Before we begin …
I want to clear something up straight off, which is: I am writing this, that’s why I know what’s happening. It doesn’t mean that everything that happens here has happened to me, let me clarify.
I’ve been moved by a piece by Nora Ephron in which she says that, as the author of Heartburn, she is often accused of writing a ‘ thinly disguised’ novel, and that this term is used disparagingly of women writers, though not of men. She says that Philip Roth and John Updike “picked away at the carcasses of their marriages in book after book, but to the best of my knowledge they were never hit with the ‘thinly disguised’ thing”. Then she goes on to explain which bits of Heartburn are autobiographical and which bits aren’t.
Had she said her book was autobiographical she would have been attacked for distortion of the truth, however faithful she had been to the events as she experienced them. It goes to show that writers should take not one bit of notice of what others say about them, and I do not intend to take any notice of what anyone says about this, unless I enjoy what they say. When I say ‘I’ I mean, of course, the writing ‘I’, which, in my view, is as little like my non-writing I as can be. This is because, when the writing starts, as everyone knows, the self is changed, and things happen in the narrative that have not been planned for.
I do, however, have some notion of boundaries within which the subject mater will fall and since I will be revising this introduction later, it is mainly for my own benefit that I can now affirm there will be no exchange of body fluids of any kind in this account. In my view many fine works have been near, or actually, ruined by the author’s insistence on the sex scene.
Nor will I be framing this writing within the usual format of chapters that run on drearily with hardly any indication of where they are going, giving simple chapter titles or worse, just the numbers. That used to be fine when there was a common understanding of what should happen in each chapter, or when chapter titles told the reader what was about to happen, as in Chapter Eight: ‘Things Go From Bad to Worse’, or more explicitly, ‘Natalie looses all her money and then her house burns down’. Not that I expect there to be much in the way of violent action, nor am I looking to excite you dear reader by suspense. When I read detective, crime or mystery fiction I always read the end first in order to be free of the distraction of trying to work out the who, why, what and where questions which would mar my enjoyment of the unfolding. I shall willingly let you know everything I know as we go along, if any murders occur , and I know who did them, I shall let you into the plot right away; I do not anticipate murders, though of course I could be wrong.
Also, I want to say something here about fantasy and the creation of other worlds. As an example, I remember with distaste a so-so novel, read many years ago, in which the lives of apparently ordinary people in the South of England were plodding along until about half way through the story when one of the women turned out to be a mermaid. Had she been a mermaid from the beginning I would have had no quarrel with the author, even a hint of some upcoming mermaidness might have saved it for me, but as it was I closed the book in disbelief and a resentment still lingers. I do not want the same to happen to you. All the manifestations in the following spring from my own internal processes, there is no need whatsoever to give them substance or sustain these figments as anything other than fictions, though the fictions are necessarily products of truth.
Nora Ephron closes the piece about her novel by saying that in it she transformed a tragedy into a comedy, but of course in doing that she revealed her past as having been a comedy all along, not a thinly disguised tragedy, just not a tragedy at all. That is the difficulty with coming to a conclusion, an end, there is no option to keep on circling through the tragic-comic-tragic-comic cycle, either the tragedy or the comedy get transformed, the process ends, and I am in no respect different in my desire not to end than anyone else.
For all the above reasons, I have chosen a somewhat academic format of descriptive headings to chapters because it has the democratic benefit of allowing you to know what is coming, to go on reading if you want to, and to form you own opinions. To conclude, this story is entirely autobiographical and entirely fictional as are all bits of writing, in whatever form, and a look at the chapter headings and their contents together with the outline should be enough to let you know what you are in for.
OUTLINE
Winifred-Emma (w-e), being of an age that was well schooled in what it means to be a ‘good girl’ and a ‘good woman’ finds herself bored and more imprisoned than enlightened by all the advice, knowledge and understanding she has taken on in her life and seeks a way to loose them. It is more difficult than one might imagine to forget what one knows, but she remembers Umberto Ecco saying that information on the internet is largely unreliable, and decides to use what she hopes will be misinformation, accessed via Google, to dilute and confuse her data. So starting by randomly finding seven words in her dictionary she begins to look them up acquiring a host of new inter-relating notions. Her reverse-quest draws her into an examination of the words: muller, trachyte, defuse, learn, ohone, jesserent, language, and an involvement with the myth of the goddess Inanna, who looses her powers during her decent to the underworld.
