by Carmel Bird
It was a safe life; no real risks were taken. Perhaps it was as happy a life as anyone can reasonably expect. But, you know, I rage about something. I remember the promise of the clever and beautiful girl, and I see her dancing with bright young men at the School Ball when she was about sixteen, and the songs from Oklahoma! run through my head, and I see Louisa laughing beside the piano as I play, and twirling as she sings. There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow. I feel so sad about it all. She might as well have taken some risks. Perhaps if she hadn’t been so safe she might still be alive. She might have done some other thing, had a good deal more fun. I wish she had been able to walk out and leave the creep to Cathy. But she didn’t. She stayed. Got cancer. Died. Is there a connection? Maybe. Maybe not. Anybody can die, after all, any old time.
Behind the pretty fences of all the pretty houses in all the pretty towns and villages in all the world there lurk the dangers of disease and emotion and loneliness and cruelty and sorrow. We know this, but we have to pretend, most of the time, not to know.
There is violence somewhere at the heart of things; without that violence nothing would ever happen. Violence destroys; violence creates. Without death and decay and violence and loss there would be no creation at all. No rose without thorns. Do my thoughts jump too easily? Do I leave out the logical steps that should be there for the reader, connecting one thing with another in order to prove a point? I have been accused of suffering from a form of madness because of the zigzag pathways and the circular threads I follow in my writing. Too bad! I’ll risk it. This is a weird sort of writing, I have been told. It isn’t fiction; it isn’t essay; it isn’t poetry. What is it?
Ken wonders about this too. What do you actually think you’re doing here, writing this stuff, he says.
It is a slow and vivid search with words for the point where consciousness and understanding intersect with unconsciousness and confusion; a search for some sort of threshold between knowing and not knowing, for the place where there is an invisible membrane that separates what is true and good and beautiful from what is not, from what is evil. It is a search for what makes it possible for a bomb to go off in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, blasting the life out of Baylee Almon, who was just learning to walk, blowing the light out of her eyes. It is a search also for the nature of that light, and for the moment and the place when that light went out.
But I am also sad that Baylee, whose mother desired (probably rightly) that she should not become a public figure, is the subject of my meditations and speculations. I know of her only because she is dead, only because of the manner of her death, because she was a baby, because evil crossed her path.
She was Learning How to Walk
Just now a letter came from a friend who is far away. It ends: ‘Hope you are well and that the words are taking you where you want to go.’ And in the end that is what matters, that the words should take me where I want to go. And they are. Writing can be lonely, and messages of hope and confidence are very precious.
Do You Remember Blue Velvet?
An image comes to me—an image from the opening scenes of the movie Blue Velvet—white picket fences in the sunshine, bright flowers, neat lawns, a hose spraying lovely water on the flowers and shrubs. The hose goes berserk; a man is having a heart attack. Which thing is true? The pretty flowers or the man in crisis? They are both true. Which matters? They both matter. (How can she say that?) Well, without the man the flowers will die. (And without the flowers, the man will die?) Well, in a sense, yes, in a long, winding, spiritual sense whereby man does not live by bread alone. (And there are many instances of plants that can exist only so long as certain conditions or certain animals are there to help them along. Instances of animals that can exist only if there are certain plants. If the African elephant goes, then a particular acacia goes with it because the elephant’s digestion is part of the process of the acacia’s germination. There are plants that need bushfires in order to survive.)
It often seems to me that when it comes down to it, we, none of us, have anything much to lose. We might as well take some risks, climb the mountain, swim the river, throw caution to the winds, write poetry and shout it from the tops of city buildings, get married, get divorced, tell Cathy to go jump, tell Ron to go with her. Do something. (I was told that Louisa’s mother, who had never been known to use strong language, said, at Louisa’s deathbed, ‘Oh shit.’ That seems to me to sum it up quite well.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Baylee Almon’s mother wasn’t taking any risks. Her new job was with, of all the ironic things, an insurance company, and her baby was as safe as safe could be in the daycare centre on the second floor of the Federal Building. Not safe enough. That place was the riskiest place on earth that morning—and yet it looked so innocent, so ordinary. You never know, really, just where safety lies, where danger sits quietly coiled up and ready to spring. It seems the bomb was put there because it was a safe Federal Building—because on the top floor there was the office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). These Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms guys were the guys that mounted the siege at Waco, Texas, in 1993. (Waco, another name to add to the list of names that strike terror into the heart.)
