Be concerned but not alarmed

One of our cats has gone missing, the grey one, the boy.  The one who is most persistent in his hunger and calls for attention.  My husband tells me this morning, in that combined serious but also light hearted way of his that says ‘be concerned but not alarmed’, 'the cat has not been around for two days'. 

We both know that our cats have a tendency, each one of them to stray from time to time, for days on end.  And usually they reappear.  But I have no memory of the boy disappearing.  Besides, I’ve been away myself for the past four days at a conference and I wonder if the two are connected.

I am not the chief carer of the cats.  I share responsibility with my husband and with whichever of our daughters are around, but the cat might have resented the disruption to our house hold routine and taken himself off somewhere.

Forgive me for anthropomorphising.  At this conference among other things a few people talked about the notion of ‘post human lives’.  I won’t go all theoretical on you other than to say, the notion of post human lives has something to do with the idea that human beings and animals, and machines, as well as cyber creatures, all organisms, have more in common than we like to think.  We tend to create artificial divides here.  That’s a crude rendering of this idea of the post human which I continually have the impulse to call ‘subhuman’.

I relish these conferences, the ones on autobiography and biography, and on what is roughly called life writing studies, because there are all these people – in Canberra three hundred of them – who come together from all over the world to talk about the way people think, paint, photograph, sing and write about their own lives and the lives of others.  And increasingly, there are people like me who write and theorise more explicitly about their own lives. 

At the conference in a paper on digital lives, I talked about my blog.  The hazards, the pitfalls the exquisite joys of blogging, all dressed up in a skimpy frock of what gets called 'blogging theory'. 

And now after all the pleasures of meeting new people, and of crawling around in my head with new ideas and notions, I find myself fretting for the cat. 

You might recognise him if you saw him, a grey cat, a large cat, a boy cat, who has been neutered and who perhaps resents this because sometimes he looks as though he’s scowling.  But he is a loyal cat.  A gift to one of our daughters from one of her boyfriends several years ago. 

That daughter has since left home.  That relationship between boyfriend and girlfriend  is over but the cat remains in our care, as many animals do after children leave home.  They might even be considered to take the place of the children who leave home. 

And there are other dramas and sadness afoot - too complex, too personal, to on-the-boil to mention here now, but the cat's absence stands as a reminder of the temporality of life, and it frightens me.

The Internet Never Forgets

There was a standoff in the kitchen this morning – the dog inside at the cat door, one of the cats outside, each staring the other out and neither daring to move. I thought to intervene and put a stop to their agony but before I had a chance, the cat in all her majesty dismissed the dog with a brief flash of paw and stalked through the cat door to the inside, bypassing the upright dog.

Upright and uptight, our dog has no hope against the cats, not just because there are more cats, not just because two of the cats are female, but also because the cats take command in a way in which the yappy, friendly dog cannot.

I thought from cartoons I had seen as a child that dogs chased cats, but from my experience recently – since we came in possession of a dog and since talking to others about their pets – dogs are more intimidated by cats and cats can be ferocious.

Instinctively, in my mind I create a gender divide for cats and dogs – cats as female, dogs as male, which is ridiculous as are most generalisations and yet they are easy to make.

In more recent years I have become aware of the pitfalls into which we collapse when we make such basic assumptions and binaries and yet we do it every day. This is where I find the last of the keynote speakers at the autobiography and biography (IABA) conference, Lauren Berlant’s writing both challenging and exhilarating.

Berlant writes about ‘Intimate Publics’. I would tell you here what I think she means by this but I have yet to grasp the concept fully, even as she has tried to tell me about it herself in an email.

Why is it so difficult for me to understand the dense language of theory? I start to read Berlant’s essay on intimate publics and the words on the page are readable. I can understand them, one word after the other, but there is something in the way she has tied these words together that evades me.

I am a creature of my age perhaps, a victim of my limited education as a child when the nun’s taught us to absorb the facts through rote learning. Never mind that we could not understand the facts we had memorised.

