Standing water, stagnant water. A dawn marsh with steaming fog. The past is not still, not static, the poet says. It changes. He thinks of rusted metal, turned all colours. Of an encrusted hull in drydock. That is the richness of the past, and it is why you shouldn't keep memories, pressing them to yourself and smothering them, but allow them to be what they will be; to change. Isn't the future contained in the past, too? Isn't it already there, when it returns to you, when you allow the past to be what it is, gently neglecting it, leaving it out in all weathers?
He fell through the years. He had fallen through them, imagining them burning away what was inessential. He had been streamlined as he fell; he fell faster. In the afternoon, he went out walking. In the afternoon, the long afternoon, he was one among many, a walker among walkers. What do you want?, you might have asked him. Nothing in particular, he would have said. What do you require?, another question. No more than anyone else, he would have said. And to the question, How are you?, the lightest and most innocent of questions, he would have replied, Not too bad.
He fell through the years, keeping quiet, not saying too much. And isn't that the joy of being alone: never have to recount, for another, what happened in a day, a passage of weeks? Of what happened back then, in this relationship, or that? And then letting the days pass, weeks, without detaining them, without doubling them up in a story.
To neglect: is that what he learnt? But it was a benign neglect. He learnt to be one among others, learnt to speak without seeking attention to himself. He imposed no order on what had gone before, and on what was happening. He let events be incomplete. He left what had happened like shells on the seashore to be placed and unplaced by the sea.
And now? Now he is being made to speak. A Dane is waving a dictaphone in his face. Is there a way of allowing another part of him to speak, to speak with him? He feels a kind of tenderness for him, this other speaker. He wants to protect him even as he comes forward. He is an innocent; he lives only in the telling of this half-story, or that. He lives and dies as he belongs to an event, and to the incompleteness of an event.
A child speaks, he imagines, alongside his speaking. A distracted child, whose gaze is caught by the opening of the playing field and by the trees on the other side of the field. One day he will see his classroom from those trees. Climbing up, his school seems small and far away. And he, too, will seem small and far away. For that's what he sees: himself, his own gazing. He remembers it still, that view, the poet says. He still dreams of it. The child dreams. The child wakes up, stirs, and falls back to sleep.
When he was young, he used to daydream of being very ill, immensely ill, confined in some way, lying down … He had been reading of iron lungs in the Guinness Book of Records, he says. There was a black and white picture of the longest surviving patient in an iron lung, a man with a long, dark beard and long hair, immobile, the machine breathing for him, a small mirror above his head – what was that for? To see himself? To see something of the world reflected in it? But it was angled downwards, as far as he could tell from the picture, and would have only shown the floor, and perhaps the feet of the nurses who would walk up to him sponge his brow.
He remembers an episode from a television series about flying doctors, the poet says. They landed in their helicopters to carry a child to hospital. They lifted him tenderly from his bed to the stretcher, and then they whirled him off, an ill boy to be made better. And he remembers, too, the Little Match Girl from Anderson's fairy tale, who dies of cold, but whose soul flies up to be met by her grandmother in heaven. He can see the illustration: a little girl in rags, flying up, and then the grandmother, in a heavenly glow.
To be sick, to be made better: a child's game. To be sick and die, and then be carried up to heaven: a game he might have played with his stuffed toys as a child, making his voice higher than it was, and seeking by way of such games, passage upstream to what had already shut him from the heart of childhood.
As a child, he already smarted at the idea that some toys were too old for him, even as his toys gradually disappeared into the loft, unplayed with and as though waiting for him to become a child again. For him, a very old man and lost in dementia, to believe himself three-and-a-half.
Toys in the loft: keepers of the heart of childhood. The arms of a teddy bear, eternally open. A box of Christmas cracker gifts, eternally worthless. A pink plastic angel fish in a finger puppet in a box. A child, cared for, needs something like a child to care for in turn. Is it because this is all such a child knows? Is it the ritual it enacts in order to be like the adults? Or is it because there is a loss of childhood at the heart of childhood, a sense of its retreat as the child grows older?
There's a line from Borges he copied onto a post it note, the poet says. Yes, there it is. Read it out.
Everyone is defined in a single instant of their lives, a moment in which a man encounters his self for always.
He's always wondered about that quotation, the poet says. Is it a question of a particular event, a particular revelation? Of a sign that would contain in minature the secret of a whole life?
But that secret is a kind of emptiness, the poet says, such as opens between the stars and the galaxies. It is a kind of openness, such as that he saw in the playing fields and beyond them. What defines us is indefinition, the poet says. The child – this particular child – becomes any child, no one in particular. A child, not the child: a name for childhood. A name for the anonymity of childhood, for the youngest child of all.
The past changes, the poet says. It's changing now. He thinks of Munch, who would paint outside even in the Swedish winter, allowing the rain to blur his colours, and the frost to freeze them fast. Sometimes he threw his paintings into the apple trees, sometimes using them as lids for his saucepans, letting them steam. He wanted to incorporate the passage of time into his paintings, to lend them what the Japanese call sabi, the patina of rust.
And what of he, the poet, as he speaks? He wants to break time from its passage. To deliver it unto what does not finish, and refuses to be narrated. He wants to find those instants in which he was lost for always, in which a child was lost into its gaze.
He fell through the years and through the streets. And even now, he is falling, the poet says. Even now, as a Dane waves a dictaphone around in front of him.
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