past-future

Until fairly recently, amongst other things, I was a removal man, working for a rather quirky outfit. It was amongst my favourite jobs. Rummaging through peoples lives - weird momentary intimacy and trust. Adventure. Mostly great fun.

But also. On occassion housing associations, who provided affordable homes to 'vulnerable' people, would hire us to clear out houses of those who had died, or were being moved to a 'retirement' home. Usually men. Many were loners, or at least had retreated into themselves. I think often no one talked to them. Disconnected lives. People only seemed to know them through their daily routines outside - trips to the shops, the post office, or a fry up in the local greasy spoon cafe.

Many of these people were obsessive horders, and lived in dark squalor. They hung onto tattered objects, usually paper, of seemingly no value. But they must have evoked some past memories for them; or maybe created some sense of continuity; or perhaps it was just to surround themselves with the familiar. Attempts at orientation.

Usually this stuff was as close as we got to the person. It was all we had to go on to get a sense of who this person was. All we would ever know. On occasion I would save something from being dumped. I wish I did this more often, but... anyway. I would look at these objects, and try to imagine how they had arrived at that state of being. What did they think. What did they feel. What did they think thier futures were to be when they were young.



Collage always perplexed me: but suddenly I found myself doing this one. I constructed it intuitively, with little thought. So it was finished before I thought much about what I had done. The lined paper is a journal page rescued from one of those men. Most pages had a date written in the corner, dozens and dozens of pages. But only a very few had anything else written down of that days events. "The man next door cut down my apple tree". "The woman upstairs spit on my door." This is probably the only thing that exists that showed that he existed.

Then there is an x-ray of a woman's spine from a battered book on radiology. Apparently there is something terribly wrong with her.

And then there is a scrap of newspaper - from 1934. I found sheets of this under some cracked lino in a bedsit. 70 years it had been under peoples feet. There is an article of a mother who had killed her own child, because he was suffering dreadfully from some terminal disease.

Echos of people no longer there. Forgotten, unknowable narratives. Despairing, mostly. This may be all that remains of them. But I don't think it's this unknowability that effects me so, although it was a jarring lesson in mortality, of the fleetingness of life. Rather, it is that thier vitality disappeared sometime before death. Death was a process.