Rumination + Illustration = Illumination

I wrote this on 7.7.2005:

Yesterday Kevin and I stood in Trafalgar Square and yippeed our hearts out as London was granted the 2012 Olympics. Everyone was so happy and excited.

This morning, I drove for hours looking for a way out of London, listening to the radio, and crying. Buses screeched by, the only passengers being the brave and grim-mouthed drivers, heading pell mell for the garage and a safety check.

I have just come from having a quiet moment in Bath Abbey, where a hastily erected board by the front door invites people to enter and pray for London, for Britain. Two American women stood posing next to the sign, and laughingly asked their lensman whether they should cry for the camera.

For the eightieth time today, I asked myself just what the hell possesses some people to do what they do.

Then I passed an elderly Jamaican man with a guitar who was busking on the High Street. He was singing, “Get up, stand up, all you British people, don’t give up the fight.”

“Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.”

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This too shall pass. That’s been a mantra for me at times. King David had it engraved on his ring, to remind him to enjoy good times while they lasted, and to weather the bad. There are moments - such as a few evenings ago on my way home, when I was struck to the core by the beauty of stark, bare tree branches against the ethereal pastels of a winter dusk sky - that the saying seems a useful bulwark against taking things for granted. It’s good to be reminded that there are some things that are beyond our control or even our imagining, and that this is not always a bad thing. Although, when I think of some of the human-made horrors in the world, what continues to go on just a few hundred miles north of here in the gulags of the Kims, it rings a little hollow suddenly. [Picture of my Grandmother, Helen ‘Nell’ McNiff Walsh, in Stockport, Cheshire, 1993]

“Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it …”

* A Scent of Sarsaparilla, Ray Bradbury

I’ve just been reading his Dandelion Wine again for the first time in a great many years; I’d forgotten how beautiful it is.

“The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.”

* Abraham Lincoln

I swear that time moves faster in Korea than anywhere else. The weeks go by like days, the months like weeks ….

You can only really close the door on your past when you have emptied - or at least tidied up - that room in the house of your soul.

In common, I suspect, with many if not most other people, I couldn’t wait to grow up when I was young. I hated my powerlessness, felt imprisoned and smothered by it. So I carried the mistaken belief that when I was finally ‘an adult’ all would be well; not understanding fallibility, and the weight of days. Nowadays I sometimes feel imprisoned and smothered by my prodigious memory and the immensities it contains. There are things done you can’t undo, things undone you can never now do, images you can’t erase, words you can’t unsay or unhear. The perfectionist in me longs to be young again, to start over and do things right, as if life was just one long school project.

‘Your stepping inwards from the air to earth
Winds round itself to meet the open sky
So vanishing becomes a second birth.
Fare well. Return. Fare well. Return again.
Here home and elsewhere share one mystery.
Here love and conscience sing the same refrain.
Here time leaps up. And strikes eternity.’

* Andrew Motion, Saint Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London