REVIEWING THE FOURTH WALL

We were painting the living room and my role was to review, revisit, shift, dust and generally aerate the bookshelf wall, the fourth wall. I began at the bottom right, through old telephone books, radio manuals, gardening, food, and pond life. To poetry and drama, ancient and modern; and thinking, ideas, science, Gödel Escher Bach. To autobiography, biography, memoirs and diaries. To fiction, twentieth century and onward. 

I got stuck at John Cowper Powys. I was supposed to be reducing the volume of the shelves, getting the horizontal books into the vertical. Tidying. Dusting. Reviewing. Wolf Solent was my first John Cowper Powys. They are broad books, nearly half a shelf. Would they stay or would they go? 

I went back up to the top left, under the blue cornicing. 19th century novels. Russian fiction. Red miniature editions, some vellum, some gilded. Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, for example. Dickens, Michael Fairless, The Roadmender. Michael Fairless is Margaret Barber. S/He was a wild success in the early part of the twentieth century.

I have attained my ideal: I am a road mender, some say stone breaker. Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other.

I moved the red miniature books around. Left some where they had been. Others went upstairs, under the eaves. A swatch of red vellum upstairs and downstairs. 

So I came back to John Cowper Powys from above, via Kathy Acker and everyone back to the letter p. There were some interesting bookmarks. And a lot of dust. It was good to get Svetlana Alexeivitch comfortable on the shelves. And Olga Tokarczuk. On the title pages of Rowan Hewison's Salt Pan, I found a long dedication across the title pages about our small literary moment in Paradiso, Amsterdam, circa 1981.

All this comfort was made possible by packing into a cardboard box an entire set of french and other study books, as Claire would call them, Genette, Sarraute, Barthes etc. Reshelving your library. Resetting your vertebrae. Dusting as you go. Books and shelves. Lives. Soul. It was altogether an emotional affair, and the tidied books, with some space for new ones, looked less like mine than before.