Sometimes I think I have the weirdest vocation in the world. It seems to be that I constantly have to 'not do things'. This is why my calling in life is a difficult thing to label as 'work'. I am called to do little and listen a lot and plan really carefully so that I can do even less and we can all listen a lot more.
The oddest experience is realising that I am active in my 'not doing'. I do actually work really hard at saying and doing very little so that other people around me can do and say a lot.
I have a realisation that I still need to be there, not doing but listening and planning for more not doing but listening so that profound moments then have opportunity to happen. I am aware now that this curious experience of feeling that I have no need to be somewhere is not the truth. People I trust tell me that it is vital for me to be there...doing nothing and saying nothing. But it is still a bit hard to accept a role in life which is all about encouraging others and just humbles me every time I am moved to tears by someone else's offering of themselves.
If you were at Candlelit Church tonight you will know what I am talking about. If you are not religious and you got to the end of this blog entry then you are charitable or amused.
I am personally completely bemused because although I am not actively doing... I know that my actively being and specifically actively being in that place at that time allows others to do the same. It is the most rewarding work in the world, as you can see it isn't really work at all. It is just fab.
Not doing stuff and not saying stuff all the time so that other people have a chance to give us all extraordinary gifts of kindness and healing is very powerful. The hard part is constantly trying to bite my lip and sit on my hands...or put bluntly to sit down and shut up.
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
the other one
It is the other cat tonight. She is playing 'over-familiar' and drooling all over the laptop on the kitchen table. But she is more polite than the other one and knows I that I am now working so she is sitting neatly with her paws together like a doorstop.
Cat
You know those 'Mystery Shoppers'...they are paid by large Shops to visit and pretend they are shopping. They take notes and tick boxes on a sheet of paper which say things like 'did the shop assitant come and 'ask if you were alright' within the three minute deadline?' Did the assistant return to you within the next two minute deadline and 'ask if you were alright' again (in case the customer is stupid I assume). They have a list which evaluates the qualities of the poor unsuspecting Shop Assistant.
Well...I believe my cat is concerned that I might be a 'mystery cat visitor'. She appears to be over-doing her role. I think she belongs to a Secret Society who have workshops on 'being a senile cat' and is trying to be as authentic as possible as an 'elderly' feline.
She appears to have her own standards. They seem to involve a relentless routine of squawking at me. There is a distinctly choreographed 'walking in front of the person who feeds you and loves you and tripping them up as they go down the stairs' dance. There is the 'screech for food for several hours and then take one look at it with disgust and walk away' task. There is the 'sit on the dining table while friends are visiting putting your bum in their faces and knocking over their drinks with your tail' game. This morning she is being over-zealous with the squawking and tripping up tasks. I wish I could explain that she has already passed her 'Being a Cat exams' and can now relax a bit. She is not being scrutinised to check her authenticity as a cat. I KNOW she is a cat.
Got to go...the cat...
Well...I believe my cat is concerned that I might be a 'mystery cat visitor'. She appears to be over-doing her role. I think she belongs to a Secret Society who have workshops on 'being a senile cat' and is trying to be as authentic as possible as an 'elderly' feline.
She appears to have her own standards. They seem to involve a relentless routine of squawking at me. There is a distinctly choreographed 'walking in front of the person who feeds you and loves you and tripping them up as they go down the stairs' dance. There is the 'screech for food for several hours and then take one look at it with disgust and walk away' task. There is the 'sit on the dining table while friends are visiting putting your bum in their faces and knocking over their drinks with your tail' game. This morning she is being over-zealous with the squawking and tripping up tasks. I wish I could explain that she has already passed her 'Being a Cat exams' and can now relax a bit. She is not being scrutinised to check her authenticity as a cat. I KNOW she is a cat.
Got to go...the cat...
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Swedes
The first thing I am inspired to write about is my Swedish relatives. We had largely lost touch and then my cousin Fredrik got in touch via Facebook. He has been completely brilliant putting all of us cousins together and linking us all up with e-mails.
I had already decided that I needed to do something in Mum's memory. I felt absolutely sure that I needed to go to visit Mum's two remaining sisters. One lives in Aberdeen and one in Sweden. I am planning Sweden first and then Aberdeen second.
We are going to Sweden this June in my Mum's memory to visit her sister, because it is the most appropriate way I can think of to honour her on her birthday. While we are there I am planning to meet with some of my cousins. None of us know each other really, but we are starting to get to know each other by e-mail. We have various random memories of each other and of our respective parents. One cousin remembers me when I was one year old and she was 16. I have a horrible feeling that there is a picture of me in a yellow bucket and her being 'Miss Elstead' in the carnival.
The exciting thing about it is that it is about Mum's family and about new relationships and possiblities. She always loved new possiblities and was a person of relationships, but most of all she loved these sisters. She was particularly close to her sisters Barbara, and Betty and also to Jennifer. Betty also lived in Sweden, but she died from Motor Neurone disease. Mum was heart-broken about this and although the three of them had some really good times together in Sweden I know Mum missed her terribly and was devastated by the suffering she endured. Jennifer is in Aberdeen and that is another planned visit.
