Janet Frame – Page 2 – Sixth in Line

The worst of times and the best

‘Beyond the fixed stars and variable suns…’ James Joyce Ulysses

Last night the wind howled, and it took energy to convince myself, the tall oak in our garden, with its high and crooked branches, would not drop one onto our roof.

In the particular lies the universal, or so I’m told. And I can believe it.

For isn’t it so, these howling storms and the bleak weather with which we’re faced mid-autumn in Melbourne, Australia, while on the other side of the world people roast, is also a reflection of the volatility of our times.

The worst of times and the best of times, only who’s to say.

In 1992 we hired a houseboat on the Murray, three small children, one husband and two adult friends, a long married couple who chose to stay childless and enjoyed the company of our children in small doses by way of remembering their own child selves. If they ever took the opportunity of reflecting deeply.

On this boat, I read Janet Frame’s memoir, Angel at my Table. Stretched out after lunch while the other adults slept and the children played, on one of the pull out beds in the living area cum kitchen area.

And wept when I came to the part where a sister died drowning, first one sister then another. Dickie hearts, which no one knew about until they died, and in the aftermath, Frame’s life is turned around towards even greater desperation.

I was grieving then too, much as I tried to maintain a cheerful demeanour. The analysts had only months earlier decided I was unsuitable for their training, and I could not see how I might go on in my chosen career beyond putting one foot in front of the other.

We took turns to steer the boat across the slow river, which at a time of receding drought was shallow in places, such we got stuck. We needed to drag tall poles to ease us out of the mud.

If only it was as easy to tug myself out of my hidden despair. If only I knew then that time would pass and the pain ease. That I would find other ways of using my mind to manage my life, that over time I might find even more rewarding than wearing the title, psychoanalyst.

It was to be a medal of honour, like the coloured badges I collected as a young girl guide. A badge for being able to set up a tent. A badge for making a telephone call from a street phone, coins in the slot, dial the number and pull on the receiver in that order, then speak to your mother or sister or brother at the other end. A badge for sewing on your badge, in neat whip stitch. To stop the edge from fraying. Small marks of development.

I knew this was how a person grew. You learned to do things you were previously unable to master. You absorbed new forms of arithmetic. Division, multiplication, and fractions. You learned to spell long and obscure words. You rote learned the dates of wars and kings and queens from the past. The date of Federation in Australia, easy because it happened at the turn of a century. You learned the colour of your nation’s flag, and the mysteries of the rosary, the joyful and sorrowful mysteries, the luminous. You scrolled through the stations of the cross, and committed the Credo, (the I believe), to memory. You repeated the ten commandments, only those had protestant ring. You rattled off the Our father who art in Heaven, whose final sentence differed from the Our Father they recited at Girl Guide camp one Easter time when where you were the only Catholic child present.

Small differences between the ways people peeled their potatoes, some under running water. A waste. Others in a sink filled with water which grew murkier by the minute as each potato was robbed of its dusky over coat.

So much to learn in childhood, and much of it I managed, always on the edge of amazement as if I had learned words by rote and could hold onto them only if I recited them out loud and from the beginning.

I did not understand the things I learned. Just the words. It left me with an uneasy sense of fraudulence. As if I could recite swathes of knowledge by rote, but if you prodded me, stopped me mid-stream and interrogated the meaning of what I was saying, I would lose my place. A type of stage fright and I could not speak or think or understand the mysteries of the world.

I felt this way when I first read Sigmund Freud. The case histories of Anna O and Little Hans. On the page, these stories simple, but the voice of the great man had an old-fashioned tone. It took time to absorb and even then the ideas he offered floated in the air like so many dust motes I could rote learn, but not corral.

I went once to an evening lecture conducted by one of the newer members in the 1970s, a Lacanian analyst from South America who spoke non-stop for over an hour. Not one word made sense to me. Granted I was new to this language, and he was of Lacanian extraction.

Jacques Lacan’s writings translated into English are not for the simple minded. They are dense and opaque. Belonging to universities and in need of interpretation before you can grasp something of their essence.

Even today, decades later, my eyes glaze over when I read Lacan’s writing. Not so Freud’s but then, it was all gobbledygook, and even more veiled than the words of the bible.

Mid-afternoon on the Murray after we stopped somewhere for lunch and tied our boat at anchor to one of the many jetties along the river’s edge. I watched the overhead sun illuminate the skies. Best at twilight when we were again at anchor and readying for the night when the sun danced across the red cliffs looming over the water. They threw reflections as though someone had folded a sheet of paper in half. Each side carried a replica of the other. Mesmerising.

