by Nike Sulway
18 Weeks: The Unborn Child Can Form A Fist
At first, writing in Nahum was a way of entering into Morgan’s world, but the further inside Nahum I journeyed, learning the language, the history and geography, the more he retreated from me, and from this connection with his past. At first, when your letters started coming, I could barely read the passages you wrote in Nahum. I spent hours bent over that table near St Bavo’s, trying to piece together the words, the sentences.
Months would pass during which I learned to read Nahum by studying the stories Morgan had recorded about the men of the islands – myths about their gods, fairytales they told their sons, stories and poems. You and he had discovered Nahum as boys – had forged it out of your need and imagination – but I had followed after you, a secret, distant scribe tracing the path your oars made in the ocean. Eventually, I started writing new stories as well: narrative poems and works that tested the boundaries of what you and he had created. I wanted to open a new space within the language you had made. Sometimes, I suspect, I wanted to press out from the edge of what you’d made partly because I was convinced that one day – surely – you would see that the letters and stories you received could not possibly be your brother’s work. I feared discovery, and craved it.
When I read about an author who had published a book anonymously, or under a pseudonym, and been found out, I would peer at images of them for hours. I sought out transcripts of interviews with them, reviews of their work. I pored over the interviews, wondering if we were alike. If the desire to speak without being known had some private and essential core, some central essence that might reveal me to myself. If speaking without being known released me into some freer and more perfect form of expression. The more I wrote to you, the more I felt constrained by the need to be the creature I had created. In the end, this is why the letters stopped, and the stories began.
Not to make the deception deeper, but to try to escape its limitations.
The first book I wrote for you was a cycle of narrative poems: The Box of Beautiful Things. It was a poetic motet with two parts: the cantus firmus followed by the discantus supra librum, or the descant. I wrote it in this form because I knew that your mother had taught you both about music, and that music had been a defining connection between you. Morgan often played Saint-Saëns’s Ave Verum in D, a keyboard reduction of the four-part motet, in the mornings. The women’s voices stepping through the tragedy of the Eucharistic hymn, buoyed up by the sombre suck and lift of the horn and organ. He often hummed along with the parts, or sang the words under his breath while he made coffee. His heavy male voice lengthening and deepening the sounds, as though longing the true body of Christ into being. Though Box was not an echo of the Ave Verum, the notion of the true body – of the living, breathing, actual body of the hymn – informed my ideas about trying to capture something real through the prism of a false identity, a false – or at least synthetic – language, and a created culture. Each poem in the cantus firmus of Box was concrete. Actual. Not in form, but in the use of language. Like the verum corpus of Christ in the hymn, and the paintings of objects Morgan admired – the ordinary objects of ordinary lives – my poems were about things in and of themselves. Fish and stones, houses, children, churches, keys, a glass of water. A pair of shoes. This seemed like a simple idea at first, but the more I worked on it, the more difficult it became.
The difficulty lay in getting language – any language – to say anything without being false. Everything I wrote was a shadow of the thing I wrote about: a shape more insubstantial but greater, too. Wide, dark, flowing out across the surface of the ornamented world.
A poem about a child is not a child. You cannot put your arms around it, or smell its milk-sweet breath. It cannot grow or change or leave you. I wrote about the snow. About the weather. About birds and babies, fish and spiders. I worked hard to demonstrate that all these things lived, in the body, in the world, as we live – as I live – not only as languages and ideas, but as creatures formed of wind and flesh and love.
I felt that the first cycle of poems was an articulation of the failure to be actual, and in some sense any beauty they retained was the beauty of a kind of ebullient, naïve hope. They were beautiful in the way my father’s birthday cakes were beautiful: lopsided, lumpen, gestures towards something he would never be able to articulate or achieve.
