Correspondence to family after the passing, ‘in impolite succession’ of Chris Potter and Lynn Ritchie, two of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known. After: Picnic Comma Lightening by Laurence Scott. Read it, it’s brilliant.
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Hi all,
Reviving this thread as I've been thinking a lot about Lynn and Chris the last few days: the sadness seems to come and go in tides.
I've just arrived early for a flight (very unlike me) and have an unexpected hour to transcribe some words which have been of some comfort. They’re from a book I picked up the other day. It's called 'Picnic Comma Lightning' and from what I've read so far seems like a fascinating dissection of the changing nature of reality. It's by Laurence Scott and I recommend it.
Some paragraphs in particular resonated, though in line with the book's subject matter, I've been bending the text to fit my own reality, or rather the un-reality of a world without Lynn and Chris. To that end I've been reading and re-reading in jumbled order, diving into some pages and then going backwards, or editing in my head as I go. Sometimes the words blur on the page, or in memory, morphing from the author's original 'mum and dad' to my own 'uncle and aunt'.
So the below text is a kind of representation of this, a tailored-remix, but given the subject matter of the book I think the author would approve. Either way, these words, in something like this order, had an effect on me.
I hope they do for you too.
With love from Dusseldorf Flughafen, Gate B37.
x.
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In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert tells us very early that his mother died when he was three. The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: '(picnic, lightning)' and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again.
For some time, there was something about Nabokov's sentiment that I didn't understand. It seemed ruthlessly ironic, flippant and wicked. But recently, my own uncle and aunt died in impolite succession. They were both in their seventies and had no business going anywhere.
The suddenness of their loss ran like radioactive iodine through my sense of reality. It had a way of making things very real, but also, somehow, less so. There are many merciless truths: they will never walk into a room, never send a birthday card. They'll never be waiting at the train station. They don't sleep. They don't light the candles before dinner, or listen to the Archers.
Their loss has not only highlighted the materials from which my reality is made, but transported me into a new one. The change was as clean as the flicking of a light switch, although whether it has been turned on or off is unclear. It feels like the lights have gone up after a great party, while also being a plunge into the dark.
And with that flick, these two impossible beings have migrated, from the outside to the inside of life. And though they don't trip our senses anymore by hugging us, or swing into view over the crest of a road as two unmistakable thumbprint silhouettes, they live, at least part-time, in our mind's electro-charged darkness. I mean just look: there they are. They have posthumous opinions on the news; they roll their eyes, they laugh. They ask about the boat. They approve of the new shed.
They are mythological, time-travelling creatures, who appear in different forms and hail from different decades, brown-haired one minute, grey the next. They mow the lawn, lay the table or stand at a long-gone kitchen-counter, as if nothing bad had ever happened.
And it’s made me wonder: what is a real person? Because overnight we've been landed with this sudden, astonishing hybrid, made up of memories and intimate knowledge. The past now spreading itself across our everyday reality in a more concerted way than before, with both of them occupying the middle distance.
So maybe now I understand Nabokov's bracketed tragedy better than I did before. The parenthesis are an attempt to contain the intense brutal reality of loss; to house the unimaginable, to barricade the horror from the rest of life. They make a little fortification in the middle of his narration. '(Picnic, lightning)' is, after all, a cellular story, a two-word drama, with all the detail and energy packed tightly inside it. And for all his wickedness I understand Humbert on this point: where do we put our dearest dead in the story of our lives? What happens when a reality more real than our mundane experience comes forking into our midst?
With these questions the whole thing grows in my mind into a scene: the edges of a dress rippled from the grass below. The wicker baskets, the parasol. For now, the thunderheads are pretty; standing like bleached cauliflowers as still as statues behind the escarpment.
And it's at this point that I hit pause, throwing down a comma, which can keep the lightning back, at least for a moment.