by Marc Nash
So even if I grapple successfully with the conundrum over our deepest motivation for bringing children into the wide world, the more benighted of us are bound to consider why we bring them into this stunted portion of it. Just now I am too damn tired to exercise my mind much about it. Too damn weary moreover to do anything about it. Too fucked even to fulminate further.
My eyes bolt open, my trunk swings from the bed in one taut flow. I hear the report of the girls even before the door chimes. Saved from further morbidity by the bell. And henceforth slump once again into damnation. I try to envision the make-up effect I’d be after, if I still pandered to cosmetics. The look of a confident, independent woman, who has just serenely engaged in a most delectable morning. Rather than the look of Euripides’ Hecabe, yoked amid the shattered wreckage of Troy. I’ll just have to use my facial muscles to feign the effect. Appears they too have stagnated without recent employment, since, on opening the front door my children burst into sobs. As he is smiling beatifically, I can only assume that it’s more likely to be the scary clown face they’re confronted with than anything he’s wreaked upon them.
Shockworker Daddy had evidently put in a good shift. The girls were exhausted and put up no resistance to retiring early to bed. I resumed my journal, to put the counter-case. I was at a bit of a low ebb this morning. Caught at a vulnerable moment. First time without the children. Bit of a loose end. Time to sally forth, rather than be an Aunt Sally. This had better be good!
Er, um...
No, I’ve got it now. Of course, it’s wondrous, thrilling, delightful, glorious and all the other shortfall words of high emotion, when the kids want to share their discoveries, their existence, their kinship and even their selfish selves with you. But that’s not what I’m doing this for. I’m not in it for anything to redound to me. The most inflammatory thing anyone could and has said to me, is ‘You must be very proud of them.’ Which I acknowledge is a stock, throwaway compliment, but which makes me regard the utterers as clueless and unfit parents, be it of the past (relatives), present (alleged friends and peer group) or the future (those merely out on license). Pride, the one sin that I see eye to eye, tooth and nail with Ian Paisley on.
Proud of what precisely? That they’re unfurling more or less according to the DNA programming inside them? In which case I have to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to my own parents that I’m not quite reconciled to just yet. Naturally I’m relieved my offspring are relatively healthy and vibrant and neither physically nor mentally in-valid, even residing here in Ulster. I’m not sure I would cope with it if they were. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to bring up a child who was. No, proud of how they’re turning out to be such nice children of course. They’re only eight and five for christsakes! I certainly don’t want you casting judgment when they attain the ‘I blame the parents’ stage.
If they chance reflect well on me, even at this tender age, I hope it is not in my image (assuming the reciter of the poisonous phrase holds a positive image of me, like say one of my friends [but if they were truly a friend of mine, they would know not to blurt said phrase in the first place]). The girls are emissaries for themselves. It is not in their remit to do me proud. I don’t want to impose anything on their character, stain or not. Sure as hell my life isn’t anything worth emulating. I’m just trying to make a decent fist of my job as homemaker. To the best of my ability, providing a stable and loving environment as a launch pad for their own evolution. I will harness everything I can and give of myself wholeheartedly towards this aim. Am I doing a good job? Who on earth can say? There’s no assessment, review or promotion under the terms of this employment. What’s the point anyway, when there’s no professional pride to be gleaned from any job which garners so paltry regard and scant esteem in our society. Do I associate with any peer who would honestly comment that they were proud to know me? No, well then don’t presume that on my issue either.
The defence rests, no doubt worn out after its eye-popping, crimson-tidal, if-I-had-an-Adam’s-Apple-it-would-be convulsing rant. It went well I thought. Always accentuate the positive. There must be some reason. I’ll give it some more thought. Till I come up with something.
It’ll be a new year in four days time.
T) None of these sidebar confabs should matter a jot. Since, reputedly, I am the unequivocal mystery of life. The innermost secret. The key to your clandestine chambers and occult workings. Yet I am certain you will only come to intercede with me for your own private auguries and readings. I will be a blueprint consulted solely with reference to your own peculiar variation and defects.
A) From my print run of any two unrelated individuals, there may be one million different letters between them; about six disparate letters per gene. So no one’s going to match this template you are directly unfolding. Following my well-worn system, every possible misprinted version is likely to exist throughout You.
T) So as each draws on my extensive library, with reference to their own vanity published volume, excavating after their genetic lot, you just know that your edition will be the one man jack that can’t be located. It’s out on loan already. Or out of print. Being updated. A new forward and some addendums. A new edition entirely if you have sired. Even as you go about living. For you necessarily engage my workings in any inquiry that pursues, well, my workings. Nor shall you ever fully know yourself, if you persist in treating me purely as a source of your debility. I am not just about dis-ease. I give you everything there is to have. I give you your innermost selves. I beg you not to spurn your own advances. Don’t suffer your own intimacy to lie beyond you.