My Mum came from a family of eight. I never met her parents Lavinia and Robert Swanston, or her brother Bobby who died in a drowning accident aged 14. They had a childhood fragmented by the war. They were Londoners and nearly all evacuated to various places around the country. They would all laugh, I am sure, to think that they are now the subject of the English school curriculum in history lessons about World War II. Initially I think Barbara, Betty and Mum were moved to Brighton together, but were later separated. So they went on some formative journeys together and were closest in age within the family. Large families seem to develop clusters of intimacy within them. Presumably this is because it would be hard to have such close relationships with all eight of you across the age range. Mum's family consisted of Pearl, Irene, Betty, Barbara, June, Bobby, Anne and Jennifer. I understand that Betty, Barbara and June (my Mum) were much older than Jennifer and effectively adopted her and felt responsible for her after their parents died. Jennifer was very young at the time, possibly as young as 15. She and Barbara are now the only survivors.
The reason for all this detail is to explain my motivations for developing the connections with my remaining aunts. Mum always loved her visits to Sweden.She associated them with joy and fun and friendship. She married into the May family. They are a very loud family. Her own family seems to have been somewhat drowned out. My Dad's Mum had 'delusions of grandeur'. She was convinced that Mum was 'not good enough' for the May family. In England at the time, the class system remained highly significant. It still is highly significant but it has become unpopular to talk about it and its powerful impact upon us. People could be persecuted all their lives for their 'background' or 'upbringing'. For reasons known only to herself, my Paternal Grandmother thought she was classy and was a therefore a terrible snob, particularly with regard to Mum and by implication her family. The truth was that Mum came from a poor family in the East End of London. Winifred May only recovered from the shock of her son marrying someone of this background towards the end of her life. But as my Mum was always quick to point out "Darling...there are two different types of East End...there's East End and there is 'East End'...and we were a respectable family".
I think that her Mother-in-Law put further distance between June Swanston and her immediate relatives in addition to the already significant chasm of geographical distance and death. I knew that their bonds were stronger than she admitted. She always knew when one of her relatives was in pain or trouble. This happened on the day that Bobby died. She cried all day on a 'day out' until she drove my Dad crazy and they came home. She couldn't explain her behaviour but kept saying 'something terrible has happened, something terrible'. There were no phones and there was no way of contacting her with the bad news. When they were at home someone called or visited and she simply said 'its Bobby, isn't it? Its Bobby, and he's dead', before they had even opened their mouths to speak.
My point is not that she was psychic, though I think she might have been, it is that she never lost that deep connection to her family. I am not trying to romanticise her family or over-sentimentalise them. This isn't an exercise in sickly-sweet nostalgia. She wasn't close to all of her sisters, it wasn't an idyllic family but my Mother always remembered every single one of her siblings birthdays. She knew the names of all their children and their partners and their children too. She remembered the details of Bobby's death with deep sadness with vivid clarity 'as though it were yesterday'. I don't know whether, in the end, she ever forgave God, because at that time a 'boy' was a very important thing to have in a family comprising so many girls. She thought it was grossly unfair of God to take their only boy. She used to say 'we used to say to each other...why couldn't he take one of us, there are loads of us, it should have been one of us girls'. Even in the last years of her life talking about their collective loss as a family would make her cry. She showed me a picture of my Grandmother (her Mother) shortly before she died. She was deeply disturbed by it and cried even though she was well into her seventies by then. She felt that she had allowed Dad's family to 'take over'. She said that she wished she had made more time for her blood relatives and her parents. She said that she felt very sorry for her Mum and wondered what on earth she must have felt seeing her daughter moving on into a new society trying to impress this new family by giving them everything she had.
She had lists and lists of extended family, and she also traced her ancestry. Being an evacuee has subsequently been extensively researched. That research demonstrates that being wrenched away from home and family to live with strangers in an equally strange geography during wartime certainly had a dramatic impact upon these children. Apart from the practical implications of living miles away from one another and starting new lives apart, it also significantly altered how these children formed as adults. I came to think that her interest in her ancestry and her sister's lives lived out as far apart as Sweden and Australia and her interst in all her extended family stemmed from that sense of dislocation. She kept contact with many of them, some more than others. With her closest sisters in particular there was a bond there which was treasured. I think it would be sad for her and for us if that connection was completely lost. The family she married into has no greater claim on her. Neither did they have a lesser or greater claim on her affections. Her birth family and the shared trauma they endured were very dear to her, even though some of those relationships were more significant than others. She did treasure these relationships and I want to honour that. Even if realistically that honouring only takes the form of sending a Christmas card once a year or chatting on Facebook periodically, it will be 'something', which Mum always said was ...'better than nothing'.
Many of my cousins are a generation older than me and I am nearer in age to my second-cousins, apart from Fredrik who is younger than the others. I get a real buzz from having this contact with them. I intend to make more of an effort to discover the English cousins and what is going on for them.
