Read Online The Death of All Things Seen by Michael Collins - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Collins
Ads: Link
Polly; a proper Victorian family seated in a second-floor, wallpapered room with a white tablecloth, overhanging chandelier, and portrait of the queen on the wall.
It was so self-contained, so real that it was easy to conjure up a life lived inside the dollhouse, this world fashioned and conceived in a time before two world wars and the collapse of the British Empire, in a time before the slow leech of civility, good manners and proper dress.
Norman had the relevant history, the facts, the apparent mood of crusty manners, the staid voice of George Crumby – authoritatively clipped, sensible, George Crumby speaking over the rasp of a knife in the spread of butter on toast, with a measure of rebuke, reprimand or instruction. He felt he could begin right now with a play of sensibility and manners, and yet, in standing there, it fell on him, the revelation of what was far more difficult to capture – the in-between time of the great mansions and what came after George Crumby and his family – the subtle shift when a time was no longer as it had been. It took a keen insight to understand that what was felt was not the thing itself, but its after-effect. Though, somewhere in the in-between of in-betweens, he felt that an understanding could sometimes register – and just barely – if one had the acuity to feel it. This is where greatness lay.
In looking in at George Crumby, in seeing the small black umbrella stand, Norman was reminded of the depth of Lennon and McCartney’s lament for the passing of an older England; their transformation from clean cut pop stars to the strung-out, long-haired gurus of an Eastern mysticism. How had they navigated from the perfunctory vacuity of ‘She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah’, ‘It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, to the melancholic dirge of childhood memories of standing in the English rain? And so, too, capturing the inexplicable litany of those most English of moments in ‘Penny Lane’ where a pretty nurse sold poppies from a tray, to the dirge of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the church where a wedding had been, all of it a slurred past seen through a yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Norman recalled a naked John and Yoko in the bed-in protests in a world come undone by Vietnam, John and Yoko a contrite Adam and Eve reckoning with the grim reality of what the snake had so offered in the Garden of Eden.
Norman looked away, felt a shudder run through him. He opened his phone, scrolled through some photos. He settled on a shot of Grace. Both her hands were earnestly fixed on the steering wheel of a miniature ice-cream truck.
He scrolled to another image of her. How strange to mark time against physical change in the way a child grows with the passage of weeks and months. He could see with the distance of three years how exotically Oriental she had looked upon arrival, her large doll face, her body so shockingly tiny.
Grace had suffered apparent malnutrition, or that was the determination of a doctor who had cautioned that, most probably, her adult teeth, when they came in, would need dental work. She was missing an enamel coating on her baby teeth. It was advised she not eat processed sugars. Her bones, too, had been deprived of calcium. She was suffering rickets. There were things that happened during her lack of prenatal care that might yet manifest. Norman learned all this stateside.
Norman navigated to an image of the orphanage in the southern region of the Guangxi province, a province, until then, unknown to him and not disclosed before he left America. There had been that much secrecy in the adoption.
The house warden was a small, withered peasant dressed in Maoist style standing outside a dilapidated government building that had served as a place for indoctrination during the Cultural Revolution. Against the dark background, he could see a constellation of lights, the eyes of the children caught in the camera
It was so self-contained, so real that it was easy to conjure up a life lived inside the dollhouse, this world fashioned and conceived in a time before two world wars and the collapse of the British Empire, in a time before the slow leech of civility, good manners and proper dress.
Norman had the relevant history, the facts, the apparent mood of crusty manners, the staid voice of George Crumby – authoritatively clipped, sensible, George Crumby speaking over the rasp of a knife in the spread of butter on toast, with a measure of rebuke, reprimand or instruction. He felt he could begin right now with a play of sensibility and manners, and yet, in standing there, it fell on him, the revelation of what was far more difficult to capture – the in-between time of the great mansions and what came after George Crumby and his family – the subtle shift when a time was no longer as it had been. It took a keen insight to understand that what was felt was not the thing itself, but its after-effect. Though, somewhere in the in-between of in-betweens, he felt that an understanding could sometimes register – and just barely – if one had the acuity to feel it. This is where greatness lay.
In looking in at George Crumby, in seeing the small black umbrella stand, Norman was reminded of the depth of Lennon and McCartney’s lament for the passing of an older England; their transformation from clean cut pop stars to the strung-out, long-haired gurus of an Eastern mysticism. How had they navigated from the perfunctory vacuity of ‘She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah’, ‘It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, to the melancholic dirge of childhood memories of standing in the English rain? And so, too, capturing the inexplicable litany of those most English of moments in ‘Penny Lane’ where a pretty nurse sold poppies from a tray, to the dirge of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the church where a wedding had been, all of it a slurred past seen through a yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Norman recalled a naked John and Yoko in the bed-in protests in a world come undone by Vietnam, John and Yoko a contrite Adam and Eve reckoning with the grim reality of what the snake had so offered in the Garden of Eden.
Norman looked away, felt a shudder run through him. He opened his phone, scrolled through some photos. He settled on a shot of Grace. Both her hands were earnestly fixed on the steering wheel of a miniature ice-cream truck.
He scrolled to another image of her. How strange to mark time against physical change in the way a child grows with the passage of weeks and months. He could see with the distance of three years how exotically Oriental she had looked upon arrival, her large doll face, her body so shockingly tiny.
Grace had suffered apparent malnutrition, or that was the determination of a doctor who had cautioned that, most probably, her adult teeth, when they came in, would need dental work. She was missing an enamel coating on her baby teeth. It was advised she not eat processed sugars. Her bones, too, had been deprived of calcium. She was suffering rickets. There were things that happened during her lack of prenatal care that might yet manifest. Norman learned all this stateside.
Norman navigated to an image of the orphanage in the southern region of the Guangxi province, a province, until then, unknown to him and not disclosed before he left America. There had been that much secrecy in the adoption.
The house warden was a small, withered peasant dressed in Maoist style standing outside a dilapidated government building that had served as a place for indoctrination during the Cultural Revolution. Against the dark background, he could see a constellation of lights, the eyes of the children caught in the camera
Similar Books
