Thursday 21 July 2011

memory space.

It is genuinely mind-boggling and entirely unsettling when you happen upon an empty site in the city and start wondering where you might be until it dawns on you that this is the space once occupied by a building that contained your rawest experience. I'm sure this sounds unnecessarily hyperbolic and indulgent but - and I divulge to make my point - I speak of the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street, where I spent weeks at the age of 18, numb in a waiting room, waiting for my brother to die, or for a miracle to happen. Incredibly luckily it was the latter, but those harshly lit spaces, corridors, lifts, wards, windowpanes, the chapel; these were the built containers of his sickness, our sickness, suspended and ended time, numb tears.

This massive, red brick, monumental and endless building became my reluctant home. The spaces are etched in to my life; they stick to me like glue. Of course I never wanted to return there, but having it all removed without my knowledge, I feel as if reality and history have vanished - did it really happen if the place it occurred in no longer exists? I stumbled upon the new, empty, alien space and slowly realising where I was and what had been removed completely destabilised me. Its absence renders both the place and memory dream-like. It also feels as if the very ground has eaten up the walls and all their stories, consuming the bad and good until invisible. And now what? Another luxury block of flats I suppose?

I have always felt that spaces have characters, but in some kind of earthly impossibility, it is as if a space ceases to be - a black hole removes the very fabric of reality, just to replace it with a new space, for a new time.

But this is the city, and this is what happens. Always shifting, renewing, for better or worse.


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22 July: Today, by chance, I opened a John Berger book I've had for 2 years, unread. I came across the following.

"To this human ambiguity of the visible one then has to add the visual experience of absence, whereby we no longer see what we saw. We face a disappearance. And a struggle ensues to prevent what has disappeared, what has become invisible, falling into the negation of the unseen, defying our existence."

Far more eloquent than me, John.

1 comment:

  1. Hi - Phoebe here (in fact, i'm posting this under the name of a blog I started ages ago and never did anything to, but it's appropriately named...anyway...) Franny, this is a great blog - I like it muchly. Also, have you read any Peter Ackroyd? I know he's a strange moustachio-ed and sweaty chap but all of his writing - and, most interestingly, his novels - dwells on this idea, only turned on its head: he suggests that no matter how relentless the shifting landscape of an area may seem to the eye, the memories that are there - either stamped on lifeless stone or seemingly erased with the raising of a new block of flats - are the hauntings, the layers of light and shade, that lend a place its character. And this is not merely aesthetic - it is contagious, and exerts itself very actively on the characters in the books. The rest is all, as it were, cosmetic. I refer you, in particular, to Hawksmoor. It's a strange book, but very good on this kind of palimpsestic, dream/city-scape that you talk about. So is the House of Doctor Dee, another Ackroyd. Both flit mainly around Clerkenwell and Spitalfields kind of areas. Over and out, and keep blogging! x

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