We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.  

Marcel Proust.

The way memory and history work in the act of writing becomes ever more absorbing.   For some time now I have been writing books toward a memoir series Outside the Frame. The first volume, Regret Horizon, is written but not yet published. Maybe it won’t be. There’s a story behind that.

I have always thought of myself as “outside the frame”. Is this due to my early life experience? No doubt. I was the only child for five years in a family torn apart by wartime trauma, misery, discord, illness and death. Nothing unusual for the times, or for millions of children in many parts of the world today. But there were many other elements, some of which were specific to my own family lineages and histories.

I am also fascinated by framing in art. The frame creates the picture, cuts it off from its continuity with the wall, with the room, with the space enclosing the room, and thus with the world outside the wall. It’s part of what Siri Hustvedt calls “The Mystery of the Rectangle”. The rectangle, the frame, encloses the image and makes it secure in two dimensions. It can’t leave, we can’t claim it. There it is for ever, unless it is erased. I imagine myself looking at the viewer from across a transverse edge, sliding in or perhaps it’s really out of the viewing space. I can’t seem to get fully inside that frame, or maybe I just can’t stay there. That’s the power of the Great Illustrator.

Am I the product of some other idea, which has its own existence and  mobilises me as its exemplar? The attribution of will or intention to ideas makes a weird sense today in the light of the memetic world replete with interpretation …. of what though? Do ideas really care?

So far I’ve finished two volumes, although they still being edited, half-written a third and have started on a fourth. I have no idea how many others there will be.