Loving Medusa: A Fiction of Memory

By Elizabeth Rose

Loving Medusa is a fictionalised memoir of a folie a deux of the goddess Athena and the mortal Medusa; two women emotionally entangled with each other.
Both women have a longing to be free of each other and the toxic emotions they generate together. The struggle for that costs them dearly.

How do they find a way?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jul 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669833390

Elizabeth Rose

Elizabeth Rose is 64 years and lives in regional Gippsland, Victoria, Australia. with her dog Pooki. I live a privileged life as I am surrounded by fresh air and endless acres of forest and mountains. these are my inspiration.

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Copyright © 2023 by Elizabeth Rose.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/20/2023

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CONTENTS

Forethought

Snowflakes

Snowflake Vision

Most Everyone I’m Telling You about Is Dead

Myths Are of Us

Memory Isn’t Linear

Out of Zeus’s Head

C Complications

Efficiency

Vanity

The Abyss

Gateway

Love

Beginnings

Family Matters

Totalitarian Family

I Am So Ashamed

What Psychologists Don’t Know

Softness

Fathers and Their Kin

Glue of Conversation

Blood

Nana and Papa

Gifts

Tragedy of Beauty

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

God’s Fire

Raped into Consciousness

Who Raped Mother?

The White Envelope

Inflicted Deformities

Never Enough

Decapitation

Medusa’s Rage is Against Limitations

Fog

Falling

Revelation

Love or Power

The Match

Eye

Lying Transparencies

Beheaded

Women’s Troubles

Gas

Whistling in the Dark

Misdemeanours

Balanced

Needs

Life at Home

Murder

Human Shield

Inconsistencies

Little White Skeletons

Spells

Spice

Homemade

Fences-defences

Attachment

Innocence

Grace

Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth

The Joy of Unselfconsciousness

Sand

Kicking Over the Traces

Pain

The Grieving Generations

Expiration

Release

Clearing Out

Hidden Message

Folie à Deux

Dome

Victory

FORETHOUGHT

Autobiography contains many lies (mistruths).

Much fiction contains truths.

Memoir is their Love child (bastard).

Writing begins with paring. The writer has to present a bouquet, not the garden from which it was plucked.

It is judicious to leave out some of the people who have shared my life so far, weeding.

Sometimes you just have to respect the fact that there is nothing to be gained by gratuitously spilling the guts from a body of truths.

Privacy can still count and should as with respect and modesty.

Humans need the right to ruminate in quiet places, unobserved. We need the right to make some mistakes without judgement, to not be critically policed.

Respect means more people are eliminated from the cast.

I spent a lot of time gazing out the window at the pink camellias, scanning through the memories of my life, figuring out which person I needed to include to make the whole hang together and who was peripheral.

How far do you go to avoid hurting the people who shared your life? How far are you willing to compromise your own truth and integrity so as not to hurt their feelings?

The inverse of this operation was a matter of who to include.

Every now and then, I have to scold myself, pull myself back into focus, and remember—this is my life I am trying to turn into a work of art, art being the design that holds the sense of the whole.

Mystery matters too, not as something that must be exposed and solved. When everything is exposed, all our senses scab over, scar over, and we cannot receive what is gentle, subtle, and joyful where our nerves are distanced from what defines us.

If we were more willing and able to be moved by small things, we’d show mercy more often and possibly receive it.

Mystery in writing is rather like the spacing between letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. These are magical spaces, spaces where the readers’ imagination can safely graze, ruminating on the meanings the writing imparts.

The meaning created by the writer is only ever partially received, human to human. In being received, it becomes something else, a hybrid, because humans as a species only know what they know by a clumsy consensus.

If the mystery is limited, underwritten or overwritten by meddlesome detail, nuances are lost. The writer and the reader have lost.

Modesty is the third sister in the selection of people from the writer’s life. Modesty withholds in order to reveal but only in her own good time, in her own way.

Gazing out of windows at pink camellias can get a writer to ask herself why she writes.

It is probably not so hard if one didn’t feel the ancestors were reading every page I type, delivering every thought that wakes me demanding to be entered precisely in the bedside notebook. ‘Keep the wording as precisely as it came to you!’

They’ll send me messages and notes several times a night. They flee at the first glimmer of sunlight.

Above them, angels watch to see whether I’ll make the mark. Does she really have anything useful to relate? Does she even know how to write what she needs to say?

