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- Herausgeber: Liberties Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Michael Murphy's second volume of prose, The House of Pure Being, charts the author's experiences and revelations since the release of his best-selling memoir, At Five in the Afternoon. In this sequel, he brings the inspiring stories of his women friends up to date, tackles difficult subjects like the lingering effects of cancer, and the passing of Aengus Fanning (former editor of the Sunday Independent), and writes movingly of his Civil Partnership ceremony to his long-time partner Terry. Michael shares his deeply insightful and unique reflections on writing, art, language, love, family and friendship, and the seductive charms of his beloved Spain. Thought-provoking and eloquent, The House of Pure Being explores the inner complexities of an exceptional writer, and in doing so, highlights the warmth and compassion of a much-admired man.
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The House of Pure Being
Michael Murphy
Foreword by Máire Geoghegan-Quinn
‘Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.’
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
‘But that kind man, that teacher, lover, friend, who remained indistinct, would be generous with words; she imagined their life together as a long conversation, equally shared.’
Anita Brookner, Fraud
‘The Jews, Ravelstein and Herbst thought, following the line laid down by their teacher Davarr, were historically witnesses to the absence of redemption.’
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein
Contents
Foreword by Máire Geoghegan-Quinn
‘Comhgháirdeachas ó chroí. I cried. I got very angry. I laughed out loud. What a wonderful story beautifully told with nothing held back. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading it.’
That was my letter of congratulations to Michael Murphy after I’d read his memoir, At Five in the Afternoon. I meant it. And I suspect I assumed that it would stand alone, since it centred on what prostate cancer did to his life and his perception of his life. Such an experience, dragging a writer face-to-face with death, necessarily gives their work a unique shining harshness.
When he asked me to write a foreword for his sequel, The House of Pure Being, one of the reasons he gave for contacting me in Brussels was that when I had been Minister for Justice in Ireland in 1993, I introduced the Bill that decriminalised homosexuality. He told me that this was an act which had set him free.
I agreed without any hesitation to write some introductory words, and then wondered: what could be covered in a second book which would not be overshadowed and rendered trivial by the absence of a life-challenge to match the threat of death? Too many second books are little more than evocative shadows of the first, exemplifying Robert Frost’s shrugging comment: ‘In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.’
In a sense, Michael’s second volume of reflections and memoir deals with precisely that: the progression of those we met in his first book. Or, in some cases, their failure to progress, most shockingly demonstrated in his account of family members who set an icy silence around the revelations within his first book. That silence invited the kind of surrendered retreat and matching silence often characterised, in the anti-massacred words of our parents, as demonstrating ‘common decency’. This book picks apart the concealments, the collusion and the coercion implicit in many of our notions of common decency. That doesn’t make it easy reading. But then, anyone who read Michael’s first book knows that he is neither an entertainer nor a panderer. To reverse a current cliché: you get much more than what it says on the tin, whether you like it or not, because this is not a man passively examining the shadows on the wall of his life’s cage. This is a man engaging with the cruelties of his past with a fury to which he had no access, back then. This is a man baulking, in what he describes as the evening of his life, at events, actions and hurts absorbed in silence at the time. This is a man at one with a writer I know he loves, Federico García Lorca, who held that an artist is always an anarchist, in the best sense of anarchy.
‘He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices,’ Lorca said. ‘The voice of death, with all its foreboding. The voice of love. And the voice of art.’
Those three strong voices unite the varied writings within this new volume. The voice of death speaks, not only to Michael’s own experience with cancer, but through the dying of Aengus Fanning, former editor of the Sunday Independent, whose conversations with Michael, with their long, companionable silences, establish a side to Aengus that will be new to many who believed they knew him well.
The voice of love sings softly throughout the book. Love of friends, especially when their lives and happiness are unravelling. Love of place and time and the capacity to work. Love, above all, of Terry O’Sullivan, Michael’s partner, whom he met when, a quarter of a century ago, making a documentary about the Rutland Centre, where Terry worked.
The portrait of Terry manages to be affectionate and awestruck, culminating in the simple honesty of the poem he wrote as a Civil Partnership gift, the epithalamion: ‘… once upon a time on a Dublin midsummer’s day, I always loved you.’
What makes Michael Murphy singular as a writer is his ability to recreate an emotive scene or event, right down to the feel of the wind on his skin or the movement of a curtain against an open window. That ability is based on an almost obsessive acuity of recall, which hammers home a truth none of us needed to understand before Alzheimer’s Disease came to live in each of our families: that without memory, we are nothing.
This is a major theme throughout the book, painfully memorable in Michael’s account of a meeting with his elderly mother, where she struggles to tell him something she knows to be important, but which will not form words in her mouth.
