Bright blocks of perception
“One is always at home in one's past...” (Nabokov)
One of my favorite books to read, teach, and wrestle with is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I have a ten year relationship with the book. It astounds me every time I crack it open. I feel wrapped in something silvery and ephemeral - an exploration of time, childhood, nature, home, consciousness.
“I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.”
-Nabokov, Speak, Memory
I think of myself as critically nostalgic - not haphazardly sentimental. I’m curious about my past and how it shaped me. I’m curious about landscapes that speak to me more than others. I like to return to places, people, landscapes and conversations, knowing that as I do I am putting a narrative wedge between myself and the truth. But there is emotional truth. Natural truth. The truth of the songbirds that frequent the neatly trimmed hedgerows behind my parents’ house in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Robin-heavy dawn chorus at my parents’ house, Raleigh NC, April 2024
I’m also creatively nostalgic. There are landscapes that move me moreso than others - like Big Sur, the Great Dismal Swamp, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s homestead in Austerlitz, NY. I can sense a storied place - layered, haunted. If I find myself revisiting particular places, chances are I’ll keep exploring them fictionally. One landscape I revisit in truth and in fiction is a particular bend in the Ashley River, just outside of Charleston, where I set my novella, Indigo Run, from my latest book How Strange a Season. It has that collision of culture and ecology, of rural and urban, of natural versus built environment, of past and present. I’m drawn to that churn. I carry it.
I’ve been told writers often default to the cinematic sense of sight, neglecting the other four senses, particularly smell and sound. As a birder, I’ve trained myself to notice sound. I also value soundscapes from an ecological perspective - they tell us a lot about what species are where, and when. As our earth degrades, they’ll serve as a record, a rich sensory moment in time where lives and sounds were unfolding.
Ashley River, Charleston SC, April 2024
It’s a quiet one, except for me murmuring into the mic to remind myself where I was recording, because my creative life exceeds my organizational one. My daughter was asleep and I was drinking coffee, staring out at the lone alligator, thinking of all the things I usually think about when I’m alone.