Negative Spaces: Postcards Home by Tom Ottway

2 am or so – 2 August 2017 Villa Tancotes, Mallorca

I’m too warm to sleep and go to the kitchen to get water, wrapped in just a towel. Tricked by my mind that it’s time to get up, it’s today I take you back to the airport. I secretly hope you too will be up, and we’ll talk. But you’re not, so I pick up a pen, still full of Hot Milk and Cixous. Who will ”break the old circuits” …

We exist within the 

tiniest of tolerances

the thinnest range of

temperatures

One minute exalting in 

a certain set of rays

and then moaning moistly

at another

It’s suddenly too much

no fun anymore

 

 

I love you, my mother

My favourite irritant

You are my sun

I come to 

and rail against

for warmth

You are my ranges

the strangest and yet

most familiar of heats

I’m from you and to you

 

 

It needed saying, acknowledging.

 

I now speak to you everyday, like the sun, or its absence, on the phone – a line – to the point where I am defined by the rising and waxing, zenith and waning.

 

Today was strangely, ordinarily special.

 

A calm day, without kids,

full of us and our happy, joined up absence.

 

less need to speak,

more to chatter

and natter

drawing and

painting.

You showed me again how to mix

to look differently

 

for

 

negative                 spaces

to bring the light out

 

I’m awoken, worrying.

About you, for you.

I’m mindful I need to express my appreciation

of you, for you.

 

A precious re-source. It dawns on me – this lazy lump of holiday self, first sleeping well, and now in reverse, increasingly poorly, until I am wide awake now – being ‘housed’

together these last few days, all of us, that my story of home is told in negative spaces, through you….

My numb pain

at my mother’s raw pain has been at the back of my mind for 25… no 26 years.

 

It’s anybody’s story.

It will be everybody’s story.

 

I used to have the insulation;

the protective range of heat and cool,

engendering safety to allow me to be brutally, gently honest.

 

Coming here on holiday has been like repacking

 

I am making home as I go

Weaving it like a skin,

filtering through it, 

unfurling a skein,

Your story, my story

 

It was easy to tell my limited, four-walled-intense story of love-sex-bed-death when I was twenty-one.

It is so much harder now at forty-six,

my father’s final age,

to capture and retain

 

the essence of life and living 

in the liquid experience 

as it falls through my hands

 

language is liquid, 

life liquid

memory fluid 

 

You are now a guest in our temporary, borrowed, holiday home.

Still trying to pay you back for lending us some of your death money, which we lost playing at ideal homes.

Now playing host, cooking for you for a token few days – a paltry return for the tens of thousands of yours.

You no longer cook, you say.

Driving you around, avoiding sharp bends and sudden drops, we visit the darkest, deepest cave.

… A drop of water hits my nose. What does that droplet represent? A hundred years? A lifetime?

I snap my family from below

brief palimpsest

ancient walls

ancient skin

where we begin

unravelling

 

paint and sing

paint and sing

 

liquid voice

noughts and ones

 

All of this is the source of my unease,

of what needs saying,

of the need to acknowledge,

silently negotiate

the negative spaces

 

You are here,

everywhere,

and there and there

uncovering

 

As we fill

we erase

 

And that is the conundrum 

of home,

of life of living

the giving begets

taking 

the taking, forsaking

 

[[The family accountant looking on from the sidelines, ticking, nightly-unplugging:  Off, off, out, out]]

The dwindling stock

The last ravishes

“Mum, did he really say to me in those last moments…

Paint and sing

Paint and sing

… Or did I just imagine that?”

“I don’t know”, you say, eventually.

 

It is our story of loss

And needs to be uncovered fully

Fully recovered

 

listened to, recorded

re-corded

re-coded

 

From many angles, in many forms

edited

brought into life

edere: brought forth, produce, dare

into existence

 

 

All images and drawings Tom Ottway 2017

Hélène Cixous et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–893. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173239.

Deborah Levy Hot Milk (2016) Penguin

 

 

 

[Back to Place]