Thunderstorms

                                         (My youngest brother's wife somewhere near Oman)

Impeccability of word choice is delicate. Editorial marks reveal mistakes. How does an art form ever be ‘perfect’? Form and function attend even bridges. And some bridges are more beautiful than are others; so too is the water that flows under them. One bridge I know was dubbed ‘Purgatory’ by my friend just in for a quick visit; passing over it too often rattled me so much that I relocated. At the end of proverbial days it is the smoothness of life that we use as a gauge of our general condition. Much of yesterday there were thunderstorms. Three magpies huddled on the chair-back I see from the dining room window. Even the fire-place directly behind me dripped from the steady downpour. Sometimes the house shook. The twelve-seater solid oak table before me vibrated from the almost constant grinding of the printer. The house occasionally grumbled and groaned under duress of thunderous rumbles from belligerent skies. But focused, and unaware of what was going on around me, you’d think I could get things perfect?

M’Lady’s hairdresser arrived early. For some reason she did not use the bell. She banged on the living room window, twice or thrice. I called out for Nancy, but the heaviness of the storm on the roof, or her fixation at her kitchen-counter work-space with the first stack of fifty pages precluded her attention. So I made my way to the front door. It is getting more difficult for me to move. It will be good to get my fixation on one location ambulatory again. But we step gingerly on rocks, though once I leapt across the tops of boulders. Yet now Sandy was peering in at me from a window pane. And even at first glance I could see she was soaking wet. The distance from her car to the front door must have been about 30 feet, perhaps only 29, or was it 31? But she could not never-mind the rain, not without an umbrella.

“The rain of your insults has no effect on the indifference of my umbrella,” was a phrase I picked up as a school boy; it delighted my metaphorical mind. Sandy bustled in, dripping. Too early.  As much as an hour or more early. And it entirely upset our cheery cart. M’Lady carefully concealed her down-right disappointment (or was it stage-left?) Her own organization of paraphernalia atop the counters and the kitchen nook table needed quick re-assorting. Sandy came in like a storm-tossed boat. She carried her accouterments with practiced panache, and began plonking them down as though she was familiar with this beach head, knew the routines. She’d brought some freshly baked something or other, “nice and warm!” Her voice was booming. “I’ll put the kettle on for coffee,” she announced. “Then we’ll do your hair!” Outside it thundered. Inside M’Lady politely received the goodies, and responded with intent to microwave the things at another time (she did not say ‘nuke’), but right now she was not disposed (she did not say ‘indisposed’), she was not disposed to having baked goods; not right now. Or have I repeated myself? Then, the coffee at last made, M’Lady brought my cup in to me, raised but an eye-brow of communication’s accord, and went back to settle down her invader... her intruder...  to settle down her unexpected guest. She offered not the buns that had been brought, but opened instead her usual tin of biscuits. Whether the usual mini free-loaders of miniature black ants were to be seen in the biscuit-tin or not I do not know, but the two women sat at the kitchen table, where I could just see some of Sandy’s shoulder and torso, but not her face. She decidedly quietened down. Beside me, the printer froze.

Distractions attending the print out of 270 files at 1.7 GB (I’ve backed them up enough to know the exact itemization) can lead to mess ups. It’s like upsetting the pale-full of carefully picked out pebbles; hours of work are dispensed with at the indelicacy of a slipping of the handle. Real flow is about the acceptance of the moment. But it is a thing of practice, this taking on of thunderstorms in one’s days.     

Completey Incomplete

After exactly 40 days, the 426 draft pages of the Memoir are complete. Three sections, M’Lady’s memoirs, and then a Visual Overview chapter and commentary for each family member, as well the substantive Appendices.  Last night, at 10:03p.m., the whole thing was done! Today (Thursday) it gets printed out for editing by Nancy and her two daughters (all senior to me), and by Monday I shall have made all corrections. Tuesday it goes to the publisher! And even then it will be completely incomplete; even yesterday Nancy’s eldest daughter said she had no photo with her granddaughter, and little Giselle was whisked over by her mother, Gabrielle, and I took the snapshot of her with Grannie-Linda. Viola!

