Author: Elisabeth

Inside the coffin.

Julia Cameron talks about ‘morning pages’, a place where writers can go to unload their thoughts, unclutter their minds, free their imaginations before they settle into the serious business of writing. Whether they’re working from memory or imagination – and people like to make the distinction – it’s important to find a place for these excesses of the mind. 

By Saturday morning, mine is full to overbrimming. 

During the week, I read about a writer friend’s shock when he came across these words from the great Ralph Waldo Emerson: I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin. Too raw and private to be included in Emerson’s writings, my friend believed. Why had an editor not omitted them in 1832? 

The thing that pings for me: what did Emerson see? How long had Ellen been dead? Bones hair and teeth or a putrefying corpse. It must have been easy to lift the lid off coffins in the 1800s, not so these days. 

There were grave robbers in Emerson’s day,too. I read about them when I visited a graveyard in Edinburgh which JK Rowling also visited when working on her Harry Potter books. That graveyard and the one in Shillington where several of my husband’s ancestors are buried remain in my mind as places of both memory and imagination. Places that haunt. 

Lift the lid off the coffin and what do you see?

What will it be like when someone handles my body and settles it into a coffin? A sobering thought, knowing that I, the I of my mind is no longer inside that body. My body the suitcase that holds my mind, a convenient vehicle in which to transport my thoughts and feelings even as I understand my body is also the source of those feelings.

That’s what it was like when I was 22 years old and on the edge of ending a relationship with my then long-term boyfriend, Paul, with whom I had shared a home for the past two years, with whom I had shared my body since I was nineteen. He took away my virginity as people describe it.

Such a quaint expression. As if your virginity is a special something you hold onto with pride and pleasure, at least for a time, but beyond a certain time if you haven’t rid yourself of your virginity, then you begin to worry about your inadequacy as a person. This is particularly so for females but males too, I imagine, worry if their virginity hangs around for too long. 

His name was Shaun, a blond, blue eyed Canadian who came into the social work department at Prince Henry’s hospital where I worked, with all the confidence of a senior clinician. He knew his stuff. He knew how to greet people at their bedsides when summoned by the doctor. He knew how to take a jam-packed history of that person and he knew how to ask the rest of us locals what services he might locate to help the person stuck in the bed. 

Shaun had a partner, he told us, and the two had travelled together to Australia with the intention of settling here. He liked us. A group of women social workers ranging in age from the youngest me, to our senior, who was in her mid-forties. She did not join us for lunch at the Olive Tree round the corner that day. Too much business to manage.

The others left the lunch as soon as it was over, but Shaun and I lingered over our coffees and then, as if in the movies, he suggested we rent a room in a hotel nearby and spend the afternoon together.

I remember the white sheets on the hotel bed, his pink body freckled and studded with curly orange hairs. He was not a great lover, but then again, nor was I. I performed as I knew I must perform, as a woman of confidence, a femme fatale, a woman who had a partner back home as Shaun had his partner, but we were on the road to more important things like staking our claim in a world of sophistication and drama.

‘Possessions hold you down,’ Shaun told me as he pinned my arms behind my head with one hand and tortured me with his touch. From my inner eye we looked as good as any couple, in any movie. From the place where my mind sat inside my body, but I was no more there than Shaun turned out to be.

I was late back to work and in trouble with my boss. I made some implausible excuse like an emergency call from my sick sister, but everyone knew that Shaun and I had lingered longer after lunch. Everyone was suspicious. 

This soon became the trigger for me to find another job, which in the halcyon days of the 1970s when social work jobs were aplenty, I found easy. Easy enough to leave the hospital to work elsewhere, an elsewhere that led me to a future I can now look back on with amazement, though I could not see it then.

When you’re 22 years old, you can’t see the pattern that unfurls ahead of you and the years behind you of childhood and adolescence are still too close to make any sense, only you’re glad to be past them.

Ten years later, by which time I was no longer the muddled young woman of my early social workdays, Interpol contacted me. There was a Canadian man, they said, who had worked at Prince Henry’s during my time there and was an imposter wanted for embezzlement. 

