(Requiem for dying mothers.)
“For oft, when on my couch I lie/ In vacant or in pensive mood,/ They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude;/ And then my heart with pleasure fills,/ And dances with the daffodils.”
- William Wordsworth
I.
There are some women in my position who ignore the deep, underlying continuum of time.
Waking up: the day’s first small acceleration. Her slow, palsy movements slur time, as if it were palpable, as if caught on a slack thread, dragging time around in her efforts to dress, to get the right anatomy in the right places. Arms to arm holes, legs to leg holes. Appearance is all the more important now she can’t see it. Now she’s got to feel it. Her ordinary body’s got to pulse with its own self-belief. Looking toward the mirror, out of habit, she scores a rogue streak of rouge lipstick in the region of her mouth. Pulls a brush through her hair. Her hair’s wayward now: wiry strands, wan, dust white.
It’s weeks since she went to the salon. She can’t stand the tattle. The local howl of conjecture and smoke.Her ears burn inside those helmets for containing breathing gases. Dryers they lower over her head, inspect her brain. She’s begun to fear radiation. Begun to fear all sorts. The commotion of appointments made and cancelled and remade. Who knows why, what makes people do what they do. The telephone either ringing or engaged. There’s running water and the door opens and the door closes. Street coughs rise and fall.
The breath of conversation. It consumes her.
When she was young she’d keep her eyes tight shut. Practice walking the hallway unsighted. The stairs when she felt emboldened. Arms outstretched, feeling the wall for notes of familiarity. She hadn’t wanted to strain her eyes. To use them unnecessarily. To not see gave life an early sense of tragedy and mystery.
There are twelve steps on the staircase but I always forget about the one at the bottom. The half-step. I always forget about that one.
She is closer to her environment now, and every object is local, singular, its own shape and size and texture, and now she can’t see, these dimensions matter. Sometimes she practices for hours; slithers inside her skin, turning herself inside out; and she finds the objects she made real with her hands there too.
She likes to feel the sure grain of the bannister beneath her palm; and she seizes it when she hesitates on the half-step. She runs her fanned-fingers along the back of the settee. The room’s dark. She has to create light, some dim glow. She feels like she creates light. She moves her half-moon-hand up the smooth, curvilinear base of the lamp, and pauses. A practiced pause. A dramatized moment of composure. Part of the ritual. The creation of light. She manouevres her thumb into the micro-factors of the mechanism, sourcing the tip of the clicker, centring the teeth on the fulcrum of her thumb, letting her skin take the hit, the slow-motion indent, and what she can’t see: a small, flushed white island. She pushes. A practiced push. A momentary application of force. Another movement that thuds time forward. There is a light. Her thumb tingles with estranged numbness. The skin’s leathery there, developing resistance.
There is no longer any nightfall. She exists somewhere between black and grey and white, between the shades that compose the shadows and penumbras. The whole adumbrated world, shocked of colour. Her eyes are cloudy and she no longer wears her glasses. At first she’d persisted, to magnify what remained of appearances, to bring the details into focus, to feel detached from fate on a large scale.
She’d always said there was more here than meets the eye.
Losing the apparent world she recovers another, starts to seek signs of the spiritual. She likes to open the door to the garden in the morning, to be swooned by the cuckoo rapping the tall, tooth-leafed beach tree, or to hear the little redbreasted robin bicker with larger birds on the feed table he’d put together. One of many practical inventions he engineered from the jumble and tat in the tool-shed, a lifetime’s hoarding, of finding beauty in what seemed minor, yielding at last, as he’d always said it would.
She lets their deliberate melodies infect her. Like the well-meaning people of the village, they show her an uncommon, almost suffocating goodwill. She wonders if their faces tell another story.
He’d been a milkman, and he forces himself in here because you can’t write of them apart; because her life was, as they used to say, devoted to his life. Every evening they’d go to the dairy and collect crates that rattled with cartons and bottles. She’d ride up top with the dog on her lap panting. Proud to be out in the world with her husband.
She’d walk the dog around the industrial estate while he went about his work. Walk the figurative parameters of her existence, the sublime edge of her prescribed domain. She could see into the world from here. That world inside the world that defines the world. That world that thrums with male heroism.
In spring, she’d watch the shadows form late. Imagine those vanishing shapes might yet take different shape, in the dark.
We were there for each other in all instances. We were each other’s someones to give a shit about our daily grumbles.
She’d mull over projects and pastimes, which, in the closed-circuit of the home, hummed with meaning. They diminished the burden of a future without set definition, with only the well-spaced punctuation of events, rituals, ceremonies. Time weighed heaviest for her when it was empty. She needed that other emptiness: the empty urgency of things to do.
Losing her sight trivializes every small-scale concern, like saving newspapers or soaping the windows. It calls into question every minor joy.
II.
Was I not modern to stay at home, to find myself there? I found a home in the maelstrom, and wasn’t that all the modernists had ever wanted?