God, I wonder if God considers human words as minuscule versions of ‘the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1).

We were made in God’s image (Gen 1:27). If this is held to be true then every thought, however fleeting, counts. When you think of all the crap, we write and read and say!

I think the angels weep as much from the polluting words in the world as for the writer struggling to find a way through all the paring processes to get to what is paramount to her, finding her Voice.

If, as I believe, writing is a prayer, it is critical that we are careful that what it is we bring with us, into our mini- gravitational field, is as pure as we can make it.

Voice and the writer’s truth are in essence the same thing. One has to align values with heart and mind. Speaking one’s own truth, the voice is finally located and released.

Freedom of speech seems extraordinarily threatened by governments and the manipulation of technological communications all around the world.

But the younger people are fighting for it, for the right not to disappear merely for expressing an opinion or making artwork.

We cannot allow the beauty and truth of life to be erased.

Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘Freedom of speech is what you give yourself.’

Writers spend too much time waiting for permission to write.

In my late twenties I had a dream that every time I wrote a poem or a chapter or did a painting, I would be struck by lightning, literally. Zapped into ashes

It has been a hell of a personal and creative journey to get here, where I no longer fear to speak my truth even if it does end up in a drawer.

I am now sixty-four. The intervening years have been occupied with practice. In the last ten years of writing this, there is a great emphasis on young writers. Many are talented, but what do they have to draw on. ‘They don’t know they are born’ as my ex-husband would say. But he had survived Buchenwald, so he would say that. There is survivor guilt but also survivor arrogance.

Art ought to be a celebration of everything sublime. No matter how dark its content, artists have a duty to open their eyes to an understanding of what is base and show that glory can rise from the muck.

Never let anyone say writing isn’t art. Writers know the effort in opening the crown chakra and allowing that one elusive word, the only correct descriptive to float gently through the mind and out through the fingers onto the keyboard—one recalled vision after another, singular images blossoming into glorious dendrites.

My fingers type at a speed almost keeping up with my thoughts. Thank God for soft and sensitive keyboards.

I stroke my memories back into an approximation of life.

snowflakes.jpg

SNOWFLAKES

My Mind is falling apart.

Snowflakes drift slowly. Leisurely downward.

Each one is a part of my Mind.

Each unique flake drifts daintily to earth.

Settles and slowly adheres to its fellows

Creating a beautiful chaos

                                                it seems ordered,

                                                it had order

As it lies there

                Where gravity

                                                And a soft breeze

Have located it;

                        a community

                                                with its own secret purposes.

This is my Mind

                                        falling

                                                apart.

Softly luxuriating into

                                disarray.

I am not distressed.

It is so much easier to live

Without having to be ordered and rational.

To watch all things beautiful and natural

Even in their decay.

I thought it might be useful to write it all down,

The things I still recall with clarity.

The things that seem insistent on being related.

They might articulate

The urgency behind learning to live meaningfully.

The Snowflakes fall and I watch

Their slow, fluttering descent, full of wonder.

My Mind is raining

Shards of ice in the shape of sparkling stars.

When the sun catches them momentarily

They flash colour like the finest opals

An illumination

                        an animation

                                which melts

My Mind participating in its own decline...

SNOWFLAKE VISION

The pathology nurse drew dark blood from my secretive vein, the colour of a Mr Lincoln rose, but sadly, not as fragrant.

I was as fragile as a leaf. I did not have the strength to hide. The words came out without any self-censure, except that I noted a feeble footnote for my own reference; perhaps in the telling the power of my vision might be diminished.

The nurse was anonymous. Countless times I had submitted to this bleeding ritual. But never did the same nurse perform the offices.

Her back faced me as she carefully wrote in tiny writingletters on narrow labels that were stuck onto slender vials, using the strange glyphs of the modern apothecary, adding my name over and over, six vials in all.

The vision hovered in front of me, projected onto the atmosphere, demanding to be told. The nurse turned toward me passing me a form she wanted me to sign. There was no eye contact.

‘Last night I had a dream,’ my voice sounded to me tremulous and not my own, ‘ it started snowing softly, then heavier. Every snowflake, a piece of my mind, it was my mind disintegrating.’

