Living with multiple sclerosis

Far away time

2012-01-08T21:08:00.000-08:00

In that far, far away time

there were no trauma counsellors.

So when the woman drowned on the beach, we had to deal with it as best we could.

It wasn't a dramatic drowning;

she appeared to have fallen forward

and gone on breathing water

until the end.

Her companions hastened

to reassure us, or themselves:

she was just out of hospital,

heart trouble, had been filled

with delight at the day's outing,

drowning could well have been

her favoured choice of death.

I don't know how my brother

received this bromide. After all,

he was the one who brought her in,

laid her face down on the stones,

turned her head to the left

and knelt beside her

unavailingly pushing down

on her rigid torso,

listening for the first gasp of breath.

I remember standing beside her

but not her body

being moved from the beach,

nor our walk up the hill to lunch,

nor even whether we told our mother.

But I do recall waking in the night

to my sister's silent sleeping

and having to stand by her bed

until I could actually hear her gentle

in and out breath.

I do not know how my brother

coped with his futile contact

with dead flesh.

We never talked about it again,

didn't go in for “do you remember

the time when the woman drowned?”,

any more than we discussed our

shared distress at the cramped

quarters given to the big cats

at the visiting circus.

Emotions were not to be displayed.

For all that, a few years later

when I first encountered Shakespeare's

Mutability sonnets, I responded totally:

his fear that time would come

and take his love away; the fragility

of “summer's honey breath”.

I felt them on my pulse.

Would counseling have smoothed

such awareness away so

I would no longer have acknowledged

that life was transient, that death

could come unbidden even

while I was swimming in

a calm sea, under a summer sky.

Eclipsed

2012-01-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

I have been enduring an eclipse,

a brown murkiness across my garden

contaminating trees and flowers.

I am not a primitive, ready

to forebode the future

but it's been hard

not to imagine disasters,

misaligned stars misdirecting

their energies towards the earth.

I know it's atavistic

but it's out of my control.

I'm so glad to welcome back

a brightness of sky and feel

the load I have been carrying

grow lighter and lighter.

The eclipse has been caused by the district nurses' reaction to my acquiring a visible pain. As they have not been able to do anything about my rolling ankles or my compressed stomach they have mostly ignored these problems, but now I am sporting an ulcer on my left bum, at least 3cm deep at its worst and nearly 3cm across.

The nurses threw all of their big guns into this problem, bringing in my doctor and wound specialist, warning me about septicemia, wondering how I would manage the Christmas / New Year break. Until I worked out that their reaction was so extraordinary only because they could actually see this particular pain I allowed myself to be sucked into their panic. Even though I still refused to lie for 6 months to prevent the ulcer deteriorating, I began to feel I might have to give in and take the dreaded pain killers.

Now, over the last 10 years I have continued to choose clarity over comfort with good effect - 4 poetry books and 1 autobiographical account; I would set myself 4 days a year, New Year's Day, my birthday in March, Paul's in July and the anniversary of his death in October. On those days I would make a decision about pain which would then hold until the next date came along. The nurses almost got me to thinking I would have to make a decision once a month and that I would, in effect, lose my clarity of mind, which is all that I have left: my response to the garden, music, friends and the stories they bring. It just didn't seem worth carrying on if I were to live in a fog with only brief spells of lucidity.

But I have realised now what has been going on, realised that the nurses reacted the way nurses do. A doctor friend tells me they sing only one tune and I had been hearing it every day for a couple of months. Now I am free to ignore their harassments, to say “No” to antibiotics, hospitalisation, bed rest, painkillers, or any other interference to how I want to spend my days. I can use my yoga / meditation techniques of shifting my awareness of the pain; the brain can only process one at a time anyway and I have a great variety. There are parts of the day where the pain is excruciating, but they are brief and I can anticipate them. By altering how I am positioned on the wheelchair, I can have less weight on the wound, and gives me referred pain down the thigh, which my mind knows is perfectly alright. Anyway, I have just as much pain on the right bum, where the skin is not yet broken. As the poem says, the sky is brighter and the load is lighter.

A Memory to Love

2011-12-07T22:31:00.001-08:00

It must be the same for everyone;

we hold special memories

of when the world felt balanced.

Here's one of mine: walking into

Winchester Cathedral, late afternoon

with the light slanting horizontally

along the arches and the organ

pealing. I rang with joy.

“But what about people?” you say.

If you want people,

I'll give you my three year old

inciting his cousins to kick a ball

up and down the long aisle.

This memory is part of who I am;

I want it to outlast my burial,

to be released it into the world

so that long, long after my body

is mulched into the ground

my memory will still be drifting

over oceans, hovering

across hills and mountains.

No Thoroughfare

2011-11-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

My inner maze has blocked both ways;

I am cabin-fevered with sameness.

Myth would have it the goddess

is sitting cross-legged at my threshold.

If I am to dislodge her,

I need to loosen, undo, untie

fling open winter-shut doors and windows,

let in fresh air and sunlight.

But my courage and the goddess

have developed an inverse

symbiosis. I can have one

or the other, but not both at once.

The Whims of Chance

2011-11-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

Life is made up of conditional clauses:

if . . . , then . . . ,

especially the subjunctive,

if I had . . . , or worse,

if only I had . . . .

I've been examining

the road map of my life,

seeing how little input I've had.

A slight, unplanned change of direction

and everything is different:

places, friends, activities.

Its like being a character

in a novel by someone else.

There will be an ending,

but I have no way of knowing

what form the ending will take.

I am insignificant,

blown by the whims of chance.

Yet, on one occasion

I was farewelling Paul

and he shared his gratitude:

“Out of all the possibilities

of space and time, we're here,

together, on this Melbourne station.”

The world expanded under my feet.

The Art of Weaving

2011-10-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

Death steals a person away,

but leaves feelings intact.

Now, grief, like my rogue wisteria,

takes over my life.

I need to create a daily ritual,

write my grief with bird song,

with dappled light and shadow.

I need to weave it with honour

into the fabric of my days,

I Need More Time

2011-10-23T23:41:00.001-07:00

Time is so variable:

take this exact moment,

it's gone almost before I've noticed it;

in the blink of an eye,

tomorrow has become yesterday.

Time as a succession of pixels.

The wise tell us to concentrate

on the moment but that's like trying

to keep hold of one drop

in a rapidly moving stream.

Anyway we need time:

sentences are temporal.

Without time, we can neither think, talk,

understand, read nor write.

To communicate we need

words or images in a sequence.

So I have grave doubts

about eternity.

It lacks pixellation,

it lacks communication.

I don't think I am ready for it;

I need more time.

Bric-à-Brac

2011-10-15T23:20:00.001-07:00

I am an image junkie,

always on the prowl

for metaphors

If I'm to write poetry,

I need the nourishment of time.

But my illness is bulimic,

devours time and spews it out

undigested. Where's sustenance

in gobbets of time

mixed with stomach acid?

iii

I always thought my final

resting place would be the quiet earth.

So great literature tells us;

never mind moths and harebells,

I wanted a small piece of ground

where I could slumber peacefully.

But that is not to be. My grave

is situated plumb above

an active fault line.

My skeleton, together

with my neighbour's bones,

will rattle and clonk

percussively until the end of time.

Homage - for John.

2011-10-02T21:53:00.002-07:00

This is threshold music.

After his wife's death,

Bach wove chorale melodies

into his solo violin works,

mostly Cantata number 4,

Christ Lag in Todesbanden,

Christ lay in death dark prison,

with its ringing Allelujah

at the end of every section.

But with voices and violin

matched together,

the Allelujahs take on

a more sombre form:

not the hubris of certainty,

but a human hesitation

and self doubt, good listening

when a loved one has died.

Bach's wife and my friend and brother

deserve the wistfulness of hope,

Allelujah.

A Tribute

2011-09-24T00:13:00.001-07:00

Nouns are deserting her.

Last week we had a long

conversation about “clutter”,

a catch-all phrase;

we agreed clutter needed

to be reduced, set in order.

I didn't know whether to call in

a gardener, housekeeper, doctor or priest.

There are other nouns;

but mostly it's a code I cannot break.

Would you expect the bonanza

of the royal wedding to become

“the folks up north”?

I try to think myself into her mind

but without success.

Does she recognise me?

Does she see clearly a world

she can no longer describe?

She is left, a solitary survivor,

struggling to hold on to

the remnants of a language

only she can remember.

Significances

2011-09-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Imagine a celebration party,

a ceremony of blessing

for my walnut tree, planted

a tree-ling of four, now turned sixty.

I would have a circle of women

in dark hoods, dancing in the moonlight

to a ripple and swoosh of my wind harp

invoking the strength of the tree,

invoking its magic.

Once, just before midnight,

snow began to fall;

as the flakes drifted down

they woke the harp

which sang into the silence.

A bone carver chooses to live

on an estuary, awash

with moon-tugged tides,

a meeting place for earth, air and water.

I have no estuary.

But the morning after the snow,

my tree was shrouded in white;

garden and sky mirrored one another

so exactly, there was no horizon line.

I could have walked across my lawn,

climbed the rungs of my tree

up into the heavens,

leaving my harp to sing

a solitary requiem.

I have no estuary;

only a thrush's song

filled with moonlight.

A kindy question

2011-09-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

A four year old question:

“How do you become a poet?”

A poet must stalk like a cat,

dive deep like a fish, soar upwards

like a bird. She must love words,

their movement and sound,

making them dance and sing, tip-toe

and whisper, galumph and shout.

Like the wind, she must ripple across

her garden, dappling

light and shade, turning leaves

inside-out to shine against the sky.

All this, with only words.

Earthquake Spring

2011-09-03T19:17:00.001-07:00

4th September

North of the equator, April

might be “the cruellest month”.

Down here, in the south,

August is cruel.

Spring, with its promise of hope

new growth, and plans for the future,

blossom, daffodils and birdsong

sits uneasily amidst shattered houses

with gaps where there used to be

a teeming metropolis.

Roses may flourish despite

liquefaction, but where are

the lost lives, missing pets,

uprooted and tortured trees?

Mine is a grieving city,

and grief heightens contrasts.

What is black looks more black,

what is white looks more white.

No wonder we are pulled apart

by this poignancy of seeing.

Spin-offs

2011-08-25T00:36:00.000-07:00

When I decided to transform my 'musical landscape', I had not expected there would be two amazing spin-offs.

At the house concert, Anthony himself played the piano, Cathy the violin and Elizabeth was the soprano.A couple of months after the concert, Elizabeth visited me. In the course of her visit she asked whether she could bring one of her pupils to rehearse for a big singing exam. It was a lovely occasion; the singing was beautiful and included songs in Italian, German, French and English. The singer brought, as well as her accompanist, her husband bearing a gift of flowers, her sister-in-law and niece. When he was introduced, her husband asked how I was, a question I try to avoid. I said I was fine, and because I had just been listening to the weather forecast on the radio I mentioned the fearsome snow warning. Immediately he pounced on the word 'snow', informed me that he belonged to a Jeep club and gave me his phone numbers in case any of my carers were prevented from reaching me because of snow. That was Saturday afternoon and by Monday morning the sky had dumped 6-8 inches on us and we were very grateful to take him up on his offer. Without his help, my morning carer would not have been able to reach me Monday or Tuesday.

The second spin-off is more long-winded: the Otago M.S. Society has a Wobbly Art exhibition every year to which I have submitted entries. They are auctioned so I've been able to share a little bit of money with the carer who has helped me. The first two years, I submitted photographs with snippets of poetry, such as ' I measure time by raindrops”, which required one carer to direct the hose on to the birdbath and another to photograph the phenomenon.

This year, I submitted just three earthquake poems. One aspect of the exhibition is that a practising artist donates some works and also chooses any outstanding entry for an encouragement award.

This year there were four awards, and one of them was me. I received a certificate and a $50 cheque. But as I had already requested that any money obtained from auctioning my work should go to the Christchurch earthquake fund, I didn't want to pocket the $50. As a result, I emailed Cathy, and asked for suggestions as to how to encourage music in Christchurch.

She came up with a lovely suggestion of taking a version of Goldilocks to a couple of kindies in the eastern suburbs, those most affected by the earthquakes. She played the violin, her daughter Carolyn on the clarinet and a young man, Thomas, on the trumpet. Instead of 'who's been sleeping in my bed?' it became ' who's been playing my clarinet?'. From the accompanying photo you will see that the children were rapt, and I am now nourishing a dream.

The song cycle always was for me in the nature of a talisman into the future as I will have no grandchildren. The dream is that 10-15 years down the track a young musician will be interviewed, asked how he/she became devoted to an instrument, and the answer will be 'from a kindy visit when I was four'.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake-2011/5496486/Poet-gifts-tunes-for-quake-hit-kindys

Eventually

2011-08-18T00:18:00.000-07:00

I never thought i'd come to see death

as a cock-teaser, tantalising me

with “maybe tomorrow”,

“maybe next month”,

“maybe just before christmas”.

It's a full-time commitment:

cycles of anticipation

followed by complete collapse.

Six years ago, my doctor

pronounced the dread sentence;

“If...” he said, “then...” he said.

Since then, I inhabit

a subjunctive world.

I share a toddlers view of death;

how many sleeps in “forever”?

