‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’ Henry James
They weren’t flash backs exactly, at 5.00 am, launch day over and my mind racing over scenes from my book launch. My sense I was foolish in my enthusiasm and lack of coherence.
Here’s one definition of a flash back from Miranda July in her book All Fours:
‘It wasn’t over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements.’
I had tried so hard to make it work. But it was hot and I grew flushed which left me as I often feel these days when my cheeks glow scarlet as if I have made an utter fool of myself. My anxiety is riddled all over my features, a woman in a heightened state and not one of sexual arousal, more one of panic.
So many people I know and love with the occasional ring in invited by Carrie Tiffany who urged them to come to help make the occasion splendid. And people chatted together amicably including a lovely woman whom I knew from elsewhere whom I could not place, but she told me she was happy to be a fly on the wall and watch.
What is it with me that I so want everyone to feel comfortable and ensconced in meaningful conversation? Why this urge to introduce everyone so no one is left out? Why my discomfort with the awkward silences that precede an occasion where people meet one another for the first time and don’t know what to say. Here on this occasion through me.
And my morning pear has gone soggy and taste of pear but with that squishy consistency that I dislike. Lacking in texture.
I have a strange sense of not knowing what to do with myself. Where to put my mind and body. A sense of wanting to cry in the aftermath. And my husband has gone to Bendigo for a Lost Arts exhibition with a friend and I’m to meet other friends in the afternoon for a get together and somehow I feel socialised out but also lonely, as if I want company but also to be alone. I want more sleep.
It all feels too hard as if I have lost all my adrenalin in the effort yesterday and despite sleeping all night I’m still tired.
And last night on a crowded tram on the way home, my husband asked a young man to move the bag on his seat to give him room. The young man was visibly annoyed. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. He did not want to move.
In the next brief kerfuffle, my husband wedged himself onto the seat as the young man cursed him for being old. Old was the one word I heard. ‘Oh you’re old,’ he seemed to say. This is how old people behave.
And a young woman seated nearby gave her seat up to me, while the young man who sat opposite a woman and small child glared.
My husband said words to the effect. ‘Is this the example you offer a child?’
And the woman asked the man whom we assumed was her partner, ‘Do want to move?
All three left their seats empty for me and my friend and the young woman to sat comfortably while the man and his partner and presumably their child made their way to the other end of the tram where they stood for the rest of their journey.
A bad feeling, this person so reluctant to share. And a reflection of the ugly world in which we live where people look after their own and pay no heed to the needs of more vulnerable others.
And I might well go back to be for more sleep tiredness sits behind my eyes, a well of exhaustion. How can I go on?
‘It wasn’t when you felt hunger you were in greatest danger. It was when you stopped. That’s when you died.’ Joseph O’Connor Star of the Sea
The words of a hymn trickle into my mind when I hear the title of O’Connor’s book and reflect on its content.
‘Oh Star of the sea
Sweet Star of the sea
We pray for us sinners
Sweet Star of the sea.
The sorrow of it all.
Or these words from a completely different book, All Fours by Miranda July. ‘The more threadlike you became, you were halfway gone already.’
Words that speak to disappearing acts.
I suppose I can keep on throwing quotes your way and hope again for a response.
I collect quotes like bower birds collect bits of blue.
Blue the colour of sorrow and of skies. The colour of water and of hope.
‘Never underestimate the meanness in people’s souls,’ whites Alice Munro. ‘Even when they’re being kind…especially when they’re being kind.’
I think of this often and more so now after reading Avgi Saketopoulou’s essay on The ethics of Violence. The cruelty of colonisers who take people’s land from them and leave them with a tiny corner somewhere where they might languish. Then offer them the so-called comfort of pastoral care, or paternal care or the only form of care left available, permission to survive ahead of genocide. This is the worst cruelty of all. To be required somehow to show gratitude to someone who holds you captive and then tells you they’re looking after you.
I grew up daily under the weight of my mother’s ostensible kindness and my father’s cruelty.
They call it the father wound. Watching our father’s hurt our mothers. Watching our mothers go into survival mode. Watching the level of oppression in an apparently civilised household, at least as far as the outside world can see.
It’s not that I haven’t written about my father ad nauseum. My mother less so, but she too has appeared in my pages many times. How would she feel to read these words now? How would I feel to read the words my children might write about me?
I prefer criticism, even in its cruellest forms, to false praise. I prefer having my foibles addressed to taking up the saintlike suffering of my mother.
I prefer substance to simper. What was it Flaubert said about form? At least, according to Julian Barnes in his wonderful Flaubert’s Parrot:
… Form isn’t an overcoat flung over the flesh of thought (that old comparison, old in Flaubert’s day); it’s the flesh of thought itself. You can no more imagine an Idea without a Form than a Form without an Idea. Everything in Art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang…when a line is good, it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. If you happen to write well you are accused of lacking ideas. Maxim by Flaubert.