She avoided eye contact, told me to tell my doctor. The tone of concern in her voice made me feel ashamed for burdening her. With an effort at showing some energy, I assured her that I would. I wanted to assuage her anxiety. But I certainly had no intention of telling anyone else.

If indeed I was losing my mind, I wished to do it in privacy in the peace of my home.

To get caught up in the blizzard of other minds in the hospital wards, I knew my mind would turn to slush.

The Soul witnesses the process of mental precipitation, but once the mind is gone, the Soul makes itself absent too. Mind, not flesh, holds us to the earth. The Soul is willing to return to Heaven at a split second’s notice.

The mind is all we know. And everything we remember. Without memory, we are void.

We are exhorted by modern self-styled therapists to live in the Now. But this is not possible. Everything we are is predicated by our past, even the things we plan for.

We build our perceptions by comparison, by seeking out remembered memory similarities and differences. Even the startlingly new needs a foothold on some analogy or metaphor derived from what we already know, have already experienced.

When I was a little child, I puzzled over the way adults seemed to encourage me to forget. ‘You forget pain in time.’ ‘Time heals all wounds.’ ‘Don’t worry as you get older you only remember the good things.’

This was alarming to me. It seemed that all one lived through ought to be kept sharp and clear in the memory Without distortion. Flawless. Animated.

And why live at all if living is not a resource for living better?

Where was the point of living if as we lived, all the truth of our living was discarded as we went?

It seemed patently obvious to me that by sanitizing our memories, we were turning ourselves into living lies, deceiving not only those we know but worse still aligning ourselves with a fake self, a mask.

Children of my generation, in Australia of the 1950s, were raised to believe that telling the truth was at all times paramount. To be caught in a lie, even to atheist parents, felt like I was bringing down the wrath of God. Parents went spare; their faces twisted grotesquely, their voices took on a tone and volume never used in daily conversation. Mine judged me severely.

The mind and body cowered. The soul watched.

Punishment always followed a swift slap across the back of naked knees or trousered buttocks followed by a teatime meal where I swallowed my food in lumps often between shamed sobbing. ‘Eat!’ my Mother screamed. Her eyes, like pale grey stones, devoid of compassion, flinty with her outrage.

The wooden spoon—crack, whacked down on the Laminex table, a sound like lightning hitting the earth. Then to bed without a story while it was still light outside.

The lie, what lie could a five-, six-, or seven-year-old have told that would warrant such rage?

One lunchtime Mother screamed at me unintelligible words and brought down the wooden spoon, crack, and it flew into two pieces. I was so shocked and surprised by both the suddenness of the punishment and the unexpected breakage. I summoned up my four-year-old courage and with genuine innocence said, ‘Why for you do that, Mummy?’ This question shamed her into the consciousness of her crime.

This became a part of family lore and was repeated whenever chatter about the old days when I was little would come up in conversation. And everyone laughed. Apparently in that instant of crisis turned comical, a family joke had become crafted, and Mum had been able to see the funny side.

Mum had a sense of humour, a dry one. But also she appreciated the hilarity of The Goons and the amazing versatility of Peter Sellars and Punch magazine cartoons and articles. When she entertained or was on the phone, she would laugh a fruity, full laugh.

Oddly humour was the one phenomenon all of us shared.

snowflakes.jpg

The crime I had committed was that of telling an untruth, of attempting to deceive, to disassemble. That is what the punishment was for. The child who lies successfully disempowers the parents steals a piece of their all-knowing control, which is possibly why children lie in the first place. It is an act of rebellion and an assertion of their individuality.

When a parent first suspects their child has deceived them, has manipulated the facts to excerpt their will, the parent is dethroned. There has been a coup.

This loss enrages the parent. By denying the parent the absolute truth, the child has asserted its desire to be equal.

The adults are caught out at their own game. Children learn by imitation after all.

Disproportionate punishment teaches children that the truth can and will be used against them. Confessions of deception still bring punishment for the original lie, not a reward for finally being honest.

Children are appalled by the double standard as they witness parents lying. A thousand white lies and some darkest black ones have become a complex network of not-truth in the place where they live in.

Living in a climate where nothing said is meant and everything meant is a distortion, most of us grow up only too willing to learn the game and conform to its rules.

When I lied, I was denied my right to receive love.

The emotional eruption by either parent, but especially Mum, so disrupted my sensitivities I could not recall what I had done wrong.

