Aug
2014
Bolter 2.0
The other thing that Bolter’s piece made me think about, was my experience of travelling alone in Europe last year. After my phone was stolen in Rome, I arrived at my Paris apartment the next day with no ability to contact home, some passable French and ten days to spend walking the streets alone. My French speaking skills limited my possibilities to express myself orally, and with no one to share the experience with in English, I made best friends with my diary and the ten novels I devoured throughout my time there.
After ten days soaking in the beauty of cobblestone streets, pain au chocolat for petit dejeuner, afternoons spent in the library section of the wonderful Centre Pompidou and whole days spent in city gardens hidden in courtyards around Le Marais, designed to capture the sunlight and minimise the noise from the street, with Tim Winton, Ian McEwan, Helen Garner and my moleskin notebook for company, I felt like I was bathing in literary prose.
But as the days wore on, something strange began to happen. My constant exposure to literature and habit of writing down every last detail that happened each day was changing the way I was experiencing the world around me. Instead of noticing things happening around me arbitrarily, everything became inspiration. Everything.
The way the garbage man threw away his cigarette butt was suddenly loaded with poetic grace, as was the homeless man leering at me from across the street. A blue towel hanging of a balcony above me became bird like, a trapped animal desperate to float away into the dusk. Lying in a garden, I was moved to tears by the young boys kicking a soccer ball in the dust and the heat, and as the perfect blue sky was split in half by a ghost white aeroplane passing directly over me, as if trying to remind me in my loneliness that home was always just a plane ride away.
Not only was I constantly moved and inspired by the events around me, I was no longer experiencing them through a method of notice-react-move on, but instead as I saw each unfold around me, I experienced it in the prose that I imagined I would write about it in later.
I even thought of myself in the third person, as if I had stepped outside to see and feel myself for the first time in my life. I became ‘she’, or ‘the blonde girl’ in my own mind, and each line of prose came to me as if pre-written.
I understand how Bolter speaks of the writer’s inability to separate himself from his craft or his machine, and the exhaustion of such a difficulty. However, this bizarre and constant sensation brought about a level of surreal fulfilment to my experience that I might have previously thought impossible.