‘My mother is ninety-three years old, and she dwells now in a house of pure being,’ Michael writes. ‘She has only the present tense, because she forgets what is past, and I’d come to believe she no longer has any idea of the future.’
Terry’s mother, too, reaches from beyond death to touch the lives of the two men, and of another who was forced to live a motherless life because of the constricting expectations in the year that he was born.
Michael’s poetry appears at different points within the prose of this volume. And, although the extract which follows was not written about himself, it may well reflect the experience of many readers as they finish this startling and beautiful book.
You will gladden with a smile or with a glance
When people feel your presence in the wonder of beautiful words
Lingering in a room like your fragrance
The blown petals falling to earth like prayers
Whispering over and over that I have always loved you
That I have loved you, too
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science
Part One
My Mother
‘Imagine!’
That’s what my mother used to say. ‘Imagine, just imagine …’ It was her favourite exclamation of surprise at something suddenly made visible, a version of ‘fancy that!’ which she’d made her own. She would picture mentally what wasn’t present, what she hadn’t experienced, and speak about it, clothe it in words, as once she deftly fitted her eldest boy with upstretched arms into an overcoat. She was filled with wonder and delight at the miracle of creation which happened seemingly without her participation, but which nevertheless had somehow involved her: ‘Well, imagine that …’ she’d say. Today, as I write in my study in Spain, I can see her come out of the kitchen and walk diffidently down the hall, because she’s never been in La Mairena. Her ghost calls out to me: ‘Imagine!’ The invitation is a personal one from a mother to her son to join her in telling a story, and make an emotional connection with her in setting forth in words a fantasy which is unrestricted by reality, and write a fiction that comes flying out of the air from nowhere: ‘Imagine!’
The contract requires that I bear her in mind. So here I am on top of a mountain at four o’clock in the morning, with the lights of Fuengirola glittering like the brightest stars down below me in the darkness, my mother’s mouthpiece in this dual endeavour, giving voice to a narrative that has known the two of us over the years, and that has also shaped both of our lives, as we strolled around the Mall in Castlebar in Mayo, playing within the protective pathways of its gentle and nudging words, which set safe limits to our known world. Unlike Helen and Anna, those stylishly beautiful women who are my friends in Spain, my mother is an unlikely muse, but I feel safe under the protection of her azure cloak, her cobija, which now covers the vast, velvet belly of the sky with softness, pregnant with the possibilities of new life, because I know she has the knowledge that’s expressed in memory, best practice, and above all, the miracle of the human voice.
‘Imagine …’ she says.
‘… that there was once …’ I whisper back, continuing on her story as she strokes the side of my face with her finger, marvelling at the softness of my beard. And I see the sun begin to shine out strongly from her clear, blue eyes.
‘Michael,’ she calls, ‘I have something to say.’
‘What is it, Mum?’ as I move even closer to her. She’s examining my face intently, and her eyes suddenly fill with tears.
‘I don’t know what comes next …’ she says.
I am thunderstruck. ‘I know that, Mum.’ And I take hold of both of her hands. We remain held that way in the silence, looking at each other, and then the clouds arrive again and darken the sunlight, and my mother leans back into her chair, and I let go of her hands. I realise that I’ve sunk to my knees beside her.
My mother has gifted to me the awareness that she’s lost, that she’s without her ability to imagine. I can understand from the outside what a fearful tragedy that is. A fatal flaw in the workings of the brain has led to her downfall, and I grieve with her. But there’s also something that has been left unsaid in the dialogue between us, and there are still many possibilities within that gap. I shall continue to visit with her in the nursing home until she’s able to say it, or at least until such time as she enters the family home on the Mall in Castlebar for the last time, and closes the hall door in my face forever. Then, from the retrospection granted by that arbitrary end point, everything will have been said from her point of view, and she’ll have made her statement.
In the meantime, I shall try to put into words what she hasn’t yet said, because in itself it must be of the greatest importance, given my mother’s great age, and the wisdom of the personality that she’s earned for herself down through the years. It’ll be what the French call an aperçu, an insight, a summation in a few words, a recapitulation of the main chapters of her life. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons why I’ve written my second book, to give her voice in saying what has become unsayable, what’s impossible and unknowable. The disclosure will have the quality of a supernatural revelation, because it will be the truth.