Nudged

2011-08-11T04:37:00.001-07:00

With my poetry self silenced

my dreams have turned peremptory.

My outer garden might be peaceful,

enclosed by trees and bird song

but my garden exists in an earthquake

ravaged city, frozen into silence

by last week's winter storm;

I am losing time-honoured carers

and many friends are reaching critical

transitions. I am bandying about

words like carotid artery,

pneumonia and dementia.

My dreams have returned me

to a house of grief, more spacious

and airy but requiring further attention;

I stumble when I walk, if 'walk'

is the right word, I lack

necessary information.

If the inner world mirrors the outer,

I am unfinished and ungainly.

Hoist with my own Petard.

2011-07-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

When this blog was set up for me 2 years ago, I never thought it would be a means of increasing my self-knowledge, nor did I ever think I was going to have to apologise on it. But I was wrong.

In my last blog I put myself on high ground, as regards intuition, and in the process, I, implicitly or explicity, grumbled at my friend's lack of intuition.I was very wrong, and I am sorry.

I should have remembered Kant's “catergorical imperative”, where you don't claim for yourself anything you wouldn't grant to someone else. It's more complicated than that. There are times, when because of lack of experience, you don't know what their claims actually are.

My mother several times said to me that, as a young woman, she didn't want to be known as “the lame one”, she had two younger sisters close to her in age and her osteo-arthritis had already manifested itself. I don't remember that I ever effectively responded and it's only now, when I'm disabled to the point of deformity, that I can understand her struggle to retain a sense of value when she was beginning to limp with every step. I can see I should have agreed that not wanting to be known as “the lame one” was very understandable. I needed to have acknowledged her pain; it's not enough that I still rememeber the conversations 13 years after her death.

In another situation my judgement was also seriously flawed.

I had an aquaintence who, I knew, was against euthanasia. To rattle her, I told her about a moto-neuron case where the sufferer had indicated she wanted her feeding tubes shut off, so that effectively, she starved to death. My listener flinched with what I took to be distaste (but then, I wanted it to be distaste so I could feel superior). But later, I discovered that what she was actually feeling was compassion. Dorothy Sayers was right when she said, “Our capacity to stand in our own light amounts to genius”.

After turning all this intuition back on my myself, I can see that I should have offered some explanatory commentary to the photos of my garden, somehting like: “Haven't I got beautiful prison walls?”. It was the same with the song-cycle; if it was, for me, a talisman into the future, I should have said so, not expected friends to pick that fact out of the air.

As you can see, I don't come out of this very well.

Valedictory Grumbles

2011-06-26T04:25:00.000-07:00

I have decided that I don't want eulogies at my funeral, I want valedictions. 'Eulogy' means to speak well of; valediction means to say farewell, which leaves more room for honesty. You can say: ' I didn't like this, this, or that; but I did like these other things'.

So, if I were writing valedictions for my friends, I would have a few grumbles. But explanations first.

I am, in Jungian terms, a high intuitive. And I have honed my skills for 55 years by studying literature: noticing subtleties, nuances, what is said where, how it is said, how often and where it is left out all together. This makes me wrongly expect the same level of intuition in my friends.

As well, I have a different sense of time from the rest of you. I have no immediate family and the M.S. has stolen my ability to involve myself in hobbies, entertainments and travel. This gives me an entirely different perspective on my life and other peoples'.

Thus, I send photos of my garden and receive the response “what lovely photos”. But I have left this garden 'disastrously' only twice since December 1999, so the response I was looking for was: “what beautiful prison walls”.

Similarly, I commissioned Anthony Ritchie to set some poems to music. This was my talisman, my grandbaby, something to throw into the future where I might be remembered a little. Some people who have received the CD have not commented at all, some have said “how lovely” and only a few have responded with real depth and appreciation.

They would be my grumbles, but as well as the grumbles I want to acknowledge with gratitude and love my friends who have stayed with me through decades of time and across oceans.

A London School

2011-05-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

For my last 3 years in London, I taught 3 days a week at a so-called 'comprehensive school' Sarah Siddons in Margaret Drabble's 'Ever-weeping Paddington'. Lacking its grammar school component it was more in the nature of a secondary modern, with a 17% West Indian roll, and the rest of mostly poor Irish background.

Now it happened that, over a period of months, someone took to letting the fire alarm off on a regular basis, noticeably, on fine afternoons. The school was 6 storeys high and it took considerable time to marshall all of the girls down on to the tennis courts, organise them into their correct classes and marshall them back upstairs – if it had been a genuine fire and panic, those on the top storeys would have crushed many of those below them – but in this case we sauntered down. Northern Ireland was much in the news at this time. A phonecall to the police warning a bomb in the school, led to the police themselves letting off the fire alarm. The head mistress was going distracted and decided she needed to lecture the school but the assembly hall was big enough to hold only half of the school at one time. In true middle-class fashion she appealed to their better natures, telling them the story of the boy who cried “wolf”. As she was releasing the first half of the school, someone let off the fire alarm.

It reached the point where we had to write down the names of any pupils outside of the classroom without permission. One afternoon I had a class of the equivalent of Year 9's and 2 of the noisiest, most confident white girls were bothered their names had been taken, probably because they sneaked into the loo for a quick fag. I reassured them they would be innocent until proven guilty.

Whereupon, one of the West Indian girls at the front of the class leapt to her feet and started banging at her left arm vigourously.

“It's all very well for them,” she shouted, “ I would like to paint you all black. If you take the skin off, it's the same underneath, the same bones, the same muscles.”

We sat in silence and luckily no body sniggered, and the class went on.
She waited at the end of the class and said to me falteringly,

“I made a fool of myself."

"No, you didn't", I said.

A Musical Journey For Anthony

2011-04-11T00:39:00.001-07:00

Everywhere I looked,

I saw limits and restrictions;

there seemed to be no options.

On the off chance, I tried

transforming my musical landscape:

Aeolian harps, at the wind's behest,

rippled across my garden;

a song cycle enclosed my words

in different textures

and a vibrancy of colour.

I found I had passed a milestone

on the labryrinthine journey.

I was restored to myself,

with an entirely new perspective,

a changed chiaroscuro.

The world had opened out once more.

Aftershocks

2011-03-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

Christchurch is being tantalised

by an ongoing strip-tease show.

Most performances are heralded

by a drum roll, so any sound

that resembles a drum roll

has us on the edge of our seats

in electric anticipation.

Organisation is chaotic;

we're never told in advance how long,

what time of day or which days of the week.

A weekend vigil was not rewarded

until 10 on the Sunday evening

with a display of cleavage.

There's talk of a return season,

but we don't even know how long

the current season will endure.

No wonder, we're all unsettled.

The Last Farewell

2011-03-15T03:27:00.000-07:00

If this day were to be  my last,

I would die  loving 

the long shadows of autumn 

as light filters through the apricot tree; 

celebrating the chattering flight of a fantail; 

rejoicing in the architectural splendour 

of a Bach partita, arch after musical arch

soaring upwards.

The tomorrow when I will be dead,

there still will be a lilting blackbird's song,

 the iridescence of a spider's web 

but I will not feel the lack. 

It's now, when the day's last sunlight 

flames horse chestnuts against the darkening hill; 

there's the yawning ache at a remembered loss. 

Tomorrow will be different.

iii

The trajectory of my death

has changed over time.

Ten years ago, the idea of death

was spiritual, focusing me

on the beauty of the moment;

tree lined shadows,

conversation with a fantail,

Bach's grand pinnacle of sound.

Five years later, even though

I had one tentative foot

across the threshold,

I was still introvertedly

gazing back at the moment I had left;

a spider's web, blackbird's song.

But now, five years further on

with death shadowing my every footstep,

I have been forced

to face that I was afraid.

In my fear I relegated

my friends to the outer suburbs

when they really belonged

on the main thoroughfare.

If tonight were to be my very last,

I would be desolate

at leaving behind

a lifetime of friends.

Line by line

2011-03-06T02:34:00.001-08:00

When you read this poem,

don't forget, I didn't write it.

I have to think my poems,

working them line by line

whenever there is free time.

Mostly, I start with one line

and the poem takes on a different shape

over a succession of days.

Sometimes, I am so desperate

to edit, that I change a word

in a conversational lull

or between mouthfuls of soup.

But it can happen,

that the poem itself takes control,

putting up roadworks, diversions

to prevent me reaching my goal.

Its like being in Wellington

expecting to set out for

Invercargill, only to find oneself

snowed in on the Desert Road.

And even when finished

it still has to be transferred

from one medium to another:

a thought poem is not the same

as a written poem.

It's as if I've had to

introduce a translator and you know

how difficult that is.

If for you, hills are green

and rolling, you are not

going to anticipate that, for me,

they are tawny, volcanic outcrops

otherwise known as Banks Peninsular.

I'm not even sure whether

I can claim the poem as my own,

but who else does it belong to?

Requiem for Christchurch

2011-02-25T22:06:00.000-08:00

Earthquakes destroy the past.

I never thought I would live
long enough to witness
the end of my city
but Tuesday lunch time, a cold grey day,
the earth, like a hunting cat, pounced.
We tossed and tumbled,
with our houses see-sawing under us.

Initally, our city was built
on a swamp; when the earth
split open, water and silt
bubbled out through the cracks,
pot-holing pavements and roads.

The cathedral, where we prayed
to God, that same cathedral
collapsed one wall and its spire
on to unwitting passers-by.

Yet it is quite surreal;
my garden is still a wonderland,
even though half a block away,
everything is in disarray.

I mourn for the lost, the maimed, the dead.
I mourn for our grieving city.

Wonderland

2011-02-11T22:28:00.000-08:00

My outer life is taking on
the quality of a dream:

I live in a tree-walled garden
filled with bird song,
a black and white rabbit
zipadees around and around;
a rose, hemmed in by a mock orange
and a Japanese honeysuckle,
spindles itself higher and higher
until it ventures
one vibrant orange flower.

If death is akin to sleep,
please can I keep on dreaming.

Thoughts from an Inner Garden

2011-01-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

It felt rather brazen but I did it anyway. After all, I had nothing to lose.

The story starts long ago. Paul has been dead 25 years, and the hole in the centre of me has not diminished. In fact, in recent years, it has got bigger. All my friends are acquiring grandchildren to dote on. I wouldn't want them not to share their pride in their grandchildren as it would make my life even more marginalised. But I cannot help feeling wistful. I have no talisman to throw into the future. I identify with Yeats' "I have no child, only a book". I have several books, but poetry is anti-social; I try to tell, even if in black humour mode, the truth of my situation. It's not a truth for everyone.

So I had a dream, a dream I nourished for a year or more that I would like to hear some of my poems set to music. In the end, I got brave enough to write an explain the dilemma to the eminent NZ composer, Anthony Ritchie. He was willing to undertake the task, selected 7 poems and we have agreed work will be piano, violin but are still deciding on the register of the voice.

The work will be launched for the first time in my living room before it goes public (wow!).

He was up in Christchurch a fortnight ago and played and sang sketches of all 7 songs, which will have the name, 'Thoughts from an inner garden'. Of course, the piano part included the violin part, but even so, to me it sounded lovely and all together is very exciting.

Aeolian Harps

2011-01-19T02:41:00.000-08:00

I now have two Aeolian harps;
Their presence in my garden
is like the echo of distant church bells.
I have had to change my way of listening
and focus my mind away
from outside noise and inner turbulence.
But the wind is neither consistent
nor a conscientious player.
When it blows fiercely,
my harps are enrolled on the spot
for my garden’s orchestra.
But other days, gust follows gust
and there is silence; only, once in a while,
amidst a rustle of leaves and swishing
of branches, I catch one solitary note.
But again there are days when the wind
seems to hover above the tree
calling forth a silver ripple of sound.
But this is high summer
with the trees in full foliage;
I do not know what the winter will bring.
It’s all in the gift of the wind.

Compare and Contrast

2011-01-08T02:30:00.000-08:00

Three centuries apart,
two paintings of a woman
totally preoccupied.
The first is pregnant,
standing absorbed in a letter,
she is lit from an invisible
window to her right; the room is
sparsely furnished, a table,
two high-backed chairs, a scrolled parchment;
she is composed; we do not know
whether the letter contains
joy or sorrow, astonishment
or consolation.
We have been invited
into the middle of her story;
there has been a beginning, a marriage;
there will be, we hope, a healthy birth.

The second painting has
no source of light and no story;
to emphasise pattern and colour,
the painter has eliminated
spaces around objects;
we could not walk around the room.
The anonymous woman,
sitting at a table,
is a silhouette defining a shape
which is repeated on the tablecloth
and again on the wallpaper.
But there still has to be space
between me and the painting;
I could not appreciate
its swirling arabesques
and vibrancy of colour
with my nose pressed against it.
If perception requires
discrimination
between figure and ground,
in the first painting
the woman is the figure
and the ground is the room
which surrounds her;
in the second, the painting itself
is the figure and the ground
is how I have displayed it,
in this case, on an old wooden door.

Two different styles of painting,
two different ways of seeing.

But this morning I gazed at the park;
the trees on my boundary
have become so lush they merged
with the park trees. It was only
when a car drove past that I could see
the distance between them.
There, was a Matisse.
On the other hand, if you had looked
into my solitary room
where I sat absorbed in thought,
you would have had a Vermeer.

?

