Tag: Dreams

From serenity to chaos

‘The metamorphosis of childhood.’ Susan Choi. 

Write within the cruel constraints of time, even as the impulse might be to avoid. 

Reading Susan Choi’s novel Flashlight I’m stunned by her capacity with words to tell a story that is complex and compelling. A story that hints at the diversity of lives. The story spans the course of history and leaves you gasping. A type of insight into what it’s like to grow up in a country that is foreign to your birth right even as it is the land of your birth. 

Such is Seok’s story and then that of his daughter Louisa born to an American woman whose life takes a turn when she is nineteen and gives birth to a son whom her otherwise married to another partner takes away from her to raise with his wife. 

Louisa comes along years later after her mother sees almost nothing of her son and Louisa who begin life as a lovely infant whose Japanese/Korean/ American father is constantly fearful for her well-being grows into a precocious young girl who must repeat grade four because she shifts countries three times and although she masters at least two languages must also tackle the hardship of constant migration against her will.

And then when her father disappears which happens at the beginning of the book then trace back over the next several chapters to understand how we got there. The story of her parents till about the middle where we catch up to events in the beginning and then follow onto a conclusion that is as exciting and intriguing as any book I have ever read.

She talks about the metamorphosis of childhood, the way as children we shift constantly. And I my mind’s eye I see my own grandchildren whose baby years run so fast. And now grandmother of a nineteen-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old grandson I find these years the most perplexing as I found my own children’s adolescence the toughest time of all.

Mainly because in some way I think I might have by passed adolescence getting the message it was safer to by-pass that difficult period and move straight from childhood into adulthood thereby avoiding all that in between difficulty of the tempestuous years when we fluctuate between thinking we know it all and are invincible to its opposite. 

The image on the front cover of my copy of Flashlight intrigues me, the sight of a small girl around ten walking alongside her father, their backs to the camera heads bowed looking under the gentle waves that lap at their feet. Each in white shirts, his long sleeved her a t-shirt. She wears shorts and he rolled up jeans. Her hands at her side as if for balance against the wobbly sand while his are clasped behind his back. And once you’ve read the first chapter of this astonishing book you know that all this will change in a heartbeat.

From serenity to chaos.

And isn’t this the way life can be, including the metamorphoses of childhood when one minute all is calm and the world feels predictable, to the moment it tilts on its axis, and we’re plunged into a swirling abyss of not knowing what’s to come.

And soon I will walk the two dogs in my care, Dogs who have been with us for two weeks now and due to tackle another two weeks before they return to their arms. And life with dogs is also unpredictable. 

At this moment all calm peaceful quiet but at any minute they might erupt in fits of barking especially when my fifteen year old grandson who is also staying with us but he only for the weekend, when he comes down the stairs and the bigger dog, a labradoodle, black and furry and loud, wags her tail and barks ferociously at first seemingly out of anger but more recently out of a determination that he should throw a ball for her. 

The dog is obsessed with ball throwing as many a dog. Throw that ball and I will retrieve it and return it to you as is my destiny. This dog from the poodle family initially trained to be water dogs for hunters. The dogs fetched the dead birds as they landed dead over water. 

And just now my stream of thoughts was interrupted by the sensitive hearing of the little Jack Russell who can hear the meanderings of my grandson from bathroom to bedroom and will not be satisfied until he materialises. 

So, I will take these dogs for a walk to remove all trace of nastiness and then my day might well progress. With its ever-increasing swirls of certainty and uncertainty. Beyond my final dream of the morning, whose initial details are vague. Only I was engaged in helping friends and others rescue a small child from a family who do not want her, a type of Cinderella story and then I look down a flight of stairs and see the face of my analyst at her door. 

She has seen me from this distance, and I’m delighted to carry down my little granddaughter, plump in my arms, to introduce the two. But Mrs Milanova makes the mistake of sitting on the stairs as I approach, beaming up at me and by the time I reach her, her body gets stuck in some way and she cannot move. 

I cannot help her much as I want but she reassures me her sons will arrive soon and with them some person from elderly care who is trying to talk her into something she does not want. And her final words to him, give me a small pension, and then I will consider. And he disappears. 

Here my dream ends. And with it, this meandering post from Flashlight to dogs and dreams.

Telling and not telling

‘We resurrect the dead in our dreams.’ Siri Hustvedt

The only time I see my parents now is in my dreams, in photographs and my memories.

My dreams, the clearest depiction when they come alive, and in them we have conversations. Reading Siri Hustvedt’s book Ghost Stories, a story of grief on the death of her husband Paul Auster in 2024, I’m struck by her passion for this man, within the context of a long and fulfilling marriage, despite the tragedy of drug addicted Daniel, Auster’s son who killed himself soon after the death of his eight-month-old daughter Ruby, for which he was held responsible. 

Hustvedt details this tragedy, the year before Auster was diagnosed with lung cancer as a possible determinant in the onset of the disease. The doctors, she writes, are interested to know his genomic history and the fact that he smoked, but they did not once reflect on the extent to which this tragedy, losing his granddaughter and son in such a short space of time, could derail a mind and body such Auster is unlikely to have been the same ever again. 