Yesterday, I was reading the publisher’s blurb about my first book on his website, and saw that I was described there as ‘a soothsayer’, a person who tells or speaks the truth. The word also has overtones of being a prophet or prognosticator: one who is robed in foreknowledge of the future. Certainly, that’s the direction in which my mother has also pointed me through her being speechless. The words of her first sentence, ‘I have something to say’, were ordered by the future anticipation of the words to come in her second sentence. She wants me to articulate some imagined future state of conclusion. It’s a completion which I doubt can ever be achieved. Steve, my publisher, had brought forward his conclusion from my writing. Now I too was in the position of a reader looking over his shoulder. I saw myself through his eyes, and to my surprise, the effect on me was alienating. It split me in two. I was looking at myself in a looking-glass, except that the judgment Steve had delivered caused me to switch places, so that I was the insubstantial reflection confined within the singular word he had chosen, from whence I was looking back at myself, helplessly in thrall to what he had in mind.
I can remember coming around the back way from where I lived with my grandmother, and peering in the kitchen window at my brother and my mother and father, who were laughing and joking around the dining table. At that moment, I felt I was the stranger looking on, extraneous to the family’s enjoyment. And when they all turned their heads to look at me, I reddened under the sting of their gaze, ashamed of what they saw. The terror rising was for me to be held outside, and I wrongly believed that the glass barrier didn’t permit the transmission of my feelings of deprivation. But my younger brother had scrambled off his chair and pressed his face grotesquely against the window pane, mocking my isolation. He’d read the singular truth that I was set apart, egregious, and he was reacting to it. I read in his gaze that it was I who was the stróinséir, an odd stranger who wasn’t part of the household, the one left over as a remainder. I also experienced for the first time that people could travel from my outside in as if my skin were permeable. Or perhaps it’s because I was born inside-out; it certainly feels that way.
I hope I do my mother justice. I seem destined to fail in the attempt to express what’s been left unsaid between us. My words will be inadequate and partial, merely an approach, an approximation, which may do violence to her. ‘Imagine,’ she has instructed, furnishing me with all the information that’s required. She’s invoking my powers of imagination to supplement her deficiency, but inevitably I’ll fall short. Maybe somewhere she understands that too: that I’ve failed her, inasmuch as she has herself been failed by words, which have run away over the ridges of sand, leaving her lost in the desert. Somehow I’m complicit in that abandonment, and by exploring the something my mother has to say, I shall uncover the truth of my role in her life, and ultimately my transgression.
When I finished writing my memoir At Five in the Afternoon, I understood that what I’d written no longer belonged to me, but to the reader. He brought his own being to the words, and breathed into them a life which was different to what had inspired me. Even though it was recognisably my life story, it brought forth a different book which gave off a smell I didn’t recognise. A reader from Kinsale sent me an email containing a Jehovah-like denunciation: ‘You have shamed yourself, your family, your friends and colleagues in the manner you portrayed them.’ That was taking my text and stretching it out, leaning forward with it, an effort that I hadn’t made. The wording of what I’d written was an obstacle to the flow of his being that obviously lent itself to such an interweaving, but I felt that the resulting garment didn’t fit out my soul, while it thoroughly went along with someone else’s. I’d been displaced from my mooring, which made it doubly difficult to feel certain of the truth.
If my mother gets to make her statement in my hearing, I wonder will I be able to accept it willingly, without straining to make it fit into my reality? I was genuinely at a loss as to how to reply to that reader’s words, because he spoke in a different language, and sought to discredit my experience of abuse: ‘In fairness, the only character who comes out well is your partner Terry, who has a real – not imagined – situation to take from his early life.’ What I have learned from living with Terry, and from many years studying psychoanalysis, the obligation to hand back abuse to the perpetrator no matter from whence it came, eventually dictated my response, although it left an after-taste of intolerance. And did the scolding over shaming reveal a truth I couldn’t accept, that his characterisation was a darker mirror-image of myself, an alien that I didn’t want to know lest I be forced to make room inside for an awkward, unmanageable stranger, and have to welcome him back home as my brother?
Paradoxically, the publisher’s word ‘sooth’ aligns me with the previous generations back through my mother and father. In the time of my ancestors, what is true derived from being. So were I to bypass the disjunction and describe myself as a soothsayer, the particular truth I’d tell would necessarily draw from that universal and ancient wellspring. I admire the wisdom in the way that the word has been constructed and handed on down to me in an eternal relay, but still I feel dislocated. When I read my own book myself, which details my slow recovery from prostate cancer, I’m unable to resume possession of the land, because the enclave of my being inscribed in the book belongs to a different time with a different set of circumstances, and I have moved on. My mother suffers from dementia, which is a chronic deterioration caused by organic brain disease, so that when eventually she speaks her truth, it will have to articulate in distinct syllables a being that we share now in the present, without referencing the past. And consolingly, either of us can attempt to say what we hold in common.