A) Look, maybe you can’t fathom any point in existence. Even the imperative for passing on my code is necessarily blind. But can’t you just descry the beauty in the construction? Perpend my model and swoon? I don’t mean about the order and harmony of your material selves, for that’s only form. Mere aesthetics. Multi-dimensional ergonomics and free-standing bridge building, remember? I acknowledge it’s a bit of a head-scratcher, but it’s well worth the effort. Your imaginations can evolve to the next level, free of any outside influences or compulsions. You can transcend mortality and truly appreciate what it is to be autonomous. And then, maybe, just maybe, you can begin to aspire to the meaning of relatedness.
T) There is no gene or group of genes coding directly for an arm or a finger, a reversible thumb, or even for two fingers stuck vertically up and wafted. That much you recognise. For you have already inferred most of my detail. But while you treat them as pathological, you cannot begin to court me. While you identify and tag each and every one of the genes that constitute me, you have no real conception of how they function. Who knows, maybe in time you will even have that charted. But like a mound of termites, or a colony of ants, how they correspond and work together defies your topography. You might be able to spotlight the particular activity of a small section, but in the main you can only see a heaving, pulsating host.
A) I exist as, and through, the entire panoply of relationship. I have, and am, a whole lattice of interactions. I accord genes on different chromosomes that reach impalpably across the divide to communicate with one another. I bear other genes which seem in permanent slumber. Their particular, virtually undetectable function, to nudge awake a silent partner, while rolling over undisturbed themselves. Or to reach out in their dream state and gently shutter the lens of the scope of their watchful compatriots. How these genes combine to achieve the right conditions to muster a certain functioning protein unfolds along an extensive and involved chain of interdependence. But they are not automata, following a preset programme. There is no chain of command. No queen awaiting the apotheosis of the war effort for her fertilisation, which is where your similes fall short of bridging understanding.
T) This is more a cascade of effects. A Mexican Wave of modular activity. An explosion of generation, emerging from an easy-going, back-slapping and high-five, jiving co-operation; gene-protein-cell. Their effortless kinship. Sure t
he genes do contain a programme, a programme that can generate any species ever known or lost to man. And after egg-sperm union, they divide and multiply to produce identical stem cells, with the potential to produce any type of specialised cell that may be called for. But as to which they produce? I leave that to the field operatives. For truly I am a republic.
A) In my land of the free, all cells are born equal and have the opportunity to pursue their own destined manifestation. I have no chosen elect, nor those pre-ordained to a certain outcome. Pattern and structure just evolve through my devolution. My de-evolution. Each constituent may take initial instruction from some branch of my stock, before devising its own choreography of chemical valence, gradient and clustering, in order to aggregate its own local troupe of permanent dance partners as part of the great ensemble.
A) And from this medley arises the most diverse, specialised and harmonious common weal. Every piece of the microcosm contains every other piece, since they all contain me. Each gene is reliant on every other of its kind for a commodious outcome, which maximises all of their chances of being passed on. Every cell knows of its fraternal origins, no matter what its current status. Each recognises that it has had to work equally with its neighbouring cells to foster their locality. Yet you who can scarce tolerate neither difference nor stratum have little chance of encapsulating this marvel. Your diagnostics have no insight. Your mental matrices and linguistic iron maidens squeeze the very life out of this, well, life. This Being. Sublime? Ethereal? Do me a favour! Within our macrocosm, the Babel Tower is a stellar construction. It’s how we maximise our potential for creating everything. Cover any suit. A specialist on call for any eventuality. A maven to meet every responsibility.
T) How can you perceive any of this when you do not even comprehend that you are part of the nexus? For are you not fundamentally enmeshed in the structure through your axis with it? Your primary senses inform the body, just as it too reports back to them. Your recording equipment also relies on these intrinsically compromised senses. Analogue or digital, it makes no odds. Neither can wholly remove you from the very thing you are investigating.
A) Now, were you to suspend your aware self and somehow diffuse your consciousness, so as to attune simultaneously with every one of your cells, then you might be getting near. But could your entrenched sense of identity handle such a retreat? To acknowledge that you are just a discrete articulation in time? A chance singularity, changing in very minor ways along your surface, but your essential core remaining unchanged since the moment of DNA fission within the milky way of your mother’s womb.
T) Such sacrifice would be worth your while I believe. For were you to embrace me truly as a dance partner, then just like me you would possess, in potentia, all knowledge and all possible being.
A) Take the plunge one step further. Strip yourself down fully.
A) Switch off your conscious, reflexive self entirely and you
A) could join me in cheating time, space and death by
A) luxuriating in our gene pool of all possibilities. Where
A) there is no reason, no definition. No you and no me for
A) that matter. Not even relationship pertains here. Just
G) pure, undifferentiated existence. I can sense your
G) disembodied nervous system convulsing at that one.
G) How can such a thing be deemed existence? Because
G) we prevail. We are continually sustained through
G) temporality and space and we have recourse to the
G) configuration of matter at any point. Can you just lie
G) perpetually in state, careless to all future dispositions?
G) Unaware and unconscious, yet brimming with surety?
G) This is the biggest wager of your aleatoric being. And the
G) moment you try and collect on your pay out, you lose!
