by Lucy Ellmann
How to apply for reincarnation when one is so LOWLY? But Dot was in luck. News of her death filtered down into the Underworld. Dot was eventually located and rushed to the Debating Chamber, just in time to be awarded the prize for the most horrific death that week! She was carried aloft down the centre aisle but nobody could SEE her so they put her down on the podium and asked her what she’d like as her reward.
In a tiny voice, Dot replied, ‘I want to be REBORN … as a … PERSON.’
Everyone cheered. The paperwork was completed for her, and the bureaucrats were somehow placated. Dot signed the forms with a miniscule right paw, and then she was escorted to the boat by a skeleton band playing ‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen’. Her obol was paid by the Prize committee, and Dot was soon on the other side of the Styx.
At least she had specified this time that she wished to be HUMAN. But once again she was baffled that no one asked her WHICH human she wanted to be. There were other worries too. A lot of complaints were coming in from SHEEP, who kept being made sheep AGAIN. There was a Foot and Mouth Crisis going on and they didn’t WANT to be sheep! You were barely BORN before you were thrown on the pyre. These sheep were so desperate they said they’d even be willing to be PLANTS (NOBODY wants to be a PLANT).
Other animals were murmuring darkly about anatomical remnants of PREVIOUS LIVES: a horse, reborn as a mouse, had found he could still whinny and his neck was too LONG; an ostrich was surprised to see fur growing under her wings; and a crocodile came back as an alligator and couldn’t tell the DIFFERENCE.
All reincarnations ceased while important work was carried out on the funnels. It was a tense time. But finally, operational efficiency was restored and Dot and several sheep were offered a trough of Lethe water to drink, a sign that soon they would be setting off on a new life (the sheep still hoping not to be sheep). The mood was optimistic.
Reincarnation IS for optimists!
Part Three
Life is understood backwards,
but must be lived forwards.
Kierkegaard
Dot Reborn (Again!)
America does suburbia so well! No one else knows how to drive that much truth and beauty out of life. They think, with their cars and their condos, their low-cholesterol dips and chips, their dumb-ass religions and daughters-in-law, their knowledge of several kinds of spaghetti sauce, their wasteful use of gas, electricity and hot water, their dependence on STYROFOAM, their Bargain Basements, sprinklers, jungle gyms, their screens-vs.-storm-windows understanding of the seasons, their card games, calorie-counting and cancers, their all-you-can-eat Sunday brunches, they think THIS is enough to overcome the meaninglessness of the universe! (Or have they simply accepted it?)
There are three types of house: ranch, colonial or modern (fake thatched roofs made of ASPHALT are optional). Whichever one you’ve got, a basketball hoop hangs over the garage. You rake leaves, shovel snow, and mow the lawn, depending on the time of year. And somewhere near by there’s a Mall, where you can buy everything you want and if you can’t FUCK YOU: a Chaplain at one end, False Memory Stirrer at the other, Blood Pressure Checkpoint in between. WHOLE LIVES are conducted here — you never need leave as long as you keep buying SHOES. You can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Food Court: there’s an ice-cream place with every kind of ice-cream and a bagel place with every kind of bagel. People EXERCISE by walking around the Mall in official exercise GROUPS.
Every Mall has a supermarket dedicated to oral delight and unsustainable resource. There you will find Big Grab Bags and Big Gulp Drinks, or a Deluxe Fruit Basket done up with a pretty pink bow, ‘generously packed with fresh mountain Pears and Apples, and loose-skinned Mandarins with a rich smooth citrus flavor’ (the only loose-skinned thing that ever sounded good, besides an elephant). The AIMS of suburbia are in evidence everywhere, on the menus, the birthday cards, coupons, ads for the bank, frozen-pie cartons: the perfect HOUSE, the perfect FAMILY, the perfect MILKSHAKE, the perfect LIFE. All varying in significance but equal in perfection.
Milkshake ÷ perfection = perfection.
But there is no perfection here! It’s like the fall of the Roman empire — everyone is so FAT. America’s the only place in the world where fat people feel comfortable. They have RIGHTS. Things are adjusted to accommodate them. In America fat people even get MARRIED. They do all the stuff thin people do, except maybe slower. They flirt, run companies, play baseball, relax HALF-NAKED on BEACHES. They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world (they read only local papers) and they don’t WANT to. They exist only to stuff WHOPPER SUBS into themselves in order to achieve ever-greater INSENSIBILITY.
