Knick-knack

Almost Japanese by Sarah Sheard has one passage that uncannily reminds some readers of the scene describing the results of a special un- and reclassifying of the elements of a collection in Jane Urquhart’s novel The Whirlpool. That which a child touches ...

On my way home I came across a children’s cemetery -- little spirit stones with impish faces, wrapped in red cloth aprons with dustcaps on their heads. Offerings had been left which could only have been children’s treasures -- parts of toys, buttons, crayons, candies.

The reminder no doubt runs through the notion of the formal display of offerings and the artful heaping of mementos wiping out the history of individual accession. The same, the same. Like next to like.

Memory of a scene from elsewhere thus serves to render ambiguous the possessive in this location. A cemetery for children. A cemetery of the remains of once were children.

Treasured by children. Treasures for. There is a distance here. A dispossession that is difficult to grab. Though not impossible if one ever read Beckett rubbed a pebble in a pocket.


And so for day 11
25.12.2006