Month: February 2025

Madness in a closet

The days are getting shorter. We wake earlier in darkness. I thought I’d resent this endless approach of winter but find I’m reconciled in the same way I’m reconciled to ageing.   

During my impressionable twenties I met a man who introduced me into his life and with it a series of taste experiments that stay with me. There was Gordon Lightfoot’s If you could read my mind, and gourmet dinners, as he called them, where we each took turns with friends to host lavish dinners, complete with delicacies like Coquilles St Jacques, scallops cooked in a shell-like dish which served as container for the tarragon infused mushroom cream sauce with gruyere cheese melted on top. 

My stomach roils at the thought today. Not so at the Devils on Horseback, a strip of bacon around a pitted prune soaked in port wine and stuffed with blue cheese, then roasted in the oven. Or their counterpart, angels on horseback, which included an oyster surrounded by partially cooked bacon fixed to a toothpick or on skewers. 

In summer there were fresh slices of melon wrapped in ham. We had not yet heard of prosciutto, which works better. The more difficult winter dishes included Beef Wellington, a lump of tenderloin stuffed with pate and mushrooms and baked in pastry. The trick was to cover the ball of meat, which we had rolled into shape with all its precarious stuffing, not only pate but onions and garlic, a swathe of crisped bacon in the pastry without gaps. Similar to the intricacy of Bombe Alaska, a frozen lump of ice cream interspersed with sponge cake and surrounded by meringue which we also baked fast. 

We adventured into dangerous territory in our choice of food, but always with the aim of impressing our friends who tried equally to impress us.

This venture followed years living with a younger sister and her girlfriend in a tiny quarter of a house rental in Caulfield. This, my first year away from home when I decided food did not matter as much as a thin body after I had doubled in size following a lengthy stint at boarding school. 

It developed into a sort of competition between sisters. Which one of us could stand the greatest starvation? Almost the opposite of our childhoods when everyone competed over the biggest slice of cake, the largest wedge of melon, the tallest glass of lemonade. 

My sister and I hived off food onto the other’s plate while ours servings grew smaller by the minute and our friend, who until she moved in with the two of us had been willow tree tall, a basketball player of some renown, ballooned with our cast offs. 

It was a grim time and better by far, once I moved in with my boyfriend and threw off the shackles of starvation into our gourmet dinners and an appreciation of the good life, alternating with bouts of self-control such I tried to get back into the shape of a younger self.

My boyfriend introduced me to books, as well as food and music. For one of my birthdays, he gave me a two-volume set of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which he sealed in clear covering for lifetime protection. 

I imagined he gave it to me, not because he thought I needed more words, but because at the time he worked for Hall’s Books and dictionaries came to staff cheaply. That I, if he paid for them at all. My boyfriend was not always the most honest of people. If he could get something for nothing, he would. Including my affection. 

I loved him to the moon and back, or at least I thought I did, until one day after I started to work full time and earned an income of my own, when one of the doctors on the hospital ward where I worked asked me out for a drink.

I was flattered. My boyfriend was away studying interstate to become a Commonwealth police officer and the thought of going out with another man, an impossible thought at first, led me further from the constraints of my life. 

Before he turned the corner into the police force, my boyfriend lived off his wits and winnings. He wanted to be a professional gambler once he dropped out of his dietetics course in Geelong, and from then on studies evaded him.

At the same time when I was still at university studying to become a social worker, my boyfriend took night classes to repeat year twelve subjects in biology, but he soon lost interest, once the world of horse racing and of chess proved more fascinating. 

At the time, I told myself it did not matter. Once I was working and earning a proper living I reasoned, I could support us both and in a more reliable and consistent way than he had done during my final years at university. My scholarship offered only a pittance in support and holiday jobs provided scant relief from the demands of life’s expenses, including the cost of our gourmet dinners.

It came to me the other day in a rush of memory, my boyfriend also introduced me to Gormenghast. The trilogy by Mervyn Peake which came out in 1968 and grew in popularity at the time. For months in between university texts, I immersed myself in the life of Titus Groan. Born into the sombre life of the Groan family, a dynasty of strange characters who stalked the dark winding corridors of Gormenghast Castle. Gothic in the extreme with towers and turrets and sprawling gardens. 

The book’s illustrations in black and white suggested life for the Groan family was also in black and white. Patched into the world of places like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, only Gormenghast held a fantasy quality as in a Tolkein story with people whom you wondered could even stand, let alone walk. Their features gnarled and lopsided as scarecrows. 

Madness in a closet that ran on from room to room. A world that helped me to join my boyfriend in temporary escapes from the real world that then seemed endlessly impossible. 

I put this book out of my mind for many years until recently when the title crept into my feed from some literary source and I wondered at the imagination of Peake, his ability to tie words and images together such we enter fabricated worlds of beautiful horror. 

In the days when I read these books I was a person who could not retain much.  Ideas trickled out of my mind, as if through a colander, distracted by the concerns of my day. 

