Shared Geographies

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time – T.S. Eliot

I want to say that I don’t believe in fate. Coincidence, maybe. Yes, I’ll accept coincidence–this happened and so did this, what a coincidence. But then in a certain light, from a certain angle, things start to look ridiculous and too improbable. There’s that whole funny thing about me meeting a man–the man–my first day in Oxford, and then it gets even funnier when you learn that before me there was another American girl called Miranda with the same initials who studied the same things in college and it’s almost as if we were literally meant to be and maybe he’d got the wrong one the first time round–but really, who believes that? I don’t believe that. I’d like to, but actually what I believe is that we happened one night to meet in a pub and we got along. And later it turned out that he happened to once have had a girlfriend who shared my name and initials and nationality. Maybe it says a lot about him—that he’s consistent, that he has a type–but more likely that’s just the way things are.

But then this: this street. This street that I’ve been working on for more than two years. In my life, my twenty-something life, that’s a lot. I’ve held this job longer than I’ve ever held another and now I’m leaving it. It was not an arbitrary appointment, either–no more than anything else is arbitrary. Because it’s where he went to school (and also where she–the other Miranda–went to school). Because he had good things to say about it, I applied for a job there. You can’t even say I applied for a job there. More like: I wrote a desperate email and they responded saying yes, what a coincidence, we do have an opening, would you be available for an interview next week?

And that street. What a funny street. Tucked away in North Oxford where I would never ordinarily go. Except that I did go there. My first week in Oxford, three years ago, long before I was hired. Because just around the corner is where my tutor’s house was. And we would sit and drink tea and discuss the political history of the situation in Iraq.

And then it turns out that Pico Iyer went to school just down the road. The Dragon School. Once I had to go there to deliver some errant post. Pico Iyer has been one of my favourite writers for a long time and I’ve always felt this stupid sense of connection–because he lived in Santa Barbara, where I’m from, because he was schooled in Oxford, where I love–and then to think that he walked down this street where I have spent five days a week for more than 728 days. Well, that’s funny enough.

Then tonight. Arbitrarily, because if you remember this is all arbitrary–I look up the name of an author I once wrote an email to. I’d loved a book of his and I had a question–who knows what it was, I was in high school–and he wrote back within hours and I thought it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I remembered his name tonight, for no good reason at all. It popped into my head as I watched an episode of Dr. Who so I typed it into my computer and pressed “search”. And you know what? Paul Watkins went to the Dragon School too.

How do I express the strangeness of this? I can’t tell him–can’t say, retrospectively, I’m writing to you and in ten years I will share a very specific geography with you . I don’t write it to him now, because the time has passed for that sort of thing. I wouldn’t write to him now, I couldn’t, because I am an author too, and the letter would be tainted by that–no longer an innocent high school girl seeking advice and giving praise, but a bloodsucking competitor trying to network. And yet–

And yet–

And yet here we are. We share a street. We have that street in common. You know who else lives there? Roger Bannister. Who was the first man ever to run a sub-four-minute-mile. 3′ 59.4″. And my first year in high school that was the name of my favourite album–Four Minute Mile by the Get Up Kids, who, if I listen to them now, sound like noise and nothing else and I feel very little except for some obligatory and very vague nostalgia. I used to listen to that noise coming through headphones every night. Four minute mile and Roger Bannister, and I played with the idea of being a track star myself and I listened to Belle and Sebastian and thought idly, though I never imagined it would ever actually happen, that when I was free of the shackles of high school I would move to Britain and set up a life there which was a million miles away from where I knew, and it would be good–

–And it is good, and feels spontaneous. But then if you really look, everything points to it. Everything points to that one damn road–the road where I’ve spent hours making photocopies, constructing files, answering phones–I share a knowledge of that road with other people–and maybe Four Minute Mile wasn’t so much about the noise but about something else.

But then I don’t believe in all that, do I? Do I? On nights like this I’m tempted to say yes. Yes I do.

