I remember how unsure I was last year about whether or not to do Honours. I remember dithering over the decision so much, even though I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that I would ultimately do it. I’m going through my archives right now in another tab to find posts of me dithering to link to, but I think that would benefit me more than you guys, who I’m sure remember all my complaining and hand-wringing well enough without any reminders.
To have emerged on the other end now, with a piece of work, completed (in a sense) and so large and small at the same time, is mind boggling. That this year – so full of so much – has yielded this work, in as neat a package I could manage, is something I am still trying to comprehend.
The Resilience of Echoes was a phrase casually tossed off by my subject librarian when I had a personal session with him to learn about research tips and databases and journals. I made him repeat it and wrote it down in my clumsily large handwriting – all caps. It then became both a title and a hat stand, a place for me to hang all my different ideas, to see them all in one place.
Pretty much everything I write is about my mother, who died the year I turned eight. She is the absent presence that shadows my life, and I have so many questions about her. About how she split our lives, and how her death coloured the life she had before a blood clot burst in her brain, how remembering someone you never got to know is this weird unfolding and feels a little like a lie, and how now her 23 year old daughter can’t figure out who she is, because how can a person be solid when they’re built on something that no longer exists?
Those questions went on the hat stand, and they stuck around. They made a shape, they looked like a person, several people, a ghost. Those questions and more turned into The Resilience of Echoes.
The work is in the form of a Flash file, made up of several sections linked together, employing prose, poetry, audio, images and a slight bit of animation. With my bundle of design ideas, aesthetic choices, word fragments and rudimentary maps and storyboards, and all these many memories, I turned to a friend of a friend, Andrew, who became the developer for Resilience. Patiently, he built this thing up from the pieces I would shoot off to him, several days later than what I promised, accompanied by so many notes and rambling. Patiently, Resilience waited for me to find its shape.
It’s still unfinished. I think of it as a perpetual work in progress. There’s things in there I’ve always wanted to write about – the day of my mother’s death, our time in America (where she died), how I harboured a little hate in my heart for this death, this robbery, this abandonment, how I still carried a teaspoon of guilt over who I’ve turned into without her – but there are also things that for now still live in the overcrowded pages of my notebooks. Ghost stories from my childhood, the years immediately following her death and how they barely register to me, her childhood home up north, our relatives there, my dad, his poems to her, her work, her girlhood. There are whole lives to unpack, hers, mine, those of our family. This version of Resilience is like a hallway of doors, behind which some rooms lay incomplete, half-built and unfurnished. I must find a little faith somewhere that this is a comma, not a full stop. And I hope those that read Resilience see it the same way.
And so this year comes to an end. I put away my notebooks, my large A2 sheets of paper covered in highlighter ink for visual graphs and charts and maps, I label folders in bigger folders and clear my desktop of the many many drafts of my exegesis. I clear out of the living room in our house, the lounge I took hostage and locked myself away in for the last two weeks leading up to my ultimate deadline. I am done. For 2011, at least.
The Resilience of Echoes can be downloaded here.
To view, open a new tab on your preferred web browser and drag the file to it. We’ve only tested it on computers, so I don’t know if it would work on something like an iPad, if you’re lucky enough to have one. If you have any comments regarding the work – technical, grammatical, positive, negative, whatever – I’ve set up a special account to receive them. theresilienceofechoes at gmail dot com. Thank you for reading this, and if you find the time to sit down with Resilience, thank you for that too. It means more than you’ll know.
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