Friday 13 July 2012

Salman Akhtar

Poetic little abstract from one of the speakers at a conference I'm attending tomorrow...


The emotional biography of our childhood homes goes beyond the architectural envelopes they provide for our mentalized and un-mentalized erotic, hostile, tender, civic, and spiritual aspirations. Internalized, their corridors, closets, and cloisters function as life-long psychic retreats and springboards for mental rejuvenation. Driven by naive hope, we visit them in actuality and come back wounded. But then the plump nursemaid of nostalgia leads us back to those very streets and lampposts and we return with a poem in our hands. As we grow old, life's intoxication gradually changes into tipsy indifference, but arriving at our eternal resting place we are unexpectedly clear-eyed. We see that we have ended up where we started from. Our childhood homes might have been lost but childhood itself has turned out to be our home. Loyally and forever. 

Poetics of Space territory, probably, although I understood so little of that book that it's difficult to know whether I can legitimately site it.

Just noticed the reference to 'cloisters' - anyone grow up around one of those?

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