An intermission
and a memory of ceramics
Dearest reader,
I write this from my desk, the early morning light of Saturday a balm to the week that has just passed. The chair creaks as I move, each sound threatening to break the solitary quiet I find myself nestled within.
I had every plan to post what might be the penultimate entry to And it was lost (my short story about a strange rock1) this week, and though I have a slim draft that is being filled, I simply have not had the time to write. That pains me. Pains me to the point of wanting to beat myself up about it. I even considered hunkering down this morning for solid hours to try and rush it out. But I don’t want to do that. I can’t write like that. It wouldn’t be true to what I want to achieve.
I could leave it at that. I could just not post anything, but then I find an equal fear of letting go in that act, accepting some failure that—obviously, I hope—doesn’t exist. I’m not going to do that. Instead I’m going to dig from the archives, from almost exactly a year ago. The following2 piece was written just after having read Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that had, and continues to have, a profound impact on me. I have just read Pale Fire, which is something I would enjoy talking about at some point. I think it, erm, pales in comparison to Lolita, but what I love are the moments when Nabokov’s witty and linguistic prose shines and burns through each page. His style is one of my favourites, and it was something I was striving for (emphasis on each syllable) in the below. You may have read it before. You may have not. Whichever the case, and whether you read on or not, thank you for being here. May there be actual time and creativity on these pages next week.
Dreams of jug and jar
I was seven, and though that is an age from which rafts of memory float muddied by time, I shall recount to the reader some semblance of that day and its proceedings.
From all angles but one, there was nothing overtly wrong with the room. Far from it. It was well-lit, with a south facing window that peered onto a typical English lawn, fringed on either side by a border of neat azaleas. Outside, hugging the sill with its deep green leaves, a creeping vine would tap against the glass whenever the wind blew, its playful erratic jitters keenly observed from the aged oak writing desk—lacquered slope, insectile legs, matching chair with plumage-stuffed cushion—positioned for the ever-watchful writer. That piece was an antique passed down through generations of family, an item for which even now I hold no love save for the drawers and their unknown treasures kept endlessly barred from prying fingers by tumbler and spring.
Of course, I mention all this with the acute lens of time, my pre-teen corpulence knowing not oak from mahogany, but with enough wits to understand two simple facts:
Primo: The house, and by extension the room and contents therein, were my grandmother’s. (For later consideration: technically her late husband’s, a wealthy writer of some repute, though of notable reclusivity in both character and process.)
Secondo: It was entirely off-limits. Locked. Closed. Warded against wandering children.
The more important feature of the room, the antagoniste maléfique—that of which I am so inclined to herein write—was, upon entering, entirely obscured from view. Gliding across the floor, little socks purring against carpet, a witless and hapless enfant would pass beneath a shelf of stout wood imprisoned to the wall above the doorframe. But it is not the shelf itself that need worry the reader. It was what lay upon it. Arranged with militaristic precision were a series of clay vessels—jugs, jars, whatever you will, nine ceramic cylinders of unwholesome taste, grinning foolishly with handles conjoined neck to head, all-seeing pinpricks of obsidian and alabaster ensconced in grimaced faces displaced from view unless the unfortunate individual precisely sat upon the chair’s plump cushion.
What I mean by these rambling specifics is that if said individual—having entered and sat at the desk to perhaps watch the tedium of growing grass or push pencil across barren page—were so inclined as to extricate themselves, then from turned shoulder the natural eyeline would settle and intercept the counterpart from each beglazed ceramic. To satisfy with a simpler explanation: the jugs would stare back. Mocking eyes of jest. Slits from atop door’s vantage.
And occasionally, through tremulous claylips, those very same would speak.
They would … utter. Words. Chants. Desires.
The astute reader may wonder then as to why this bumbling youth, the protagoniste involontaire, knew any of these facts about a room that should (I refer back to aforementioned limits) have remained uncharted. The answer—oh the answer!—awaited his quintillionth visit, a day when the intrepid junior explorer, cartographer of rooms unvisited, would finally venture cotton-heeled and catlike into that forbidden vestibule and glean its shelf-kept secrets.
The door, it must be understood, that day was ajar.
It was a cold March afternoon and via tortuous hours of rain-pelted windscreen the cruel affront placed upon two siblings was a visit to the grandmother. Our arrival heralded no respite from the reliability of England’s inclemency, and at that age the undulant surrounds held no special promise or stimulus. Seeking refuge from endless and nonsensical adult chatter, we (herein I should clarify for the reader: my brother and I; let us call him S–, for simplicity), S– and I became unmoored from the living room and sought from cryptic corridors any sustenance to sate Sunday’s boredom. S– suggested we resort to the tried tradition of paper planes. Having no inclination for the optimal folding of paper, I was capable of neither the aesthetic grace nor ensuant sailing-forth to achieve worthy distance, yet S– excelled. (Another note for the keen reader: later in life, an unsurprising engineering career, financially successful.) Nevertheless, I humoured him, clapping with false joy at each distance of record achieved across the grandmother’s upper landing.
