Happy Birthday to Dare

I got back from Devon yesterday, where I have been for the last week. Now I have catching up to do.

Today, December the third, is Dare Wright's birthday.

I will be writing a little about Dare Wright today.

Happy Birthday to Dare!

…

I was wondering what to write for Dare's birthday, other than the birthday greetings and the fact that I am a confirmed fan, and it occurred to me to write a little of how I discovered Dare Wright in the first place. Since Dare is the author of children's books, you might think that they were read to me as a child, but they weren't. I found them in the spare room of the house where I lived. There were, I believe, three of her books – The Lonely Doll, The Little One and… well, I'm not sure what the third one was, because I have been unable to recover it, but I think it might have been Holiday for Edith and the Bears.

Since the books were not read to me, my discovery of them was silent and solitary. I'm not even sure how old I was at the time. It must have been before I was a teenager, but more than that I can't say. My sensations on finding the books and leafing through the pages were certainly the kind of sensations that seldom – perhaps never – come in adulthood, sensations, that is, belonging to a mind for which the world is still composed largely of questions and strangeness. The story of The Little One begins with a turtle (or terrapin) pushing through the door of an old deserted house and finding, inside, covered in dust and cobwebs, a doll:

"Who are you?" asked Turtle.

"I'm Persis," said the little doll. "I've been here for years – for years and years. I don't like it here."

My discovery of the books reminds me somewhat of this discovery, made by the turtle. The books were in the old spare room of the house, where full daylight seldom came – a dim and musty place. On the one hand, the photographs inside the books, of which the stories were composed, were immediately thrilling to me, as if I had found something of real significance, and that thrill consisted partly in strangeness and partly in sadness, not unlike the feeling described by Wordsworth in 'The Solitary Reaper':

Will no one tell me what she sings?–
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago…

And yet, on the other hand, there was also something remarkably familiar about what I saw, as if this were some long-lost family album, recording events in my own life that were forever frozen in some monochrome world outside of time, and in turning the pages I was recovering some precious portion of myself.

I have tried, a number of times, to account for this response, or to describe the feelings that Dare's work evokes in me. Here is one of a few attempts I made to put my feelings into lyric form:

Persis (i)

In the old house, Persis
Is the first of all things,
Unremembered beginnings,
Born lost, a name that only waits and dreams.

In the spare room, where they
Lay in wait for me one day
I found the books – that other age
Of distant now – and turned the pages.

From the dusty cabin
Into the shady woodland,
All we have ever missed,
Here it is. Here it is, Persis.
Perfect and timeless.

The summer was forever,
The quiet dust in sunlight.
I tried hard to remember
What turned the summer black and white.

From the dusty study
Into the sunny garden,
All we have ever missed,
Here it is. Here it is, Persis.
Sadness and bliss.

If I try to think of other artefacts, already existing, that have a similar atmosphere to the work of Dare, the closest I can come is something like Back to the Old House by The Smiths:

But, wrack my brains as I might, I cannot think of anything else with which to compare her work. This is peculiar. What Dare expresses seems so large and essential a part of the human experience that I am surprised to find no one else expressing the same things. Nonetheless, I sit here, and can think of no one. Dare Wright is an entire genre unto herself, and, like all true originals, she enables you to rediscover some lost continent within yourself.

A song like Back to the Old House comes close to that aspect of her work that might be called monochrome melancholy, but there is much more to her than that. There is also a kind of magic, such as that which makes a child shiver when she or he wishes upon a star. And there is also a kind of feral vulnerability, like that of the doll Persis, who wears skirts of ferns in the forest, and wishes to be loved by the bears with whom she lives.

And, even having written lyrics and said as much as I have, I feel that I have not really managed to hint at the appeal of Dare's work.

Anyway, since it is Dare's birthday today, I would at least like to direct the reader's attention to the Kodagain song that is a tribute to her. It is currently the fourth song on the pop-out player thing on Kodagain's MySpace page, and is also the profile song of my own MySpace page.