The suburban idea of conversation: vivid description of a daughter-in-law’s allergic reaction to CALAMARI (wooziness followed by nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea: it is stressed that both ends of the alimentary canal were called into play during the crisis). Someone chips in with HER daughter-in-law’s response to SHRIMP (face swells up and liquid issues from every pore). They’re big SURVIVORS, Americans. They’ll gross you out into eternity.
In a spiral of EATING, TALKING about food, BEING fat, and giving FOOD away to the POOR, they somehow convince themselves they have free will. What they have is a PLAGUE.
There ARE real tragedies in America, but nobody wants to look at them. There are real successes and real failures, but nobody knows which is which.
And yet, an unobtrusively well-organised life could be had in suburbia in the ’50s and ’60s, with Leftover Night every Thursday and a view of sunlit grass or snow out the kitchen window, the house angled to see the woods behind it.
In a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, amid other suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, sat a house that was DIFFERENT from all the other houses in all the other suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. It contained everything GOOD that America can be! Dot knew this house so well that in later life she could comfort herself by walking around it in her mind, stand looking at the little stained-glass birds, boats and balloons that hung on the back door and glowed as the sun set behind them. See the neat china basin and pitcher on the antique wash-stand that housed the liquor bottles, the souvenir glasses on the windowsill over the kitchen sink, the weird gangly plant by the stairs to the attic, the rocking chair with its plaid cushion, the giant black ants that came out from under the kitchen cupboards, the trash closet with treasured newspaper clippings and recipes taped to the inside of the door. She could walk down the hall on the plaited rag rug her mother had made in the first year of her marriage, past the Den on the right where her father liked to paint, past the little pale-yellow bathroom on the left, with its shell-shaped soaps and view of trees outside and low loo and soft loo paper and pale-yellow hand towels (blue for guests), past the box-framed picture at the end of the hall containing REAL LENTILS and PASTA and tiny dried purple flowers. To her parents’ room, so QUIET, the high bed with its white quilt, big paintings on the wall, and the two little windows from which Dot’s mother once, when ill, saw car thieves trying to drive across the front yard and made a CITIZEN’S ARREST through the WINDOW, while Dot’s father called the police. There was a lot of SUFFERING in this room, but it retained its perfection in Dot’s mind: the bed they shared, the rag rugs, Christmas presents bought well in advance and hidden in the closets, ice-cream every night with the Eleven O’Clock News on TV, the frilly curtains her mother had made and the blinds with their rings on strings.
Her father’s paintings everywhere, the revolving steam-train lamp, the sofa in the living room that turned into a bed. The SAGA of the ant infestation and her mother’s war on them. The smell of coffee and cigars, the plentiful but dutifully measured whisky and sodas when people came, all meant so kindly! — in the wooden house like a New England BARN up on its hill at the end of the quiet street.
Dot’s parents — Maisy: plump white shoulders Dot loved, blonde hair, cigarettes, high heels and red lips; and Sam: anxious, funny, wild-haired, often leaping up to change the record or check something in the dictionary, still
clutching his cigar. They had LOVE OF LIFE. It had blossomed somehow in OHIO, summers spent wiping sweat off your nose bottling tomatoes, winters knee-deep in snow. They had wanted only to be together, and had children as a happy afterthought to their love. Doomed to DIE IN DISARRAY, she slightly before him. But what does the END matter if your heart went into the beginning and the middle?
They were an amalgamation of natural substance, carbon atoms, European descent, American innocence. Maisy saw Sam’s legs lit by the headlights of his car when it broke down on their first date, and knew she loved him. He loved her hair, which she kept in a loose bun except in bed, when its gold encircled her. This, and her lips, her thighs, her calves, her breasts, would serve him all his life. They honeymooned in Mexico.
Sam was a psychoanalyst with no respect for his patients. They all seemed too rich and spoiled and STUPID to have real problems. He would come home and RAIL against America, its government, culture, idiocy and self-love. He was suspicious of American thought, American FOOD, American fads, the movies, cartoons, schools, the Army, the meat industry, ALL institutions, even American PLACES, tourist sites and landmarks. Americans cannot be trusted with HISTORY, they have no understanding of it, they do not really BELIEVE in the past. Also, they have no TASTE.