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CONTENTS
I
The First Gate: Muller
Winifred-Emma met death; coffee morning; well-roundedness; Helmshore Apartments; ruthless dinners; a small picnic in the cemetery; setting her ear; w-e professional life, Death reappears, muller the first gate; the computer course.
II
The Second Gate: Trachyte
Trachyte; Chalkedon and its Creed; eruption and Ascension; blood in the corridor; w-e dreams of her grandmother; out walking; the Advice book; Helmshore and Christmas.
III
The Third Gate: Defuse.
Defuse-Lear; a cemetery walk; the sub-post office; the necessity to acknowledge fate; dead baby stories; in Homebase.
IV
The Fourth Gate: to Learn
At the Wilheim Institute; Looking after Clara; in church; ordinary paint; her turquoise necklace; dentistry.
V
The Fifth Gate: Ohone
Listening to the great below; one night at the end of a long walk; tooth–centred living; the year turned; Sedna
VI
The Sixth Gate: Jesserent, Jazzerant
The process of loosing the scriptures; the motives for Innana’s descent, jesserent, Molly’s bones; coverings; the cemetery re-visited; the dentists return; wave and mountain dream; Ucello’s St George and the dragon.
VII
The Seventh Gate: Language
the most diluting word so far; naked; the sound of cotton; memorial; checking out at the supermarket; jealousy; Donne’s poem; Helmshore refurbishment; rotting; Terminator Two; the flies; life-stories; love and the most noble truth; Lent; First time reinstatement
VIII
Return - Entoil
Entoil; sacrifice; day one - acquisitions diary; another day; hair; crossness and hairdressing; flowers, fish and disability beds; sunny day; veneers; conference entoilments; the Land of the Tulip; menu dream; replacement
IX
The Above - Tweet
Tweet; Easter; At St Elmo’s; Saturday; On Sunday; ends; Clay bowls
On Earth - Capitulum
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Chapter One
THE FIRST GATE - MULLER
Winifred-Emma met death; well-roundedness; Helmshore Apartments; a walk in the cemetery; setting her ear; w-e professional life, Death reappears, muller; the computer course.
Winifred-Emma met death
Winifred-Emma met death while writing on her computer. This is not an indirect way of saying that she died, nor does it herald the arrival of a magical realist or Bergmanesque figure with a cloak and scythe. The death she met was non-specific as in medical terminology, for example, ‘this is not syphilis it is a non-specific urinary infection’. So, less dramatic than one might imagine, a bit on the death-lite side.
She had found herself writing: ‘I’m sweeping the courtyard for your arrival, not for an ancient sage to tell me right from wrong, or how to proceed, no, I am waiting for you a mercurial being to jump from the chariot and somersault towards me, take me with you to dart like a dragonfly across the pond, through the air to places I have never been, and now the yard is swept and I am ready, I have pushed the gate open, looked down the lane, found my sandals. I remember Pigsey and Tripitaka and Monkey on their journeys, though I want to loose the scriptures rather than find them, go on a scattering expedition, forget the noble truths that bind me.’
She looked at this with some surprise, it seemed to be a kind of prayer to Mercury though the image she had had her mind was of the leaping Bacchus in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. She understood that she was bored and wanted someone adventurous to run away with, travel the road with above and below ground, but, as she imagined this, Bacchus had morphed improbably into the figure of Death, his leap carrying him out of the picture and onto the gallery floor, and now here he was, taller than Mercury should have been, and with deeper less glittering eyes. It was Death who was promising to come with her, to help her to scatter the wisdom of a lifetime, all the female trappings of her generation, which neither birth-control nor women’s liberation had removed, patience, endurance, acceptance, kindness, restraint, conformity, and greater than all of these silence.
Silence was the power that reinforced female wisdoms, and because of it she was not just voiceless, the silence extended to her body, eyes, and to her still face. Silence and stillness, these brought separation, kept her from contamination. She did not seek excess or vice, simply the cessation of constraining wisdom. She asked Death, ‘What shall I do?’
‘Put your ear to the great below, listen to the screaming’.
‘But I hate noise’ said w-e ‘I’ve spent my life on my toes, straining upwards, in ascent, surely that was right?’
‘Then fly like a shaman’, said Death obligingly ‘watch the globe disappear to a dot beneath your elevating feet’, then dropping his voice a couple of octaves he said, in the tone and phraseology of a television relationship guru, “and how has that worked for you?”
w-e went to the kitchen and tied up the rubbish ready for the chute, washed her hands, came back to the computer. Looked at the cursor blinking for a while, then got dressed and went out.