I hope to compile a family tree developed from her existing list. I know Fredrik is also interested in this, so I will take her work with me when I go to visit them. I don't know all her sister's grandchildren's names. But if you are one of them...she had you on a list, and she knew all about your life. I became acutely aware when we were preparing Mum's funeral of the way in which our relationships vary. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend, I am a Pastor and a cousin and I am also an Aunt. My nieces and nephews are important to me. When we thought about Mum we realised that she was all of these things and a Grandmother and a Mother to many more than just her own children. I thought then about her role as an Aunt and thought of her nephews and nieces, and felt the need to acknowledge the importance some of them held in her life, simply by virtue of being the children of her closest sisters.
Since she died I have been quite alarmed at the long list of relatives as well of friends who seem somehow through distance and time to have become a bit forgotten and their relationships and the nature of them somewhat overlooked.
Hopefully if you are reading this and you are one of these people you will find this consoling. She would have.
I had already decided that I needed to do something in Mum's memory. I felt absolutely sure that I needed to go to visit Mum's two remaining sisters. One lives in Aberdeen and one in Sweden. I am planning Sweden first and then Aberdeen second.
We are going to Sweden this June in my Mum's memory to visit her sister, because it is the most appropriate way I can think of to honour her on her birthday. While we are there I am planning to meet with some of my cousins. None of us know each other really, but we are starting to get to know each other by e-mail. We have various random memories of each other and of our respective parents. One cousin remembers me when I was one year old and she was 16. I have a horrible feeling that there is a picture of me in a yellow bucket and her being 'Miss Elstead' in the carnival.
The exciting thing about it is that it is about Mum's family and about new relationships and possiblities. She always loved new possiblities and was a person of relationships, but most of all she loved these sisters. She was particularly close to her sisters Barbara, and Betty and also to Jennifer. Betty also lived in Sweden, but she died from Motor Neurone disease. Mum was heart-broken about this and although the three of them had some really good times together in Sweden I know Mum missed her terribly and was devastated by the suffering she endured. Jennifer is in Aberdeen and that is another planned visit.
My Mum came from a family of eight. I never met her parents Lavinia and Robert Swanston, or her brother Bobby who died in a drowning accident aged 14. They had a childhood fragmented by the war. They were Londoners and nearly all evacuated to various places around the country. They would all laugh, I am sure, to think that they are now the subject of the English school curriculum in history lessons about World War II. Initially I think Barbara, Betty and Mum were moved to Brighton together, but were later separated. So they went on some formative journeys together and were closest in age within the family. Large families seem to develop clusters of intimacy within them. Presumably this is because it would be hard to have such close relationships with all eight of you across the age range. Mum's family consisted of Pearl, Irene, Betty, Barbara, June, Bobby, Anne and Jennifer. I understand that Betty, Barbara and June (my Mum) were much older than Jennifer and effectively adopted her and felt responsible for her after their parents died. Jennifer was very young at the time, possibly as young as 15. She and Barbara are now the only survivors.
The reason for all this detail is to explain my motivations for developing the connections with my remaining aunts. Mum always loved her visits to Sweden.She associated them with joy and fun and friendship. She married into the May family. They are a very loud family. Her own family seems to have been somewhat drowned out. My Dad's Mum had 'delusions of grandeur'. She was convinced that Mum was 'not good enough' for the May family. In England at the time, the class system remained highly significant. It still is highly significant but it has become unpopular to talk about it and its powerful impact upon us. People could be persecuted all their lives for their 'background' or 'upbringing'. For reasons known only to herself, my Paternal Grandmother thought she was classy and was a therefore a terrible snob, particularly with regard to Mum and by implication her family. The truth was that Mum came from a poor family in the East End of London. Winifred May only recovered from the shock of her son marrying someone of this background towards the end of her life. But as my Mum was always quick to point out "Darling...there are two different types of East End...there's East End and there is 'East End'...and we were a respectable family".
I think that her Mother-in-Law put further distance between June Swanston and her immediate relatives in addition to the already significant chasm of geographical distance and death. I knew that their bonds were stronger than she admitted. She always knew when one of her relatives was in pain or trouble. This happened on the day that Bobby died. She cried all day on a 'day out' until she drove my Dad crazy and they came home. She couldn't explain her behaviour but kept saying 'something terrible has happened, something terrible'. There were no phones and there was no way of contacting her with the bad news. When they were at home someone called or visited and she simply said 'its Bobby, isn't it? Its Bobby, and he's dead', before they had even opened their mouths to speak.
My point is not that she was psychic, though I think she might have been, it is that she never lost that deep connection to her family. I am not trying to romanticise her family or over-sentimentalise them. This isn't an exercise in sickly-sweet nostalgia. She wasn't close to all of her sisters, it wasn't an idyllic family but my Mother always remembered every single one of her siblings birthdays. She knew the names of all their children and their partners and their children too. She remembered the details of Bobby's death with deep sadness with vivid clarity 'as though it were yesterday'. I don't know whether, in the end, she ever forgave God, because at that time a 'boy' was a very important thing to have in a family comprising so many girls. She thought it was grossly unfair of God to take their only boy. She used to say 'we used to say to each other...why couldn't he take one of us, there are loads of us, it should have been one of us girls'. Even in the last years of her life talking about their collective loss as a family would make her cry. She showed me a picture of my Grandmother (her Mother) shortly before she died. She was deeply disturbed by it and cried even though she was well into her seventies by then. She felt that she had allowed Dad's family to 'take over'. She said that she wished she had made more time for her blood relatives and her parents. She said that she felt very sorry for her Mum and wondered what on earth she must have felt seeing her daughter moving on into a new society trying to impress this new family by giving them everything she had.