The second cycle of poems in The Box of Beautiful Things was the antithesis of the first. While the poems of the cantus firmus describe the things of the world and human life – the body with its cavities and flows – the poems of the descant are about ephemera and improvised beauty. In a motet, the descant is a voice removed from the others that sing, rising up over them, soaring like a light-blown cloud – traditionally, it was improvised. A hymnal scat. Literally, the descant is the discantus supra librum: the voice above the book.
I reduced and reduced this section, filling up as little of each page as possible. Allowing for decay, for loss, for the lack of certitude. I wrote about the ice formations on the dyke outside our building, the shadows of clouds on the grass and on water, of echoes, flames and light. I wrote poems that recorded the way light touched the earth. The flat, breathy light exuded by early morning air. The way a slope of grass looks greener in a particular late light, as bright as if washed by summer rain. Whenever I fell down into using language like this – the poet’s language of imagistic comparison – I fed the pages to the fire and started again, working to resist analogy, metaphor, simile. To speak only in concrete terms. Resisting the knowledge that language itself has only an analogous relationship to the world: trying to find or give birth to the verum corpus of Nahum.
Writing is a dangerous, hallucinatory process. Too often, I convinced myself that I could declare what a thing actually is, that I could escape the proliferation of meaning that comes through metaphor.
This is like this: this is this. A word is an apple, a song, a leaf.
Increasingly, even as I wrote, I became aware of the certainty that I would fail to escape the limits of language’s ability to speak about anything true. The terms within any analogy, any linguistic correspondence between the world and the remembered world, the written world, are never thoroughly parallel. I began to think that perhaps the answer lay not in attempting to collapse the distance between words and things, between the term and its metaphor, but in opening up the distance between them, cantilevering them apart, evolving not towards convergence and stable equivalence, but towards divergence and diversification. Accepting that language is expressive rather than precise. That there is endless variability within and between words, which have a tendency to dilate and contract, to oscillate between meanings, to slide into obscurity, to snap and give.
I began to accept that perhaps it was necessary to accept the transience, the mobility, of language, its tendency to evolve, its monstrousness. Not to write that the sun is like an orange – round, warm, sustaining, familiar – but that it is like a stone, or a sword or a spoon. To make language strange. No, not that. To recognise that language is already strange, as are we who live within its seams.
When I sent that first book to you, it was partly just to have another person in the world who might understand what I was attempting, and might enter into a conversation about that work with me. Of course, I lied, pretending I was Morgan, and that the stories I had written rose up out of a shared childhood that I had never been a part of and which, of course, was never made to accommodate a woman.
At first, I expected to be discovered almost immediately. It never occurred to me that you would not see through my mask. Morgan was so secretive, so damaged, so strange, it was difficult to believe I knew enough about him to fool you, who had been his childhood companion, who had slept and suckled alongside him, and built the islands of Nahum with him – syllable by syllable. The trick, I found, more by accident than by design, was to maintain my secrecy as if it was his: to be circumspect and remote, and to refuse to allow you the intimacy you sometim
es desired.
It was a cruel game. I was cruel. And it was crueller still to continue with the deception after we became lovers. To hold you apart from me, and to continue to allow you and Solange to believe that it was Morgan who had written those letters and stories. Morgan who had reached out to you.
But what choice did I have? If I told you the truth, I would lose you, and you would lose the illusion of your brother’s affection, and his forgiveness. While I continued to withhold the truth, you would never know who Morgan became, or how thoroughly he rejected his family, his past. You would not know him, but you would not have to lose him again, either. Or have to grieve, once more, his loss.
Nevertheless, while I withheld the truth, you could never truly know me and could not, therefore, truly love me, though I kept you for a little while, and felt the distant shadow of being loved.
During the last few months, I lay in the dark, feeling our child tumble in my body. This much, at least, is true. I am your lover. This is your child. This gesture of my breath, my body, reaching across to touch and hold you: this is true. Your flesh on my flesh. Your flesh in my flesh, growing, turning.
This much is true. This much you can keep.
