Funereal
I also dream about my mother’s funeral. One time for instance I was in some kind of ‘funeral waiting area’. Holding my Uncle Pete’s hand. I don’t recall ever having done that in real life – when he was alive. Then I became aware that my father was in front of us. He’d started walking ahead. The route was awkward. There were various obstacles. The detritus of some social event from the previous night. A pint glass on a doorstep. Other items in a box. Clothes strewn. We proceeded with difficulty. Stopping and turning with no one to direct us. Then we were in the church itself. My father was sitting alone at the back. I told him he should go to the front. He seemed pleased at being reminded he could do this. But still he moved only one row forward. I sat down next to him. I saw that he hadn’t shaved for several days. Unlike him: he was not a man for stubble. But at the same time he looked very well. Except that he was crying. Then I realised he was crying with joy. He was remembering early days with my mother. In the dream I knew this: I could read his mind. He was beaming through the tears. And now I saw with a swelling wave of happiness that it would be possible to ask him to reminisce. To tell me just a few of the marvellous memories he must have of my mother.
Then I woke up. Or the world woke up. The immediate feeling: bereftness. Bereft of my uncle bereft of his brother. My father bereft of my mother. Bereft of the memories he had of her and about which it had never occurred to me to ask. But also the faint irreversible crest: that feeling of being in the wake of a world-changing wave.
Of another dream I jotted down:
My mother’s funeral. Somewhere in central London. One of my old school friends due. I haven’t seen him in decades. One of the boys who used to come to our house in Cheam and spend his time in conversation with my mother. Like others he found in her both comfort and inspiration. Vital time out from a ‘broken home’ as it used to be called. But he and I became estranged. I’m not happy about the prospect of this reunion. But he doesn’t show up. Then I’m in a rush. I’m using a wheelchair. Racing a busload of others along Embankment en route to the British Museum. I stop at some benches. There is a raised dais with various old folk sitting about and a young prankster who appears intent on winding them up. Here I remove my contact lenses. The lens solution is black. Everyone at the benches is going or returning to where I’m headed – the ancient Egyptian and related exhibits. Mummies.
A dream becomes memoir. It becomes the recording of its memory. It also becomes in the sense of suiting: memoir aspires to the dream. I should have annotated at the time with more clarity and care. Sometimes a dream is like a ‘found object’. As in the one about the oversized antiquated sewing machine trundling down the street. At other times it is little more than a feeling of something mysterious missed. Irrevocable. A night cavity. Like the eerie dip in the ground in the field just behind my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse at North Berwick. So close to destroying the building. Caused by a Luftwaffe pilot offloading on his flight back to Germany after dropping bombs on Edinburgh. I am dismayed not so much by the obscurity of the dream as by my incompetence in recording it. As if by scribbling ‘Mummies’ at the end I had captured it all. The memory of a dream cannot be filed away for future consultation under the heading of a single word.
Coleridge remarks in one of his notebooks on ‘the non-existence of Surprize in sleep’ but the same cannot be said of the experience of writing down a dream. Writing down? Or up? Or across? The parallels with doing a crossword flicker into view. Surprises lie in wait everywhere. The dreamer accepts the desire for the dream to be remembered. It will be a memoir of the dream. The least pause in transcription can be fatal as Cleopatra. As faithful. Or as fateful. It is supposed to be a strict Platonic relationship. In other words a singular kind of non-relationship. But the dream is seductive. As alluring as salad days. It keeps showing its back above the element it lives in. The dream shows its appreciation of being remembered – with every word the waker writes. And with every word it asks: ‘Not know me yet?’ It invites pinching and being pinched. Pinching and desiring. Salt of the earth. The more the dreamer submits the greater the prize. The dream prises open and surprises without end.
Mummies. What is that conclusion about? It might be just a reference to the embalmed dead bodies in the British Museum. Or a misspelled exclamation (the sort my mother herself was capable of) identifying what belongs to my mother: Mummy’s! (And thus a return to the beginning: My mother’s funeral…) It might be a one-word telegram meant to condense all the different possible denotations and connotations that the dream evokes. Today or in the future. However construed the dream says: the funeral never takes place just once.
Why did I not speak at my mother’s funeral? It was spring. The village churchyard was packed with daffodils. Far more people came than I’d ever expected. My father gave no tribute. It didn’t occur to me to ask why not. Grief hard as a brick. Across the congregation there were pockets of shock at the size of the event. Several individuals expressed their amazement. Others their lack of it. She was a popular woman your mother… A lot of people were very fond of her… Natural such a big turnout… As the grave was being filled a heavy rain began to fall and it was necessary to retreat. Next morning as I set out on the journey back to the other end of the country there was once again bright spring sunshine. As I drove down the lane and approached the church I felt impelled to stop to look at the flowers on the grave. My four-year-old son exclaimed from the back-seat: Oh no! We’re not going to see Granny’s funeral again?