And Janet Frame took me to the ice cold of New Zealand and that room at her aunt’s whose walls were lined above the picture rail with the chocolate boxes of her dancing career. Her trophies. And at night after Frame’s sister had joined her, the one who later died, the two ate their way through every single chocolate putting back the empty boxes on display.

Imagine the aunt’s horror when she discovered they had been scooped out. Those chocolates would soon be inedible but no matter to her. The shock the scandal, the horror. And Frame’s shame.

And it reminds me of the times when as a child I stole lollies and was duly punished. It reminds me of the top tier of our wedding cake, which still sits in a tin, sealed with silver masking tape at the top of a kitchen cupboard.

Nearly fifty-years-old now, this cake will only be opened after one of us dies. I would not chance it ahead of time. Or maybe I would. Superstition says, it’s dangerous to open it ahead of the death of one of the partners, unless you open it when you should. And we missed that event because we never baptised our children, in the Catholic way.

So, there were no milestones other than anniversaries when it was once okay to open the tin.

In my mind’s eye, I open it and see maggots. Though they could not survive for long, or get in. I see saw dust. The cake crumbed to powder. I see a perfect cake dulled by time, the once white marzipan icing, now yellow, but inside who knows.

And in this night of blustery winds, the tree branches stayed in place for now at least and the world as we knew it, at least here in Hawthorn it continues.

Silence is a crime

‘Someone with a capacity for silence,’ writes Jacinta Halloran in her book Resistance about a man who keeps things to himself.

When I read these words in isolation, ‘a capacity for silence’, they sound like a positive attribute, someone unafraid of stillness, someone prepared to sit in silence for long periods, someone not in love with the sound of their own voice. A circumspect person, not given to prattling, to ‘exercising their tongues’.

As my list rolls on I recognise the wisdom of these words. A capacity for silence bespeaks a spy, someone who holds their cards close to their chest, someone who gives little away. A person who refuses to let their vulnerability show; a person who lets others appear foolish, prattling on about the weather, desperate to share their thoughts while the person capable of silence keeps everyone guessing.

I find such silent people difficult. I am not such a person, although I can hold my tongue when circumstances require. At least I like to think I can.

Other times, I’m bursting with wanting a turn to speak.

In every group I have ever attended, be it large or small, there are always a few who speak up first. They have something to say, make a point, share their thoughts, while most other attendees remain silent.

I am not one of the silent ones. The number of times, especially at analytical gatherings where I have felt the weight of the microphone in my hands, my pulse racing, my hands sticky around the clunky loudspeaker, when I hope my words do not reveal too much of the tremble behind them.

It is a daunting thing to speak at such conferences. The audience thrums with disapproval. Only the guest speaker is allowed to have a say or their appointed discussants, their presenters, the rest of us must sit back in awe.

When it comes discussion time and questions or comments are invited, there falls a long, agonising silence across the room. Sometimes the presenter might urge the room to feel okay about the silence as people gather their thoughts.

Karen Maroda during a recent zoom conference to some 200 participants, after she had talked at length about enactments in therapy, asked for questions, and the zoom room fell silent.

‘You’re kidding’. Maroda could not believe the timidity of her audience. Timid or taciturn. Leave the speaker to stew in their juices. Leave them to gather almost no sense of how their words have landed.

When people participate in discussion they begin a conversation that is the bread and butter of relationality. The to and fro, the back and forth, the give and take that is a hall mark of the human condition.

We get along because we share our thoughts and when we do not, and leave others in the dark, we are withholding and cruel, however much we might imagine we are timid, shy, or too frightened and do not want to upset the other.

Silence is a crime.

When we’re babies we learn to vocalise and ultimately to talk through a process of turn taking. You see it all the time. The baby makes a cooing, gurgling, burbling sound to the parent and the parent, or whoever else is interacting with the baby, tosses back clear, exaggerated words.

Baby talk. It’s a form of marking that helps babies to recognise the difference between themselves and others. Your turn, my turn. But the silent one, the one with a capacity for silence breaks these rules by refusing to play the game.

Think of the still face experiment when babies are confronted with a mother who fails to respond. One minute she engages in her usual playful interactive way then she turns her back and when she turns back she holds her face stony still. She refuses to interact with her baby who then throws their arms around, grimaces and grunts, or shrieks, burbles, and coos, all to get a mother’s attention. To find again the mother they once knew.