She had lists and lists of extended family, and she also traced her ancestry. Being an evacuee has subsequently been extensively researched. That research demonstrates that being wrenched away from home and family to live with strangers in an equally strange geography during wartime certainly had a dramatic impact upon these children. Apart from the practical implications of living miles away from one another and starting new lives apart, it also significantly altered how these children formed as adults. I came to think that her interest in her ancestry and her sister's lives lived out as far apart as Sweden and Australia and her interst in all her extended family stemmed from that sense of dislocation. She kept contact with many of them, some more than others. With her closest sisters in particular there was a bond there which was treasured. I think it would be sad for her and for us if that connection was completely lost. The family she married into has no greater claim on her. Neither did they have a lesser or greater claim on her affections. Her birth family and the shared trauma they endured were very dear to her, even though some of those relationships were more significant than others. She did treasure these relationships and I want to honour that. Even if realistically that honouring only takes the form of sending a Christmas card once a year or chatting on Facebook periodically, it will be 'something', which Mum always said was ...'better than nothing'.
Many of my cousins are a generation older than me and I am nearer in age to my second-cousins, apart from Fredrik who is younger than the others. I get a real buzz from having this contact with them. I intend to make more of an effort to discover the English cousins and what is going on for them.
I hope to compile a family tree developed from her existing list. I know Fredrik is also interested in this, so I will take her work with me when I go to visit them. I don't know all her sister's grandchildren's names. But if you are one of them...she had you on a list, and she knew all about your life. I became acutely aware when we were preparing Mum's funeral of the way in which our relationships vary. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend, I am a Pastor and a cousin and I am also an Aunt. My nieces and nephews are important to me. When we thought about Mum we realised that she was all of these things and a Grandmother and a Mother to many more than just her own children. I thought then about her role as an Aunt and thought of her nephews and nieces, and felt the need to acknowledge the importance some of them held in her life, simply by virtue of being the children of her closest sisters.
Since she died I have been quite alarmed at the long list of relatives as well of friends who seem somehow through distance and time to have become a bit forgotten and their relationships and the nature of them somewhat overlooked.
Hopefully if you are reading this and you are one of these people you will find this consoling. She would have.
TERROR
So
I have now put my blog link onto my Facebook page and made it public knowledge. It has been a relatively well-kept and slightly embarrassing secret until now. If you have decided to have a glance at it, be gentle with me. I am determined not to start apologising for it, but it is intensely personal. Some articles have been removed to protect those I love but otherwise it is fairly raw material. Don't expect anything 'polished'. Most of the time when you read my material you are seeing it as it is created. You are entering into the creative process with me and it will mostly have an immediacy about it. There are exceptions. Some of my work has been created on retreat and then typed up on my return. Some has been developed online, taken off and re-worked and put back on. Some is hand-written and added.
This blog is part-journal, part stream-of-consciousness, but mostly confidence building and motivating. I needed to start being more public with my writing. I have been writing all my life, but only recently listened to people I trusted who have relentlessly encouraged me to let more people enjoy it. If you enjoy it, please keep logging in and reading it.
I have now put my blog link onto my Facebook page and made it public knowledge. It has been a relatively well-kept and slightly embarrassing secret until now. If you have decided to have a glance at it, be gentle with me. I am determined not to start apologising for it, but it is intensely personal. Some articles have been removed to protect those I love but otherwise it is fairly raw material. Don't expect anything 'polished'. Most of the time when you read my material you are seeing it as it is created. You are entering into the creative process with me and it will mostly have an immediacy about it. There are exceptions. Some of my work has been created on retreat and then typed up on my return. Some has been developed online, taken off and re-worked and put back on. Some is hand-written and added.
This blog is part-journal, part stream-of-consciousness, but mostly confidence building and motivating. I needed to start being more public with my writing. I have been writing all my life, but only recently listened to people I trusted who have relentlessly encouraged me to let more people enjoy it. If you enjoy it, please keep logging in and reading it.
New Look
So, at last the cat allowed me to work. It was more like play actually. I have given the blog a fresh look for a fresh start. I plan to re-vamp it every year. This is symbolic of new beginnings, fresh stages on a journey. I hope you like it.
at last...
Well, with the cat ritual out of the way and her settled with her sister on the bed, and with two door stoppers wedging the sliding keyboard and the heating back on and a freshly re-heated coffee and a cement-encrusted bowl soaking I might be able to do some blogging....and then the phone rang!
no...that doesn't work either
and don't suggest shutting her downstairs because then she scratches at the door indefinitely. The only way that works is if she is allowed in the front roon where the sun is, but she isn't allowed unless we are in there because she shreds the sofa covers using them instead of her redundant scratch post.