So the ATF was the target for the bomb, and the date on which the bomb exploded was the second anniversary of the siege at Waco, not so very far away from Oklahoma City, in Texas.
The right-wing citizens’ militia blame the US Federal Government and in particular its ATF officers for the deaths at Waco. The bomb in Oklahoma City was revenge for Waco. If it can happen in Oklahoma, it can happen anywhere.
The way has wound back to Oklahoma.
Well, Ken says, that’s something then. Give us a line from that song.
Corn as High as the Elephant’s Eye
My collection of elephantalia is creeping up to the height of the corn—books, pictures, stories, articles, photographs. I used to have a glass replica of an elephant’s eye. It was part of a collection of glass replicas of the eyes of about fifty different animals. They were stuck, in order of size, onto a display board and named, and there was information about each eye written in black Indian ink in my father’s handwriting—my father being an optician. The board is gone; most of the eyes are gone—the remaining eyes are in a red glass dish on the mantelpiece. I am not sure whose eyes are what any more. I think one of them was meant to belong to a tiger. The elephant’s eye was, I think, a dark-brown affair, and not as big as I would have expected. Don’t ask me how a person could come to lose a board and close to fifty animals’ eyes. I would very much like to be able to take from the dish the eye of the elephant, place it in the palm of my hand, and stare at it and touch its false glass surface, and try to get it to give up its secrets. Of course, it actually has no secrets; it is a toy, a dead thing, a bit of glass.
Ken says he does wonder about losing all those eyes. Then he says let’s have a geek at some of the elephant pictures instead.
So I get two of the pictures: one is a coloured photograph I took of the wooden statue of an elephant in a shop; the other is a black-and-white photograph of an elephant cut from a newspaper. The caption underneath the newspaper picture says: ‘Police officers corner a 21-year-old African elephant on a Honolulu street shortly before killing it with a high-powered rifle. The elephant burst out of control during a circus performance, killing its trainer and injuring thirteen others.’ The headline above the picture says: ‘A rogue circus animal’s last performance.’ The word ‘rogue’ is used carelessly, inaccurately and unkindly. Rogue animals are defeated ex-dominant males who are exiled from the herd and who roam round dangerously looking for females. This tragic elephant went from Africa to Honolulu to be a circus performer, and turned upon its keeper. It isn’t really a rogue at all—just a tragedy.
Forget that this animal should be at home in Africa; forget that it is surrounded by cars and men in helmets carrying guns and cameras. Forget the chain of events that has brought it to th
is moment where it is about to die. Look only at the elephant’s eye. One eye. Animal in profile. This eye expresses pure terror, pure panic; it is the eye of an enormous wild animal that is standing in a public road, powerless, vulnerable, confused, aware that it is about to die. It is the eye of the moment of truth. The eye of terror is small and nacreous. And the glassy eye of a camera has opened and shut on it, and now the image of the elephant, the elephant’s eye, is available to all, able to be flashed around the world and reproduced in newspapers. Behind the eye of the camera was the eye of the cameraman, and all over the world where newspapers are to be found on newsstands and on the front lawns in the dewy morning behind the pretty fences there are pairs of eyes, pairs and pairs of eyes ready to flip the page and look at the elephant’s eye, and then flip the page again and look at something else. (Newspapers on lawns are rolled up in tubes of plastic.)
Paramedics wrapped them in long white gauze like christening dresses.
This great beast, who in Hindu legend supports the world, stands in a street in Honolulu and is shot down by police. (He killed his trainer and injured thirteen other people, having, it will be noted, burst out of control.)
