bite

enough privacy
— what is enough? — a curtain
to hide — to reveal
the intimate, mythical,
tender core of the apple

My mother nearly died on a the Acute Assessment Ward at A&E last summer. She was delirious and thrashing around in the bed — impossible to tell how much consciousness she possessed, if any — though her eyes were open some of the time. The curtained-off cubicle of her hospital bed was a world ruled by the medical staff, in which I felt like an interloper. I felt stupidly inhibited and at a loss how to behave, or how to reach out to her in her delirium. A spectator rather than participant, while the nurses did their job. Without the medical care, she would have died. But then also, without the medical care, I would have been forced to find a way through my own reserve and maybe to cradle her in my arms as she died — a very different and perhaps better emotional scenario. I dreamed last night of trying to use a curtain for making sure I wasn’t overheard. I was dimly aware how useless the curtain was for the purpose: it was just one of those ordinary hospital bed curtains. I was talking about mental health issues, feeling unsure of myself in terms of whether I was fighting a losing battle to assert the importance of the ‘user-survivor’ perspective, against the massed forces of collective prejudice in the opposite (medical) camp. Modern medicine is a very odd phenomenon. It has a lot in common with Christianity, in being so well-meaning and in doing so much harm.

Ewig-Weibliche

so why do women
get put on a pedestal
by men? — it’s as though
we want to elevate them
away from their own Being

And incidentally, away from ours — away anywhere — just away. I’m afraid this poem is itself something of a defence/barrier against the unsavoury content of last night’s dream. The great love of my life, at least through my teens and twenties, was a girl named Anna with whom I never had any degree of physical intimacy at all. But in my dream last night she was focused, to the exclusion of all else, upon achieving physical intimacy with me. It felt very undignified, even in the dream: so it’s perfectly clear the dream is bringing her down off a pedestal. The poem tries to do the same thing but I’ve noticed a circularity in the way the capitalization of my final word Being somehow restores her to her pedestal even though the sense of the poem is arguing completely against this tendency. Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan (the last two lines of Goethe’s Faust) is normally translated ‘The Eternal Feminine draws us upward’. But, via Google, I’ve found ‘Woman Eternal, draw us on high’ which seems better to me. Anyhow, either way, the fact Goethe chose to end Faust this way helps convey how deep-seated the whole pedestal thing is, in the male psyche.

limited

how deep does it go —
any of it? — a fine thing,
to come in the end
fully to terms with my own
superficiality

What kind of trap are we caught in, where self-knowledge always seems to consist in knowing less and less? Try telling that to my infinitely curious baby nephew, whom I met for the first time yesterday. He’s aged six months, which says something about how distant I am from his mother (my half-sister): although, I discovered yesterday that babies have a way of absorbing you into their sphere. They are pure intimacy. My poem has a lot to do with a lecture by Chogyam Trungpa, which I used to have on tape, where he explains how, in a state of meditation, the emptiness at the centre of consciousness makes the periphery extremely vivid. Baby consciousness seems to be a bit like that. From what anyone can tell. Depth and superficiality are imaginary categories of course, transcended by the fact of reality. In my dream last night, I was contemplating jumping off the side of a ship. The depth of the water wasn’t on my mind so much as the danger of getting entangled in the propellor. But the main thrust of the dream consisted in a realisation that the ship needed me to stay alive. It needed me to remain within its hierarchical structures, under the command of the captain, and somehow this was my destiny, although only an instant earlier it had seemed to me that my destiny needed me to jump overboard. If my sense of destiny is at the beck and call of a hierarchical structure, doesn’t that make it (the sense of destiny), and therefore me, in the end paper-thin and superficial? That sounds derogatory, and limited is a word that can easily be used in a derogatory sense. But that’s strange considering how limited on all sides we are, in so many ways. Some idea of a tension between infinite (sea) and limited (ship), gets to the heart of what I took away from meeting Thomas yesterday and from my dream.