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Authors: Rachel Cusk
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Summer came, clanging days of glaring sunshine in the seaside town where I live, the gulls screaming in the early dawn, a glittering agitation everywhere, the water a vista of smashed light. I could no longer sleep; my consciousness filled up with the lumber of dreams, of broken-edged sections of the past heaving and stirring in the undertow. At the school gate, collecting my daughters, the other women looked somehow quaint to me, as people look when seen across a distance. I saw them as though from the annihilated
emptiness of the ocean, people inhabiting land, inhabiting a construction. They had not destroyed their homes. Why had I destroyed my home? Visiting my sister, I sat in her kitchen while she folded laundry. I watched her fold her husband’s shirts, his trousers. It shocked me to see these male garments, to see her touching them. She seemed to be touching something forbidden. Her right to handle these forbidden items overwhelmed me.
emptiness of the ocean, people inhabiting land, inhabiting a construction. They had not destroyed their homes. Why had I destroyed my home? Visiting my sister, I sat in her kitchen while she folded laundry. I watched her fold her husband’s shirts, his trousers. It shocked me to see these male garments, to see her touching them. She seemed to be touching something forbidden. Her right to handle these forbidden items overwhelmed me.
You know the law, my husband said over the phone. He was referring to my obligation to give him money.
I know what’s right, I said.
Call yourself a feminist, he said.
What I need is a wife, jokes the stressed-out feminist career woman, and everyone laughs. The joke is that the feminist’s pursuit of male values has led her to the threshold of female exploitation. This is irony. Get it? The feminist scorns that silly complicit creature the housewife. Her first feminist act may have been to try to liberate her own housewife mother, only to discover that rescue was neither wanted nor required. I hated my mother’s unwaged status, her servitude, her domesticity, undoubtedly more than she herself did, for she never said she disliked them at all. Yet I stood accused of recreating exactly those conditions in my own adult life. I had hated my husband’s unwaged domesticity just as much as I had hated my mother’s; and he, like her, had claimed to be contented with his lot. Why had I hated it so? Because it represented dependence. But there was more to it than that, for it might be said that dependence is an agreement between two people. My father depended on my mother too: he couldn’t cook a meal, or look after children from the office. They were two halves that made up a whole. What, morally speaking, is half a person? Yet the two
halves were not the same: in a sense my parents were a single compartmentalised human being. My father’s half was very different from my mother’s, but despite the difference neither half made any sense on its own. So it was in the difference that the problem lay.
halves were not the same: in a sense my parents were a single compartmentalised human being. My father’s half was very different from my mother’s, but despite the difference neither half made any sense on its own. So it was in the difference that the problem lay.
My notion of half was more like the earthworm’s: you cut it in two, but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself. I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked, picked them up from school once they were older. And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn’t want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me. Why couldn’t we be the same? Why couldn’t he be compartmentalised too? And why, exactly, was it helpful for a man to look after his own children, or cook the food that he himself would eat? Helpful is what a good child is to its mother. A helpful person is someone who performs duties outside their own sphere of responsibility, out of the kindness of their heart. Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude. And did I not have something of the same gratuitous tone where my wage-earning was concerned? Did I not think there was something awfully helpful about me, a woman, supporting my own family?
And so I felt, beneath the reconfigured surface of things, the tension of the old orthodoxies. We were a man and a woman who in our struggle for equality had simply changed clothes. We were two transvestites, a transvestite couple – well, why not? Except that I did both things, was both man and woman, while my husband – meaning well – only did one. Once, a female friend confessed to
me that she admired our life but couldn’t have lived it herself. She admitted the reason – that she would no longer respect her husband if he became a wife. The admiration interested me. What, precisely, was being admired? And how could what was admirable entail the loss of respect?
me that she admired our life but couldn’t have lived it herself. She admitted the reason – that she would no longer respect her husband if he became a wife. The admiration interested me. What, precisely, was being admired? And how could what was admirable entail the loss of respect?
