remembering

A work for multiple screens and a solo performer

(remembering) Mel Gooding

sites of hiding seeking finding keeping in mind what was before/ bombsites gave sight of what only private eyes in love and labour had seen: the everlasting wallpapers of childhood as forever fixed with their roses and flourishes in the world as the hidden orchard behind a hedge with its perennial green apples stolen and sour every passing late summer/ as the unchanging streets on the way to school/ as the smell of creosote on wooden fences that splintered the knuckles that discovered the percussion hidden in their overlapping repetition (just as the saw disclosed the latticed rhyme of laths hidden in the plank plied by the builder at his trade in Peckham High Road)/ unchanging as the unweeded blitzed spaces invaded by rosebay willowherb and inhabited close by St Pauls and further east by black redstarts fooled by wildness/ ‘locations come into existence’ by virtue of the houses whose secret walls and stairways were exposed to weathers and eyes no longer private/ those inside out spaces cleared by firestorm for new beginnings, new occupations by flower and bird, playing child, lovers/for mew builders freeing the space `for settlement and lodging’/bringing the presencing of dwelling in which childhood ends and nothing lasts forever/being human on the earth as mortal

after

innumerable secrecies and numberless intimacies and layered acts of love and hate and hidden complexities of daytime and night time and miseries and felicities and familiarities and kindness and unkindness and domesticities and things done and undone and things undone and sleepings and wakenings and thoughts and deliberations and reveries and dreams and inadvertencies and careful observances and careless derelictions unseen indoors within walls in home and house

these layers revealed (clandestine disclosures) elegant simplicities !

clatter of bright plates

clap of pigeon wings

soft step on the stairs

rustle of treading pigeons on the roof tree

‘…those dying generations…”

familiar they felt barefoot the way to bed

roofed, holding safe hands

stranger, latecomer, trespasser at a private view

I stare at a carpet of birdshit, feathers and broken shells

tread warily upwards without hand hold and down

fearful of falling

(derelict)

quotidian in a house hold life: door hearth window skylight; the framings of a known made world: within, of hall and staircase in electric light, living room and bed room, the fire set or lit; outside, of the walled yard, grass, flowers, leaved tree or winter tracery, weather, the changing sky

images of the days’ and seasons’ turns

measures of a mortal dwelling here

openings merely now/apertures for the unseen light/entrances for wildlife to a cave a hole a darkness: shelter to lives merely given merely taken in a furious and fearful now

1 ( a working visit)

in cold half darkness he hears scufflings scatterings pigeon squab gurglings/he does not live here nobody lives here/he enters these vacancies to make them briefly ‘ locations’ once more/visits an imagined memory upon the place/dwells for a moment in the past/starts to make the works in this present/inhabits the space momentarily (his trespass revives its privacies)

2 (dialectics)

: a simple technique (a kind of thinking) that lets “something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way’/in this way by subtraction from what is no longer present/art in this house is ‘a sum of destructions’, a negation of negations:revelation! (something disclosed/something thought)

nothing lasts nobody lives here nothing is lost

this dereliction is an emptying makes possible thoughts and memories

of beginnings and informings

of other orders, other paradigms,

of geometrics and architectonics,

of rhythms and intervals,

of the music in the beautiful near-repetitions of nature

of conjugations and generations

separations and endings

of other rooms in other places

of other windows, other doors

of other uses for the signs these walls

of other dwellings within such walls

Nothing is lost: the rubble belongs where it falls

Part of the thinking

Part of the memory

Part of the work

Part of the story

Part of the ea

Living with someone with these conditions is to see them fading away, gradually in front of us. The physical body is there but frame of their personality remains for a while, but eventually they disappear and what is left is just a ghost or shadow of their former selves.

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive brain disorder that damages the brain and is the most common type of dementia. It affects parts of the brain that control memory, language, and thought, and symptoms include:

Memory loss
Difficulty with tasks
Poor judgment
Misplacing things
Changes in mood, personality, or behavior
Thinking and reasoning difficulties
Language problems
Changes in vision and hearing

Dementia is not a specific disease but is rather a general term for the impaired ability to remember, think, or make decisions that interferes with doing everyday activities. Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia. Though dementia mostly affects older adults, it is not a part of normal aging

Living with someone with these conditions is to see them fading away, gradually in front of us. The physical body is there but frame of their personality remains for a while, but eventually they disappear and what is left is just a ghost or shadow of their former selves.