Coffee Morning
It was coffee-morning in the communal room which w-e could not bring herself to call a lounge. It had the traditional wing-chairs, in upholsterer’s mid-pink and mid-green, their backs stoutly against the wall. It had taken Sylvia two years of being there to encourage anyone to use the room, and even now they were resistant to moving the chairs into a circle, preferring to sit in surreal isolation, like saints in separated cathedral niches. There was a small open-plan kitchen at one end of the room and towards this Sylvia moved, her hair drawn from her brow in a balletic bun her face nun-like in its kindly serenity.
Net curtains flowed down the long windows mostly obscuring the residents’ garden, a concrete square edged with narrow beds and dotted with a row of plastic urns lavishly filled in the summer with bedding plants. Beyond the fence, the bit of grass and the iron railings, the North London traffic glittered and fumed making the garden noisy and overlooked, unsuitable as the peaceful grotto where the aged could doze-out their days, which is what must surely have been in the mind of whoever planned it. Sylvia was taking out cups and saucers when w-e came in.
Well-roundedness
In a sense the ‘great below’ to which w-e felt she should listen were the newspapers, there was certainly a lot of screaming there, but w-e could not bear to read them, she used to until she felt they were produced on a loop-track like a toy train set in which each disaster came round the tissue paper mountain at regular intervals: earthquake, famine, flood, airplane crash, uprising, war, torture, murder, child abuse, road-rage, toxicities of land, sea and air, of food, of interpersonal relations, an then, ‘here comes another earthquake’. Instead she learned to listen to all of these things mediated through personal experience, her own and other people’s. She was tired of sympathies, empathies, of listening to screaming however moderated. Surely Death was wrong to suggest this.
A Google search of the ‘great below’ gave 9,230 references in 0.31 seconds, most of them related to a suicidal lyric by the Nine Inch Nails, a few were about Inanna. w-e looked through pages, one, two, three, nine, thirteen, seventeen and thirty-something of the Nine Inch Nails sites, lots of rocky depression, black sites with small white writing, or smudged arty b/w pages of visually distressed looking lyrics, NIN were huge with decades of romping across global rock venues behind them, hard to imagine never having even heard of them. She downloaded an odd photo from one of their sites, the head and shoulder of a man, head bowed his right ear which was fairly central was the only intact, un-roughed-up part of him.
She found an interview in which the NIN person said. That being able to make art is dependent upon him having some well-roundedness, the had some work ahead of him on an emotional and spiritual level. But knowing the need for it, he was more willing to work on those things. He’d realized that there is a resolution to self-destruction, which is death, he laughed death and said he’d like to put that off for a while.
Would the scattering of scriptures count as self-destruction, was death directing her towards well-roundedness? The computer itself seemed to have come up with the peculiar piece of writing in which Death had arrived and now it had helped her find a reference that might be useful.
The computer and death, as she went downstairs to find Sylvia, she wondered if these might not be the helping companions she needed to start on her quest to forget the noble truths that bound her?
In the lobby she met Sadie, Mike, and Esther gathering ready for transport to another centre for an introduction to a computer course. Through the drizzle she could see Sylvia supervising the entaximent of a wheel-chaired resident into a specially adapted red taxi, other damp people were waiting outside for the off. w-e had no shoes on and so could not go outside to ask Sylvia about booking the guest room.
While she held the door opened, so they could look for Sylvia, Sadie remarked on her right hand incapacitated by a ‘small stroke’ and which she feared would impede her computer skills, w-e was consoling, Sadie said she hibernated and had become lazy, had grown from a size ten to a size eighteen that she hoped the computer course would get her out more, because of looking things up on it that she could go and do, she talked of her daughter, her daughter’s injunctions. The draft was icing w-e’s shoeless feet, she saw a small hole in the toe of one sock, noticed the internal balances moving, the cold discomfort on one side, the need to listen and respond kindly and helpfully on the other, when the discomfort significantly outweighed the need to continue listening she detached herself. The question was: what was the point at which a normal person would have stopped listening, or have managed to ask Sadie to close the door and then felt alright about it?
Helmshore Apartments
Helmshore Apartments, built in the 1970s were laid out, and that might be more of an appropriate phrase than usual, like a student hall of residence. Two storied with flat roofs which periodically wept into the building, the apartments were cells opening off long internal corridors, each an identical L-shaped room and attached to it, a lavatory, balcony and the blessing of an individual kitchen. Also leading off the corridors were separate shared bath and shower rooms. Alliances, if any, were built between neighbours, those next door or on the same landing might get to know each other in passing, later words might be exchanged. The nether ends of the building were gangrenous and foreign to those living in the middle, the middle unknown to those at the edges.