30 Weeks: Eyes That Can Open
Morgan knew, of course, that after I gave up working with wood, I took up words. I wrote poems and stories; my great dream became the perfectly ordinary one of being a novelist. It was one of the things he least understood about me. We had argued – long and often – about the function of art. Its purpose and usefulness as propaganda, as consciousness-raising, as educational.
He had been unable to tolerate my work as a sculptor. He saw the works I created as merely decorative. ‘What point is there in expressing yourself?’ he said. ‘What purpose does that serve in anyone else’s life? These birds that can’t fly, that are just pretty expressions of your pathetic mourning for your dead father. No matter how many artist’s statements you write about the symbolism of birds, he’ll never read them. He’ll never tell you that you’re right. He’s dead, for fuck’s sake; he’ll never forgive you for leaving him to die alone while you were off fucking some stranger in Mexico. The dead don’t know how to forgive. It’s the living you should be worried about.’
‘It’s the only thing I know how to do,’ I said.
‘Learn something else,’ he said.
For a few years we travelled together, giving our time to various causes, trying to find a way to make a difference. I was a human shield, a builder, a teacher. I handed out food to the starving, dug graves, drove buses, built wells, planted seeds. We walked beside the injured, sat down to eat with them in temporary camps on the edges of deserts, in slums and tenements. We listened to, and recorded, the stories of the people we met. In the end, it was those stories that gave me something to do. Not just to do, but to occupy the space that had been evacuated by my art. I could work – I wanted to work towards change – but I needed something else as well. Something for myself, I suppose, but also something to soften Morgan’s vision of the future.
I wasn’t as pure as Morgan, who believed he had emptied himself of personal desire and urged me to do the same. Despite his demands, I couldn’t be what he expected. His purity of purpose, of intent, was exhausting. I needed rest, and dreams. Morgan’s hope was pure and unadorned: he was a political animal, shorn of ornament. He was content to dream of a future in which people had enough to sustain their bodies, and no more. In his dreams there was no need for stories, or art. The women of the future never wore jewellery, or pinned flowers in their hair. The men of the future had no need for poems, or games. Their children’s toys were spades and ploughs, preparations for the simple futures into which they would be released.
Morgan dreamed of houses – of things foursquare and practical –while I dreamed of homes. Stained-glass windows. Rooms filled with books of poetry and art. Cushions and flowers, linen napkins, soft sheets, beautiful clothes. Sandals as well as boots. Cake as well as bread.
I began to write stories, about the past and the future. About what we had seen, sometimes, but largely about the things that lay beneath our experience of the real world. The early pieces I wrote were not about the men of Nahum, but the men and women of the world. They were portraits – uneasy, slipshod things – of what we had seen. Sometimes Morgan made an uneasy peace with my writing, so long as what he read of it reflected a clear and overt political agenda. He was comfortable with reportage, and with stories that made icons of the men, women and children whose despair we had witnessed. I was careful, mostly, to write such things, and to leave them on my desk at night in place of the things I hid from him.
The Nahum stories I kept in a plastic bag submerged in the cistern of the toilet. Sometimes, even when he was awake, I stole into the bathroom and turned on the shower. While the water ran, I pulled them out, unrolled them and sat on the floor to write. Other times I went to the bathroom before I left the house, took out the work and buried it beneath the other things in my bag so that I could go out and work on it for longer periods. Hours lost in dreams of that remote archipelago, and of you, their reader.
One morning, I woke in the dark in our apartment in Haarlem. A light rain blurred the windows. I got up and made coffee, silently as always, and took the cups out to the table. Morgan stood with his back to me while I lit the fire. When it was done, when the flames had taken hold and I rose to take my place at the table and begin working, he placed the wet plastic bag on the table.
Water dripped from the bag onto the false work I had left out for him. It ran in rivulets across the timber, onto the carpet. He tore open the bag and took out the rolled pages, placing them on top of the bag. Quietly – so quietly – as though he were talking to a small, disobedient child, he asked me to burn it all, everything I had done so far. He said it was time for me to stop fooling myself, to stop trying to believe that it mattered, my writing, that it could change anything.
