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The paradoxical title of Samuel Beckett's strange and despairing monologue, from 1965, is given in the first sentence: ‘imagination dead imagine’. By contrast, Lisa Dart's Fathom (2019), which she describes as a creative memoir about trauma, begins with a seemingly more straightforward, single-word paragraph that, in a benign circle, is repeated at the beginning of the fourth and final part of the memoir: ‘Imagine’. The contrast is telling. Meaninglessness provoked Beckett at the most profound level: For his narrator, there is ‘no trace anywhere of life’, all is lost finally either in the dark or in the unchanging whiteness. On the other hand, Dart's female narrator is a writer and a published poet who, even as she spirals into psychosis, moves ever closer to the ‘subjective certainties’ of an imagination the death of which she does not entertain. In the aftermath of her breakdown, she dreams, reminisces and tells stories. Above all, she creates from a series of evocative objects a vivid pallet of madness at the interface of colour and meaning: White snow, a royal blue duffel coat and a red scarf.
The groundwork of Fathom is chromatic, and the centrality of pictorial imagery links it to Dart's other work. Following the publication of her first poetry pamphlet, The Self in a Photograph (2005), Dart, for whom ‘colours yawn the movement of things’, brings her longing for light more clearly into view in The Linguistics of Light (2009), which includes a sequence on the paintings of Edward Hopper. Alongside Hopper (his world in her imaginative reworking shot through with ‘longings’ closed’ and ‘errant echoes’ as well as the momentary ‘brilliance’ of morning light), Dart counts Francis Bacon, Paula Rego and Frieda Khalo (a formidable triumvirate of modern painters preoccupied with the body in extremis) among the many artists about whom she is most passionate. She believes her fascination with colour is rooted in her infants’ school classroom, where the proverbial wax crayon