My memories seem to be appearing unexpectedly these days, and not as pictures to begin with. Most seem to start as uncertain sensations that I notice in their intensity rather than in their form, whether that would be a picture or a sound, or a feeling of touching something. I assume they are memories because they seem, eventually, to suggest something of the past – but I also feel they are ahead of me, whatever these things are that I am becoming aware of me.

Something about this picture by Vilhelm Hammershøi reminds me of what I am trying to describe here. His work is enigmatic. I’d describe it as ‘open’, though, rather than ‘closed’, which is how I often experience enigmatic art. Usually the enigma, the secret, is so apparent in its absence that there is little to be said. We all know there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s trumpeting. Hammershøi seems less keen than many to betray his secrets. You might simply say there’s a room full of possibility in this painting, even if we can only see a part of it, and the dust it contains. His ghosts may be ghosts of the future, things he is in touch with but which he hasn’t known yet.

I was reading the novel N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto and my mind seemed to find something helpful in it. She writes about those moments of intensity, surprises, shocks, that escape most writers.

I’m in the slipstream of something happening in front of me, like a comet and I am in the tail. I have no idea what is happening ahead of me, although someone like Freud might have spoken about it as unconscious, and others as something magical, and others still as something already written that I am simply following. 

None of these things I shall ever know apart from in the way they come to me, which I imagine is probably delayed – from the face of the comet, where I am not, to the tail, where I am. Hang on.