‘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.
Even in this day and age when a penny won’t buy you a penny caramel I still stoop and pick them up although not so many now the world’s started the descent into cashlessness. I’ve used the wafty thing with the bank card twice, just out of curiosity. I still prefer hard cash. Some aspects of modern life I embraced, like the computer (I literally have, and use daily, five computers) but my mobile phone is over twenty years old and not even 3G. I never use my credit card and am not sure why I still own one to be honest. In case. Like the fiver tucked away in your jacket in case you lose your wallet.
I remember watching some kids, after they’d been to the ice cream van, throwing their change down the street. God, I was appalled. I walked down after they’d gone to see what I could salvage. Not that I need the money but… it’s just wrong, throwing away money.