The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  Is that the weakness that Stefan had intuited: a gay carelessness or frivolity which lies concealed behind our eagerness to please and to be useful? I’d told him, ‘Of course you can pay the rent every two months, if that suits you better, Stefan.’ And Stefan had stopped paying any rent at all, because from the outset he knew that I hadn’t taken a stand on the contract which both parties had signed up to, nor had I strongly insisted on an upright position based on the law: pacta sunt servanda. I’d surrendered our state of being manly, of being law-givers. As Terry facetiously puts it, ‘Beat me up if you want to!’ And my version of that saying is, ‘Why don’t you hit me and get it over with!’ Beneath the sharp humour, both of us are recognising a fault in our characters. From the phrases we employ, what’s enfolded within the words is a reference to another repeatedly striking a blow with a fist, a distinguishing symbol which has left its mark on the body or an imprint on the soul. This battery was engraved or scratched onto our distinctive natures, so that the furrows which are cut there direct us to the pages of a book where the information may be found: on our memories.

  Being pleasant towards another is expressed in the form of an invitation to hurt, in both cases: ‘I give you permission to hurt me, yes.’ As a child, Terry was repeatedly beaten up by his older brother, Joe. In my case, the frightening figure was my father. He seems to have so undermined my being at a critical point in my childhood that I never really recovered from the shock, and live life at a regressed and lower level than is appropriate. I can understand the taking control of an intolerable situation by making the choice to allow the inevitable, but seeing clearly that I make an equation between being agreeable and inviting an assault is more difficult to grasp, unless it’s viewed through the psychoanalytic lens of castration, the normalising psychic function of accepting castration in order to take up a symbolic sexual position not defined by anatomy. ‘Why don’t you hit me and get it over with?’ is essentially, in its positive form, a passive ‘Fuck me!’ In its negative form, it seems to rein in the verb to be through enforcing limits, obscuring my attempt to shine throughout the universe with an omnipotent burst of spreading, divine light, painfully aware of my lacking and the losses that I suffer, appropriate restrictions which go with being successfully human.

  We were in the Habitat store in Marbella’s La Canada shopping centre yesterday, and I could see out of the corner of my eye a burly man begin to cut ahead of me in the queue for the checkout, so I moved ahead of him decisively. I’m beginning to learn from this debacle with Schmidt that an assertion of my rights matters for my sense of wellbeing as a man, and that my stance has to be the masculine one of challenge, as opposed to the yielding feminine one of response. I’m astounded to discover that the latter has been my unthinking, natural position up to now. The cause I’d plead and the accusation that I’d make, my motive which rightly reproaches me, has been to tell myself that the battle encounter, the joust in particular from those I’m next to so that I can see their expropriating soul flicker in their eyes, robs me of speech. I stand dumbstruck, unmoving, passive. I should realise that they can read the beaten imprint on our bodies, and have no compunction in profiting from that.

  I can see Terry take the battle to people who park in spaces marked disabled without displaying a disabled person’s parking permit. Years of painful suffering from polio have taught him the importance of this small concession from the Government and the Irish Wheelchair Association. His argument is that his pain can be that less if he isn’t forced to walk excessively, which is why we now use a wheelchair where necessary. Terry is a vociferous warrior, waving his cripple-fabulous walking-stick in the air, loud and noisy, defending a right which the able-bodied could usurp with impunity, without reckoning on his belligerence. In the Lidl supermarket, as Terry approached the checkout with his trolley, he saw a tall and stately, elegantly dressed woman, who was wearing a wig, drop a packet of waffles onto the roller belt and walk away. Terry unloaded his items onto the belt, and just as he arrived at the top of the queue, the woman returned with a large box of groceries, and pushed past him, jostling him out of the way. He immediately confronted her. When the woman explained that she’d been there first, that the packet of waffles reserved her place, he pointed out that that he’d seen her leave the waffles on the belt and walk away, but that was several minutes ago. ‘People join a queue – that’s what we do.’ And gesturing to the line, ‘Look at all of these people waiting.’