Sometimes my awareness of my own competence alarmed me. How would I remain attached to the world if not by need? I didn’t appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole? In a sense I was living at the high point of feminist possibility: there was no blueprint beyond ‘having it all’. The richness of that phrase, its suggestion of an unabashed splendour, was apposite. To have both motherhood and work was to have two lives instead of one, was a stunning refinement of historical female experience, and to the people who complained that having it all meant doing it all I would have said, yes, of course it does. You don’t get ‘all’ for nothing. ‘Having it all’, like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires an adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary, forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise for the fact that she is essentially alone.
So I was both man and woman, but over time the woman sickened, for her gratifications were fewer. I had to keep out of the way, keep out of the kitchen, keep a certain distance from my children, not only to define my husband’s femininity but to appease my own male values. The oldest trick in the sexist book is the female need for control of children. I perceived in the sentimentality and narcissism of motherhood a threat to the objectivity that as a writer I valued so highly. But it wasn’t control of the children I was necessarily
sickening for. It was something subtler – prestige, the prestige that is the mother’s reward for the work of bearing her offspring. And that prestige was my husband’s. I had given it to him or he had taken it – either way, it was what he got out of our arrangement. And the domestic work I did was in a sense at the service of that prestige, for it encompassed the menial, the trivial, the frankly boring, as though I was busily working behind the scenes to ensure the smooth running of the spectacle on stage. I wasn’t male after all – men didn’t do drudgery. And I wasn’t female either: I felt ugly, for the things that were mine – dirty laundry, VAT returns – were not pretty at all. In fact, there was nothing pretty that gave me back a reflection of myself. I went to Paris for two days with my husband, determined while I was there to have my unkempt hair cut in a French salon. Wasn’t this what women did? I wanted to be womanised; I wanted someone to restore to me my lost femininity. A male hairdresser cut off all my hair, giggling as he did it, amusing himself during a boring afternoon at the salon by giving a tired blank-faced mother of two something punky and
nouvelle vague
. Afterwards I wandered in the Paris streets, anxiously catching my reflection in shop windows. Had a transformation occurred, or a defacement? I wasn’t sure. My husband wasn’t sure either. It seemed terrible that between us we couldn’t establish the truth. It seemed terrible, in broad daylight, in those public anonymous streets, not to know.
sickening for. It was something subtler – prestige, the prestige that is the mother’s reward for the work of bearing her offspring. And that prestige was my husband’s. I had given it to him or he had taken it – either way, it was what he got out of our arrangement. And the domestic work I did was in a sense at the service of that prestige, for it encompassed the menial, the trivial, the frankly boring, as though I was busily working behind the scenes to ensure the smooth running of the spectacle on stage. I wasn’t male after all – men didn’t do drudgery. And I wasn’t female either: I felt ugly, for the things that were mine – dirty laundry, VAT returns – were not pretty at all. In fact, there was nothing pretty that gave me back a reflection of myself. I went to Paris for two days with my husband, determined while I was there to have my unkempt hair cut in a French salon. Wasn’t this what women did? I wanted to be womanised; I wanted someone to restore to me my lost femininity. A male hairdresser cut off all my hair, giggling as he did it, amusing himself during a boring afternoon at the salon by giving a tired blank-faced mother of two something punky and
nouvelle vague
. Afterwards I wandered in the Paris streets, anxiously catching my reflection in shop windows. Had a transformation occurred, or a defacement? I wasn’t sure. My husband wasn’t sure either. It seemed terrible that between us we couldn’t establish the truth. It seemed terrible, in broad daylight, in those public anonymous streets, not to know.
Sometimes, in the bath, the children cry. Their nakedness, or the warm water, or the comfort of the old routine – something, anyway,
dislodges their sticking-plaster emotions and shows the wound beneath. It is my belief that I gave them that wound, so now I must take all the blame. Another version of the heroic, where the hero and the villain are hard to tell apart.
dislodges their sticking-plaster emotions and shows the wound beneath. It is my belief that I gave them that wound, so now I must take all the blame. Another version of the heroic, where the hero and the villain are hard to tell apart.