What would life be like if funerals could be repeated? Ghosts of the real in the funereal. Groundhog Day from the other side. Instead of working out how to steal a load of money or get someone to fall in love with you everyone would work again with increasing candour and articulacy to share the unbearable event. There would be a tribute from the father and the son and every other member of the family and in due course every person in the congregation who wanted to remember and share. Memories would return in steady ebbs and thought-pools one morning after another. People’s capacities for eloquence would intensify. All the sweetness of remembrance would be compacted into this single afternoon day after day coming back. Everybody would go to bed shattered with exhaustion and next morning: Awake! Time to attend the funeral again. The congregation would become ever more mellifluous in singing. The renditions of ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Jerusalem’ would grow each day more accomplished and affecting. An unknown lone piper would find his way into the scene and play ‘Amazing Grace’ on the hill beyond the church. Elsewhere a phonographic glass rendering of ‘The Lea-Rig’. There would be rushes of loving laughter in the service at memories of the gifts of grace and playfulness of the woman brought back in tribute after tribute. Humorous colloquialisms would flare like fireworks along the pews. The vicar would become defenceless. Even though he never knew her. Come to her through the mourning of music laughter anecdotes and reminiscences he would find himself in a state of absolute euphoria stripped of all religion.
Trap
Keep your trap shut my mother liked to say. It’s another of the idioms that distinguishes hers from the language of my father. He would never use such a phrase. He would never say anything to anyone else about their silence or their loquacity. For the majority of his life my father seemed devoted to keeping his trap shut. Did he think about speaking at his wife’s funeral? Or did the idea never cross his mind? This is as mysterious to me as the idea that he never dreamt. Is it possible to go to bed every night for decades and never remember anything that occurred in the land of shut-eye? Or did he have dreams as vivid and powerful as anyone’s but choose to keep his trap shut? He was one of the most reserved people on earth. He had an inner calm at times more discombobulating than any outward agitation could be.
The lane up to the cottage from the church was winding and single-track. There were just a few passing-places. My father knew very well where they were. It was not uncommon while driving up or down the lane to have to stop for a delivery van ap
proaching too fast in the other direction. Sometimes there would be the makings of a confrontation. The other driver needed just to back up a few yards. Whereas my father knew that he himself would be required to reverse along a fair stretch including two blind bends in order to get to the nearest passing-place. So he would sit at the wheel placid as the strange Buddhist he was. If the man in the van did not take action the waiting game could last for some time. But then my father would get out of his car and stroll over to the other driver’s window and deliver with great deliberation and numerous pauses a humble but magisterial maxwellian oration explaining that if in fact this fellow road-user would care to take the trouble to put his motor into reverse gear and back up a short distance he would very soon arrive at a space adjacent to the hedgerow quite satisfactory for the rather brief period of time required for my father to be able without further ado to galvanise his own vehicle into action and drive past. Such was my father’s mild and gentle manner that he never encountered any opposition or unpleasantness in these situations.
I suspect that it was not so much the softness of his speech as the silences he injected into it. He would start a statement then stop. A word or phrase could come. Or not. Just as his usual response to any question was a maxwellian Hmm that might grow to inordinate length and lead anywhere or nowhere. The latent logic seemed to be that it would be better if he and indeed everyone else could just keep their trap shut. Michel de Montaigne writes somewhere: I have never met a man who does not say more than he should rather than less. Montaigne never met my father.
My mother by contrast was like Montaigne himself. An endless generator of speech. In herself and in others. An ever unpredictable borrower of the stories and experiences of others. The designation of mouth as trap is sublime. I don’t know how many times I heard her use the phrase before I began to understand what she was saying. Keep your trap shut mingles in my memory with the Venus flytraps we tried to keep when we were young. A plant as challenging to tend as any animal. We tried positioning it on the windowsill for maximum warmth and sunlight. We tried not to feed it too often. We tried not to water it too much or too little. But this plant proved very resistant to cohabiting with us. It would wilt and die and we would have to acquire another. No doubt we should have let it keep its trap shut more often. But my brother and I were smitten by carnivorous curiosity. We wanted to feed it a fly whenever the thought came into our heads.
It would have been good advice to the old woman who swallowed one. The distinctive disagreeableness of a fly alighting in one’s mouth. ‘Keep your trap shut’ recalls the old British wartime propaganda ‘Careless talk costs lives’. And like so many of my mother’s everyday sayings it continues to resonate. There are plenty of bad silences. There are compelling reasons why people should talk. But in their very volubility Montaigne and my mother have a point. What if we spent more time keeping our traps shut? What if – as we keep them shut – we think about what we are doing and try in a concerted way to do something with that? What if alongside or beyond the ‘talking cure’ we hearken more to the creative energy of a psychoanalyst’s silence? Why is silence so rare? What are people so scared of? What about the value of silence in schools and universities? Why should there not be courses – in the sciences as well as the humanities – devoted to the benefits of keeping one’s trap shut? I imagine Montaigne and my mother at work together compiling a list of ‘Learning Outcomes’.