Even so, somewhere in my unconscious, tucked away within the detritus of my life, some memory remains of days with my boyfriend lost in his books on the next best chess move, or the racing guide, and me lost in Gormenghast, hopeful of re-entering the sunlight but entranced with a world I could only escape once I said goodbye to him.

A symphony in parts

‘Multiplicity is our first characteristic, unity our second. As your parts now they are parts of you, so must you know that we are parts of humanity.’ Theodore sturgeon.

All my life I’ve kept my head low, eyes to the ground. As a child I was proud of my ability to find money. Coins slipped from pockets or dollar notes haphazardly flitting from wallets or purses. 

I did not realise my luck rested squarely on the shoulders of my impulse to look down. Nor did I consider what I missed in not looking up and around me. But my odd financial success from the earth felt safe, and I did not dare raise my sights higher. 

Even in my dreams today I will notice the edge of a red or green bank note or the glint of silver in the sun and know I’ve struck gold. 

When I reach to collect my find there is another underneath and then another and another. My one small coin or note becomes a treasure chest filled to the brim. It can be never-ending. The pleasure of excess.

My once broken finger is healing. After six weeks held rigid and speared with a K wire to fix the bone in place, I’m now able – and the physio encourages me – to bend it again. As much as I manage.

To do so hurts, especially when I cock it beyond ninety degrees. My poor finger, swollen as if wracked with arthritis and still bearing a couple of itchy stitches on either side from where the surgeon pulled out the wire. 

As much as it hurts to bend, I cannot straighten it into a fixed line alongside my other fingers. It is buckled out of shape, like a leather shoe left in the rain and all weathers, buckled and care worn. 

My finger like the rest of me cannot get itself back to the way it once was before my accident.

Noli mi tángere, don’t touch me, I read those words during the week, and they jumped out for their power as command. A protective command or a fearful request but it comes, I presume, from a person seeking safety.

The world feels unsafe at present. Not that it ever felt safe but from where I sit and stand it has its moments and now with The Hitleresque Trump and his populists in power in the US, and the media riddled with news of his great efforts to dismantle social structures designed to keep people safe, and others more conservative or right leaning jumping on the bandwagon, the pull to the past feels compelling. All the progress humankind has made is now in for regression. 

It happens with small children. For every step forward there is a step back, a small regression to accommodate the advance. Maybe it’s the same now. Maybe humankind has been advancing too fast, so we need a circuit breaker. But we have such lousy ways to interrupt our excess by creating more, as in my dreams of finding money which never stops materialising. 

It can feel wonderful in the beginning but whenever I discover another coin or note hidden behind the last, I begin to feel a wish that it stop. That I can rest from my claims for more and consolidate my gains.

Isn’t this often the way? We aim to grow taller. As children we order ourselves along the markings of a height measure chart with each new centimetre, but there comes a time when it’s good to stop growing and to know that this is now my official height for the rest of my life. 

When we’re young, we fail to factor in the knowledge that as we age beyond the middle decades into our seventies and eighties, we begin to shrink as our bones compress. A tall person not quite so tall and a short person even tinier. If we manage to live that long. 

I’ve been reading Philip Bromberg’s essay, ‘Standing in the spaces’. The idea appeals to me. As if I’m standing in a field and all my multiple selves stand to right and left of me, like soldiers or sentinels ready to do battle with one another, as so often happens in my head. When one voice decries my behaviour or mocks my apprehension of events to come, while another sentinel’s voice kicks in to reassure me, it’ll be okay. 

I’ve been here before. It will turn out fine whatever I fear, and all will be well. 

Another voice then kicks in and tells me I’m too much the Pollyanna. Shades of my analyst from years gone by, while another still tells me it’s better to be an optimist than a pessimist. The pessimism grinds you down to nothing even as the optimism which can border on denial has a way, like the money I find in my dreams, of expanding itself too far.

Then a third or fourth sentinel kicks in with calls to calm. And all the different parts dance around my world stage. And there is little me inside, standing in the spaces between all these separate parts while another weighs the value of each one, as if conducting an orchestra. 

This cacophony offers an illusion of control I don’t otherwise have even as I know my fixed position from one minute to the next will be buffeted by external events outside my orchestra or voices, and one day I will be toppled once more by grief or disappointment 

One day something so destabilising might come along I will find it hard to stand in the spaces. I will fall over and lie there on the ground while my internal voices clamour heedlessly inside my head and I cannot move. 

Standing in the spaces ‘distinguishes creative imagination and concreteness, distinguishes playfulness from facetiousness,’ Bromberg writes. 

Hopefully, I will be able to get up and recover, and like my finger, regain some semblance of movement again. But I know it will never be the same. All of it preparation for the great unsettling of the day I die, when all my voices fall silent and there will no longer be spaces available for me to stand between. 

A grim thought but until we get here, I shall go on trying to make the best music from the many voices my internal world can create.  My symphony of life.