2011-01-01T22:27:00.000-08:00

Elsewhere, that’s the place for disasters;
elsewhere, preferably
north of the equator,
even Australia
is too close for comfort.
Although we knew we lived in a country
susceptible to earthquakes,
they were long ago
and wouldn’t affect our generation.
But 4000 after-shocks later
we are singing a different tune.

It appears our city
is built on a fault line;
a line sounds mathematical
with a beginning and an end.
It would be truer to say
our city is built on
a lattice-work of faults,
with earthquakes popping up
here, there and everywhere.

For the most unfortunate
it is a question of survival
with homes and businesses written off;
the rest of us are distracted
from the eternal questions
by chimneys, insurance
and cracks in the ceiling.

But the eternal questions remain:
each and everyone of us
shares our world
with billions of others,
a world that existed
aeons of time before people,
in a universe so large
it stretches almost to infinity.
And now even the stable earth,
the earth where I thought
to lay my final bones
is writhing and coiling
like a wounded snake.

But incessantly the questions
hammer at us to be answered.
“Who are we?” “What do we count for?”

The universe remains silent.

The Wind's Song

2010-12-11T21:26:00.000-08:00

For Chris

I live with a double-edged sword;
like the earthquake which made us aware
our insignificance
in the general scheme of things
as well, made us acknowledge
the magnificence of that same scheme.
If the numinous is both beautiful
and terrifying, every day
of my life is numinous.
Old age and illness are bound with fear
but there can still be beauty: a sunrise,
a toddler playing in a birdbath.
I am buying two wind harps which will
ripple with the spirit of the wind harmonizing birdsong
and the rustle of leaves.
They will sing the song of my life,
they will sing the song of my death,
here in my garden.

Timeless Journey

2010-12-08T00:40:00.000-08:00

My unconscious does not
acknowledge death as an ending;
as far as it is concerned,
it has gone on forever
and has no need to recognise
human transitions and boundaries.
The fact that my conscious mind
and, even worse,
my over-weening ego will disappear
makes no interruption
to its timeless journey.
I feel I’m being evicted from myself.

At times, I want to borrow
a long-ago, four year old’s rebuke,
and say: “I’m me and you’re you,
and you do it”.

Look out

2010-11-22T21:23:00.000-08:00

I am being undermined by a poem.
I had a rigorous thought
and shoved the blame off
onto someone else’s shoulders.
Wallowing in self-righteousness,
I thought I’d try a poem;
but the poem took the thought
mulled it over and over
and re wrote it casting the blame
squarely back where it belonged
on my own shoulders.

Rule No 1: never trust a poem.

Drowning

2010-11-22T21:22:00.000-08:00

I inhabit a watery
landscape;
like the man in the poem,
I am far too far out,
not waving, but drowning.

Drowning creates communication
problems; it’s difficult
for a bystander to know what to say.
She could venture a direct question:
“Why are you drowning?”
which might ellicit an equally
direct reply: “I’m out of my depth
and cannot swim.”
But the grammatical ambiguity
still remains: the present continuous,
“I am drowning” is never resolved into
the perfect tense “I have drowned”.
And an obscure answer might be better:
“With my crossbow, I shot the albatross”
or a metaphysical subtlety
“I am not drowning, life is drowning me”

Well, if you’re going to bring fate into it!
Fate never follows human timelines
No need to launch the lifeboat;
there’ll be no drowning today, tomorrow, not until the end of time.

Better just wave back and call out;
“have a happy day”.
If challenged later
to justify the crassness
of this remark
insist you’re not wanting to deprive me
of a moment or two’s happiness
before the final gulp.

Doubting

2010-10-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

More than 55 years in one city
and only four earthquakes
until about six weeks ago
when there was a ferocious one
followed by, so far, 2000 aftershocks.
The earth, like an injured animal,
is containing within itself the pain
but from time to time
rears up against it.

With the earth jerking
and shuddering under our feet
and our houses cork-screwing
upon their foundations,
how are we to maintain
we are of any account
in the scheme of things?
We can rebuild our houses
but how are we to restore our shattered confidence?

At odds

2010-10-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

My poetry-writing self is wily
and very observant;
she’s in cahoots
with my dreaming self
and together they delight
in the mischief of undermining
my practical, everyday self.
Like Jung, they do not need to believe;
they know, whereas my agnostic self
lumbers from doubt to doubt.
They know that at death,
the body disassembles
its carbon, nitrogen, oxygen
into compost but they also know
that death is an enlarging horizon,
that the essence of self
cannot be destroyed.

I would like to die when I am dreaming
or writing poetry
instead of living
this incomplete fugue
where one part follows another
only to be interrupted
by a discordant jangle.

Memories that clutch and cling

2010-10-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

The house did not contain a memory
of him arriving unexpectedly,
our sharing a meal,
listening to music together,
sitting on the floor giggling foolishly
as we played childhood card games.
These memories belonged
to a different house
in a different country.
But it did contain the memory
of his ringing one birthday
because as he said, correctly,
I would prefer a phone call to a present.
It also contained
the anguished-ridden calls
as his health leeched out of him.
When, after his death, the house
was up for sale,
I had no choice but to buy it.
How could I leave a house
where I had last heard his living voice?

Euridyce

2010-09-18T23:35:00.000-07:00

The story is indubitably one-sided:
look up Euridyce
and you’ll be directed to Orpheus.
That’s the problem of marrying
a famous musician, who charmed
people, animals, birds, fish,
set stones and trees dancing
and stilled the punishments of hell.

We know very little about Euridyce,
so let’s shift our point of view:
she was still-born,
her near-life experience mirrors
near-death experiences:
groping through darkness
towards a threshold
beyond which there is light,
warmth and brightness
only, at the last, to be drawn back
into blackness and delusion.

Life and death are not opposites;
it is birth that opposes death.
Birth and death
book-end our life’s story;
we call one a miracle
the other a travesty.
We do not mind not knowing
where we’ve come from
but we dread not knowing
where we are going.
It would be better if like Janus
we could face both directions
with equal grace.

Stolen

2010-09-09T22:55:00.000-07:00

It must be the most consummate
burglar of them all.
At the beginning, the thefts were basic;
walking, dressing myself,
turning over in bed.
But later, it removed my ability
to feed myself, to sing in a choir
and play the piano.
It seems the thieving is systematic;
when I spasm, I either go rigid
like a corpse or curl into a fetal ball;
my very beginning
and my very end are intact;
it’s the life in between
that is being dismantled.

Some weeks ago I had friends around
to honour a young man’s death.
Shubert’s “Winterreise” was sung.
The room was full of beauty and pain;
the human need to give comfort
was expressed by my friends
holding one another in close embrace.

Entrenched in my wheelchair,
like an armadillo,
I sat watching.
I could neither give
nor receive comfort.
The M.S had stolen
my human connectedness.
I was left with only words,
but words were not appropriate.
It was a double grieving
and brought with it the fear
that one day, even my words
might be taken away.

The outside of enough

2010-08-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

My days are all the same:
every morning I have to summon,
against an erosion of spirit, the discipline
to confront the day’s routine.

I inhabit a sombre mood:
a Shostakovitch quartet,
with all four instruments playing
in the lower register of grief.

At the later stages of my life,
In the middle of the dark wood.
My only exit is death,
the cold silence of eternity.

The poem is obviously lying because my days are not all the same. This morning at 4.30am I was woken by a 7.1 earthquake centered about 30 miles from Christchurch and 7.5 miles underground. I live in a wooden house and they are very forgiving to earthquakes. This one happened in the dark but the last one was in daylight and I saw the walls bulge.
This morning in pitch dark I did not feel any movement at all, I just heard the most enormous creaking and in one of the many aftershocks, a shattering of glass which turned out to be two recycled wine glasses. Nothing else was broken and my chimneys remained intact.
What interests me is that I wasn’t in the least frightened. Yesterday evening I was quite caught up with watching the BBC version of Cranford. Between episodes I suddenly returned to the reality of myself. That was fear, a state of utter dereliction. But the earthquake did not phase me and very shortly afterwards there came a succession of neighbours, friends and carers checking me so I didn’t spend time alone in the dark worrying about what damage would greet my eyes at day break.
Christchurch itself has suffered extensively. Power is now mostly on but there will be considerable infrastructure issues with water and sewerage for several days and a massive rebuilding of facades of 19th century shops. It certainly was a big earthquake, but luckily no tsunami and so far no casualties.

Mistaken

2010-07-26T23:41:00.001-07:00

I am mortified. I not only have to admit I was wrong, but I have to make this confession on the world wide web. I knew rabbits would not obey the incest law; I did think the shortest day would be a breeding deterrent. But not so.

One and one did not equal three, it equalled five. But Tuzi didn’t stick around very long after he had impregnated his sister. He disappeared back across the road or she packed him off as being no longer necessary. For around four weeks we were fooled, but then one day there was a large quantity of white rabbit fur in the outer enclosure and Teresa thought to investigate the inner hutch. She found a ball of breathing fur which she took, correctly, to be baby rabbits.

We were initially disturbed as, Tuzilina never seemed to be with her offspring, but a google search revealed that baby rabbits do not give off any scent so the mother in the wild keeps her distance in order not to attract predators. As well, rabbits feed only twice a day, early in the morning and early in the evening, it’s the babies’ shared warmth, not any warmth from the mother that keeps them alive. Our ones grew rapidly and within the week were acquiring fur – one white and black like the father, one white and charcoal like the mother and one completely charcoal – by the second week their ears were becoming more and more developed. They emerged from the hutch successively two days apart, so that by the time they were three weeks old, they were all in the inner enclosure and starting to venture into the larger fenced area. At that stage, we were bringing them inside so that I could have a lapful of baby rabbits.

The skull at the feast

2010-07-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

Apart from his music, I know very little about Brahms:
a handsome youth, with unfulfilled love for
Clara Schumann, and perfect pitch.
There is a story that he was visiting a house;
he remembered the street name
and that the metal door scraper
sounded E flat but had forgotten
the number. A quick foray
up and down the street
settled the problem.
But this story is surely apocryphal:
why was he not arrested
for loitering with intent?
And do all metal door scrapers
play their own individual notes?

Anyway, the final story is true.
Brahms liked to compose
with the skull of Josef Haydn
beside him.
The skull had undergone adventures.
Filched from its grave
by an eager phrenologist,
but scrupulously returned
to Vienna when the phrenologist died,
it had traveled far.
The story may not be apocryphal
but it still leaves questions hanging.
Was Brahms seeking inspiration
or a reminder of his own mortality?
Inspiration – a breathing in;
conspirators need to breathe together
in a small room; they would not shout
their messages of subversion
across a windy moor
where the words might be blown away
and blazoned across the sky.
Inspiration – of the air
but a skull is earthbound,
of the grave. Was Brahms hoping to gain
inspiration from Haydn
to compose a work that would rattle
his reluctant audience
into acknowledging
their own mortality?
Nor does the story tell
what ultimately happened to the skull.
Did it join the body at Esterhazy?
But there had been a fraudulent skull
of an old man placed with Haydn’s body
which would then need to be removed
into the darkness of its own
anonymous grave.

Thank God, I need no skull on my desk.
The best of my poems seem to come from the air,
as if they are writing themselves;
and my illness offers its own
momento mori.

Life without music

2010-07-08T23:13:00.000-07:00

“Life without music would be a mistake.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I couldn’t agree more. After lots of fiddle-faddling, I managed to start learning the piano when I was eight (Dad had to stop smoking to pay for the lessons and I had to practise initially on a neighbour’s piano). I started with Step By Step to the Classics, books one to six which introduced me to the company of simple Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Scarlatti and they have been my companions ever since.

Some of the music I listen to is 400 years old, Monteverdi’s Vespers or Schütz’s Christmas Story, music that was written while Shakespeare was writing his plays and Cervantes had just launched Don Quixote out into the world.

I love belonging to a community of people over so many centuries who have listened to and loved and played and sung these works. In Clara and Robert Schumann’s The Marriage Diaries, she mentions his love of the “great B Minor Mass” and especially the “Et crucifixit, Et resurrexit and the Sanctus”. I love sharing such a passion with a great composer.

I have often tried to decide what work I would take on a desert island, but have never managed to agree with myself until I worded it differently. What work is there in the world that I couldn’t bear never to hear again? It’s not necessarily the greatest, but I couldn’t be without the Bach B Minor Mass. I had four to five weeks of joy when I lived in Melbourne and I sang it with a small choir; every rehearsal you could hear the texture of the parts.

Another work which is for me, a close runner up is the Bach St. Matthew Passion. Recently I had been trying to find the right adjective to describe the opening chord. I could hear it in my head and ran through about 20 possible words such as ‘resolute’ or ‘solemn’. The night the doctor had told me of the dire effects I could suffer from a bowel blockage, I played the first C.D of the three C.D set. Two or three notes in, I knew the word I was looking for was ‘foreboding’. This work always makes me weep and at first I wept for myself, but then like all great art it removed me from the particularity of my own pain and fear and made me weep for the world at large. King Lear with its final line exhorting us to: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” would have had the same effect, but this time it was the music: the grandeur of the opening chorus, the disciple’s grief at going to sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane and the wonderful duet plus chorus of “Moon and stars have for grief their light forsaken”.

