running in the family

The other night I plucked a book from the shelves in the dark: Michael Ondaatje's running in the family was in my hand. A childhood in Ceylon, family as riotous as was manageable in prose, albeit poetic prose. In the poetry is the managing. Snakes run through the house. The cobra that settled on the radio was not shot because the radio was the only source of music in the house. The snakes ate the hens' eggs, so hundreds of ping pong balls were introduced in the nesting boxes, which disabled the snakes for a while. Mervyn Ondaatje, Michael's father, ended up keeping hens. As did the mother of Marguerite Duras. Last dance of a falling family. 

Michael Ondaatje found everywhere stories and people in Ceylon when he went back after twenty some years, he found roads and food, trains and verandahs. In and around Maldon, Essex, where I grew up, I found the places I went to get away from stories and people: salt marshes, old allotments, disused railways. Between the chickens and the cacti and succulent society, I came to like Mervyn Ondaatje.

He kept journals about every one of the four hundred varieties of cactus and succulents—some of which he had never seen, others of which he had smuggled into the country via a friend. Important days were those when certain water plants arrived from islands in the Pacific.

Narratives, stories, tales

The word narrative has something controlling about it; story is cosy; a tale is recessive, mossy. 

We live in an era of narrative. Narrative sells. We all have one, whether or not we know it. These are the structures that shape our ends. Though actually, reading Elizabeth Taylor in the middle of the night, shaping sleep is what I'm trying for. The fascination of the weave should put me out, I hope.

In town today I sought out Elizabeth Taylor and Rachel Ingalls, both writers who have been resting for many decades, as actors used to say, 

I choose old narratives and their trappings because it's more peaceful. I do not want to read narratives of now, of Ireland. Why? To read its current fiction is to take on its history, the assumptions that underly it. 

The assumptions that lie beneath Elizabeth Taylor or Rachel Ingalls I grew up with. I didn't' know them, they were absorbed through the young soles of my shoes up and down Maldon High Street. I have no desire to write the fabric of Maldon High Street; or of Inniscarra, County Cork. I want to island myself on this island. 

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Again

Finally up at the (revised) pond in sunlight reading Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout and noting the reestablishing wildlife: ten thousand tadpoles, six whirligig beetles and a couple of water boatmen. It's hard to imagine being as involved as Elizabeth Strout and her Olive in a small town like Crosby, Maine, taking sustenance from the same, peopled place. I suppose I had that in Maldon, Essex, but did not choose to stay with it in any way.

Olive Kitteridge was a maths teacher in Crosby, Maine, and in some chapters her former pupils remember her as odd and strong; they remember her, anyway, so she appears in their lives, these chapters, among these boiling tadpoles in the first good day in six months.

Although much of the world's current nervous stasis is sympathetically quiet, I balk at the connection everyone wants to make with links & vids & photos & chat. I don't want any more from people than I did a month ago or a year ago. And such as I might want is supplied by Olive, Again.

With the advent of dry weather, Tim Chambers has spread slurry in the field below. The northeast breeze sends the smell, ammoniacal, right up through the pond. The tadpoles, I suspect, have no sense of smell.