If there were long term time lapse filming of Helmshore it would reveal a regular cycle. Men would come to renovate and paint an apartment, a resident would arrive, there would be a blur as the door opened and closed many times a day, then a slowing down would occur, and some pain, and communal ambulance ferrying to the hospital, sticks and leaning on the wide supports bolted onto the sides of the corridors would give way to wheelchairs, the elderly person become increasingly confined, eventually immured, those outside would forget their faces, there would be a briefly renewed round of activity from care-workers, then death, usually in hospital after the apartment had been empty for a while. The effects would be cleared, then men would come again to paint and renovate.
Ruthless Dinners
Perhaps it was not the scriptures that she wished to scatter to the winds, but her uncomfortable relationship to them, the endless difficulty in deciphering them, in adhering to rules which were conflicting in themselves and whose results were so often unsatisfactory. Mostly scriptures seemed to deal with concepts of less. w-e was of the view that what might have been useful injunctions to curb all-powerful patriarchs as they swaggered across the deserts jangling with tents, camels and wives, was, on the whole, less useful when addressed to congregations of elderly women in fawn cardigans who had mostly given their lives to others, and were even now striving not to think of themselves, but to put others first, keep the peace and keep going. Young female persons of course, were no longer like this, which was good, but they could be unpleasantly brutal. w-e remembered sharing a house in Islington with a set of girls whose approach was ‘Its never too soon to be unfaithful’, they cooked ruthless dinners for boys they wanted to sleep with, fed them, had sex and then unkindly dispatched them. w-e often found lost boys waiting around in the kitchen, or standing outside the house with their bikes, moping.
A small picnic in the Cemetery
Beyond a soft layer of garden, Helmshore angles into the junction of two roads to the west and south, is bounded to the east by the back of a short row of shops, with flats above, and to the north by the cemetery wall and behind it storm blasted oaks.
On the last day before the hour went back, in the cemetery the golden leaves of the ancient trees were lit by late sun. It was best to walk in the cemetery because her regular walk up the hill to the duck pond was sunless at this time of day. w-e read ‘In loving memory of my wife and mother’, she was wondering idly how this might be rephrased so as to be less Oedipal, could there be punctuation, on a gravestone? She could not remember ever having seen any. The cemetery had many red notices which said ‘Danger, avoid headstones and monuments at all times’. Most of these were stuck into empty ground, nowhere near headstones, and it was not a cemetery for monuments, there were a couple of war memorials, but no people were to be seen dashing about endangered by foolish proximity to them.
At intervals there were small wooden structures, on which hung five or six watering cans with a tap nearby. A notice explained that the cans were for the use of visitors to the cemetery and asked that they be replaced. “So far so good” thought w-e, but then there was a following paragraph which gave a request for all complaints to be reported via a telephone number to the council. “What might all the complaints be? About the watering cans, their litre capacity, type and efficiency, the replacing of them or not”. The council in whose bosom Helmshore nestled, or perhaps wrestled would be more exact, was obsessed with communication to as near the absolute exclusion of any other activity as they could manage. A weekly flow of full colour statements reports and requests for feedback came through the doors of every resident, ecstatically breaking down the changes and benefits planned for the future, earnestly seeking their approval, soliciting their comments on forms, their participation in focus groups, their attendance at numerous meetings, for which transport would be provided. Sometimes a light lunch was dangled as an enticement. w-e knew from sad experience that nothing whatever would result in a practical way from these exertions. This was because the people who launched themselves into these projects invariably left the council for somewhere else just before the plans had to be carried out. The new incumbent would solicit a full report on the project and the council would roll on printing and evaluating statistical analysis of data, soliciting new and more relevant feedback until all the annual allocation of funds had been exhausted. Meanwhile no complaint could ever be addressed because there was always a committee already in the process of looking into it, and no blame could ever be levelled at those struggling so earnestly for a manifestation of the democratic ideal in which the needs of all would eventually be assessed and attended to.
Up at the other end of the cemetery she saw a man she thought was visiting the grave of a sixties’ singer, but when she came closer she saw that he had been leaving gifts at the grave next to it, five white bowls of cooked rice with chop-sticks stuck in them, and an abundance of fruit and vegetables. From the date on the stone she realised that it was the anniversary of the death. It was somehow a shocking sight, a link to prehistoric practices, thought w-e, the man could not possibly have imagined that this food was going to the beloved buried there, and yet he had been compelled to carry out the ritual, come in the car and place the things in this picnic at the foot of the grave. She could not stop and stare at him, though she would have like to, but she saw in the second of passing him that none of this was bringing him any peaceful resolution.
