Two Lyric Essays by Ian C. Smith
Ancestry
When I visited, then lived for some time in the U.K., I embarked on genealogy’ s quest, curious about my troubled family, chasing long-dead shadows, imagination’s blood and bone. This was an ideal excuse to discover quaint villages and towns where strands of my existence, presumably, were relayed mostly by agricultural labourers and women who bore child after child, toiling through to their eventual final sunsets. The spoor of my genes soon became magnetic with one grandfather’s trail cloaked in mystery and lies tantalizing me. Holed up between searches, I wrote about these misadventures realizing that what seemed the tallest stories were those based on truth.
Overseas escapades all finished except in my mind. No more living on the edge, time the enemy, its advance leads to retrospectives, the present inextricably served by the past. Various dramas punctuating my life including during that research, have waned, as silent and still now as spatial art installations, sculptures on a frozen heath. In their dim past what would my ancestors, many of whom spent much of their non-working hours in darkness during pre-electric times, have made of me, a traveler from the future of creased appearance, tall to them, with scribble-covered notebooks, strange haircut, and dwindling bank account, driving an obstinate foreign car? If I could visit their fetid lairs, their little tragedies, would we pursue common traits like long-separated twins, or perhaps our failings?
Back in Australia I lived in an old bat-haunted house I loved piled with books and papers. Where I rested my head incorrectly thinking this was where I would die, a full-length window overlooked a glory-vined verandah, heraldic when autumn light first appeared. The house and garden were sometimes filled with guests, the fridge crammed full. That bed sometimes collapsed, as did our mood when we sheepishly reassembled it. A club armchair hulked before another window where I mulled over stories in quietude, dead insects fading to husks on the sill in slanting light. No longer living there but still using the same bed that never breaks now, that I both love and hate, sometimes dozing in the same chair, I revisit the house constantly in dreams, sleep transporting me back much like that car and my improving tracing skills had earlier.
The residue of my genealogy, all those lives, some lineage zigzagging back on vellum to Elizabethan days, a calligraphic chart with details: names, occupations, some anachronisms, some blanks, dates of marriages, births, and deaths, and prevailing headstone epitaphs, stands scrolled, unread, in a corner. Home movies of my wretched kin, figures from past centuries walking, gesturing, talking—What did their voices, their accents, sound like? Did they sing?—would update my sterile, probably dubious, bare facts. Oh, how I imagined seeing those social classics in moving color, if a history of poor working people could be described thus. But, death’s claw never far away then, might sadness overwhelm me?
If possible, I would leap the fading abyss separating my early years from this relative comfort now, scrabble through the discordant music, the cracked sinks and sombre streets—the bitter truth if I am honest—of days seen from this distance as radiant simply because they were my youth. Despite the misery of betrayal and other mishaps, the past, even if bleak, would attract hordes of us as tourist destinations. If only I could trump memory by mingling with those past players again. Though no antidote for regret, the opportunity of time-tripping, relishing forgotten details, would absorb me.
Between where I sat and that collapsing bed I surrounded myself with pictures, prints, artworks from distant junior schooldays and photos; graduations, weddings, like in an exhibition, regularly rummaging through a jar of assorted hooks and screws to curate them. Gradually a gauze of dust greyed their once rainbow splendor in silence measured by the hours’ insistence. In art galleries, my heart spilling over, I have stared into the past imagining myself as part of sumptuous stories in paint. Those pictures whispered to me, small narratives of days beyond brushwork and gilded frames. A kind of cinema screen dwells in my mind’s realm, phantasmal figures appearing as if projected, but their burnished silence always leaves me craving more. What I want is to oversee a story made with dialogue not just about the past, but in it.
Last Garden
The winter of my arrival the garden sagged in bleak recession though signs of better times engaged me. Desiccated baskets of succulents drooped, a gaunt toasted filigree of tree fern fronds gasped, while the unraveled front doormat’s Wipe Your Paws reminded me of dogs, thus, olden days of my sometimes rainbowed past. Long before, still a boy, I had moved to the city alone where I walked labyrinths of stained brick streets to combat loneliness in poverty, walks costing zilch. I also read a lot and watched movies, which cost enough. Daydreaming about myself as a character I once patted a stray dog that followed me at a discreet distance. A striking collie, she could have stepped from her own silver screen.
A rusty, holed, wheelbarrow, not Bill Williams’ red model, shallow, unpainted, its starved soil mourning withered plants, so not glazed with rain, you can depend on that, slouched out the front, a forlorn protest of abandonment. On wonky knees collecting my tossed newspaper rolled beneath my parked car, as if both it and I were ashamed, I knew I should snap out of a current gyre of despond. I remembered taking that collie in a train’s guards’ van to a lost dogs’ home, the self-respect this act endangered. Thoughts then ranged to a time when I was not young for a novice backpacker. Thrilled, I traveled on a shoestring budget. Horizons more aesthetic, escaping a banal existence, I rode different railways, my reflection superimposed on now fragrant battlefields, history’s panorama, the landscapes of famous paintings, charging past my windows.
Scraping soil from the lane behind my cottage beyond a rickety back gate, access to solitary walks of meditative lamentation, I built up that wheelbarrow’s bed after plugging holes, set seedlings to jolly my new leaf-denuded next-door neighbor, his own garden, nature-strip, shaved within a whisker of baldness. I shrank from his righteous indignation of the district’s standards slippage: my bedraggled chaos, the broken clothesline, pegs weathered, and wind strewn, paths an archaeological dig, this terminus of a juggler bereft of balls, my last refuge, the prime example.
During those overseas glory days, I attended the marketplaces of Europe. I loved fairs, fantasized about time-traveling, moving through a fairground many decades earlier, witnessing. In soft light, hearing a whicker of pigeons, with just my pack and imagination, I read plaques, chasing biographical shadows. Raggedly clad, I joined clustered ancient world refugees braving emigration’s hard slog, these daydreamed fancies accruing in curling notebooks. At a stall near medieval Bruges, I bought roasted chestnuts and rented uncleaned rooms in Barcelona. I drank at scarred tables in old inns of strange cities, foreign forays now blossomed into a splendor of experience through memory’s processing of wanderlust when time for the dark halls of sleep was always later.
Watering with a found green can, laboring like a sculptor, pathways revealed, even a coin dated when I was at school, I train creepers to curl like gossamer threads. Backed by a carillon of birdsong my neighbor’s hands grip shears, tremble, my once poor garden now in the sun looking brassy, smelling pungent, a patient on the mend, like me.
A protagonist in one of Murakami’s yearning tales says we should stop ageing at twenty-one, hereafter reliving each earlier year. I think I’d like to cease now—who wouldn’t when far gone?—start tracking back, but not so far as the single gas ring days of my hard teens, more like until I first sat in an airport transit lounge entranced by a jet’s muted yowl, feeling its tremor taxiing towards glass, anticipating my first overseas adventure, the elusive ache of things.
Photo credit: Susanne Jutzeler.
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