She remembers her mother reading to her, a story from the newspaper, “as housewives, we are worms. All those pretty phrases about the hand that carries the string-bag being the hand that rules the world or something are as empty as the butchers’ shops.” She thinks hard on this, her putty brain ruminating the sound of the words, the imagery; the ramifications. Her mother explains it’s a call to agency, to personhood. A summons to see the house as a sphere of activity, and a world to act upon, where women like her will have specific capacities, responsibilities, and powers.
The home seemed to her to dramatize different gradations of personhood. Her father, her two brothers, her mother, herself. All hard, hidden interiors.
The article proposed a “sit down strike” that will bring “the life of the home” to a standstill for men, “those great tough creatures.” The author says she will be found “in a nice comfortable chair with a picnic basket beside me.”
Oftentimes we close our eyes to things we know to be true.
III.
She begins to dream the modern dream. That one day she’ll have a home of her own. It will not need be too grand but will accommodate herself and her husband - as no doubt she will marry still, and this action at this time catalyzes without thought the coming presence of children. There will have to be enough rooms for two, if not three. And a garden, but it mustn’t be too big. She thinks growing-up has to be graduated, steady. It will be their first intimation of a world beyond the home.
The smell of new-mown grass. Draughts of grape hyacinth and anemones. It will shine from the kitchen to the bedrooms with compact newness.
She’ll need a kitchen and a larder. A place to store cakes and dropped scones, her afternoon’s labour. Tins on top of tins on top of tins: guarantors against a compendium of familial and global disasters. She’ll express herself through the home, choosing the colours and the furniture; the neat, personal touches through which she thinks character shimmers, through which the past will be redecorated; and she’ll break away from the assumptions that corral her mother’s existence.
By thinking in future effects she comes to know herself peremptorily as a wife and mother.
She wants to be that rarest of species: a good worrier. She wants her children to grow-up to worry about themselves with the same intensity she worries about them. She moans for them in her dreams. She thinks it’s what one worries about that fills and defines a person. Her worries give her substance, a self to refer back to. A familiar, frowning face, and a raw emotional nature that expels worries into the world replete with their own radiant agency.
On good days she’ll exult in her worries and think herself resilient, think there’s something heroic in her repose. In her unremitting exposure to the quandaries of everyday life. Her metaphysical infancy.
She’s not heroic in the classical sense, but thinks a failure to do more than be a housewife and a mother is, in its own way, an heroic failure, and like all dying mothers, she’ll both maintain and modify the tradition. She’ll happen to be caught in the dots and dashes of a distinct historical moment; living, in the space of just ten years, the acquisition of electricity, running water, a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a car, a television, and all the various liberations and oppressions associated with each.
First, the media will infiltrate via the printed press and the radio, and they’ll spread new ways of comfort and physical hygiene, even here, to the unmapped depths of the countryside. The refrain will be of “privatization.” The business mantra of the times made vernacular, personal. A new vision of conjugality, and an ideology of happiness based on consumption, the couple, and radical depoliticization.
“Let’s win over the women and the rest will follow.”
The discrete aria from inside the inside, remaking women as the innermost structure of society itself.
Next, there’ll be that hard-won acquisition for the home, that first commodity that in turn creates new motivations for comfort, crystallising the interior, drawing a kind of definitive boundary between interior and exterior. It will give her a realm of her own, and, by extension, a new psychological interiority and depth that will, they’ll say, lead to her autonomy.
Her life will begin to unfold in a space where objects dictate her gestures and her movements. Gestures that have not yet congealed into any degree of rote familiarity, and that for the most part will be learned from watching imported American films.
They’ll tell her she’s got to begin to think in terms of “communication.” The way one room flows to and from another, and what this says about the people who inhabit them. Yet she’ll feel no one is saying anything to anyone anymore, and find herself suddenly overwhelmed by consumer durables, by appetites and expectations, toiling through a temporality managed by detergent boxes and recipe books, eventfulness restricted to the local adversity of the washing machine malfunctioning. And the more convenient these machines make her routine, the more efficient, the more provident, the more damn perfect she’ll be expected to be.
IV.
She finds it difficult to write the simple household notes for someone to collect the laundry, or instructions how to cook. These are the scribbles that break down the distinction between fiction and reality.
When she lies awake at night, she worries as a way to avoid a dream she might have. This is real life, she’ll slowly mouth, and it’s happening now. If she don’t dream she can’t be disappointed when it don’t come true. It’s the better end of boredom. The fragile statement of something so there’s not nothing.
This is real life, she’ll say aloud, and it’s happening now.
She worries about little Simon brooding in his room, about his lisp, and how the other kids’ll take to him when he misplaces the syllables of their foreign, fissiparous names. Worrying floods her with a feeling more verbose than love. Thinks love sinks into people and sates them and makes them serious with a sense of who they are. Thinks people need to keep changing or else go on facing the same hostility all life long. Thinks worrying loves faults in a practical way. Thinks this way she’ll do something that helps. Thinks she just don’t know what yet.
Realism is that mode of writing accounting for the people of instances. The people everywhere not annulled by discourse and emulation. People who live the specific, breathing instances.
This began as an attempt at realism.
