July 2024 – Sixth in Line

‘Beyond the fixed stars and variable suns…’ James Joyce Ulysses

Last night the wind howled, and it took energy to convince myself, the tall oak in our garden, with its high and crooked branches, would not drop one onto our roof.

In the particular lies the universal, or so I’m told. And I can believe it.

For isn’t it so, these howling storms and the bleak weather with which we’re faced mid-autumn in Melbourne, Australia, while on the other side of the world people roast, is also a reflection of the volatility of our times.

The worst of times and the best of times, only who’s to say.

In 1992 we hired a houseboat on the Murray, three small children, one husband and two adult friends, a long married couple who chose to stay childless and enjoyed the company of our children in small doses by way of remembering their own child selves. If they ever took the opportunity of reflecting deeply.

On this boat, I read Janet Frame’s memoir, Angel at my Table. Stretched out after lunch while the other adults slept and the children played, on one of the pull out beds in the living area cum kitchen area.

And wept when I came to the part where a sister died drowning, first one sister then another. Dickie hearts, which no one knew about until they died, and in the aftermath, Frame’s life is turned around towards even greater desperation.

I was grieving then too, much as I tried to maintain a cheerful demeanour. The analysts had only months earlier decided I was unsuitable for their training, and I could not see how I might go on in my chosen career beyond putting one foot in front of the other.

We took turns to steer the boat across the slow river, which at a time of receding drought was shallow in places, such we got stuck. We needed to drag tall poles to ease us out of the mud.

If only it was as easy to tug myself out of my hidden despair. If only I knew then that time would pass and the pain ease. That I would find other ways of using my mind to manage my life, that over time I might find even more rewarding than wearing the title, psychoanalyst.

It was to be a medal of honour, like the coloured badges I collected as a young girl guide. A badge for being able to set up a tent. A badge for making a telephone call from a street phone, coins in the slot, dial the number and pull on the receiver in that order, then speak to your mother or sister or brother at the other end. A badge for sewing on your badge, in neat whip stitch. To stop the edge from fraying. Small marks of development.

I knew this was how a person grew. You learned to do things you were previously unable to master. You absorbed new forms of arithmetic. Division, multiplication, and fractions. You learned to spell long and obscure words. You rote learned the dates of wars and kings and queens from the past. The date of Federation in Australia, easy because it happened at the turn of a century. You learned the colour of your nation’s flag, and the mysteries of the rosary, the joyful and sorrowful mysteries, the luminous. You scrolled through the stations of the cross, and committed the Credo, (the I believe), to memory. You repeated the ten commandments, only those had protestant ring. You rattled off the Our father who art in Heaven, whose final sentence differed from the Our Father they recited at Girl Guide camp one Easter time when where you were the only Catholic child present.

Small differences between the ways people peeled their potatoes, some under running water. A waste. Others in a sink filled with water which grew murkier by the minute as each potato was robbed of its dusky over coat.

So much to learn in childhood, and much of it I managed, always on the edge of amazement as if I had learned words by rote and could hold onto them only if I recited them out loud and from the beginning.

I did not understand the things I learned. Just the words. It left me with an uneasy sense of fraudulence. As if I could recite swathes of knowledge by rote, but if you prodded me, stopped me mid-stream and interrogated the meaning of what I was saying, I would lose my place. A type of stage fright and I could not speak or think or understand the mysteries of the world.

I felt this way when I first read Sigmund Freud. The case histories of Anna O and Little Hans. On the page, these stories simple, but the voice of the great man had an old-fashioned tone. It took time to absorb and even then the ideas he offered floated in the air like so many dust motes I could rote learn, but not corral.

I went once to an evening lecture conducted by one of the newer members in the 1970s, a Lacanian analyst from South America who spoke non-stop for over an hour. Not one word made sense to me. Granted I was new to this language, and he was of Lacanian extraction.

Jacques Lacan’s writings translated into English are not for the simple minded. They are dense and opaque. Belonging to universities and in need of interpretation before you can grasp something of their essence.

Even today, decades later, my eyes glaze over when I read Lacan’s writing. Not so Freud’s but then, it was all gobbledygook, and even more veiled than the words of the bible.

Mid-afternoon on the Murray after we stopped somewhere for lunch and tied our boat at anchor to one of the many jetties along the river’s edge. I watched the overhead sun illuminate the skies. Best at twilight when we were again at anchor and readying for the night when the sun danced across the red cliffs looming over the water. They threw reflections as though someone had folded a sheet of paper in half. Each side carried a replica of the other. Mesmerising.

And Janet Frame took me to the ice cold of New Zealand and that room at her aunt’s whose walls were lined above the picture rail with the chocolate boxes of her dancing career. Her trophies. And at night after Frame’s sister had joined her, the one who later died, the two ate their way through every single chocolate putting back the empty boxes on display.

Imagine the aunt’s horror when she discovered they had been scooped out. Those chocolates would soon be inedible but no matter to her. The shock the scandal, the horror. And Frame’s shame.

And it reminds me of the times when as a child I stole lollies and was duly punished. It reminds me of the top tier of our wedding cake, which still sits in a tin, sealed with silver masking tape at the top of a kitchen cupboard.

Nearly fifty-years-old now, this cake will only be opened after one of us dies. I would not chance it ahead of time. Or maybe I would. Superstition says, it’s dangerous to open it ahead of the death of one of the partners, unless you open it when you should. And we missed that event because we never baptised our children, in the Catholic way.