I should speak for myself here. I could not understand much of what I learned as a child particularly in science and mathematics. I imagine therefore that I have a block against some theory, as if I am looking at a page of numbers or a list of mathematical equations that I cannot compute.

I once sat an aptitude test for librarianship as a seventeen year old, in the days when we were encouraged to apply for all the respectable jobs a young woman might undertake – nursing, teaching, social work – and I had trouble sorting out the order of a series of red and white, differently shaped flags. The detail evades me, though I believe I must have failed in this basic spatial test.

Berlant said at the conference that she has trouble writing and that her sentences can be too long and convoluted. Her interlocutor, Jay Prosser, disagreed and reeled off a number of beautiful sentences she has crafted.

For me the difficulty lies in the degree to which Berlant deals with abstractions. I cannot accommodate abstract thought. I need a story to hold me to the page. My brain is constantly looking for an image onto which I might latch an idea, but when it comes to the abstract ideas, whatever they are, such concepts as ‘intimate publics’ evade me.

‘Read what other people have to say about her ideas,’ my oldest daughter says, after I explain my difficulties in understanding Berlant’s writing. ‘Read the reviews. That way you’ll begin to understand her ideas and it’ll give you some idea of what she is on about before you tackle her directly.’

I am troubled by language, the way even people who speak the same language have so many different ways to say the same things. Interdisciplinarity and ideas that cross over from one framework to another seem to create new frameworks.

On another but related note, to do with knowledge and understanding, I have read recently about the horrors awaiting us given our growing realisation that the Internet never forgets.

Does this frighten you, too? Everything we post on line will be recorded forever, for posterity and anyone can hold it against us if in ten years time they choose to dredge up some wayward indiscretion on our part, or some hint of deviance from the past.

The Internet needs an inbuilt facility for forgetting some argue, rather like the human mind. If things are remembered with all the accuracy of facts, our memories cannot undergo any of the transformations our brain processes normally put our experience through – some experiences get repressed, some forgotten, some concertinaed, some distorted.

Without an inbuilt delete button we lose our capacity for change. We get stuck in rigid stereotypes and an overload of unchanging and therefore immutable information that renders us constipated and dull.

We need an internal delete button on the Internet to help with the overload, and to allow us to continue the process of change that goes on throughout our lives from the moment we are born. But someone has yet to invent a way of introducing it so we do not fall into the trap of unlimited information and no capacity to forget.

I lost my watch in Brighton

I feel deskilled. My coffee tastes off, not simply because the milk is beyond its use by date - although it smells okay - but because I have not drunk such coffee for over fourteen days and I am not used to it. Nor am I used to sitting at the computer, or the wintry weather.

When we first arrived in England everything seemed so different. We stayed in hotels and bed-sits. We slept in strange beds on lumpy under filled pillows. We travelled in hire cars, on busses and trains, in planes and on foot. We did things we do not do normally here in Australia.

All those other things, the things I had feared, the stuff about getting there, the planes falling from the sky did not come to fruition. Needless to say. Here am I writing this now. In fact often as I sat on the plane listening to the roar of the engines, imagining the ‘footless halls of air’ below me, I surprised myself by my lack of anxiety. Both trips there and back, and the two in between from Heathrow to Shannon in Ireland, and from Dublin back to Heathrow were the best flights I have ever experienced.

This trip has broken the back of my fear. I thought often of what I had written in my blog before I left for England and realised that so much of what I had feared was the fear itself.

Our time away has flown as I expected it might. It rushed past me in a haze of memories. We went to Shillington, first to find my husband’s ancestor’s graves but many of them were no longer visible. The lettering in stone had been worn off by wind and erosion. The plaques in the church were more visible but one had been overlaid by a new altar. The vicar offered to help us in our search for graves but only briefly. The Sunday service was about to start at 9.30 am.
‘Stay for the service or come back later in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘We have afternoon tea.’

