Author: Elisabeth

A child in transit

There was the time, many years ago, when I woke one morning to a dream. One that was murky and unsettled in the way of dreams and the only thing that remained were the letters of one word. PHALANX.

At the time I had no idea what it meant. I was not even sure it was a word.

I took it to my analytic session the next day. Mrs Milanova sounded intrigued. It was indeed a word and she was surprised I did not know its meaning. A line of men, usually a term used in war.

Vintage engraving of a Macedonian Phalanx. The phalanx was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar weapons.

It’s not a word we encounter often in the everyday speech of our lives and in later years I came to imagine I first saw it in my eighteenth year when I studied books like Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin. 

Phalanx is a word that must have featured often in Virgil’s many discussions on the antics of the armies, the language of battle.

Dreams are like that. I wake with a start and Mary Oliver’s poem comes into my head ‘One day you finally knew what you had to do…’

Get up and now despite it being the first day of holidays.

Get up now because your youngest daughter is about to travel in a car with family friends and drive for seven hours and all day long she will be there in the back of your mind in the way each of your children are there in the back of your mind when they travel far from home. Whether in a car or on a plane or boat.

The sensation is the same, at least until they reach their destination, and your mind can settle into the usual stuff of life. 

A child in transit is a scary thing. A child who might not reach her destination. A child who takes themselves far from you. As each child must.

And Mary Oliver’s words come back to me: ‘though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice’. 

Their bad advice on how to live your life, for Mary Oliver on how to save your life. Your ‘one precious life’. 

There’s not a lot to it in the scheme of things, this one precious life. Not a lot to hold onto but it’s the most you have in life, this one precious life. 

Use it wisely. Whatever bad advice those voices throw at you. Whatever admonitions come your way.

In school holidays I read the Scarlet Pimpernel in advance of my year ten days and took notes at the end of each chapter as a refresher for when we would study the book in the year to come. The Scarlet Pimpernel, a dashing man who saved the lives of those hapless royals in fear of the guillotine. 

I tried to imagine the world of these people, alongside the images of those old hags who sat knitting beside the guillotine, teeth rotted in their mouths as they crowed with delight whenever a royal head fell to the ground at their feet. There was much trampling of horses’ hooves in the night, and many clandestine meetings behind the backs of those who sought their revenge. 

It taught me about the confusion you can encounter between good and bad.

Why should I identify with those flamboyant royals with all their money when the peasants were starving? But I did. 

Around this time my mother began her special pleading for my father. He was troubled, she told us. He’d had a latch key childhood. A terrible time with parents who were never there for him.

Mother Mary John’s pronouncements came into my head. The colours yellow and purple when placed together signify an unhappy childhood. It became a secret code in my mind and I used these colours often in my childhood illustrations, a hint to passers by, a hint to the nuns and priests that I too had endured an unhappy childhood but I was nothing like the royals in The Scarlet Pimpernel. 

Their fate was worse unless the Scarlet Pimpernel could save them. I was more like the wretched peasants hell bent on revenge against those who had wronged them. Hell bent on letting those, including my father, know how much I had suffered. Only I could not let my father know these things. His vengeance was greater than mine. He smashed into walls. He stripped himself naked to punish us with the sight of his unclothed body. He cursed ny mother as a whore. He threatened to be rid of us all, one by one beginning with my mother, going through me and my sisters and ending up with my brothers.

And my brothers could hardly form a phalanx against him, strong man that he was.

We could only do our best to survive our one precious life. 

He meant no harm…

I slipped on a slab of wet wood in the dog park the other day and landed on my backside.

I was unhurt. I knew as soon I stood to brush myself off, but a few bystanders came to my rescue.

‘I’m all right,’ I said sweeping twigs and leaves from my clothes. ‘Only I’ve bruised my bum.’

‘I’d offer to rub it for you, but…’ from an older man among the three who came to help.

I laughed it off, but in my mind an instant discomfort.

He meant no harm, but I wanted to tell him it was an unnecessary comment, especially in the light of the current conversations in parliament and throughout the zeitgeist. No more gratuitous sexual references from men towards women however seemingly harmless. 

