Aldgate East station is not
now where I thought I’d left it
Writers are, almost by definition, as self-critical as they are self-aware; but their intuitive powers are patchy. The writer, no matter how well-intentioned or sensitive or gregarious, lives in a solipsistic bubble. Thus the giftie conundrum: we cannot read ourselves as others read us.
Many of us are fortunate in having a decent-enough notion of what we’re trying to achieve and a means, more or less, of gauging whether we’re succeeding; but we’re always in danger of deluding ourselves.
And yet (almost, again, by definition) we find ways of living with that possibility.
After all, we’re confronted time after time by intimations of critical perversity - we know full well that our favourite children may be written off as losers, while our quick fixes, bridging passages thrown together for purely functional purposes, may be praised as being really rather special.
So I think I sort of assumed that returning to a body of your own work after a good number of years would be interesting but unchallenging and that the emotions involved would tend toward fond indulgence or feelings akin to nostalgia.
I was wrong. It has been sobering. And no more so than in the process of reabsorbing paragraphs that had acquired, however vaguely, a special place in my memory, passages that made me feel good when they were new-minted, those that acquired an even greater glow through the editing process… but which now, read afresh, seem clumsy or ill-conceived or just downright badly written.
And the unique nature of this exercise – the rendering down of a photographically-illustrated narrative into a web site – has helped to highlight other weaknesses. And, indeed, self-
delusions.
In building this site, much that was implicit has become explicit, not least the whole notion of the shape of the narrative, the space it occupies, its properties as a labyrinth.
Structure is now laid bare for all to see, formalised in digital architecture. And here’s the nub of the matter, the crux of the apostrophe – somehow (I know not how, I know not when) I managed to acquire a vague notion that the coda to one of the book’s climactic incidents, a dreamscape walk, through a city of dreadful night, to Aldgate East tube station, had, thanks to serendipitous aesthetic considerations related to form, acquired transcendent status.
In particular, I sort of assumed that the steps down into Aldgate East tube station formed the entrance to yet another rabbit hole; and that this connected up pretty much in short order to an infernal part of the labyrinth.
This feeling, I suspect, was compounded by a vague perception that, in these paragraphs, we have echoes of the opening gambit of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the poet led by the shade of Virgil through the dark forest and into the nether world.
Well. What can I say? Other than… it just isn’t so. The Aldgate East steps don’t drop you into the vicinity of Dante’s Circles (or Piranesi’s Carceri, for that matter) but into an entirely different region altogether.
I wish I had the time or the inclination to explore this further. But I don’t. I really don’t.