There was just a blank where the memory of my crime ought to have been. The circumstances of my sin evaporated like rainwater on leaves—slowly turning to an invisible mist, droplets shrinking unevenly, burned away to nothing at all in the bright light of day.

If everything was taken from me, every photograph, drawing, ornament, if I was stripped of my home, my clothing, all my money, all friends, and relatives, how would I know who I was if not for a true memory?

Memory can be taken too. It is not hard to rob a Soul of its Mind. Subject it to enough shock, enough horror, enough loss, enough physical damage and memory can perish. It can be done. It has been done.

snowflakes.jpg

Our lounge room bookcase housed a large collection of Mother’s photography magazines and journals dating from the 1950s, some containing historical photos.

I spent hours leafing through the black and white images. These I preferred because they threw the truth into sharp relief, far better than colour which dissipated it by distracting the eye and seducing the mind as it did.

Page after page, photo after a photo showed the death camps of Europe. That is where I learned just how stripped of identity a human could become at the hand of other humans.

Hell is what people do to people.

In the case of the Nazis, one group of humans had developed for themselves a concocted myth they insisted was the absolute ideal. An ideal so pure, so not of this world, there could be no room for anything or anyone who did not fit, who reminded those idealists of it’s internal falsehoods. Individuality either of culture or people had to be exterminated, erased. For all that they despised the masses, the Nazi identity was rooted in absorption into a manufactured elite.

As the magazines and journals were printed and distributed, annually there were images from Korea, Stalinist Russia, Manchuria, Korea, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Vietnam, on and on. Even further back were photos of the Crimean War, the First World War.

All those subjected people, all those wounded, tortured individuals, what kept them alive? Memories or is it just a case that willing oneself to di e? Is an nA act of will sufficient to keep one clinging to life. ?But it must be faith too, not only in God or the MessiahaMessiah’s but in a glimmer of an idea that someday they may find a beloved or a home. But then all that is posited on memory.

How profligate humans are through their insane hatred, wasting lives built up cell by cell in their Mother’s wombs, delivered in births where the Mother walks through the Valley of Death to claim the Soul of her child, risking her own life to deliver it into the world.

Parents raise them, nurture them only to have them mown down by appalling, sadistically efficient weapons imagined and invented by men specifically designed to kill other humans as efficiently as possible. Weep. Weep. Tears of blood.

Being unmasked, exposed as false and as a monstrous distortion, is a humiliation not to be borne by the deluded and deceived.

In the long (longest!) run Truth will finally triumph over Evil. The price already seems incalculable and already beyond envisaging. But Evil cannot be sustained. It contains the seeds of its own undoing and rots from the inside outward.

The camera distorts the truth only as far as the degree photographer is monstrous. The photographer’s aura acts as an added lens between her or his eye and the subject.

Once familiar with a particular photographer’s work, it is quite easy to pick one of the pictures from a gallery of work by other photographers. This is an amazing fact. I can pick out my Mother’s work anywhere. There is a kind of grey tinge like a gauze between her camera lens and the subject, pinned like a butterfly. It is an image deprived of life in order to be isolated and controlled in a split second of time, not an embrace but a foot on the back of the neck.

The photographic journals also contained images of joy, a child suspended in time high in the air tossed up there by her father, a woman arranging geraniums, or an elderly couple taking a stroll hand in hand.

Simple pleasures, it is often said by those partaking of complex pleasure, are so necessary to human happiness.

Those who are in the moment know Joy, know what they experience is true, and leave the analysis of it to others.

Simplicity is not enough by itself. We are not here to be beasts of the field. We can choose our actions to an alarming degree. War proves that wantonly allowing people to starve, to be displaced and homeless proves it. Cruelty to animals and raping the planet prove it.

It is in the choosing that we follow our basest instincts. If we let our appetites rule us, we find memory is either completely lost or warped by the poisons we indulge in. The drugs we use each uniquely provide their own justification for using them.

Mind and memory are subject to our physical and spiritual chemistry. Experimenting with that subtle organ by altering its subtle chemistry does not lead to revelations or epiphanies. It is overrun by toxic deceptions all the more fiendish for seeming so divine or terrifying. They are not truth but delusions.

It might be that civilisation will crumble as our minds crumble under the pressure of submitting to conformity at the cost of surrendering our integrity and active faith in what is right and true.

