Forty Minutes in the Stream of Consciousness

written and illustrated by JULIETTA GRAMIGNI

ese houses are all the same. Each disappears from view in a second. e sky is our constant. Ocean said his novel is born out of poetry, like the beautiful birthed from the broken. e fact that the last sentence of a book is for obsessing so that I forget the power of the journey. So the books collect dust, bookmarks unmoved.

e fact that really one’s voice is formed from the rubble of many collapsing together. e fact that the best view is always someone else’s, in the next carriage. At the airport Waterstones; Penguin Modern Classics; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He ruminates on a blurring. Sanity and madness. Soaring away forever from that maze of cut o elds. Hedges and borders and walls. en there is the cage: be normal. It contracts, inhales, exhales, so that you might have the illusion of breathing freely and seeing shi ing horizons you will never quite trespass. Take o is tense.

e fact that I took o with such an idea: that months of Rosetta Stone Italian might replace for my brother the march of his words, into eager newborn ears, a bellyful of phrases grounded like pebbles. Now we rise together with the sun, e Sun Also Rises in my seat pocket, afraid of being forgotten.

e way each person’s shell, that houses them long enough, grows like a re ection grows into view, until really it is impossible to ever lose them. Preserve the shell. And learn, nally, that reading each title is like uncovering a piece of him. Nonno was into sci- . But maybe surrealism more, but maybe not. e way catching - for a moment - the performance, the stormi di storni, is eeting and stretches through sky and time with the logic of a dream. Stormi and each bird is the eye commanding a tempest, a concerto that dances and erupts, rips and oats.

narratives. Stories ow through us whether we want them to or not, and with a simple passing glance to a name on a plaque, we give a whole new life to the person it is commemorating. Whilst in bed with Covid last week, I watched Disney’s Coco. In the movie, the souls of our ancestors live on in an a er-world, but those who are no longer remembered by anyone in the living world begin to disappear. I can’t seem to get this idea out of my head-- the idea that beinghood is not just the time spent alive, but the time spent existing in living memory. With this in mind, I think the reading of inscriptions goes beyond simply being an act of respect – it honours the life it is celebrating and, through memory, allows for their continued existence.

But what is it about us that wants to make these deeply personal displays of remembrance public? Maybe Coco’s storyline is not new at all, but one that re ects that innate human desire to be remembered? e inscriptions on these benches, whilst addressed to the commemorated, are perhaps most commonly intended for a public audience. We describe the person in terms of their connection to those they le behind - they are remembered as an uncle, a brother, a son, a grandson, a friend. ese descriptions are the pinnacle of what makes memorial benches so curiously beautiful in my opinion. In life, we exist as our relation to those we love - we are a collection of lives and not an isolated singular entity. In that respect, we are never truly lost and we are never truly alone.

So, on your next walk into campus, I implore you to spend a couple extra minutes with the benches of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For a moment, whilst you sip your morning co ee, become part of their ‘one wild and precious life’. In the words of Franca Knowles MBE, inhabitant of a bench on the north-west side, “Live your Life.” e best New Year’s resolution: call an old friend out of the blue. I hope we make it out. Eunice takes our tin can forcefully so that stomachs turn with the clouds, rising fold above fold, sublime. In the last dream before departure, windows opened like great doors to a heavy silence, somehow indescribable. e fact that hitting ground hits stronger than wrestling turbu lence, realising how tightly you were wound up, a ball of shiv ers. Applause. Wave of cold relief. Safe now, we look out at other planes taking when we set out the week before, so that the memories in between spill through my ngers like a mere forty minutes.

Landing is worse. Lucy told me trauma is written best in the present tense, more urgent, gripping, publishable. ‘Space Oddity’ on repeat. Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. We hugged goodbye too many times, but not enough. e fact that I should have called; but there is no signal in the sky. e fact that he wanted to call but it might seem silly.

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