The weeping was healing, but somehow full of joy. Life without music would be an appalling mistake.

The race of life

2010-06-30T00:19:00.000-07:00

I have one complaint agast Aesop:
he concentrates on the hare
and the tortoise,
on their differing personalities
but gives no indication
of how long the journey will take.
We do not know how often
the tortoise draws level,
only to find the hare has woken up
and sprinted off once again.

So think of me, lumbering
under that great weight of shell,
towards an elusive finishing line.

Crying Wolf

2010-06-26T22:55:00.000-07:00

This M.S dying is a long process. It’s not meant to be a terminal illness, but, as a consummate thief, it steals to good purpose. Four and a half years ago, my doctor warned me that my intercostals (ribcage) muscles were collapsing which would mean I couldn’t cough and any chest infection would cause pneumonia. He is somewhat amazed as the pneumonia has proved elusive.

However, collapsed muscles bring about another result. They are curving me dramatically and the compression is having a disastrous effect on my digestive processes. So much so, that my doctor informed me last week that the end result could be a blocked bowel.

A couple of years ago, spurred on by a friend, I had reluctantly asked my doctor about a colostomy. Quick as a wink, he had said I wouldn’t survive the operation. So that remedy is out of the question.

Choking is one of the dying options for M.S patients. I have tried it and don’t enjoy it very much. I have also, at the time of the compression fracture, tried a blocked bowel and didn’t enjoy that much either. The last time I had pneumonia was about 70 years ago and I still pulled through despite limited medication in those days. It’s beginning to look as though all options are unlikely or unpleasant.

If any of you have been kind enough to put in a good word to the Almighty to help keep the pneumonia at bay, I would ask you to slacken off a little. My doctor had said that he hoped the chest infection would come before the blocked bowel, so maybe you could have a hand in helping me to it.

All of this looks as if it going to take a long time. Almost 40 years of vegetarianism and yoga and a very good genetic background make it likely that I will live to a ripe old age. In fact, I will probably see most of you out.

More thoughts

2010-06-19T23:01:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking back in order to discover the ways in which the yoga/meditation/mindfulness have benefited my life.

It all starts back in 1985, the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth and so a year full of music, but otherwise, a devastating year. It started with the M.S coming out of remission and entering the secondary progressive stage where it just dwindles little by little. In April, I was rushed into hospital one evening (I would like to say at midnight, or the wee small hours but actually it was about 9.30pm) with an undiagnosed stomach ulcer. Then, in September Paul started the malignant course of liver failure which led to his death at the end of October.

But it’s the stomach ulcer time I am talking about now. Before they worked out what was really the matter with me, they gave me pethedine which made me float above the pain and revealed to me that pain killers don’t take the pain away; they shift your awareness in relation to the pain, so you perceive it differently and, no doubt, perceive other things in the world differently. I decided that if all it was going to do was make me float above the pain I would use my yoga, meditation, yoga breathing skills to do that myself. At that stage, I didn’t have the massive M.S discomfort/pain that I have to deal with now. M.S is variable and I have been granted the condition of allodynia, which means an indivisible pain that can obviously not be measured. The word is not in my dictionary but I suspect it is the opposite of anodyne: rasping versus smooth and emollient.

What I have to do is a reverse of Brueghel paintings where in the foreground there is, for example, the flailing of St. Anthony and in the background it is tranquil with there is someone skating and someone climbing a tree. I have to do it the opposite way with the turmoil in the background and the tranquility – birds at the feeder, light on the walnut tree, interaction with friends, what ever I am thinking about or reading and the music I am listening to – in the foreground.

This is how I manage not to take M.S pain killers during the day. As I cannot change position at night I do have to give in and take something to help me sleep but during the day my mind is clear and watching, the Buddhist mindfulness put to another use.

Further meditation thoughts

2010-06-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

It’s not meditation that I am mocking, but rather all the ballyhoo that surrounds it. I have been meditating for years and really value its effectiveness.

In 1968, I was in London; there was all the hype about The Beatles and Maharishi. I wanted to start meditating and so I followed the Transcendental Meditation technique and decided to give it a one year shot before taking stock, by which time of course, I was hooked.

I was given a three syllable mantra which, it was suggested, was suitable for the person I was. Despite Paul’s coaxing, I have never shared it with anyone or said it out loud so I cannot vouch for its suitability.

Meditation, it is claimed, is about emptying the mind.

Here are some of my experiences: when I first closed my eyes and started on the mantra, I mostly felt as if I had dived deeply inwards. I have no idea how long this feeling lasted because in that state you have no idea of time. When I returned to the surface, it was as if I was in the middle of a small pool and crowded around the edges were banal housekeeping-type thoughts, like “Did I write balsamic vinegar on the shopping list?” or “Is my library book due back yet?”; soap opera-thoughts: fabrications about what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow and whether he meant that when he said it or whether he meant something else and what I should have said back (played over and over again) and why she hadn’t been in touch.

My uninvited guest
chatters endlessly,
constructing fantasies
of rejection and denial
on no more evidence
than an empty mail box
and a silent phone.

Later my extreme M.S sensory discomfort was added to all these thoughts and together they absorbed more and more of the pool until I was standing on dry land once more and the process had to begin again.

Another way meditation worked was that the three syllables would extend so that all I was thinking was, particularly, the final syllable. Despite this rigmarole there were good results. I had always been trying to change my husband for the better, but the meditation changed me, which changed the mix and things between us did improve.

About 18 months after I started meditating, I got involved with Iyengar yoga. Iyengar devotees thought Maharishi looked like a used car salesman and Maharishi followers thought Iyengar yoga was too vigorous so I kept my own counsel. Maharishi had been surprised that, in the West, meditation had produced slower results so he had recommended simple yoga which I had dutifully practised. But, once I started Iyengar yoga I found there was a great difference between putting my head on my knee by bending forward from the shoulder blades and lying along my knee so that I was bending from the hips. (Once, at one Iyengar weekend seminar I could even kiss my ankle bone.) This ability to bend from the hips still stands me in good stead when I need to be brought forward in the wheelchair.

Yoga requires a great deal of watching. Question: how am I standing, with the weight on the ball or on the heel? Have I locked my knees or my elbows enough? Have I dug in between my shoulder blades and relaxed the back of my neck and amoungst “all these multitudinous instructions, don’t forget to breathe”. All these questions had to be answered simultaneously; this led to the practice of what the Buddha mindfulness. Eventually, I was applying the same mindfulness to my meditation and watching the strange performance that went on in my head. Somehow I was outside all the activity, not judging, merely observing. That meant I could never say: “I don’t know what got into me”, because I always did and had to take responsibility for it. Apart from a short spell when I was doing more intensive yoga and not meditating, I have meditated for more than 40 years.

But in September 2008 I suffered a spinal compression fracture and my meditation ground to a halt. I no longer had the initial diving downwards sensation, but I am discovering that I am still practising the mindfulness. As an example, here is what happened one morning: counterpointed on the M.S pain/discomfort there was a monarch caterpillar transforming itself into a J. The room was numinous. At this point a neighbour who suffers from severe brain damage after a bicycle accient turned up. She needed to unload a whole succession of stories about some street kids she had recently encountered. Each of her stories brought associations into my mind from other stories I had heard or from literature particularly Dickens or Dostoevsky. Throughout all this my mind was still registering the light on the walnut tree and the bird feeder. My mind was abuzz. In visual terms, my mind contained innumerable circles with tangents attaching them to still more circles.

In no way could I claim I was emptying my mind. Rather, it would be true to say my mind consisted of layer after layer of activity. So you can see I am not knocking meditation but would you actually say I was achieving meditation?

I know that many schools of thought recommend that we “let go” our emotions as they are the cause of mental pain. I always feel such techniques border too closely on denial or suppression. I prefer to go deeply into an emotion so I can transform it. My way of meditating helps me to achieve this.

Meditation

2010-06-02T23:23:00.000-07:00

If a succession of full stops
constitutes a straight line,
then I am meditating.
But the function of the mind is to think.
Concept formation is important
for the human race. I have watched
a toddler who had learnt that an animal
with four legs and a tail was a dog,
greet my cat with a triumphant
woof woof. I have known of an old woman
whose concepts were unraveling
present milk tokens at the shop
and placed them in her teapot.
Despite this, we believe that an empty mind
furthers our spiritual development.
We focus on our breathing, a mantra
or a candle flame. I have tried
listening to a familiar
and well loved piece of music:
the Kyrie from the B Minor Mass
but do not succeed.
The empty part of my mind is squeezed
by thoughts such as: ‘ I am not thinking’,
or taxonomic statements like
‘ this is a wax eye’, ‘a green finch’,
‘I have cold feet’, ‘I need a drink’.
My illness requires me to concentrate
on the smallest action or I cannot do it.
I concentrate only in snippets;
I meditate staccato.

Disappearing

2010-05-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

There is no escaping.
As I grow older, the landscape
of my friends is flattening out.
Where there used to be a small hill,
a stand of trees, a distant cathedral spire
there is now no definition.
Or, to change the metaphor;
on a rocky out crop, I watch
as, little by little, the waves encroach
until, in the end,
the ocean engulfs me.

Now, didn’t I do well?
I talked about flattening,
loss of definition,
disappearance.
I invited you to imagine an artist
painting from different vantage points.
You neither cringed
nor turned your head away.
I never once mentioned the word “death”.

Hopefully

2010-05-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend asked me what I felt about my own dying.

I fluctuate between three responses to the idea of my own dying and death: fear, acceptance, hope. Several of my poems deal with the threshold between acceptance and hope, but I know many people are allergic to poetry so I will risk repeating myself.

The fear relates more to the dying than to the death and it relates more to the effect of the multiple sclerosis. Because I cannot turn over at night, I have to take a pill to get to sleep which doesn’t work gradually. Rather, I am lying there fully awake and then I am still fully awake but it is morning and in the missing bit I must have fallen asleep. I have become anxious that I will stay awake all night. So I lie there, virtually in rigor-mortis; sometimes my legs feel as if I’ve been standing in a glacial lake; it is pitch black and I am waiting. On the worst night of all I felt as if I was already dead: ram-rod stiff, bitterly cold, it was dark with an eternity of waiting. It was only the cat’s warmth against my shoulder that reassured me that I was still alive.

Even after the bad night, the fear had diminished in daylight, but I still live with its residue.

My usual state is acceptance. I have no trouble with the physical body being mulched into the earth and coming up next spring as grass, explored by birds and insects; the minerals and salts of my body becoming part of the world as long as our planet exists.
This idea of the cycle of existence has been very much part of belief systems for centuries. For me, it was Loren Eiseley who pointed out that Christianity changed our thinking by introducing a linear perspective. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. A human life is the middle and we know nothing definite about the beginning or the end. Shakespeare describes it as “undiscovered country” which still suggests co-ordinates of place and time. We have no language to describe the unknown and have to resort to the familiar.

All the great religions have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to find words to describe this unfamiliar experience for which we have no words, the experience that our human life is but the middle and that the beginning and the end go on for ever.
I have experienced moments when time has seemed to stop, or there has been another dimension of light, or that I am so much in the present moment however mundane the activity I am engaged in, that I am fully focused. These moments of awareness are not something which I do myself; they always feel like gifts.
From my own experiences and what I have read about other peoples’ I have glimpses that this life is not all there is. The acceptance is always with me, occasionally darkened by fear and, more often brightened by hope.

The Unknown

In the days when the earth was flat
was it considered limitless
infinity backwards and forwards?
Or did the sailor set out
into the unknown
unsure whether he would arrive
at an ultimate boundary?

As I approach my final years,
I am facing the same ambiguity:
where is my beginning, where is my end?
My ancestral beginning
is lost in the mists of time.
Of my caesarean birth
I have only a fictionalised account;
my mother's pain
and my own outrage
at the abrupt eviction
have been edited out.

As for my ending:
like the sailor venturing
into the unknown, I do not know
whether I will achieve a landfall.

1 + 1 = 3

2010-05-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

In January 2009 I acquired a rabbit. I am the year of the rabbit so I called himby the Chinese word for a rabbit: Tuzi, the first syllable pronounced like the whoo of tu-whit-a-whoo, the 'z' pronounced as if tz and the 'i' becomes a mute e. Initially Tuzi was contained in a smallish hutch but more recently, in a larger wire enclosure. A few weeks ago, he discovered that with judicious digging or biting through wire, he could escape back over the road to where he came from. My neighbour has several other rabbits. After a week where Tuzi was getting out twice a day and then again the following morning, I enquired at a pet shop and was told rabbits like soft toys for company so I dutifully bought him a soft green dinosaur which he had the good taste to ignore. So my neighbour bought over one of his rabbits to keep mine company. I have called her Tuzilina.

When Tuzi wasn’t escaping he was mooching rather a lot, so I was expecting to have twice the mooching. Instead, there is a great deal of rabbit activity now that he has his sister for company. He has heard that people breed like rabbits so he wants to too, but at the moment, he is not humping her, just chasing her energetically. So I have discovered that one rabbit energy plus another rabbit energy does not equal two; they equal three.

The world of mathematics has been turned upside down.

Post Script

2010-05-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

This is in the nature of a post script; the last two journal entries came about because of my feelings after my friends’ son died. I chose to talk about my grief for Paul but could also have dwelt upon the daily attrition which comes from living with a consummate burglar, multiple sclerosis.