As a writer, I see what is true flicker about in the words and the phrases as I set them down. It surprised me to discover that truth is like a fóidín mearaí, a sod of confusion, on which you can easily lose your step and be led astray. Truth surfaces briefly in the gulf between what has happened for me in the past, and what has not happened to me yet. And the continuous flow of my words onto the page as I type in this no-man’s land names for me a coming-to-be in language that approximates to the truth. I wouldn’t say that the full truth is in the brutal reality of my existence which has been scored onto paper by the printer. Rather, it’s the rising into the air of my spirit, which is momentarily visible in the words on my computer screen, always open to change at the flick of a flying finger, where it produces the music of poetry, as in mythical times the wind would pass lightly over the strings of an Aeolian harp to produce a deep musical chord, rising and falling with the breath of air.
And just like truth, my spirit seems to escape capture, no matter how carefully I try to control the various arbitrary syllables being taken together in phrases. I feel like a composer jotting notes of music onto a stave. When they’re read horizontally, they sound vertically down the page, down through the memory of the years which are immediately present to me: they make my being sing. I catch myself, hearing myself say ‘I be’s, employing Hiberno-English usage. It permits my voice to inhabit the patrimony of the verb, and be more emphatic. ‘I be’s’ gives body to the tenuous pointillism of those dots of living colour, truths that briefly break cover as I watch them. They coalesce into a luminous ‘present continuous’ stream that can sweep me along in its wake for the length of a breath: my singular contribution to the symphony of life. The choir has been singing for millennia in a fusion of instrumental and vocal forces, but without the addition of my individual voice or that of my mother, until recently.
My mother is ninety-three years old, and she dwells now in a house of pure being. She has only the present tense, because she forgets what is past, and I’d come to believe she no longer had any idea of the future. Certainly, the logical structures of time and of space don’t define the world that she’s living in, which is that of the dreamtime. People who aren’t fixed in her memory appear randomly in the three or four seconds of the now that draw her attention. They’re without a context, and speak to her in puzzling fragments: ‘… well today …’ ‘… milk in …’ words detached from meaning that are sent skimming over the waves like fragments of slate until they sink into the deep, phrases that pat lightly over the top of her head with the same childlike tones, before evaporating into the ether above. The imaginative thoughts that participate in my mother’s overflowing reality are like that medium, which was once believed to fill all space hypothetically.
When last I saw her, I hadn’t recognised her at first. I retreated from the large lounge where she usually sat, and asked the nurse at the nurse’s station, ‘Where’s Sue Murphy, please?’ She brought me back almost to the door of the room, and indicated towards a huddled figure lost in a corner. My mother was sitting alone, slumped on a settee in the nursing home lounge, and her shoe was off. Framed by the doorway, I was removed from the static scene within, a dispassionate observer of inanimate objects, a still life by Cézanne, dull and without colour. My expectations were of an encounter with a neatly dressed, alert woman, a person of note who would continue to carry the weight of her ten decades with elegance. I walked across the room until I appeared in front of her, and she recognised me: ‘Well I never think about the boy visiting me …’ she announced smiling shyly with delight, rising to the occasion as I bent down to kiss her puckered lips. It was the only coherent sentence she was to form that day, but to me it was like opening up the score of a Bach cantata, a revelation inscribed in the master’s handwriting with ‘soliDeo gloria’, for the glory of God alone. I savoured in my mind the concerted collection of utterances she brought forth: ‘Well I never … I never … I never think about the boy … the boy visiting me … visiting me …’ The additional voices with their different emphases chased each other putting the previous one to flight and resonated around the room, interweaving a counterpoint with the main subject in their various combinations, and adding layers of harmonic complexity which continued to build for the duration of my visit. They also formed an airy counterpoint around the rapid assortment of syllables, the neologisms that she began to create in my presence and continued to say. Nothing was dwelt upon: the notes were left as soon as they were sounded.
Her speech is now reduced to a substrate of language that she urged on me, cupping it together in her hands: ‘Tissue Paris laboringly taoiseach taoiseach …’ she said, English words and Irish words that appeared to be spilling out from between her bony fingers. It was a sieve I made from the rushes up in Flannery’s field as a boy that she placed trustingly into both my hands so that I could buttress it, and catch the runoff of what she was saying. ‘You, you, you …’ she said, re-affirming in votive speech the umbilical cord that tied a mother to her son in a rainbow of love. My mother was performing a religious act for me, a sacrament, because in that gesture she was gifting to me a ciborium, and entrusting me with her being, whose fragments she was holding tenuously between her thumb and index finger. From now on I was to be the golden container who was her salvation; it was up to me to make sense out of the babble she’d placed before me. I was to separate out the extraneous particles that cluttered up her speech, and give birth to the truth of what she had to say, because in that ritual she was demonstrating to me that she was no longer able, that it was beyond her. She needed the containment that a mind ordered by time and space could provide. I felt the responsibility of her heartfelt cry as she desperately gripped onto my hands above the abyss. It overruled the pressure that deadlines can enforce on me, and the exertion I can feel from trying to attain to some other place. The ambiguous bestowal of these gifts has been cruelly confiscated from my mother.
