The skies beckon

I'm about to enter the big silver bird and will not return for a couple of weeks - hopefully.

In the meantime I'd like to introduce you to Christina Houen's blog. Christina is a good friend and writer who lives on the western side of Australia.

Our friendship has been conducted by correspondence mostly. We help one another in our writerly endeavours, though I'm usually the one who comes off with more than her fair share.

Christina is an excellent writer and literary critic. And if ever you need good editing work, Christina's your woman.

Bye for now.

My computer weary hands

There is an autumn leaf caught in a spider’s web in one corner of my writing room window near the outside ledge. I wonder how long it will stay there. Until the next gust of wind tears it away, until someone opens the window and forces it from its sticky moorings or later still when it has disintegrated and turned into lace ready to fall back down to earth, dust to dust.

I had so much wanted to write this morning and now I am here ideas evade me, and words refuse to come.

Perhaps I am ready for a break. Writing has become too much like housework. I do it everyday and like housework it comes back again the next day even more insistent than the day before and with the same relentless, ruthless, unending quality. Rarely do I reach a stage when I can say well at last this is finished, this is good. This will stand the test of time.

Most of my writing at the moment feels like the autumn leaf caught in the spider’s web outside my window. It hangs there, a leaf torn from a tree, a leaf close to the end of its life, a leaf that no longer serves a purpose other than to disintegrate and join the earth’s surface, a layer of dust, like my writing, a layer of words.

There’s a hole in my cardigan that needs stitching but I cannot be bothered finding needle and thread. Such a simple task and yet it remains like so many others - unfinished.

I have lost my sense of momentum. These days, tasks rise up for attention and I look away. I put off what was once an imperative till another day when it can no longer wait.

Why can I not settle into the business of completion, of housework, PhD, house renovations, writing?

Things I once embraced I push aside.

Is it a stage of my life, like the autumn leaf on my windowsill?
Have I lost my tenacity?
When did it start?

If I were to sit face to face with a listener I would say that I have lost my grip, that I have lost energy. I once had energy to get on and complete the tasks at hand.

I am not sure when it began, this downward trend, this energy less state, this wish to escape into isolation and comfort.

My memories lose their translucence, their conviction. I begin to doubt the certainty of my grip on the past.

Once I begin to write down a memory it shifts and sways. It loses the clarity it once possessed when held firmly in my mind and then takes on the clarity of the written word. It slips from me and onto the page and no longer feels to be mine.

I have leached out so many memories over these last several years that I begin to doubt my memory of myself. Have I explored too many memories now to believe them anymore?

Once I have written about an event I find I no longer have the impetus or desire to record that event again. It feels old and stale. It loses its guts. The clash between the way I imagine things might be and the way they are leaves me empty and listless.

I remember such times when I enrolled for a course through the mail – fifty piano lessons at a set price at the end of which I would be able to play stock standard favourites for family and friends. I found it advertised in the Reader's Digest.

I had stopped learning the piano after only one year of lessons at school as a ten year old. I resented the way I had needed to practice after school when I could have been outside playing with my sister and my mother had better things to do with her money if I was not going to attend to my practice.

I dropped out of learning to play the piano but the image of myself as a concert pianist remained. In the advertisement the offer to get to this fantasy without any exertion beckoned.

My mother agreed, as long as we spread the lessons over time, so that she should not have to spend too much money too soon and I could prove myself by sticking to the practice.

The pages arrived. Pages of instruction, followed by pages of notes on paper, no different from the notes in my preliminary piano lesson book. I could not trouble myself with the tedium of reading through such instructions, if it did not happen by magic it would not happen at all.

Years later when we had been forced by circumstance to leave home and go into boarding school my mother told me she had finally paid off the last of my lessons. The contract meant that she could not evade the fees even if I did not use the opportunity.

And so it goes. Another opportunity wasted.