I wounded them and in this way I learned truly to love them. Or rather, I admitted it, admitted this love, admitted how much of it there was. I externalised it: internalised, it had been an instrument of self-torture. But now it was out in the world, visible, practical. What is a loving mother? It is someone whose self-interest has been displaced into her actual children. Her children’s suffering causes her more pain than her own: it is Mary at the foot of the cross. In church, at the Easter service, I used to be struck by the description of Mary’s emotional state, for amid that drama of physical torment it was said that she felt as though a sword had been run through her heart. It interested me that such an image was applied to her feelings, an image that came to her from the cold hard outer world, from the physical plane of men. Somehow, in the transition from other to mother, the active becomes passive, the actual theoretical, the physical emotional, the objective subjective. The blow is softened: when my children cry a sword is run through my heart. Yet it is I who am also the cause of their crying. And for a while I am undone by this contradiction, by the difficulty of connecting the person who acted out of self-interest with the heartbroken mother who has succeeded her. It seems to be the fatal and final evolution of the compartmentalised woman, a kind of personality disorder, like schizophrenia.
Winter comes: the days are brief and pale, the sea retracted as though into unconsciousness. The coldly silvered water turns quietly on the shingle. There are long nights of stars and frost, and in
the morning frozen puddles lie like little smashed mirrors in the road. We sleep many hours, like people recovering from an operation. Pain is so vivid, yet the stupor of recovery is such that pain’s departure often goes unnoticed. You simply realise, one day, that it has gone, leaving a curious blank in the memory, a feeling of transitive mystery, as though the person who suffered is not – not quite – the same as the person who now walks around well. Another compartment has been created, this one for keeping odds and ends in, stray parts of experience, questions for which the answers were never found.
the morning frozen puddles lie like little smashed mirrors in the road. We sleep many hours, like people recovering from an operation. Pain is so vivid, yet the stupor of recovery is such that pain’s departure often goes unnoticed. You simply realise, one day, that it has gone, leaving a curious blank in the memory, a feeling of transitive mystery, as though the person who suffered is not – not quite – the same as the person who now walks around well. Another compartment has been created, this one for keeping odds and ends in, stray parts of experience, questions for which the answers were never found.
We rearrange the furniture to cover up the gaps. We economise, take in a lodger, get a fishtank. The fish twirl and pirouette eternally amid the fronds, regardless of what day it is. The children go to their father’s and come back again. They no longer cry: they complain heartily about the inconvenience of the new arrangements. They have colour in their faces. A friend comes to stay and remarks on the sound of laughter in the house, like birdsong after the silence of winter. But it is winter still: we go to a Christmas carol service and I watch the other families. I watch mother and father and children. And I see it so clearly, as though I were looking in at them through a brightly lit window from the darkness outside; see the story in which they play their roles, their parts, with the whole world as a backdrop. We’re not part of that story any more, my children and I. We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom. The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.
We sing the carols, a band of three. I have sung these songs
since my earliest recollection, sung them year after year: first as a tradition-loving child in the six-strong conventional family pew; later as a young woman who most ardently called herself a feminist; later still as a wife and mother in whose life these unreconcilable principles – the traditional and the radical, the story and the truth – had out of their hostility hatched a kind of cancer. Looking at the other families I feel our stigma, our loss of prestige: we are like a gypsy caravan parked up among the houses, itinerant, temporary. I see that we have lost a degree of protection, of certainty. I see that I have exchanged one kind of prestige for another, one set of values for another, one scale for another. I see too that we are more open, more capable of receiving than we were; that should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders.
since my earliest recollection, sung them year after year: first as a tradition-loving child in the six-strong conventional family pew; later as a young woman who most ardently called herself a feminist; later still as a wife and mother in whose life these unreconcilable principles – the traditional and the radical, the story and the truth – had out of their hostility hatched a kind of cancer. Looking at the other families I feel our stigma, our loss of prestige: we are like a gypsy caravan parked up among the houses, itinerant, temporary. I see that we have lost a degree of protection, of certainty. I see that I have exchanged one kind of prestige for another, one set of values for another, one scale for another. I see too that we are more open, more capable of receiving than we were; that should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders.
