In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  But the house persists, of course, as something lost, as the image of an intimacy to which we can never return. For all Bachelard’s enraptured descriptions of the spaces of childhood – the corners, doorways, cabinets and drawers in which the child finds a paradoxically open field in which to exercise his sense of the imaginative vastness of things – in the end we are banished from this idyllic enclosure and discover ourselves adrift, still tied to its centrifugal centre by the threads of recollection. It is not only a matter of nostalgia, of the longing to return. The desire for home, writes Bachelard, is an urge to fulfil its lost promise:

  why were we so quickly sated with the happiness of living in the old house? Why did we not prolong those fleeting hours? In that reality something more than reality was lacking. We did not dream enough in that house. And since it must be recaptured by means of daydreams, liaison is hard to establish. Our memories are encumbered by facts. Beyond the recollections we continually hark back to, we should like to relive our suppressed impressions and the dreams that made us believe in happiness.

  The very fact that the house has protected our most unworldly sense of ourselves is what ensures that it now seems utterly lost.

  I have the impression that Gaston Bachelard was a happy, if ruminative, child. Everything in his book circles around this vision of childhood daydreaming as a promise of happiness: hours spent sensing oneself at the heart of a universe bordered by the walls of the house, dreaming the rationed space of youth into the plenitude, the open plains, of the future. But while I recognize with Bachelard that the object of childhood memory is exactly this state of reflection, rather than the lucid depiction of datable events, the phenomenon which I am trying to track through the rooms of my childhood is more obscure and closer, perhaps, to that described by the critic Gabriel Josipovici in his book Touch. In a chapter devoted to the simple sensation of being in a room, Josipovici sketches the outline of a state of mind that seems to me to grasp much more accurately the child’s solitary experience:

  it is the condition of knowing that one is alive but not being able to feel it, of feeling rather that there is life but it is elsewhere and that one is somehow cut off from it. That vague unfocussed longing, which feels as if it would be appeased by the touch of another, is so frustrating precisely because it seems as though so little is required to bring it to fulfilment, yet that little is nothing less than everything.

  It is as if, in the house of my childhood, those moments, which hover somewhere between Bachelard’s intimate immensity and Josipovici’s bereft ache, have been frozen into tableaux which it is the task of the recollecting adult to breathe on and bring to some warmth of movement and significance. But they seem to want to persist in their icy state, as if their thawing into recognizable events and chronologically articulate histories would set in motion a process of decay which memory has halted. ‘In its countless alveoli,’ writes Bachelard, ‘space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.’ Memory is time’s frozen breath; locked in the secret spaces of the past like the last breath of an icebound explorer, it records an instant which the historical rescue team, arriving far too late, can only dissipate in legend and surmise: ‘to localize memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history’.

  ¶ Subsidence

  In a photograph taken in the spring of 2001, I am standing on the pavement outside the house, for the first time since I left eight years earlier. I have no intention of disturbing the silence of those years by knocking at the door and startling the current inhabitants of the house with my doleful reminiscences of the home which is no longer mine. In the intervening years, I have not only purposely avoided the house itself (I allowed myself no reason to go there) but have in fact steered clear of the whole district, out of a relief to be rid of the memories that still hovered around it (not to speak of those tangible relics that might have accosted me had I had an opportunity to actually go inside), and from a barely acknowledged guilt at having abandoned it in the first place. On the afternoon which this photograph records, it had seemed for the first time a journey which I might make casually, without much of a sense of what it was that I was going back to. It was only later, looking at the snapshot, in which I stood for a few seconds in front of the crumbling wall, that I began to see there something of what I had left behind.

  Not much has changed, and yet the house looks dramatically different. The windows have been replaced, the metal frames (which had seemed so modern only a decade before) giving way to apparently sturdier white plastic. So jarring is this addition to the façade, so glaringly at odds with the still decrepit pebble-dash of the walls, that it looks as though the house has been sealed up at all its openings. A new door – with a white plastic frame even thicker than those of the windows – has turned the shallow porch into an airlock between the house and the garden. (In the photograph, I cannot tell if the garden is still there or whether the tarmac, which looks new, now stretches over the whole area in front of the house.) Behind its glass, barely visible above the glare of the camera’s inadvertent and unnecessary flash, I can make out the chrome mailbox, from which the door handle has vanished. The handle, I recall, had a habit of jerking loose at one trunnioned end as I pulled the door shut, and it seems that the house’s new inhabitants have not worked out how to jam it back into place (or have tired of bending the metal into shape again). Other details have simply vanished: the wrought-iron gate has been removed, leaving the house bereft of the third patch of colour which once brightened its dull frontage. The other two – the front door and an identically green-painted door to the narrow passageway at the side – have conspicuously not been refreshed since I left.