Visual overviews are like that, completely incomplete. Mistakes are natural to us. And I’ve made some very stupid mistakes in my time. ‘Stupid’ is not I word I bandy about. It is pejorative, demeaning, silly to use, and unfeeling. But it was very stupid of me to run (!) along the tops of boulders of all sizes and shapes that lay like so many spilled chunks of dark chocolate in an Orkney Island bay, just beyond St. Margaret’s reach. From my overview along the cliff tops, from as high as two houses atop each other, the rock-bound giant’s outspread hand plunged down into the sea, making multiple arches between its crag-creased fingers and the frothy surface of the heaving and tossing Pentland Firth. I wanted to explore! Find a smuggler’s cave! So, all alone, I ventured down a goats’ path to peer among the arches. Then I looked across the rock cluttered beach, espied yet another cave across the bay, and in the agility and carefree suppleness of my youth (I was only 23), rather than gingerly make my way from boulder to boulder, I ran along their tops. Ever done that? The fluidity of motion allowing for precise adjustment is magical! How the body so instantaneously can co-ordinate the myriad details of weight distribution, speed, differentiation of distances and one’s own stupidity is absolutely marvellous! But one slip and I might still be there, a ghostly skeleton wailing in the wind for someone to come and get me.

Not being afraid of mistakes has a similar quality of spontaneous admissions. Only when older do we take much more precaution before uttering things, initiating action, pursuing what we know is fool-hardy. We become more aware, one hopes, not so much of the possible consequences to ourselves, but to others. That’s what the Orkney Island farmer yelled at the group of us when he rescued us from a storm-tossed dinghy in Widewall Bay. “Did’na ya think o’ the danger yee put otherrrs in?” About five of us had taken a single-oared boat around the cliff heads, intending to go to the pub at St.Margaret’s Hope. (Hitchhikers from all over the world would arrive to spend a night or two at Herston Hiker’s Hostel, which I was tending for Sandy Annal, back in 1975.) And we should have asked to borrow the boat. And we should have been able to read the weather more-better. And we should have had more experience. Because when we tried to come into shore the tide was pulling out and struggle as much we did, with huge waves drenching us, and the boat refusing to put its nose down on the beach, we were in danger of capsizing, being swept out, or worse, having a whole community involved in a search and rescue effort in a wintery sea of deep discontentment.

There was no energy in me to write this essay last night. The tidying up of loose ends, the preparation of files for print-out, the backup of all files onto brain-sticks, took time. Besides, the advent of having finality to the entire rough draft, all 426 densely packed pages, had the result of my body dragging me to go sleep! So I write here, right now, as the birds begin their cooing to greet the sunrise. I knew not what I was going to write, I just plunged in to let my fingers tap over the jutting out tops of the keyboard. And though this little vignette of my own seeming memoirs be incomplete; it is at is. The more fool me?

The Fall Out

Not until I related the story did a shiver course through me. It was one thing to have the fall out, but then actually to explain it gave it significance beyond the immediate. Perhaps in my flow of 3 a.m. something application to task I took the gentle flip, flap, drop of the hard-copy photograph for which I was searching as de rigueur.  I do know I thanked it for being revealed! Thanked Perry’s ghost.

All around me Australia slept. The birds had not yet stirred. Usually, the nesting pair of kookaburras over at the billabong are the first to laugh themselves awake. I was in the dining room, the weighted down chairs arraigned around me, M’Lady getting her sleep. Circumstances yesterday created a train-wreck in the smooth order of things; we needed photographs that belonged to another person, were with that person, and needed both sorting by and commentary made by that person. And though there be reason enough for non immediate delivery, the vital time needed to keep this train on track was waylaid at a side-station. In the meantime I tended to the reserves, replenished the order of things, backed up the two brain-sticks, and... But it did take until nearly midnight to get that section done. And now, at 7:30 a.m. with a hold-up as I wait for the very last hard-copy before all the rough draft is done, I write here with a sense of awe for this early morning’s fall-out.

