Gaps between

Friday Fragment #3

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a proposal, below, for the book that I’ve been trying to arrange in my mind for more than twenty years. Once done, it felt possible to begin shaping that book onto page. I’ve given it a working title: Gaps Between. The bulk of the work that writing such a book will entail is still ahead of me, but I am once again moving towards that aim. If you connect with anything below, or feel that you would like to read more, I’d love to hear from you via comment, message or mail.

I wish to write about the relationship between a mother and her son and how it is experienced through the spaces that we confine ourselves to, and to search also the emotional and existential spaces that exist between those two people through a recollection of things lived, seen and spoken. It will be an essay that will explore both the physical and the metaphysical – what we perceive through both the senses and the mind. I wish to explain the poetics of these spaces: between one floor and another, between a room and a hallway, between a chair and a door. And I wish to describe also the gap between language, feeling and the faith that we store in the memories we retain of these spaces. It is a book about the objects that collect in these areas and the hold that they exercise over us: the netted view out through the window from the chair in the corner of her bedroom. But also the way an elbow plants into the arm of a chair, akin to the geographical melancholy that John Berger once expressed as ‘the place where your finger fits; where your foot rests, turned outwards’. It’s also the cold darkness of the stone step leading down into a childhood pantry, a keyhole brushed by squinted eye, the intimacy and neglect found in a sideboard drawer, the sour happiness aroused by a metal box of clothes buttons, the fluids which leak and spread beneath cracked linoleum... the sadness ‘inscribed in the lines of the ceiling’. I plan to explore a geography of house and home, weaving the ideas of artists and thinkers who have helped to shape my perception in between the biographical vignettes of a life lived. What do these spaces mean to us? How do we live inside and outside of them; within them and without them? And how do the spaces we inhabit bond one life so powerfully to another? I hope to draw an outline for these many various aspects of interior, but give to them their colour too, to create, what the writer and literary critic Jean Paulhan described many years ago as ‘a space which the heart feels’.

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