He became incensed by American PRODUCE (‘You call this a tomato?’) and started growing his own chard and coriander in the back yard, as well as onions, carrots and potatoes, eventually buying a plot of land outside of town where he planted an APPLE ORCHARD. But he was a sucker for Special Offers and would often come home, chagrined, bearing five hundred rolls of toilet paper or the biggest box of Quaker Oats you ever saw.
Ferdinand was their first child. Having children is always a mistake, leading to destruction and dismay, but they didn’t know that. They were happy together and thought they could EXPAND on this, take the PRINCIPLE of happiness and start multiplying.
Ferdinand turned out to be some kind of GENIUS, whom they were obliged to NURTURE. It’s a bit like giving birth to Christ. He played with an abacus (MATHEMATICALLY) at six months, read at two, made sage comments at three. Maisy and Sam fretted over his diet, his education (BEGGING teachers to be kind), and his dubious social skills. They worked themselves into a FRAZZLE over Ferdinand.
The narcissism of parenthood duly gratified, they could have stopped there but DIDN’T: they had Dot. Though not exceptional in any way, Dot was a very agreeable baby. She would sometimes wake to find the whole family STARING at her. They were entranced by her plump legs and blonde curls! Delighted with such an audience, Dot would kick her legs in the air and do a sort of prostrate JIG for them.
What is the point of child-bearing? People act like their child is their own personal DESIGN for the perfect person, but actually they have little control over what the kid becomes. Dot in her diaper, barely a blob herself, is already in charge of three hundred and forty-two eggs! Whether she uses them or not, she’ll still be a DOT, as will her offspring. Death doesn’t matter if we accept this. If we accept this, NOTHING matters. Even PLANTS are obsessed with SEX. The female cycad constantly thinks, WE MUST MAKE MORE OF THESE.
Dot’s Infancy
We have our allotted era and our allotted company to keep. But such a LONG life, and each time Dot got this mean Grandma named Yetta, all alligator shoes and matching bag and a mouth like a VANILLA POD. How many whales died to daub those lips?
Yetta liked to tidy, to vacuum, to send dust into sunbeams in a way that perturbed Dot. Ferdinand was enlisted to help with the housework, washing dishes in a plastic basin on the floor while Dot shat in a corner.
Yetta was always trying to SEPARATE Dot and Ferdinand. One minute Dot would be sitting beside him, the next she was TEN FEET AWAY, facing in the opposite direction! It was baffling. Dot sometimes played POSSUM, lying very still in the hope of being left alone, or hid under beds where she examined carpets and saw the life of bugs.
Yetta once found her blue in the face, strangled by a telephone cord wrapped around her neck. Another time, Dot got caught up in the strings of the Venetian blinds at Yetta’s apartment and choked! Once Dot tried to cook. She’d seen her mother pull things out of the fridge so SHE tried. A lot of stuff fell on her and it HURT. Yetta ran in with Ferdinand and shouted ‘Look at you!’ and dragged Dot over to the sink. Embarrassed to be scolded in front of Ferdinand, Dot watched the vanilla pod open and shut, and wondered, What’s the point of grandmas? After the blood was washed off, Dot was locked in a room with Pepito, the big brown poodle. He licked her tears and let her curl up beside him to sleep.
Slow to start walking, Dot identified with dogs. She thought SHE might be a dog. It was a shock when she figured out that Pepito couldn’t SPEAK. After that she noticed other things about him. His nose was awfully long, his fur very thick, and his feet small and pointy. She was not a dog — though Yetta sometimes treated her like a dog, pulling her along the street screaming, ‘LEAVE IT!’ when Dot tried to pick something up off the sidewalk.
WHAT MADE YETTA? Nobody knows. But there are WITCH women in the world who want BAD THINGS to happen, and it WORKS.
The woman had no IMAGINATION. She’d made Sam wear a SLEEP-HARNESS until he was THIRTEEN because he’d once fallen out of bed. The sleep-harness totally IMMOBILISED him. She gave him GEFILTE FISH, cheese knoedel and peculiar Slavic delicacies to eat, and told him matzobrei is the same as French Toast. It ain’t. She also wrote rhyming couplets about ZOO ANIMALS and, when not belittling Sam, fussed about the SCHWARTZEN next door, who seemed to Yetta to be procreating on a massive scale.