I begin to notice, looking in through those imaginary brightly lit windows, that the people inside are looking out. I see the women, these wives and mothers, looking out. They seem happy enough, contented enough, capable enough: they are well dressed, attractive, standing with their men and their children. Yet they look around, their mouths moving. It is as though they are missing something or wondering about something. I remember it so well, what it was to be one of them. Sometimes one of these glances will pass over me and our eyes will briefly meet. And I realise she can’t see me, this woman whose eyes have locked with mine. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to, or is trying not to. It’s just that inside it’s so bright and outside it’s so dark, and so she can’t see out, can’t see anything at all.
The day my husband moved his possessions out of our house I had toothache. It was raining, and all morning the door to the street stood open. The wet air gusted in and the dim hall lay like an opened tomb in the grey daylight. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hands over my mouth, like a mime artist pantomiming dismay.
The dentist recommended extraction: the X-ray photograph showed that the tooth was beyond repair. Theoretically, he said, it ought to be possible, but the idiosyncracies of the case were what counted here. The crooked shape of the root made it inaccessible to the long, fine instruments that would kill the nerves. They, the instruments, could not turn corners. And the root, as the X-ray showed, had grown at a right angle to itself halfway down.
Why had it assumed that shape? It was difficult to know, the dentist said. It may have been bent by the pressure of other forces, but there appeared to be an aspect of fate to it too, the response of its own nature to the available conditions. To an extent it had simply chosen to go in that direction. One could not entirely blame the positioning of the other teeth, the spatial properties of the jaw, the condition of the gums; no, the tooth itself would have to answer
for its doomed character. It had been in some ineluctable sense wayward, and now it had put itself beyond reach. A straighter root, however diseased, could have been redeemed. Superficially the condition of this one was not so bad, but form is destiny; form, not content, that which is shaped and therefore shapes its own fate.
for its doomed character. It had been in some ineluctable sense wayward, and now it had put itself beyond reach. A straighter root, however diseased, could have been redeemed. Superficially the condition of this one was not so bad, but form is destiny; form, not content, that which is shaped and therefore shapes its own fate.
While the X-ray was taken the dentist and the nurses stepped back, as one, reflexively turning away and crossing their arms over their chests. Their soft-shod feet were noiseless as they withdrew in this synchronised gesture of self-protection: in their white overalls they stood like acolytes at the ceremony of blood. The dentist, a tall and broad-shouldered Greek, wore beneath his overall a richly patterned floor-length robe. The wan nurses were silent as they moved dimly among the white and chrome cabinets at the back of the room, forever recessed, like figures in the background of a painting. Was the pain more or less constant, he asked, or were there still phases of normality in which one could do and think of other things? Had we reached the point of crisis where our only experience was the experience of suffering, where our only need, our only desire was the desire to end it? It is terrible to desire the end of something, the absence of something: desire should belong to life, to presence and not absence. One should be careful not to live in this inverted state too long; nor, he said, should one pull out a tooth unless it is absolutely necessary. Had we, then, reached the moment at which extraction had become impossible to defer any longer?
It could be said, yes, that the pain no longer had any intermissions. It used to be possible to escape from it at night, in sleep, but lately it had found out that hiding place too and had broken it down, like an invader breaking down the door of an ill-defended fortress. The ease with which the door came down was a crisis in
itself: how fragile, how insubstantial normality was proved to be once pain came to disturb it! Pain is strong and huge and relentless, and ‘normality’ – that was the word he used, wasn’t it? – normality is the fine balance life achieves in the absence of disruption, is the blank register of events and their aftermath, slowly re-stitching and repairing itself, as the surface of a pool gradually becalms itself after a pebble has been thrown in. Normality is capable of resisting nothing and can outlive almost anything. Pain, on the other hand, can destroy whatever it has a mind to. Pain is the bomb that falls, and normality the grass that grows, at length, over the crater. To resist pain one must be as strong as pain, must make of oneself a kind of human bomb-shelter.
itself: how fragile, how insubstantial normality was proved to be once pain came to disturb it! Pain is strong and huge and relentless, and ‘normality’ – that was the word he used, wasn’t it? – normality is the fine balance life achieves in the absence of disruption, is the blank register of events and their aftermath, slowly re-stitching and repairing itself, as the surface of a pool gradually becalms itself after a pebble has been thrown in. Normality is capable of resisting nothing and can outlive almost anything. Pain, on the other hand, can destroy whatever it has a mind to. Pain is the bomb that falls, and normality the grass that grows, at length, over the crater. To resist pain one must be as strong as pain, must make of oneself a kind of human bomb-shelter.