The word ‘mouth’ trips off the tongue. To have a mouth would seem an inalienable human right. But in the World According to Humorous Colloquialism no one would have such a thing. Everyone would have a trap and be encouraged to see it as that. You no sooner open than you’ve fallen into it. You trap yourself. You let yourself be programmed. You let language trap you.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s I got interested in what was called ‘theory’. And so too therefore did my mother. On occasion I would read aloud to her from an essay by Blanchot or Foucault or Derrida or Lacan. But more often I tried to explain what I thought they were talking about and why. Her nodding smile and blue eyes lighting up were essential to my making sense of it. ‘Theory’ always seemed an absurd name. These texts were about thinking and doing everything anew. Desire and identity. Language and literature. Education and society. I talked to her with heady enthusiasm one evening about Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses: the idea that family and school and TV and church and so on are ways of controlling people – their identity and their thoughts. Their beliefs and behaviour. The concept of ISAs now seems almost quaint. Today’s ‘culture of surveillance’ is so much richer and more varied. And while Foucault was with feverish and magnificent intensity making possible so many new kinds of ‘history of the present’ other forces were doing away with any need for ‘society’ altogether. There’s no such thing as society as Margaret Thatcher would sum up in 1987. There are individual men and women and there are families. The ongoing catastrophe of global capitalism is the remorseless and grotesque expansion of such claims.
But in my mind’s eye the 1980s are one long Wimbledon singles final: Margaret Thatcher vs. Kathleen McAdam. It is a very dilated drawn-out sultry stultifying day. The umpire is Creepy. An African gray parrot who belonged to my Uncle Pete in the Cotswolds. He’s only there for the seeds. And of course fair play. Fault! he cries. Creepy wants there to be tennis. My mother wants there to be tennis. Second service. But Milk Snatcher just seems intent on inflicting on the audience as much as possible of her voice. Her toxic self-conviction by gradual degrees makes the grass turn yellow. She tries non-stop to interfere with play. She shows no respect for Creepy. She patronises the ball boys. She vents venom on all sides. First and last on the enemies within herself. My mother responds with top-drawer stuff at every point. Quick-asa- flash sumptuous colloquialisms with top-spin. Brilliant backspun sliced puns. Here a hilarious put-down backhand smash. There a delicious drop shot. Laughing-to-tears lobs. Breathtaking down-the-lines. A final passing shot. A communications ace. My mother plays lawn tennis in the world according to humorous colloquialism. The Iron Lady is dressed for the occasion but can’t play tennis to save her life. Or anyone else’s. She’s the grocer’s daughter who wants to play shop but is just trying to serve herself. She knows she is self-serving but she doesn’t know which end of the racket to hold. Or what the racket is that’s holding her. Double fault! cries the African gray. Purse up those plummy rotten lips. Match point. Keep your trap shut. Quiet please! Margaret Thatcher appears to have walked off with the trophy but everyone watching knows that whatever future of society there may be rests with the spirit and wit of Kathleen McAdam.
Autobiography
The innumerable evenings spent in peaceful Devon pubs. The names of the villages are a sort of music in themselves: Colyton Wilmington Sutton Barton Dalwood Axmouth. My mother would have a bitter lemon or a tonic water or a cup of coffee and I would have a pint and a half of beer or lager – the legal limit for me as the driver. And we’d smoke like chimneys. We’d talk about anything but be just as much at ease not speaking. Sometimes I’d have written some fiction and we’d find a discreet corner of the bar and I’d read aloud to her. In our pub-going there was an element of ritual in keeping with her father in his final years wearing his jacket and flat cap as he sloped off alone to The Harrow for a Guinness or two. I never thought of that at the time but she must have done so. My brother and her father and her mother and my father and others were also there with us in the pub. No: there’s no such thing as ‘individual men or women’. There are ghosts and dreams of listeners.
The critic Mary Jacobus has suggested that ‘autobiography comes into play on the basis of a missing mother’. I encountered this idea just after my mother died. I was asked to give a lecture on Wordsworth’s The Prelude. His autobiographical poem (sub-titled ‘The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’) is supposed to be about his mother. Ann Cookson Wordsworth died when William was seven years old. Of the thousands of lines of blank verse that make up The Prelude only tw
o refer to her in an explicit way:
Early died
My honoured mother, she who was the heart
And hinge of all our learnings and our loves.
When I’d read The Prelude in the past I had taken note of the heart and the love but not so much the hinge and the learning. While preparing my lecture on ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ I also came across something Adam Phillips says in his book about D. W. Winnicott: ‘the mind is a mother, a process of self-care based on mothering’. In the weeks following my mother’s death I felt a strong compulsion to write some ‘story of my life’. I had no idea how to go about it. I was forty-five years old and had always thought the very idea of autobiography impossible. You couldn’t write such a thing unless you’d come to the end of your life. How could I be contemplating an autobiography? Montaigne observes: ‘If I have only one hour’s work to do before I die, I am never sure I have enough time to finish it.’ Death never comes on time. Neither does autobiography. The thing, as Jacobus puts it, comes into play. I had to write.
Mother Page 13