It’s hard to imagine once we were only a collection of cells mutating fast and slow into human form.
In my case cells put in place by my father. I do not like to imagine my conception. I doubt it a loving intercourse saw my entrance into the world given my father’s need for sexual conquest and my mother’s subservience, but things might have been different then. Though how, I cannot see. My parents were living in Australia by then wracked by the pain migration brings. Homeless apart from a bungalow of sorts, an old chook shed the Hickling family offered while my father spent his weekends building our first Australian home.
This cluster of cells became me. Just as a cluster of cells brought into existence after your father put his penis inside your mother and climaxed into a sea of sperm swimming up her fallopian tubes towards the one egg fertilised into you.
At least this is the conventional way. There are many others modes of sperm transportation.
Do you ever wonder about your conception? The day a glimpse of you materialised in this world ahead of your life which however many years you might live, in the scheme of humankind, will be short lived, as will mine.
Even if we reach our nineties, which somehow I doubt for me, we will have only placed a small footprint on this earth and our legacy will be left with our children and their children, assuming they have them.
And for the rest we are as good as other people’s memories.
I imagine my mother would not have relished this thought even as she comforted herself with the divine afterlife forever with Jesus in Heaven. The pie in the sky when you die as my husband likes to say.
For me the great comfort after death is the quiet. The sense of no more struggle. The sense of no more. We are born and pump as much energy as we can into our survival over the years. Battling the impulse to push others out of our way. The need to share, to work hard and find meaning in our short lives and then there is peace. The great no more. This is what I imagine once we’re gone
It’s a strange comfort. Not for me reincarnation. I will have had enough once I take off into death. Though who’s to say? I might change my mind.
My mother liked to think my father was converted soon before his death. He re-found God.
She said he spoke these words, ‘St Francis of Assisi was a glorious saint’ or some such on his death bed. Was he hallucinating?
Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals. I never noticed my father’s love of animals when we were growing up. Though he allowed us pets from time to time. Reluctantly, as we grew older. In much the way I resisted pets when my children were growing up only as they involved extra effort and care on my part. The rabbits caged in wire bottomed hutches to stop them from digging holes in our back garden became my responsibility for years. Unlike my beloved friend Judith Eardley whose rabbits shared her lounge room with an open back door to the garden, our rabbits were fully wired in to protect them from foxes.
We did not believe foxes existed in our neighbourhood in those days. But they did and even more so today.
Indoor cats and dogs are the way to go in suburbia. My in laws in the country leave their dogs outside overnight in wide back sheds. Their dogs are forbidden from entering indoors. Dogs are for the farm. Work dogs excluded from human company. It goes back to the idea of why dogs exist. For us humans. Are they too oppressed like the people in Gaza, or our own indigenous folks? I cannot abide the notion of colonisation but I am a coloniser, of colonialists born and bred.
The Dutch, as my eldest brother argued at our family weekend recently, were the first capitalists. Such a boring breakfast conversation with my eldest brother holding the floor in his kitchen with six of his eight siblings, one dead and one absent seated in a circle around a tight table. And my brother telling us about the likes of Maynard Keynes and Isaac Newton until I could take it no longer.
‘My analyst once said,’ I said to the assembled room, ‘for families like ours, we need a talking stick. Whoever holds it gets a turn to speak while others must listen.’
Titters around the room. I’d said something dangerous. My eldest brother responded first, half apologetically. ‘I’ve been talking too much,’ and my youngest brother rescued him. This brother, the second most vocal as they argued about politics and the world and avoided any mention of the thing we each have in common our childhood. ‘I suppose we get a little anxious when there are silences, so we keep on talking’.
We broke up after this to join a zoom meeting with my dead brother’s wife now undone by Alzheimer’s and living in a nursing home in Brisbane. Her daughter and the first born of my parents’ grandchildren arranged the call and spoke for her mother, helped her mother to speak and addressed each of us in turn. When this conversation ended we said our goodbyes, another unsuccessful family reunion.
It’s my turn to organise the next one and I have suggested we meet in Healesville where we spent a good part of our childhood, all except the youngest who was not born until we moved into our rental in Camberwell.
I will make sure we address the issue of our childhoods, as best I can. I will not let them wriggle away. As much as I try to stop you from wriggling away. But wriggle away you do,
And I recognise you have every right to do this, but I too have the right to winkle you from your shell, to find a way of connecting that meets both our needs and wishes. And if I cannot and you stay away, so be it. But I will be sad.
