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