I wanted to share my belief that grief belongs with other inexpressible human feelings, feelings that require us to use an ‘as if’. I have to say: “I ring with joy” when I enter a great cathedral. In the same way my poem stated that I was hurled, winded on to the beach. Both experiences require metaphor.

So here is another metaphor: A life full of grief need not be stunted or maimed. I have a very tall garden where almost all the trees compete upwards for the sunlight. But one of my trees, unexpectedly called a smoke bush, has chosen a different journey. The trunk is only about 20 feet high and from it extend at a 45° angle to east, north and west, branches that are 20 - 40 feet long. At this time of year, the tree is turning dramatically, so along these extended braches there are red-gold, orange, yellow and green leaves. The area of colour is greater than if the branches had gone upwards.
So, in a life that contains the poignancy of grief, the growth may still be dazzling.

Metanoia

2010-04-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

In my most recent journal entry, I talked about happiness, which obviously suggests unhappiness. But that is not the right category when someone has just lost a beloved child. That category is desolation/anguish/misery as opposed to joy/elation/euphoria.

Desolation/anguish/misery all relate to loss and therefore grief. In the months after Paul’s death I found that on those occasions when I honoured the grief – thinking, feeling, remembering – I felt close to Paul. But on those other occasions when I allowed myself to be distracted by busyness, Paul was fading away from me like the shade of Eurydice. Despite the pain of the grieving I needed to persevere if I wanted to feel close to him. As a result of the thinking, feeling, remembering, I talked a great deal about him. At first my friends looked taken aback, not to say embarrassed, but they got used to it over time. I had lost Paul’s future. I didn’t want to have also lost his past. This has meant that friends and carers can speak of him as a real person in the same way that I can speak about their loved ones even though I haven’t met them.

There is a strange element in grief. Just as tears and laughter may be close together, so grief and joy may also be connected. Once, in tears I was walking in the rain through bush at Lake Brunner. I had no need to wipe the tears as the rain was adding to them copiously. I stopped for a moment, looked up at a punga (tree fern) against the sky and suddenly I was flooded with joy. It was like a see saw; the misery had completely gone. I believe this experience of a total reversal of mood is called metanoia.

Grief has a strange poignancy; it heightens contrasts, black becomes blacker and white becomes whiter. Both grief and joy may serve the same purpose: they enlarge the ego, pushing it beyond its limited boundaries. It’s easy to see how joy can achieve this, but harder to understand the paradox that grief can also function this way. Somehow grief that has been honoured, relativises us. We are bought face to face with our microscopic insignificance as part of a crowded world in a vast, ancient universe. Paradoxically this may act as an enlargement.

I am forced to resort to the language of mysticism:
to be full, we must first have been empty:
to be free, we must first have been imprisoned:
to be chaste, we must first have been ravished:
to be light, we must first have been dark.

Obviously words are inadequate purveyors of such truth so I will resort to those of a great poet, T.S. Eliot:
“a condition of complete simplicity,
costing no less than everything.”

Storm-tossed

2010-04-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

Where does it come from,
this yearning we all have,
for halcyon days,
this dogged denial
that life is an ocean where,
at any moment, unplanned
and unprepared for, a wave
may dash us gasping
on the shore?
Rather than outrage
at our being singled out,
undeserving, we need
to feel grateful for the mercy
of calm weather.

The son of friends’ has just died and remembering how I felt beached with grief after Paul’s death, my heart has gone out to them. But then I thought about the surviving families of the earthquake victims from Tibetan China, Haiti and Chile and I wondered whether we in the West have not acquired a wrong expectation that our life is supposed to be happy. Maybe when people are struggling for survival, all they can do is hope for happiness: they have no expectation, but can merely bless the days of happiness that come their way.

‘Exotic’

2010-04-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

This morning I spent two exotic hours in my garden. The word ‘exotic’ to me means rare, unusual, and brings with it all the hot spicy atmosphere of the Orient. I come from the bottom of the southern hemisphere; maybe New Zealand appears exotic for people in the Middle East.

I have always had trouble with ‘exotic’ when it means ‘coming from another country’ but when I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary, the first meaning offered was ‘introduced’ and the second was ‘rare and unusual’. So what I had thought was a colonial obeisance to political correctness turns out to be good English usage.

Therefore, the familiar birds of my childhood – blackbird, starling, thrush, sparrow – are all exotic. Geraniums red, delphiniums blue, chrysanthemums yellow and white, and ‘a rose by any other name’ are all exotic. Fruit trees, oak “planted in defiance/of evergreen bush and a bell bird’s song” silver birch, poplar, elm, plane, willow and the nearly 60 year old walnut tree in my garden are all exotic.

Apparently, exotic means introduced by human agency, as the welcome sparrow, which has flown quite easily across the Tasman, is regarded as a native, as is the wax eye which appeared in the 1850’s and is called ‘stranger’ by the Maori. But the wax eye is a very small bird with a swooping tree to tree flight and it is difficult to imagine it could have flown such a distance. If it had hitch-hiked on a sailing ship for a journey of several weeks it still would have required apple, sweetened bread, dripping, alias lard or suet, or aphids. There would have needed to be enough birds to create a viable colony, so I have always suspected some anonymous human to have bought the wax eye across the Tasman.

The word 'exotic' when applied to these introduced brids and trees always sounds pejorative, but how long do you have to live in a country before you belong?

Now before I tell you about my exotic hours in the garden, I need to fill you in about Christchurch weather. Christchurch is built on a swamp which means that I am probably a cathedral depth below sea level, as sea level is the top of the Anglican cathedral spire: It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, nestles against a great volcanic bump called Banks Peninsula (named after the naturalist on Captain Cook’s ship) and some 50 miles away from the foothills of the Southern Alps of which the highest mountain, Mt. Cook, is a little higher than two fifths of Mt. Everest. The Alps may be much lower, but they are still rugged and avalanche prone. All these conditions make Christchurch weather inconstant and changeable.

On the day in question we had just recovered from a week when the temperature had plummeted from 26° to 16° to 14° to 12° and when it was at the lower temperatures it was grey and blusterous. On the exotic morning it was mostly clear with scudding clouds; I found it a great relief to be outside and to listen to the ground swell of ‘exotic’ birds – sparrow, hedge sparrow, finch, blackbird – all the birds, also, were glad at the relief from cabin fever.

Then I had the first of my three ‘exotic’ visitors; they are native to New Zealand, occasional visitors in the autumn and always a delight.

First it was a bellbird right in my garden; it did not just give one or two peals but a complete chime of bells, a sequence of five ringing notes. The bellbird rang on and off for about ten minutes and was followed by a fantail, the most regular autumn visitor, almost regular enough not to be exotic. Fantails are insect eaters and immensely coquettish. They seem both fearless and friendly but actually I constitute an insect magnet having either disturbed or attracted the insect around me. They chatter excitedly between each mouthful. So even if I can not see them pirouette, I know a fantail is there.

The last of my exotic visitors was a grey warbler, a little grey bird, sparrow shaped but much smaller, with a trill of piercing sweetness. The volcanic bump, Banks Peninsula, must have originally been an island because it has different flora and fauna. I am most familiar with the Banks Peninsula grey warbler with its three descending semi tone trills. But the one on my special morning was either a visitor from some where else in New Zealand, a mutant or a young one rehearsing its song. It sang and sang.

Once I was fortunate enough to watch a grey warbler sing. It's whole body vibrated with the intensity of the song and I knew without a shadow of doubt that the whole world, at that moment, depended for it's existence of that song, you, me, and the rest of the teeming billions. From then on I can never hear a grey warbler without grateful acknowledgement the world is underpinned by some such moments, a bird's song, spider web, or act of generousity.

So who's going to tell me that I did not have exotic visitors on that bright clear morning.

Pathetic Fallacy

2010-04-01T01:33:00.000-07:00

Today, if nature had been truly
sympathetic, there would have been
a driven storm and blinding rain.
Instead, there was blue sky, not much wind
and a tinnitus of crickets.
I was consumed by self-pity,
a great perverter of reality,
an egocentric wallowing,
no room for beauty.

Fortunately I stayed outside,
and little by little, the integrity of trees
erased the word self. “Oh the pity of it!”
allows compassion, welcomes beauty.
The trees had done it again,
I was healed.

*****************

I am living dangerously,
pursued by a runaway poem
which tells glaring lies.
Sure, I berated the pathetic
fallacy for being pathetic
but tree-centric as my garden is,
in the end it wasn’t the trees
themselves that made me feel better,
it was my writing a poem
about the trees making me feel better
that made me feel better.

The poem was sophisticated,
quotes Shakespeare, knows the difference
between coherence and correspondence,
is well versed in Romantic twaddle
about man and nature, but unwilling
to go out on a limb
about woman and nature.

This is a sorry case of an unreliable
narrator, but please remember
it is the poem who is the narrator.
You are faced with a choice:
which poem to beleive.

Wistfulness of memory

2010-03-25T22:38:00.000-07:00

Today, a new Monteverdi;
as the Magnificat rings out
I am transported back forty years.
Young and full of hope
window-sill perched, delighting
in crooked brick walls, London plane trees
and narrow gardens
I am not for a moment aware
of the stifling shadow
when, bereft of my son,
I dwindle towards my death.

The music, triumphant in its own right
with its celebratory trumpets,
and antiphonal choirs,
containing now
this double reality—
the ever-hopefulness of youth,
the diminishment of age—
has acquired a wistfulness,
an echo that will remain
until my end of time.

“How all occasions do inform against me.”

2010-03-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

“How all occasions do inform against me.” The above quote from Hamlet shows how relevant Shakespeare can be but I am sure he wasn’t imagining how slight the occasion might need to be.

A week or so ago one of my computer friendly young carers posted a journal/blog about my doctor's use of metaphors to describe my condition. By focusing on the metaphors I now think I was trying to distract people from what the words actually meant. But I had not allowed for one of my ex carers/friends who has now moved to Melbourne and who, as a fine arts student, had inevitably retained a strong visual, kinesthetic image of me. She ignored the metaphors and posted a comment in response to what the doctor really meant. My first reaction was such a comment was private and needed to be removed from the blog. But then the other reactions set in and I discovered that I need to consider 1. My way of presenting my self and my illness and
2. My attitude toward the internet. These considerations will meander “with a mazy motion” but will make sense in the very end.

When I was a small child, we lived for five years next door to my aunt in a flat that was part of my grandparents’ house. My mother was frail: probably a saucer hip socket undetected in 1903 had brought on osteoarthritis, lack of exercise had lead to drastic varicose vein problems which necessitated two operations and as well she had an irritable bowel. My brother was born in 1934 and Mother was told that if she was careful she could risk another child 5 years later, which was me. Caesarian births in those days didn’t bother about bikini lines, but were a wholesale cutting open and I think that probably for my mother, the second birth was touch and go.

Taking responsibility

As I grew up I internalised a constant adult injunction from my father, aunt and grandparents, “look after your mother”. Later difficulties and the having a child meant that taking responsibility for other people was firmly entrenched in me and manifests itself now in how I present my illness. I feel the need to protect people against the harshness of reality, submerge myself in black humour and other forms of verbal irony rather than speak out about how it really is. I act this part so well, I even convince myself. So, on those days when self-pity gets hold of me and I feel grumpy that my friends don’t seem to understand, I am forgetting to remind myself that I don’t seem to understand either.

My objections to the comment about my living on the knife edge reveal to me that 1. I had not sufficiently protected Monique (as she put me to bed two or three times a week for nearly two years, it shows how stupid I am for trying to protect her as she was only too aware of my fragility and muscle weight loss) and 2. That I am actually a lot worse than I think I am. My doctor is a very good listener which has the effect of my hearing what I have just said, so after one of his visits I briefly have to take my condition more seriously.

Internet and privacy

My attitude towards the internet is somewhat more complicated as like other people of my generation, I feel it invades my privacy and yet here I am using it. So I’ve done all sorts of thinking and this is where I go meandering: if I had lived in a nineteenth century village everyone would have known my grandparents and my grandchildren, when I had my breakfast and probably what I actually had for breakfast. There would have been no privacy.

In 1940’s, Christchurch, New Zealand, living in the family situation I described above and with another aunt and uncle a 5 minute walk away and the second grandfather 10 minutes walk away there was still very strongly a sense of place. I was located within a family and there would have been little privacy.

When we went to London, we lived in a long street with four to five storey terraced houses, each floor one separate flat. Very few people had cars and so we encountered one another on the street all the time. Three years after living there I had to take to my bed for six weeks with my first M.S assault and my splendid milkman would bring the milk in every day and put it in the refrigerator. London had a village feel about it, and I didn’t mind the loss of local privacy even while I loved the anonymity of London as a whole.

Now back in New Zealand the single storey, one family houses are set back from the road with fences, trees or shrubs and nearly every one has a car. There are very few street encounters. As well, the population has greatly increased and there is upward mobility. For the forty years my brother lived after he was married, we were in the same city only for nine months.

