Gut Symmetries Read online

  We had built our safe tower, put the trophy on the roof and dared lightning to strike. He wanted to shut out temptation. I wanted to shut it in. I wanted to be tempted by him, re-tell the story of Adam and Eve. He wanted Paradise, a sacred temenos where he would be free of his own pain. My father used to warn me, ‘Never turn your back on the serpent.’ He was right that the enemy of Paradise is always already inside. Jove used to laugh at my Jewishness but wasn’t the serpent under the foundations of our house even then? Once or twice I caught him drinking from the buckets.

  Then my husband took what was left of the stale dirty water and threw it in my face.

  No escape now. I stink of it. I smell like the sluicings from the abattoir.

  He said, ‘If only you would try to understand.’

  I understand that pain leapfrogs over language and lands in dumb growls beyond time. A place where there is no speech and no clock, no means of separating either the moment or its misery. Nobody comes and nobody goes. It is a place unvisited by civilisation. Civilisation has not happened.

  Look up at the bloody clouds made angry by the sun. Cower back from them in your nakedness and in your fear. There is no one who will help you and help is not a cry, it is still the deep ache of millennia, before humanness, before love.

  The fool in his folly thinks that time before time is gone. He thinks pre-history has sunk into its swamp and we have long since drained the land and built on it. So we have, towers all, hygienic, raised up, electric lit. The horror of pre-time is a Saturday night special effects show, until I discover in my own body the swamp, the smell, the dark.

  Where am I that the wind whips against the ledge battering my face and hands into the indifferent rock. No one will come to take me home. There is no home. For a little while, at least, there is sleep.

  Dream. Dream myself into what I might be, out of what I have become. In the dream there is a tall mirror hinged into a case. The woman in the mirror has an unknown face. There is a sadness about her but at the side of her body, a bright light, as though the skin will burst and something alive tumble out. When I put out my hand to touch the mirror it is as warm and thin as a membrane of skin.

  Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes. The sun has kept his promise and risen again.

  Part of you or one of you responds to this; wakes because the sun wakes, just as the earth wakes, and what can grow will. Nothing has changed this, no matter how technic, nor how remote, I go on opening my eyes to the sun.

  This gives me hope. It connects me when I am most in need of connection. The grey city and its lost hearts force their way between myself and my healing. I cannot be still, wait for an answer, I can only hear the roar of the traffic and the misery under it. I am one more noise, one more pain, each locked off from the other.

  Let the sun come. Break sense into nonsense. I have lain caught in the lunar crayfish night in blue waters too deep for me. I swam but there was no surface. When I fought to come up for air I came up into other waters. Where was I in the night where two dogs howled at the moon and a ruined tower reflected down at me?

  In the grainy night I could not understand. Strange portents from another life opened at me. I felt delirious, absurd, these messages were unreadable or I was.

  Too fast. Too soon. When a fissure opens up in the self, half-known beasts climb out of it. The sane sensible clock-driven day has been bloodied to death.

  Now other laws apply and this place does not respect yours.

  Nervous breakdown? Doctor, pills, rest, shh, shh. The crazy lady who frightens children. Why does she frighten children? They can still see what she sees.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, I saw the lady who drags the waters at her feet.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  I am being silly but am I any sillier than when I trusted him?

  Pull yourself together.

  Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It’s on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I’m told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?

  You look better.

  Thank you. I dumped the broken bits and varnished the surface. Not bad is it? And now I can be released back into the community, encouraged to join a dating agency, and invited to speak about my experiences at a Transcendental Self-Lobotomy seminar for the prematurely smashed.

  No. There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night. My whole self is in hiding, not daring to get too close, for the fissure smokes and belches and there are hands reaching over the edge towards me.

  What is in there? The thin line is weak but curious. I have to send out my courage like a moon probe but as yet I cannot decode the incoming signal. I should have done this slowly slowly over the years. I should have learned a new language before I needed to speak it. But I never thought I needed a new language. The inner life has been just that; inner. Doesn’t a healthy person look outwards? I forgot what my father said, my father in his dark coat and ringed hair, warning me to remember the serpent.

  Let the sun come. I shall have to take the nights more slowly. For now it is enough to find a tiny pattern, faithfully every day, that begins to spell my name.

  These matters compressed into my half-thoughts and comforted me in the second before I turned over in the half-bed. Then the gentle light of the sun was put out as my body hit a power station of pain. Is that me, voltaged out of life into one burnt smell of defeat? I read that those who are executed by electric chair retain a tiny proportion of consciousness, enough to know that they have been killed, before the final death of sense and mind.

  What is the moment of death? The moment when the heart stops? The rupture of command from brain to body? The soul climbing out of its dark tower?

