This might not be an easy read, it’s not even a necessary one. Post fucking-shit experience rarely seems to leave you disorder.
Sometimes stuff falls out – makes a noise, like lots of crockery, falling from a high cupboard – mind the sharp edges, clean up, move on… but for the smell of soot, like a pigeon pulled from a chimney. Early morning phone calls.
Walking home from the cinema last night, I stopped near a house that had been on fire earlier in the day. The fire crew were still pumping water in through the roof – filthy, sooty water pouring out through the doors and away down the street where, while the fire was blazing earlier, locals had brought chairs and beers out to watch. They’d gone in now, it’d rained heavily while I was watching Nomadland, chased them from the street back inside their homes – I hope they are homes.
Dark smoke stains up the walls from the windows – still basically a house still, 3 floors, the roof and all. But, I’m guessing the contents were fucked – homeliness is no wet soot and charred remains.
The smell of wet soot, wet burnt wood even burnt concrete has a smell – stone in wet in soot and smoke. It’s not an easy smell to shake, it’s always just about me like I’ve stood in shit but it’s gone and the smell is not…
– I’ve posted this photo before – one of the few recognisable objects after my dad burnt the house down. The house, that ‘family’ house wow, of the 5 of us that lived in it originally 3 are dead, 2 of them killed themselves, 1 clung onto life too long after her sweet mind left her body behind.
Dad always accused me of stealing the typewriter – but it was found in the rubble where his bedroom had collapsed, so it was probably in there all along. I remembered his amazing old Leica camera, he’d never let me use it even though he’d never use it himself – I guess it was under that rubble too.. unfound, not a typewriter.
Things.
I really felt for the people who’d lived in that house until yesterday. It’s hard to describe the feeling of the loss of pretty much every ‘thing’ – photos, mementos, gifts, books, crafted things, embroideries, drawings, 50s pointed dancing shoes, paintings, the pots and pans my mum cooked with, her ‘best’ china, gardening shoes, boots, plants, tools, screws and hooks – beds, sheets, clothes, the towels, soap, passports, birth certificates, school reports, dad’s papers from 75 years of never really ever stopping working, piano, clocks, graduation photos, records, car keys, the car, door keys, the doors, windows, floors, walls, pipes, roof. All exchanged for soot, rubble, some melted glass and a dead typewriter. We found lots of wet, dirty, photos too, oddly – spent weeks drying them – brought the stench into my house, spread our wet, torn, burnt, filthy remains out on the table…
Mostly people don’t choose, with furious neglect, to destroy everything they ever valued with so many of the memories of ours too that’ll fade a little faster without the objects and the place where they sat.
Phil Pool - Art and Protest 