  She loudly berated him, looking him up and down. She’d raised her voice for others to hear. ‘You are very rude for an elderly man,’ she called out imperiously.

  Terry held her gaze, ‘I’m in my fifties – not much older than you are.’

  And she caused a scene, began to shout at him and gesticulate, waving him away with her arms.

  Terry pointed out, ‘You’re not accepting your responsibility in this.’ But he was shaking with shock at the eruption of her sudden hysteria. So he continued to speak determinedly over her cries, responding to her charges: ‘You’ve obviously done this before and gotten away with it because nobody has dared to challenge your behaviour up to now. I’m telling you, you won’t bully me!’ And he was unyielding against her rant, until eventually she carried the box of groceries like a battering ram back away down into one of the aisles, still roaring at him. The line of people looked stunned at the commotion, and a few at the end moved their trolleys to join another queue. The manager arrived, and Terry was feeling shaken and angry. He told him it was shameful that customers had to put up with such bad behaviour. He was very upset by what had happened, which overshadowed how well he’d dealt with it.

  My defence in the future will also involve the active approach of not yielding, whereas in the past I’d have suffered from quietism. Again, I infer from those words that what I term active, i.e. not yielding, is very much a static approach, which omits the confrontational aspect of the behaviour undertaken by Terry. My words barely draw near to the ideal. So the paradigm inside which defines how I interact with those around me is more deeply ingrained than I’d imagined at first. Perhaps it truly is structural, because it’s an apparently fixed position that I’ve always held with respect to others, rather as the various words – nouns, adjectives, verbs – take up their accustomed places in a sentence. I seem to have an internal representation of these interpersonal relations, which is in control of my behaviour. It’s a compass I’ve relied on automatically to find direction, and pace out steps that increasingly have become pointless, even dangerous. Like Terry, I need to pursue those who would encroach upon me, take the battle to them and push them away. The effort involved in paying minute attention to how I interact with my surroundings should pay off. It demonstrates my consequent commitment to the importance of how I want to live my life in the now. I hadn’t realised that I’ve to be oh so careful of my being in the world, so that it can truly become a house of pure being in the present, clean, clear and unmixed. It will be a gentle and serene dwelling where my soul can remain, appropriate to the vibrant colours therein. I have to expand the dream, and live it big, so that I can always affirm that ‘The sun lives in my house!’

  The eviction, when it happened, was an anticlimax. The judge in the Marbella court had found in our favour on all counts. Stefan had to vacate the apartment, or he would be evicted in three months’ time on Wednesday, 27 September, and he also had to pay all of the back-monies he owed us in rent and for his electricity bills; however, to retrieve the money would necessitate another court case, which we decided to set in train. Our lawyer, Roberto, assured us that it wasn’t necessary to be present for the eviction, because the court would organise all of the personnel: the process-server, the barrister, the locksmith. But in a stepping-up to the plate, Terry and I decided we should go down to Spain to be present, because the matter pertained to Stefan the tenant, who held our property legally through a lease which we’d signed.

  The idea of an eviction, to recover property by judicial means, at best is
an ambiguous concept for any Irishman. More particularly, eviction has been blackened by the folk memory of the terrible fate that befell the people of Mayo, and those who made their living around my hometown, Castlebar, during the Great Famine of the late 1840s. When their crops had failed, and they were unable to pay their rent, Lord Lucan, a military despot, had the starving families evicted from his estates in County Mayo, and he employed what was known as the Crowbar Brigade to level the homes on their smallholdings so that the wretched people couldn’t return there to find shelter. Newspaper reports of the time document these living skeletons stalking the countryside in a desperate search for food, and dying in their thousands, famished, by the wayside. Death and emigration accounted for the loss of 114,057 souls in Mayo, almost a third of the county’s population, during those hungry years, and their tragedy has seared itself into the memory, so that the word eviction still evokes horror. It comes from the Latin ex vincere, meaning to conquer. The Irish were a conquered people, evicted by force from their ancestral lands through centuries of domination and plantation by the British, and the five years of pitiless evictions clearing Lord Lucan’s 60,570 acres in Mayo were the culmination of this penal system. Michael Davitt, who went on to found the Land League, a mass movement which campaigned for reform of the land legislation, wrote in his autobiography, ‘Straide [in Mayo] was my birthplace, and almost my first remembered experience of my own life and of the existence of landlordism was our eviction in 1852, when I was about five years of age.’ For me, eviction lacks the force of will which the law invokes: rather it results in a real uncertainty about the ethical nature of its pursuit, particularly where there are defenceless children involved. There’s a going around the concept involved before it can be taken in and assented to, however falteringly.