Cat
Every morning the cat goes ballistic at me until I pick her up. Nothing else works. She must be picked up. She also goes crazy with rage in the morning if I'm not up by 9am, which these days, sometimes I'm not, especially during the holidays. The annoying thing is that she will leave Graham asleep but thinks it is out of order if I am not up, feeding her or putting her on my lap. Currently I am touch typing and the cat is nudging my hands and knocking them off the keyboard. She just can't help herself, so now I have a wet nose lodged between my thumbs, drooling and sniffing and nudging at me and purring. This is better than putting up with her yelling at me non-stop. Now she has decided to rest her head on my left hand like a pillow. I am readying myself to move the hand so I can eat my porridge (New Years resolution).
She knows what she wants and nothing, no porridge or computer or housework will stand in her way. She is so clingy that she would sit on my shoulder while I mop the floor if I found her a harness.
Moving the hand was unsuccessful, so I am eating my porridge with one hand and the bowl on the ironing board, leaning across her with my right hand and balancing her head on the left which is making it slow progress.
On top of it all, since my laptop died I have been using Graham's which means that I am using his computer cabinet with the slide out key board rest and it keeps sliding in taking my hand and the cat's head with it. I think I will give up for now and take the cat to a psychiatrist.
On top of it all...if I were to relinquish the hand, which I just tried, so I could pick up the bowl, she then nudges the bowl out of my hand. Countless outfits have been ruined in this way with cups of tea and coffee and food ending up all down my front because she got jealous of them and knocked them out of my hand
She knows what she wants and nothing, no porridge or computer or housework will stand in her way. She is so clingy that she would sit on my shoulder while I mop the floor if I found her a harness.
Moving the hand was unsuccessful, so I am eating my porridge with one hand and the bowl on the ironing board, leaning across her with my right hand and balancing her head on the left which is making it slow progress.
On top of it all, since my laptop died I have been using Graham's which means that I am using his computer cabinet with the slide out key board rest and it keeps sliding in taking my hand and the cat's head with it. I think I will give up for now and take the cat to a psychiatrist.
On top of it all...if I were to relinquish the hand, which I just tried, so I could pick up the bowl, she then nudges the bowl out of my hand. Countless outfits have been ruined in this way with cups of tea and coffee and food ending up all down my front because she got jealous of them and knocked them out of my hand
Monday, 5 January 2009
using this blog
From time to time as you read this blog you will see chapters of stories developing which will then be removed and replaced by a fully developed story. So you are watching the process of its construction. This is what happened with Nameless, parts of the story when it is finally pieced together will be familiar to you but probably altered. With Nameless I experienced that rare phenomenon where the story writes itself and I heard one author talk about this quite well-known experience as 'like being visited'. That is why it felt like sacrilege to alter it once it had been completed. I was just a vessel for its development. Apparently not all writers have this experience but when they do it is the exception to the rule, so I was lucky it happened to me at all. The rest is likely to be discipline alone.
Not Bad for a first attempt
Resurgence Magazine actually liked my short story and this is what they said: I'm quite proud of it because it is my first rejection letter!
Dear Jess,
Unfortunately this piece is not quite right for us. We had the feeling that the story was ended rather abruptly, and almost violently – the narrative was also a little unclear in places. However, our short story editor very much enjoyed reading the piece though, as did I – the language you use is almost musical, very eloquent and we an interesting turn of phrase.
I am sorry to disappoint you, in the sense that we won’t be publishing it, but please rest assured that we all enjoyed reading it. We hope this has not put you off sending submissions in to us in the future.
With kind regards.
Dear Jess,
Unfortunately this piece is not quite right for us. We had the feeling that the story was ended rather abruptly, and almost violently – the narrative was also a little unclear in places. However, our short story editor very much enjoyed reading the piece though, as did I – the language you use is almost musical, very eloquent and we an interesting turn of phrase.
I am sorry to disappoint you, in the sense that we won’t be publishing it, but please rest assured that we all enjoyed reading it. We hope this has not put you off sending submissions in to us in the future.
With kind regards.
Nameless: A Short Story developed for Resurgence Magazine
He turns. He stares. It is the flat-eyed stare of the startled. There is fear in the brown flecks of his grey eyes. There is a hint of confused panic in his frown. There is the beginning of a smile. It grows wider on only one side of his mouth. The other fixed in a dreadful resentful grimace.
She waits. She grows impatient for a word, stands frozen on the flagstones. He stares and she waits.
"Is you", paralysed speech.
"It is"
"How di you kno where do find m-me?"
A paralysed answer.
The effort to bring the tap into full song is the cause of his current exhaustion. Since his sculptural fingers show no real enthusiasm in coaxing the torrent out of the drip he tries persuasion. She finds him serenading the tap's silver neck.
"A l-little w-water, a l-little w-water, sing to m-me the river's m-melody"
"W-wet m-my lips and s-sing like a s-stream" he mumbles and his voice rumbles like stones in a leather barrel.
