As memories of sexual abuse randomly re-present from the archive of my memory, I’ve come to question my complicity in the events, even though I know intellectually that I was just a child who firmly believes that he’s to blame. Different men had covered me. They breached hidden boundaries with no unpleasant consequences ever accruing to them, unlike to me. They passed me around like a grubby, ten shilling note, each of them linked to the other through their access to my body. I fell into those incidents, and the repetition of the abuse coming at me from outside seems to imply a seeking again after something, scenting it out like a hound. Even though I was fearful, I learned what to expect. And yet, I took torturous routes home after school, to avoid passing by the doors of my abusers. Still it would happen that when I turned a corner, out of sight for a moment, I’d be solicited, ushered obsequiously into the shadows and always with the same whiff of peril, of trembling and terror, but with somebody new, nevertheless. Nothing was ever said, at least by me. Each of us used the cloak of silence – the fact that my child’s eyes were the only ones which saw, that boldly held the men’s gaze until they looked away – to conceal their nefarious activities. And I was used by them shamelessly, until I emerged on my own back into the sunlight.
I want to take a shower to wash them away from me. When I was coming out as a gay man, after I’d willingly had sex for the first time, and I remember it as a joyous seduction, I drove home dazzled by the early-morning sunlight, and stood under the shower for over an hour, letting the lukewarm water flow down over my forehead, through my hair and over my skin, soaking me, washing me clean, cleansing me as I thought, from the surprising happenings of the night before. Now I understand why I couldn’t move for shock. I bring it up against myself that I’d allowed them inside to do this to me again, from the Latin al-laudare, to praise, by presenting myself to them, like my story was presented in a book. People have an animal instinct that can smell out those early woundings to the spirit, as sharks in the ocean smell blood. And some of them cannot resist entering through the opening to run amok in a feeding frenzy and have a go, to cry havoc as a signal to seize plunder, simply because they have the opportunity. They cut off moral considerations, and decide to take it.
I was sitting with my laptop at an art-deco table in the large, wood-panelled library of the Elephant Hotel in Weimar, an intimate baroque city, which is the spiritual and intellectual heart of Germany, when I deliberately scrolled through all of my manuscript over a period of three days after New Year, and deleted every reference I could find to my uncle and aunt. I reorganised the text as if they’d never existed. That was the time when they died to me. I killed them off as characters in my narrative, and watched impassively as my cursor swallowed up the letters that were giving them life, emptying out obligation from the sequences of my words. The deleting wash renewed and refreshed the text, made it leaner. I was unable to detect any awkward connections or impoverishment as a result of my action. The re-weaving holds no reproach for one who knows.
The first Civil Partnership ceremony I attended took place in the heart of the county Wicklow countryside, in the garden of Ireland. It was a glorious day in late spring, when the hawthorn bushes in the hedgerows were pushing out into the winding narrow roads, dappled under a canopy of fresh green leaves. The strong sun shone out of the clearest blue sky, and everything glistened in the light. At the ceremony they’d planned in the tiny chapel, which was striking for the warmth and goodwill from the one hundred and fifty glamorous guests, all of whom had made spectacular efforts with their outfits, we were surprised to be taken up by the swell of emotion. Everyone was so supportive of the happy couple. We continually burst into applause during the ceremony, and we were aware that we were participating in a little piece of Irish history. Ireland at last was facing up to the truth of human relationships. The generosity of spirit continued on into the reception afterwards. Jarlath, one of the grooms, gave a graphic speech in which he not only thanked his family for raising him, but also the people of the village in which he grew up, who had always looked out for him. He teetered on the edge of sobbing.
On the way home in the car, sated with what was a memorable day blissfully near to perfection, Terry casually remarked with a psychoanalytic eye, ‘I think Jarlath has a bit more maturing to do …’
‘In what way?’
‘All that seductive come-hither business about the home-place in the West of Ireland needs to be left behind.’
We’d been made aware that in a phone call just one week before the occasion, Jarlath’s mother had omitted to tell him whether she and his father were going to be present. On the morning of the ceremony, she bumped into Jarlath and Blair in their dapper cutaway frock coats in the hotel, and Jarlath was mightily relieved to see her there. In a deflating put-down, she enquired, ‘What are the two of ye doing dressed up like that?’ We found out later that Jarlath’s father had had to be confronted by his own sister in order to get him to put back by twenty-four hours his trip to the States, to watch the local GAA football team play a match in New York on the following Sunday. Plainly, his parents didn’t want to be there, despite and perhaps because of the prevailing mood of celebration. So the groom was in two minds about how he’d express himself before his well-wishers without publicly embarrassing himself and his parents, and I felt that he’d traversed the obstacles very well, and come up with an inclusive form of words which was truthful, and which expressed the warmest feelings of his open heart. He was not unaware. I know that privately he’d acknowledged to his partner after that phone call with his mother, ‘As their eldest son, I deserve better!’ It was a searing indictment. Nonetheless, I could see Terry holding strongly to the view that early attachments should be definitively left behind if you’re to mature appropriately, and not be held in thrall to a sentimental positioning from the past that’s rooted in childhood. The hankering impedes psychological growth, and doesn’t reflect present realities.