  Because Stefan’s behaviour had been so bizarre to our way of thinking, we didn’t want to meet him by chance. Also, we didn’t know if he’d been informed of the eviction, and we didn’t want to give any indication that the process was underway. Stefan hadn’t attended the court case, and our lawyer, Roberto, intended not to contact Stefan’s solicitor until the Monday beforehand, so that there could be no time for objections. We skulked in the apartment over that weekend, conjecturing from the footsteps overhead about the various comings and goings of Stefan and his children. It was Tuesday before we heard the commotion, heavy weights being dragged across the floor, furniture being moved about, and loud hammering, as though beds were being dismantled. ‘He knows now,’ said Terry, relieved, standing listening in the centre of the living-room. Stefan and a friend of his were packing up a van, climbing up and down the steps outside with furniture and cases. During the day, judging from the brief, sudden silences, he made several short trips away to another location somewhere in the vicinity, and then back again. Suddenly, by evening, all was quiet overhead. I went out to reconnoitre. His section of the apartment was in darkness, and the car tyre that had been dumped outside the hall door from the day that Stefan had moved in, was gone; just the black tread marks that had dirtied the tiles remained.

  The following morning, as I turned my landlord’s key in the door lock for what was the last time, under the eyes of the officials from the Marbella town hall, I felt relieved when I saw that Stefan had left the place clean. The sun was slanting in through the sliding French doors and glittered off the polished marble floors.

  Terry’s mobile buzzed. ‘Look!’ he said, handing me his mobile. The text message consisted of just two words: ‘Stefan Schmidt’.

  I promised, ‘The day will come when you’ll hand him back a similar message, just as odd and pointed, like the tip of a weapon!’

  The officially appointed locksmith set to changing the lock, and then he handed me a new set of keys. It signalled a new beginning for Terry and for me. To start to say or to speak, and to use words that draw from a source that’s been restructured in such a way that it yields a stressed syllable at the end of a line of verse in a masculine ending, is what was symbolically put in place when I received into the warm palm of my hand a ring of shiny, new keys. The apartment was empty, because Stefan had wanted to rent it unfurnished, and we’d unthinkingly acquiesced in that. We’d sold all of the furniture for a derisory amount to Daniela, the smart German agent who’d recruited him for us. She’d assured us that she knew Stefan personally, that he was a friend of hers. To our relief, we had vacant possession of the little apartment. And the view from the balcony of the sun shafting through clouds, and striking the Mediterranean Sea in a glittering pathway of light which seemed to lead directly towards the balcony, was a welcome home that invited our participation in the open-hearted Spanish dream once more.

  It was many months before the court in Marbella finally concluded that Stefan had no bank account in Spain, so we couldn’t pursue him for the 20,000 euro he eventually was to owe us in back rent. However, Stefan used an antique Mercedes E Class van in Spain that was his pride and joy. Whenever we saw it, the van looked immaculate on the outside, and everything inside was kept ordered and clean and tidy. We determined to sequester it, and to sell it on by way of payment. This would be a taking of the fight to the enemy, that final stage in the bullfight, when the matador, killing sword in hand, walks slowly out to the centre of the bullring, to face the bull before a fight to the death. And despite the temptation to have packed his belongings into black bin bags, and to change the locks on the door, even to have him visited by James’s friend from Birmingham, ‘Mick the Brick’, we’ll have done it legally. It was to be a further year before the Spanish court sanctioned the embargo of Schmidt’s cars, all three of them.

