Keeping secrets

My mantra: write without expectation of any outcome.  Write into the unknown.  

Grade two, 1960, seven years old, pen in hand.

And then I go into a non-fiction class where the facilitator reckons that anyone who can’t write five sentences on what her book is about is in trouble, or words to that effect.  I challenged the notion.  

We are talking about different processes and perhaps even different times in the life of a book.  I may well still be at the beginning whereas she’s talking about the end phase when the book needs to come together. 

I stood over the cats this morning as the boy tried to pinch the last of his sister’s food before he had decided to leave.  He’s a real standover merchant and so I stood over him, ordering him out of the house until his sister had finished.

I told the non-fiction writer that I love to write.  That was a mistake.  Besides it is not true, not entirely true.  I write because I need to write, because not to write would leave me feeling as if my life has no purpose or meaning.  

I write to find that meaning and to make sense of my life, but that is not something I love, not really.  It’s more like something I am compelled to do, for the pleasure it gives - and indeed it gives me pleasure - and also for the need.

Hilary Mantel in her essay, ‘Diary’ writes about her experience of hospitalisation for surgery that went wrong.  She describes her hallucinations, her ‘hallies’ as she calls them, as if they are real and no doubt they were real to her when they appeared to her mid fever and pain.  But towards the end of her essay she talks about her reservations about this writing.  As if she is fearful of being included among the so-called 'confessional writers', those who, to use her words, 'chase their own ambulances'. 

Is that what it’s all about, this writing of mine?  

I asked a friend to define the expression.  ‘Chasing your own ambulance’, as he understands it, means to go looking for an accident, to write about your trauma, as if to bear witness, thereby encouraging the reader also to bear witness.  

While the word ‘confessional’, despite its religious connotations of admitting to sin, can also mean the notion of disclosing something that has hitherto remained hidden.  It has perhaps a more neutral tone, though the notion of sharing secrets to me does not.

For some reason secrets carry the weight of sin.  Why else keep something secret unless somewhere along the road there is some sense that someone has done wrong?  That someone has something to hide and that something stirs up anxiety or fear.  

We don’t keep unimportant things secret. 

Keeping things secret takes an effort, which is not to say there aren’t many things we might repress, seemingly without effort.  They slip out of consciousness and only crop up when the pressures they exert for exposure rise to the surface.  How did Freud term it? ‘the return of the repressed.’  But that's not the same as deliberately keeping a secret, one that refuses to leave your consciousness.  

I have long tried to understand my inability to learn while I was first at university from eighteen years of age till I was twenty two and went out into the world to take on my first job.  Certainly numbers had me flummoxed.  

In places they talk of a female phobia of mathematics and perhaps of the sciences generally, that goes back in time.  Certainly in my family my father’s conviction that girls were good for nothing apart from housework, child rearing and sexual comfort held sway.  

Despite this, my mother read all her life.  She still does.  But in my father’s mind her reading was limited to trashy romance or pot boilers and religious propaganda like the Catholic Tribune and the Advocate.

The education system within the Catholic schools I attended both in my primary years and at secondary level added to this fantasy of female inferiority.  

The focus was on memory, which we polished with rote learning. Understanding why people might behave as they do, as explored through English literature and history books,  came through a thick layer of religious conviction. 

For instance, Attila the Hun was a barbarian who sought to overthrow the Christians. We read and rote learned the lives of the saints and were encouraged to practice with sincerity and devotion, and an eye to our calling as dedicated to others.  

If we were not called to follow God as priests and nuns, then marriage was the only option, marriage to another Catholic with whom we would bring up several children, as did my mother, but she had married a convert.  Mixed marriages were then frowned upon. 

There was a system of rules in place that barred deeper explorations of the meaning of things and I did not come to understand the meaning of the words, concepts and theories until much later in life.  

There were facts and religious beliefs, faith and goodness.  Others practised evil and wrong doing.  We should not and that was all.  A black and white world, and one which I now prefer to avoid, especially in my writing, other than to describe it.  

Too much pepper

I blogged a poem about childhood abuse yesterday and shuddered at the possible response. People do not like to read these things, I imagined.

On the contrary people have been kind, as so often happens in the blogosphere. I should respond to you all and soon enough I will.

After I had posted my abuse poem, I asked myself, was it by way of abuse of my audience, that I should inflict on them something of that painful experience, that I should make them squirm and feel uncomfortable.

So the very fact of putting writing out there, presenting it to an audience for their ‘consumption’ might well be akin to putting a meal on the table that you hope your guests will enjoy, even as you know it might be unfamiliar to them, too many foreign flavours, or could it be you have added too much pepper, too much spice and the flavours clash with the predictability of their palates and they cannot take in what you have offered them?