In my own case, unlike Jarlath, I’d always felt menaced by that call from the past, which releases a stab of fear in my stomach whenever I’m made aware of it, because I know the experience of family to be ambivalent. The adjective ‘ambivalent’ is actually a psychiatric term. It was coined by Eugen Bleuler, when Carl Jung was his assistant at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Switzerland, so it’s a relatively new word, less than one hundred years old. Bleuler formed it from the Latin prefix ambi- meaning both, in two ways, plus valentia, strength, vigour. I see now that ‘ambivalent’ is an obfuscation I’ve clung onto, rather like those clients who come to me initially proclaiming that they’re bisexual, until eventually after work in depth, some are able to admit to themselves and to me that they’re gay. Ambivalence also masks hostility, which has served to darken over the truth of the pain I’ve known in my body. What I haven’t known is how to deal with it. Like Jarlath, I too have always deserved better.
I would have expected that murder, the secret killing of a person, to have perturbed my spirit. I remember the first time a particular client came to see me. His appointment was the last one that evening, and it was already dark outside when he walked into the consulting room. He sat opposite in the leather armchair moving his head about unnervingly as if it were separated from his spine, and perched atop his neck. He didn’t speak at first, just kept wobbling his head, sometimes rolling his shoulders. Then he looked at me in the eyes and said, ‘I’ve committed a murder.’
I didn’t move.
‘Are you afraid of me?’
I said nothing; just held his gaze.
‘You should be. There’s nobody in the building, except for the two of us,’ all the while staring at me intently with ice-blue eyes.
I felt a frisson of fear, released into my stomach like acid. But still I said nothing. He looked away, and then he began to weep. It turned out that he’d been badly damaged as a child. He’d suffered greatly at the hands of a brutal and alcoholic father. When he was old enough, he’d turned on his father and killed him during a
row, and he did time for his crime. But my client was crippled with remorse: he felt heartfelt regret for the wrong he’d done in taking his father’s life, and for not allowing the man to remain alive, and perhaps repent of his behaviour. He was haunted by the fact that he’d robbed his father of possibilities, which have the potential for development. He’d believed he’d killed the future, whereas while undertaking the work of analysis, he found out that he, in fact, was the future.
As a psychoanalyst, I’m conscious of the privilege people accord in telling the story of their life to a listener, particularly where there are secrets. It can be an unruly and non-sequential drama, highly emotional, when characters in conflict come alive in the calmness of my consulting room, and wrestle around on the floor to win the argument. I treat them all with understanding and honour, and support the various voices of those hesitant speakers as best I can in their struggle to be well, for they know that my psychoanalytic assessment comes from a sitting alongside them. While the therapeutic approach is rooted in my professional training, it’s a stance that I’ve always tried to take towards others, an attitude of well-wishing that I expect in return, because life is difficult at the best of times for all of us.
Maybe my mistake in relation to my uncle and aunt was to have believed they’d judge my work with considered, critical, literary distinctions to achieve a balanced viewpoint on a work of art. They’ve judged my book through the lens of different criteria. I presume I’m the subject of obloquy because of what I said about my father, and Robbie’s older brother. My own uncertainty and unease surrounding publication was about holding on to the secret of alcoholism, which for me is centred on the figure of my father. Like all family members who suffer from alcoholism in Ireland, my father has been sentimentalised into a romantic figure, and patronised into harmlessness, who beat me savagely when he was drunk. My uncle and aunt don’t want to have that said, so they’ve closed off the future, where I could re-work the past.
I’m also aware that the battle between us is the earliest one for supremacy, played out now between the last survivors of my father’s generation, and those who are younger, coming up behind. By their silence, my uncle and aunt intended to render me impotent and supplanted, paradoxically, the two outcomes which cancer has already achieved. The disease tripped me up and robbed me of physical potency. After that stumble, I was forced to pursue personal growth and development in a different direction, through writing. Like a hunter sighting prey, my shouts have propelled me to hunt down and explore my new family of words for their definition and determination. The experience is without emotion, in that I don’t feel lambasted by the words in a dictionary. Yet, words too have a history, and also have a loyalty to their ancestors, but they’re amenable to change, and supportive of my individuality. And the language I used as a child is different to the vocabulary I employ now. And yet, by removing from my uncle and aunt the endless possibilities of living in a book and entwining their life stories with mine, I’ve fulfilled once again what was familiar to me from before: become an only child, a foundling, a child found deserted, orphaned, who’d grown up in the house next door. The continual supplication of wanting to be accepted back as a member of the family was what confounded me, whereas the absence of words sent back and forth between us entirely pointed out the truth. I have the sense that in erasing them from my text, I was carrying out or satisfying a determining prophesy, and interpreting correctly the will of the gods.