  I come from a people to whom the invisible world is everyday present. A people for whom there is no death though death has followed them across history and continents. I come from a people who hope against hope, whose melancholy is the outer garment of their mirth. In their celebrations and in their mournings, the spirit is the same. I used to speak Yiddish and Hebrew fluently but I have not spoken either language for thirty years. What else have I lost?

  The moment of death, the moment of reckoning, whatever it was, the image that stopped you, at that moment the protective accumulations of life prove useless. The inner life, the other language is what I need and the room is empty and silent.

  I can’t go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be. The only way for me to handle what is happening is to move myself forward into someone who has handled it. As yet that person does not exist. She has not those resources. I will have to make her as Jewish legend tells how God made the first man: by moulding a piece of dirt and breathing life into it. The dirt I have in plenty. The life I will have to draw out of lungs unused to deep breathing.

  What kills love? Only this: neglect.

  I knew I was neglecting myself. Oh not in the ways taboo to modern religion: leaving my hair like the inside of a rabbit hutch; choosing clothes that hang as though they had started life as a horse blanket. My hands don’t shake when I read the morning paper and when I take my make-up off I don’t look like a red-eyed werewolf. When I put it on I don’t look like a red-eyed werewolf either. I eat well, drink modestly, exercise to prevent my thighs from swimming into two seals. I read, think, work hard, and my blood pressure is average. />
  Was there nothing else?

  There was: a woman whose face collides with mine in the mirror. I know she wants to speak to me but when she bends forward to whisper, she has no mouth.

  An older woman, short and strong, dark aspect and thick hands. When she comes close she tries to clutch me but as her hands shut around my body there is no body. I see her bent over the terrified air.

  And else? A man, younger than I am. I get a feeling of him now and then when I am zipping up my jeans. He seems to want to attract attention to his balls.

  When I told Jove about my occasional shadow-man, he served up Freud with the pasta and told me it was my inadequacy anxiety.

  ME: I don’t feel inadequate.

  HE: Unconsciously you do. You need to compensate for my success.

  ME: His balls are bigger than yours.

  HE: Aha, but they don’t exist. (He rearranged himself.)

  ‘So when you dream of that pneumatic water-sprite, breasts a-bouncing, are you compensating for my success?’

  ‘Hell, no, she’s just a hopeless male’s porno-girl. They get delivered by the breast-load.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  This is the man that prises open the deepest clams of matter. Would you go fishing with him?

  I did. We took a boating holiday in the Bermudas. Rocks, pale-red in the chrome water, chrome surf plating the boat.

  We made a small indulgence in the dazzling austerity of the bay; its tin-tautness, the look of sheet metal, seeming to force the waves out hot-pressed not cold. The waves blistered off its smoothness, hit us with a clang and fell back again, bubbling, splitting, onto the sea tray. Perhaps we had fouled the compass and come to a magnetic pole where we were spinning, spinning in a steel sea. In the ferrousness of our situation Jove landed a fish tough as a bar.

  He said, ‘If we don’t eat this we can use it to break into the hotel safe.’

  ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘The fake diamonds of the fake Countess.’

  ‘No. Down here.’

  He came and lay down and stared over the edge of the boat. We could see our severed heads.

  ‘You and me in another life.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever find it?’

  ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ and he rolled over heating his body in the sun.

  In the bow of the boat the fish panted.

  I started to talk about the well and as I did so the boat becalmed itself or maybe the water tightened but we were as still and solid as a frozen boat on a frozen lake. Jove wasn’t listening to me, which was as well otherwise I’m not sure I could have gone with it. It became a kind of active dreaming and the fish looked like a baton in the boat, beating time to me.

  Under there, where what I am sure of is back to front, inside out, reversed, I feel in the way that I presently think, that is constantly, lucidly, testing all experience against feeling, clear and powerful as the water it suspends in.

  Here, what I know by sensation, there, I know by intuition.

  My empirical finger-tips numb and I can’t open my eyes. What I see, what I touch is interior, either I am inside it or it is inside me. It is only vague when I subject it to the laws of the upper air. It is as though there is an entirely other way of being that makes no sense to my world, any more than my world makes sense to it. I cannot connect the two; the watery world won’t move up into the dry bright light that I live in and when I take the dry bright light down there it immediately de-charges, leaving me to fumble my way in the dark.

  This has been happening for years and I used to conceive of it as a poet’s place or a place of inspiration; a place I imagined but where I could never actually visit. It comes closer to me than I am able to come to it. Dreams do dream us, don’t they? We are not the ones in control.

  Distinctly though, in the boat in the rigid sea, I had a premonition of finality. That if I did not find a way to go there soon, the seductive watery shaft would fill with rubble and I would never again approach further than its rim.

  I jerked my head away and looked down the length of our little boat. Jove had fallen asleep and the fish was dead.