But I was young then. The worst years of my life were the years of my adolescence and beyond into early adulthood. Those were the years when I wanted nothing but for time to pass, that I cared only about the appearance of things, when I longed for love and in its absence contented myself with getting by.

Why was I not more dedicated then, why not more dedicated now?

In a few days we leave for England. Whether I want it or not, I will have a break from my writing. I will give my computer weary hands a rest from typing out words. I hope to come back refreshed and full of energy, enough to take a new tack in this blog.

I leave on 25 June for two weeks. I will most likely not post again until my return, but I’ll float around the blogosphere for the next six days and then take my leave.

Good wishes to you all.

Fear of Flying

I am in winding-down mode. In two weeks we leave for England.

I do not enjoy this travel. If I were given a choice I would take myself back to Varuna for a writers retreat, me and my computer, meals prepared by someone else, occasional conversations in the evening about the process of writing and none of the responsibilities of home and work. This is my ideal holiday.

As it is I am traveling to England for a conference. Conferences are fun, at least the conferences to which I take myself, the English literary conferences where the focus is on autobiography and biography, on story telling and memory. This will be my third such conference, run by the International Autobiography and Biography Association, the first in Germany, six years ago, the second in Hawaii two years ago and now in Sussex, England.

Already I anticipate meeting some of the people I have met before. There will be the usual array of 'footnotes' running around – Philippe Le Jeune, Paul John Eakin, Sidonie Smith, perhaps, Julia Watson, a definite. Michael Holroyd is one of the keynote speakers.

I enjoy the process whereby these literary dignitaries take on ordinary human form at conferences. They are approachable, accessible. When I first read their papers they seem aloof, ethereal. When I meet them face to face they present a mix of personalities. Leigh Gilmore, the godfather of non-fiction will be there. Blake Morrison, writer and memoirist, also. I met him at another conference. A lovely man, every bit as affable as his alter ego Colin Firth in the film of Morrison's memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?

I look forward to reconnection with some of these people. At the same time, I am aware of how brittle these connections are. During the conference itself we talk. We compare notes. We make good friends. We promise to email after we get home. We promise to keep in touch, but rarely do we do so. I am as bad as the next.

When we meet in the heat and excitement of new ideas – old ideas more likely but often dressed up as new, at least they might be new to my ears - we make good friends. It is like going on a cruise when people travel to distant places with a group of strangers; only at this conference we share a common task, exploring ideas on autobiography and biography. Once over, the camaraderie dies down quickly.

My first such conference was the best. I had no expectations then. I now have expectations and as Gillian Bouras writes: I can already hear the echo of goodbye in our first hellos. I do not like making connections that will end so quickly.

But worse than this, my journey will be sealed in a sandwich of airplane trips. Once we leave the tarmac and Melbourne airport and sit down on the plane, even before it takes off I will find myself settling into a sort of torpor, a surreal state where the only thing that matters to me is that I get to the end of the journey alive.

I have all manner of strategies to help. For long trips to Europe I plug into the movie channel and make a glutton of myself watching as many movies as possible. I try to lose my mind in celluloid.

I travel this time with my husband. I can see him in my mind’s eye. He too goes into a sort of torpor but his is different from mine. He covers his eyes with an eye patch, squeezes in earplugs, pulls up a blanket and goes off to sleep as often and whenever he can.

We have been married for over thirty years but when we travel on these long journeys we become almost strangers to one another. We sit side by side, but we rarely talk to one another during the journey, except towards the end when we are preparing to land. Then and only then do we start to make contact with one another. It is as if we have entered a timeless zone where our normal friendly connections are unwarranted. We enter the zone of survival.

I can and should only speak for myself. I have not discussed this strange state with my husband.

My friend and correspondent, Gerald Murnane refuses to travel in planes. I understand this. One day when I am older, when I do not feel the obligations I feel these days to make physical connections with countries, people and places further a field, then I too might dig in my heels and say, no.

