting for some time to write about my scooter, my extra leg, my prosthetic limb, and so I'm going to share with you a few thoughts
A few thoughts on why I love walking and now why I love scooting. My blue steed, she hangs here against the wall. This is her sound out of the brass hooks that hold her in place to the side of my boat. There she goes. There she goes. The wheel hitting the side of my boat. The wooden rim. There she goes. She does rather swing about.
My metal scooter, my blue shiny metal scooter with rubber clasps, handles on each side. She has her own kind of percussion, her own kind of sound. Let me see if I can make her talk. Let me see. But first, all objects have a kind of soundscape. I think of it as percussion.
My scooter certainly does. Let me see if I can make her play. There may be a few awkward moments. She's shy and so is my right arm and hand. I may not be able to do this very well, make my scooter play, but on each side of the paddle at the bottom where I stand, there are two shiny knobs or screws, one vivid almost
peacock blue and the other silver and my task is to try and squeeze them both together with my one strong hand. Here they are and that is my scooter protesting. Bang, there she goes. There are many awkward sounds to this maneuver and I am going to have to put down the microphone so I
ask your forgiveness for the awkwardness of this choreography, but I want to try and convey to you how intimate my relationship now is with this blue metal paddle. It is a tiny little paddle that I stand on, my micro scooter, and without it I am nothing. I cannot walk, I cannot move very far at all. So there is one sound in particular which I want you to hear. Let me see if I can do this.
Bash, bash, bash, bash, bash. There will be some bashing. I expect you could hear that. That is the sound of her extended limb going down halfway, partway. And I really now do relate to this as an extension of my body life. There is a kind of visceral relationship we have. And when my scooter was taken from me, when I was flying to Italy for one of my book talks, I did go rather
mad in a sort of genteel English way when they refused to allow me to have my scooter on the plane inside the cabin. And I can hear myself still now saying, but that is my leg! That is my leg! And I have to say, it was quite a successful operation. The special assistance attendant went flying through the airport to find my scooter and to take it out of the hold-all queue. She was returned to me.
My faithful steed, made of metal, shiny silver and blue. And I am often telling my students, write about an object, grant the object consciousness, let it have a biography, a life, a history, a story, attach it to a pair of hands. Attach it to a pair of hands, watch those hands. Watch those hands. Mine are increasingly dry, dry, although I live in a damp environment.
and my right hand is increasingly weak and unreliable and I spend a great deal of time dropping objects and finding them again. This morning I was delighted to find my earphone charger. Yes, so I can surround myself in music, which is a kind of physic, a kind of medicine for me. And this morning as I was thinking about my relationship to objects and how often I'm losing things and finding them,
As Elizabeth Bishop, the great Canadian poet, speaks of in her poem One Art, The Art of Losing Things, you should read it. The art of finding things is a great joy, that extra cylinder of gas inside my gas locker, so neatly tied up with a chain. So neatly tied up with a chain. And now I'm thinking of a lady I used to care for many years ago when I was a student at a Scottish university.
I used to look after older people in my holidays. I was the only one in my group, my coterie, who worked through the holiday and even sometimes through some of the term and I would arrive back late, having read everything, and sped into my essay life, thinking of the older people I had left behind. I used to go and stay with them in their houses, their cottages. I was often, I remember, sent to Buckinghamshire, to a village outside of Amherst.
Born-end. B-O-U-R-N-E. Born. A word I use in Girl with Dove. My first coming of age story. I speak of Jane Eyre. Being born from and born to. Carried from this part to that. Born. Your place of origin. Born-end. And the lady I cared for was called Mrs. Moon. Mrs. Moon. I believe it was spelt M-O-U-G-N-E.
But I remembered her as being Mrs. Moon as in the spherical sphere in the sky. The moon. Another Elizabeth Bishop poem. Insomnia recalls the shape of the moon as a kind of other self. And Mrs. Moon had another self. She had a prosthetic limb. She had a prosthetic limb. A ghost of a limb. A limb that haunted her. There and not there. An artificial leg.
Her leg was off at the stump, top of her thigh. She used to tell me that she would go looking for her leg in her dreams, her waking dreams. Her phantom pain, her phantom limb, no, her pain was real. Phantom because it haunted her day and night. She was a patient and kind woman, and her relationship to life was pragmatic and cheerful.
She reminded me of Miss Marple because she used to have tea underneath the cedar tree in her garden with a good friend of hers who would come most afternoons when the sun was out and I thought of Jane Marple and Dolly Bantry which must have made me Mary the maid. I used to carry tea out across the lawn thinking of Miss Marple and Dolly. They were kind women. Miss... Mrs Moon.
Mrs. Moon and me, Mary the maid. And when I go out on my blue scooter, I think of Mrs. Moon, who was not fortunate enough to have found the kind of locomotion that I have found. She had a wheelchair, and I pushed her, and she never complained. And I think now of that wheelchair, and I can hear the sound of it rattling away across the pavement.
Complaining. The wheelchair itself, not Mrs Moon. A metal thing. A rattling metal thing, ungainly and awkward and rude. Unyielding, ungiving as I pushed her up over the pavement. To go to the butchers and the greengrocers and the bakers. It was that kind of life. It was that kind of place. And you see how far you can travel just through an object? Association.
Association. It's what William Hazlitt, the English essayist and critic and writer, he did everything, writes of again and again. By sympathy, by power of the imagination, you can travel far. Backwards or forwards or just an inch away if you wish to. To my scooter hanging on the wall, it's a struggle. Sometimes to fold her down or open her up. She's an ungainly moth. A metal moth.
who longs to fly. Thank you for listening to A Reading Life, A Writing Life. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please like it, give us a review, or mention us to friends or on social media. Thank you.