I’d sat companionably beside her on the couch, so that she could lean back into the hammock of my warmth. I’d brought with me some regenerating cream, whose cold drops I began to massage into her dry and misshapen hands. This was an anointing, which even today in a mirror image still tried to facilitate my living by gifting to me all that she had to offer in return: rubble from the building blocks of words that formerly had upheld the architecture of her life. Once upon a time these hands used to play the piano so expertly, hands that bestrode the keys generating music of the highest rank from deep within, soul-feeling which still poured out fluently even as her grasp on words had become hesitant and faltered like her skin, which to my horror began to disintegrate and peel away into slivered rolls of worked clay beneath the vigour of my kneading. I looked up, anxious lest I hurt her, and her blue eyes were scanning my face. ‘Are your hands sore, Mum?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she replied. Then, ‘Tissue, tissue, tissue …’ she instructed, as I modulated my touch so that it became gentle, warming the coldness of her confounding world, supplying for a few moments a familiar, external reference with which she felt secure. I hoped my presence could give back to her once more the consistency of sameness, without me having to immediately move away from her as the busy carers in the nursing home have to do. Held now in my gaze, and embraced by the loving tones of my voice, the flesh of her flesh, I hoped that I could keep her from disintegrating, from being drawn in different directions: someone sitting talking to her, a plate with biscuits, then coming into her line of sight, sitting up close and saying to her, a hand being rubbed of skin: fragments of being from the outside imbued with the nonsensical logic of dreams.
Like an author writing down the words about one of his characters and plotting out their lives, I was unsure whether it was I or my mother who was in control of the dictation. At least I could continually be there for my mother to keep her in mind. My thinking about her wouldn’t be as alienating as that ‘soothsayer’ phrase which was chosen for me by my publisher, who knows me professionally, but who doesn’t know me at all. I could be her voice, in a method which is familiar to me from my psychoanalytic work, where the stream of a person’s being is gathered together under the constraints of the couch so that as much as possible is channelled into speech, in a message sent to the analyst, and back to themselves by way of my interpretation, which punctuates the discourse suddenly belonging to both of us.
There’ve been many occasions, a falling down in wonder, that have witnessed the daily miracle of my mother issue forth from my behaviours. I move food around my plate with a fork, before isolating an irregular object, ‘What’s that?’ tapping at it like her. I also do her reproving glare, a fierce look which I see in the photograph of her McGauran grandmother, and which unmistakably says, ‘Never make noise!’ I register her bodily delight at rag-time, stride piano, and dance an impromptu Charleston with my hands as she plays the piano. I can also sit rapt, carried away with spiritual awe at the complexity of Bach’s music, which is an advance on what would’ve held her interest. But the grounding we have in common is a similar, reverent attitude towards all forms of music, sounds in time that always belonged to the Muses. These are the inheritances which have anointed me my mother’s heir. But to incarnate a voice that is so characteristically hers is of a different order of magnitude. And now that she’s fading, the task of travelling that road takes on increasing urgency. I always remember the colour of her voice speaking Hans Christian Andersen’s words aloud to me slowly, so that I could understand and live within the dream world of his fairytales. But what I remember most is the quality of her silence, clasping me to her, underpinning with bated breath and delight my excitement at telling her my own stories, the fantastical adventures which happened for me with her in mind.
Recently, when she’d had a short stay in hospital to regulate her Warfarin, I was talking away at her bedside, filling up her silence with how well she was looking, that I hoped she was trying to eat what they gave her because it was good for her – maybe she would try some of the jelly? – and I caught sight of her peering at my leather jacket. She reached forward with her hand and fingered the soft brown leather appreciatively. I broke off from what I was saying to ask, ‘D’you like that, Mum?’
She looked up and into my eyes: ‘It’s wonderful to be loved,’ she whispered to me.
The misalignment in our conversation, the shock of the truth had the effect of repositioning me within a flow of words that I realised had never ceased for my mother, despite her confusion. I saw that it would continue on for as long as she drew breath. It was immaterial whether she was referring to me, and to my partner Terry’s birthday gift of the leather jacket, or whether she was the person who felt loved by the presence of her son: the import of her narrative embraced us both. After all, love is love. And love matters.