We did not stay nor get back. We had so little time. The conference at Sussex University began the next day. So we made our way to Brighton where we stayed at the Granville Hotel in the West Pier room. The hotel overlooked the gravel filled beach and stood next door to the Hilton Hotel Metropole, which in its turn stood next door the Grand Hotel where Margaret Thatcher had stayed several years ago in the early mid eighties. A bomb devastated the front of the hotel during her stay but Thatcher was unharmed. The security guards had put her in a room towards the back.

There was a sign on the door to our room in the Granville, ‘Children are not permitted in this room’. I imagined this was on account of the wall to floor windows that opened out two floors up and looked across the street below to the sea.
Not so strange then that on so many nights during our time in this hotel room I dreamed of babies. Many in danger.

Later that first day we walked along the Brighton pier among crowds of visitors. It was hot by English standards and the pier was shocking in its gaudiness, a dome in the middle housed multiple poker machines and gambling opportunities.

I lost my watch in Brighton, or so I thought until it showed up at the end of the day in the bottom of my backpack. I thought at first it was an omen. In the gambling hall on the pier, my husband held his camera low. 'No photos allowed', the sign said. He held his camera low and snapped it from time to time, his middle camera eye unseen directed towards the glaring lights of pinball machines, and half dressed women, sun worshipers of all nationalities, men in tattoos, mothers with prams.

He held his camera in line with one old woman at a poker machine, her back rigid, her eyes fixed at the line of fruit on the screen, seemingly entranced by the clatter and clang of the money as it dropped into her tray. Bright lights the occasional jackpot, and then she gave it all back again.

I thought of my children and for an instant I worried they might be dead. Time had slipped from my wrist. My children across the water, across the sea lost in time lost to me forever, I imagined. I feared I had been careless. I had not kept a close enough watch on time, on them. I had left them behind for the faded grandeur of Brighton and a thousand conference words that would never bring them back.

They were fine of course, except in my imagination for that brief moment, which blended in with the heat and stink of urine behind the Brighton kitchens where we walked after dinner that first night, and stared at the endless queues.

I came to think of England as the land of the queue. But there were compensations, especially in the green of the landscape. Everywhere throughout the countryside I noticed clusters of red poppies, sometimes in small bunches, elsewhere whole fields and every time I saw them I thought of the war poem, In Flanders Field.

'In Flanders Field the poppies grow among the crosses row on row that mark our place. We are the dead…’

Flanders is in France but it could just as well be in England. Along the Sussex roads the traffic islands are filled with clusters of flowers, red, pink, white and purple. They shimmered on warm mornings as I took the bus to the conference, but the nights again were cold.

Now at last I know what people mean by hedgerows. Now I can use the word in my writing as I have done at times since I was a small child and now I can see a hedgerow in my mind’s eye. Until now the word bore no real meaning other than as a word I had read in poems as a child in British books, the first met in primary school. Now I also know about the green of England and the sight of those Irish cliffs I have seen so often in movies.

At the conference dinner my husband and I sat at a table with none other than Michael Holroyd who had been one of the keynote speakers. He came to the dinner with his young interviewee, Sarah O’Reilly. Together the two had presented a beautiful example of the work Sarah is undertaking for the British Dictionary of Biography, a chronicle of the lives of a number of significant British writers including Michael Holroyd. It was a delight to sit with the man and to chat over wine and food. And again that sense of the brittleness of relationships that spring up in conferences. We will never meet again ever.

The private intimate conversations in which you share so much only to close the door behind you forever. On the last day of the conference I felt the weight of a certain kind of sadness – all over so soon, sad and yet glad. There were too many people, too many events, too many words and my feelings rose up and down continuously like being on the end of a yoyo.

Gradually more memories will come back to me, but for now I must settle for the prosaic and obvious, the weather and the food. It's good to be home.