Civilised life is a vast network of untruths. Almost every human contact in any human environment is a game of deception and counter-deception. We lie for convenience to expedite getting what we need or want. Often we construct a personal image and value our reputation more than our commitment to our destiny.

Revolutions challenge the collective deceit. However, while the personalities change, they wear the traditional lies under their nice new look.

It is idealism and the propaganda it spawns that corrodes individual integrity. It sets the bar ridiculously high, out of any human reach. Those of us who embrace shiny falsehoods will be left with that sickeningly pervasive feeling of having failed again.

Each snowflake is a unique shape. This has been proven by W.A. Bentley who invented and mastered the art of photographing snowflakes. Each human is unique. This has been proven. When we play in the snow, we experience joy like no other. We are in an element that excites our children. Yet like all joys, it carries a shadow of threat; it must end, and it could end us, freeze us, hypothermia and the dancing images that entertain our mind before the soul’s release.

snowflakes.jpg

MOST EVERYONE I’M TELLING YOU ABOUT IS DEAD

Most everyone I am telling you about is dead, which is great, liberating! There is no one left for me to hurt To get hurt.

This rememberance is my perception of what went down.

The danger in not speaking ill of the dead is not that they may haunt us and bring down some terrible retribution but that their true legacy, their effect, and influence on their heirs and associates are buried with them. Veracity is buried with them.

Without that the living lives distorted lives. However, what is out of sight has a mystical life of its own, forgotten, mislaid, but what is hidden exists still and like a dead rat in the wall, it soon poisons the atmosphere as it putrefies.

Speaking only good of the dead is superstitious, a propaganda exercise generated by primitive fears. The dead can guide us if that is their duty, assisting us to find our true path, helping us find our destiny. The dead can only harm us as long as we haven’t forgiven them their trespasses against us. We should ask their forgiveness too. Hauntings are real and possession too where the ritual of letting go hasn’t been attended to.

Who was Dearly Beloved on a gravestone? If the cemetery were to be believed, no one on earth was ever evil. No one ever told a lie as they ordered the headstone! Why not be truthful, Murderer of Souls or Sadistic Torturer of the Family, Absentee Parent.

Hold up a mirror to the evil dead, and their power over us is neutralized.

But we are required to really see what reflects back at us.

From conception onwards, we are defined by the people we come up against; we define ourselves by whom we are bumping up against moment to moment. We absorb a cocktail of other’s emotions and feeling from the darkest rage to the lightness of love. We hear language around us as a musical refrain in every place we are taken. They penetrate our virgin brains and bodies by osmosis.

Nothing escapes our attention. We understand the intention. It must quickly become clear that life on earth for a human is a drama of dissonance, of dislocation between the pure, original God-given self and the social self. Everyone dissembles, manipulates, deceives.

Some children become confessors for adults who are unable to carry the burden of polite untruth alone. There is a child who seems ancient in the Soul, wiser than its years, the solitary child actively searching for a way to express its own authenticity. Such a child seems ideal for a world-weary adult, a beacon of hope being so naively wise but too young to really understand.

It is easier to induce a child into absolute confidentiality than to trust any adult.

These little pPriest people become the repositories of dark secrets. They hear a lot of the ill-spoken of the dead and the living. They are privy to acid resentments and envies. They learn about cruel injustices and betrayals, jealousy and humiliation, and wicked intentions.

It is not enough that raising up a child intimates such things exist, and we may even witness them or experience them directly. It is the word that carries the power.

Words name the conditions of living. Words are filled with magical intonations. The confession is an incantation. The more it is repeated, the stronger it binds the teller to the listener, the listener to the teller. The relief for the teller is addictive. They return over and over to unburden onto those preternaturally responsible little shoulders.

Spells work. Where the intention is sufficiently concentrated for good or evil, we cast them every day by the way we function, through the type of attitude we bring to living. It is by what we say and the way we say it.

Confession is not enough of course. It lets off steam. But the child priest soon discovers that they are not just meant to listen but that their advice is sought. ‘I don’t know what to do?’ ‘Please what should I do?’ ‘Tell me. I can’t seem to choose/decide/act.’

The child priest responds well to flattery that hooks into their desire to grow up fast and become the adult they are prematurely forced to be. If the confessor keeps on about how trusted the child is, the child is caught hook line and sinker. The confessor now graduates from the confession from mere words to sobbing and wailing, clutching at the child’s body and physically laying all their weight against the small body. The child is overwhelmed with hot tears in her hair and deafening sobs in her ears. Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall. And who on earth can put her together again? It is eerie when nursery rhymes become real-life events.

