Where are the snows of yesteryear?

[pjthompson]

Oh. My. God. I looked at chapter 18 today after not going near it since April. In one part of the chapter, the clichés were flying as fast as sparks from a grease fire. Once again, I am convinced that someone has snuck into my ms. and substituted bilge for my deathless prose. Or is that undead prose? At any rate, it stinks like a corpse. Although I think I cleaned up the worst of it, I'm not going to do a heavy fix on this--just post it to the 'shop, clichés and all, then move on.

The last two chapters have shown clear evidence, I think, of saggy middle fatigue.

Guilt of the day: I owe a ton of crits on OWW. Very sorry. I'm trying to rectify that.

Surreality of the day: Someone went over to the old building, the one we moved out of in October that they're just starting to knock down, and took pictures on the inside. It was disorienting--they'd knocked down walls, taken down doors and bulletin boards. Every once in a while I'd see something I recognized, but in a highly unrecognizable state. It was like looking at pictures of the Titanic wreck, hard to tell what was what.

By sheer accident, this person took pictures of the office suite I used to work in. It was a rather unusual configuration and there was a decal on one of the windows someone had stuck on in the misty days of yore. So amidst the carnage of collapsed walls and ceiling tiles, I recognized exactly where my desk used to be. Only it was one cavernous suite now, four offices with walls knocked down from one load-bearing wall to the next. Incredibly strange to think I'd spent so many years there and now it no longer existed. Talk about palimpsests...

That seems to be the metaphor that's gripped me hard this summer.

Over the weekend I was thinking about the strange little house I grew up in. I'll have to write about that one of these days. It no longer exists, either--but so much of my taste, my values, and personal metaphors came out of that space that as long as I'm here, as long as my writing exists, that place will never quite be gone.

I suppose that's true of all of us and the spaces we used to occupy.

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,--
But where are the snows of yester-year?

—from Dante Gabriel Rosetti's The Ballad of the Dead Ladies (after François Villon)

Comments

[frigg.livejournal.com]

Melancholy. It's amazing how places visited in childhood are so vivid, the exact colour of the walls, the smells from the attic. Sometimes I wonder if my senses were stronger then or if I'm just too busy and distracted to pay attention to the details any more.

[pjthompson]

I think that in childhood place is extremely important: the shapes of the walls and floors give us a solidity that we crave as kids. They define the entire world and so we absorb them with an ardor that perhaps we don't duplicate again until old age, when our world becomes once again limited to a particular place.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I recognized exactly where my desk used to be. Only it was one cavernous suite now, four offices with walls knocked down from one load-bearing wall to the next. Incredibly strange to think I'd spent so many years there and now it no longer existed. Talk about palimpsests...

Who'd have thought the old building had so much plaster in him?

Or how 'bout those "ghost houses"-- when they knock down a rowhouse, they often leave the plaster on the party wall in place, so you can see exactly what the room layout was, or at very least the roofline. You look at that and expect to see a ghost walking down now-nonexistent stairs, forty feet up in the middle of unoccupied air. In your case, the ghost is the you of the past, which must be creepy. (Any spectres told you you'll be visited by three ghosts, recently?)

[pjthompson]

Who'd have thought the old building had so much plaster in him?

LOL.

when they knock down a rowhouse

We don't have many row houses out here on the Left Coast, so I've never seen that particular phenomena, but I imagine it would be quite weird.

As to the ghosts (of Labor Day Past, Present and Future?)--God, I hope not!