I will not go back inside one of those silver steel monsters, the metal birds of the sky. I will not expose myself to the hours of anxiety, my breath held every time there is a bump, a jump or a skip mid flight. I will not subject myself to the strange airlessness I feel when entombed in the cabin of a plane surrounded by equally fearful people - though most manage in their own different ways to cope with that fear - the fear of dropping out from the sky and crashing down onto the earth, shattered and in fragments.

I have frequent falling dreams, dreams in which I travel on an elevator up to one of the topmost floors in a building only to recognise that the cables that hold the elevator in place, have come apart somehow and the elevator is plunging through the air. In seconds, and what in my dreams feels like minutes, it will crash into the basement.

The sensation of falling, readying myself for the end, stays with me long after the dream is over. Every time we hit an air pocket mid flight I expect the same. The cables that hold the plane firm in the sky have come adrift and we are about to plunge to our deaths.

I can remind myself that statistically we are safer in a plane than in a car on the road. I look around the airport and consider the number of flights scheduled throughout the world. They reach their destination. The ones we imagine are the ones that do not make it.

When I prepare to travel, I leap frog across time in my imagination and settle into thoughts about what it will be like once I am home and all of this is past me. Only then will I be content, when this latest trip is over and I can once again settle into the comfort of home.

Fear of flying, Erica Jong called it - notwithstanding her obvious reference here to sex. For me it is the fear of being off the ground, in the air pulled from my moorings, untethered, falling, falling, falling, with nothing to hold me together but my will to survive.

Not yet an orphan

What a day I have had. It is too busy at the moment by half. Once again I resist the basics, like hanging out washing that has sat in the washing machine overnight. I rationalise it is because of the rain. I have also failed to ring my mother. Every time I try she does not answer. I worried at first until I spoke to my older sister who tells me that in the evenings my mother takes out her hearing aide and turns up the television. She cannot hear a thing. So I must keep trying and maybe during the daytime. My mother does not watch television in the daytime. She is far too disciplined for that.

And busy she tells me, what with activities in the home, trips to doctors, her bible reading group and reading generally, she has no time for television by day but she likes to read in the evenings, once she turns off her TV.


My mother, I think to myself, is the sort of woman who will die in her sleep. Not yet I imagine, but one day soon enough. She will die in her sleep because it is the least painful way to go.

Imagine it. Imagine that last night alive. You follow your usual routine. For my mother the news on television, a few programs till around ten o’clock when her eyes start to feel heavy and then a visit to the toilet and the long struggle into her nightclothes. Finally she will put her dentures into a glass beside her bed and pull out her favourite book. She has been reading Ann Tyler of late.

My mother has always been a gluttonous reader. She will read for sometime, a fresh burst of energy with all the effort getting into bed has taken and in time her eyelids will droop again and she will make the supreme effort of switching off the light before falling into sleep.

She will mutter a prayer under her breath before she slips into unconsciousness, before her unconsciousness slips into oblivion and sleep becomes death.
Then my mother will have made her exit from this world in the same way she made her entrance, oblivious to the hardship and suffering around her, which is not to say she has not suffered. My mother knows intense pain but her way of dealing with her pain is one of looking on the bright side.

And now it occurs to me. This might account for my resistance to those who seek always to create lovely images in life, my hostility to those who resent my efforts to present different and less attractive facets of life, those who might prefer to die in their sleep oblivious to the pain of moving on, from those who rejoice in the struggle. Those who claw at the last vestiges of their lives, those who insist, I’m not ready to go yet. I want to stay.

My mother imagines these days she will live until she is 96 years old. It used to be that she imagined she would die at 86, the age of her father when he died, but she moved past that age. Now she has a little over five years to go on her reckoning.

What this means for me? For me at the age of 57 I am still not orphaned. None of us, my siblings are orphaned. My oldest brother in his mid sixties still has an intact mother. It drags back development. We must wait until we are next in line and by the time we get there assuming my mother’s death precedes that of her children, we will be so close to the possibility of our own deaths age wise, we already are that way, that we will have little time to ponder on the subtleties.