Alchemy by Iain Sinclair

Author:Iain Sinclair [Iain Sinclair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749173
Publisher: Notting Hill Editions
Published: 2016-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

As a kid, we used to travel on airplanes all the time. Every summer we flew from Austin to London or Hamburg (my mother’s family still has a house, about two hours from Fuhlsbüttel, on the Danish border) to escape the heat. Once my dad even made us take a day trip to Dallas/Fort Worth – we never left the airport, we got right on a plane coming back, just for the air miles. Planes seemed to me boring and uncomfortable and I associated them with a certain amount of stress. My parents were often trying to schlepp a year’s worth of belongings, most of them packed by my mother in enormous cardboard boxes, back and forth from Europe, and some of their anxiety inevitably communicated itself to us. But I never felt an actual fear of flying until I found myself alone at the gate in Logan airport waiting for my plane to start boarding. Flights were stressful because of all the people involved (I’m one of five kids) and just the ordinary family tensions exacerbated by sleeplessness, junk food and confined spaces, but something about the fact that I was entirely alone, twenty-two years old, and about to get on a plane that would fly through the night and drop me on a different continent, where nobody especially loved me, freaked me out. I remember becoming uncomfortably aware of my breathing and that this was a problem that concentrating on it harder couldn’t solve.

The reason I flew to Hamburg is that my uncle, my mother’s brother, lived there. He was a bachelor psychoanalyst, a stylish and genial man (he had longish hair and often wore a little scarf around his neck, even indoors), who was used to his own routines and getting his own way. But he was basically very generous to me. In his student days, he had borrowed some money and bought a run-down apartment block in a shitty student part of Hamburg, which had become, in the intervening years, the fashionable artsy quarter. He lived in the penthouse flat and rented out many of the others cheaply to his friends, on the understanding, it seemed to me, that he could stop by whenever he liked, and they would entertain him and probably give him supper. He had never married (or only once, very briefly) or had kids, and these are the sorts of relationships he felt comfortable with – playing host and guest at the same time, among friends to whom he had been generous. He also ate out almost every night at a restaurant called the FilmHaus, a hipster cafe connected to some indie cinema, where the waiters knew him by name. This is where he took me on my first night in Hamburg.

I stayed with him, off and on, for about two months. In the next ten years, most of which I spent in Europe, I probably saw Anke, Caryn and Evelyn no more than two or three times each. With one exception, which I’ll come to in a moment, they played no part in my life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.