There is nowhere to run.

It is scary to have adults fall apart. The walls fall down, the child’s walls too. Nothing can be relied upon now.

One is indeed alone. ‘Mummy, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’ What to do now? Oh yes, when I am sad, Mum puts her arm around me and says, ‘There, there.’ But I have no idea what is wrong. Something so hugely wrong even Mother cannot cope with it.

‘It will be all right, Mum, won’t it? I love you.’ It is a prayer to ward off this enveloping dark chaos.

snowflakes.jpg

Once I saw my Mother slump to the kitchen floor. She sort of slithered down the kitchen cupboards. Her head flopped forward over her lap, and blood oozed over the red and black-patterned lino from under her dress.

I was three and already the Child Priest. I had watched her that morning in the kitchen, clutching at the benchtop or kitchen table or a kitchen chair, moaning as she grasped each support. I knew something was wrong. Yet she kept on doing whatever it was that kept her in the kitchen.

There are no more memories for me of that day. It floats as a disengaged image. Much of my life has been like that, intensely clear recall followed by a complete absence of memory. Sometimes only short fogs intervene, but there are whole years missing too.

They are like snowflakes, filtering and reflecting prism colours, icy, softly floating, falling opals.

snowflakes.jpg

Children love to hear a story told and retold. They never seem to tire of the details and will pull up the storyteller when they omit a detail or get one wrong.

However, while my favourite was ‘Jack in the Beanstalk’, I was subjected to another story that gripped me from the days of my earliest memory. My Mother was obsessed over my birth and the agony it inflicted on her like it was some incantation to release her psychic pain.

She told me how close she and I came to dying in labour and during the birthing via caesarean section.

The year was 1957, no ultrasound and anaesthetics, and pain control was far inferior to that we can access now.

She was in labour for seventy-two hours. The only way the nurses could tell if I was still alive was to place a glass on my Mother’s belly and press their ear on top of the glass, listening for the foetal heartbeat.

They determined I was in the wrong position to deliver, so they inserted a hand into her uterus. But in attempting this feat of torture, quickly realized that Mum was placenta previa meaning the birth canal was obstructed by the placenta. They were also able to make out that the cord was twisted around my neck. So for a full seventy-two hours, if not longer, I had been receiving an inadequate amount of oxygen.

So a caesarean was done under full anaesthetic since there was no epidural then.

According to her, I was born a very sickly baby who was rushed off to the critical care nursery, given a full blood transfusion and kept in quarantine there for five weeks.

Mum would never say why I was quarantined or why she was forbidden to see me, why she was denied the right to hold me.

My mind’s eye image of Mum at this stage of my life is watching her from some distance, where she sits on the garden bench in her father’s garden under the ancient pear tree. It is spring and as she sits slumped and sobbing, white blossom petals fall gently like snowflakes onto her shoulders, which shudder with despair and onto her lap that catches them like a hammock in her skirt.

My soul must have been watching over her for me to have this memory. I see her there clear as a bell.

snowflakes.jpg

Nine months later, despite being told not to, Mother got pregnant again. She told me there was no way she was going to inflict the life of being an only child on me.

Her gynaecologist told her to abort the child. Mum refused despite at five months along she was unable to keep water down for a couple of weeks.

The gynaecologist washed her hands of her.

Mother was prepared to die and for the second baby to die, leaving me in the hands of my father for whom she had no respect or faith in... There’s selfishness for you.

Mother lived. The baby lived, also a caesarean. We were each of us, mentally slow and pretty incompetent at conforming, fitting in. We marched at a slower drum at a different beat.

This is my story, me and Mother. My brother must find his own words.

Death wanted us. Death is seductive. Death is easy. It whispers in your ear constantly.

Babies who are born without the intervention of a scientific community that is committed to life at any price, don’t have to learn about death because they already are embraced by the life force.

When one has been dragged into life because of the miracle of science and scientific magical skills, death sings a refrain that promises release and peace.

Every moment of every day, I have longed for heaven filled with fragrant plants and exquisite music and the joy of being boundless, free of boundaries, free of the limits of living.

