I wonder sometimes about pictures, images or photographs of the places I write about. Sometimes, particularly if they are of nature, the photographs accompany the words as if they were made to be together. I enjoy images with text, whether it is in a blog post or a book, and I think it was in W G Sebald's books that I first noticed small black and white images that had inserted themselves between the printed lines and what I particularly liked about them was their unintrusive nature, they were not especially beautiful photographs and were not meant to be. Their function in fact or so I thought, was somewhere between map and memory or aide-memoire or sketch made while writing the notes and included in the finished product so that the reader might also follow the deliberations of the writer, add to their sense of curiosity and their enjoyment as they participate in the threading of thought and image and association, leading to a clearing in the dense wood, or to a rise which when you reach the top, gives you this immense view out over the surrounding countryside or the city below you and these sketchy photographs have formed part of the path, part of the wings that have carried you up here, to a view that strikes you like a thunderclap, a slap of insight a heavy wave of water that knocks you off your feet with the power of it, and you fall over laughing, in the spray of the breaking wave.
I've been thinking about this because I wanted to post an excerpt from a piece of prose that's been published recently and because it is about a very particular place, I went looking for some photographs to illustrate the place I was writing about. I could not find any because I did not take any at the time. And I thought that even if I had, would they have conveyed the streets I had written about, really? For writing is made up of that mixture of vision and imagination, and of associations and perhaps memories that arise, and the photographs would not convey that, not really. I don't think so anyway. And, looking through other photographs of streets near the ones I wrote about, in Tirana and other Albanian towns it seemed to me that they invoked their own stories so I could imagine looking at them and writing a story from them, but that would be a different story...
So I decided to put in photographs at the end. They might be seen as sketches or fragments from a notebook, or they might form a story of their own.
An excerpt from Walking in Tirana, included in Scottish PEN's anthology of prose and poetry, I'm Coming with You. It says on the back that the writing 'reflects on places, journeys, people, home and exile, and most powerfully on freedoms found through writing and reading.'
Near the clock tower I walk across a flat expanse of earth, with here and there a tuft of grass growing, emerald green against the brown. The area of earth is scattered with shiny puddles and most of what is not underwater is slicked with a film of mud. I negotiate the lakes and swampy areas and I feel briefly like a child, playing at explorers.
I do not know who I am as I step over fragments of patterned paving stones, the sunlight chopping all that it touches, slicing it up into brightness and shade. I am swept up with the rubble and smoothed down with the dust. I am nothing other than this. I am laughing and frightened. I am possibly only the words that I write. So I have to keep writing, as I have to keep moving, in sunlight, or out of it.
I don't know who I am as I walk through these streets. I feel like a chink in a wall, stuffed with extravagant flowers. In the evening, the flowers droop and drop, one by one, from the gap that they filled.
A loosened soil, I could be that, as I walk through these streets. Something crumbling. Maybe a stone. Maybe, once part of a red-brick archway, like the one I saw on a muddy track between Bajram Curri and Myslym Shryi, with greenery dangling from the curve of its roof. Or the darkness the archway is covering. Tell me I whisper to the sauntering streets, tell me who I am. My walking is waiting and listening, not walking at all.
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Rubyxx