Not all fall-outs are bad things. I was searching for the snake. Well, not the snake but the picture of Perry killing a live snake in Nancy’s back yard. I’d not seen it. In her notes from yesterday, Nan wrote “see Perry’s page”, and though in my pre-dawn daze I checked and re-rechecked, no such slippery thing snuck up to greet me. So I went to source. And sifting through the piles of stuff on Perry’s chair (too close to Nancy’s bedroom for me to make any noise about it) I went through some albums, lifted the papers and documents off the chair, and... The lone photo just fell, flip, flap, to the floor!

So many kismet moments have happened on this journey into another family’s soul. The right moment to edit something; the right moment to catch a mistake; the right document to be revealed at the flip of a page; the right album to delve into to get the right image for the right words. Such is rapport. And there is hardly any tension in the admixture of a 90 and a 60 year old working over six weeks now on a 24/7 project that has become all-consuming. We honour the ghosts. We take down the pictures off walls and dust them of the very many years worth of being left alone. We take the frame-backing out with pliers, knives, scissors, and we scan the photo, clean the frame’s glass both sides, and put it all back together again to be even more-better than it was before. And it all flows as the work goes, with just some hiccups for the check-in, the persuasions to include or exclude; the reasons not to have a fall-out.

Ego concerns were momentary. There were a few days in which My fear was about My not being able to deliver, or if I did, that some error would reflect badly on Me. But such feelings were of the moment; i have spilled over into the grander service unto others that life really becomes. And whether in the moment, or with the product in hand, one has but evidence of where one was at in any given time, which has already passed. Such is flow. If we are rivers of energy then we are not a boat to be tossed about on the surface, with all hands on deck. Control of the boat has its merits. But boats are but the projects that we do on the surface of ourselves. Our essential current runs deeper than that. Besides, when in a boat, one can have a fall out. Only then may one realize the grander ocean that buoys you. 

  

 

To Chase a Ghost!

‘The Dresser’ is an interesting phrase. I was once in a play by that name. Perry Burton was the delicately effete dresser to Bill Baksa’s irascible and self-centred M’Lord. My role was as the undeserving, the one insufficient of self to stand on his own two feet but must needs wait attendance on the company until chance and circumstance collided to grant him opportunity  to rise to the occasion, to perform a greater role than himself. Interesting how that cameo was not quite so much in my consciousness until this very moment. Like a ghost it slipped out of some cabinet in my mind only now to clamour for attention.

Like the squeaky hinges on M’Lady’s ‘dresser’. That’s what she calls it. That’s apparently what it has been called since the 9^th century! Yes, since Aelfred The Great himself. Mentioned in Aelfred’s will, and now in the Duke of Norfolk’s line of heritage, Arundel Castle is believed to be the second oldest in Britain (according to the newspaper clipping about the eminent historiographer, John Rutherford). The dresser, big as it is, eventually found its way to a London antique shop, and that’s where newlyweds Nancy and Denys Sinclair decided to spend just about their entire war-service gratuity on acquiring it. Yes, it was authenticated. And yes, that immensely heavy and expensive nine foot long oak dresser has travelled with them from England to Australia (in `59) and thence from house to house. Almost 70 years in M’Lady’s possession; but almost a thousand years in the presence of man! Perhaps Aelfred himself set eyes on it? And since the hinge on the upper left door squeaks, “and has squeaked like that ever since we’ve had it; it keeps the ghost’s away!” M’Lady jested; did Aelfred once hear that same sound too?

Thing is, for whatever reason I’ve long been fascinated by Aelfred. As a boy it was a pivotal point in my being interested in history when I realized that Moses could not have spoken English, that Yul Brunner’s Pharaoh could not have spouted, “So it is said, so let it be,” in English, that Cleopatra could not have burbled as senslessly as did Elizabeth Taylor. Nor could King Midas so command the sea. English did not come find its birth until Aelfred! He amalgamated the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and fixations of word usage thereby evolved with The Northumbrian Chronicle. At university I studied Anglo Saxon, memorized snippets for imaginative pronunciation, as I did with the opening passage of Chaucer (almost two centuries after 1066 ‘and all that’, according to a mirthful Monty). Not until Shakespeare does English become recognizable to our ear, and even then there are many who do not take to his words. Or to his ghosts.

