The moving parts of a body

I come as a multitude. My identity is not fixed. I contain many moving parts. And those parts can sometimes pull in opposing directions.

‘Cast your eyes towards the horizon,’ Mother Anthony told us in year eight. ‘Use your right hand. Separate your thumb and fingers like this.’ She raised her arthritic knuckles, jointed stones under her skin.

‘Hold up your fingers and thumb at right angles, then hold your hand along the line of the horizon to calculate the angle as it reaches towards the Azimuth.’

I knew the word horizon, but there was not one to be seen below the roof tops of houses fast erected in the back blocks behind my home in Cheltenham. Roof tops reaching skywards. 

There I stood on the concrete veranda that took you down some five steps to reach a bare back garden in a house newly built with all the trimmings of modernity.

It stays in my memory as one of those experiences where the moving parts of my body cooperated, while my mind joggled in uncertainty.

I had no idea what I was doing. Night after night on the back veranda measuring the azimuth.

I made a few guesses each time and wrote a figure somewhere between 90 and 360 degrees, as I understood the range of angles possible. Then wrote down the figure in my notebook.

After a week we were to add up all figures and divide them by the number of days to find our average.

One of those exercises you complete as a child without any idea of what you’re doing or why. The why of it was the most potent for me. So many things the moving parts of my body directed me towards, and I did not have a clue as to why. 

Even at university I found myself guessing at the why of things. It was not until I was in mid to late adulthood that pennies began to drop. A second stint at university when I began to read the theorists of the day, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous.

When I began to read on the significance of the post-modern, the meaning of the modern and the idea of grand narratives as constructions. Then I realised there was more to the many things we did and understood in the past. 

Although I had abandoned religion long before, even its dictates began to make sense to me, and with that the possibility of seeing why people might adhere, and why many, including me, might not.

And not just out of laziness or a reluctance to believe, because belief is central to any religious doctrine, belief and faith as the nuns taught. And if your faith failed you and you lost it, somehow then you could never understand the significance of faith.

One of those weird things. You needed to have it to understand. And if you did not hold it tight then you could not understand.

The same it seems with our understanding of things in the world that change over time. Attitudes and views rooted in belief systems held across generations. The firm black and white beliefs of masculine and feminine as two distinct polarities.

Gender binaries that are in the minds of some people as fixed as the sun and the moon. As clear cut as the seasons. And over time I began to challenge this notion of a fixed self. 

I have begun to move away from any form and fixed belief in the certainty of boundaries in binaries.

We all come as multitudes, only some of us prefer to hold a more fixed sense of identity, one that feels immutable.

It can be challenging when you encounter someone who travels under a different frame of identity one that shifts over time from the masculine to the feminine or vice versa and in between. 

Born with a sexual apparatus and determined at birth, to be a he or a she, yet choosing otherwise over time. And often from early days, though not necessarily to embrace another, the opposite seemingly, or something more mixed, gender-neutral determinants of the they.

I come as multitudes, not just one but many.

We can sense it more in our dreams where we might find ourselves as a female sporting a penis, or as a male carrying a baby in utero. Our mind’s defiance of the fixed rhetoric on how we must be. 

There are some who would say it’s only a dream. It belongs in the land of the mystical, the extra-terrestrial, not the real. Think Freud’s reality principle.

And then we might argue what is real. What’s fixed. Even time as much as in the chronological appears to be fixed, while elsewhere in our unconscious it is not.

But how do we know what’s unconscious when it is by its very nature unknowable, only we might catch glimpses.

And why are so many people fearful of the nature of transitioning or morphing from one gender identity to another, especially in children.

It begins in children, for any number of complex reasons. Some might say it’s born of a troubled identity. Or problems in the family. Or the intergenerational transmission of trauma. 

We don’t know why it is that one person born into a particularly identified body at birth and thereby assigned their gender and treated accordingly with all the hormones that accompany the female form or the male form choose to abandon their ascribed identity at birth and then identify with other characteristics to which as a woman for instance they’re not entitled. Or as a man. 

And the trans person who seems almost more than the single entity of female or male to which they have been ascribed can become a ‘they’.

We binarians might cringe because we do not understand the complexity of identities and how they are not fixed. Just because you’re born one way does not mean you must stay that way forever. 

And some might argue the only thing allowed is the course of ageing.

Ageing is a given even as many people rail against it. Some argue death is inevitable. Lives are finite while others with money and perhaps delusions of grandeur or dreams of coming back to live in corporeal form once dead might have their deceased bodies cryo-vacced and frozen over time until such day when scientific advancements allow them to be thawed and revivified.

From here it seems fanciful. And most people I imagine will not or cannot afford to travel this route.

Not something I desire.

The many multitudes of me are not yet ready to die. As if I will ever be ready. Though perhaps one day I might. Be ready, that is.

And in the meantime, I recognise the inevitability of death, and find comfort in the idea there will come a time when I might not need to strive in the way I strive to settle the multitude of forces in the me, the many moving parts and voices that can create a cacophony of ideas and movement like a tornado to interrupt my sleep as if thought grenades are dropping on my need to retreat from consciousness for a time.

A time after death when I will cease to exist except as a memory and some of my name continues apace anywhere it will become a figment of the imaginations of the few who come ahead of me who can know something of the fact I was once here.

