Signs of Age
The years since I was a small child have passed like a dream. When I look at myself for signs—at my mirror or my hands—there is nothing fresh to notice. No new lines on my palm; perhaps several on the backs of my hands. Where the thumb meets the body of the hand there’s a crease that looks sharper when I waggle my thumb than it was: sharper and deeper, and the skin folding up. As for my face—there’s nothing; nothing to tell I’m older and in despair that I might never reach anything at all, let alone achieve. There is, perhaps, something. The fold over my eyes which leads down to my eyelids, seems to be not so full and plumped out as it was: it seems the curve is almost there but some slight amount of flesh underneath has gone.
Imagination is busy, looking for signs.
When the exams are over, I’ve resolved to spend some time with my parents instead of either working or being out all the time enjoying myself or competing in things.
Thoughts of Colin
How does he do the things he has to do, with such small hands?
Why is his skin so fine and so soft?
Are men’s necks meant to be places so desirable to kiss?
Are they meant for a woman’s lips to linger on, to camp there?
How can a man’s foot be attractive to a female?
Do other women hear music and singing at the movement of a man’s wrist?
Is a man’s palm meant to be fine and strong, pink and soft, all at the same time?
When he talks to me he touches each word, and each word touches me.
When I am near him his smell, the smell of his skin, starts a thin thread of feeling that travels right down from my chest to my clitoris.
Have other women kissed the ground where a man has trod?
His kiss is sometimes chaste and open, but always golden. On the bed it begins by seeming white, but as his body penetrates mine, his kiss turns transparent gold. At each approach and part withdrawal, his kiss goes through this change—turning white, then golden and transparent as he comes further into me.
He, not just his body, penetrates me, not just my body.
My beautiful young man, talk in your dreams to me.
I think about him. I wish I knew who he is, and where to find him. Sometimes I feel so empty, thinking about him, that the world looks bare and has no color. I feel so lonely. I can’t stop thinking about him; he fills my head.
Tonight I sat up and wrote a poem to him.
Gentle invader of my heart and ways
leave me some neutral space unconquered
for myself. Since you remain a depth
I may not fathom, you must rest content
to know that tangled uninviting thickets
mined areas, precipices, exist
in this no-man’s-land it would be foolish to enter.
Better we both respect the boundaries
we find than try to stumble on the hidden
final mystery that separates
you from me and me from what is mine.
And to this careful, fearful skirmishing
and reverent warfare, bring the love you are.
Actually, I didn’t mean all that. I’d be satisfied if I could find him, then have him near me—his flesh and bones and voice—every time I wanted him to be.
My Tunnel of Inertia
The examinations passed in a blur. I know I did well. After the years of wondering, it seems absurd that I was ever not completely confident. All that is needed now is to wait.
If only my heart didn’t feel so dry and empty. The touch that boy gave me, the response in me that had been waiting for it, my helplessness to resist the feelings that flooded up inside me, have given me a new direction; my eyes are no longer entirely on living up to others’ expectations. But nothing is strong enough to drive me to action.
My tunnel of inertia is filled with blobs of half-heavy things that move up and down and obstruct each other, defying me and the laws of gravity, and these are evasions and excuses and paranoias.
(All my life I have had a feeling that I am not wholly real, not complete; that I am waiting for something to be added to me. But is that thing my ambition—or is it love?)
Mother’s Monument
Today I found what mother was writing. I had come across a list of her sexual intercourse occasions, with descriptions, written up in diaries labeled S. There was one diary for each year since she had started to fuck at fifteen. There were no blank days; when she missed her exercise, as she called it in the diaries, she explained why and how it came about and what she thought of it and him and the situation, the feelings she had expected to have, wanted to have and had been denied, those she would have if she were denied again.