Why is it that when we write about something, we are often seen to be doing it?

My Cleaning Lady is not a Slave

Two months into the year and already my desktop is cluttered with papers. It happens so quickly. I scarcely notice them piled up one after the other. I cannot complain. After all I am the one who puts them there. I am the one who leaves them there each day with the thought I will file them later. But I keep putting it off.

The woman who cleans our house is away for two weeks and I am mindful that I will need to try harder to keep abreast of all the mess that builds up over time elsewhere, not just here on my writing desk.

I had intended to write the words ‘cleaning lady’, but such words speak to me of class privilege and superiority. It took years before I allowed myself the privilege of a cleaning lady. Is it a privilege, or as some of my friends and colleagues at the time suggested, merely a more sensible use of my time? Besides, I rationalise, it involves giving someone else a job.

The woman who cleans for me is my equal. She is not a servant. She is not a slave. I pay her well, but still the concept bothers me and I hesitate to write it down here, to write about it for fear that readers might consider me to be blue blooded, well heeled, a snob, all those things that smack of class privilege from over one hundred years ago.

I used to be quite a housekeeper myself. Before this woman came to help with the cleaning on Fridays, I spent the better part of each weekend cleaning out the house, the toilets, the bathroom, the dusting, the vacuum cleaning, and the changing of sheets on beds.

I took pleasure in my efforts in those days when my children were young. Not now. Now I hate housework. I do whatever is necessary on a daily basis to get dirty dishes into the dishwasher after meals, to wipe down bench tops, to wash, hang and fold away clothes, but otherwise I keep my domestic habits to a minimum.

These days I spend almost every spare minute I have beyond my paid work, and the shopping, and the occasional task I must share with one of my now essentially adult children, to the business of writing.

In between my efforts at writing I read. But it is the writing that offers me greatest pleasure. I have an ergonomically designed chair to protect my back from the ill effects of sitting for too long each day and I visit the optometrist every two years to get my glasses adjusted so that my aging eyes can cope with the glare and proximity of the computer screen.

Let’s face it. Writing is a prosaic activity. The sight of someone hunched in front of a computer screen tapping away at a key board is one that does not inspire much confidence in said person. It is not like watching someone dive into a swimming pool, smash a tennis racket against a ball or climb the slopes of a mountain. The sight of someone who taps away at a keyboard has a quality of excluding the onlooker. I know this from memory.

Many years ago before I started to take my own writing seriously, when my children were still little and I spent many more hours at housework than I do today, my husband went back to university to study for a law degree. He was a conscientious student and although he tried hard to confine his studying to the nine to five life of a university student, he still needed to bring work home and to study on weekends, especially around exam time.

I remember well the resentment I felt as I watched him tap away at the keyboard in those days on one of the first computers that then existed, while I swept the floor or chopped vegetables. In those days we had no room for a study and he worked in the central living area, which continues today as the place in this household where people gather to eat, to talk and to play. I felt left out then, as if he were engaged in deep conversation with a beloved friend and there was no room for me.

I think of this memory often these days because now it is my turn to be so deeply involved in conversation with my keyboard, and others - my husband and my children - are the ones who must suffer from this sense of exclusion.
‘That’s all you ever do,’ my children lament. ‘You tap away at your computer.’

I resist a defensive response. I know it is true. If you want to find me these days, if I am not in the kitchen preparing food or tidying up after adult children, who still sometimes neglect to return the lid to the vegemite jar or fail to put their dirty dishes into the dishwasher, you will find me here, where I am now writing down endless words, writing into the ether to an imaginary audience.

I drive my car past my old primary school often. We still live in the neighbourhood where I spent a large chunk of my childhood, from five to fourteen years of age.

Our Lady of Good Counsel, OLGC sits alongside the church of the same name on Whitehorse Road in Deepdene. It is a prestigious neighbourhood. It is now, it was then, maybe more so now, but even as a child I knew that our neighbours and the children with whom I struggled to learn every day were from well to do families who seemed not to understand the struggle that my parents endured daily.

We lived on the fringes of the zone that took in the catchment area for this school. In more ways than one. Each day we walked to school, past the mansions on Mont Albert Road and the well appointed houses of Camberwell. We wore a typical uniform, the girls in blue and white gingham dresses in summer, tunics and pale blue shirts in winter, the boys in blue shirts and grey trousers, shorts all year round while at primary school. Our school jumper was grey, our school colours blue and gold. Hair ribbons were meant to be pale blue but somehow such ribbons if they ever found their way into our house soon found their way out, and more often than not, I tied my hair together with a rubber band, which the head mistress of the school, Mother Mary John, despised.
‘You’re a disgrace to the school, without wearing the proper school uniform and that includes the regulation ribbons’.