And that’s the magic of it–that you never know. All the signs point to this–whatever this is. This moment in East Oxford with the ever-evolving draft of my first book in a special folder on my desktop and the knowledge of that road with the Dragon School at the end, and the man who sleeps beside me every night with his heavy breath and his soft beard. But the signs could point anywhere if I wanted them to. It’s like that film Pi where you start to see 3.14 everywhere, and the more you think about it the more it appears in obscure places. It takes over your everyday life.

And here is everyday life. Early mornings, muesli drenched in organic milk from the farmer’s market. Cups of tea and pints of cheap cider. Kisses across the table. A street, another street, another, all the way to and from work. A bicycle locked up in various places all across the city. Everything is arbitrary. You love every minute. Things shift at the back of your mind–maybe this was meant to happen, maybe this just happened, but definitely it doesn’t matter which. You curl up with the window open and the duvet up against your chin and a warm body beside you. Never mind all that. This is now.

Islands & Volcanoes

I dream I’m on the island again. I dream we never left. There’s Swahili coffee and still heat in the morning; wind and dust and the stickiness of salt in your hair in the afternoon. Over and over again. It was months ago that we left this place but it has wormed its way into my deepest consciousness. It’s not a love for the place, or a haunting, or a yearning–just that something about the clarity or perhaps the foreignness of the air on an island stays with you for a long time, maybe forever.

I grew up in a country that has very little sense of what it’s like to be on an island. The width of an entire continent is our playground, and the places we visit on holiday–Catalina, maybe, Martha’s Vineyard–are places detached from the mainland only in geographical terms.

So in my mind there’s a sort of lore about islands. Prospero is there always, throwing spells, glowering, remembering, conjuring. When I went to Greece I had been recently captivated by John Fowles, which maybe is why I was so ready to believe in a kind of magic. We hopped from one sunny, rocky, enchanted isle to another. The sky and the sea were so clear it was as if you could see right through the whole earth, the entire universe. The daytime heat and the incessant buzz of the cicadas at noon made the nights balmy, gentle by comparison (the beer helped too, I’m sure). Love became, like everything else, something transient–you could fall madly in love with anything or anybody without regard for consequence or reason, and the next morning the feelings might be erased. The only constant was a heady sort of beauty, which might, I suspect, be dangerous for any length of time–like being exposed to a poison–but we were only tourists, so we were fine. We went back to California. The madness faded, though the magic stayed under my skin for some time.

But now there is the volcano. I live on an island, but I had forgotten this until now. And suddenly, after one morning, I remember. We are floating in an ocean, isolated, confined. Everyone is conscious again of what technology had allowed us to ignore: our geography. The vastness of the earth is perceptible again.

Lists

My life seems at the moment to be made up entirely of lists. To-do lists mostly but other kinds, too–grocery lists, mental lists, lists of people and places and times. So here’s a list of things-that-have-happened-recently, in no particular order.

1. My parents are visiting from California. We talk of the ranch and the weather. We go for walks, have pub lunches, eat pizza and watch television. When people visit me here, but particularly people I’m close to, I start to feel that time expands to include them. I cannot imagine what it is like living here without my family close by, though this is what I do, most of the time; their arrival, only a week and a half ago, seems like something very faint in the far reaches of an old woman’s memory (I met them on my bicycle and we ate Indian food, that day).

2. I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely Lady Who Lunches–and her charming boyfriend Jock–in real life. We had pints and burgers and talked about life in a foreign country. I forget, you know, that this life–my life is a life in a foreign country. The foreignness has faded and when you wake up and go to work and later you walk to the shop and wave hello at a few familiar faces and you pay your bills and you go for a run and have a shower it’s so easy to imagine that it has always been this way. Then every so often the sun glitters in a funny way and you remember that you’re not from here. And so it was comforting to have real contact with someone who had until then existed purely online; even more comforting to remember that my particular situation is not entirely unique. Read her write-up of the evening here.