He is frail, crumpling, curled and greying, a fragile relic of parchment inside his tired stature. If he were in a scrum now his head would snap off. In his old age a game of rugger would leave him shaken out like a Russian doll. Inside and inside and inside again there would be a small foetus-like creation. There he would be, vulnerable without his skin. He is thin in a way that wounds. He has a hungry kind of thin, an alarming stark quality. The hollowness and the paralysis are framed by a tight silver mesh of curls. His smashed nose leaves little room for breath. His ears are disproportionate. He has a mythical outline. His gigantic stature reduces him still further. The remnants of his resolve to live are engulfed by his redundant frame.
The flagstones absorb the ensuing silence and the evening light is sheening everything up. The tap is in its best light and still isn't singing to his melody. Benedict turns his resentment away from her towards the tap. She is waiting now for her own answers.
She moves away from the flagstone which seems as though it might lift suddenly and topple her over. She waltzes oddly to the tap. As she walks past him she can feel his fear in her chest bone and it lodges next to hers. The anxiety is making her unsteady. Each step takes another two to sustain it. He watches, bewilderment descending. She turns with strong and dignified hands the cold metal grip, grapples shakily with the smooth surface of a clear glass. She is on the wrong side of his resentment now.
She drinks and he is thirsty. He waits and she stares. Her hand reaches out. The glass seems to glide across the air alone. The water is moving at its own pace. He is drinking. She is shaking.
"W-why?" Benedict speaks.
Her heart beats too many times. She can't sustain it. If it carries on beating so fast something will crack apart.
"Because "she breathes sharply upwards, her shoulders lift.
“…cause why?”
The clock taps out his rhythm until her shoulders drop, her head lifts and she sees her own reflection in the glass of his eyes. She says simply
“I have lost all of my rage”.
He nods with the slowness of retirement. He is resigned to the time it takes for each vertebra to creep into action. He finds his eyes suddenly reluctant. The lids close without him, reptilian in their lethargy. These eyelids capture something he has not known in sixty years.
He cannot name the constriction in his throat, the sharp pain in his eye sockets. It reminds him of the scars of his sport. The lids enclose him, there is darkness. He cannot look at what it might contain for fear that it might captivate him. A cough erupts, and another and another, he hears gasping noises. Someone is wailing deeply the notes of a song sung within the depths of a barrel. His face wet, his shoulders shifting up and down, up and down. His body convulsed by a primal involuntary repetitive shrug. Slowly his body loses its construction. An unseen weight presses him downwards. He is weak and he is trembling. He feels like a bird. He finds himself seated. He is in a hard, waxed chair. It is rigid against his tender flesh. As mucous streams he is not self-conscious and no one wipes away his disgrace.
“How”, he gasps, “How d-did you l- lose your rage?”
“I forgave and I turned away”.
“W-what-t ‘appen? Howw? B-beginning…” he tries again to ask the biggest question. “W- where beginning?” and again: “H-How did it b-egin?”
The morning had been fragmentary. Piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart. Her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate.
"Hurry up, they have come, they are coming in, hurry!" her mother's voice penetrating the present moment.
She packs the strange grey textured suitcase. It is striped along the centre of its crocodile-skin back. She clicks the small metal buckles, checks the torn leather trim. She piles random patterned skirts, crumpled and ironed together. Squeezes the red Moroccan slippers and still thrills at their glitter and pointed toes even now, even here.
She scans the room. Apricots, peaches and ragged oatcake carpet. She calls out.
"Mum, Mum, I'm ready".
As she turns she goes to speak and opens her mouth to breathe. She pushes the hollow door. She finds herself standing on the edge of an open French sliding door. The metal cuts into her tender feet. The plump soles flush with pain without her Moroccan slippers. She raises her eyes. No corridor, no bathroom, no spare room.
She is on the edge of a vast expanse of water. It is edgeless, mirrored in the glass door, permutations in the sheer gossamer surface. The wide and inky watery darkness merges with the wide and inky absent sky. Where one ends and the other begins she cannot tell. It is a lightless box. It could be glass. It could be frameless and infinite or mirrored and complex but limited. There is no one on the edge of the precipice but her in her tender naked feet clutching a battered suitcase full of ageing photographs.
It happens sometimes, the nameless stuff. It happened in childhood too.
Her life along with the lives of everyone she knew had not turned out as she planned it or as she imagined it. There is no name for that either, the way it all changes shape, all the ideas that weren't and the surprises that were. As children they were all 'going to be' when they grew up. As if 'being' was a thing for the future. Here on the edge of this infinite expanse she wondered if there was any distinction between the past and the future. She couldn’t be sure there was a beginning or an end. In the ice sharp air in her night dress she stood, feet throbbing, shaking violently with cold. Here in this moment she was a young woman of twelve. Her journey had started with an imperative to flee. She had responded to her Mother’s call, packed her memories and started out only to find herself at an apparent end. Now her only hope is the invitation of the water.
In this inarticulate moment, the silences stretching out across the spaces where nothing can be said speak so loudly to her confusion. Loudly they sulk, loudly they swear, loud the whisper into the hush. The tongue sticks, the throat gasps and the teeth clench. Gridlocked the words, louder the whisper, silence speaks to the silent. The silence yells of the future, it sighs, breathes and dreams of poetry, and of the capacity of this silence, the power of the things we never say. The silence is saturated by all the images she cannot paint. She feels her toe dipping into the liquid. It shimmers outwards with the disturbance. She looks up and her eyes adjust to the darkness.
