Tulips & Roses
Liudvikas Buklys
Gintaras Didžiapetris
Elena Narbutaitė
Antanas Gerlikas
Rosalind Nashashibi
Nicolas Matranga
Robert Snowden
Dear Scott,
Thank you for your letter. I don't think I received a single letter in the past five years, so your white envelope on my doorstep was a small adventure. I started thinking about traveling even before I opened it.
Sadly, I will have to spoil the adventure for you. I don't suppose I could say anything worthwhile about my father to help you with your research. My memories are fading. Strangely, I feel that memories of him started to fade out even before he died. He never really returned from this last journey I am sure you know well about. What returned was a silent shadow drowning in the armchair for days watching sports on TV. He didn't care about writing anymore. In fact, he probably didn't care about anything at that point.
I am still not sure what happened to him, what changed him so much. I am not the one to answer your questions. Most people know him as the modern day Ulysses passing through the pillars of Hercules. He made us believe in the unknown again. As if you can still go and discover a new land or get lost in the oceans. You know what I think? I think that people love my father's books because they can feel at home while he acts like a mirror of the distant. Yes, he gave us all the illusion of having a home again.
But he was the first one to suspect his own fictions. I guess that caused this terrible anxiety he suffered. He was an unhappy man and a violent man. It was almost as if he created all these locations, all these adventures, people, masks, animals and godheads and then strived to live with them, to immerse into his own stories. A bit like this donkey with a stick and a carrot on its back. He was bound to break sooner or later.
So take this sentence as the portrait of my father you were asking for:
A tall man with a safari hat in his hand fearing that the true journey is happening in his proximity of which he knows nothing yet.
I hope this helps you at least a bit.
Regards
Edna Parker
The beginning in all of the Sherlock Holmes stories is more or less the same every time. Sherlock is sitting in his room, presumably by the table opposite the door. He is bored, smoking a pipe and seemingly thinking. In fact, Sherlock is rarely thinking in the usual sense of the word and certainly never in the beginning of the story. Rather his mind is rotating in a state of free motion, having all its potentialities in one concentrated point but not emitting any kind of energy. Somewhere close to him we have Dr. Watson who is also the reader – always in the exaggerated state of expectation, but unable to think and act because he is locked within the consciousness that is not a consciousness of his own. Then there is also a window to the street. Someone always has to walk down the street before entering Sherlock's room. A series of footsteps, sometimes highly rushed, sometimes steady and self-assured. Then one can see a hat emerging from the corner of the window. A hat is half of a man, the way he wears it is another half. Then there is the coat. Introducing a coat into a detective story is already telling the story itself, so it can only enter in its own time.
We feel that the room expects something to happen, but does not move. This is the moment of utmost pleasure for Sherlock Holmes. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this moment is the pleasure of the detective story itself. Everything is literally hanging in the air or in the intense smoke of Sherlock's pipe. The moment extends a little further when the man with a hat starts to speak. It always feels as if Sherlock is deaf to the voices of people who speak to him. Or rather, during a conversation he hears something altogether different than a human voice. We know next to nothing about Mr. Holmes, but we know that he is a violin player who cares about the violin much more than the music it resonates.
I keep thinking that Sherlock Holmes himself is just a plot device in his own stories. The real character is always the room where the action takes place. The empty silent vessel which registers words and things brought into it and then makes some kind of structure out of them. Maybe the structure of a detective novel is quite similar to that of any other conversation?
Tulips & Roses
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