Author: Elisabeth

Memory bright as a star and equally mysterious: Freefall Writing

I tried to open the blind in our bedroom this morning and the toggle snapped off. Just like that, after only thirty-five years, who’d have thought the thread holding the toggle in place would eventually wear out and snap.

IMG_2430

This blind pulling ritual is one I have come to hate. I usually leave it to my husband who’s mastered the art. I can’t quite work out why it is with this particular blind I can never get it right.

Either I pull down too hard and the whole things comes out of it’s moorings and loses touch with the mechanism up top that allows it to spring back or I pull too hard and the whole thing snaps back, furls up too far and flips over itself at the top.

Then you need a chair or ladder in order to reach up high enough to get back to the toggle- that has now come off – and to unwind the whole thing manually so that it can continue to operate as these blinds do.

It has long been a mystery to me as many things are.

Last week my husband and I spent a week away in Yarck, in North-Eastern Victoria on the way to Mansfield and near to Alexandra on a writing retreat of sorts. We joined a group of ten others, including our mentor and teacher, Barbara Turner Vesselago, to enjoy the experience of writing Freefall.

This is my preferred style of writing, to write without looking back over what I have written; to write in an effort to bring forth all the sensuous details, the sight, the taste, the touch and smell, including dialogue; to write what comes up for me and makes me sweat; to go fear ward; and to avoid writing about material that is less than ten years old when writing autobiographically; unless something screams at me, you must go into this now.

We stayed in cabin number one at the Mittagong Homestead in Fawcett, close by Yarck. Two small bedrooms, a kitchen and living area with separate and large bathroom and spa.

We had only one table on which to write, so I dragged it out of the kitchen area and into bedroom number two, while my husband, who had hoped to write outside in the morning sunshine, found there were no outlets for his computer there. So he dragged the outside table from the veranda and into the living area, thus creating two separate writing spaces for the two of us.

‘A room of our own’, a writing space of our own, a prerequisite for any such event.

And there was structure. We wrote every morning from whenever we woke up and felt like making a start. We wrote till midday or thereabouts, as we then needed to drive to the main house Andana, ten minutes away, where the other participants stayed, all except one who holed up in the nearby Yarck bed and breakfast, attached to the Giddy Goat cafe.

Every day at 12.45 pm we brought our writing, printed, double spaced, numbered and dated with our names on each page, to Barbara and she took our offerings away to read.

We were free them to walk or shop or drive around the district for a few hours until 4.30 pm at which stage we re-joined the group and Barbara who had read as much as three thousand words per person and had ordered our writing into some seemingly mysterious, but meaningful order.  Then she read to the group from our writing and we all discussed each piece in turn till 7 pm when we shared dinner together.

We took responsibility for the preparation and presentation of evening meals in pairs.  Wonderful food.

Barbara is one of the best readers I have ever known, both in her ability to take in work through her own silent reading and as a performer who reads other people’s writing out loud. She brings words to life.

And so we sat in a circle in the Andana house on large comfortable chairs and couches listening to the lull of Barbara’s voice as she read excerpts from our writing. She did not identify the writer of the piece but over the course of a week it became easier to put writing and writer together.  But that was not the point of the exercise, though some of us could not help but wonder.

Sure it was easy for me to recognise my own stuff and my husband’s and to hope that our writing would be read, as everyone hopes their writing will be read.

It is as if in reading your writing out loud, Barbara affirms some sense that this piece, however long or short and whatever its shortfalls, has merit.

It’s amazing how tortured the process can feel, at least for me in those first few days when I pitched myself up against myself, determined to write into a more fictional state of mind, the way one or two of the writers at the retreat spoke, of going into a trance, and of letting the writing flow.

Not for me. Never for me. No trance like states just the hard slog of trying to follow the contours of my thoughts, lulled back into memory and then using my imagination to fill in gaps where my memory failed, which it does all the time.

Memory is like that. It’s there for a moment, bright as a star and then becomes indistinct and so I draw on other memories, the colours, the smells, the images, to bring together something meaningful. To tell a story which might not be the absolute and actual truth of what happened but carries the emotional essence of it.

Out of this mystery come stories, some of which I’ll share.

A suitcase full of secrets

Yesterday a letter arrived from Holland from my cousin, Lilo, who lives in Switzerland. She sent me a copy of my aunt’s obituary along with a few handwritten words of greeting and acknowledgement.

The letter is in German, as is the obituary, and although I can make out the meaning of some words, without the help of our German house guest, I would not be able to know that my cousin writes to ask where I fit into the scheme of things.

She also acknowledges that her mother died with a suitcase of secrets still strapped to her chest.

Not until her nineties, did my aunt tell her daughter Lilo that she had experienced terrible things as a child. She would not elaborate, beyond the description of Lilo’s grandfather as a tyrant who believed that women should not be educated and were fit only for housework.

This aunt is the youngest of my father’s siblings and so the story goes to the grave with her. We will never know the truth of what happened in my father’s family, only the bare bones.

Historians might root around in the archives and try to piece together the jig saw of our lives but unless there is someone out there still alive who can bear witness to the events of my father’s life and that of his sister as small children then we are left to guess, as I have been guessing all my life.

I do not fully understand the way people hold such secrets from the light. I understand the pain might be unbearable, but to carry such knowledge and not to share it with another who is concerned and interested seems unfathomable to me and yet this is so.

There are many who want the past to stay hidden as a black hole in experience that others in the present and future can only guess at.

I imagine things went terribly wrong in my father’s family from the extent that things went terribly wrong in my own, from the few things he said to me when I was a child, not all of it war related.

When I was small, maybe as young as five or six, I sat once on his lap. We were on holidays in Edithvale in the house that an uncle let us borrow for a week or so each summer. An old shack among a series of holiday places, it was a short walk to the beach and I could hear the waves in the distance and by day the caw of sea gulls.

This particular evening we had finished dinner and I chose to sit on my father’s lap, a thing I have no memory of doing as an older child and not something I would ever do willingly when I was older.

At this stage of my life I was young enough for my father not to terrify me, not yet.

‘Where is your family? I asked my father. ‘Your mother and father, your sisters and brothers?’

My mother had talked endlessly about her own family back in Holland but my father travelled alone in the world. I asked the question with the innocence of the curious young. I wanted to know about my other Oma and Opa, about my other uncles and aunties.

‘Look into my eyes,’ my father said. ‘They are black and evil. I have no family.’

Something in his words, something in their tone, propelled me from his lap.

I could not bear the idea that my own father was evil. That he had no one. That he had come from nowhere and I ran from the room in tears.

‘Don’t be so stupid’ I heard my mother say behind me, not to me but to my father. She said it in Dutch Do nit so fou (sic), or words to that effect. Don’t be foolish perhaps or cruel or hardhearted.

In my mind it all began then, this life long search for the meaning of my father’s experience.

When my aunt Nell’s obituary arrived, I felt another door close but at the same time a crack opened up elsewhere, a crack that must be further prised apart because of the language barrier.

My cousin wants to know about her mother’s story from me. As far as I can, I will tell her.

She’s been kept in the dark for too long.