The extraction will leave a sizable declivity – a crater of sorts – behind it. It is a molar, centrally placed on the lower right jaw: a large tooth of great practical and personal significance whose disappearance nonetheless will be surprisingly unnoticeable from outside. It will not, of course, grow back. The intimate world of the mouth will suffer irreversible loss. In time, if sufficient resources and effort of will can be found, a simulacrum may be fitted; until then, the other teeth will have to do the work of compensating for the absence. Different modes of eating and chewing might evolve to remove strain from the area; curiously enough, the mirroring molar on the left-hand side is also missing. This is not, then, the first such experience of loss. A major tooth has already decayed and been extracted from this mouth, a history which obviously makes things harder. The current extraction is a darker business because of it. And the question of blame, always so delicate where it is in the nature of things to break down, is altered by this new piece of evidence. It’s beginning to look like carelessness, to paraphrase
Oscar Wilde. For a tooth, properly looked after, ought to be able to last a lifetime.
Oscar Wilde. For a tooth, properly looked after, ought to be able to last a lifetime.
Outside the dentist’s windows is a sky of brilliant blue. Yesterday’s rain has been succeeded by an outpouring of confident spring sunshine, as unseasonally hot as the other was preternaturally cold and dark. The dentist’s room is balmy and bright; the sun sparkles on the steel instruments. The whole place is somewhat decrepit, the narrow building in its higgledy-piggledy street all crooked angles and canting floors, its partition walls and flimsy ceilings thickly muffled in bumpy off-white paper, its beech-patterned beige vinyl rising and falling thinly over the uneven boards. In the reception area there is a small fishtank with electric-green plastic ferns and a bubbling pirate ship sitting on a gravel bed; there are posters of diseased mouths, of infected gums, of the blackened stumps of rotted teeth. The dentist strides superbly around these improvised spaces in his patterned robe, as cheerful and dignified as his visitors are pensive and cowed. His teeth are strong and white and straight, and perhaps for this reason his smile is irrepressible. It lives on the surface, always reappearing, like something buoyant in water: it can’t be sunk. It looks, almost, unnatural. It is hard to know whether it represents good fortune – luck – or diligence and hard work. He appears to be happy, but has he always been like that? His partner in the dental practice has teeth as grey as tombstones in an overcrowded graveyard, and a canny, comprehending face; his overall is shabby and creased. From these appearances it might be deduced that one man has the knowledge of failure and the other does not. But how can one really tell? And is it better to be at the mercy of someone who understands pain or who has managed thus far to avoid it?
The dentist rummages in his tray of instruments; the nurses
draw close. He leans forward, a dark shape against the bright window. The sunlit room is silent and there rises a kind of aural transparency through which a deeper background of sound emerges, intricately embroidered like an ocean bed seen through clear water: the sound of passing cars outside, of dogs barking and the distant keening of gulls, of fragments of conversation from the pavements below and music playing somewhere, of phones ringing, pots and pans clattering in a faraway restaurant kitchen, babies crying, workmen faintly hammering, of footsteps, of people breathing, and beneath it all a kind of pulse, the very heartbeat and hydraulics of the day. The dentist has a pair of pliers in his hand. Their factuality amid this impalpable veil of sound is unmistakable. They are simple and heavy and black. He wields them, drawing closer. He enters the mouth and with the arms of the pliers lays a ferocious metallic grip on the tooth. Every process has been passed through, except this one. First there was the long process of decay itself, brewing day after day in the darkness of the root; then the birth of pain, a seed that grew and branched, seeking out consciousness, awareness, like a plant seeks light and thereby blots it out; then the negotiations, consciousness negotiating with pain, trying to pacify and mollify it, to control and contain it, to dull it and hence live with it; then crisis, decision, action, a date and time decided on at which extraction would occur and the situation be brought to an end. But the contact of steel with human flesh has a reality of its own. It is happening: things are being changed, having been unable to change themselves.
