Tristia

When I moved back to Manchester – when was it? – I had with me a book which allowed me to dream that dark city in the North was also Petropolis and that my dark Levenshulme room was Pluto’s cave. That book contained a partial translation of Mandelstam’s Tristia and rather than read it again here (I don’t have it with me; I’m too busy – up until what time was I up last night?) I want to remember the protection it gave me when I lived in a house with a mad landlady.

The day after I moved in and signed a contract, a chance meeting with a woman from across the street who said: ‘oh my God you live there – we had to rescue the last tenant – she’s quite mad you know’. And she was, but I was dreaming I lived in Petropolis, protected by Mandelstam. But I also know as the ogre of the fairy story whose heart is locked in a chest and buried in a lake far away that my heart was far from me. It was in the book; a book I had to watch over in turn. Tristia watched over me; I watched over Tristia knowing that when that heart was pierced there was no more illusion: Manchester, Levenshulme would reveal itself as it was and always had been.

That was ten years ago – or it was ten years ago when I escaped that house for another. What I know now is that Tristia, a book written by a man in his late twenties, was a name for my youth just as surely were the soft toys I played with in my childhood. That the books piled in my office, away from here where I write, keep my childhood between their covers. Just as one day it was time for the soft toys to go into the loft where they remain, it was one day or another time for my heart to be drawn from my books and release itself elsewhere. What happened? That’s another story.

Last night, rereading the manuscript of the second book I said to myself: would that my heart could find a new place, far from me, that would allow me to dream, still, even now I am old, of becoming a writer. So it was that in the moment I knew the second book was botched I dreamt of the third. And that in a year or two, it will be the fourth, then the fifth …

… Last year I at last reread the books I used to have time to read. Began reading what is called literature again. And wrote here – at this weblog – of reading and writing. Knowing that Spurious – this blog – keeps watch over my heart, my eternal childhood.

Childhood: books of Duras, Cixous, Bernhard, others. Childhood: writing about reading and writing.