Stress, Hustvedt reminds us, can lead to bodily changes, which the medical establishment with its heavy emphasis on the mechanics of bodily health and disease the quantitation of blood and hormone levels fails to factor in.

This book, like all diaries, as Hustvedt describes, is a ‘geography of telling and not telling.’ Isn’t this true of all lives?

Yesterday, I met with an old friend. We extend across four decades with long periods in between where we have scarcely seen one another. Linked in large part by mutual friends, one of whom has since died. His wife, now in her mid to late nineties is losing her memory. My friend and I tried to piece together the time in between, when she spent a good deal of time with this friend and placed that memory against earlier times when this woman was like a substitute grandmother to my children.

When this older friend and I travelled every Tuesday to an event held at the Athenaeum Library in the city, for The Tuesday writers. A group of people stemming from my days at the Council of Adult Education with whom I completed a diploma of Professional Writing and Editing. 

Some from my class did not want our novel writing class to end so we formed the Tuesday writers. I left this group ahead of my friend to care for my grandchildren which I’ve done these past 18 years. The Tuesday Writers might still exist but given my Tuesdays are never free now, and I no longer know anyone in the group I cannot say.  But something is stirring inside. How can I chase them up? How can I reconnect?

They, too, are like ghosts in my memory. So many people and their names fading much like the ghosts of a lifetime.

And the conversation with my contemporary friend was studded with gaps but I gave her a copy of my memoir The Museum of Failure assuring her there were people she might recognise despite the pseudonyms.

I did not tell her that the person who was most instrumental in my failure was a woman who was most significant in my friend’s life as her analyst.

There is something about keeping the identity of other people’s therapists safe and sacred for the sake of the person’s therapy or analysis that is deeply ingrained in me.

We don’t want to badmouth other people’s heroes.

It would be like telling you things about your parents you do not want to hear. Things about your parents that might re-shape their view of those parents after death. The ghosts will morph into something horrendous relative to the idealised views they hold in their hearts. But I want to tell my friend about her analyst now dead. About her strange ways that were hard on me. And other secrets I know, but secrets are like this. You hold them close for fear of the damage they might do. Her secrets, my secrets.

A geography of telling and not telling. 

Paul Auster began writing letters to his grandson Myles, born four months before the writer died. Such compelling letters as Hustvedt details in her story. She also includes some letters she wrote to her friends during her husband’s illness. She wanted them to know. He wanted them to know what was going on following Auster’s cancer diagnosis. To keep them in the loop. 

It reminds me of the messages I sent to my siblings during our mother’s last days when she was in the Dandenong Hospital dying. 

We did not realise this until she was described as palliative. For much of these last three weeks of my mother’s life, my sister and I operated as though we would need to find her higher-level care given the retirement village where she lived for the past decade did not offer this. 

My mother died in the Bethlehem hospice, which seems apt given this hospice which is no longer trading under that name was in earlier incarnations a maternity hospital where my husband was born. 

He likes to joke, like Jesus, he was born in Bethlehem. Born in Bethlehem and baptised in St Patrick’s Cathedral. You can’t get more high ranking than this within the Catholic hierarchy of Melbourne, but he does not submit to these hierarchies anymore.

My mother did. She believed in miracles with all her heart, which brings me to another of Hustvedt’s observations when talking about the roller coaster of the story of her husband’s life, his final months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. 

‘There is an important distinction between optimism and hope. The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that at least for those who love the patient are unsustainable. Hope on the other hand is necessary for living on. In my case a stringent reality principle with hope allows me to be a better companion as this story moves ahead.

The number of times my mother told her children a miracle had occurred, and our father had agreed to stop drinking is remarkable in its frequency. This alone put me off the idea of miracles. And the day my analyst told me there is a fine line between optimism and denial stays with me. Such a fine line. Better to stick with the idea of hope. That things as Emily Dickinson writes like hope with feathers. It can fly. Despair cannot.

But miracles belong with the ghosts of our pasts and presents, ghosts that help us maintain our connections to those long gone, but they cannot be rematerialised except in our Imaginations.

And like Hustvedt pining for her beloved Paul we must learn to grieve our losses rather than image they will one day be resurrected that way of Jesus. We all must die. But while we live we hold onto the hope of finding meaning in our lives and connections such we might never need resort to miracles if religion or otherwise. 

They can lead us into false hope, and denial which ill prepares us for those final days. Auter said he hoped to die telling a joke. Philip Adams talks about wanting to be awake when he dies. From my limited understanding of death when it comes, it’s unlikely to go the way of movies with a person uttering their final word. My mother reported that our father’s final words were along the lines of ‘St Francis was a wonderful saint.’ 

Somehow I find this hard to believe. Perhaps she thought it. Perhaps she wanted it. My father reformed from alcoholism into the church of heaven. Another miracle, or so my mother believed. I suspect he died in silence. His last breath no more.