His last throw, though, aroused curiosity in even my listless mind. The trajectory—launched from a swift right arm, S– perhaps aiming via open door for the exposed sanitary fixture—was high, Pinus planus soaring and sweeping and at the very last an uncanny bank left, the unmanned origamic wonder curiously aloft through the entirety of stair’s descent and, again uncanny, another bank, right this time, to the small corridor. The very corridor at the end of which resided The Room, the threshold from which I was convinced I should have caught whisper the subtle thunk of paper greeting door.
I heard nothing.
I left S–, trotting down the steps and slipping right to stand in alarm—more a mild confusion, my soft juvenile face having not yet developed the necessary musculature to convey any complexities of expression—at what lay before me. The diminutive white aircraft had ceased its voyage upon the tendrils of carpet, its miniature passengers (had there been any) wading through fibres of territory unknown. I stepped forward, allowing an advance upon the beige frontier, eyes now drawn and fixed on the wooden writing desk with its entomic legs, its writhing height and sheen, la position dans la petite pièce snug beneath the terminal window.
My feet, having absently crushed all possibility of return flight, carried me forth and presently I was sitting on the oak chair, buttocks undergoosed by feathers, fingers drawn already to those drawers, unsuccessful at each pull.
I remained there, foolish child, idiot empoté, whilst from another world I heard S–’s distant enquiry as to my whereabouts; speaking not, I stared through glass at the garden, the incapable extension of my legs engaged in rhythmic sway. Time’s maw engulfed a number of minutes. At some unreasoned moment I felt the prickle of sensation against the fleshy nape of my neck and, sans pouvoir m'arrêter, commenced a rotation of the upper body.
And that is when I caught glimpse of the hitherto missed feature of that room (the reader, already gifted the writer’s omniscience, must remember that for the seven-year-old this was the virginal encounter): the nonet of kiln-cast faces, their ominous and unceasing ocular intrusion holding me transfixed.
(Somewhere distant, another exclamation from S–, the lack of a search party.)
Dropping from the chair, I stood, a shieldless Perseus shifting right, left, and with each move so did follow in painterly fashion the gaze from embedded eyes. I resolved to leave, acutely aware of the spawn of entire oceans across my skin.
And that is when I heard it.
Them.
The first utterance.
Open us, open us, the claylips spoke, horrible unison chorus.
Look in us, look in us, they chanted, rasping.
Listen to us, listen to us.
I became aware that my hand, the right, the left too limp for any use, was reaching for the chair’s crested rail and that, once grasped, commenced a slow drag to the doorframe, whereupon I proceeded, stuporous, to clamber and stand. My little fingers, delicate unscathed digits untamed by age, reached toward the jugs, feet tottering as tiptoes extended on cushion’s edge, and handle hooked I retrieved one jar, nearly releasing it as I brought the glazed urn toward my face to peer over lip and lips and see into the abyssal reach of its belly. Staring at what was inside, rapidly did I grasp the others, checking each and seeing that—oh, my dear reader, the horror!—they were the same, that each was a casket to foul powdered ash! Bone-fine, though not without bone, white-grey and crumbled, all near full and in lidless exposure accepting the room’s undying air.
I ran, screaming, seeking S–, later my mother, and never seeing, not then on that day (far later, in will’s receipt), the bardic names etched upon each base.
∗
Of course, with door locked I sit and have sat at that very desk in that very room under those watchful eyes, heeding via word and chant my arcane muse.
Each day I listen. Every day I write.
In rereading this, there have of course been minor edits. I am indebted in the original to
in helping with some of the French scattered throughout.
Before I sit down to read the "memory of ceramics", I just wanted to assure you, Nathan, that all of us who admire your work will read anything you have written ( new or old ) whenever you post it. We are not concerned with deadlines. We read as it comes. Should art be hurried? Can art be hurried?Take your time, get it right. We stand by.
I don’t know how you write fiction on deadline at all. I would go absolutely bonkers!
This is a lovely parable and the French gives it another mysterious layer. (Alexander has helped me with some German 😁). The personification of the ceramic works so well and the focus on the youth of the protagonist adds to the strangeness. A joy to read, Nathan!