When you witness this experiment you witness the slow unhinging of a baby. They cannot get a response and thereafter lose sight of themselves in a void of absence, of silence.

It’s devastating to watch.

The experimenters allow only a minute or two to spare the babies going fully mad but long enough to distress them. To demonstrate the point: Babies need live company.

In television crime series when police or barristers ask the prisoner a question and the reply comes: ‘No comment’, we’re left with a similar sensation. Some one who remains tight lipped.

Rather as the infamous video clip that went viral many years ago. After Tony Abbott, then Prime minister of Australia, refused to answer a question put to him by a reporter about his response on hearing of the death of a soldier in Afghanistan, that ‘Shit happens’.

He stood still, for what seemed like minutes, only his head nodding, as though he had heard but was could not speak, or could not/would not share his thoughts.

How often have you heard someone, at least in my day, say words like ‘Hold your tongue’ or reflect on the women in America who cut out their tongues to protest those who raped them?

Or the women whose tongues are otherwise cut out to silence them. Saints in the church, too. Saints Agatha, Anastasia, Hilary among others. All these people, women mainly, forced to hold their tongues.

My father’s demand of our mother to hou op, which to me as a child meant ‘shut up’. But now I discover, means ‘don’t, which then makes me wonder, did my mother say this to my father when he attacked? Or were they his words?

The Dutch for shut up is Hou je mond. Hold your mouth. An insult. Shut your trap.

You who must hold that capacity for silence because another person does not want to hear from you. You, your words, your existence is too hard to bear.

Chain of hearts which I prefer to call bleeding hearts.

When I was a schoolgirl of thirteen travelling home with my sister on the red rattler from Richmond where our convent school squatted on top of Vaucluse hill to the flat lands of Cheltenham, which once housed acres of fruit gardens, a man told me I talked too much.

He overheard me talking to my sister and a friend. It was not his business that I should speak as often as I did. I don’t remember being loud or obnoxious. But at one point this man told me I was too loud.

‘You’re schizophrenic,’ he said, and the word stuck in my head like a piece of shrapnel. I did not understand its meaning but recognised it as a word of derision. I did not understand why he found my enjoyable conversation with my sister and friend, talking about something as innocuous as a poem we enjoyed in class or our pleasure over some series on the television. Something like our favourite variety of chocolate, so offensive.

We were immature girls bent on the small pleasures of life. We were otherwise shy souls. This man seemed like one of extraordinary audacity. To intrude on our conversation.

When we came home, in one of those rare moments when my father was not drunk and surly in the lounge room, when he had stayed sober at least for this part of the evening. He sat across from my mother and they seemed to be enjoying an unpredictably calm conversation about something safe.

I told them what the man on the train had said.

My father dismissed the word without explaining its meaning and I was forced to visit the dictionary.

Years later when the film One flew over the cuckoo’s nest came out, I watched the treatment of people with so-called schizophrenia, appalled at the inhumanity. And then several years later when I read Angel at my Table, Janet Frame’s memoir. Childhood poverty in New Zealand and family troubles led her to such depression she was hospitalised. And deemed schizophrenic in a heartbeat. This during the nineteen fifties where such a diagnosis could lead to electro convulsive therapy, or cold baths. Sleep therapy at best. At worst a lobotomy.

Frame was spared because a doctor, about to order the final procedure, read her manuscript and realised she did after all have a mind that was not worth removing. As if anyone’s brain is.

Years later in England, another doctor reversed the diagnosis. The cruelty of humankind to label in pejorative ways and to keep silent about the possibility that so many other trauma related events in a person’s life can turn them into people they might otherwise never become. To label them in pejorative ways, made more so by the power to intimidate. They sound serious and authoritative these words and leave the ordinary person feeling they must indeed be suffering some terrible infirmity, so unspeakably sad as to be thus labelled.

The powerful professional who once hid inside the white coat of anonymity and silence who announces in short snatches what is wrong with you the other and washes their hands of you, vermin and despicable. You are then left buried under the weight of shame. And shame leads to silence. You go silent at the risk of further shaming.

And what needs to be said is never able to be spoken and the cruel practices of the past are allowed to flourish into perpetuity. A capacity for silence is not always called for. And sometimes needs to be replaced by the ability to find words against an avalanche of silencing.