  A burglar alarm has been added to the façade of the house. I imagine myself breaking in and wandering through the empty rooms in search of some evidence of my prior presence, some relic to steal from the present and take back to the past. And I remember that a couple of days after my father died, I was woken in the middle of the night by a sound that could only have come from downstairs, at the other side of the house. Somebody was moving about there, stumbling in the dark and trying the handle of the sitting room door. There was enough light in the bedroom to know that Paul was asleep and had heard nothing. But across the landing, I heard Kevin, whose room was directly above the sound of the intruders, moving towards his door. I decided immediately that I would stir from my bed only if I heard a footstep on the stairs, or if Kevin came out on to the landing. Minutes later, a loud crash from the sitting room confirmed that the house was being burgled, and I remember clearly that I thought: they can do what they like, just don’t come upstairs. Eventually, I fell back asleep, and had forgotten the whole episode the next morning when I went downstairs to discover the front door open and, in the sitting room, a drawer from a small side table collapsed on the floor. Nothing had been taken, and our burglars (an amateurish lot, I decided, taking advantage of a newspaper death notice, but too stupid, or too reckless, to find out if the house was still inhabited) had clearly panicked when they opened the drawer and it fell, empty, at their feet. But Kevin had lain awake all night, and I realize now that for him the house had altered for ever during that night: from then on, he slept, despite my protestations, with an iron bar beneath his bed.

  I am looking now at the photograph I took of a house which was no longer my house. I have never noticed before that from the junction of pavement and tarmac, where there was once a gate on which I was forbidden to swing, there radiates a pattern of cracks that stretches out to the edges of the image. There was a time when I knew every one of these striations, and all the similar scars and contusions that marked my passage towards the house as I turned off the main road and into the quiet curve of ours. I remember now that as I approached the house that day, I remarked how familiar each and every crack still looked, and how at the same time they seemed to have recomposed themselves into a new and startling arrangement: they all led to a house I could no longer en
ter, a house that in some sense was simply no longer there. The house in the photograph seems to define the centre of a web of memories that have obliterated its actual, concrete presence. It is the meeting place, and the vanishing point, of the lines that make up my perspective on the past. Once, on the morning I prepared to leave it for good, it had seemed to be overpopulated with the shades of the past. I thought I had succeeded, as I closed its door behind me for the last time, in locking those ghosts up once and for all. But in this photograph, with its fractures running from the house to the edges of the frame, it looks as if they have escaped again, and I will have to track their passage elsewhere, in other objects, other spaces, other bodies that have gone wandering in my memory.

  THINGS

  ‘Because (in principle) things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experiences they have had with us inside them and are – in fact – the book of our history opened before us.’

  — W. G. Sebald, Unrecounted

  ‘I aspire to the object, to the blessing of matter and opacity.’

  — E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

  ¶ ‘So many things of rarity and observation’

  There are, I’m sure, individuals and families for whom the objects they have inherited from deceased loved ones comprise an uninterrupted corridor into the past: historians of the stock of mementoes who consider it their duty to arrange and classify objects with all the dendritic intricacy of a researcher delineating a family tree. But I have never been much impressed by the genealogist’s labours. The impulse to trace methodically one’s family history through official documents and scraps of correspondence seems as weird to me as the archival fever of those households in which family snapshots are slipped into crackling albums, chronological depositories which assure the viewer of a frictionless unfolding of previous homes, notable occasions and beloved physiognomies. I fail completely to identify with this calm acceptance of time’s implacable advance (or with its corollary: the discovery, in words or pictures, of familial secrets, long-forgotten or suppressed scandal). Instead, I have gradually surrounded myself with objects which trace the most random pathways into the past I am now trying to map. I feel myself dispersed, fragmented among these relics, quite unable to fit them into a logical sequence. I can dimly imagine such a story; a whole narrative, properly autobiographical, a chronicle replete with precise dates and an unstoppable propulsion towards the sort of self-knowledge that can conceive of itself as some kind of culmination. These props, in their solid significance, would then furnish the stage of a more vivid and visible drama. But I cannot write it; time and again I bump my faculty of recall against the edges of the things themselves, hopelessly inarticulate reminders of nothing other than their own obtuse persistence.

  I wonder if there is not actually a certain pride at work in my abject failure to make of these things a coherent image of the world I would like to remember. It is, after all, the dreadful privilege of the orphan to be able to forget precise chronology (there is nobody there to remind the newly bereaved almost-adult of dates and occasions), and so one invents a universe out of unverifiable impressions and self-serving revisions. Once it has been locked into the prehistory of bereavement, there is a kind of seduction to the memorial fragment: every detail becomes telling, each rescued object a reminder of a vanished era. But I cannot say that these things summon up a story, only that they mark out a space which is immovably still that of their original homes. The double bulwark of my parents’ deaths seals a watertight chamber in which to dream everything on the other side of the divide as a storehouse of memories all the more alluring for being glimpsed through the thick portal of mourning. The objects I now attempt to describe are submerged, as if they could not survive in the corrosive air of a clear recollection, and so must be left to drift and settle in their strange submarine resting place, becoming ever more inaccessible as they calcify into myth.