  What is the moment of death? The hook, the line or the sinker? When I fell in love with him? When I trusted him? When he betrayed me? What kind of death is it?

  I lay on the torture bed listening to its wounded springs seize as I moved. The uncoiled metal was twanging gently at the floor, a crazy lute for a crazy lover. I reached out my hand and rattled the wooden slatted blind. Lovers like music, don’t they? This had been a lover’s bed. I wondered if she could hear it, wherever she was, hear me, composing for her. I was no longer able to observe the steady four-four time of normal life. The rhythm didn’t suit me. Perhaps it had never suited me, and I had been dancing along the way winos do, all shuffle and swank, a gin bottle Fred Astaire.

  Against the rage and the self-pity and the shock was one single clear … thought/feeling?, that in the months before this, no, the years before this, I had heard it coming. It was like a steel ball, a ball-bearing, rolling somewhere around the apartment.

  ‘What is that? What’s come loose?’ and I used to make Jove crawl round under the furniture and re-screw all the castors, and for weeks it would stop. Then, suddenly, unmistakably, across our wooden floors, the ball-bearing, rolling, rolling.

  We used to joke that we had a ghost.

  We did. Me.

  Was it her that waits behind the mirror?

  Was it her that clutches at the air and cries?

  Was it him, smiling, challenging?

  Was it another part of me that I had not met?

  I said I had neglected myself. There’s a photo of Jove and me years and years ago when we were married. He is shy, awkward, daring, defiant, the street boy pulling himself up to the avenues. I am staring out of the sensitive paper, with a look I used to have, quizzical, determined. We were new, new people in a new place and the shine was still on us.

  When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell.

  I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

  Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. Totality of time.

  Page of Swords

  June 8 1960. Liverpool, England. Sun in Gemini.

  I was born in a tug-boat. My mother whelped me in a mess of blankets while my noctivagant father towed in the big ships.

  His was the night vessel, the vessel on oily waters, his was the light shining in the darkness, come home, come home.

  He worked for a shipping company and had done so since he was fifteen. He had started at the end of the war as an office boy and fourteen years later was to be made a director of the line. To celebrate he made love to my mother and I was conceived.

  By day my father was a smart and increasingly smarter man. By night, or to be truthful, by three nights a week, he manned a tug-boat. There he is in a greasy donkey jacket and seaman’s balaclava. Spinning the thick cable from the windlass and bringing in the banana boats, the grain boats, the boats of Turkish silver, and the boats full of Irish, shamrocks round their hearts.

  When I was born the waters were still alive. My father too, was still alive, strong and burly, as wide as he was tall, with an enormous chest that looked as though it could tow the cargo boats itself.

  His own family were Liverpool limeys; had always worked the docks, the boats, in the Navy or as Merchant seamen. The women had worked in the clutter of cargo offices up and down the quays. His mother, my grandmother, had been the Official Polisher of Brass Plaques and some said that when she had finished her Friday round the shine of it was so bright that it tipped the waves
like a skimming stone and could still be seen in the harbour of New York.

  His father, my grandfather, was killed in a war farce when an American torpedo scuppered the wrong boat. As a result, my grandmother was paid a sizeable pension and was able to have her wild strong son privately educated. She poured her money into him as though he were a treasure chest. He learned well, looked well, and if anyone questioned him about his Mersey terrace two up two down he simply knocked them out. Throughout his life my father has dealt with difficult questions by knocking them out. What is unconscious does not speak and that included the hidden part of himself.

  In 1947, certificated and handsome at eighteen, he was given a lowly job-with-prospects at Trident Shipping (Progress, Tradition, Integrity). All of his family had worn clean clothes to work, that was their pride, but none had ever worn clean clothes home. For them it had been mother with a boiling hip-bath and a packet of soap flakes. My father went to work clean and he came home clean. This was an endless source of satisfaction to my grandmother who never lost her own whiff of elbow grease but delighted in the sweet smell of success.

  My father loved the sea and should have been an active seaman but there were more opportunities indoors for a bright boy who had a way about him. He compensated by wheedling his way onto the tugs, and because there was still an apprenticeship mentality about the Company, his oddity was tolerated. What harm could it do and wasn’t all experience useful? Besides, he did it in his own time and it made him popular with the men.

  In 1957 he married my mother. She was Irish, nearly well-to-do, the daughter of a partner in the firm who was based in Cork. My father had seen her at the Annual Dinner and Dance and vowed that he would marry her. For two years they exchanged letters and gifts until romance, persistence and a promotion won the day. On their wedding night, at the Hotel Ra-Ra (décor: Merseyside-Egypt), my father took off his pyjamas so that his wife could see him man qua man, then told her that he would not make love to her until he had been made a director of the line. He put on his pyjamas again and after a moment or two of violent shuddering, fell asleep.