Ken leans over my shoulder, looking at the elephant’s shiny terrible eye. He says it looks like a marble, and that it looks insane.
The Little Point of Light
I sit at my desk in front of a window outside which the long pink buds of jasmine are beginning to flower into white stars, and I smooth out the newsprint picture, and I stare and stare with sadness into the eye, the appalling highlight, the elephant’s last look at life. The eloquence of the photograph is such that I seem to be able to hear the sound the elephant utters, the high-pitched whinnying roar and scream and squeal of terror. I see the motion, feel the gesture of the body as if this were a sequence in a movie. Always my gaze comes back to the eye, to the little point of light glinting there on its surface.
If this were a picture of a man about to be shot, how would the light fall? Would I see the expression in the man’s eyes?
Ken picks up the other picture, the one I took in the shop.
The photograph of the big wooden statue of the elephant also shows one eye. Although this eye is only carved and painted, it too forms the focus of the picture. There is something wild and tragic about this imitation eye. This elephant, I remember, stood among piles of cushions and large ornamental vases in the shop. The elephant was as high as a man is tall. It was pushed into a corner, partly barricaded by a row of shelves containing terracotta pots. And it wore a big cardboard price tag on which was boldly written with green pen ‘$4,999’. A large expensive bauble. An even larger notice hung from its ear:
PLEASE Do Not Touch the ELEPHANT Thank You
The boy from Starpoint, the man from Dreamland. Watch out for him. He would touch the elephant.
Imagine the beautiful white elephant that appeared in the dream of the Buddha’s mother at the moment the Buddha was conceived.
Ken knows a girl who was so lonely at boarding school she went around all the time hugging a toy elephant, and because the girl was too shy to speak to anybody she put a notice on the elephant that said, ‘You can kiss my elephant’, but nobody did and the girl got even more lonely. Stories, stories, Ken says. Everything is stories. Are you getting to the point then? He says to me. And I say, I think so. Are the words taking you where you want to go then? Are you getting to that membrane thing you reckon you are always looking for? And I say:
Once Upon a Time in Vanity Fair There Were Three Sisters
Who were all very beautiful, their names were Marie-Chantal and Pia and Alexandra. They lived in a palace high on a hilltop in the exciting city of Hong Kong. Their father was very rich and their mother was very beautiful and when they had been to school in England, they went to school in Switzerland, and then they went to school in America. And then they were ready to go out into the world and seek their fortunes in marriage. Pia married a millionaire, Marie-Chantal married one prince and Alexandra married another prince. And a magazine by the name of Vanity Fair (of all names) sent a photographer to take coloured pictures of the sisters, who were all wearing ball dresses. The dresses had acres of tulle skirts, and lovely little pleated bodices, and around their shoulders the sisters wore pastel-coloured silks and brocades. They were dripping with precious jewels. The photographer asked them to drape themselves on a rather cheap piece of stage furniture in the form of a red-velvet chaise longue, and he suggested that they adopt dreamy, stoned expressions. And so they did. With moody, transfixed stares they collapsed onto the old chaise longue and the chap (his name was David Seidner) took the photos. And there we have them.
The dresses were by John Anthony, Valentino and Barney’s Private Label. Capes by Lanvin, Adrienne Landau and Vivienne Westwood. Jewellery by Van Cleef & Arpels. Shoes by Manolo Blahnik. Hair by Avram and make-up by Brigitte Reiss-Anderson. Most of the rest of this information is blotted out by the glue in the spine of the magazine. For further details you can look at the credits page of Vanity Fair (June 1995).
The story in the magazine tells us that this, actually the eve of two of the weddings, is a fateful moment. And so it must be. But the story ends on a sober, warning note. This could be ‘happily ever after’ they say. ‘Or so it seems.’ Oops! Or so it seems.
