August 6, 2001
I mentioned a night out with a friend B. and waking the next day feeling miserable (May 22nd). During my visit to Ireland I had dinner with her. She apologized for not having phoned the next morning after our night out in New York; her husband had gone on a Sopranos tour and she had sat in the sauna of the hotel and wept. She hadn’t been sure why she had spent the day weeping but mentioned having these days of late.
My clearance of the books led to a desire to clear everything. I tackled the boxes of photos and was doing well until I encountered the past. Photos are all the past, but some—it’s partly to do with the quality of those photos, they are good photos, and with the point in time when they were taken—render the past in a more acute manner. One set of photos is particularly redolent of this phenomenon. In the photos it is apparent that it is not warm. We are in Donegal. There are five of us; four women. We are swimming naked in the Atlantic, drying our shoes with hair dryers in the cottage and walking on sea foam covered rocks. B. is there. It’s probably seventeen years ago. There is a very vivid sense of movement in the photos, of us walking on the beach, jumping across rocks, of wind. There is something not quite static about them, as if they might start up again at any moment and subsume the present. The past has distributed itself unevenly in the box of photos, some are merely old, but in the ones of Donegal there is a great glut of old time silting up the images.
I mentioned to B. at dinner in Dublin that I had awoken in a similar state after our night out in New York. I hazarded the lost girlhood theory as an explanation for our melancholy and knew immediately by her reaction that for her this was not the case for her.
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I mentioned a night out with a friend B. and waking the next day feeling miserable (May 22nd). During my visit to Ireland I had dinner with her. She apologized for not having phoned the next morning after our night out in New York; her husband had gone on a Sopranos tour and she had sat in the sauna of the hotel and wept. She hadn’t been sure why she had spent the day weeping but mentioned having these days of late.
My clearance of the books led to a desire to clear everything. I tackled the boxes of photos and was doing well until I encountered the past. Photos are all the past, but some—it’s partly to do with the quality of those photos, they are good photos, and with the point in time when they were taken—render the past in a more acute manner. One set of photos is particularly redolent of this phenomenon. In the photos it is apparent that it is not warm. We are in Donegal. There are five of us; four women. We are swimming naked in the Atlantic, drying our shoes with hair dryers in the cottage and walking on sea foam covered rocks. B. is there. It’s probably seventeen years ago. There is a very vivid sense of movement in the photos, of us walking on the beach, jumping across rocks, of wind. There is something not quite static about them, as if they might start up again at any moment and subsume the present. The past has distributed itself unevenly in the box of photos, some are merely old, but in the ones of Donegal there is a great glut of old time silting up the images.
I mentioned to B. at dinner in Dublin that I had awoken in a similar state after our night out in New York. I hazarded the lost girlhood theory as an explanation for our melancholy and knew immediately by her reaction that for her this was not the case for her.
- rachael 8-06-2001 8:55 pm