XVIII.VIII.MMIII
A lesson in pain and suffering today. Though I was the pupil, rather than Suzanne. A lessening of her suffering, as she graduates from primary bale to secondary scrapes and grazes. Only serving to heap greater psychic pain on me, as I am held back and made to repeat the past year of torment in my head. Prior to the current passing out ceremony, whenever she came into harm, the anguish she felt was raw, unadulterated, untreatable and, incidently, my fault of causation whatever the external reality. With the pain siren howling, and depth charging the slight friction of blame, I would crank myself up into hysterical emotional overload. ‘She’ll bleed to death. She needs stitching. Get a compress on it till I can get her to the hospital. Call 999, curse 666. Will someone not deliver us from this catastrophe?’ Well, no longer.
Now she knows to wash down the wound even as she waves away my wringing hands. Then to toddle off and get a plaster from the first aid kit. How to adroitly work the adhesive protective paper off and to line up the lint over the gash. The trickling blood does not faze her, for she is all cool application. Yet she is far from detached, for she constantly explores the clotting process. Dragging me to our reappointed internet (at the school’s behest), in order to trace every interlocking ply of the coagulate weave. And also through her own forays, unpicking the scab, back through the clot, past platelets and fibrin, seemingly unsatisfied until she has located the enzymic source of her red Nile. And thereby I am plucked into redundancy. Standing alone from me, she now looks to herself and her own body. My hysteria is cut off. Set adrift. There is no place for it to go, to drape itself. To lavish like a cataract of engulfing love. I tamp myself back down. Hysterectomy of my emotions. My daughter the locum gynaecologist. Only, could the self-surgeries possibly have been botched? Wherein hope, I lash myself to the mast of despair.
What if she’s punctured too many epidermal layers? That the laceration’s too deep, or gouged through too many inconvenient nooks and crannies to be smoothly resurfaced by the clot’s chain gang of conscripted fibres? There they would be, backed up at the lip of an untraversable hollow. Chafing at the bit, angry red in hue. Tendrils extended over the gorge in vain, grappling for a hook beyond, with which to establish purchase. But where they are met with nothing. Holding back the press of their brethren with a flabelliform sweep of outstretched filaments, one plucky member suspends himself a line in an attempt to span the breach. But he just hangs pendulously, beyond redemption and his lariat is severed, consigning him to the void. His fellows froth and writhe in their stranded sterility. Still the lurching impress from behind. Will no one give the signal? They knot and grind in their constriction. It’s getting ugly. Would then the fluffy pink french polishers sign off the work and just stretch an ill-fitting flap of strangulated skin to cicatrize? And thereby only italicize the blemish? For there are those scars that fade quickly and those that mark for life. Brought about by her involuntary clumsiness and unimagined consequence, and my voluntary inconsequence and all too imaginable ineptitude. My poor baby. No more of doctors and nurses. Now we can converse about cosmetics, covering up and masking.
G) I am a singularity. A singular creativity. Multi-faceted, infinite combination. Yet my sedulity is to one end and one end only. That end being me, that I have no end. This is my sole impetus. This is the limit of my involvement. I have no interest beyond that. Though I permit anything and everything else in that interest, it is outside my auspication to get hung up on which apportioned bundles of me are packaged into billets of you. I am merely cognisant, that such temporal clusterings take place in order to conduct me across time. Since that way I conserve my plenitude. To proliferate on into perpetuity. For you are my torch-bearers. My movers and shakers. My stable-hands. My tidal flows. Your existence ensures that my gene pool is stirred and thus prevented from becoming stagnant.
C) So come on in, the fluid’s lovely. Juicy and full of sap. Just dive in. Head first and eyes closed. Give yourself up to the inchoate, the seething and effervescing. Surrender both the horizons of your despair and the depths of your dreams. All is indeterminately rife here.
A) And if the
withdrawal of being is too crushing to bear, then you are free to re-immerse yourself periodically in life. Welling up in my sharply roiled waves, breaking on the earth to be deposited as sediment. As gathered parcels of me. Re-align for terra firma, not by seeking after perspective, but by trusting to my ferment. An infusion from the collective species-memory, as you churn and sputter among its pother. The scraping of the particulars of time and place as you wash up on the beach. One lives, one dies, having touted your intellect and desires, then revert to my bosom having passed us on in the process. Your entire existence is as a gaseous bubble in me. An eructation.
A) I do not say this as self-aggrandisement, rather to make you apprise your true scale in all this. You see, though I earlier postulated the relationship of all my genes in order to fabricate cells that agglomerate to you, ultimately, I’m afraid, you can’t even hold on to relationship as a working model. (See how the swashbuckling ambition of your sharpshooting comparisons now lies buckled and spiked before my oblique subtility? Small bore.) At source, fundamentally there is only temporary, random contiguity.
CG) You demand yet further proof? When I can espy the seismic tumescence of your indicator needles, rapidly shrinking to a flatline? Okay then, I hope this is still gentle enough to let you down by. I am contained in my entirety within every imperceptible, microscopic piece of you. The whole of me, folded into the membrane of each one of your individual cells. Imagine that. Can your egos handle that? And that fleck which is but one unit within any single cell can generate another whole you. How can you wrap your grinning gauges and Cheshire cat calibrators around that?