First of all, and for Daniel: the photographs in this piece are breathtaking, each more compelling than the next, often bordering on the abstract. Bravo, Daniel, and deep thanks.
Claire, this is a beautiful story, almost mystical for the way your voice comes from the body - the way you inhabit and move in the space, how the sensations affect your sensorium, and how you are transported back to your childhood.
I’ve often experienced the way I move through life as exactly the way I did as a child, as if from inside a vessel that never ages and barely changes despite aging and changing. There is a sort of inner I and inner eyes that are deeply embedded inside, and this is how I felt reading your piece. It’s hard to explain, which js frustrating but maybe it has to do with embodied sense memories: the sounds that lull you into deep sleep, the sensations that return - and return you to your childhood body. The juxtaposition between the comforting, almost magical memories, and the various unpleasantries of the present create a kind of scaffold that bends and breathes.
I could go on about why I love this piece but I’m feeling weak and need to rest. In closing, I want to say that the below section feels to me like its own prose poem:
“Not as steady as a clock, not as warm as a heart, not as resonant as a drum, but known like a melody and present like the wind is the sound of lines slapping against the masts of pleasure boats docked in the harbor, a sound signifying safety, at least to me, for it lulled me to sleep each night after a day of sailing or bobbing on the Dutch waters during the long summers I spent on my father's yacht, and each time I come upon a port on my travels in whatever region of the world, and I hear the lines slapping in the breeze, accompanied at times by the masts' mournful humming, I feel this sense of home away from home, which is not as exciting as a dive in the Pacific Ocean, not as cozy as a campfire in the Sahara dunes, not as wondrous as the brilliant green rice paddies in Northern Vietnam, but which is like an anchor, lodging deeper than my connection to the places where I grew into myself and promising me that life is continuous between my movements and my breaks and I am forever on my way.”
To your continuing to grow into yourself; to the promise of life continuous; to being forever on your way.
Thank you so much, Robin. You make me see things in my writing I wasn't even aware of. I want to write more about embodied sense memories as you call them—an excellent term. Your comment makes its own essay on the subject.
First of all, and for Daniel: the photographs in this piece are breathtaking, each more compelling than the next, often bordering on the abstract. Bravo, Daniel, and deep thanks.
Claire, this is a beautiful story, almost mystical for the way your voice comes from the body - the way you inhabit and move in the space, how the sensations affect your sensorium, and how you are transported back to your childhood.
I’ve often experienced the way I move through life as exactly the way I did as a child, as if from inside a vessel that never ages and barely changes despite aging and changing. There is a sort of inner I and inner eyes that are deeply embedded inside, and this is how I felt reading your piece. It’s hard to explain, which js frustrating but maybe it has to do with embodied sense memories: the sounds that lull you into deep sleep, the sensations that return - and return you to your childhood body. The juxtaposition between the comforting, almost magical memories, and the various unpleasantries of the present create a kind of scaffold that bends and breathes.
I could go on about why I love this piece but I’m feeling weak and need to rest. In closing, I want to say that the below section feels to me like its own prose poem:
“Not as steady as a clock, not as warm as a heart, not as resonant as a drum, but known like a melody and present like the wind is the sound of lines slapping against the masts of pleasure boats docked in the harbor, a sound signifying safety, at least to me, for it lulled me to sleep each night after a day of sailing or bobbing on the Dutch waters during the long summers I spent on my father's yacht, and each time I come upon a port on my travels in whatever region of the world, and I hear the lines slapping in the breeze, accompanied at times by the masts' mournful humming, I feel this sense of home away from home, which is not as exciting as a dive in the Pacific Ocean, not as cozy as a campfire in the Sahara dunes, not as wondrous as the brilliant green rice paddies in Northern Vietnam, but which is like an anchor, lodging deeper than my connection to the places where I grew into myself and promising me that life is continuous between my movements and my breaks and I am forever on my way.”
To your continuing to grow into yourself; to the promise of life continuous; to being forever on your way.
With love, and days,
Robin
Thank you so much, Robin. You make me see things in my writing I wasn't even aware of. I want to write more about embodied sense memories as you call them—an excellent term. Your comment makes its own essay on the subject.
I’m so glad my response resonated for you, dear Claire. With love, always, xox R
So gorgeous. Wish I could be there, thank you, Claire, for letting us in. Just the right thing for my homesickness for Europe :-)
I’m glad you can live vicariously through me and hope you can return here some day.