Me and my many multitudes. 

As much as I’m reconciled to death, I’m reconciled to being forgotten. In some way it’s a comfort, the thought of blending with rocks, earth, and sky. A blimp on the horizon a small measure of the azimuth and my many multitudes wanting to rest. 

As I send this piece to my computer I remember today is the anniversary of the day on which my mother was born.

She has been dead now for almost a decade. I remember her well. But she fades from the memories of my children. And when we are gone i will fade into a similar blip. One of the multitudes who have passed by here. All of us specs in the universe. 

Fluent in silence

‘So, if you are too tired, sit next to me, for I too, am fluent in silence.’ R Arnold.

In my nineteenth year there came a day when I walked alone through the city surrounded by people. The peak hour homeward rush and every person hell bent on a destination, be it tram stop or Flinders Street station. They brushed past me with one intention alone, to leave this place. 

I did not want to leave. Not yet. In every face I imagined the round-faced sweetness of the man I had come to regard as my one true love. He had disappeared from our workplace that afternoon before my shift ended without a goodbye. 

Why leave me in limbo? Why leave me waiting, hankering, caught in the not knowing when I might see him again.

Over a decade later, the first time I met Mrs Milanova, I did not tell her about this episode in the city when I thought my heart might break with longing for this man who re-materialised sometime later but not before the damage was done. 

I did not tell her of a time when I was small, but not so small I could not remember. The house was filled with visitors. My mother’s family from the Netherlands.

The house suffused with the smell of cigarettes and port wine glasses passed around. Coffee and cake. Smoked oysters from oily tin cans, on round crackers and my mother in her element. 

I had watched her prepare earlier. Saw the pleasure she found in visits from her loved ones. But we younger children were ushered off to bed without so much as a good night cuddle.

Did I call out to her when I heard her footsteps pad past my room?  Not sure. But after a while, long enough for my younger sisters to drop into sleep, my mother pushed through my door.

I asked if I, too, might have a cup of tea like all her guests. She was busy, she said, but would bring me one in a minute.

The minute never came. It went beyond several minutes and I fell asleep waiting.

Early in 1986 when I met Mrs Milanova for the first time and offered her a potted version of my life up to my thirty-third year, she did not blink. It was only when I told her I was thinking of having an analysis and could wait till she had space that she questioned me. Should I really wait?

Her use of the word ‘wait’ and memories flooded in. 

My sister and I at the East Camberwell railway station waiting as train after train arrived empty of our mother. Desperate for her to return from her work. Our bare legs in shorts sticking to the hot green paint of the slatted platform seats.

Life in our house without our mother in the company of our drunk and unpredictable father was unbearable.

Waiting for the face of my beloved boyfriend to materialise in the crowd. Waiting, the unbearable state of being when you cannot see that something you hope for will happen.

In all likelihood it might not, but still you hope.

I usher in my mantra. ‘Something good will happen.’ Knowing well one day good things will stop happening, for me at least, even as so many good things are punctuated these days by the not so good and the downright bad. 

We all need to find ways of coping. My way to cope with waiting has been to fill the waiting time with a useful activity. A distraction. 

When Mrs Milanova questioned my capacity to wait, and all my tears, she was right. I should not wait.

Such an odd expression. I cannot wait. Even when we know we must. I cannot wait for the next good thing. 

When I was a young person I imagined good things would happen in my life such that eventually, before I died, everything would be put right.

Such a self-satisfied notion, as if all good things congeal around me. 

I have been through enough political cycles now to see the ebb and flow. The way we move a few steps forward towards greater equality and bat off oppression, then slide into the cruelty of our unequal world where the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

When the revolution?

When the change of heart. And all the time the waiting. I have yet to find the silence Arnold describes. Even as I say I, too, know about the longing for it.

As I sat beside my dying brothers-in-law in recent years and watched their faces slowly shift out of this life and into wherever they might have gone, into death, I began to think about the peace of passing. Even as neither man passed so peacefully, there came a time when it was over. And we, their family sat around these two who were dying, a decade apart, and felt the ache of longing their mother might have felt had she herself not left this earth decades earlier.

When someone dies, we latch onto our own, especially when we get past an age where youth is no longer on our side.

After my mother died I saw instantly that I, along with my siblings, was next in line. And when my own brother died, I could not feel as much as I felt when I was ten years old, and he left home for the first time and a couple of decades later when he moved with his young family to another state far away.

I grieved then in a way I could not grieve at his funeral, distanced from the pain his own children felt. Distanced from the pain I imagined I might have felt when one of my siblings died.

Death is final. The waiting is over. But the waiting. It has no finality. It goes on and on and on.

And in this moment, while I am waiting for a good outcome to a painful situation that in itself seems interminable, I can find no way of settling my troubled mind. 

I am back in my small bed waiting for my mother to bring me a sweet and milky cup of tea so that I might feel remembered and less alone.

I am stalking the streets of the city searching for his face, the round glow around his bright eyes that might light up at the sight of me as mine would light up at his.

In this waiting I do not find the comfort of silence but the ache of a heart that’s breaking. And the words of a song rattle through my brain: The Proclaimers: 

My heart was broken. But the singers at least have the benefit of past tense while for me the heart break repeats again and again with every new disappointment, every new disappearance, every new failed hope. 

Every step closer to death.