Add to that the changes in transport: no longer sailing ships which took three months or the five week sea journey we undertook to get to London, but an approximately 36 hour air trip. Mail, instead of, at the best, a 6 month round trip now, with email, is virtually instantaneous. We rang New Zealand from London once in over nine years: it was expensive and we had to speak so loudly it was as if we were shouting the distance. Now there is Skype and text messages. Instead of place, what is important is time. A friends’ daughter in Sydney looking at a rainbow receiving a text from a Melbourne friend who was also looking at a rainbow. Instead of a village or extended family, we have a global family and in my case there won’t be that many people surfing the internet to discover a website with the key words, multiple sclerosis and death. Monique’s comment on my website showed the generation difference. She is a third of my age and had no trouble at all writing what she did on the net. My removing of her comment was high handed, but at least revealed to me in Shakespearian ways, why I initially objected to it. I was moved and felt this should be a private emotion, but in a village it would have been public property.

The inner significance of each one of us is increasingly threatened by changes in life style, the population explosion and new knowledge of the age and extent of the universe. There are enough galaxies out there for each of the billions of us to have five apiece and then there would be some over. We are no more important in the scheme of things than a leaf from last season’s walnut tree. For those of us lucky to have computers, our access to the internet is able to fill some of the empty spaces created by this insignificance.

All this, from one comment on a website.

Words and their meaning

2010-03-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

People are feckless with words. They toss them over their shoulders as casually as they would a cigarette butt. I, on the other hand, am a word scavenger. I collect them, polish them into brightness, display them, gloat over them.

So when my doctor some 20 years ago described me as living on the edge, I immediately came up with images. I was teetering in the wind on a high cliff. Below me I could hear the roar of the sea but I didn’t dare look down. I could only hope there would be some outcrop of rock that would break my fall. Or, I hoped that, like the blind Gloucester, in King Lear, I would fall over the edge only to land in a meadow with exclamations of wonder that I had fallen so far, floating like thistle down, and yet had sustained no injury.

But on his most recent visit, the doctor said I was on a knife edge. Now that’s a much more violent image. I’ve had no training or experience in tight rope walking. Who, anyway, would venture out on a knife edge, unless she was trying to escape something horrible. In which case, there would be no point in turning around and going back. I would be like a toddler just learning to walk who lacked the necessary balance to turn round. So I would have to go on, but how far and what would be my destination? M.S never gets any better; my point of arrival might well be worse than my point of departure.

My doctor had hoped it would be quick, my being on the knife edge, I assume he meant. So did he want me to fall off and to fall off on to what? Would there be a safety net? Or would there be Gloucester’s meadow? Or did he just want the journey to be short and was kidding himself that at the end of it I would have reached the Elysian fields? More likely I would fall across the knife and whether it was sharp or not, it would cut me. I think I had better opt for Gloucester’s meadow, and his sad recognition.

“I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw.”

Poetry as Fiction

2010-02-26T21:22:00.000-08:00

Lately, I’ve been feeling like Josef Grand in Camus’ The Plague who spends an interminable amount of time rewriting the same sentence about the beautiful horsewoman riding through the Bois du Boulogne on a May morning, or was it riding on a May morning through the Bois du Boulogne.

I have been trying for days to catch a particular feeling in a haiku. Below are two versions I have come up with.

The cry of sea gulls
and I am a child again
in holiday mood.

Sixty years later –
the cry of sea gulls recalls
summer holidays.

The problem is that neither of these captures exactly what I am looking for. When I was a child my grandfather owned a bach (New Zealand equivalent of primitive cottage) with rain water, no hot water system and an outside dunny that had to be emptied. If, when I hear the sound of sea gulls I close my eyes, I am on my way to that summer bach. The train from Christchurch has just arrived at Lyttelton, I am on the wharf smelling salt and diesel, about to step on to the launch which is going to chug the 15 – 20 minutes across the harbour. Every time I hear sea gulls crying I have that memory but I can find no way, in a three line poem, to indicate that one moment can be repeated again and again.

One of my friends finds it difficult to compress an idea or feeling into a three line haiku because she needs a “Once upon a time…”. My poem about the sea gulls also requires a “Once upon a time…”.

And this next one is no better.

sitting desolate
in an autumnal garden –
then a grey warbler

The only way I can indicate the wonderful lifting of mood I experience when I hear a grey warbler is to suggest that I was desolate first. But I can feel as happy as Larry and then be immensely elated by the sound of a grey warbler. Again, when I hear one, I am running down the track to the beach past the high grass with the smell of dry hay and broom seeds popping, round the corner and under the cool of the pine trees, over the stile, and down the root-sculpted path. So once more the poem tells only half of the story and not even the right half.

Thus it can be seen that all poetry is fiction.

Haiku Moments

2010-02-16T21:20:00.000-08:00

the dark midnight hour
my body rigid and cold
the cat snuggles closer

no good harping on and on
I’m alive not dead
let’s talk about the light

as the sea mist rolls in
I trace out the shape of my life –
the cat inscrutably sleeps

a life in waiting –
Michelangelo’s slave
straining out of the stone

I pause at the threshold
which direction shall I look?
back to the past or onwards

late afternoon
light on the walnut tree -
the balm of living

criss-crossing water
morning barge passes
soon pure reflection

looking up from book
music peach blossom seagulls –
the whole world stands still

Ramshackle

2010-02-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

Straight-lined people repudiate
vigorously the world of curved-liners.
With set-square and ruler
they seek to measure and quantify;
trying to show, once and for all,
the inherent geometry of things.
Straight-liners see patterns
in a succession of items,
while curved-liners
see a pattern in the whole,
loving the curl of a wave,
the arch of sky, the flickering
brightness of flame, preferring
a wilderness of garden
to the statutory distance
between plants, a subtlety of hue
to primary colours;
never minimalists,
they want to be absorbed
into a polyphony of sound.

This poem appeared after one of my new carers got me safely out of bed one morning, but as she left put in the mailbox her letter of resignation, which took effect from the very moment I received it. The poem constitutes my efforts to understand that she found the job lacking in structure. After all, working for me cannot be a regimented activity when there must be space for the unexpected visit of a friend with a boisterous three year old grandson or a missing rabbit.
Her replacement carer wishes to bring her horse to graze on my overgrown lawn. I feel confident she will be suitably curve-lined.

From a comfortable middle-class armchair

2010-01-30T21:38:00.001-08:00

It’s all very well being able to focus on birdsong when the rawness of my grief has settled into painful scar tissue and when I live in the tree enclosed security of a New Zealand garden but it would be crass beyond belief to suggest birdsong or sunrise to a survivor of a Haitian earthquake who had just witnessed the lingering death of family and neighbours. 85% of the population of Haiti were already below the poverty line and are now living with no guarantee of food, shelter, warmth or as one BBC announcer put it, comfort.

We can turn to the writings of the poets, for example, from Macbeth: “Come what, come may:/time and the hour runs through the roughest day” or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Comfort that serves in a whirlwind:/each live death does end, and each day dies with sleep.” But these are only on the surface of comfort; all they are telling us is that life continues, not that tomorrow will be better. Paul’s death was hideous, but the very worst was waking the next morning and knowing he was dead. It’s the scale of the disaster that appalls us.

200,000 deaths are strictly speaking, no worse than one death repeated 200,000 times within a few months, the deaths arouse in us compassion, and I trust, no suggestion of prurience and maybe: “There but for the grace of God go I”, which appears just to be saying that I am fortunate and other people are so unfortunate (an elderly woman said that to me several times until I asked what it was saying about me and the grace of God). But if you unpick the saying completely, it is implying that God’s grace is on the side of some of the inhabitants of the world and not on the side of the others, an echo of the nineteenth century belief that if you were wealthy, it proved you were in God’s favour.

In the end it is probably the fact that we are so totally out of control that shocks us, that the world we live in is not gracious and generous towards us. Instead, we are at its mercy.

And the birds sing

2010-01-25T22:29:00.000-08:00

It was suggested to me recently that blog was an elision of blurb log. While I was mulling this over, another friend told me authoritatively that it was web log.

The internet obviously extends everywhere and catches people and objects. A web is more aesthetically pleasing but has sticky fronds. It reminds me of: “‘Will you walk into my parlour’ said the spider to the fly.”

When you come into my parlour, there will be no small talk but there will be lots of stories:
A friend’s very young grandson neglected to say thank you. His mother asked: “What do you say?” To which came the enthusiastic reply: “Amen.”

My recent piano tuner plays the cello. About three times a year the state of the world, either his own world or the world at large, requires of him that he go out into the streets and play. Most recently he attracted a young man who happened to have a violin in his backpack. The two of them played to an appreciative audience for some two hours and people bought them cups of hot chocolate.
A friend recently visited with her daughter, who last week was a baby and now is a toddler. Three steps and plonk, unless her mother was at the end of the plonk, where she took five steps. Her greatest delight was to hold her mother’s fingers and run at full tilt across the carpet.

Another friend brought a matchstick sized goldfinch she had rescued from the road. She sat there patiently scooping canary soft food into an ever hungry mouth.

I notice all my stories are on the positive side. I am not mentioning my concern at the sluggishness of my peristaltic activity nor that yet again, and I mean yet again, mucus has blocked my catheter, which necessitates that it be removed and another one inserted.
Am I failing to mention these details out of maidenly (at nearly 71) modesty? Or because of a life long habit of protecting people and taking responsibility (“Human kind cannot bear very much reality”) or because news these days has to be immediate and sensational and repeated problems are neither immediate or sensational.

There are two intractable facts: Paul has now been dead longer than he was ever alive and I have now been battling through the secondary progressive stage of multiple sclerosis for nearly 25 years. Years ago, I wrote of grief:
“It is a life lived continuously
in a minor key,
a lingering bass note
endlessly sustained.
On this minor bass note (timpani, trombone, double bass) I have to counterpoint a musical structure from the higher register (woodwind, baroque trumpet and the upper strings). Some days I manage very well, especially if it’s sunny and I have sat out under my cherry tree: others, I manage only a short piccolo note.

Recently I wrote a poem:
“Sleeping or waking,
the nightmare remains:
yet a sparrow is busily
feeding her young
and a blackbird is singing.”

Somewhere, anywhere, at any time,
a person is being born.
Somewhere, anywhere, at any time,
a person is dying.
The birds sing.

When you visit me, I will try to concentrate on the singing birds.

Do come again; there will be no cucumber sandwiches nor bone china for the cups of tea. But there will be talk.

Piano

2010-01-11T20:46:00.000-08:00

If Yeats could opt for a tower as a symbol
I have chosen my grandmother's piano.
More than a century old,
it has a decayed elegance,
pitched a semi-tone
below a concert grand.
Its mellow romantic timbre
would have suited Chopin
or Tchaikovsky and not the Bach
and Haydn I imposed upon it.
The upper and lower registers ring
but the middle octaves twang dismally.

Similarly, I am battered,
subdued and of a long gone style.
I resonate to the extremes
of joy and sorrow
but am out of tune
for the commonplace and banal.

The tuner is coming tomorrow.
I cannot speak for the piano
but hold out no hopes
that i will change for the better.

Beyond Recognition

2010-01-11T20:45:00.000-08:00

If the observer alters
what is observed,
my coterie of carers
who never take their eyes off me
have changed me
out of all recognition.

I am lost in the outskirts of a maze.
Unlike Theseus who required a thread
so he could retrace his safe steps
to the outside world,
the outside world has dispersed me
so without a thread to guide me
I will never return
to the centre of my being.

Rigmarole

2010-01-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

The M.S doesn’t just steal movement and activities associated with movement, it interrupts other aspects of life: perception of time, language, private space/boundaries. There will be other illnesses that do exactly the same thing, but multiple sclerosis is the one I know about.

Perception of Time

My days are full of regular routines. I do the same thing, in the same way, in the same order, and probably the same time of day, every single day. The rigmarole I have to face before I go to bed this evening makes tomorrow seem a long way off. The rigmarole I have already endured today makes yesterday even further away. If I contacted you four to six weeks ago and you haven’t replied, it feels as if you have been silent for months even though in your busy life with family, holidays, travel and other occupations, very little time has passed. By now, I am at least 150 years old and when people suggest I might live another two or three, they are dooming me to another few centuries.

Language

In recent years I have been learning the dialect of disability. Unlike sign language, it does not have its own grammar and syntax, nor a particular pronunciation. Rather, it stretches the words of the mother tongue.

Thus, I say: “I stand up and walk across the room.” Now if walking means being upright and travelling from A to B, then yes, I walked. But if walking requires lifting one foot off the floor and bringing it forward, I did not walk. I stood up, turned around and slid backwards.

Then again, when you say you have cleaned your teeth, presumably, you mean you moved your arm so that the toothbrush traveled backwards and forwards against your teeth. What I mean is, that once the toothbrush is prepared and I have it in my mouth, I turn my head from side to side, so I move my teeth backwards and forwards across the toothbrush. This does produce the same effect but the words mean different things.

A friend who has to listen to talking books says she reads. I say I walk and I clean my teeth. We are using language out of habit and to be economical. To do otherwise would be pedantic.

The problem can also go the other way. I have said to a new carer: “If you go on doing it this way, you will make me spasm.” She retorts that she is not trying to make me spasm. In order to remove any suggestion of intentionality, I have to rephrase my remark: “Doing it this way will cause a spasm.” Spasms are vicious, like electric shocks and it is difficult to believe that my own body has become so inimical to me. Initially to my shame I was accusing my carers: “What did you do that for?” When I managed to hear what I was saying I could at least apologise. Spasms are an issue therefore, both for my use of language and the way the language is received.