3. I’m working a lot. This is good in one sense–in more than one sense–but bad in the sense that, in my enthusiasm for all these new tasks, I’ve neglected my book (and my blog).

4. A volcano erupted.

5. I started, as I always do this time of year, to suffer from hay fever, and now spend several minutes every morning sneezing.

6. I graduated. At least, I donned an enormous gown and hood and walked down an aisle and shook someone’s hand, and then stood in the sun playing with the billowing sleeves while people hugged each other and took elaborately staged photographs. I felt lucky; my parents were there, the Man was there. Privately we laughed at the whole affair, which was cheap and stuffy and full of obscure members of the Oxford Brookes faculty wearing ermine cloaks and court-jester-inspired hats, but I can’t pretend that there wasn’t a really thrilling moment when, for the first time, I caught a glimpse of myself in academic dress.

7. The sun has come out and the trees have blossomed and the garden is suddenly overgrown. I even wore a skirt with no tights, once.

A Good Night for Walking Home

It’s a good night for walking home. The night that follows the first really truly warm day of the season: that’s always a good night for walking home.

In the streets around Summertown, everything is hushed and the lights are out in the houses, or maybe everybody has just drawn their curtains shut, and there are fallen blossoms under my boots. Even the cars as they slide down the road seem to be saying, shhhh. Be reverent, be gentle.

The warmth is fading a little but when the sun was out it got trapped under my coat, so maybe it’s stored up, and my limbs feel different.

On Broad Street the big issue seller suggests that if he can’t have my spare change, maybe he can have the yellow flower pinned to my coat. And why can’t he have my spare change, after all, I think? Because 20p is too little and 20 pounds too much, and that’s all I have in my pocket, and besides, yesterday I tipped a man in the bike shop £2 just for pumping my tires.

(In retrospect that seems backwards, but then, maybe not. I don’t want to feel guilty about my generosities. They’re too tiny as it is.)

And also, once I actually bought a Big Issue. I don’t know what came over me. I was exiting a shop and it was a bright sunny morning and I thought, well, okay, I guess you’ve got to do it eventually. But then I got to the office and couldn’t figure out what I should actually do with the magazine itself. Not read it, surely–it’s a symbol, not a consumable, a receipt, a badge. But I couldn’t throw it away either. That would be a true waste. So in the end I tucked it behind the scanner on my desk and then found it eight months later and went through the same process of thought before deciding that, actually, I could bin it, so I did, but not before I offered it to everyone else in the office. They politely declined and I think for half a moment as I dropped it in the recycling I felt a little fickle, as if I’d committed myself to this thing and now I was breaking my commitment. Why do we care about objects so suddenly and irrationally?

Three figures pass under the Bridge of Sighs. They look like shadows. Sitting outside the entrance to Hertford College is a young man in a red t-shirt crouched on the ground, flipping through a magazine, which is barely illuminated by the lamplight. A girl takes a photo of her friend; I hear her say, “that’s almost perfect, you know,” but there are so many things about which she could be talking about.

Speaking of almost perfect, I don’t suppose you could ever grow tired of Queen’s Lane. There’s that view of the back of All Souls and the windows of St. Edmund’s Hall and sometimes some music coming from somewhere (once, late at night as the Man and I were walking home, it was real proper jazz-age jazz played on a piano and I probably danced, a little bit).

On the High Street, the candy shop looks funny all asleep. You can’t see the colours of the candy and it’s like Willy Wonka dreamed in black and white.

In the end it’s a funny relief to be on the Cowley Road. Those North Oxford streets–they’re so beautiful, so big. It smelled heavenly up there, all pink and white blossoms. It was black and deserted and it would be easy to imagine yourself the only inhabitant of the entire area.

But here we have something else entirely. Chefs standing outside having their cigarette breaks. Girls in heels, shorts, and leather jackets (not even as sexy as it sounds, not even close). An ambulance, parked, lights flashing, no driver, outside a darkened house. An ice cream shop, a burger joint, a cinema, a chinese restaurant. A woman walking her dog with an open bottle of cider pressed to her lips. It all smells a bit greasy. I like it.

