Mapping the Wasteland
I've been back in Bournemouth nearly two-and-a-half weeks. The most distressing thing about coming back is that absolutely nothing has changed. One might consider this to be a fine attribute in a place one calls home - to find that things are how you left them. With Bournemouth, what it really means is that everything that made me leave in the first place remains: the same hierarchies and prejudices, the uneasy mix of small-town narrowmindedness and aspirational art-think (certain parts of town - The Winchester, 60 Million Postcards, the AIB campus, Dusk Till Dawn - are in fact mini-colonies of Shoreditch), the constant presence of so many no-hopers, and, above all, the topography.
Urban environments are often conceived of topologically, but we experience them - the places we grow up with, grow into - no other way than spatially. And as the years multiply, geography is saturated with memory - with familiarity. Every single bearable route through town I've walked - all its parks, its leafier suburbs, its beachfront paths and clifftops - countless times. Just as it grows increasingly memorialised - with the pleasure, of course, of revisiting those traces each time you come back - it grows increasingly boring. Bournemouth, I considered the other day, never had anything to give me, and still doesn't: the only thing it had to offer was total mental desertification, and nice public gardens (well, a few). Although, leafing through some old files tonight, I found some papers from when I was still in Sixth Form - almost two years ago, now. They were from the Creative Writing group I participated in with a couple of other people; I was the only person to turn up regularly. It was a couple of sheets of poems by John Hughes, the English teacher who convened the group. I remember now how strange it seemed that a teacher should write poetry; and, for that matter, the tone of the poems, the kind of toughened, humane, exploratory feel that I wouldn't find until I read Staying Alive two years later - and began writing poetry again. The habit of riding to and from the school each day, the route, the space around the school (how claustrophobic, positively resonant with the old-boy network, Oxbridge-training air - it should be noted that I got in only because I read Kafka and Nietzsche) is completely engrained in my mind, and bound up with that time. You know what they say about the myth of origins, etc. etc.
Urban environments are often conceived of topologically, but we experience them - the places we grow up with, grow into - no other way than spatially. And as the years multiply, geography is saturated with memory - with familiarity. Every single bearable route through town I've walked - all its parks, its leafier suburbs, its beachfront paths and clifftops - countless times. Just as it grows increasingly memorialised - with the pleasure, of course, of revisiting those traces each time you come back - it grows increasingly boring. Bournemouth, I considered the other day, never had anything to give me, and still doesn't: the only thing it had to offer was total mental desertification, and nice public gardens (well, a few). Although, leafing through some old files tonight, I found some papers from when I was still in Sixth Form - almost two years ago, now. They were from the Creative Writing group I participated in with a couple of other people; I was the only person to turn up regularly. It was a couple of sheets of poems by John Hughes, the English teacher who convened the group. I remember now how strange it seemed that a teacher should write poetry; and, for that matter, the tone of the poems, the kind of toughened, humane, exploratory feel that I wouldn't find until I read Staying Alive two years later - and began writing poetry again. The habit of riding to and from the school each day, the route, the space around the school (how claustrophobic, positively resonant with the old-boy network, Oxbridge-training air - it should be noted that I got in only because I read Kafka and Nietzsche) is completely engrained in my mind, and bound up with that time. You know what they say about the myth of origins, etc. etc.
posted by Dan at 3:44 PM
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