The hi-fi in the nursing home began playing a CD from the wartime era, when my mother was in her early twenties. Vera Lynn sang slowly in her clear, determined voice, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see …’
I started singing it for her too, and quickly faltered to a mumble, choked with emotion, overwhelmed by the sudden grief. It pained me that we didn’t have any more tomorrows, and that we’d come to the end of the idyll. The poem that was our lives together had been simple and charming, and short. The promise of tomorrow which the song held forth wasn’t the truth. My mother would never again take her place at the head of the dining table in the big kitchen of the family home on the Mall, empty now, cold and succumbing to dampness.
‘There’ll be love and laughter and peace ever after, tomorrow …’
The love and laughter which had once echoed off those plastered walls blistering with rusting, brown patches of damp belonged with the cobwebs, and with the dust settling silently like Dickensian fog onto the old-fashioned furniture that nobody wanted. There were going to be no more tomorrows for the Murphys of the Mall. The song mustered courage to help people face the burdens of the day, but as I held onto my mother’s hand, I heard an ironical lament for an era of family which had begun at that time, but which was now, some seven decades later, definitively over.
I looked around the day-room at the helpless, elderly patients, some of them dozing, slack-jawed in their chairs, others moving restlessly, muttering out loud for nobody to hear them, or to pay them attention. I could clearly see our irrelevance, numbering myself among those in the frontline facing ‘peace ever after’. That was to be our tomorrow, and the implication of the relegation brought me up short. It shocked me to observe that today’s generation bustling about, helping patients out to the toilet, wheeling some of the chairs with their protesting cargo in to the dining-room for lunch, had within the unthinking possession of their youth the many tomorrows that had been taken from the two of us in a re-distribution of realities. My mother and I were suddenly left alone in the empty lounge. The valley would indeed bloom again, but we wouldn’t be there to see it. And I was surprised to feel pangs of jealousy at being displaced.
Before I left, Aileen took me aside and said that they’d increased the number of times they changed my mother’s pad during the day, because her incontinence was getting worse. I know it wasn’t Aileen’s intention, but I felt berated by the effort of care that the Polish assistants were giving to my mother. Not one of them had passed us by as we took tea and I fed my mother the buttered scones topped with strawberry jam from the generous tray they’d provided for us, without saying a loudly cheerful ‘Hello, Sue!’ And yet, they were the ones who were ministering to her in private several times a day. As I drove back to Dublin after my brief visit, I was tormented by the thought that I’d profaned my mother. After she’d twice attempted to boil the electric kettle on the range, compromising her safety, I was the one who’d been instrumental in turning her out of her home, so that she was abandoned to this life of exile among strangers. The shock to her system had so affected her that she’d progressively withdrawn her interest from the surroundings of the nursing home, and lived amidst her memories turning deep inside her being. Suddenly my voice seemed to take on an added importance, if only to undo what couldn’t be remedied.
When I sat beside Mary, a bookshop owner, for dinner in an Italian restaurant after the intimate signing of my book she’d organised in Village Books of Malahide, and she asked my partner, Terry, about his work with abuser priests, and whether those who’d been abused went on to abuse, my mind went directly to my mother, and how she was folded into my earliest decision to go live with my Granny in the house next door, and apart from my immediate family. As the conversation continued on around the table, I wondered whether I was avenging that hurt by visiting the same exclusion on her. The son on whom she believed she could depend had robbed her of what she’d made known to me about her being. I’d taken with me the supplement of continuity, the joining together of moments of being that enabled her to connect with a son whom she continued to love, and driven it back to Dublin, forgetting my mother to the care of strangers for another fortnight, leaving her bereft of meaning, because she has no context.
During those first few months of settling in, when we’d arrive back at the nursing home following an afternoon drive, my mother would protest as soon as she caught sight of the building. ‘No, no, no …’ she’d cry out, distressed. My mother is lost, and I’ve deprived her of the future hope that she could re-find herself again in my continuous presence. Even in the etymology of the verb ‘to be’ in Old English, while it didn’t have a past tense, I could see that it was always open towards the future. My mother had clearly demonstrated to me on more than one occasion in the nursing home the possibility that she was about to be in language, and I’d pillaged that from her by walking away. I’d turned my back on her again, a rejecting action that is replaying on a loop in my life, and that’s beginning to infiltrate my text like a virus. By continuing to involve her in what was my own fractured response, I’d committed a sacrilege. ‘Tu es ma mère: tuer ma mère’: according to the French homophone, in affirming my mother, I kill her. I’m guilty of murder.