“H-how d-did it b-egin?”
Frustrated and grimacing with the effort of speech and the exhaustion of waiting and the shock of her appearance the contorted man bellows into her strange detachment.
“H-how d-did you l-lose your rage?”
He is flashing with the effort to suppress a rage all his own through gritted teeth and spitting features.
“H-how c-could you? H-how c-ould you? After all they d-did to us?”
“I had a vision.”
Stillness
“…of water”
He tries to create a dismissive expression.
They plunge together at the word
“W-water”
“Water” nodding, calming.
He is captivated and she is tranquil. She is still as she describes.
“In my vision the water’s melody captures me. I find myself moving with it. The river flows through our lives. I see us bleeding, pleading. The machetes mash flesh. The severed heads slung sideways. The sound of our sisters being torn apart penetrates louder than their screaming.”
She breathes deeply, swallows and begins again.
“The water is red with blood Benedict. It is innocent blood. It is your blood. It is my blood. It is our sisters’ blood. Our rage colours the water bleeding into the current. The water carries crimson fury.”
Her eyes are liquid now and different water spills.
“The water sings to me.”
He nods less slowly, his movement more lyrical.
She grips her mouth together with the effort of the word she must name.
“Forgiveness”
The silence is followed by a sigh.
“Forgiveness… is what the water sings.”
She fills her lungs.
“I hear the word and the disgust drowns me.”
He catches her hand and pulls it to the scars of his resentment.
“But under the water there is light. It shines through crystal waters. There is warmth and something nameless.”
The sun stuns them with a final dance before it leaves for sleep. He weeps and she does too. “Let the water sing to you”.
Jessica Boulton
Page 1 of 6
She waits. She grows impatient for a word, stands frozen on the flagstones. He stares and she waits.
"Is you", paralysed speech.
"It is"
"How di you kno where do find m-me?"
A paralysed answer.
The effort to bring the tap into full song is the cause of his current exhaustion. Since his sculptural fingers show no real enthusiasm in coaxing the torrent out of the drip he tries persuasion. She finds him serenading the tap's silver neck.
"A l-little w-water, a l-little w-water, sing to m-me the river's m-melody"
"W-wet m-my lips and s-sing like a s-stream" he mumbles and his voice rumbles like stones in a leather barrel.
He is frail, crumpling, curled and greying, a fragile relic of parchment inside his tired stature. If he were in a scrum now his head would snap off. In his old age a game of rugger would leave him shaken out like a Russian doll. Inside and inside and inside again there would be a small foetus-like creation. There he would be, vulnerable without his skin. He is thin in a way that wounds. He has a hungry kind of thin, an alarming stark quality. The hollowness and the paralysis are framed by a tight silver mesh of curls. His smashed nose leaves little room for breath. His ears are disproportionate. He has a mythical outline. His gigantic stature reduces him still further. The remnants of his resolve to live are engulfed by his redundant frame.
The flagstones absorb the ensuing silence and the evening light is sheening everything up. The tap is in its best light and still isn't singing to his melody. Benedict turns his resentment away from her towards the tap. She is waiting now for her own answers.
She moves away from the flagstone which seems as though it might lift suddenly and topple her over. She waltzes oddly to the tap. As she walks past him she can feel his fear in her chest bone and it lodges next to hers. The anxiety is making her unsteady. Each step takes another two to sustain it. He watches, bewilderment descending. She turns with strong and dignified hands the cold metal grip, grapples shakily with the smooth surface of a clear glass. She is on the wrong side of his resentment now.
She drinks and he is thirsty. He waits and she stares. Her hand reaches out. The glass seems to glide across the air alone. The water is moving at its own pace. He is drinking. She is shaking.
"W-why?" Benedict speaks.
Her heart beats too many times. She can't sustain it. If it carries on beating so fast something will crack apart.
"Because "she breathes sharply upwards, her shoulders lift.
“…cause why?”
The clock taps out his rhythm until her shoulders drop, her head lifts and she sees her own reflection in the glass of his eyes. She says simply
“I have lost all of my rage”.
He nods with the slowness of retirement. He is resigned to the time it takes for each vertebra to creep into action. He finds his eyes suddenly reluctant. The lids close without him, reptilian in their lethargy. These eyelids capture something he has not known in sixty years.
He cannot name the constriction in his throat, the sharp pain in his eye sockets. It reminds him of the scars of his sport. The lids enclose him, there is darkness. He cannot look at what it might contain for fear that it might captivate him. A cough erupts, and another and another, he hears gasping noises. Someone is wailing deeply the notes of a song sung within the depths of a barrel. His face wet, his shoulders shifting up and down, up and down. His body convulsed by a primal involuntary repetitive shrug. Slowly his body loses its construction. An unseen weight presses him downwards. He is weak and he is trembling. He feels like a bird. He finds himself seated. He is in a hard, waxed chair. It is rigid against his tender flesh. As mucous streams he is not self-conscious and no one wipes away his disgrace.
“How”, he gasps, “How d-did you l- lose your rage?”
“I forgave and I turned away”.