  Part Five

  On Writing …

  I’m always in the process of constructing a narrative, weaving words to tell my story. I make up my reality, and my desire stages the mise-en-scène. Like Aristotle in the summer heat of Greece, who strolled within the shady walkways of the Lyceum grove teaching and debating with his fellow Athenians, I too walk about in the south of Spain, disputing in my mind. Shopping in El Corte Inglés in Fuengirola, working calmly with expatriate clients at my Spanish consulting rooms, cleaning the apartment in La Mairena after the dusty mess of having had new bathrooms installed, I leave traces of my being strewn across the landscape, which in turn engraves itself upon my life in a mutual intaglio, making cuts in the surface. Unlike the wrinkles which can be read upon my face, these incisions etched onto me and my environment are invisible. I know that if both were to be smeared with ink and the surfaces wiped clean, the ink in the recesses would print off our collaborative story onto the fabric of existence, as naturally as the words that I write are scored onto a page.

  I was here, I made a difference, and I said it. While those three actions can be grasped by my mind, they only have real substance and become tangible for me when I can experience them in words, and can reflect upon them. These three statements make permanent in definitions modelled from the finest silver and gold what otherwise would be fleeting, escape capture, or be deemed never to have happened because they’re not consciously remembered. I also understand at the same time that every detail is inscribed on the unconscious as on a computer, so that nothing is ever lost irretrievably.

  It was another Greek philosopher, Socrates, who said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ That’s one of the reasons why I work as a psychoanalyst, helping people to put their lives into words, asking them to explain and to clarify, particularly when a word they use seems to have a more personal meaning so that it drags a familial lexicon in its wake, made up of ancient proscriptions. My clients have the ability to put something out into words, to examine it, take it back, change it around, and even return to it the next day we meet. It’s as if their narrative is always dependant on there being a future, a next time, which I can hear is forever reworking their past. Through writing, I’m able to examine my own life, which also becomes a life lived in words. Following the assault from cancer, Death hovering at my shoulder seems to be much more present to me.
Unlike my clients, I write as if there’s no tomorrow, as if Death greedily swallows words that envisage a future, leaving me with no opportunity for further change. There’s a fixed quality to the ordering of the words, as if I’m writing out my last testament. When I write, there’s an onus on me to get it right the first and last time, because the finished book means that my life is over. It’s as if the potential death sentence in cancer has been pronounced, Death’s cloak extending outwards silently like a spreading pool of black oil until it covers everything

  The narrative also has its own logic, and requires an ordering, with which the editor looking over my shoulder was able to assist. I confess that at times I could see no reason for moving certain chunks of text around. I’m not so sure that editing should be undertaken in the cause of meaning: there are certain aspects in life which are opaque, unintelligible: they don’t transmit light, just don’t have to be understood. Editing also highlights certain episodes over others, while Freud said, an analyst should listen with an evenly suspended attention, giving everything equal weight. I find the world of the book is a closed world, where everything has an equal and self-referencing importance. And maybe a person’s life is like that as well.

  In relating, recounting or explaining, a listener is implicated in what I have to say. That dialogue is initially with myself, a conversation of such celerity that speaking and listening alternately results in a seamless text that seems to write itself, coming from elsewhere, the words bobbing about in the air like putti, cherubs peeping out from underneath the cupola of a baroque cathedral ready to be engaged, awaiting the reader’s contribution. I have the power to change, refine, and weigh each word, to judge how it impacts on the ear as it reverberates off the exuberantly ornamented concave and convex surfaces, so that the full range of sound can deck out my story beautifully in the most gorgeous of vestments. That audience is with my soul, ushered in with trumpet blasts on the organ, and the throwing open of ornately carved double doors at the west end of the cathedral by liveried pages, when I advance into the nave in solemn procession, regularly moving forward past the serried rows towards the chancel, and after the deepest, camp genuflection, take my place at the high altar in the sanctuary. I turn and begin to speak into the tremulous hush, so that the projection of my words suddenly infuses the air with clouds of incense, and a thousand beeswax candles burst into flame at the sound. That’s what the formal invitation to read what I write is for.