Since I last wrote, I have been occupying a space inside the final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby.
Borne back ceaselessly, unmoored from my usual berth, I was sent spinning across the archipelago of my family’s history. We all have such a chain of islands in our wake, some scrubby, deserted, others lush and laden. They represent who we were and where we may never set foot again. The past is geographic. You can map its contours within your memory, chart your route via a wafted scent or a pop song on the radio. Artifacts of touch, sound, vision, emotion have the power to transport us, like Nick Carraway, for “a transitory enchanted moment”, but, other than a swift sensory flash, there’s no way back. And now 2023 is officially a yesteryear, another fast receding shore.
My mother died in late 2022. I spent most of 2023 back in England, dealing with the aftermath. The family home– a concept more about people than place–expired with her. Without her protective presence, it lost all function, closed up shop as a genealogical museum. It had to be dismantled. The job of butchery, carving up and carting off all the objects, decor, documents, furniture, clothing, obscure treasures, fell to me. The brutal erasure of lives lived. Generations of keepsakes. Shred, donate, sell. Everything must go.
Inch by inch I sifted through the substance and the insubstantial, haunted by memories good and bad. Inheritance. Postcards, invitations, partied-in frocks, loved-to-bits teddy bears, even official documents like old bank statements. The things you carry with you, deliberate keepsakes and trash no one ever tossed, a lifetime of fragments, each evoking a day, an hour, an island. A seemingly-endless array of energetically charged objects, each one igniting in my hands. My grandmother’s bridal veil. My great great grandmother’s nightgown. My father’s merchant seaman identity card. My great aunt’s fake fur coats. My brother’s school reports. My mother’s payslips. Two suitcases of love letters between my grandparents. So many of my once-treasured possessions too: primary school exercise books, teenage vinyl, miniature farm animals, diaries. Items both inconsequential and crucial. Every object triggered an irrevocable choice: discard or save?
It was hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
By profession, I’m a researcher. I dig through information to construct a story, connecting facts, hypothesizing, drawing what I hope are plausible conclusions about what happened and why, arriving at a version of the truth. But I am the story here, at least the final act. I’m responsible for orchestrating the ending, the last in the line of mitochondrial DNA. I let my female ancestors slip through my fingers, their embroidered tablecloths, their crocheted doilies, their postcard albums, their china, their brooches, their hopes and secrets. I don’t come from money, but I do come from women who treasured beautiful things and saved them and passed them down. I salute their taste.
One particularly difficult day I picked up a porcelain box adorned with blowsy roses, the kind my grandmother loved. I remembered this from her dressing table when I was a little girl. Then, it contained her hairpins. However, when I removed the lid last August, it contained a yellowed newspaper cutting with torn edges, hastily folded. I read it, cried, then had the strength to beat on.
It’s not good for us, mentally, to spend time mired in personal history. Too much looking back can be fatal. The term nostalgia was coined in 1688 by medic Johannesburg Homer to describe a version of psychosis. He observed the hopelessness and homesickness experienced by soldiers sent abroad. After as little as three weeks, healthy young men descended into a near-catatonic state, unable to function in the present. They succumbed to depression, or a suppressed immune system, or even died by suicide. In 1688, naturally, this disease was caused by demons. There was no remedy, other than sending the soldiers back where they came from.
In 1688, Los Angeles was a sparsely populated river basin. But, since she started seducing Midwesterners with her sea breezes and orange groves in the late 19th century, Our Lady the Queen of the Angels has offered a rest cure to anyone overwhelmed by nostalgia. She is the Eternal Now, with no seasons, no roots, no regrets. Her loyal subjects, especially those who have fled their own bygones to be here, urge one another to ‘live in the moment’, drinking lotus tea in endless sunshine. We’ll never go home again, not as long as we can worship the green lit orgiastic future, the best that is yet-but-never to come.
It feels good to be back in her arms. And yet… this is my twentieth year in Los Angeles. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my vagabond life. I’ve always thought of my past as happening in another place, far off, overseas, but it stretches out behind me here now too. It has somehow cluttered up the kitchen drawers and crammed the closets of my Hollywood bungalow. Islands formed from layers of sediment, deposited by the wind and tides and time. After twenty years, Los Angeles and I share an archipelago. As I map her vanished trees, her phantom theatres, her lost tramlines, I glimpse myself as a ghostly reveler in a demolished pool hall, or sinking shots with spectral friends in a shuttered bar. I’m both Then and Now. I’m haunting my own path.
So, dear readers, thank you for sticking with me through these months of silence. I hope you’ll stay on board for more postcards from the dead. 2024 is terra incognita. Let us use the patterns of the past to chart it together.
Welcome home. Your grandmother's message is perfect for this day in L.A.
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