Around the Block; or the Tricks of Memory

In a series of stories this book chronicles life in a small town in the 1050s. The stories involve life on one block, moving from house to house to follow the exploits of the people, especially the children, who lived on the block. The stories wander the spectrum from fantasy to the low mimetic, but whether they are openly unreal or close to the world we inhabit, they are about memory. The voice you hear in most of these stories is the voice of someone looking back, retracing the past, inventing memories, and imagining what it was like to be back there, re-feeling and re-experiencing that circumscribed world. We can't go home again, but we can imagine going home again and we do this by cross-fertilizing memory with imagination. This is the process at work here. Interestingly, memory has a way of attracting imagination. The two mental activities - remembering and imagining - are manifestations of desire, and we know how frustratingly unending desire is. Desire by definition cannot be satisfied. To satisfy desire is to end desire and to end desire is to end movement, to cease to live. Desire is, yes, an aspect of nostalgia, the longing for home, for that place of origin. Such desire may be unhealthy, yet it may also be free-floating, looking for a place to land. If it lands, it does so only until it has refueled and then it takes off again. And so if desire lands in the past, it does so only for a while. Visiting or revisiting the past is just a way of refueling for the future. Nostalgia of this kind is restorative.