  I remember a small plastic snow-globe which used to sit on a shelf in the living room of my grandfather’s house in Kerry. It partook of a modest and immediately decipherable narrative: it was a reminder of a place that somebody (my grandfather, my grandmother, or one of their daughters?) had visited. That place has vanished from my memory; I cannot summon the little landscape which the globe enclosed at all, nor the inscription which I am certain was to be read on its base. But the globe still conjures up the objects with which it was surrounded. Its smooth surface was dotted with condensation produced each morning by the competing weather system of the steam from a kettle below. (This was the kettle in which my grandfather, rising early, would delight me with his economical habit of boiling an egg in the water with which he made his tea. Occasionally, disastrous results ensued.) On the wall opposite the shelf where this, my favourite of the house’s many ornaments, resided, hung a heavily framed Sacred Heart picture. A yellowing label at the bottom recorded, on a few dotted lines, the names of the family: my grandparents, my mother, her two brothers and three sisters. It also included another child who had died at the age of four, and who had never lived here, though I always imagined my infant uncle playing in the places I did. Between these two poles of the room, a universe of familiar objects expanded around me. At one end a vast, mottled, brown-and-cream-coloured range served for heating and cooking. An electric cooker in the tiny kitchen was a concession to visitors; I don’t think my grandfather ever used it. Although I was regularly warned not to approach the range, I was fascinated by its paraphernalia: a collection of thick blackened iron implements for lifting the heavy discs sunk into its top so that a pot could be placed above the fire; a tapered lever of the same heft and hue, used only to prise open the doors on the front; a slim poker with which my mother would stoke the embers. So imposing was the whole edifice that it was always a surprise to see its fiery interior revealed: otherwise, it looked as if it was made of solid iron to its core.

  At the other extreme of the living room, everything was cool, fragile and hollow. In one corner was a tall wooden cabinet, painted pale green. A small, meshed rosette of metal set into the door served to ventilate shelves that had once held perishable foodstuffs. Its lower shelves now supported huge, tottering piles of crockery, while on the upper strata I was always surprised, each year, to find jars and bottles left over from the summer before (I think I was half convinced that their contents aged less rapidly in this house than they would have at home). To the right of this cupboard (it was not a cupboard; it was a ‘press’: the word has only just resurfaced) was a refrigerator that seemed, by its design, to date from the 1950s: a huge object, round-bellied and noisy, which put an end, when I was about ten years old, to the regular trips to my aunt and uncle’s nearby house to collect milk, butter and meat. Drinking water, however, was still fetched several times a day in a bucket that inevitably lost a good quarter of its contents as you staggered back along the road.

  In my memory, all of this orbits around the colourful interior of the snow-globe. The thing, acquired as a memento, I suppose, of some holiday or pilgrimage, has become a reminder of another world: the universe of my childhood holidays. As I remember it now, its reservoir of fluid seemed gradually to deplete over the years, so that the blizzard which it had once given me such pleasure to set in motion was in later years a shallow and dismal flurry, descending to earth abruptly and surreally (the phenomenon would not be out of place in a Magritte painting) from the empty air above. I could never work out where this watery atmosphere had gone. If it had evaporated, then surely the integrity of this miniature world was threatened, and the entire contents ought to leak away, leaving only a dry residue.

  ¶ ‘Rosebud’

  Objects such as this once mysterious orb are examples of a certain sort of kitsch: that species of miniaturist whimsy inherited from the Victorian obsession with capturing and preserving whole worlds in nuce. (The habit was not unrelated to the mid-nineteenth-century discoveries of geologists concerning the age of the earth and its infinitely slow alteration
: each household could now watch, fascinated, its own domestic image of evolution.) In her study of the kitsch sensibility, The Artificial Kingdom, Celeste Olalquiaga might be describing just such an object when she writes that ornamental orbs ‘evoke through visual imagery an intensity of feeling that is otherwise inexpressible: it belongs to the pre-symbolic realm of experience of the unconscious, where events organize and articulate themselves in a non-verbal language sensitive to the most subtle emotional intricacies’.

  A few foggy minutes into Citizen Kane, one such silent relic becomes the emblem of a long-unspoken pain. Orson Welles whispers the talismanic word which will set the film’s elaborate mnemonic machinery into laborious (and, for its first protagonist, the newspaperman who is charged with reconstituting Kane’s life, quite fruitless) motion. Keen viewers of the film, attuned to the devious mechanics of Welles’s cinematic puzzle, will have spotted (though rarely on a first viewing) the logical oddity of that scene: there is nobody in the room to hear the dying man’s last utterance. The entire protracted effort to reassemble the biography of the deceased magnate around this enigmatically enfolded word is in fact a complex delusion, a trick played on the memory of the audience as much as on the endlessly frustrated decoder of the Kane myth. The feint succeeds because the film is not really about words at all (this despite the lengthy narratives – bitter, drunken, self-serving or nostalgic – offered by its reminiscing interviewees) but about things. The little glass snow-globe which falls from Kane’s hand as he dies is, by a cunning symbolic sleight, the lens through which, at the end of the film, we see another object: the ‘real’ Rosebud, the childhood sled which is a reminder of Kane’s lost past, now consigned to the flames. The glass memento – pocketed, we remember, after Kane has destroyed the bedroom of his second wife – is a substitute for this other, more tangible reminder, which had already (as the film’s closing shot of Kane’s prodigious accumulation of useless things reveals) been lost in the museum of his past. The most precious object turns out to be only distantly – that is, poetically, metaphorically – related to the past; it conjures up, in the end, only another object.