The main discovery was that in the piles of notebooks, all the paper tied and clipped and sewn, the subject was her life and feelings before my conception. At the stage she had reached, she had only just decided to think around the question of whether she would decide to have a baby. There were some notes, though, to be added later, on the subject of my conception. They confirmed what I overheard when I was so very young. All the words, the emotions, summed her anticipations.
There were descriptions of the appearance and the personality of a baby she might have, if she had one. There were a number of differences in these descriptions, but the central unwavering opinion she had was that, when it came, it would be special. It meant me. One passage ran: “Even though I have been screwed four thousand one hundred and seventeen times, or rather, on that number of occasions, I know that my baby will be an amazing child.”
What sort of mother would she become when she realized I was here? I shouldn’t say that, because she loved me. It was all there in the notes.
Though she had never liked or even noticed kids, the first sight of me had done it: she had loved me from that moment, the feeling fading as I got older and moved around more, finally leaving her when I was able to go out unsupervised.
The movement of her love and her feelings was mostly a paper movement.
I saw only the papers available to me there on the table, the most recent ones, and all I read accounted for her feelings as she was preparing to decide about me. I had one look into the older notes. She was a girl of eleven then, searching for an answer to the question: Who am I? Now, at forty-three she was still looking for the answer.
Yet it was a monument of love, though made of paper. I was all there, in anticipation.
What a pity I have no way of knowing her. Yet what good would that do? I would probably be more sorry for her than I am now.
I can see her, bent over her papers—this is a little after nine—always bending over that desk, always concentrating. I feel like writing something about her.
MOTHER
She is a little tired tonight; the slight
of the long-dead whisper re-forms; no storms
forget their original targets, regrets
never fail to return; the trail
of the lightning leads inevitably
back to the first scar.
Those prone—there is no shelter from those shafts—
retire. Their glory was illusion; there is no shame
attaching to certain defeat. Clashing
the broken pieces—shards, tears
brittle as sharp glass—
in the hand, the blood remembers.
And remembers the bright mornings that never were,
nor ever
should be; the comforts invisible, the light intense
that seeks a surface anywhere, in places
always elsewhere. Fall content,
who wake up bruised from dreams
and dream you still sleep.
(Why is it that when I try to write a poem the thing comes out more like poems I’ve read and less like the truth of what I’m writing about? I don’t really think and speak like that. When I think, I’m in a state of—innocence, perhaps—about the world, and all is fresh and new and strange.)
Why didn’
t I ask more questions? I wish I knew more about her; why she shut herself in. Was there a change neither father nor she told me of?
The Book Burners
I went with my father to watch the late shopping at the shoppingtown.
An artist held a large audience while he painted black branches on gaunt trees and stippled willow leaves over a creek with an old shaving brush. The roughnut Frees, men and women, stood enthralled. The prices scaled from fifty to two hundred, but the glib eighteenth-century beauty he placed on the canvas was too rich and meaningful for them.
Shopping people led round vegetables on leads of leather, raffia; books walked and waddled round on the tiled mosaic floor; old people towed lighted stoves to keep them warm if they felt a moment’s chill; a wealthy woman had a man in tow to hold her array of books so that when she felt like it she could stop and have him hold them up and she could read a few sentences and walk on.
Books without visible means of support were corralled in a corner of shoppingtown and burned at the end of every month. The lust of the public for fire and destruction took a particular lift from the burning of books, symbols of their personal failings and defeats while in the machine of childhood.
Near the Tiki Bar I saw them chained, having fallen from the tables of disgrace where they sold three for a dollar.
Surfers late from the beach, still with their boards leaning against shopfronts, helped make a fire in a waste tin, and threw copies of Marx and Frank Harris on the flames. The fire was no good, though, and some books easily jumped out, springing up fiercely from the ground, and biting at the surfers’ pinkly-blue shins. (It had got cold.)
“The only way!” shouted a helper, a thick Dutch person. “The only way! They must be clubbed! Club them to death!” And he laid about him with a wrench of antique design.
