List of Soft Things
Pillow Scarf
her hands Cushion Blind bath
Duvet Hat Soap
Carpet Glove Bubble
Curtain Breakfast Eyes
Flower Egg Shade
Dressing Gown Yawn Books
Skin Cat Tea
Hair Morning Madeleine
Linen Tissue Cake
Sock Shower Slippers
Hand Mum Blanket
Bum Mum Death
Mum
List of Hard Things
Knife Cupboard corner Nail
Tap Fork Stair
Window pane Door handle Screw
Ceiling Tape Plate Mug Tile Fireplace
Toilet Brick Plaster
Wire Lightbulb Kettle Doorframe Aerial Telephone
Beam Chimney Cord
Steel grating Razor Mirror
Toilet seat Sink Drain
Pipe Hammer Spoon Scissors Bracket Window sill
Shelf Birdcage Bells
Radiator Fan Cat flap
Alarm clock Stool Fish tank
Television Videotape Cassette
Glass Tweezer
Nail clipper Needle Coal
Wood Furnace Oven Grill Stove Fridge
Freezer Larder Your stare
Silence Slamming door
The other side of the bed
The dark Boiler The future The past Money Outside
Boredom Scraped knees Scaffolding
Concussion Teeth Fuck off
Wheels
I would hear the sound of wheels,
plastic wheels over wood
wheels which would crack
and squeal on the cracks;
the sounds of which would
suggest a slow train’s haul
through a station, as I stood,
the unstopping carriages,
metal caravans, passing, past:
I am standing still at the station
and hear the sound of wheels
on wood, which whistle
on the cracks, and at my back
as the train hauls through
that whole yellow wall
Falls through itself into
The sound of the wheels wheeling
me through corridors to the last
prayer, wheeling me out a door
to be looked over, washed, welcomed
away for the last breath; this tiny,
broken train at my feet, wheels
creaking time to a terminus.
Reflections on Dramaturgy and Writing
Home
When I started trying to write about home a year and a half ago, I could not separate myself from a sense of rupture. Not to deny the warmer memories of a home nurtured in the arms, sofa pillows and pasta of my mother, or the more recent swarm of my brothers around the dinner table but two of the strongest brushstrokes in my personal history of home are the most disruptive:
- cuddling my crying mother on a couch when I would have been 2 or 3 years old
- the last time my father would have picked me out of my cot before he left.
To make matters more confusing, two weeks ago I discovered that all memories from before the age of 4 are imaginary, which means these key personal memories are, in fact, a fabrication.
Why is this rupture at the root of my sense of home? I was lucky to grow up in a home where my mum was effusive with affection, where sweetness, pleasure, feeling, dream and our tiny pagan family survived.
But I cannot help that something still hurts, remains entangled or lost, and that this disruptive cocktail has led to a spirit of disruption and imbalance in my inner representation of home. Pain, at least, is not boring. Nor was my childhood home.
Who else had such a talkative home as I had? Even the walls had tongues.
Early on I learnt that everything could speak, and therefore that I could speak to everything. Everything had a name: fish, cat, dog, car, garden, house, toys, bedroom became Splodge, Kevin, Sam, Daisy, Samantha, Fabby, John, George. Everything was animate; the house and its contents was a living, breathing organism, a personality even, a character in our lives.
My mother created this: she is a mutterer, and speaks to everything around her as if it could hear and understand her. I still often gripe that the dogs have as much say in the routine running of her house as the humans. She is whispering, mumbling, sighing, laughing, groaning and grumbling all the time and we are all pulled into this; and so it has always felt with my childhood house, incessantly speaking whether in silence or in the constant background sound of the radio or television.
All of this is mottled, not lucid but associative, shifting from one sense, one scene, one shaft of morning light in the kitchen to another.
‘The good lord has not drawn the world with continuous lines: with a light hand, he has sketched it in dots, like Seurat.’
What is my sense of my mother tongue?
As an uninterrupted constantly disrupted cascade; as sounds and meaningless mumbling; as constant reaction; as gripe; as sigh; as sweet whispers to a loved dog. Mum speaks German and French no longer fluently but as the details and borders to her babble: vati, mutti, on y va, ich liebe dich, merci… so the sounds of other languages have always been more present than their meanings, and even in their nonsense they have carried sweetness.
Home has been a fragmented, constructed and estranging topic since I was a kid, when I spent a lot of time shuttling between different ones but at the centre there are trigger details which lead to sensations which - for the sake of this reflection at least - I will call home.
The smell of the dust in the pillows of our living-room couch and its warm brown, green and red patterning as I buried myself into it day after day. The wooden door leading from the kitchen to the garden where aprons, towels and some nondescript black bells hung. The wooden kitchen table, its lean, its creak, mum’s stir-fry on its mottled place mats, the candle wax’s indelible stains. The hall way I played out (and won) countless football and rugby matches. The bedroom where I sprayed my anger, where I hid, smoked, read, wrote and (eventually) lost my virginity.
These are my details, though. What about our details?
What common reference points do we share?
Is my kitchen table open to you?
Is breakfast?
By searching to essentialize the components of home and family, I have stripped back certain aspects of the personalities of the sense of homes; sometimes the only way I can dig into this is to bring another skeletal language to the fore.
Like the list of soft things.
Pillow
Bath soap
Yawn
Tissue
Her hands
Blanket
Sock
Mum
Mum
Mum
One of the most effective means of evoking home - I have discovered - is listing its parts. Lists are good at holding all the necessary information and staying open to the listener or reader, giving little regarding the opinion or sentiment of a writer or speaker. They are skeletal poems, collages with holes for people to piece the parts together. In its most essential form it’s just a collection of things that we think we need to remember.
These parts can trigger feelings and images which give rise to memories of home, whilst keeping the construction as open as possible for an audience or reader to fill up with their own details. Leaving things open has been an essential part of this process, which began as an intimate and personal one: open to focus, open to interpretation, open to imagination and reason.
A list of hard things
Nail
The dark
Toilet
Wire
Door
Radiator
Fuck off
Knife
Mirror
Plastic Bag
Brick
The wider approach to this project, which is about our relationship to objects as memento mori, souvenirs of grief, distractions from existential fears and absurd, beautiful playthings, has been to collect: to amass a host of things and reconstruct our relationships to them in a a poetic space.
Home is the birthplace of poetry in that is the space to daydream (Bachelard), where our sense of childhood and family bleeds through subconsciously from our pasts. The sounds whispered into our ears as children reproduce themselves through us as we mature (or don’t) just as the things that surround us as children morph into the attachments we form as adults: this book, that cup, those spices, these chairs.
We have sought to bring all these things to bear. One after the other. Whether it’s a memory of grandma, a list of soft things or the root of the word home, these lists bring us to our own kinds of meaning in this recreated childhood home, reliving personal griefs, echoing the repetitive, insistent, relentless sounds and words and things and feelings of the piece.
The sound of the wheels wheeling
me through corridors to the last
prayer, wheeling me out a door
to be looked over, washed, welcomed
away for the last breath; this tiny,
broken train at my feet, wheels
creaking time to a terminus.