draw close. He leans forward, a dark shape against the bright window. The sunlit room is silent and there rises a kind of aural transparency through which a deeper background of sound emerges, intricately embroidered like an ocean bed seen through clear water: the sound of passing cars outside, of dogs barking and the distant keening of gulls, of fragments of conversation from the pavements below and music playing somewhere, of phones ringing, pots and pans clattering in a faraway restaurant kitchen, babies crying, workmen faintly hammering, of footsteps, of people breathing, and beneath it all a kind of pulse, the very heartbeat and hydraulics of the day. The dentist has a pair of pliers in his hand. Their factuality amid this impalpable veil of sound is unmistakable. They are simple and heavy and black. He wields them, drawing closer. He enters the mouth and with the arms of the pliers lays a ferocious metallic grip on the tooth. Every process has been passed through, except this one. First there was the long process of decay itself, brewing day after day in the darkness of the root; then the birth of pain, a seed that grew and branched, seeking out consciousness, awareness, like a plant seeks light and thereby blots it out; then the negotiations, consciousness negotiating with pain, trying to pacify and mollify it, to control and contain it, to dull it and hence live with it; then crisis, decision, action, a date and time decided on at which extraction would occur and the situation be brought to an end. But the contact of steel with human flesh has a reality of its own. It is happening: things are being changed, having been unable to change themselves.
The dentist wrenches and wrenches amid the soft tissues. His intervention seems allied somehow with death, yet it belongs to life, for its purpose is to liberate the sufferer from the cause of suffering.
Its purpose is to separate what will not naturally separate itself. But it is cold and hard, insensate, brutal. It is called violence: people are forever trying to find alternatives to it, but they seldom work.
Its purpose is to separate what will not naturally separate itself. But it is cold and hard, insensate, brutal. It is called violence: people are forever trying to find alternatives to it, but they seldom work.
The dentist speaks.
‘More force is required,’ he says.
The nurse hands him a chisel. He positions it on the edge of the jaw and places the flat tip between the tooth and the gum. He pushes down, straining so hard that his smile becomes a grimace. Presently he stands to improve his leverage. He uses both hands; he stands on tiptoe, bearing down with shaking arms. The tooth resists and resists, and when at last it gives way it does so too easily, so that the chisel spends its force upwards, hitting the teeth above. They take the blow, these innocent teeth, rocking in their moorings; they loosen, but they stay where they are. The dentist holds up the bloody tooth between his trembling fingers. He is beaming again, though with less intensity. A little consternation threads his brow. Violence is so unwieldy, so difficult to control. There is collateral damage; the fine mesh of life is torn. He has caused unnecessary pain, and trauma to the other teeth. He feels bad about it. He is surprised.
‘I didn’t expect it to come out like that,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t worry,’ I say, with difficulty. ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘I will pack the wound with dressings,’ he says. ‘You need to change them every two hours. The bleeding should stop by tomorrow but you won’t be able to eat normally for a while. Soft things, that’s all. And cold will feel more pleasant.’ He smiles, happy again. ‘Make sure you buy yourself a big ice cream on the way home.’
Home: as a child I loved my grandmother’s house, a semi-detached Edwardian villa in a Hertfordshire suburb with mullioned windows on whose sills china shepherdesses stood, and King Charles spaniels with enamelled waterfalls of porcelain hair. In the gas-scented kitchen my grandmother served shepherd’s pie with frozen peas; I was put to bed in the little room upstairs whose window looked out on the rectangle of front garden with its laid redbrick path and gate, and beneath the faded pink candlewick bedspread and thick stiff sheets succumbed to the force of these sights and smells and textures which, though not human, seemed to define humanness. Touching the ornaments in my grandmother’s sitting room, from whose windows could be seen the long, sloping back lawn that led down to the railway line, I felt visible; the smell of the room where she and my grandfather slept in their mahogany bed, of the cold narrow lavatory, of the small pantry where the constituents of her plain English cooking dwelled, were so distinct that they made me distinct too, just as in the garden the dark foliage of the perennial shrubs made it possible to see the filigree spiders’ webs spun across their empty spaces. My mother grew up in that house: her amniotic atmosphere was there too in the potent rooms, as it was in my own consciousness, ineradicable.