Like Emerson looking into Ellen’s coffin, what I see when I lift the lid on this story, bones, hair and teeth, a carcass and no mind left behind. Only the fading memory of a young and foolish woman who thought she could share in the excitement of being in the movies. 

Audacity and shame

Not much to go on. A hint of something that nags at the periphery of my mind. The joy of the new.

Those five words and I’m transported back to a time when everything was new, as it is for my twelve-month-old grandson who has a habit of pursing his lips into a tight O whenever he sees something that enthralls him.

Oh, he says. Ohhhh, something new. 

I scratched my lips in my sleep last night. I felt it as it happened, a brush of my hand across my face to dislodge a few loose hairs that were pressing on my neck, and my fingernail came in contact with my lip and scraped off the top layer.

I ignored it till this morning. The congealed blood of a tiny wound on that most delicate of surfaces, my topmost lip, which is prone to cold sores and fungal infections, so I must take care.

It’s so easy to hurt yourself, so easy to stub a toe or walk hip height into a cupboard and bruise the bone and surrounding tissue. So easy to be careless and fling your body around as if its ability to preserve its walls is endless, even as it’s not.

‘Audacity always flirts with shame.’ An Adam Phillips’ special.

The analyst comes out with sentences like this, short and pithy and filled with resonance. Breathtaking and yet, I want to scream out at him,

‘What gives you such confidence, to state your ideas with such conviction when so many others grapple with the possibilities of other meanings. Never certain of anything.’ 

Audacity ALWAYS flirts with shame.

Is it possible there are moments when an audacious gesture, when an effort to rise above your years can travel unaccompanied by any such fears whatsoever? Though I take his point. 

Even writing this here now is accompanied by the ever-faithful internal voice that says, who’d want to read this crap?

As a writer you know this voice so well, you learn to ignore it. You learn to press on with fingers at the keyboard, pen on paper, you learn to push ahead despite the nagging fears you have nothing of any value to say. 

In a novel-writing class several years ago, I threw out a quote from AS Byatt’s novel Still Life, about the need for a wool-gathering time.

” She remembered from what now seemed the astonishing free and spacious days of her education the phenomenon of the first day’s work on a task.  One had to peel one’s mind from its run of preoccupations: coffee to buy, am I in love, the yellow dress needs mending, Tim is unhappy, what is wrong with Marcus, how shall I live my life?  It took time before the task in hand seemed possible, and more before it came to life, and more still before it became imperative and obsessive.

There had to be a time before thought, a wool-gathering time when nothing happened, a time of yawning, of wandering eyes and feet, of reluctance to do what would finally become delightful and energetic.  Threads of thought had to rise and be gathered and catch on other threads of old thought, from some unused memory store.”

I was tired of listening to people go on about where they might send their manuscript and how they might get a foot in the door of the publishing world. As if they were selling sausages at a marketplace. 

I wanted to worry myself with these concerns only when I had what felt close enough to a finished product.

‘All very well for you,’ one man said. A tall man who once walked the pilgrimage Via Francigena in Italy and described how when he reached the shrine his feet were red raw, his sandals in tatters.

Here was a man who knew how to persevere, but now in his sixties, he was wary of life sneaking past him. He did not have time for wool-gathering. He needed to get on with it.

When we started the novel writing class that year Janey Runci, our brave teacher, challenged us to look into our motives for writing. 

‘Let’s face it’ she said. ‘Most of the books you’re working on in this class will never reach publication.’

It was a sobering thought and enough to stop some people from returning to complete their novels. But a good fifty percent of us persevered.

I sometimes wonder where they are now, those would-be writers from my novel writing class. I do not hear of their book launches within the small sphere of publishing in Australia or at least not among the awards.

But awards are another notch up, several notches up from even being able to complete the writing of a novel, or even a short piece of writing like this.

The internal voice that screams at you to be silent is always there hovering over your shoulder like a banshee screeching death is not too far away and then you can have a rest, for now, if you continue like this, you’ll only bore your audience.

If you can find one, and for the rest, consider it a writing exercise, going up and down the musical scales of words, repetitive notes up and down, rehearsals behind the scenes, but far from the real thing.