So, there were no milestones other than anniversaries when it was once okay to open the tin.

In my mind’s eye, I open it and see maggots. Though they could not survive for long, or get in. I see saw dust. The cake crumbed to powder. I see a perfect cake dulled by time, the once white marzipan icing, now yellow, but inside who knows.

And in this night of blustery winds, the tree branches stayed in place for now at least and the world as we knew it, at least here in Hawthorn it continues.

‘The sinister pedantry of therapy. Its suggestion that somehow life was reparable. That here existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided towards it.’ Hanya Yanagihara.

Elsewhere Yanagihara writes about ‘the still life of a dead family’. Grim thoughts with which to begin my day.

I disagree with the first notion. Therapy as repair. Therapy as conformity. My version runs more long the lines of Freud’s initial suggestion: Therapy might help a person move from overwhelming misery in life to more bearable misery.

It’s a modest claim, even as Freud, the man, seemed anything but modest, to me at least. He had his grandiosities.

Don’t we all. Our determinations. Our hopes and dreams.

As for the dead family in still life, I can picture such a family. The family that lives on the surface while underneath all manner of brutality occurs, particularly to the children. And their root system rots.

Wounds on trees

Where branches have been torn off in storms or fallen under the woodchopper’s axe. Wounds that leak sap as an antidote to bleeding. Some type of coagulation of the inner sap to help such amputations to heal. Into burls.

A wood turner’s delight. All those veined synapses in the wood. Tree branches as arms to support the leaves and stabilize the root system underground. A tree without branches has little chance of growth.

A memory slips in. During my twenty third year I rented a flat, one of two, within a rambling singe storey dwelling on Burke Road in Camberwell. At the top of the hill close by Canterbury Road and St Marks Anglican church. A solid brick residence stuccoed in battleship grey behind a broad front garden of grass and woody plants, including a spreading jacaranda which shielded the house from the street.

Inside was dark and needed lights on all year round. Two bedrooms to one side, in one of which we slept. The room closest to the back with a wide window and wardrobe space and the other smaller, closer to the front but with the tiniest windows. We used it mainly for storage.

The kitchen through which you entered by the back door was pokey with a small stove, room for a fridge and few cupboards almost no bench space to speak of more like a boat galley and around the corner a spacious loungeroom with the one wide window in the house.

Even so it too was gloomy given the overhanging trees lining the front garden. There was also a pond void of fish but replete with water weeds.

My memories of this place, even at the height of summer when the equinox blazed brightly were of inner darkness. There was a narrow gravel driveway to one side where I parked my white VW and my husband-to-be his blue Renault. And a garage that was locked.

Just as well it would have been a nuisance to open those clanking doors, where the once grey paint peeled to reveal the bare grey of aged boards. This garage was an aberration.

We lived in this flat over a year before the landlord sent us a letter, via the agent, to tell us they were about to sell and we needed to move out.

That day in the front garden. Oh the costumery.

Memories are piling in now thick and fast.

The first when I was in the front garden one day in the weeks before our decision to marry when I thought of visiting my mother. Only I felt no desire to do so. My father was still alive. He had stopped drinking and he and my mother lived in quiet contentment, or seemingly so.

My father had started back at the church and shared in bible study with my mother.

The idea made me cringe. But it was better than drunken abuse. Still, there’s not much worse than a reformed alcoholic, one who has found God.

Not that my father espoused the virtues of God. He kept his religious views to himself. I’ll never know whether my mother put pressure on him to re-cement her faith or his. He had become a Catholic some forty years earlier to marry her. No mixed marriages allowed. And then, soon after his death when my mother chose to marry another man who came into her life, she urged him to renew his Catholic vows.

To be close to my mother, it seemed, you needed to believe.

I could not believe. Not as I once held fast to those ideas when a child. My faith was rotten. Eaten out by my late adolescent conviction it was all poppycock. It made little sense and kept us in thrall to a God – if he did indeed exist – who seemed capricious at best, cruel at worst. Life to me was more complex than religion suggested.

The thought my mother might be hurt if I did not visit that weekend as I had promised. But the thought of visiting hit me hard, and in the end I made some feeble excuse as to why we could not come.

It set in train a process of thought in my mind about a sensation I had experienced all my life. The sense I needed to look after my mother. That she relied on me to make her happy. That she was deeply unhappy despite her religion and only I could rectify her sorrow.

After I left home this thought softened as we were separate at last but every so often it rose and grabbed me by the neck. A choking sensation as if I had let her down and she would be devastated at the loss of my allegiance.

I understood she was upset at my abandonment of religion but as with most things we did not talk about it.

The thing I remember most clearly about my relationship with my mother throughout our shared adulthood, we rarely, if ever, talked. Only once, after I sent her a piece of my writing which I had called Night Terrors.

I sent it to her through snail mail. She rang me soon after and suggested we talk.

She was married by then to her second husband and seemingly happier than she had ever been when married to my father. So, we arranged I should visit one lunch time. We could talk after we ate, once my stepfather had gone off for his usual afternoon nap. My mother did not want him to join the conversation. She did not want him to know.

The lunch was cordial, and we talked of the usual nothings, only after Gordon closed the door behind him did I feel the relief of finally letting my mother know something of my childhood experience and she in her turn acknowledging,

‘The things your father did to me’. She did not elaborate and to this day, I’m still guessing.