The Chimes

But some memories are more important than others,' she says. 'Because some memories belong to more than just one other person...Some memories tell us about who we are. They need to be kept safe so that things can change for all of us

Deep in the drilled-in mud of the fields behind me, our bulbs are wrapped in their brittle skins with their messages of color stored inside. Blue iris, yellow crocus, tulips of all colors.

How without mercy and without blame we have all of us been. And how careless to have misplaced so much.

When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing.

...after a while her mood flares. She lights her words with it and flicks them at me.

The trees are budding their new leaves and a thought comes into my head. They have a kind of rhythm in their upright trunks and their branches that start thick and then divide and get narrower and lighter and faster till they quiver in the air like breath past a clarionet reed. That is a rhythm you can see, not hear. Perhaps music happens elsewhere than in ears.

It is an awful knowledge. Even if what you are coming up out of is a nightmare, waking is hard. When you were deep inside the dream, all was decided for you. Out in the morning is something else altogether. Something you have to choose for yourself.

When you don't grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, "Okay," and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. that's what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice.

That difference, that indefinable difference between talent and genius. It is as fine as hair, invisible to the eye and even, most of the time, to the ear. But in her face when she looks at her brother, I see that it may as well be a huge uncrossable chasm.

What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love.

They are afraid of bodies. Because bodies betray us. They grow and they change and they love and they leak and they get tired and sick and old and they shake and die. They are afraid of these things because they are afraid of discord.

You can't force them [objectmemories] to flower either. Like bulbs, they show their secrets in their own time.

The man comes closer. I recognise him. It’s Johannes, who teaches rudiments and solfege at the local school. I raise my hand in the notes for greeting and he carves out the response. So crisp and clear I can’t help feeling the implied correction of my slumped tones.

What you'll learn, Simon, is that people do not want to know the truth. You might think you are doing them a great favour to bring it to them. But even if you put it right on their doorstep, nobody will thank you for it. They'll throw it away. Throw it in your face. Most people prefer to forget.

A door in my chest opens with an unfamiliar happiness. In my arms, there is an echo of his nearness, what it felt like to hold him.

Dischord lives with us, even in the harmony of the Order. You can see the fallen buildings of Allbreaking if you look to the other side of the river. The bridge between Bankside and Paul’s shakes and stirs. The people run but never fast enough. There is no bridge between Bankside and Paul’s now, but in the streets and markets, the kids sing the old forecast, like it is still taking place, like it is always taking place. London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair Lady.

There are other things I newly wake with. A sadness that is different altogether from the cloudy sediment dread bears up. It is dark and solo. I can’t see the bottom of it. And another thing I don’t recognise, a kind of hunger to grab another person and press them as deep into knowing as I’ve gone.

What is it that tells you to make a memory?

I look at her arm, tacet. It is covered in scars. They are too clear, too straight, too regular to be accident or injury. She has done them herself.

I see the different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes each time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and I do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meeting. Because there is not yet any end.

I want to show an all of us. And I want the story to hold and keep our separate strangeness and the broken pieces of all the human beings that do not fit.

... I went down to the river. I was trying to find where the silence was coming from.