There is a place where spiders knit, and fingers skitter across the keyboard.
A place reserved for memory and imagination when anything is possible, and boundaried only by the edges of sentences and their meaning.
I go there on mornings to spend my time dipping into the well of the past and there I find all manner of pleasurable entertainment, jammed against the ghosts of traumas past and the joys of sweet success.
All of them rub together. Writing is a plunge into the unknown in one person’s mind as long as they do not try too hard, at least not at first. At first they must improvise, as George Saunders writes, otherwise if they’re too intentional, the story sounds tired and inauthentic.
Authenticity lies in the will to dare.
In 1977 Dr J Peter Bush published Rape in Australia. The title letters in yellow against a black background with the subtitle ‘an appraisal of attitudes, victims, assailants, medicine and the law’. He was police surgeon at the time and therefore in a good position to see the hideous aftermath of rape and write accordingly.
The cover image in white, the symbol for woman cracked in half. To demonstrate the force of rape as an attack on a person’s identity. Most often a woman’s identity.
My mother gave me this book when I was in my late thirties as a birthday gift. I was appalled by her choice. She must have found the book in a bargain bin somewhere. That’s how my mother bought books, by the kilo. Romantic histories by the boot load for herself, along with anything by well-known Catholic writers as Graham Green and theologians like Teilhard de Jardin who spoke on the philosophy, history, and theories of her religion. She read the The Advocate every Sunday after Mass with religious devotion. She stuck to her faith.
My mother bought me this book, I imagined because I was a social worker then and social workers, at least in her mind, took an interest in such matters. Not that my mother did not care, but rape had not touched her so closely, or so she believed even as her husband had raped her eldest daughter when she was still a child. But my mother who knew this would not have considered it so.
Incest was something different.
I have read the stories of Alice Munro, now doing the rounds. They speak to the horror of Munro’s ongoing knowledge that her daughter, Andrea Skinner, as a nine-year-old was sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerry Fremlin, Munro’s second husband and still Munro refused to leave him. Just as my mother failed to leave my father.
We writers go into such territory. We circle our wounds as Siri Hustvedt describes returning once more to the place in our unconscious that bristles with energy, the agony, and the desire. the pain and the pleasure, those energy points of human experience that rock us to our core.
Do not underestimate the power of the unconscious mind to evoke memories of matters otherwise dormant.
Like Munro, my mother stayed with her husband after she knew the ugly truth of his behaviour. But unlike Munro, or as far as we know, my mother told my father, ‘If you do this again, if you come here again, I’ll kill you.’ This when she caught my father lurched over my sister in bed. ‘Her eyes like a little bird’s,’ my mother told me years later, ‘with the blankets pulled up to her chin’.
But my father did return again and again even as my mother believed, wanted to believe, it had stopped.
How do you live with such knowledge?
Is this why she gave me the book? An unspoken acknowledgement of something she believed was of my concern because it was also her concern.
Germaine Greer at a conference in Melbourne talked about the ubiquity of rape throughout the suburbs of Melbourne every night with what she imagined were countless women unable to resist their husband’s approaches for sex.
Rape, Greer called it, and there was no protest from her audience, even as her talk was gate crashed by a trans gender activist who argued Greer was guilty of writing off a whole element in society of people who claimed a different identity from the one in which they were born
Greer spent her lifetime trying to give voice to the feminine body and here was someone who dared to suggest, although they were born with a masculine body, they could after a lifetime of privilege, convert into female form.
Greer is mistaken in the idea any trans person has endured a lifetime of privilege. It is not a privilege to enter the world in a body whose form dictates the way you’re treated for the rest of your life, whether as woman or as man.
If you believe, as some do, that the body into which you were born does not feel right for you along all the dimensions we humans have constructed for our two basic genders, then why not protest? Why not seek to find some physical form that fits your sense of your identity?
There are many who would say, you can’t because it’s impossible.
They argue you cannot take on a form of body that is not yours to begin with. People cannot sprout wings and even if we wanted, they say, though we have come close in other ways with hang gliders, aeroplanes, parachutes. All of them attempts to fly.
Even as the human body has long been one we have modified. With all manner of accoutrements, and under the knife. The engravings of some tribes in New Zealand and Africa. The skin piercings of indigenous peoples, even our pierced ears and the popularity of tattoos today. All methods of bodily enhancement.
And in this time of crazy ears and polarities, it’s worth remembering David Whyte:
You act as though you’re alone, when even the soap dish enables you, writes
the poet, or words to this effect.
They call it the narcissism of small differences. Small or large they can make for conflict with its never-ending cycle of hurt. We see so much of this today. Time to get beyond our differences. To share the vast resources of our world and make room for one another.