So the squeak enchants! Now the liquor, chocolate, and candle-cabinet, along with collectibles of every kind, that ancient iron hinge lets one know that a door is being opened on the past. And as I sit in the same room surrounded by the ghosts of Sir Arthur, Mummy Denise, Maman Angele, Colonel Douglas, War Hero Pat, Great Escape victim Denys Street, Stalag Luft 111’s P.O.W. Denys Sinclair of Caithness, Diana the Artist, Ian the Land Developer, Nicholas the Marine Biologist, P. Crosly the Ranchman, and B. Cory the War Veteran, can they hear the squeak of the cabinet too? Mayhap. Particularly at sherry time!

We make meaning out of small things, or small things make meaning out of us. Facility with like-minded knowledge and interests and abilities allows for longevity of relationships, or not. That dresser was consigned to be burned on the Fremantle docks! Denys Sinclair had to attend an unpacking and inspection ceremony when the crates of their family furniture arrived. The official was adamant. Pock-marked with weevil holes and wood lice the piece was not entering Australian soils. But after some delicate persuasion and assurances that all had already been decontaminated, it was permitted to be kept. Imagine! All 900 years of The Dresser, to be consumed by fire. Enough to make a ghost shudder!     

 

'Suspended Disbelief'

Eventually words stop. And then they begin again. That dead moment between is a theatrical nightmare. At all costs we strive to suspend disbelief. We move, we make noise, we counter to our fellow thespian, “What’s that you said?” but we do not freeze our eyes, our brains, or worse, call out ‘line?’ before a live audience! We never let them know something is amiss. We never call them dead. We go with the flow!

‘Suspended-disbelief’ is foreign to 90 year old Nancy; ‘wombat’ was foreign to me. Terminology needs explication, but preferably not at the risk of interrupting the flow. Audience members get it as the actor points his index finger, raises his thumb, and yells aggressively, “Get your hands up!” When the reciprocator goes with the flow and becomes scared, real scared, we feel actual sympathy for the plight; our hearts may even beat! “All of life is shadows,” says Plato. We see the sun come in through the cave opening and make patterns of our silhouettes on the wall, and we think what we see is truth. We fear the truth of the sun. Some will be fearful of shadows. Others will mock. There are many who do not like Opera, let alone weep with it. There are many who can’t stand musicals, or the theatre. They simply cannot get past the evidence of theatrically. I’ve not met anyone not liking movies (though as a child I was forbidden to go on religious grounds). 

Some prefer black and white. I prefer some of everything.

Ensconced in this cave and well into my sixth week, the shadows within have become very real. The sun does its transit outside and I am vaguely aware of the differentiation in light. M’Lady keeps the air-conditioner on, draws or pulls the curtains according to the dictates of the hour, and maintains the cottage as a cozy haven. No bird in a gilded cage could be more contained. Meals are regular, and five vegetables at dinner time is a must! It is a nicely habituated, orderly, well practiced ritual of genteel life.

My agitation comes not from being enclosed and faced with the glow of a computer screen. It does not come from not knowing which of the 2,000 plus photos or documents I should apply to text, nor even where to find it (for like kindling to my fires, and fuel to my perseverance, I’ve organized my reserves sufficiently to be able to locate the needle in the haystack.) No, my agitation comes from my ego. When in the flow of things I know well my lines, hardly am I a-feared at all of what comes next, and can deliver as though my performance is the first time, every time. But self-consciousness intrudes. In the span of the 350 plus pages of the Memoir the possibility of omitting, offending, slighting, dismissing, ticking someone off and something going wrong is great! I shall be seen for the act it all is; which of us can be perfect? And then there’s the time spent too. Six weeks of 14 to 16 hour days ought to do it, but the rewrites, the edits, the cut-outs, the add-ins all make of some groundwork a lot of waste. Working in tandem with someone else was meant for finely matched horses, exquisitely paired dancers, ice-skaters, or well trained dogs. We humans work essentially to our own pace, our own rhythm, and often we do not rhyme. No wonder, despite all of history, marriages are on their way to being distinctly temporary things. At the end of the dance one or the other wants to bow out, or at least to change the tune.