“W-what-t ‘appen? Howw? B-beginning…” he tries again to ask the biggest question. “W- where beginning?” and again: “H-How did it b-egin?”
The morning had been fragmentary. Piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart. Her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate.
"Hurry up, they have come, they are coming in, hurry!" her mother's voice penetrating the present moment.
She packs the strange grey textured suitcase. It is striped along the centre of its crocodile-skin back. She clicks the small metal buckles, checks the torn leather trim. She piles random patterned skirts, crumpled and ironed together. Squeezes the red Moroccan slippers and still thrills at their glitter and pointed toes even now, even here.
She scans the room. Apricots, peaches and ragged oatcake carpet. She calls out.
"Mum, Mum, I'm ready".
As she turns she goes to speak and opens her mouth to breathe. She pushes the hollow door. She finds herself standing on the edge of an open French sliding door. The metal cuts into her tender feet. The plump soles flush with pain without her Moroccan slippers. She raises her eyes. No corridor, no bathroom, no spare room.
She is on the edge of a vast expanse of water. It is edgeless, mirrored in the glass door, permutations in the sheer gossamer surface. The wide and inky watery darkness merges with the wide and inky absent sky. Where one ends and the other begins she cannot tell. It is a lightless box. It could be glass. It could be frameless and infinite or mirrored and complex but limited. There is no one on the edge of the precipice but her in her tender naked feet clutching a battered suitcase full of ageing photographs.
It happens sometimes, the nameless stuff. It happened in childhood too.
Her life along with the lives of everyone she knew had not turned out as she planned it or as she imagined it. There is no name for that either, the way it all changes shape, all the ideas that weren't and the surprises that were. As children they were all 'going to be' when they grew up. As if 'being' was a thing for the future. Here on the edge of this infinite expanse she wondered if there was any distinction between the past and the future. She couldn’t be sure there was a beginning or an end. In the ice sharp air in her night dress she stood, feet throbbing, shaking violently with cold. Here in this moment she was a young woman of twelve. Her journey had started with an imperative to flee. She had responded to her Mother’s call, packed her memories and started out only to find herself at an apparent end. Now her only hope is the invitation of the water.
In this inarticulate moment, the silences stretching out across the spaces where nothing can be said speak so loudly to her confusion. Loudly they sulk, loudly they swear, loud the whisper into the hush. The tongue sticks, the throat gasps and the teeth clench. Gridlocked the words, louder the whisper, silence speaks to the silent. The silence yells of the future, it sighs, breathes and dreams of poetry, and of the capacity of this silence, the power of the things we never say. The silence is saturated by all the images she cannot paint. She feels her toe dipping into the liquid. It shimmers outwards with the disturbance. She looks up and her eyes adjust to the darkness.
“H-how d-did it b-egin?”
Frustrated and grimacing with the effort of speech and the exhaustion of waiting and the shock of her appearance the contorted man bellows into her strange detachment.
“H-how d-did you l-lose your rage?”
He is flashing with the effort to suppress a rage all his own through gritted teeth and spitting features.
“H-how c-could you? H-how c-ould you? After all they d-did to us?”
“I had a vision.”
Stillness
“…of water”
He tries to create a dismissive expression.
They plunge together at the word
“W-water”
“Water” nodding, calming.
He is captivated and she is tranquil. She is still as she describes.
“In my vision the water’s melody captures me. I find myself moving with it. The river flows through our lives. I see us bleeding, pleading. The machetes mash flesh. The severed heads slung sideways. The sound of our sisters being torn apart penetrates louder than their screaming.”
She breathes deeply, swallows and begins again.
“The water is red with blood Benedict. It is innocent blood. It is your blood. It is my blood. It is our sisters’ blood. Our rage colours the water bleeding into the current. The water carries crimson fury.”
Her eyes are liquid now and different water spills.
“The water sings to me.”
He nods less slowly, his movement more lyrical.
She grips her mouth together with the effort of the word she must name.
“Forgiveness”
The silence is followed by a sigh.
“Forgiveness… is what the water sings.”
She fills her lungs.
“I hear the word and the disgust drowns me.”
He catches her hand and pulls it to the scars of his resentment.
“But under the water there is light. It shines through crystal waters. There is warmth and something nameless.”
The sun stuns them with a final dance before it leaves for sleep. He weeps and she does too. “Let the water sing to you”.
Jessica Boulton
Page 1 of 6
2009
So here we are, 5th of January and one of my resolutions is to be realistic and only set a target of one blog entry a week. It is ok for that entry to be one sentence if it has to be.
The first Monday back at normal routine after any kind of holiday has to be among the most awful days of the year.
I realise there are a few things that make it better. Other friends who are also struggling. Drinking tea with these friends. Eating scrambeld egg. Going to a library and going for a walk. But most importantly of all...making a list! The secret to life's mysteries lies in The List.
The first Monday back at normal routine after any kind of holiday has to be among the most awful days of the year.
I realise there are a few things that make it better. Other friends who are also struggling. Drinking tea with these friends. Eating scrambeld egg. Going to a library and going for a walk. But most importantly of all...making a list! The secret to life's mysteries lies in The List.
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