On Sundays we walked to Mass through the same tree lined streets but this time accompanied by our mother who gazed longingly into people’s gardens day dreaming of the time when she might own a house of her own. At that time we rented and already I knew the stigma attached to renting a house in Australia, the country in which home ownership is a must.

When she was a girl my mother lived in a two-storey house on the Marnixplein in Haarlem, Holland. Her parents employed a housekeeper to help her mother with her five sons and two daughters. My mother was the oldest. She told us often of how she would spend hours on her bed with a book avoiding the work that had been allocated to her as the oldest girl, notwithstanding the housekeeper. She hated housework then, as a child. She hated it as an adult when she was in the care herself of nine children and could ill afford the help of a housekeeper. Here I am more than half a century or so later complaining of the same lot.

I am the most slovenly of my three sisters, perhaps even of my five brothers, four of whom have wives who might clean up after them. I have given up on the call to domesticity, I am ashamed to say, but proud as well. It is an act of defiance.

In one of my writing classes many years ago, our then teacher, Olga Lorenzo, talked about the need for us women writers in particular to forgo the demands of domesticity and even of paid work in other fields to make time to write.
‘What do you want to have written on your gravestone?’ she asked. ‘That she wrote that she kept a tidy house or that she wrote a good book?’

The answer is obvious.

Write about your obsessions

In her book, READING, WRITING AND LEAVING HOME, Lynn Freed tells a story of how at one time while she struggled to find something on which to write, a friend said,
'Write about your obsessions’.

Our obsessions lie deep within, Freed suggests. They are so familiar and non-obvious to us that we almost do not recognise them.

Freed is obsessed with her theatrical and moody mother, she writes. My obsession would have to be with my father. I write this with certainty, but can I be so sure? If I ask myself then what else obsesses me I might start a list.

I have said it already, first on my list: I am obsessed with my father, the sheer size of him. The way he would take over a room the minute he entered it. The way his voice boomed above all others, the way he needed to place himself at the centre, the way he seemed unable to share. His will was all, his militant will, his will that ruled like a sergeant major, that crossed over any preconceived ideas about what we might do or how we might do it.

And yet brooding underneath his militancy, I sensed my father’s dissatisfaction. He never believed his will had been followed. He felt cheated by life, by the very existence of the children that he had helped to bring into the world because the only way he could marry my mother was to convert to Catholicism and in converting he had agreed to obey the church’s rules about the non-use of contraception. Given that he had struggled to practise abstinence or so it would seem in view of the number of pregnancies throughout my parents' fertile years - twelve in all, and at least five of those each a year apart - my father failed to practise abstinence. And yet, ‘He loved it when I was pregnant,’ my mother has told me. 'He was always gentle then.’

My father was not a gentle man. There was a cruel streak in him that I fear I have inherited though I try to keep mine in check. I try not to let mine slip out. But it does. The other night, a woman in our small writing group who chattered on endlessly and would not be silenced, told yet another story from her extraordinary childhood, one for which she provided thorough and well rehearsed details, as a statement of fact, and all from her memories and experience as a child.

In response, instead of applauding, I could not resist the comment:
‘Have you heard of the notion of the unreliability of memory?’
'Yes,' she said, 'but all this is true.'
She was silent after that and went to bed early. Since then she has not dominated conversations with her endless detail. The conversation has become more inclusive.

This brings me to my second obsession: the stuff of fairness; my belief that everyone must get a go and that hopefully everyone’s go is proportionate to everyone else’s. Though I know I fail at this too. I know it rarely ever happens.

Perhaps the wish that everyone should get a fair go, and here I speak about fairness in conversation when together in a group. Turn taking, it is called. If the person in charge of a group in situations where there is such a person, does not take his/her responsibilities seriously and fails to move around the room and give each person approximately equal amounts of air time, then I become incensed. However, if by chance, I get more than my share - if I am one of the lucky ones - then I feel guilty.

I derive the greatest satisfaction from the illusion that a group is in harmony, that we all agree with one another; that we are having a wonderful time; that whatever experience we are enduring is equally wonderful to all. Even as I know that all of this is impossible, an approximation only and one that does not preclude the possibility of world wars.

This brings me to my third obsession, my family, not so much my present family as the one from my past. My preoccupation with my children and husband is more a constant force in my life, something I imagine I will never lose. I do not consider this to be a true obsession, more an ongoing love, but my preoccupation with my family of origin borders on obsession.