I didn’t move. He came around the table, picked up my papers, notebooks and folders and brought them to me. The new work – the Nahum work – sliding about on top. He piled the whole mess up on the bricks of the hearth. ‘Burn it,’ he said, and then he went back to the window and stood looking out at our garden. He waited, patiently, peering at the tall stone walls that surrounded the garden, at the narrow path, the snails and tulips, weeds and stones. The washing line with its bright plastic pegs. ‘What a waste,’ he said. ‘All that time wasted on this crap. Who have you saved? What have you changed? Whose life has ever been saved by your fucking words? Who has been fed by them, clothed, housed? Which poems have sopped up the blood of the wounded?’
I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him that his life had been saved. That he had been fed and clothed and housed in my writing. And that, in one sense, he had also been remade as the author of these works.
Instead, I knelt and fed the fire. I watched the words darken, then the pages turning from yellow to brown before the flames took hold. I could feel him watching my reflection in the glass – but I tried to save what I could. I slid some pages under the lounge, buried a few more in a pile of magazines on the side table. I tucked a notebook into the waistband of my pants, beneath my jumper and shirt, but most of it I burned. Two years of work, at least. I fed the fire slowly, like a baby or an invalid crabbed with arthritis, watching each page burn to ash before adding another. After I had burnt about a third of the work, I said I was cold and went to the bedroom to get a sweater. I put the notebook at the back of a shelf at the top of the wardrobe, beneath the spare blankets. I felt like a thief. My mouth was dry. I sat on the bed, fastening the buttons of my cardigan with long pauses, like somebody the police have come for. I waited for him to change his mind, but he didn’t; finally, I went back out to the main room and knelt by the fire and lifted up another page.
Ant’s dream throws its arms around him and drags him into the water. For a moment, he knows where he is – in his bed, in his home, in his country – and then the dream flo
ods into him like a wild tide. He dreams his brother’s dreams. Opens his fists and lets them come in because the creature is there and he can not bear not to see her terrible, lovely face. He feels the weight of her footstep in the forecourt of his heart and opens the door. What else can he do? The wind rushes in, the sea with all its storms, bearing the broken pieces of another man’s dreams. Here she is. Here. The long weeds twist in the current, forming a spiral, a circle, then a crown beneath which is her face, her dark mouth singing to him, pimpling his bones, pricking his flesh. She puts her claws and teeth through his skin, scratches at the bone. Her black, black eyes wax in the light. She swims through his bones, twisting between the ribs, spooling in his pelvis like an eel, collecting the mossed knuckles of his spine, his toes, and threading them on a tangle of old fishing line …
Behind me, I heard him cough impatiently. I folded the page closed, offered it to the fire. The back of the page bore a small sketch of an island, and a boat. I tried to remember the sentences I had written but already they were spreading apart like the strings of a cast net. I could recall a few words, but there were enormous gaps. The words called to each other across an empty hallway, each a child in a separate room. Their voices were thick with sleep and dark. As the night deepened fewer of them spoke. There were long silences. One called out, seeking connection and comfort, but was not answered. In the dark room it turned away, curled up on itself, and slept.
‘It’s done,’ I said, rising to my feet, glancing at his work still waiting on the table: the small black notebook on top of three folders of printouts, photocopies, pictures and notes. Would he ask me to burn it, too? Would I be able to? I pulled the cardigan around my body, careful not to make the pages tucked into my shirt crackle. Would he want to hold me now, comfort me for the loss he had demanded? My stomach clutched. If he found these pages he would know I had hidden more of them. Beneath the blankets was a stupid hiding place. Obvious. It would be the first place he looked. I wondered how to get the pages free of my clothes, how to get the notebook out from the cupboard, and then where to hide them. The apartment felt so small, suddenly, so devoid of hiding places.