The brilliance in my book has confined to the dark margins, an estrangement from others who lack faith, who cannot see or wouldn’t hear, and who choose to remain in ignorance. My writing has vexed my uncle and aunt, annoyed and provoked them so that they feel they have to react negatively. Perhaps this experience means that despite the appearances, and the hurt from once being thrown back and abjectly cast aside, nothing good is lost, or ever can be, least of all, in oneself. Nothing passes away so entirely, that it’s unable to be found or recovered. For an exile, yes, it can be an ambivalent lifeline to have to live with the hurtful echoes from another time with which regrettably I’m familiar, and see them conjured up in the present like ghosts stepping out of the past. But it’s past time to decide when it was that I first belonged to another place, or to another person, and became alienated from who I was, so that I can finally terminate the torture I once accepted by setting my own boundary, and like the child, say, ‘No! I say no!’ I’ve more than paid the price for my release from captivity, even though others have dogmatically presumed to set the ransom terms for me. Capitulation: draw up surrender terms under headings which terrorise into silence first, then exile, and finally death. I withdraw relevance from them, and set myself free through accepting the discipline of a writing ritual. The words in my first book shall continue to bring this about, improving and developing my being, and finessing the truth on which I take my stand: I am who I am.
I visited my ninety-three-year-old mother on Saturday. She was having a good day, and she broke the surface of consciousness to shine with the sunlight of her love when she recognised me. During the visit, Mum leaned forward out of her chair, and she tried to rub out with her hand the furrows on my face above the bridge of my nose. I laughed with surprise, ‘You want to get rid of my frown, Mum: I’m getting old …’ but still she persisted, pressing and flattening with the balls of her fingers the skin on my face, confounded, wanting to make everything right. Later on, the clouded sky cleared momentarily again, and she sought out my eyes with hers, and held me in the clarity of her gaze. ‘Michael, I have something to say,’ she began. ‘I have …’ she stated, and I awaited the import of her words. ‘I don’t know what comes next …’ she faltered to me as her eyes filled with tears, and instinctively I took hold of both her hands, and held her. She grasped onto me tightly at first, and for a moment we shared in the calamity of what was happening to her. My heart broke open before her. Then she faded back into her chair as the beams of light disappeared into the open ocean of her forgetfulness, and she inexorably slipped down slowly beneath the calmness of the sea. When it was time to head back to Dublin, I kissed her on the lips. ‘Good bye, Mum: I’ll come back and see you again.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, automatically polite, but she didn’t take her eyes off the television.
Driving home, I marvelled at those precious moments of clarity, when my mother was able to let me know that she had something in her possession that she wanted to share with me. She was quite definite about this, and she repeated the words: ‘I have something to say … I have …’ When she searched through the archive of her memory for what followed on, she couldn’t find a continuity there: ‘I don’t know what comes next,’ she explained. The something she has which was to be expressed, a word or a phrase, eluded her, and then the briefest time in the present for imparting it had passed, so that what she was talking about remains unuttered forever, never to be communicated. She was certainly making a statement that referenced her future: ‘I don’t know what comes next,’ she said, but her tone was more factual than apprehensive. The complete statement of what she actually said was, ‘I have something to say … I have … I don’t know what comes next …’ This was, in effect, a pictorial representation of her forgetfulness, a painting with words which told a narrative. She was in possession of something; there was something that she owned. But in her mind she’d stumbled across a nothingness where there should have been something, an absence which is impossible to convey with words. That private and unintentional communication sheltered the two of us in an interlocking embrace. I can understand what it feels like to be incarcerated in a prison surrounded by fields of absence, unable to bridge the gap and communicate directly with the outside. It’s a hopeless situation to be thrown back upon your own resources when all connections are down. It’s as if you’re striving to commune with those who’re already dead, whereas the person who’s actually dead is yourself. It’s fearful to realise that you’re the man in the mirror. As a child, I was taught in religiou
s knowledge class that there’s a fixed and unbridgeable gulf between us and those who have died. And while they can see us, they’re unable to communicate with us.
New words are required to express the ineffable, the unspeakable, and to be turned away towards the future as well. This impossible task is required of me: I have to name what my mother has. I have to piece the puzzle together like a detective, to pose or to put in a certain position, to propose, suppose. ‘I have something to say,’ she said twice, ‘I don’t know what comes next …’ as she interrogated her memory. That betwixt and between is now from a mother to her son, and from a son to his mother. I have to name in that liminal space, because she’s unable to. Because of my mother, I’m obliged to become a writer, and to inhabit that calling, and somehow to reference the future.
The House of Pure Being Page 11