time warp

Recently received an email from an old Newfoundland friend of mine. When I left I was running away. I was sixteen, and sad. I kept in touch with a few people for awhile, but they all drifted off after a few years. The internet is a strange thing. It changes our geographies. It also changes our relationship to time, the landscape of our histories.

Would you ever want to get back inside your childhood? There are so many novels out there written by adults from a child’s point of view. But none of them get inside it. How could they? Childhood is about a completely different way of seeing, may be one that has little to do with language, and articulation.

I’m re-reading Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms. It isn’t about childhood, but it is about getting inside an unoccupiable subjectivity. She writes in English, attempting to create the interior Japanese-language chatter of an old grandmother. And it works, because she doesn’t strive for realist accuracy but shoots straight for a kind of poetic fantastic.