Occasionally I suffer visitations at about a quarter past three in the morning. There’s no aura, no warning of any kind to prepare me as I make the ritual preparations for bed. At three-fifteen on the dial, I blunder into instant wakefulness, panicked from a nightmare, when the default setting of not being able to pay my way, the ghost of money, is rattling his chains around my bedroom. A catastrophe which is beyond rectification – exceeding the overdraft limit at the bank, the important receipt I sent without a record, the unexpected invoice – will have wormed its way into consciousness as I slept, and poisoned my mind with certainty. In the dream I’m swimming and swimming in an ocean too far away from a glimpse of land on the horizon, when the unreasoning terror begins to weigh my body down, and I can’t shake off his unwanted attentions. The ghost of despair ducks my head over and over under the water, but still I swim, slower and slower and with greater effort, until I start to sink into the measureless depths from exhaustion. I wake with a start to find I’ve wet the bed, an occasional side effect of the prostate surgery that has saved my life from the clutches of cancer. I get up, and out of my pyjamas, wipe myself down and the bed, spread out a clean towel on the sheet. I lie down again on the dampness. In that twilight hour before the dawn, I can see with enhanced vision the truth of myself that I’m able to suppress during the day: as a person without the distraction of my clothes and the roles that they imply, I’m beyond forgiveness. I lash myself with condemnation for having abdicated my responsibilities on so many levels, particularly with regard to my mother, and for having failed in my task, that ultimate concern around which I built my life. Loving and the grief surrounding it, latterly bitterness, even disappointment, hurt my heart so much that I hesitate to give it voice. The ghost of death insinuates that I’ve come to the end and have ceased to exist, and that this suffering I feel is the pain of non-being, that instant at the point of death which flashes into an eternity. I’m no longer able to preserve my being against the all-engulfing threat of danger, and my anxiety is naked now. For sixty years it had been eating away at the centre of my existence like the hidden, slow-growing tumours of prostate cancer, which have recently erupted in my flesh, to be laid bare in all of its ugly messiness upon the bed. Other ghosts lose their form, and I sink back into a spasmodic, dreamless sleep until the radio alarm comes on with news of the latest atrocity, followed by the collapsing economy. It’s a daily lightning rod for the projection of unmanageable feelings of paranoia, to which I know my mind is vulnerable as I take my shower. I’ve learned from experience not to entertain these thoughts before noon, when the day takes on a different temper, and the effort of upholding my being buries the terrifying potential of non-being into an open hole in the ground, and covers it over with a comforting cushion.
When I was three and a quarter years old, my younger brother Kieran was born, and I was displaced from the unquestioning position I’d held as the only son. I can reconstruct from the nightmares I suffer at 3.15 AM, that they’re an echo of this childhood trauma. A fatal doubt was brought home from the hospital along with the baby with the big head, who took pride of place in my mother’s bedroom, in what had been my cot. My parent’s action undermined the innocent certainties of the world I inhabited, and robbed me of bliss. There’s a painting which captures the moment of alienation perfectly, which is on display in Berlin’s Picture Gallery. It’s of a mother and child by Pieter de Hooch, and shows a mother lacing up her bodice seated on a chair smiling down into a covered cradle. Behind her back in the next room, a young girl stands irresolute in the shadows, pensively looking out through an open doorway at the sunlight. I walked out through that door, and went to live with my Granny; I’d no other means of redress. Mum and Dad laughed heartily at my proposal to them sitting around the big dining table in the kitchen that they send the baby back to where he came from, that we’d no need of him.
‘That’s not possible, Michael …’
Their amusement about such a grave matter to me, and the realisation that inexorably they were closed to any discussion, that there was no reaching out to help me with my difficulties, meant that I could never bring to them again questions that I pondered over, or that were forced upon me. Anxious tentacles began to imprison me at that tender age, a cage that was destined to remain forever in place, and to be reinforced over time. It was plain from their mirth that I’d misspoken, and that I was suffering because of it. As I played alone at their feet, my wounds hidden beneath the long white folds of the linen tablecloth, I saw that I’d been replaced by a younger version of myself, and with terror I understood that it was I who was superfluous.
From the many children’s storybooks of fairytales and myths that were read to me, and from the pictures that I’d studied, and dreamed over, I knew that the three bears had threatened Goldilocks and that the house of the Three Little Pigs was blown down. Before I was chosen to be slain by one of the Valkyries, who were depicted in colourful paintings flying through the air on their horses, drawn swords at the ready, I determined to withdraw to my Granny’s. I realised that she too was under threat from Red Riding Hood’s wolf, that neither of us was safe, but I believed that since she was older than me, Granny was in a better position to handle it. Psychologically, I needed to put in place a barrier against an overflowing, all-encompassing familial sea which threatened to drown my survival as an individual. Displacement was a happening and a conclusion which I arrived at fully formed. They were part of a piece, a beaten path to be followed through the forest, rather than a logical thinking through of the options. Granny lived alone in the house next door until I arrived there with my pyjamas. I knew that I could retake my rightful, solitary place under her tutelary care, and that I’d live longer there, hidden away in my cottage in the woods.