Several vagrant books loitered further and further away from the battle, trying to sidle round the corner toward the stair exit to the basement parking area. Copies of William Burroughs and Hemingway, in chains, propped themselves dejectedly by a door.
“Get the porn!” shouted an elderly shopper. “Hard porn, leather porn, plastic porn, steel porn, fashion porn, electronic porn, medical porn—get the lot!”
Surfers, shoppers, secretaries, onlookers, librarians, failed motorists, cripples selling cheap pens, mothers, tourists, trippers, travelers attracted by the violence, came and bashed the books. Admittedly some of the books had been disorderly and drunk, shouting bad things in the public ear, some had been anaesthetized by years of careless thinking, some were abusive, some dishonest, disloyal, some badly written, some with blurred photographs, some with nothing between the covers but photographs.
Jane Austen, with the help of a book of do-it-yourself porn, made a run for it and got under the swing doors of the Tiki Bar and escaped.
My father, always on the alert for the genuine, had something to say about book burners.
“You can see those idiots aren’t used to burning books. Look at them,” he said disparagingly.
“The way they use the wrist, see? No flexibility, no grace. The way they stand. Stance is one of the features of the judging for competitors in any book burning. The head should be high, but slightly inclined. The aim should never be perfect—that shows less passion than enough. The expression should not be complete joy or unwavering ferocity, but an alternating play of the two, together with a resigned, almost saintly expression. The real aficionados build a conical fire, do the correct training, take exercises and the recommended diet, as do those in international competition. At the last Olympics I saw the fires, in rows, all burning at once. Thrilling. They hold that event at night, for crowd purposes, and photograph it for judging at leisure. The only thing that detracted from it was that they took account of each competitor’s attitude and contribution to the event as a spectacle. I favor the idea of the competitor as an individual; he should not even notice the presence of other book burners.”
Those who smiled and approved book burning were a pitiful sight: they were the failures and the grotesques of our society, the members of Tea Drinkers clubs, rubberites, Footwear Associations, Pedestrian clubs, Anti-Trouser people, Cystitis clubs, Street Decor unions, Park watchers, Open Space Rangers, the neighborhood Tax forces, Alternative Accountants, Shadow Solicitors, amateur architects, noise investigators, professors of flower arrangement, cane products consultants, pore closers and lymph drainers, brick cleaners, personal cleanliness commissioners, and the Changelings.
To me the most pathetic sight was the oldest books, secondhand, dog-eared and faded, going to their death without a sound.
And the firelight danced
In the eyes of the free.
As we were leaving I caught sight of a small red glow—a campfire—and half a circle of black people sitting round the fire, clutching spears. The other half of the circular group must have existed somewhere in another dimension of the Aquarium Supplies and Powdered Fish shop. As I stopped to watch, part of a shower of rain descended through the Acousti-Damper ceiling and wet the black backs, but did not seem to cause the fire to sputter, merely to glow brighter.
You Can’t Plant All the Forest at Once
I was quiet on the way home after the suburban thrills of shopping. My father must have thought I was upset in some way by the burning—as if in my years on earth I had not adjusted to the events around me.
“Existing is thrusting and violence,” he said heavily, yet there was a tenderness in his voice. “The myriad sperm that darted and wriggled in your mother’s vagina were conquered and elbowed aside by the sperm that started you. You won. They lost. You are a person; they long since expired on the cold ceramic of the lavatory or in the sewer pipes or the gut of a fish, but most likely in the sewer processing tanks, in a sea of shit. Even the action of your mother in cutting her husband out of the herd to be her servant for life, wasn’t that violent? Wasn’t that thrusting and competition and eventual winning what her desires then wanted?”
“Yes, father,” I said drily.
“Life is a dangerous weapon. By your life you condemn others to oblivion. What you eat cannot be eaten by the hungry of other lands. Remember Clayton Emmet dying because of the need of another to breathe, and so his lungs were pierced.” Emmet was a character in one of his plays, I believe.