On James Street. Next to the pub where an open mic night is going on. I pause and peer inside just to make sure I know someone inside; I do; that’s good, I think. I won’t go in but at least I still belong. As I’m peering someone outside, smoking, recognizes me and we exchange a few words. Then I keep going, past the Conservative Club, out of which drips balding blokes and strange music.

Then our street. Always a little cramped, this street. Sometimes I can’t walk my bike on the pavement at all–how very unlike those wide North Oxford boulevards! And there, on the corner, is the house with the tall fence. Last summer I was thought the man who lived there was under house arrest because he used to stand next to that fence, eating his dinner or draping his arms over it and asking passers-by for a cigarette. Now I can’t imagine why I was so convinced of that. Harmless little house, harmless little man.

Our house, when I get there, smells of laundry. The curtains have not been drawn. The Man will come home from football soon. It’s one of those nights when I feel like it’s been an odyssey just to get from one end of the city to the other.

Pilgrimage to Paris (A Trip Revisited)

Darkness eats away at the lamplight. It’s the time of morning when everything should be still. St. Pancras glows orange and looks like a gateway to somewhere warmer and brighter.

I love the Eurostar. I love the way it feels to be moving at that speed on a pre-determined route. But I sleep the whole way because we were up so late packing and then we had to get a midnight bus to London.

We don’t have much stuff. I mostly spend the weekend in the same outfit–a bright skirt, a blouse, a pair of sandals, making the most of the August heat–except one time when I think it’s going to rain so I don a pair of leather riding boots and then it turns out to be the hottest most glorious day of the whole trip. That is the day we walk to the top of Montmartre and have lunch at a little restaurant whose name I forget. We order salads–with meat, boiled egg, avocado, beetroot–and a carafe of wine and though we’ve spent most of the day’s allotted budget on the meal there is a happiness that comes over us. We finish the wine slowly, watching a girl in a red dress and heels alight from a vespa scooter. I don’t remember coming down from Montmarte particularly though I do remember that as we do we pass a painting of a donkey on a wall and also the Lapin Agile, which reminds me of the high school production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile I once saw. (It turns out I misremember this because when I go through my photos I discover that the painting is actually of a horse, and there’s a man on the horse, riding bareback)

I remember sleeping on the floor of a friend’s empty apartment. The mattress is torn and dirty, like something you’d find in a streetside skip. There’s a refrigerator in the middle of the room where we put our juice and our cheese. The shower head is collapsing and the bath stained with rust and other unimaginable things and I avoid washing for the whole weekend, making do with splashing my face and scrubbing under my armpits with water from the sink. That’s a nice way to be, for a time.

Something Almost Being Said

“The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said.”
Philip Larkin, “The Trees”

From my study window I can actually see things getting greener. Every time I look up a new bud has appeared on a branch. We woke up one morning and the weeds had taken over the garden again–or at least looked as if they were gathering their strength, their troops, oiling their guns, polishing their boots, getting ready for the invasion. Now that we’re on British Summer Time the cool air has moved back in and between North Oxford and the Radcliffe Camera my fingers go numb and I have to stop and put my gloves on. But at least in this, my third spring in Oxford, I’ve finally learned to carry the gloves with me well into the season.

It’s a great time for trickery, spring. Philip Larkin had it right (he so often did), and the way the trees are turning green (like someone is putting a new layer of paint over them every day), the way the flowers are coming into bloom, is just like almost catching a whisper that someone almost sent out on the wind.

Past

I’ve written about this before, but a blog post I read earlier today made me think of it again.

It’s to do with Javier Marias’ All Souls–a book which I selfishly maintain paints one of the most stunningly accurate portraits of Oxford I’ve ever come across. It’s not about the city; it’s about my city. And here’s why: his narrator and I share a space. We both inhabit a world where, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.”

