There was a time when I was whole. Life inhabited me, and people, food, light, ideas and music must have too. It’s been so long now I can’t really remember. I can only assume things by looking at myself and the state I am in now. I don’t know how long it’s been since the laughter, the children, the people. I can only count clouds in the sky, raindrops leaking through my roof and leaves that somehow found their way under my bolted doors. I am half a house, but not even half of what I used to be when I could still whole-heartedly call myself half. It is only with caution that I can even say about myself that I “am” anymore because a full use of the word would involve me fulfilling some sort of function, existing in coherence with humans and feeling them alive in my entrails. That is not the case anymore. I have been maimed by history and left behind by humans.
People still used to come even after I was left alone. They would come every now and then when my bricks still had a chance to dry after rain. I wasn’t so alone then. I had the big grandfather clock, which, even if silent, reminded me that time had measure, if not meaning anymore. I had the green kitchen cupboards, still spreading a light scent of thyme and coriander seeds, and the silverware, blackened yet heavy and material. Those objects were real and reminded me that I was real too. After they were gone, I started gradually losing a sense of that. They were the first which were taken away. The cherry tree table and chairs in the dining room followed, then the closet with the shelf which served as a bookcase. It had only a few dusty old books, but they offered a resemblance to life when I was missing life. I can still remember the orange poetry book by Jokai Mor and a historical novel about the kings and queens of France. Gone. When I think about them, I wonder if they “are” more than me today. Does someone open their covers sometimes and look at the intricate signature on the first page? Maybe they have it better than I do. Yet on the other hand, maybe they don’t. Maybe I “am” more than they are. I wish I could forget about them soon, like I know I forgot so much.
I had a dream. It didn’t feel real; that’s why I say it was a dream, but it might as well have been real. I am sure no authority on that. A woman was reading a book, and I was looking at her as if through water. The image was blurred and distorted, and I could only make out her glasses and dark ponytail. I knew a girl with glasses and dark ponytail once. She used to visit in summer when her aunt was my mistress. The aunt lived alone; she didn’t need more than the full half I was back then, and the girl used to spend here what must have been some weeks. It could have also been days or months. Those summers, just like the winters and springs and autumns, are twisted and stretched now, and I can’t reach them anymore. It’s like an endless sheet of darkness stands between me and them and their colours come through only where the sheet is torn. Maybe the girl and the woman I dreamt of are one and the same because she was also reading sometimes. She used to read while lying down on a green blanket on the grass. She never came back after her aunt left.
But the sound of the woman in my dream turning the pages of the book was crisp and clear. It felt like the sound that those thick, porous pages make – a deep sound of pages which don’t bend easily and don’t stick together. I could hear her mind bubbling with reading. It didn’t sound like a story but more like words piling together endlessly and then exploding in a myriad of meanings and images. She reread paragraphs often and often closed the book, looking down at the cover and then just staring into the wateriness of my dream and rereading an earlier paragraph again. To the Lighthouse the title was. The words were crashing against the walls of my dream, and I couldn’t quite pin all of them down. I felt like she was reading the words to me, through me, yet she kept their materiality to herself. Unknowingly perhaps, but with me she was only sharing a breath of all that which her mind took in. She was reading about a night which lasted for ten years, silence, weeds, decay, death. She was reading about time, uncertainty, sorrow, memory and forgetting.
I opened my eyes to the absence of her reading, still grasping scattered words which echoed across my three mouldy, emptied, rooms: “Let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage”. I hadn’t seen poppies, carnations and cabbages in quite a while. Speaking of, I’m not sure if I ever had carnations growing in the flower beds. Maybe there are now, but I can’t recognize them. I look at the flower beds and they are overgrown with green, pink, yellow, orange and bright little violet dots. Those could be carnations for all I know, drowned in the sea of grass. The colours are rather faded. Could be the work of cabbages, or even potatoes, which used to grow there once. They all mingled together taking over the fence and inviting the grass on the other side in. If I wait long enough, maybe the narrow stream which I know flows just beyond the hill will feel like biting through its confinement and change its course. Maybe the cherries in the tree by the fence will grow sour and the rain will not wash away the red of the earth anymore. Then the wooden fence will have rotten, and the potato-carnations will have grown brighter and taller, wondering what might that unshapely pile of old bricks be doing here. Here, where I am now.
I wrote this post in preparation for the Literature Cambridge 2022 Virginia Woolf summer school. The series of lectures and seminars focused on houses, as they are depicted in five of Woolf’s works.
your thoughts?