Author: Elisabeth

In honour of the artefact

This story does not begin in a house, in a room, or on a boat. It begins in my head, unframed, uncertain, unplanned.

Weighed down by the conventional, by all the rules I have learned over the years about what I can say and must not say, about how to put one word in front of another, I cannot find my way into this story other than to say I had planned to write a paper on feminine desire, one based on other people’s ideas.

In it I would draw on the thoughts of people like Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, French feminists and philosophers. I would draw on the psychoanalysts, the upcoming thinkers from the relational field.

But as I sat with my screen open and my thoughts on the verge of tipping in, I felt exhausted. The very thought paralysed me.

I could not connect with these words. Feminine desire. Women’s sexuality. It was all too hard.

I went back to bed just now, at nine o’clock on Saturday morning, hoping to shift my state of mind from one of inertia into one of action, but it didn’t work.

In bed, I pulled on an eye patch to block out the light. I rolled onto my side and began to count the number of times my husband snored, snorted or snuffled, and the more he failed to fall silent, the more infuriated I became and the less I could sleep.

And so I considered the next best thing to shake me out of this paralysis: a walk. To get my muscles moving, left right, left right, across the Fritsch Holzer Park; sticking to the grass because whenever I walked on the gravel little stones caught inside the webbing of my sandals.

There were the usual folks up early on a Saturday morning, most with at least two dogs in tow; all dogs off leads, because this is a leash free park.

How I wished there was not a leash on my mind, one that constrains me and keeps me walking at someone else’s pace.

I went to a conference in the middle of last week, one on autobiography and biography, the theory thereof, though most of the people were also life writing scholars, people who have a story to tell.

This is not entirely true. The group divided roughly into three types, those who write their own stories, whether in prose or poetry, traditional memoir or experimental; and others who write about other people, the biographers; and still others who write about the theory of life writing, the use of objects, the nature of the texts themselves, whether online or in material form.

One woman is checking out Google Books’ plans to develop an online encyclopaedia of every book in existence with the intention of scanning as many as possible.

They take old books like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and scan each page one after the other. It’s a laborious process and Google employs desperate folks of an indeterminate nature, probably half-starved students, my guess, or out of work administrative assistants, who know how to scan page after page, hour after hour.

The job is so tedious and boring these scanners make mistakes. They inadvertently scan in the content of a letter that somehow found its way into the scanning room, for instance. There are library stamps from the libraries that once housed the books, and any amount of marginalia. There are places where the scanner’s glove covered thumb and fingers appear. All of this scanned for posterity.

The researchers then wonder about the meaning of these unintended aspects of the book’s life.

I have a trunk under my writing desk that is filled with bits and pieces, the memorabilia of my life going right back to when I was a teenager and first found myself wanting to hold onto my past in material form.

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In those days not only did I keep this stuff – holy pictures from school, an autograph book, hand written letters, bits of ribbon that I had collected at some event or another, a twig of palm from Palm Sunday forty or more years ago, the torn out pages of books that once meant things to me, poems filled out on scraps of paper.  All these things I collected and once pored over for long periods in idle moments.

There were plenty of those moments when I was young and loved nothing but to look back over my then short life and reflect on how far I had come.

By the time I entered adulthood, and began to branch out with teenagers of my own, I had little time for poring over artefacts.

One day when my oldest daughter was studying for her final school year she came upon the idea of life capsules and wanted to explore my treasure trove.

I unearthed the trunk and spread its contents though the room. In so doing, I turned what was once a vaguely ordered chest of bits and pieces into a mess.

I had no time to sort it out then, over fifteen years ago. Instead, I threw it all back inside the trunk.

The trunk is full to the brim now, along with the collected Christmas cards and birthday cards I’ve kept over the years, and I dread the thought that one day soon, I will go back inside the mess of my life to see what’s there and consider whether any of it is worth retaining.

I will not leave 600 boxes, as did Any Warhol on his death, knowing that his fame would not stop curators and the curious from throwing out a thing. Another topic under discussion at the conference.

These boxes are fast deteriorating, given Warhol kept such things as food scraps and toothpicks, all of which must be tagged and identified.