And I almost can’t tell you what that means, because it means so much. It is, stripped of context, what it means to live somewhere else. It means that when you meet friends for a drink and you look back, through the cider haze, what you see and what they see exist in parallel universes. This is the lonely side of it.

The happy side of it is that sometimes, just walking down Broad Street or cycling past the gaze of idle pedestrians, you have the strangest feeling: you’ve become weightless, your skin translucent like a fish, your mind lucid. Time overlaps with itself; Georgian architecture with Classical and Norman, Wren, Wolsey, Aldrich, a collage of names and periods. And your name? Unknown. You float down Turl Street, past the mouths of three colleges, each one guarded by a stiff porter in bowler who watches you without interest, who has seen a thousand just as young, and as possessed with the charm, beauty, and blamelessness of this youth, as you are. Oh, but this is freedom. Terrible, beautiful freedom. You are separated from your own history and yet at one with it. You can be things, where everyone around you must pretend.

So you become like a candle: self-contained, brief. I feel abbreviated here, and if I didn’t enjoy that feeling, I wouldn’t have stayed. It’s been nearly three years, and I can still pinpoint the moment at which I shed my history–which is full of wonderful things, ranches, farms, children, family, laughter, freshly picked fruit, waves and hills, sunkissed cheeks, but also of anxiety, selfishness, selflessness, a paralyzing shyness and a destructive self-pity. But then one day in May I stood in Christ Church Meadow and watched some little boys in stained cricket whites jogging across a field and thought: I’m not my past, my past is me. And then– is it coincidence?–that night, I was free and light enough to appreciate an encounter that could have been as tiny as an atom in my memory, and now here I am and that encounter is sitting across from me, and our past begins at the point where I felt for an instant that I had no past.

No one here knew me as a child. It’s the greatest blessing and also the greatest curse you could possibly imagine.

A Few Brief Notes on the Politics of Being Local

There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

Now That We’re Back

Now that we’re back there is the snowfall of dead skin. Every time I look in the mirror, I see myself fading; I’ll be ghost-white soon, just like before. The healthy glow has gone and left only a few wavering lines where a swimsuit once was.

We have uneasy memories, heavy, fragrant dreams, photographs. My bank account is empty. My card looks weary and I have debt again. I count pennies in the supermarket. I go to bed hot and wake up cold.

Of course the funny thing is, I’m home, and I feel home. I am comfortable, and happy. We make plans to rearrange furniture. We’re going to buy a new duvet. We sweep the stairs. We build fires in the lounge. We’re nesting, together. Waiting for springtime.

But the dreams. The dreams. And the way we are when we’re away.

The City Is So Cold

And so we arrive at that time of year when winter seems interminable. Your bones have been cold for so long that even a hot bath fails to thaw them. The English are invariably sullen over late-winter weather, and I’ve heard several times that we’re in it for the long haul this year, that we don’t stand a chance of an early Spring, as if we’re children, we’ve been badly behaved, the thermometers want to punish us.

I stand outside, in our back garden. It’s too bleak for words, the sticky black paste of mud and dead leaves, the naked shivering trees, the poignant abandoned laundry line, the table and chairs which have spent these long months buckling under snow and rain. I realize I haven’t stood in the garden for weeks. From my study window I have a view of it; I watch cats trying to catch birds, I see the neighbours’ sad detritus gathering mud, but I haven’t actually stood here, surveyed it at ground level, for too long. I miss standing in our garden, I realize.

Every once in awhile there is still the lingering dream of African light, of trade winds, spice, valleys like bowls; but mostly the mundane has crept back in. I like how local I feel, here, how we go to the pub on the end of our road for bloody marys and sandwiches, how well we know the roads, how predictable the fall of night is each evening, how every night is getting a tiny bit shorter. I like the idea that I will, over the next few months, slowly reacquaint myself with our garden. We will grow potatoes again, maybe. One day we will wake up and it will be warm enough to start to prune and dig, and the colour will start to come back into our cheeks, which have already turned pale again.