She had destroyed Sam’s father with UNEASE before Sam was even born, ridiculing him into an early heart attack. She immediately changed her name from Weiselberg to RADZIWILL, which she’d just seen in some fashion mag. Sam resented this later, convinced his psychoanalytic career would have been aided by the name Weiselberg (it sounded WISE), but he never complained. He spent his life ducking her scorn.
She supported them by working as a dental hygienist. She never SHUT UP about teeth, judging everybody by the state of their teeth and at the least provocation advising them on dental care. Sam suspected that she would let violent criminals off lightly if their teeth were good.
Yetta sent Sam off to college in one of his father’s old moth-balled suits, drastically altered, saying his father would be proud. This was not true. Sam’s father would NOT have been proud to see Sam go off to college. He hadn’t WANTED children, he’d wanted a DIVORCE (and he never liked that suit).
Years later Dot watched her poor crumpled father tramp through the house in muddy boots, the Big Provider, lugging his home-grown potatoes and parsnips and purple cauliflowers down to the basement where Dot and Ferdinand could roll on them. He grew melons too. Buttercups and snapdragons grew by themselves, and there was a tree in the backyard with woven, criss-crossing bark. Long strands of bark buckled other strands on to the trunk. Dot couldn’t understand how the top layers stayed ON and kept trying to pull them off.
Her mother baked star-shaped cookies with coloured DOTS on them. Dot knew she was special because of these cookies. They filled the house! CLIFFS of cookies, piled HIGH, growing brittle then soggy, on every shelf. Some with raisins, some without. No one ever seemed to make a DENT in this cookie cornucopia, no matter how many they ate.
In winter, Dot and Ferdinand would put on one-piece SNOWSUITS and go out into big dots of snow. Ferdinand built himself an igloo once, when Dot was very young. She crawled in and then crawled desperately OUT. She looked up and saw blue sky moving dizzyingly around and around.
George Washington as a Baby
There are BEAUTIFUL DAYS in America. Americans are seduced DAILY, weakened, made pliable, by the beauty of that sky. THIS is what American children really pledge allegiance to at school every day, hands on hearts. They don’t just get GLIMPSES of it. They see it all day through school windows, during recess and on the way home. It continues to corrupt all day, the deep piercing blue of that old sky.
T
he early years at school in America are devoted to confidence, continence, nap-time, play-time, story circles, show-and-tell, reading, writing, drawing, singing, and the celebration of one goddam public holiday after another. The preparations are EXTREME. Weeks are spent constructing identical Mother’s Day cards, three-dimensional Hallowe’en lanterns, pictures of Thanksgiving turkeys (made by tracing around your own hand), Christmas tree ornaments involving glitter, felt and sequins, pink tissue-paper Valentine cards and Easter crap.
Children are not being FOBBED OFF with all this creativity because they’re not smart enough yet for Calculus, nor is it anything to do with HAND-EYE CO-ORDINATION. We intensively train children in the Arts and ritual because deep down we know that these are the only things that really MATTER. This is what we must share first with the young, in case they DIE. Until Science can actually PREVENT death, it’s got nothing on the Arts and ritual (although there isn’t a single ritual you don’t at some point wish to DEFY).
On Dot’s first Hallowe’en, Ferdinand was Zorro and Dot was a cloud — she was stuffed into a pillowcase full of cotton wool with cardboard raindrops pinned all over it. They got as far as the next-door neighbours’ house where they were offered PUMPKIN PIE. Dot LOVED it. She had never had pumpkin pie before. The only problem was her raindrops kept getting in the way.
At Thanksgiving every year, Dot and her family and a few of her father’s ex-patients would sit around a turkey wondering what Thanksgiving’s really ABOUT.
For Chanukkah, Dot and Ferdinand lit small yellow candles in the menorah that Yetta had insisted on giving them, and opened presents from her for seven nights running, mostly lousy stuff like PYJAMAS and handkerchiefs (but once, a doll that TALKED), each night a bigger but not necessarily better present, and a slightly more substantial COIN, tucked in a little envelope.