This stuff about the three girls is not really a story. It is a sort of advertisement for the fashion houses, some of whose names have unfortunately disappeared in the binding. You can see why Vanity Fair would do it; you can see why the fashion houses would do it. The mystery is: why did the sisters do it? Perhaps they were so bored they did it for a bit of fun, not knowing how their bodies and lives would be constructed for the ‘story’. Not caring, perhaps? Prepared to risk it for a bit of fun, slumming it in the papers? Don’t know. Unless, of course, there are no such people as these sisters, and it is a story. But in that case, it would be a better story containing the fabric of the ‘ever after’ bit.
Hey ho, come to the fair!
At her wedding in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Santa Sophia in London, Alexandra will have to walk three times round the altar wearing a dress (by Valentino) with a long, long train. She needs to rehearse this, and has been given a mock train for practice.
Paramedics wrapped them in long white gauze like christening robes.
Hey Ho, Come to the Fair
The carnival exists on the very line I seek, the line between the darkness and the light, the membrane that I imagine separates goodness from evil. The riotous merriment preceding the rigours of Lent. The carnival. The mardi gras. The fat Tuesday that prefigures the Wednesday of death and ashes. The grinning dancing mask that hides the rotting skull.
A girl called Katie Mason was nine when she went to the fair with her mother and her sister and some friends. As Katie stood on the pavement in the crowd, a madman, ‘a large dishevelled man’, with a knife rushed towards her and snatched her by the hair and hacked her to pieces. Katie died in her mother’s arms. ‘I saw some glimmer in her eyes, almost like some sort of recognition. But by the time I had laid her on the ground, her eyes had a more glassy look. When I first went to her side, she still looked alive—but not anymore. There was no look of pain in her eyes, but instead it was a look of surprise.’ (From How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland, Chatto and Windus, 1994.)
The Pathway of Our True Desire
I remember thinking when I first looked into my own daughter’s eyes, soon after she was born, that what I saw was pure, clean, innocent wonder. A kind of surprise, but bigger. A receptiveness, a willingness to embrace. Knowing and not knowing. The eyes of good and evil. The steady look of truth. I tried to imagine that my own eyes might have been like that when they were new. Maybe when we are born and when we die we know everything. In between times, we forget most. Is the look at the beginning replicated by the look at the end? Is the time in between, the life, the higgledy-piggledy line of life, is this the line that joins two dots, two dots of wonder and surprise? Amaz
ed to be here; astonished to be leaving. The interesting time in the middle. The time when suspicion and anger must come to cloud the look of wonder, but also joy and merriment. How straight was the line that Baylee Almon took? How straight Louisa Pretty’s? Is short and straight and sweet the way to go? Or is the pathway of our true desire the strangest, crookedest, most deviating highway of risk and adventure? To ride the elephant, hunt the tiger, shoot the rapids? Way to go? Notch up as many dangers as we can on the line between the dots, between the life-embracing pupil of the newborn baby and the death-swallowing pupil of the fresh-made corpse.
One of the problems with the story of The Three Sisters in Vanity Fair is the blandness of it all. Good news is not really a story. When we get a story, we look and wait for the break, the flaw, the conflict, the thing that happens, the sad, bad, mad or funny thing that happens. They are beautiful; they are rich; they are marrying millionaires and princes. So? So? What happens? Well, apart from the fact that Vanity Fair somehow persuades them to let themselves be made to look ridiculous, there is only the dark hint that ‘happy ever after’ may not be so, and the interesting fact of the tatty old chaise longue. The surface of the picture gleams with health, beauty and diamonds, but the structure on which things rest is something, after all, from the carnival, from the circus, from the music hall.
Paramedics Rush Out
There is a brief explosion and the old chaise longue collapses, a dishevelled man leaps forward brandishing a knife with which he slashes at the princesses, ripping silks and satins, spraying emeralds and rubies, letting blood. Paramedics rush out to save the princesses. The crowd surges forward to get a better look. The paramedics have been there, waiting in the wings. There is a still camera, a video camera, and provision for voice-over and, of course, later they will add music. The princesses are wrapped in long gauze, just like christening dresses.