‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’ Joseph Conrad
To see things, you have not seen before. Or if you have noticed them before, to see them anew, with fresh eyes. To open your mind to other possibilities.
The possibilities of hope. Not so much optimism, which as Rebecca Solnit writes arise not from the position of people believing all be fine who then kick back and wait for it all to be fine, but from a hope full of possibility.
As Solnit writes, ‘we have a responsibility to try to realise them, and not to realise the worst possibilities.’
Even as sometimes it looks as though we’re headed there.
On this rain drenched day when the drips on the plastic covering that protects the newspaper which waits out front for collection by the people in this house who love to read their news at the start of each day, is a beginning.
Dear Elisabeth
You take a leaf from Adrienne Rich’s book of poems and try to write letters to yourself to flush out the secrets that hide there in the back of your mind refusing to dislodge, so concealed by the detritus of the present moment of the day ahead
And if you can’t get to them you dig back further into the dusty corners and drag out an old memory. It leads you into the past, that foreign country which you once remembered with a child’s clear eye. Now it grows hazy.
You long for the days to come where memories of the past will creep on you with all the clarity of the moment it first happened. You can see it happening with your husband. This man who has locked away so many cruel secrets of the things that were done to him, we could only detect them in his occasional outbursts of rage. Now they come thick and fast and they threaten to overwhelm him. He hears the falling apart of Yeats poem. When the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
He can no longer hoodwink himself that those events are gone. They trickle back with all the ferocity of what I imagine the falcon sees without its hood. A rabbit scurrying across a field.
Food for survival. But for my husband these memories turn him into the rabbit not the falcon, and he cowers under bushes fearing for his life.
The terror of the abused child. Why then in my dreams did three posh looking schoolboys ring my doorbell while I was home alone and insist they be allowed to move into my house? They stalked down to the kitchen living area and made themselves at home, while I, terrified, ran out to the street and tried to find someone in a passing car who might stop and dial triple zero. Cars stopped, seemed concerned for me, but no one could manage the simple task of calling the police.
So often in my dreams I’m calling the police. The police to recuse me from these intruders. Who were in some ways harmless enough. This dream, the last of the morning, morphed into another when the schoolboys finally left and were replaced by another group of older men and a woman who were like the mafia in their accents and appearance. They parked their cars in my front garden and talked about moving into my house for a time. And again, I’m out on the street trying to attract help from someone to call the police.
I long for the sound of the police siren. Someone who will come along and arrest these intruders who have taken over my space such I do not feel safe in my own house. And I am terrified once more until I wake up.
This dream is a prelude to next week when my husband is away for two nights and I will be alone in this big house, a thing which rarely happens. Something I dread much as I try to remain stoical and not let others know of my fears.
I tell myself they are a residue of my childhood. Those times of terror with my father. He still stalks my mind when I am all alone at night. When every sound, every creak of every floorboard, the hiss of wind in the trees, the screech of night bats can terrify me into a fear I am not after all alone, but some malevolent something or someone is present who wants to hurt me. Who wants to take over my body. Insert his penis into my delicate insides and I cannot sleep for fear of the glint of a knife blade in the dark, a hand across my mouth to silence my screams, which can never come out in my dreams. And I run for the front door and out onto the street where I try to flag down passing cars desperate for help.
This is a recurring dream. The need to get out of my house to escape the intruder who is most often a man who wants to take me over. Or rob me of what few valuables I own or defile my space with his stench. To make my place no longer a haven.
Already I anticipate these nights, when I will leave on the lights that spill onto the back garden and the front so that the house is not shrouded in darkness, which I prefer when I feel safe. When I feel unsafe my preference is for darkness turned off into light everywhere so I can see what I am up against.
Like a child who fears the dark. And I marvel and the people I know, men and women alike, who live alone and do not hold such fears. They who can spend each night in the solitude and comfort of their beds. They do not fear every night for their lives against some unseen menace that visits me in dreams. The residue of a child spent in terror.
And so, I sometimes imagine a life to come living in a community of like-minded souls, where we each have separate rooms, but are close by one another. Where we are safe and no one will venture past the front doors because the place is kept secure and there is no reason for any of the figures in my dreams to slip through my front door and invade my body and space.
