Wandering willows inventory space
We live, true, we breathe, true we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. “What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. The following passage inspired Inventory, and gave it its name, He questioned our surroundings and the things we take for granted and rebuilt the world from the bottom up, the way a child would – rooms, staircases, streets etc. Perec had a similar approach to Bachelard. Maybe some things are meant to find you at certain times. It might have been the similarity of the title to one of my favourite books Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which has been a huge influence on my work writing and talking about architecture and urban space. It was by the French writer Georges Perec, in a collection called Species of Space. I was adrift for some time after that.Īnd then I found an essay called ‘The Infra-Ordinary’ that changed everything. In a ridiculously theatrical moment, I threw the final draft of Tidewrack off the end of a pier in Scotland (one of the few surviving remnants is a playlist I played obsessively while writing the text in an attic overlooking the sea). The book became imbued with that, almost as if it were cursed. Things, outside of writing, were sadly falling apart. It was not a good time and I was not in great health. Initially, I wrote this strange dark river book called Tidewrack about the Foyle, which runs through my hometown and has had a profound impact on my family, but that ended up in development hell for years for various reasons (melancholic Sebaldian nature books weren’t setting the book world on fire). After writing about innumerable places in Imaginary Cities, I thought I was writing about a single city, my hometown of Derry, when actually I ended up delving into thousands of Derrys, all of them familiar but shapeshifting, through the prisms of other people.
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On one hand, you’ve a moral responsibility to be true to what happened and on the other, everyone’s experience of the world is subjective and prone to amnesia, fictionalisation and contention, especially in a region like the north of Ireland. And you start to find that Benjamin was right that memory is a kind of theatre.
![wandering willows inventory space wandering willows inventory space](http://www.royshomeselkins.com/wp-content/uploads/DSC_3654.jpg)
So you end up really writing about memory, data and relics. There is only the present and what survives of the past in the present. “Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre.” – Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900.Īfter writing Imaginary Cities, which was relatively forward-facing, I wanted to look backwards and write a book about the past but it soon became apparent that there is no real ‘backwards’.