You’d need more than a ten-storey museum to house the stuff.

No wonder we have to be careful about what we leave behind. Only the objects of the famous will escape becoming landfill.

 

A writing life and some thoughts on hatred

This weekend I spent several hours at a writer’s workshop, A mind of one’s own, where the  facilitators, novelist Charlotte Wood and Alison Manning, asked us to explore the question of why we write:

I write to dissect my doubts. To put them down on the page like a frog in a biology experiment. I take my scalpel and slice it open. I write to look into the heart of this once beating creature and figure out, not only how it works, but also what went wrong.

I write to dissect every sinew in the frog’s long legs, to stretch them out and pull apart the fibres of this creature’s being and so make sense of my own.

It started when I was young, when I wrote down my father’s words on small scraps of paper whenever he was drunk and raving. I wrote down his words as he spoke, crazy words as I saw them then, but words that lost their sting once written down on my scraps of paper.

There, they took on the aura of lunacy. There, I could pull each word apart for meaning and resonance.

Before then I wrote, or tried to write, the poetry of my day. The grand phrases of the British poets who filled my school books with their flourishing phrases, the grand men of literature.

I used their words to create my own, to transform the many ravings of my father into something beautiful, but even then I could sense the false hoods.

These words came from them, my father, my brothers, the great men of literature, and I turned inwards to study my own mind and consider the minds of others, working in the service of others, to help save people from families like mine until I turned thirty nine.

When I was thirty-nine the analysts decided that I was unsuitable, that I was like a foreign body in their otherwise quiet and respectful team and they told me to go.

I wrote then to find a voice when my own had been silenced once more, as it was in childhood and now later in my chosen career.

The more I wrote the more I sensed the rage surging through my veins, and the more I recognised this rage, the more I knew I must tame it.

‘You cannot write out of rage or revenge,’ Helen Garner said to me as I sat opposite her in a café in Brunswick Street where she had agreed to meet me to discuss my thesis topic, ‘Life writing and the desire for revenge’.

On a small slip of pink paper she wrote before our meeting, that she knew nothing of revenge. She did not tell me, as I discovered later that she is drawn to revenge like an addict to her next fix, drawn to the criminal courts, drawn to dissect her version of what it is that drives people to murder, that drives people to inflict pain on others. Perhaps she hides her own desire for revenge in her morning pages.

While I write into mine. Splat onto the page.

I write to confront others with the cruelty of childhood, to ask people to look once more on scenes of unspoken depravity, or callous disregard for others.

I write to pick away at the entrails of secrets, the secrets of my family of origin, of incest and misogyny, and the rules of men.

I write to scratch away the skin, the hard carapace of my own professional institutions, to split apart the idealisation that was once my own.

I write because much of the time I am sad, and writing helps to shift my sadness into something that draws in light and breath.

I write to keep a report of events long gone, a report however distorted because it emerges from the limited observations of my eyes and mind.

I write to create an illusion of control. On the page in the words that pour out of me, words unfettered by anyone else’s control. My own control over my own unruly world and though I cannot get these words into perfect order, the words are still out there and when I read and re-read them and shift them around – much as I shifted around the words of my father, all the time trying to make sense of his ravings – I come to see some of my own struggle.

A writer’s task is to explore ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’, William Faulkner writes. A man’s words again. A woman might have put it differently. At least Faulkner called it a human heart, not a man’s.

I write because I cannot bear the inequality of life, my own privilege now as an adult against the unfairness of my childhood.

I write against the non democracy of life, the fact that as much as we try to create equality, at least some of us might, the reality is, we are never equal.

We are all different and we cannot speak for one another, only from ourselves to another, to others and in so doing I write to communicate something of my struggles.

I dissect the frog on the page. I take notes on what I find there. I take notes on my experience of taking notes and then I take to these notes with a scalpel and sheer away the excess fat to get to the raw line of why it is I write.

I write to mitigate my hatred, to turn it into something more loving, to turn it into a less toxic river running through me, to turn my mind from its monstrous underpinnings into something worth saving.