As an adolescent I went to stay once with my grandmother alone; I ate in the linoleum-floored kitchen, sat amongst the ornaments in the sitting room, slept under the candlewick bedspread in the little room that seemed somewhat shrunken now, solidified, its reality and my own no longer intertwined. I could not, try as I might, feel like the child I once was. During those hours the whole merging of human and non-human came unravelled, for it became clear to me that the human history these rooms embodied could
never be retrieved and released back into the world. A few years later the house was sold: other people live there now. In the compact little cottage to which my grandmother moved, a handful of the familiar objects are still exhibited, a trace of the familiar smell still remains; like a footprint in the sand after the tide has washed over it, her impression is being gradually erased.
never be retrieved and released back into the world. A few years later the house was sold: other people live there now. In the compact little cottage to which my grandmother moved, a handful of the familiar objects are still exhibited, a trace of the familiar smell still remains; like a footprint in the sand after the tide has washed over it, her impression is being gradually erased.
In a box in an upstairs room of my house lie the deeds of the building, dating its successive transfers in ownership back to its construction in 1832. A sea captain had first bought the land from a farmer, one of several parcels of green hillside running down to the sea which together would form the basis of a sloping Regency terrace. The land is specified as having been pasture for grazing cattle: at the bottom of the hill the shingle beach shelves into the water, a straight and simple coastline at which the large ocean often seems to wait, as though lacking a means of intercourse with the land that bounds it. Fifty or sixty miles along, in Dorset, the relationship between the two is more dramatic, and dramatised, the limestone sculpted into extraordinary shapes by the pressing, insistent water, which is forever harassing and caressing its rocky mate, half predator and half lover. The resistant rock bears the marks of these attentions, either acquiescent or violated, it’s hard to tell. Its beauty and its deformity are its destiny, an interface lacking from the flat shoreline here, with its placidly frigid geology. Here the broad blank sea has no choice but to become reflective, as though it is not living but dreaming; sometimes utterly still, a shimmering unconscious shield of light, at others upset, blindly thrashing and roiling, unable to vent itself on anything tangible and real. There is nothing here for it to destroy, to affect: in the morning, after a storm, the beach will sometimes be littered with a great quantity of something particular,
as though this is what has plagued its unconscious – hundreds of dead starfish, for instance, and once, mile after mile of sawn pine planks. These occasional expectorations, so unnatural and strange, seem to signify a certain malaise, a sickness that I interpret as frustration. I imagine the cattle grazing here once, slumbrous too, beside the comatose sea; imagine the land swept by unimpeded waves of shadow and light, by great gauzy veils of rain, by winds roaming unconstricted over the openness, and by darkness, by dark nights of wind and rain, the sea tossing and fretful, the rain hurling itself out of the sky, the wind raving up the bare hill and away among the black shapes of the Downs, and nowhere to shelter, no front door to close against the night.
as though this is what has plagued its unconscious – hundreds of dead starfish, for instance, and once, mile after mile of sawn pine planks. These occasional expectorations, so unnatural and strange, seem to signify a certain malaise, a sickness that I interpret as frustration. I imagine the cattle grazing here once, slumbrous too, beside the comatose sea; imagine the land swept by unimpeded waves of shadow and light, by great gauzy veils of rain, by winds roaming unconstricted over the openness, and by darkness, by dark nights of wind and rain, the sea tossing and fretful, the rain hurling itself out of the sky, the wind raving up the bare hill and away among the black shapes of the Downs, and nowhere to shelter, no front door to close against the night.
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