"a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities" (from/on Thomas Hardy's _Return of the Native_): a RED GHOST!

I can't stop wanting to write about Thomas Hardy, right as I am reading.

Certainly it must already be part of the scholarly conversation around his work, but there is so much to think about, regarding the Hardy novel as a preservationist's document. 

(If you know things, please tell me . . . in the meantime, from one Benjamin Cannon's' "'The True Meaning of the Word Restoration': Architecture and Obsolescence in Jude the Obscure"): 

Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing through the early twentieth century, England engaged in a massive project of architectural restoration, focusing on ecclesiastical architecture in particular. At its height between 1840 and 1873, 7,144 churches were restored, with fully half of England’s medieval churches affected . . . Nearly everyone living in England would have had a church near them restored. As a young architect, Thomas Hardy participated in several major church restorations and, as was often the case for Victorian architects, a significant portion of the income of the firms he worked for derived from restoration projects. Always ambivalent about this work, Hardy would eventually become an energetic and vocal opponent of it, joining William Morris’s anti-restorationist Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1881.

I remember seeing in the Norton that Hardy was an architect, first, and left the profession and went home to a provincial space to write and be contemplative. I guess it all makes sense that William Morris would oppose restoration. I don't know all that much about that crowd, but I sometimes delight in the filigreed fluff of Morris' textiles; in fact, our Free Stuff space boasts a Morris print hand towel in the bathroom, and this same print appears in Caryl Pagel's Free Clean Fill Dirt, a book that I am realizing just now as I remember the Morris print coincidence, seems to fit into something I want to think about related to Hardy and the immediacy of the leap caused by juxtaposed objects in time.  

But first:       

Architecture, Hardy argues in a 1906 address to the Society, is the medium in which social life achieves not merely a spatial but also a temporal dimension; architecture becomes, over time, a repository of what he calls “human associations.” For this reason, it is particularly vulnerable to restoration’s attempts to rebuild historical buildings as they once were rather than as they presently are: “The damage done to this sentiment of association by replacement, by the rupture of continuity, is mainly what makes the enormous loss this country has sustained from its seventy years of church restoration so tragic and deplorable.” Architectural restoration breaks the “continuity” that is embodied materially in the unaltered historical building; paradoxically, the urge to reclaim and recover the past destroys what is vitally important about it.

There is something here that seems akin to Gustaf Sobin, but maybe with less of the preciousness.

The piece goes on to talk about Hardy's literal use of the contemporary debate around restoration vs. preservation (like: as details in some of his novels), and that's somewhat interesting to me--but that's not what I mean. Too literal!

I mean that--and of course so, so, so much of Literature does this work--Hardy has a tender, pro-social, labor-and class-conscious way of making tapestry of small, preserved elements of daily life that will be lost, that are practically ghosts already, or that Hardy senses (in a "lonely face suggesting tragical possibilities" kind of way) will be junk of a bygone era. ("Preserved" by the writing of them and by the inserting of these collected bits into the novel-space.)

And this work, and to choose preservation over restoration, is palimpsestic and z-axial--privileging an angled time, time laid over time: my reading of Return of the Native, the peripheral characters' dismay that communal acts of joy get washed out by a desire to "polish" our realities with the new and with updated notions of our textural experiences, while the Breeders' "Cannonball" plays on a little speaker near my spot on the couch. I'm inside because of the apocalyptic heat. I left a book open to a Hardy poem on the porch but abandoned; it's too hot for me. The repeating sound in "Cannonball" not--as I think I am constantly, inanely assuming and thinking about because of my never-ending commitment to juxtaposition as praxis--alongside of Hardy's sentences, but, rather: with Hardy's sentences, in the same lonely face--

Some characters chat around a bonfire and gossip a little and agree to go drinking together soon, and they complain of increased loss of youngsters to a more sophisticated way of living, to a way that rejects the provincial slow-time of their own lives: "amazing what a polish the world [has] been brought to" (italics my own). 