Just as my father held the size, my family holds the numbers. There are so many of us and I have never known a life without at least one or two or three of my siblings in the picture. My dreams are still haunted by my siblings, they feature nightly whether in direct form or even in the form of the people with whom I work, or my friends. I can always tell when a character in my dream has taken the place of a sibling. There is a particular feel, a peculiar mix of love and hate.

In her book, Lynn Freed quotes Marguerite Duras’s consideration of her childhood:

'In books I’ve written about my childhood, I can’t remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don’t know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can’t understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a new born child. It’s the area on whose brink silence begins.'

This would have to be true of all my obsessions: they signify the tension between love and hate, between the desire to be at one with and the desire to get away from, the desire to caress and the desire to kill.

‘Kill ’im off,’ my father said repeatedly to my mother during his nightly drunken rambles. I did not understand his meaning at the time, but now I wonder whether he too felt as I sometimes do, shut out, unwanted, a wound to be excised.

This brings me to my fourth obsession: the desire to belong. I love nothing more than to walk into a building, a house, and to sense the familiarity of location – this is where I belong. I have sensed it after years of working in the one place. I sense it whenever I walk through my own front door. I know it is illusory - most things are - but it is a comfort to me and one that contrasts with the sense of alienation I feel when a place no longer feels welcoming. A place ceases to be welcoming when there is conflict, or when there are things going on behind the scenes that cannot be addressed.

This then brings me to my fifth obsession: the sense of wanting to get below the surface to what is really going on. To deal with the version of whatever elephant is in the room at any given time. There is always an elephant in the room. There are always in any situation subterranean rumbles that people work hard to skirt around and ignore. Most of the time I do likewise, especially when it does not matter - to me at least - in superficial situations when it is okay to float on the surface.

But when it matters, when we are meant to be having a meaningful conversation but we are not because we have been given the message that we cannot speak the obvious, the obvious to me at least, then I am like a restless ant, scurrying from one thought to another. I find it hard to settle in the room. I hunger for some sense of anchoring and it will only come when someone has said something about what appears to be going on underneath. Often, more often than not, this does not happen and once again I am left dissatisfied.

This brings me to my sixth obsession: connection. I long for connection, a sense of getting through to another person however momentarily, a sense of sharing, a glimmer of intimacy where we can share an affinity and a sense of at oneness, again however illusory.

Connection is illusory. It is like the truth, it is something we can only sense, we can only glimpse, we can only hold close to us in our minds, but it can never be grasped firmly. As soon as we try to get too firm a grasp on it we lose it.

Connection turns to possession, possessiveness; and truth turns to doctrine. Doctrine is dangerous, as is possessiveness. We must hold loose to our loves. I suspect it is our hates that enable us to do this.

Have I run out of obsessions? Perhaps the list should end here.

And you? Do you, too, write into your obsessions? Can you share yours?

For me this list becomes a deep and endlessly fascinating source of ideas and I thank Lynn Freed for sharing her friend's suggestion.

Good from Bad

I wonder what distinguishes good writing from bad? What is it that makes us want to read on? To some extent it must be subjective, different words and styles appeal to different people. The good and bad of it is the wrong terminology of course. It's not necessarily good and bad, it's different, at different levels but I can keep qualifying for ever.

When I read blog sites, why do some appeal to me and others not? Why am I so taken by the self conscious confessional tone of some like Artandmylife, who forever admits to feeling poorly educated, a non expert, and yet offers her thoughts and opinions regardless. For me she becomes a sort of every woman, the mother at home with her little ones imparting knowledge to them that is greater far than anything they can read in text books and yet, her knowledge is somehow diminished because it has not been formalised through the official authorised discourse. Maybe this is why I enjoy her work so much, the same with Stripeysocksstudio and Martin Edmond on Luca Antara– was there ever a more self-effacing, yet brilliant writer, who also seems more self taught than spoon fed by the institutions. Maybe for me, too, because I have gone back to the university after thirty years and because I do not have a vested interest in fitting in with the academic ethos – I’m not looking for a job there – I can write more freely even as I know it will not satisfy certain of the establishment.


I resent the insistence that everything said be backed up by a footnote - Who gave you this idea? Who has said this before you? How can you claim to know this? How dare you presume to say anything unless someone else presumably more learned than you has said it before? To me that’s different from the need to acknowledge other people’s ideas. I have no problem acknowledging other people’s ideas, but sometimes I cannot remember and sometimes my own ideas have become such an amalgamation of all the ideas that I have read and heard from many other people I cannot think to anchor the idea as someone specific’s property.