My ego is at stake. I promised to deliver. I need for stakeholders to be ready with edits and replacement photos and deletes and add-ins within four days of my giving each of them a Memory Stick; the file is nearly 2GB. I too shall be reviewing. Print if you like; information pertinent to you is on pages x, y, and z. Have them in by Sunday! On Monday next, my seventh week here, I do all the final adjustments! It goes to the printer by midweek! By the Saturday I will have a ‘proof’; by the ninth week we will have the books in hand; yes, all 50 plus of them! And by April 01 we will have a book launch. Suspended disbelief?

Words

Eventually words stop.

DAY 40) "You Can't Handle The Truth!"

Jack Somebody is unprepared to divulge. After all, how far can one go into the forest? The actuality of life is such that few of our moments are complete. Only facts are. Yesterday there was a cockroach on the kitchen counter. Yes, yesterday. What time? I’m not sure. But I could swear it’s not the first one I've seen; and so forth. Meeting truth half-way is then to commence leaving it again. We seldom tell nothing but the truth, the whole truth, and then fold down our hand. It’s a practice to keep things up the sleeve.

M’Lady Nancy loves to read these essays. Sometimes she offers commentary, examination, exploration, but other times she just thanks me. Depends on the subject matter, I suppose. We have spoken several times about the Toltec wisdom inherent in The Four Agreements. We are agreed; not taking things personally is most difficult indeed! And now that today for me marks that epochal 40^th day, I find myself indeed half way into this busy forest of being here, and have a sense of now heading out. Friday to a Friday, five exact weeks ago I entered. And today we looked at the calendar; exactly five weeks to go and I shall be leaving on a Friday too. Magic. The mathematical fact of winning or losing days across time-zones of travel eludes me, somewhat; it’s enough that I am here, doing what I do, now! Tomorrow will bring what it does, particularly by virtue of today. But life is best not expected to be expected, or even fair. There be many a truth concealed in anyone’s pages that would illuminate our histories.

What others want to know and what is right and proper for them to know are different things. We come to honour Caesar, not to bury him. Grandchildren and great-great grandchildren are to be protected. It is only when we are sufficiently removed from our ancestry that we find a great-great-great old cardinal sinner of ours to be amusing, quirky, or a quaint old devil. Were you the seventh generation of Jean Valjean would you not take pride in his having been 24601? But what of his daughter? He was so ashamed of having been a convict that he could barely get to tell her of his past, even after all the years of a parent’s love between them. We are afraid of truth, since we can hardly gauge the other’s reaction. And we do take things personally. Few want to be told their house needs cleaning.  Few want to be told untruths; one feels cuckolded, deceived, not honoured, not trusted! But when M’Lady once did divulge a secret, way back, her erstwhile friend got surprisingly snobbish about it all. It ruined their relationship.

Matthew has problems with trusting people. In 7:6 he makes of the pearls of truth something easily to be trampled. He was of course not the Father of Situational Ethics. No, that slippery slope began when Adam first asked Eve what she was hiding behind her back. Probably. But then again, what is truth? We perpetuate Easter bunnies and Tooth Fairies and Santa Claus. We use phrases like “there’s nothing better than...”.  And we know instinctively that children ought not to hear some words, some things, or where we hide the cookies. Concealing things is often done for the sake of protecting others, or ourselves. Our experience shows that the consequences to truth are simply sometimes not worth it.   

M’Lady’s Memoir was completed today. By her! She handwrote the last of her pages. Now she has no more blank spaces to face. She gets to edit the typed manuscript, alter and make new commentary to the existing pages, and find alternatives to some of the choices we made for illustration, or for ways to conceal other’s truths. Thing is, we came to honour the dead, not to exhume them and to reveal their clutched up imprecision.  A man is all things. Women too.  And unless we accept that we be as accepting as possible with the fact that facts need to remain hidden, to protect others let alone ourselves, we shall truly find ourselves very harmful indeed. The Memoir will become history. And history rewrites itself.