Memory is a form of time travel
Micro Review of:
“Feeling Gravity’s Pull”
By Colm O’Shea
The Stinging Fly
13 September 2023
One consequence of relying on sight is how rarely we watch ourselves. We see our hands in motion, our reflections in mirrors, our steps beneath us, but we largely watch others. We watch television, films. Even as we try turning inward, we find ourselves looking outward.
In a piece of autofiction published in The Stinging Fly, Colm O’Shea’s “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” swirls in and out of memory inside the orbit of a partner’s cancer diagnosis in Dublin. Framed within two years, the narrator bears witness to the past, present, and future. His perspective is akin to “a mute guardian angel, or like a cold monument over a grave,” introverting the angelic lens of Cassiel in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film, Wings of Desire. He traces a life both terminal and endless, applying a fractured anaphora to watch himself a whopping seventy-nine times while grappling with the serpentine trajectory of a life before its ending: “she was feeling a little unwell”; “she is fighting”; “she will never leave the hospital.”
The title nods to the opening track on R.E.M.’s 1985 album, Fables of the Reconstruction, in which “time and distance are out of place here,” and the story’s scenes loosely gravitate around Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 thriller, which plays on the television while the narrator waits for the laundry. The “she” anchoring the story remains altogether off-screen, forever present but watched in a retrospective progression rather than seen in forward motion.
Caught in a loop, O’Shea balances the bluntness of knowing “nothing will ever feel as bad as this” with facts fleeting into memories, like the Welsh countryside: “[O]n our last morning together in the cottage, [she stood] in the sunlight, waving me off as I had to leave, looking beautiful in a summer dress in front of the white walls of the cottage, with the lawn in front of her, and the lush fields all around.” The result is a reckoning with being left adrift in space here on Earth. An Airbnb rental, a laptop set aside, a saved voicemail. Everyday oversights are set in discordance beside hospital slippers, bloating, medication—a perpetual knowledge of absence.
The prospect of time travel typically falters around thermodynamics: If energy cannot be created or destroyed, then something can either remain static or change. Thus, it matters that this is autofiction, how despite a struggle to still see “memories so close you can almost kiss them,” as O’Shea writes in an author’s note, the reassurances of fact and fiction begin to blur as life’s boundaries fall away. O’Shea suggests the force of grief reveals a paradox that circumvents the loop—even as you can never go back, you constantly go back. “Now I watch myself as I was then, and I know what is going to come,” he writes at the start, looking inward and outward. The gravity of loss collapses time itself.
Colm O’Shea’s (@colm_oshea) work has appeared in gorse, The Vigilantia Anthology (Chroma Editions), Winter Papers, Sublunary Editions (Firmament), 3AM Magazine, The Tangerine, Fallow Media, and others. He has also been broadcast on RTE radio (Keywords). He was a winner of the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair in 2012 and won The Aleph Writing Prize in 2019. His debut work of experimental nonfiction is scheduled to be published by LJMcD Communications in November 2024.
Seán Carlson (@seancarlson) is working on his first book, a family memoir of migration. His essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The Honest Ulsterman, The Irish Times, New England Review, The Oxford Review of Books, Trasna, and elsewhere. Seán and his family currently divide time between Rhode Island and County Kerry, Ireland.