Boundaries and Personal Space

My physical boundaries have been completely invaded. When I cannot dress myself, it would be foolish of me to complain about being dressed. But what I do complain about is people treading on my clothes, wiping sticky fingers on my face towel or touching the nozzle of my drink bottle. These seem legitimate causes of complaint. But lately I have noticed I am also protesting about the way people are removing my very fine hair from my eyes. My physical boundaries have obviously become even more sensitive.

But if they are sensitive, they are nothing in comparison with my psychological boundaries.
Because I am so encroached upon physically, my psychological boundaries go right to the edge of my tree-enclosed property. When you enter the gate, you enter my personal space. You are not given the chance to negotiate where in the room to position you chair so that you can maintain a certain individual distance. You are already trespassing.

To make it harder for you, there is also my much more conspicuous fragility. I have lost so much weight, it is harder to ignore. You have to decide whether to mention the weight loss or ignore it: if you ignore it, you have to decide what to do if I mention it. Are you willing to engage in a difficult conversation or do you think what is required of you is to cheer me up and distract me?

And to make matters worse, I write poetry. Poetry is condensed and cryptic and what is worse, it may well deal with personal feelings. It is a decidedly anti-social activity, which some people may prefer to ignore.

And then again, my hand, like Lear’s, “smells of mortality”. I am so compressed my oxygen intake is limited and so I have to live constantly with the knowledge that my own death could be imminent. As most of my friends are elderly, they also are facing their own mortality but may prefer not to dwell on it. But as another one of my traits is that I am very direct, you may find yourself partaking of a conversation which discusses what sandwich fillings are suitable for a funeral feast, or even whether it is appropriate to cut the crusts off the same sandwiches.

So when you come in the gate, even before you have rounded the flax, it is required of you that you take up a position relative to my directness, mortality, fragility and extended personal space. It is a very great challenge.

Multiple sclerosis has a lot to answer for.

This is all there is

2010-01-09T17:55:00.000-08:00

One of my friends has trouble with my ideas about the “peace that passeth all understanding”: She requires a peace that relates more practically to world affairs. So I’ve done some more thinking.

A grief that is honoured, and with the obscenity of Paul’s death and the depredations of multiple sclerosis I know all about grief, such a grief does not leave the mind grey and sludgy. It confers a poignancy, the black is blacker and the white is whiter. In such a state of mind, I sat under my cherry tree.

This is all there is:
far removed
from the world's dereliction,
a bee in a foxglove
persistently exploring
with me, caught in the sunlight,
watching.

The peace that this confers, is a peace that offers certainties, certainties that all questions will be answered; it offers connectedness – that I am connected to all living things and am therefore in my right place – a peace that cannot be explained.

If I am “far removed from the world’s dereliction,” I am also removed from the world’s cruelty and greed. So this spiritual state, however tenuous, has an ethical dimension. Although this is no more substantial than a glimpse of a monarch butterfly out of the corner of the eye which, when I turn my head is no longer there, it is satisfying to the heart and intuition.

It is the mind that asks the unanswerable questions. Such a state requires time and solitude, both middle-class attributes, which have no part in crowded, bustling, working-class lives. My response to beauty whether the beauty of classical music, great literature or nature, requires me to inhabit a certain world. I live in this tree-enclosed garden because I inherited money; I have the necessary education and exposure to high culture.

This is one caveat, the other is even more telling. What part would such experiences play in a concentration camp or an area devastated by ethnic cleansing or suicide bombs? How solid can a spiritual structure be, when it is erected on such a flimsy foundation? Does that mean my experience is relative only to me and could not apply to a victim of Auschwitz or Baghdad?

The difficulty is that these experiences are accumulative; they are a reason in themselves and create a yearning for more. You only have to read the later poems of Wordsworth to see his grief that such experiences have vanished. I am nearly 71 and rejoice that I can still be so totally absorbed by the sunshine, a bee and a foxglove.

That I am not the only one to feel this way is attested to by the following poem:

"Folk Tale"

By R. S. Thomas

Prayers like gravel
Flung at the sky's
window, hoping to attract
the loved one's
attention. But without
visible plaits to let
down the believer
to climb up.
to what purpose open
that far casement?
I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.

Difficult Choices

2009-12-26T21:36:00.000-08:00

When I returned to Christchurch after Paul’s funeral, I stayed a few days with a friend who had three younger children. But I was too exposed and vulnerable, found being in a family atmosphere intolerably painful.

Gradually, I came to recognise what was the problem and to know that I was faced with a choice. If I decided, then and there, to shut myself off from my friends’ children, and later grandchildren, I was at the same time, amputating myself. Even a temporary shut down would gather momentum and run out of control. Consequently, I needed to grit my inner teeth and endure the pain, then, and even sometimes now, so that my life wouldn’t be abridged out of all recognition. I have been glad since that I made that decision and that friends can talk freely about their children, showing me photographs and more recently, bringing babies to see me. It has been all very poignant but very enriching.

In the same way, I have had to make a decision about Christmas. The first Christmas after Paul’s death, was a nightmare. By the second one, my father had also died. At a small get-together someone brightly wished me a Merry Christmas. My response must have annihilated her: “There are too many ghosts”. Luckily, one of my friends having overheard my comment rang me a couple of days later and said very emphatically: “HAVE A HAPPY CHRISTMAS”.

This gave me food for thought. I could go on separating myself from Christmas in a self-pitying, histrionic way, or I could take part in the general stream of bonhomie and good will. Christmas is about a birth, a beginning. It is about the human need for hope. I was as much in need of hope as anyone else. I bought a crib, a few Christmas decorations (although I have never wanted a tree since Paul died) and each year have given and received presents and cards. I have not made my friends uncomfortable and I have once more been part of Christmas, although it still does hurt. Christmas day is often quite delightful, but no longer feels like Christmas.

Christmas Pastiche

A skull at the feast is all very well
but not at a Christmas barbecue.
For those of us with amputated families
Christmas is a difficult time.
Memories can console only so far.
We are forced to assume
a mask of cheerfulness
as if the black hole at the heart of us
was decorated with fairy lights,
tinsel and multi-coloured baubles.
It's altogether a game of pretend.

Prince of Peace

2009-12-18T22:03:00.001-08:00

As a young girl, I was delighted to read that Dean Inge had declared: “Originality does not consist of thinking of something for the first time, it consists of thinking it for yourself.”

Here is my ‘original’ thought.

In the Western world, at this time of year there are numerable performances of the Messiah. I have kept hearing about it as a forthcoming event and my niece has just enjoyed singing it.

In a recent dream, I was looking at a television screen with the last section of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ but there was a gap between the last two lines and the last line was incorrect. I was anxious that people would get the wrong idea and asked a carer to write in the correct line. But what I chose came from the chorus “For unto us a child is born”; the line now read “Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

What sort of world would there be which contained a Prince of Peace? Before I had even turned six, there had been Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Obviously, there has been no peace in my generation, nor in any generations that has preceded me. Peace is either arrant nonsense or needs to be considered from a different dimension. Belatedly, I remembered “The peace that passeth all understanding” which must be a similar state to the Dao, nothing to do with peace in the Middle East or Northern Ireland.

Dreams

Another area of life which requires us to think in another dimension is dreams. (For me, dreams contain considerable meaning.) Some years ago, I read a book detailing the dreams of a young woman dying of cancer. Her dreams pushed her to increased self-awareness and furthered her spiritual journey but did not deal with the cancer nor her approaching death.

In the same way, my dreams ignore the multiple sclerosis. They may have me in a wheelchair, stumbling, lurching on elbow crutches, standing or even walking but the dream itself has no connection with my condition. The nearest to a connection has been a dream which pointed out that I was struggling to keep in touch with my feminine side and this flaw in my nature might well be attributed to the responsibility/will power/control required of me by the M.S.

It would appear that the unconscious has no interest in our state of physical health but instead, extends us spiritually. What use is an evolutionary process towards spiritual growth that ends at our death?

Both these instances illustrate a view of the world which is not binary, not this or that. Instead, they emphasise this as well as that. Thus, M.S. is a heinous thief but has given me the gift of time wherein I can cherish my inner life and make contact with my own creativity. Paul’s death is both an obscene fact, but eventually my being forced to acknowledge life’s fragility bought me to an appreciation of the present moment and the belief that I was required to receive the beauty of the world both for me and for Paul. I had to make up for the fact that he wasn’t there any more

Not this or that, but definitely, this and that.

Living Will

2009-12-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

A living will is all right in theory. I don’t want you to intervene to save my life… in five years time, next year, even next month. But how about the day after tomorrow? I had always had a feeling that I would have wanted to retract, but then something happened.

A few weeks ago I had a laryngitic bug which went down into my chest. I don’t often get infections and when I do the M.S. plays up a treat. I say that it doesn’t like not taking centre stage, or to change the metaphor, I have only a limited number of troups and if I have to deploy them elsewhere that leaves my flank exposed. My flank was, metaphorically speaking, very exposed on a Saturday and Sunday when I couldn’t get the doctor. The M.S. went through the roof. Normally, I can move my right elbow up a little but then, I could not do that, I could not drive the wheelchair, I could not clean my own teeth. All that I could do, was turn my head to left or right against the headrest. I spent the evenings drifting in and out of a Brother Cadfael DVD.

The next morning, despite the fact that I had a hideous, phlegmy, chesty cough, the M.S. had returned to what it regards as normal. The doctor came in the evening, tested my lungs and found the infection had got down to my trachea but not as far as the lungs. Because of the living will, he asked me what we should do. The M.S. was picking up so I said to him that a carer from seven years back was on her way to New Zealand from England and I didn’t want to die without seeing her, that a dear friend had just had a tragic loss and I didn’t want her to have any more grief at that time, but he said I needed to consider me. But my will to live had been restored and I didn’t want not ever to see again the early evening light painting the upper branches of the walnut tree pink and gold or the white roses at evening coming towards me out of their arch as the greens of the garden merged into two dimensions; I wanted to finish my current book; I had many friends I wanted to connect with again. If he had asked me on the Sunday I would not have spared a thought for the walnut tree, roses, book, friends. Nothing mattered and I could have quite willingly slipped into death.

I find this astonishingly comforting. When I get pneumonia and I say when, not if, advisedly, given how the compression is restricting my breathing, then the M.S. will reduce me to such a state of nothingness that I will not mind the dying. I will not be dying with a great urge left towards life. I am immensely reassured.

Paradox

2009-11-28T21:13:00.000-08:00

A scabrous blot: a labour camp
in the ice of the far north:
inmates deprived of food, warmth,
freedom, hope and joy.
Tomorrow is so unlikely
that the word “tomorrow”
has become synonymous
with for ever.
That is the reality.
But, at night, from a nearby hill
the snow-bound camp is transformed
into a jeweled crown.

This is the paradox:
a crime against humanity
and a tiara of light.

No Reception

2009-11-28T21:12:00.000-08:00

Blog is an unfortunate word.
If I said I was updating my journal
I would receive smiles
of interest and approval.
But I am blogging
and it feels as if
I am addressing an empty hall.
I do not require rounds of applause
or even Rite of Spring riots,
just a nod of acknowledgment
to reassure me
that someone in the hall
is listening.

This poem is now out of date as dear Rachel is rechristening my ‘blog’, ‘journal’. It shows the power of poetry. One poetic complaint and the world has changed.

The Trick is to Consent

2009-11-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

Like the dog chained
to the chariot wheel
I have no choice.
It makes no difference
whether I am dragged
claws screaming and scraping,
or whether I trot docilely;
I travel the same distance.
The trick is to consent…

I’m not quoting my own poem because I think it is particularly good although I do think it is one of the best I have written; I’m quoting it because even an image I came up with many years ago can help to lessen a mood of desolation.

The last two months have been emotionally draining: what should have been my sister’s birthday followed two days later by the anniversary of my brother’s death; the anniversary of Paul’s death which now makes him dead longer than he was ever alive; setting up this blog which revealed to me how little of my thoughts and feelings I have been able to communicate since I stoped typing with one finger, the death of my last canary – the canaries in their confined space had always been a spiritual symbol of my own confinement and constraints; a laryngitic infection which started to go down into my chest and set alarm bells ringing which made me realise that the health experts around me – doctor, district nurse, occupational therapist - all share the notion that I am much more frail than I have ever been willing to admit; an occasion which I would have dearly liked to have attended but the multiple sclerosis firmly vetoed.

This brought me to a state where I had even started to admit to others that I was rotten with grief, pain and fear and could see no way out. As well, I was blaming my friends for not realising the desperateness of my condition. I muddled on for several weeks avoiding turning inwards by uncharacteristically watching over and over DVDs of Brother Cadfael and Lord Peter Wimsey. It was only when I allowed myself to half listen to Radio New Zealand Concerts of an evening that I could climb out of my spiritual inertia.

I didn’t come up with a new image to describe my mental state. Instead, an image I had realised some twenty years ago surfaced in my mind. At the time that I wrote the poem I had thought I had consented once and for all but over the years, as the MS had deteriorated, I had discovered I needed to renew the consent at the very least, once a day. Over these last two months I had neglected to do this. As soon as I started to blame my friends for their lack of perception I should had realised what I was doing. Self pity, a devious way of feeling rejected, is always a warning sign. But this time, the accumulation of harrowing feelings closed off my self awareness. It is not possible for my friends to realise how bad it is for when they never see me being got out of or put to bed. Consent does not require witnesses, it is something between me and my Maker. It is something I do when I am listening to music or in my garden surrounded by trees and birdsong.