I feel so "tragical" when I think about the effects of that polish. 

I'm so lonesome I could cry, etc. Lonesome in my longing for everything all once, with no polish at all: "Something that's so close / And still so far out of reach."

As I type, I'm sitting in the Free Space year-long art experiment wherein Phil and I dump free shit (our own and our longtime former neighbors' from below us) to prepare for a move after twenty years--clothes and DVDs and an unopened pedometer and tin cans that have nice hinges and old art supplies and a metallic masque and a spray can of varnish and a kid's lap desk, kids' poetry books, skeleton rings, a plaid zipper pouch, and remember when Bernadette Mayer moves through her home in litany of junk in Midwinter Day . . . the junk overflows, the preservationist posture is felt . . . the polyester 80s dress hangs over a board game with beautiful drawings of mushrooms, which leans against a maybe late 60s light fixture. (Chicago friends, come on over and take some of this great stuff!)

Before the characters get all mad about polish, there is a different scene, further away from the socius, out on the road. Hardy narrates a strange path. A man, a reddleman (hold please on that term, just one moment!), is escorting a cart in which a woman sleeps, mysteriously, sometimes crying out from her dreams, a woman of a different social station than the reddleman.

Ok, now: a reddleman!

Hardy gives some didactic exposition so as to kind of show his hand; he does indeed want to do a little preserving, here, of the soon-to-be-ghost element that is this bit of daily life:

The man on the road was "lurid red," "completely red." 

"One dye of that tincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his boots, his face, and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with the colour; it permeated him."

"The traveller with the cart was a reddleman--a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail."

Hardy just can't help it (I know! the dodo thing feels a little silly!); he's gotta' mention this "nearly perished" thing, to place it alongside/with and on the same lonely face, say, with the Breeders and summer heat and (just downstairs from where I was reading) my and Phil's kingdom of junk, our bricolage. It awaits you.

In such a winding and twisty way, Hardy makes the reddleman a double ghost. (Btw: I have only begun this novel! I can only imagine why that lady's sleeping in the cart and what it will mean that the reddleman's path intersects the circle of chatty bonfire characters!)

Just before the reddleman makes his second appearance, some of the bonfire people freak themselves out in the dark, thinking that they hear spooky noises. They start talking about "a very strange sort of" ghost that one claims to have seen, to have dreamt:

"A red one."

"[M]ost ghosts be white, but this is if it had been dripped in blood."

Whaaaaaat?

A ghost dripped in blood?

(Once the reddleman shows up, he gives them a real attack: "I half-thought it 'twas the devil.")

So, the didactic preservationist bit about the reddleman repeats in ghost-form (a red ghost, dripping in blood--a kind of after-image of the man on the road, lurid red), and because the very impulse to document the fact of a reddleman is a way of delineating an almost-ghost, when the "fact" of the reddleman's zapping out of our physical reality (an "obsolete form") gets put into the mouth of someone telling ghost stories, well, fuck, I think Hardy is doing things with time and palimpsest and echo and diagonals that I could just get high on all day. 

"A dream last night of a death's head" hangs over the characters, over all of us.

Although I don't "believe" in ghosts in a way that "believers" might conceive of them, I like Hardy's notion of architecture as a repository for human associations (that is, basically, "ghosts"), and if architecture divides temporality, and if our downstairs neighbors of twenty years were ghost hunters (they really were!), and if in this same apartment my grandmother lived during the beginning of my adulthood (on my college breaks, I'd do her grocery shopping and bring in all the items and stock them; I especially enjoyed lining up all of her Lean Cuisines in the tiny freezer) and now it's filled with giveaway things from our daughter's early life, and if I type about the reddleman and his repeating bloody ghost in a room that looks onto the back stairs going up to our apartment and about which our daughter had a recurring toddler nightmare of a "bloody guy," ascending the stairs and headed, infinitely, towards her room, I mean I can really see it.