‘…I call the ‘lyric of being’. By this I mean the quick of experience, whether felt or glimpsed: the living moment which, in an image, may intimate the whole life it is part of’.
Jeremy Hooker, ‘Ancestral Lines’ Shearsman Books, 2016
Strange how some mornings, as I enter my work room, the light blurry at the window, the house silent, I can hear other voices and a book falls into my hands. So it was today. ‘Ancestral Lines’ was lying on the table and came into my hands, opening at the end essay that I had forgotten ever reading. It was the books of poems that I needed to read at this moment.
For years I have been working at a book about Robert Knox, a seventeenth century prisoner in Ceilon, and developing a conversation with him over nearly 500 years. We whispered in each other’s ears, I grew to know him, the interior voice behind the descriptions of ‘perticulars’ of his life in Ceilon as a captive of the King of Kandy. As Robert emerged as a person – first as a young boy, then as a prisoner and, finally, in old age, as a rather grumpy reflector on his long life at sea and on land so I began to look closely at my own ‘perticulars’ – the way I had too had been ‘captivated’ by Sri Lanka, its people who became my family, its landscape that entered my unconscious in a way I had not realised. For me it was a painful journey, entering an interior self in the same way as I had learned the interior of the island, knowing it properly only after I had lost it and was living somewhere else entirely.
This journey into the meaning of a part of my life – and I pause here to change my original ‘part of one’s life’ to the personal and owned, has been a learning in so many ways. The discipline of shaping words and memories into something that might be shared with other people, learning to articulate grief and loss, coming to see the interior meaning of an experience, this has been a steep learning curve. Because it is finished, and I have sent it – like Ezra Pound’s ‘new born baby’ out into the cold world I am suddenly freed to step back into my life in other ways. Perhaps I have learned my script of the conversation and am seeing clearer, learning to engage with past emotions. starting to see the scaffold of my life and how it has brought me to the place where I am now.
Actually where I am now feels increasingly unsafe and dangerous. Not in the way in which working in the Himalayas: earthquakes, frightening roads and intense heat and cold made me feel – but a sense that where I had thought I had come to, a resting place, is now fraught with anxiety – mostly other peoples but sometimes my own- as France begins what may be a lengthy and painful detachment from what I think of as my own ancestral home.
Maybe though it is this that has set me free to explore those lines. I made a book some years ago with photographs of my family, where I tried to see the ‘lines’ which shaped us as a family. My mother holding a great grandchild, my father beside me paddling in the sea on holiday, myself, a friend leaning together under a cedar tree. I want go back to that now. Many of my historical artefacts and photographs disappeared after the death of my mother. They were kept in a wooden box which she always told me was to be mine after she died. It has gone and with it letters, cards from the front in France before my grandfather’s death, my mother’s birth and marriage certificates, and other pieces of paper, photographs and things loved. What I realise now is that I don’t need these actual ‘facts’ in order to enter my ancestry, I can do it by following the etchings on the bone of my own life en famille. What follows are some patriarchal ancestry photos – none of my mother at this time can be found.
My father in 1935 playing his accordion in the Dallas Works band (right in the top row)
Dad in the centre aged 18months in 1913
My father second from left in the second row on his father’s cabbies works outing
So I am thankful to Jeremy Hooker for a lovely morning read that has set me free in some way to follow my own lines. Like the lines on my hand that were once read for me, telling me my life ahead, I am going to try and follow the lines that have threaded my life together.
opsimathpoet 