Once I had quoted the poem to myself I felt a lot freer and the weight of self pity had lifted. The dog chained to the chariot wheel image is the Stoic description of free will. I still will travel the same distance, and it may well be long and arduous, but it is up to me whether I chose to be dragged or to run freely with the chariot of my fate.

The trick is to consent,
to act as if I have chosen
this particular journey.
Therein lies the transformation
of my inner landscape.
Falling precipitous cliffs
Become smiling meadows;
claustrophobic sycamores
no longer invade my space
but shelter, gently,
a skirmish of sparrows.

The Subtleties of Multiple Sclerosis.

2009-11-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

There have been three major obstacles in the way of my accepting what it meant to have multiple sclerosis.
Even though I already knew about the condition because of a family friend and understood that not only would it not get better, but it would get worse, I still have found one part of my mind has refused to accept these facts. Rationally, I could state them without denial, but it still was the case that on the odd occasions when I had a slightly better day I would find myself thinking: “Now you’ve turned the corner.”
One part of me was still refusing to accept the reality of the condition.

In the same way, I found it very difficult at first to accept that my body could be so out of control that I would spasm viscously at the least provocation. I’m ashamed to admit that at the beginning I occasionally cried out: “What did you do that for?” to some hapless carer who had done nothing out of the ordinary. My mind was very reluctant to acknowledge that my body could play such tricks on me.

It also happened that it took me a long time to accept that I couldn’t expect to be comfortable when I was put to bed. I would ask the carer to move me this way, that way, turn me a little more or pull me across the bed because I really believed that there was a magic key that we could turn that would make me comfortable.

I no longer feel that I have turned the corner so I have at last accepted the reality and it’s only occasionally that I will make the mistake of blaming someone else for my body’s ability, out of the blue, to make me uncomfortable.

Dreams

2009-11-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

I do love dreams.

I’ll need to fill you in on the background first. The powers that be have decided that after seven and a half years of one wheelchair I need another one which would open me out further and ease the compression. It was explained that it would steer differently, rather like my very first wheelchair where if you pushed the joystick to the right the back wheels would spin to the left and vice versa. So that, at least, would be familiar but, otherwise, after spending seven and a half years looking at the one control panel I felt as if I would be leaving home. So here is the dream:

I am moving back across the road and find that the flat is larger, brighter and has more sophisticated accoutrements. I try and make contact with my neighbours but they are scarcely affable and the one I already know is not at home.

So my new home, alias wheelchair, is larger, more sophisticated with brighter prospects but I will need to get to know my neighbours, for example, there is no pommel and the arm rests are not appropriate.

Images that transform

2009-11-11T22:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve always been struck by Jung’s advice about how to deal with emotional problems: don’t work on the problem, but find an image and work on that. I think he was generally meaning that people should draw or paint their states of mind. I was never any good at either, and anyway, now I can’t use my hands. But many years ago I had a dream where my piano was at risk of being stolen. This distressed me very much and by the end of the week I knew I needed to work it out, so I tried drawing the piano. I can’t draw. I couldn’t get the keyboard at right angles to the back of the piano; my drawing was all on one plane. That didn’t matter. As soon as I got my strange version of a piano down on paper, I realised what the dream meant: the piano represented my emotional depths and I was allowing other parts of me to steal them.

So ever since, I have known that Jung was right and that images can be transforming.

Blogging/commenting advice to friends

2009-11-11T22:37:00.000-08:00

This is Rachel’s advice as to how to respond to a blog:

To solve it, the easiest way is to get a Gmail account, if you don't have one already. Just go here, and click on the button "Create an account":http://gmail.com/and ask for a Gmail account. Be sure to remember your login details! (You never need to use this email address again, and they won't bother you.)Then you can easily comment on Diana's blog, then on the button "Comment on", select "Google Account". It'll be very, very easy now!

Please, some of my friends think that now I have entered Bloggdom, it is the only way I will communicate. But it just that I will use it for general messages and poems. Anything personal and private will still be sent by email and I have no trouble reading my friends emails.

Marginalised by Multiple Sclerosis

2009-11-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

Marginalised by Multiple Sclerosis

Here is a hypnagogic image to end all hypnagogic images:

For a while I was training a young Chinese woman who drove a brand new, bright yellow VW which she parked up the drive. One morning I woke with the image of her car in my mind. At first, because my legs had been misbehaving so that I was waking with them bent, not straight, I thought that the shape of the mud guard was duplicating the shape of my legs. Then I remembered Kafka’s Metamorphosis in which Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to discover that he has been turned into a giant dung beetle. Helpless and marginalised by a hostile political environment. I also lay on my back, cast, helpless, dependent and marginalised by a hostile illness. I had become the beetle.

Creativity: Loneliness becomes Solitude

2009-11-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

Creativity: Loneliness becomes Solitude.

In 1979 I went to take up an appointment at Melbourne University. I would be living on my own and had not long been told I had multiple sclerosis. One of my friends gave me an article to read which places toxic loneliness, the sort that drives people away at one end of a calibrated scale and at the other end was solitude. It suggested that creativity was what was needed to convert loneliness into solitude. It didn’t need to be of epic proportions; I found trying a new recipe or setting out petunia plants on my window sill tipped the balance.

All I have left is words.

As the years have passed and I have been constrained by the multiple sclerosis I have found creativity can also help against desolation and grief. The multiple sclerosis has stolen from me most of my ways of being creative: singing, dancing, playing the piano, cooking, gardening and stitching at my tapestry – but it has left me words.
All the energy of my days
is now contained in language.
I think passionately,
feel ideas,
breathe metaphoric connections.

Creativity or Medication.

But last year it was discovered that my spine had become so compressed that it had developed a fracture. For several months the doctor and I experimented with medication but nothing seemed to reduce the resulting spasms. The nervous system seems to be a circle and if you introduce an anti-spasm or anti-epileptic drug, it doesn’t eject the problem, it merely shunts it round a bit, so that instead of 2-3 spasms within 30 minutes, with 20 minutes of relative comfort, I was sitting on the brink of a spasm of the full 30 minutes, which when it came, was enormous. For the first few months all that was left of me was pain, grief and helplessness and only very gradually creativity stirred within me like an occasional bubble rising to the surface of my mind.

The particularity of pain
takes over the mind
right to the very edges,
an amorphous sludge
which leaves no space for poetry.

A poem requires connections,
they need to move freely.
Only occasionally, a snippet
struggles to emerge.

Then for some weeks, my mind was taken over by a blankness and emptiness. A friend tried to reassure me that was a significant spiritual state, but I was wasn’t fooled.

Emptiness, an attenuated self;
that’s how it was for several months.
My sense of self had almost disappeared
and there was only emptiness.

Emptiness had filled me.
That sounds logical enough,
but a self is defined
against another self,
emptiness, like nothingness,
is without boundaries.

This works only
if seen as a metaphor.
It was if the boundaries of self
were being eliminated;
as if I were crossing a threshold.

This is the language of mysticism,
reminiscent of The cloud of unknowing,
where the image of God is without form
without co-ordinates of space and time,
and must be defined by negatives
such as not here, not there, not up, not down.
This absence of God becomes a presence
to be welcomed with wondering love,
not as was happening to me
recoiled from, resisted.

The emptiness that assailed me
was not of my choosing;
defined by negatives,
even the word ‘engulfed’
implies location, movement
and belongs to the self, not to emptiness.
Without form and void,
there was no glimmer of light
heralding the approaching Spirit.
This was not divine nor demonic,
just incurably wrong.
A drawn out hypnagogic image
of a fractured spine,
a fracture that will go with me
into the grave.

Once the poem had written itself, I understood what was the matter. I often find I only understand what is going on when I have read the poem. The emptiness was not a state of being emptied out waiting to be filled with the light of God, it was my body’s way of processing how it interpreted the fracture.

Once I understood, my creativity was released and I could write again. The burden of grief and desolation had been lightened.

Paul’s Death

2009-10-31T23:34:00.000-07:00

Today is the anniversary of Paul’s death. He was twenty-three when he died; it has now been dead for twenty-four years. I find it intolerable that he has now been dead longer than he has been alive. This anniversary has joined other hideous memories from the first year after his death; he died yesterday, last week, last month, last year (a particularly nasty milestone), a year ago.

The Relay Race of Life
With his dying, he confiscated my talisman for the future. Watching my friend’s lives, I see them like a relay race. They are passing the baton onwards to their children and grand children. I received the baton from my grandparents and have splendid memories; I know the name of the plant Solomon’s seal. from following my grandmother around her garden when I was four; when I was fifteen and she was in her late eighties I remember taking her for walks. She carried an umbrella even on the brightest of days, not against the weather but so she could hide inside it little cuttings of plants she had nicked from peoples’ front gardens. She was an inveterate gardener. I’d say to her; “what will you do if it rains?” and she’d giggle. I remember my grandfather shaving with his braces hanging down his legs or playing patience at the desk I now own. So I certainly received the baton but I have no one to pass it on to. I will reach the finishing tape of death on my own.

A Grief Time Will Never Heal
Obviously I don’t sit here dwelling on this but, nevertheless, it is an aching grief that time will never take away.

Destination Unknown

2009-10-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

Texting and emailing seem really amazing to an old woman who comes from the days of surface mail or air letters that took 5 to 7 days to travel from Christchurch to London. I can really appreciate the instantaneousness of them.

But although I have a blog, I confess myself puzzled. I feel I am writing a message and enclosing it in bottle, tossing it into the ocean without checking tides and currents. I have no idea what the destination is, or even if there is a destination. If I walk pass the same piece of shore three weeks later and discover my bottle, I do not know if the bottle has been opened and the message assimilated.

Rainbow

2009-10-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

At the very moment
when she was looking
at a rainbow, she received
a text from a friend, far, far away,
who was looking at her very own rainbow.

Simultaneous
yet, spatial boundaries,
here, there, everywhere
had evaporated.

It first felt like I was an eavesdropper
but then I found myself very glad
to be sharing the moment
when two friend, cities apart
gazed at a rainbowed sky.

I’m 70 and came late and cautiously to the internet but am beginning to get the idea.

A Garden of Grief

2009-10-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Now is not good,
but it will only get worse.

The illness is squeezing me
like a piano accordion
into a tighter and tighter note.
Only with the utmost vigilance
can I swallow food and drink
past the pleated folds
of my stomach.
I do not know how it is
that my last breath hasn’t already
echoed thinly in the air.

One is not a family:
it’s a solitary fugal voice
faltering as other entries
fade into nothingness.

This morning I took these griefs outside;
with flagging breath
and dereliction of body
I cannot rant or wail.
I just hoped to release
a trickle of tears
against the pain.
But I hadn’t taken the garden
into account: the integrity
of a fifty-eight walnut tree,
a vibrancy of bird song
bellbird, thrush, canary, sparrow
each claiming their own
spring time territory.

I felt like a sailor setting out
in expectation
of fierce winds and crashing waves
only to find myself lulled
into halycon days;
calm skies, sunshine
and the promise of spring.

Who’s going to remember me?

2009-10-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

This haunting cry could belong to any of us, surrounded as we are by teeming millions and vast reaches of space and time. But it came from the heart of a 14 year old dying of leukemia. He collapsed before breakfast, was diagnosed at lunch time and dies that evening with no time to prepare his mind for his approaching death.

Hunger for knowledge

Charlie had run away from a dubious foster home when he was nine and lived on the streets for over four years with a group of similarly disadvantaged children. Then in the last few months of his life he had been given the chance of a normal education, which he responded to as if he had been starved of knowledge for years. It even turned out that he had, during his street years managed regular visits to the public library where he had read The Three Musketeers.

The importance of little things

Activities we take for granted became for him miracles of living: he was beside himself with joy at riding a bicycle. He just wanted to be ordinary. The head teacher of his school acknowledged Charlie had seen more evil than everyone in the school put together, but Charlie wasn’t one to indulge in self pity. He gave those who knew him the gift of himself and touched the lives of people who merely had heard his story.

Charlie, you will be remembered.

Particularity of pain

2009-10-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

One of my most significant writers is Loren Eiseley. In one of his essays he studies his hands admiring their dexterity.

He asks us to consider " their first painful venture on the pebbly shore" and immidiately my mind travels back to that probably ugly, not yet amphibian creature struggling out off a puddle of water, not for scientific exploration, not from a sense of adventure but from bland necessity to find more water.

This is the journey we are all on and it makes my suffering trivial and takes away the particularity of my pain. I am part of this journey even if the human race becomes extinct because of drought, famine, greed or just playing human foolishness and ends up like the sabre-toothed tigers locked in death with a tooth in each other's skull.

Pilgrim's Progress

2009-10-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

I am lucky enough to live in Bunyan St and so have my own pilgrim's progress but whereas Bunyan's Christian seems to have a fore-ordained end, my journey is more tortuous it winds back on itself, repeats itself and never seems to get anywhere. It is the labyrinthine journey of the inner life.