A cup, a chair, the ceiling

Friday Fragment #32

There are items in a house to which we form an attachment, which acquire a certain status. It is the presence of such items that helps to soften the language of nouns that we use, that enables a house to become a home. In my first childhood home, there were objects that would absolutely overwhelm me today by their association to a life now firmly rooted and so somewhat lost in the past. The orange plastic cup, into which my father used to piss and expectorate: a receptacle of illness and infirmity. How could one wish to see such a thing again? The red rounded-back wooden armchair, one of so many hand-me-down bits of furniture, in which I can picture my mother, sleeping. But where one day she was also awake: with a smile, wearing sunglasses, lit by the flash of a camera held by my brother, captured on film, developed into a rare photographic print. The print no longer remains, and the memory of it is gripped more loosely with each passing year. A cup, a chair, a slatted stool, a mahogany hair brush, a Philips convection heater. Two mirrors, one wide and heavy, edges bevelled which hung from a thick metal chain; one circular, scratched ochre-buttercup-yellow paint peeling away from filigree metal. Rarely one thing that matched with another, but each finding commonality with its neighbour via the attentions of a mother and her three sons – each fitting in where it was put, each providing only function. But verbs, like nouns, can be softened too, familiarity can eventually make comfort out of function. The poet Paul Éluard once wrote, Farewell Sadness / Hello Sadness / You are inscribed in the lines on the ceiling. We find sadness and love in things which have no right to retain such powerful emotions, as though we had carefully planted such feelings underneath that cup, wedged them tight between the sprung seat and frame of the chair, etched them gently into the bare plaster just above the coving, where the headlights of passing cars would dance via refraction through the bedroom window, and mesmerise two twin boys, unable to sleep. The cup, that chair, that ceiling and emotions, intense enough to believe that we might almost one day be capable of lifting, prising or brushing against those objects once again.

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