Meeting mother, music in the dark, and rain in Kabul
With Ben Gomori, Maria Jastrzębska, and Parwana Fayyaz
Some years ago, in early spring, for a feature for Country Life magazine, I went to stay on an uninhabited island for a little over a week. It was very cold and strangely satisfying – all morning I’d walk to a lochen with small trout in it and then I’d wander back to the cave I was sleeping in where I’d make a fire out of dry heather and cook the fish. Time moved very slowly and at night, listening to the goats, scrabbling around beyond the mouth of the cave, I hardly slept. I had my dog for company and I realised then, for the first time, that she was getting old.
I’d packed in a rush before I headed up there and the only book I had with me was a scrunched up copy of Jane Eyre that I found at the bottom of my bag. It must have been forgotten there by a sibling, many years earlier, when they were on a school trip or something.
I had no phone and there was no signal anyway. I read, without any distractions at all,, in a way that I almost never do and I think I understood for the first time, the true tragedy of the life of Bertha Mason. Not so much a mad woman in an attic but a pawn pursuit of fortune building. With nothing to look at much except the sea, I sat for a long while going over passages and thinking about what Bertha really means, before going over the passage again.
In today’s issue of Boundless, Ben Gomori writes about the intensity and richness of listening to music in the darkness. The experience, he writes, is more than the some of its parts. Maybe we don’t all have to listen to our favourite records with the lights off but seeking out tranquility and disconnecting before tuning is, I think, immensely worthwhile.
Patrick Galbraith
Forbidden keepsakes
Maria Jastrzębska on discovering the life her mother used to lead
Everything was a secret. I drank in secrets with my mother’s milk. Or later, breathed them in with the adults’ smoke, as they talked and drank.
One day as a bored 13-year-old rifling through layers of bedding at the back of a shelf in the upstairs cupboard on the landing of my parents’ house — a West London semi — I feel a hard, rectangular object. I reach my hands deeper under the layers of some blankets until I can pull it out. It’s a black photo album with leather edging, bound with ties. I open it: pictures of a lake surrounded by birches, pictures of my grandparents and a few faces I don’t recognise. I’m about to put the album back but then, as I turn a page over, under the tissue paper, I stop.
There is my mother outside a church in what is clearly a horse-drawn wedding carriage. The carriage is drawn by two white horses, driven by highlanders in Polish regional costume — white wool trousers embroidered and edged with braid, pompoms on the end of the legs, woollen embroidered jackets, black felt hats with a band of seashells and a single feather. Under the page in the album, a place name, Rabka, a town on the slopes of the Górce Mountains. The date is 1937. Mama holds a bridal bouquet of white roses. She wears a white two-piece suit of crepe de chine over what looks like a silk blouse, a wide brimmed hat and heeled court shoes — all in white. She’s smiling.
But what makes me look through the pictures again and again is the handsome young man beside her. Here is the groom in his peaked cap with a crowned Polish eagle emblem and uniform, a dress sword at his side. He isn’t tall. He is not my father.
With excitement and a kind of glee, I make my way downstairs to confront my parents about this discovery. For all their insistence on being proper, my parents have guilty secrets! And I have caught them out! I am so pleased with myself. I’m also shocked and indignant that no one has told me anything. What do I really know about my parents?
Maria Jastrzębska is a Polish-British poet, feminist, editor, translator and playwright. Her poetry collection The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingenue was published in 2018 by Cinnamon Press
Sounds of the dark
Ben Gomori, the founder of Pitchblack Playback, on curating the optimal environment to truly hear music
Even as the creator of Pitchblack Playback, I am still often overawed by the experience of listening to an album from start to finish on a big sound system in the dark with no-one talking, singing or bumping into me. I’ve had transformative experiences with albums I thought I already knew intimately, where I’ve felt like I’ve only truly understood their sonics for the first time after knowing them for years. It’s a simple idea but I am evangelical about it being more than the sum of its parts when it’s done right.
I first had the idea for Pitchblack Playback when I was a music journalist and the mighty electronic label Ninja Tune invited me to hear a pre-release preview of Amon Tobin’s mind-bending album ‘ISAM’ in a cinema screen in Soho. They showed visuals from the campaign in tandem, but what struck me was the quality of the sound, and the focused experience we all shared. I excitedly told some friends that I wanted to start an event where I could bring this pre-release experience to the public. They didn’t really get it—why would anyone pay money for that? Unbeknownst to me, one of them had just been to see Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, the first act of which is held in the dark. He said: ’are you going to do it in pitch-black darkness or something?’ That was the moment it all came together (thanks, Ben Davis).
The cynic in you might think ‘that sounds like a marketing gimmick’, or might ask ‘can’t I just do that at home?’ Well unless you have a large room with a very expensive sound system, big big subwoofers, acoustic treatment and VERY understanding neighbours / housemates / partners, the answer is probably a resounding ‘no’. The analogy I always use is: it’s the same as watching a film in the cinema vs watching it at home. You’re not getting the full picture, the large-scale immersion, or the communion of sharing an experience with others (n.b. vital ways in which we differ from the standard cinema experience: we make announcements telling people not to talk — or sing! — we don’t allow latecomers, and everyone is given an eye mask to block out the glow of the fire exit lighting).
Ben Gomori's own debut album 'Collapsing Time' was released last year by Monologue Records; future events can be found at pitchblackplayback.com
Rebirth in Kabul, by Parwana Fayyaz
Grow like trees.
This little whim inside us is not
merely a sigh of regret.
It’s the life that speaks of the
unspeakable turbulence— carrying
our existence into a garden,
where springs begin at dawn
and summers at dusk.
Here, rain gathers in our veils.
Sunlight filters through our invisible desks.
Here, we grasp our wide shoulders
and pierce into them.
Next to the shadow of fallen trees,
we lay ourselves down,
we keep our little selves there until
we are rooted inside the earth,
graceful, silent, calm—like a tree we wish to grow.
This time, we wish to grow into men,
with an arm in our heads
and a heart in our feet.
So, we can touch what we think is ours,
and walk where we love to go.
That way, we are reborn to remain in Kabul,
to fight to love again and never to leave.
Parwana Fayyaz is a poet, and scholar and teacher of classical and medieval Persian literature. Her first collection, Forty Names, was published in 2021. She is re-reading one of Nizami’s masterpieces, Haft Peykar, a Persian epic exploring love and the cosmic order of existence