Was it demeaning? 

If I’d been a younger woman, it might have come across as sleezy. To me it was just inane. As if I’d accept such an offer from a complete stranger.

Did he really want to pat my bum or was it the so-called manly thing to say, to throw in a touch of sexual inuendo to re-settle the situation?  

It can’t be easy being a man these days. Not that it’s ever been easy to be a woman or any person on this earth, but some are more privileged than others, the so-called middle class dead white males and those who are soon to join them, seem to be at the top of the tree. But their hegemony is no longer guaranteed.

What a word, ‘hegemony’. I first heard it when I was at university and it took me an age to get my mind around it. Simply put, it means dominance, but it seems to hold more than power at its base.

As Jess Hill puts it: 

Capitalism with all its problems is rooted in centuries of patriarchy. Patriarchy positions all people on a scale of entitlement to power and control: men have power over women, some men have power over other men, white people have power over people of colour, heterosexuals have power over LGBTQI, rich have power over poor, adults have power over children, all people have power over nature, and so on. Within this system, it is not individual men who have the most value, but men (and some women) who embody patriarchal traits of maleness: control, logic, strength, competitiveness, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, heterosexuality (and – critically – whiteness). Men who don’t embody these traits are assigned less value, and may be persecuted, attacked and shamed. That is how patriarchy polices men’s allegiance: through shame, violence and fear.

Folks might be sick of hearing the term ‘patriarchy’. As much as I might once have resented the notion that a woman’s place is in the home.

Where do we get these ideas and why do they hold so fast?

Power, I suspect. A wish to hold onto it and thereby not have to endure the discomfort of our vulnerability. That awful feeling we have when we fall, when we’re hurt or someone hurts us. When we can no longer stand tall, when our dignity fails us and we’re left feeling powerless or helpless.

Though not everyone becomes powerful or arrogant, at least not towards others.

Some people take it out against themselves. They become self-loathers ready to criticize their every move. Every step they take that is not in the realms of what the higher order critic calls ‘perfection’ is to be condemned.

I remember many years ago the words of Emily Dickinson’s poem, I’m nobody who are you. Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell. How dreary to be somebody…

Dickinson goes on to sing the praises of being nobody. Little did she know fame would come her way after death. Huge fame as poet. A quirky and memorable one at that. I could not quite join her praise for the nobody state. I wanted to be somebody. 

As a fourteen-year-old when I pinned clothes to the Hills Hoist from a basket overladen with underpants and socks and shirts from my many sisters and brothers, my parents, I liked to sing full throttle.

I had the fantasy that some famous gentleman walked past our house on busy Warrigal Road in Cheltenham and heard my voice rise above the roof tops.

This gentleman could not then resist making his way down the side path of our house to offer me the opportunity to star in his latest musical.

I sang all the louder in the hope of a discovery that never happened. 

It’s a pleasure to be hidden, writes Donald Winnicott, about the fun for babies and small children with the game peek a boo. A pleasure to be hidden as in hide and seek, but devastation, never to be found. And the trouble with so many of our discoveries as we grow, so many of those hopes to be found especially when you’re a young woman wanting recognition, that it often takes the form of a sexualised recognition, not you the person, but your body that is wanted to give some gratification to the other.

So deeply rooted in the male gaze. So deeply rooted in women’s place in the world as the inferior group there for the gratification of the superior group. 

Sorry to go on about this, but I find myself thinking about war. The stupidity of war. The way young men become cannon fodder. Young men die, but the women get raped as a sign of the opposition’s power. As if women are the chattels of the men. it’s not enough to kill men. The women have to be defiled too. To make the point someone else holds the power.

A rant if ever there was one, this little paean to pain but I can’t stop my angry fingers racing across the keyboard in despair at how subtle and deep-set these notions are.

The man in the dog park, who meant no harm to me, still participated in a centuries old tradition of objectifying and sexualising a woman’s body, as if there is nothing more to her than a bruised bum, that needs his soothing hand.