“To be is to act. To grow is to impose on the world. Humility can only be an addition, it is not evidenced in any reluctance on the part of humans to enter the world. None can be passive while breathing. Dying itself is an action; you cannot be detached from the world. One’s dying can harm others, as well as benefit them.”
What was he getting round to?
I waited.
“You can’t blame yourself for the separation of Frees from Servers, nor for your being so different from those people we’ve been watching. You can’t be blamed for going down the road that’s ahead of you.”
Dear old Dad. He thought I felt badly about the Frees. I suppose I do, in a way. We might as well be divided into classes by a lottery as by merit: merit’s just as much a matter of chance.
In my bedroom I lay thinking about my country and how our society had developed in the way it had; how my father and my teachers had ingrained in me the lesson that nothing could be done with the old system. It dug itself in over so many generations, it put out roots, planted stays deep down till nothing could be removed without pulling everything out.
The choice was: pull the lot at once, destroy it, or leave it and add where you could. Since they could not, in Stendhal’s phrase, plant all the forest at once, they added, bit by bit.
The people were too quiet, too patient, some said too cowardly and lazy, to have a revolution. Nothing was worth the effort, they felt their very lives to be trivial.
They had no big ideas, no fantastic enthusiasms; they lacked optimism, generosity of spirit, imagination, and that courage that throws open the window of imagination. The division of Society had happened with no opposition: the Free citizens believ
ed in and embraced their inferiority.
Backed against the wall by the expansion of other nations, they seemed introverted, defensive, cramped in every respect.
If the land could be opened! If the people could expand and flex brain and muscle. If they could shake their minds free of the past, free of barbarism, free of slavery; break chains and ties.
Every night I will repeat my hope, that a new enlightenment of my country may redeem two centuries of darkness.
Open Up! Release your energy that you have saved so long!
I excited myself so much with all this unaccustomed concern for others that I found it hard to go to sleep.
It Was My First Sickness
It was a swimming pool party. Little boys with slippery, rubbery skin writhed in the water. Adults who trod on them lost their footing; some struck arms, heads, on tiled edges and were hurt. On the grass people ate, talked, touched each other. I was alone, sitting on the pool edge, my legs in clear water. The smell of chlorine rose up from the wavelets.
Jesus bids us shine when the water covers our bodies in the heavy sunlight.
I sat motionless; people all round me, noisy, exuberant, perhaps happy. I was alone, separate from others. My thoughts flew to Colin, wherever he was.
If I could only see him. Just once. How I wanted to be near him! And if near, what could stop me touching him—touching that skin so fine it rippled in the wind.
If I could be near him, touching him, looking at his face, feeling his eyes on me. And when he’d looked at my face he’d want to look at my arms, my legs, my neck, the palms of my hands, the inner fold of my elbows, my shoulders, the shape of my feet. And I would tear away the fabric of my dress in my haste to have him devour my breasts with his eyes, and touch them and tell me about them. He would touch the curve of my waist with the fingers of his left hand, while his right hand held the nipple over my heart, and he would lean forward and touch it with his lips, then kiss that breast; some kisses passionate and fierce and some so delicate I would have to listen hard to feel them. And I would lean against him so everything was within easy reach for him, and my hand would rest on his shoulder and touch his back and drop until it rested on his thigh, where it would slip a little and cover the warm center of him with his beautiful penis underneath. And his face would come up, and he would look at my eyes, each in turn and from one to the other deciding which he loved best and telling me about the color and the tiny flecks of light and dark radiating from the deep pupil, and I would see the changes on his face and feel inside me the expression of his eyes as they looked at every detail of my body and finally found their way back to mine. And I would lock his gaze onto me, onto my eyes, into me. And the depths in my eyes would draw his soul into me, and I would hold that soul with every strength in me, and holding that, his body would be mine, and he would love me. Me.
A Woman of the Future Page 40