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.

DAY 39) Penultimate Pretensions?

Big words married as a title can be off-putting. Phraseology can do that to us. Many of us easily say ‘what?’ rather than listen for the contextual clues, rather than work it out, rather than go look it up. We seem to want immediate clarity, and obfuscation confabulates. So much so that we can feel a person is being too clever for his boots, too uppity, too pretentious, or too anything but simple. “Like using fancy French words in a menu, in an Italian restaurant.” Poetry! Many of us seldom read poetry. We do not like elusive imagery, let alone enjoy chewing over a rather tough metaphysical conceit. That which requires effort, like delving into an abstraction beyond ‘cosine theta’, might upset angelic predilections. We angle for answers, briefly, or one just moves away.

‘Penultimate’ is one such phrase. At school I guessed it meant great penmanship! (But then it was only my second last attempt.) And as for 'predilections', some of us thought it meant the privilege to vote before our time. But each of us will go by the way of our wants, and just before we die there may well be a life-flashing episode of accountability, but the end indeed arrives for us all. And so, on this 39^th day of 40, I burble as if from an abstract paradigm, for actually to have been in a desert for ‘40 days and nights’ one could but have had metaphysical contact with outside realities. Quite like being here. And tomorrow I am scheduled to open the door, to cross the date-line of my 40 days, and to be forever changed; yet shall in essence likely be seen as “the same.”

We live in the memories of others. Our voices are unique. Our chemistry is unique. Our way with words bears our brand. The way we walk, we talk, we think, we move is known. Even a slight deviation can have someone saying, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’ And lest we feel otherwise authentically inclined, most of us come up with the ubiquitous answer, ‘Oh, nothing.’

Thing is, knowing someone that way and having a rapport with them are two different things. It takes great trust to tease easily among friends. It takes great insight to relate to another in a flow of discourse that is not self-centered, narcissistic, dispassionate, matter of fact, pragmatic. The more we are able just to let another person be, the more we can be not only ourselves, but enjoy the togetherness. “And we spoke never a cross word between us.” That’s what M’Lady wrote as an end note to the death of her beloved husband, after 47 years of marriage! Truth? Mayhap not utterly, but the conceit lies in the generality of perception rather than in the recorded pin pricks of time. Even John Donne’s compass had its sharp points. And for The Flea to have been honoured it needed first to have bitten both he and she. Such is the conceit. And no, the use of that word has nought to do with pride. It is one of those things we needs work out, by going with the flow.

Rapport has as its essence a counterbalance of tensions, such that dancers protect each other’s backs without words, without being overt. Niceties and pleasantries are not rapport. Favors and gifts are not it either. Compliments certainly do not engender genuine rapport. And ingratiation is an obsequious man’s way to garner more attention than he actually renders. No, rapport is a delicate thing innately understood by the likes of birds. ‘Birds of a feather flock together’ is the proverb (but even then there is the possibility of unfulfilled habituation). No, better to be aware of potential, to care for possibility, especially on a penultimate day; and the day after that too! 

DAY 38) To Be or To Have Been?

Planes to catch have the effect of creating anxiety. Going is a complex thing. One not only has to have all sorts of security checks but then there’s the strange business of losing a day, or catching up a day! Let alone leaving a life behind. Can we get younger, or older, if we were just to keep going round and round the world?(?) And then (this heart-breaking news just-in) a dear friend of mine writes he is stuck with Badly Garlickbreath for a 12+ hour sidekick! One meets interesting people on journeys. And some things we do not catch. Like fate. Among my most memorable of moments was the Titanic actor, Frank McLeod, sputtering “Just my luck” as, useless ticket in hand, he watched ‘his ship’ already leaving. Sometimes it pays to miss a connection. Tonight I might have been packing it in. Tomorrow I would’ve been on a plane. Instead, I shall still be at typing and collating and selecting and editing, and the plane will leave without me. That decision was made last week. I’m a good day ahead, yet this journey is not yet done!

Loitering can make one late. Distractions can veer one of course. Being phlegmatic can create tardiness, disrupt punctuality, and frustrate dependability. Enjoying oneself can also interfere with datelines. We are given to dwelling in the past within our presents and so drag our feet as if walking backward with a sack-full of baggage. Not all baggage is an overnighter on handy little wheels; the weight of things might best not be judged by size. Carry-on baggage can be heavier than checked-ins, even though the more obvious stuff be at first removed. Or am I too obtuse?