The simple time of innocence had passed, leaving a fracture at the heart of how I perceived the world, which has festered over the years. The mask of being a sunny child covered over my dejection. I heard a lens make a sharp, splitting sound, and when I looked through the steel-rimmed spectacles that I wore, I saw a puzzle. The dissected piece of glass bent the light from a straight course, and the strangeness of the world that I inhabited, twisted as it was in different ways, underlined for me the foolishness of relying on an external reality which could change irrevocably in an instant, switch 180 degrees, and on people who professed to love me, but who were capable of betraying me without warning. As I grew more and more the introvert, and tried to negotiate my own ambivalence with greater skill, I saw that I was no longer guiltless, harmless, without blame. When I stood before an altar glittering with candles and decked with boughs of dark-green holly, I sang joyous Christmas carols with my classmates in the choir, but felt no nostalgia for an Eden from which I’d been expelled: ‘Natumvidete regem angelorum …’ With sinking heart I’d already seen the bicycle helmet, the board games, and the knitted pullover stacked in my parents’ wardrobe that Santy would bring later on that night. Suddenly, I was too old to be a believer, no longer an innocent.
‘Venite, adoremus Dominum …’ After the goodwill of the Midnight Mass, I’d no interest in visiting the church crib to see the baby Jesus in the manger, because ‘… there was no room at the Inn.’ That phrase tortured me because it led in two directions: when baby Kieran arrived in my life unexpectedly, I concluded there was no room for me in my parents’ house; and yet, I too was displaced from my home like the baby Jesus. Which of the two rivals did the story of Jesus represent? And which of the two emphases best represented the truth? Whatever way the sentence was pronounced, I believed there was no room for me; and no further words were available to resolve the conundrum, just the silence of God from without. It was the first of many absences. I had to live within that soundless sentence, and make the best of it: but all the while I was learning, and coming up with my own responses from within. I felt as I did walking home down Chapel Street that Saturday morning in springtime after my first confession in the Church of the Holy Rosary, when I remembered that I’d eaten a sweet during lent and that I’d forgotten to tell that sin to the priest. Others’ violent certainties must have informed me of God’s known will, since I was aware of transgression, and at the time I applied it to myself. The earth underneath the pathway trembled so much that I felt dizzy, and then it roared open. A blast of heat from hell’s furnace scorched the surface of my skin. I oscillated in silhouette over the raging orange chasm which had opened up from underneath the path, and I could see devils that were bigger than me coming towards me, taunting me, and I went cold with fear. They surrounded me with mocking jeers and began to push and to pull at me, kicking my legs with their boots trying to trip me up, mussing up my hair, until a shove to my back sent me sprawling out into the abyss, and they continued on their way, laughing at my shock and humiliation, and the embarrassment which suddenly squeezed tears down my cheeks. The ground became solid again, and I pulled myself up out of the grate into a seated position, and tied my shoelaces which had become undone in the scuffle. I spat into my hanky, and then tried to wash out the grit from my grazed knees, staunching the dripping rivulets of dark blood that were staining the tops of my knitted stockings. There was a sudden painful clatter across my ear from a devil passing back up the path. God was letting me know that I’d failed to let the priest hear the truth. I’d spoken against the Holy Ghost by not telling the full truth in confession, and I’d committed the unforgivable sin. ‘… it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.’ From the start, trying to make sense of my primitive experiences led me to conclude that I was destined to be unforgiven.
That unforgiven status was a registration which was to have many effects, both good and bad. It served to strengthen my sense of uniqueness: I had no like or equal, I was unrivalled. Because of the recording of that condition onto a list in my soul that I stumbled across in my own psychoanalysis, and which was carried back to me in various interpretations later on, relentlessly repeating in my life, I led a solitary life, moving through the silence of the empty house next door like a monk around a monastery. I tolled the bell announcing the Divine Office, and members of a ghostly community would sweep down polished corridors in their gleaming white habits like great, gliding birds to sing the canonical hours, Lauds and Matins on shadowy winter mornings, and Compline in the yellow warmth of summer evenings. Each of them was a word which had materialised out of the air. They jostled close together in serried rows to express themselves in lays, short sung poems that foretold of the divine.
Terrorised by the memory of my damnation, which continued to dictate behaviour even as it sank into forgetfulness, I was impelled into confessing the whole truth of experience to myself, naming it aloud in language as if my salvation depended upon it. ‘In the beginning was the word …’ I whispered to myself the widest range of words which formed incantations on the tongue, magic formulas, a layering of language which I employed to keep me company. They were playmates who defended me, and helped to control the anima mundi