Maybe even in the distant past no one had believed that the food was needed, knew there was no underworld, no afterlife, but wisely kept the stories, brought the rice, the fruit the vegetables, the beads, and the amulets, because otherwise there would have been nothing to do, and doing nothing is an uncommonly difficult accomplishment to acquire.
She realised that loosing whatever it was, the habitual restrictions that narrowed experience, caused muscular contraction shortening her ligaments, made her eyes and ears close, and fully occupied her energies in observation of laws that might enable her to achieve objectives set by others, could not be done directly, because these approaches to living were so entwined within her that to stop them would be to stop living altogether. What was needed was dilution, effected through the introduction of new experience, new matter, new nourishment.
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Setting her ear
It now seemed clear to her that Death in asking her to set her ear to the great below had been referring to Inanna’s journey down through the seven gates that led to the underworld, loosing at each gate some of her powers. Or, in her own case, at each gate willingly dispersing some certainties into the darkness.
The portals she chose to fall through were words, because the process of investigating words through the world wide web would allow her to drift, open up to serendipitous, synchronistic findings far from her usual processes of classification and control. She remembered Umberto Eco’s assertion that internet sites were full of miss-information, and that too seemed to be an advantage, since it would present her with multivalent unravelling strands of obscuring and confusing information.
She would find seven words in her dictionary, look them up in Google and then follow whatever random path the words brought her along.
She used her orange 1975 reprint of the 1972 edition of Chambers with an unpleasant plastic cover which she had found with a yellow ‘please take me’ post-it note stuck on it, abandoned in the staff room of an educational institute in central London. Taking the wrist wrenching brick of it on her lap she closed her eyes, started by turning the dictionary around, then over and back, eventually opening it, placing a finger on the page, then looking down and accepting whichever word her finger landed on.
These were the words she arrived at: muller, trachyte, defuse, learn, ohone, jesserent, and language, of the seven, four were completely new to her. She felt the immediate draw to order and connect these words, make some coherent message out of them, even to feel them as ‘channelled’ to her by some spirit of the Chambers, surely no more absurd than seeing the computer as a quest companion. But she could not go on with this now, had to get dressed and go to a conference.
w-e professional life
w-e had been commissioned by publishers as a researcher for a forthcoming anthology draft title, Advice, which was to contain useful or unusual advice proffered through the ages, a mix of conflicting scholarly and folk admonitions, to be matched to persons with some public profile via academic, filmic, or political prominence, who would be ready to expound on the effect the advice had had on them. A kind of up-market celebrity fest in which the celebrated could appropriate gravitas, become enriched by the wisdoms of others. w-e’s section of this tome was to be interviews with academics.
During the coffee break at the ‘Gender in Brotherhood: Man and Mason’ conference, w-e approached one of the people on her list who was attached to a university in Scotland, he was loitering by the slide projector with a young woman from central Europe who handed w-e an embossed, engraved nineteenth century-looking calling card which announced her as a Miss Constance something so long and unfamiliar that, disabled by the excess of unexpected consonants in curly writing, w-e could not take a stab at pronouncing it, not even silently to herself, though she could see immediately that Miss Constance lived just by Claridge’s. w-e proffered her own card and turned to the academic.
“Unkempt” she thought, “not a word I have applied to anyone before” but she pushed forward through his confused aura of writhing body language and discomforting laughter. She mentioned his university. Stepping back and turning his shoulders from side to side he was dismissive, of himself and his university, “I’m not really there, well only there occasionally, thank god, godforsaken place”. She mentioned the name of his head of department, he paced about, like someone ineptly practising a Latin American dance pattern, “Oh yes, well, he is constantly pressing me to go and stay with him in Cornwall, it’s a terrible trek from the Highlands”, “unkempt, ungrateful and unwilling to travel” assessed w-e, handing him the publisher’s card.
“ Good god, Henry Trimble, I once interviewed him for a film”, he made two unkind remarks, one about Henry “an extremely nervous young man”, and one about the television studios where had met him. A person unlikely to have ever heeded advice, thought w-e and abandoned him to Miss Constance who had begun intensive eye-flashing and was saying “its very complicated, I could tell you over a drink” as w-e left for the refreshment area.
to be continued next week ….