It is choices that define our lives. Appointments, schedules, commitments, other’s expectations; such are obligations that keep us scurrying, or not. And ant-like we are on the search for something to fulfill time, even if it be just to catch the next episode of our favorite show. It is so; and so it will be. But when one has chance and one does not take it one may well live to regret the decision for a lifetime. Some choices I’ve made certainly have haunted me for decades!

This journey was to complete a Memoir for M’Lady. My personal day begins around 3:30 a.m. and goes until about 6:00 a.m. I use it to read, edit my work on my own computer in my bedroom, answer e-mails, and publish my Blog. Then I shower and dress for breakfast, and almost precisely at 6:30 a.m. M’Lady brings in rooibos tea. By 6:45 we breakfast. A little cereal; yogurt; a fruit; and one toast with her home-made marmalade. By 7:30 a.m. I am in my wheelchair facing her computer on the 12 person dining table. I smile at the ghosts against the walls who each come alert at the 17 stations with their familiar names, and I sublimate myself entirely to the process of transcribing M’Lady’s ongoing handwritten notes. I amend, add photos, and keep developing her family’s past. A present becomes a future; though we dwell so heavily in the present on the past. It is around 9:30pm that I come back to my personal time, and draft the daily essay, until 11:00ish. 

Then sleep. And so the pattern continues, until one's Memoirs are done!

It has been five weeks here. Thank goodness I am afforded another four! Yet one day I too will have to catch a plane. I shall go with the published Memoir done! (Lest there be other plans in the Big Sky?) I share such domestic details for those who care. Yet like all details, they’re filled with double-entendre, esotery, clandestine allusion, and messages between the lines. Such is the yoking of variables. No joke! And yes, at times `tis more-better to bend such a concept as ‘time.’  

DAY 37) Brain Based Belligerence?

“I’m such a silly twit.”

“Sorry, can’t except that. When you call yourself a twit it means you may call others that too.”

“Well, I can’t help it if I’m an idiot. I forget things so easily.”

“Two things occur when we call ourselves idiots; we create a semantic basis of belief that demeans ourselves and worse, we are ready thereby to demean others too. We lack some compassion.”

“‘Semantic’ basis? And what do you mean; I lack compassion?”

 “Semantics is about word choice; we create habits that make words and phrases less-better for ourselves than more-better. And there are multiple levels to compassion; most of us think of it as expressing sympathy, or even with more feeling, empathy. Compassion cares for and with, yet allows as is. You have compassion aplenty!”

“Apparently not enough if I call people idiots! Sympathy, empathy, compassion; the difference?”

“Sympathy is a feeling for; Empathy is a feeling with; Compassion is having understanding.”

“Hm. ‘Understanding’; not ‘feeling’?”

“Feeling for, with, and part of everything is compassion; it allows for forgiveness of the self first, and thereby everything and all else for ‘whatever’; although that does not excuse, condone, or permit terrible things, or even silly things, ha! It just allows for an understanding of how things are as they are.”

“Okay. Why do I forget things I’ve known all my life? Or why do I forget everyday things like right now? I can’t remember a date! Or where I put something. I need my little routines, you know, or I cannot function!”

“You think you cannot function, so you don’t. If you thought you could adapt, you would. We each are what we think we are, even though it takes lots and lots of practice to think oneself into a newly habituated person, ha!”

“Still, I’m just worried I keep forgetting things.”

“M’Lady. You are physically and emotionally exhausted. You are 90 years old, and you keep the pace of people not even half your age. You’re alert and caring and thoughtful and considerate, and you run this house and tend to meals and then insist on doing the washing up too. We work at this Memoir from 6:30 a.m. when you greet me with tea until 8:30 or so every day, and even through our meals or breaks we keep engaging in conversations like this. Today and yesterday you wrote about four pain filled deaths and three weddings. We also did the Fairy Party day! And the Vargo caravans episode! No wonder you are tired! Your brain is like a multi-complex with a kazillion secretaries all scurrying to the distant reaches of time to gather documentation, and then their losing some of the pages on the way back! The short term secretaries have taken a holiday! You don’t focus on them much. But they’ll be back when the distance runners are done! You certainly care enough about them too.”

She smiles at me. “Thank you for that. I feel much better. Now then, let’s get back to work!” 

And as she gets up, gathers up some of the tea things, and leaves some things to me, I look around at the ghosts in the house, and wonder just who is listening?