It is as if death feels cheated of what it should have claimed as its own, so it constantly lingers. There are angels everywhere. OneI seems to swim through them in every moment. I want to go home. I don’t like life. It terrifies me.

snowflakes.jpg

There I was at three. My Mother had told me this saga too many times. But nature wasn’t finished with her yet. Then it was the fibroids—large numerous irregularly shaped lumps in her uterus abrading the lining of her uterus. Heavy bleeding was almost continuous. Pain she said, was beyond description.

It’s no wonder she looked pinched and bitter. It’s no wonder I feared provoking her anger by trivial childhood mistakes, suppressing my spontaneity at every turn.

Pain chases away all patience and tolerance. It thins the skin of the psyche to a slender membrane, making it raw, permeable. Every tiny distraction, each extra demand on one’s energy on one’s concentration is too much. There are no reserves. The tank is empty. The fumes self-ignite.

And then comes the tears, floods of rage and grief.

I am three, I have witnessed all this suffering and sacrifice.

I know that I am implicated in all this. I am responsible for her suffering. Had she not suffered, I would not exist. How am I ever to make amends?

Everything to do with sex and reproduction has been torture to her.

And that is all I remember about being three.

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Except then she went away to be ‘fixed’. And I got to stay at a girlfriend’s house. The Mother was known as Aunty Joan, but she wasn’t my real aunty. She kept saying things like ‘eat up, there’s a good girl.’ And I would think to myself, how can she call me a good girl even before I have eaten up?

It was very odd living in someone else’s house, living according to their routine. I got very homesick. The dad, Uncle Jim had breakfast with us, and as a Scot swore porridge would put hairs on our chests. Us two girls, Wendy and I took this literally and were alarmed that this might be true. So we ate the porridge slowly and cautiously.

And then Mum came home, and Dad was very firm about treating her gently and doing whatever she asked without whinging, which was really no different to the way things had always been.

But Mum seemed to be more vital.

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From that time on, through many years of my childhood, I would witness Mum chatting away hour after hour on the phone and often being polite to people I knew irked her. And with each new call incoming or made by her, the same details were relayed almost verbatim.

Mother’s ideas about loyalty were very odd, perhaps coming from a generation or two behind her own. She believed that having once been friends with a person no matter how much they came to annoy her or their values now clashed with hers. She must stay in contact. After very long phone calls, she would come out to make a cuppa and literally debrief, often with venom and contempt for the very person she’d just spoken with for maybe an hour or more.

One of these friends was a woman who she had a sixty-year relationship with me. They telephoned each other at least once a week. Right to the end of Mum’s life, she was having the last bitter word of criticism about how this woman had raised her children (forty years earlier) about how badly she treated her husband (whom Mum was strongly attracted to and blatantly flirted with) and about how mingy her serves of food were, not just when she went to lunch but at this woman’s dinner parties too. This was the woman who after my father had left Mum told her that from the moment she clapped eyes on Dad, she knew he was a wrong un but didn’t want to be the one to warn Mum.

And then there were the dinner parties, which were fashionable in the sixties and seventies. The planning that went into them was considerable. It was a matter of all hands on deck to shop for and prepare a variety of dishes, many of which were inspired by the Women’s Weekly’s recipes of entrees like avocado vinaigrette or prawn cocktail and mains like beef bourguignon and dessert such as zabaglione or chocolate mousse, both of which I was in charge of making as I had quite a gift for making cakes and desserts.

The table was pulled out into the hall, chairs set up, a cloth laid with serviettes to match. Glassware was polished as was the wedding silverware. I was often delegated the job of creating the table centrepiece and was permitted to light the candles standing tall in their brass sticks, coloured to match the serviettes.

Ed Ames or Robert Goulet played on the record player or perhaps John Williams on his guitar, jumping up and down to change the records when they ran out was my job too. Was it any wonder I loved these events? I got praise and appreciation from adults who had kids around my age, but I was usually the only kid there.

Guests arrived, usually letting in a blast of cold air as they came in. Dad took their coats and laid them on the parent’s bed. Sherry was served, being the fashionable middle-class beverage of the era. Even I was allowed a half sherry, half water. My parents held to the theory that children who are introduced gently to drinking alcohol in the correct context would know how to handle it as teens and adults and not become alcoholics. Was there anything in that idea? Well I am not an alcoholic and rarely drink.

Adults moved to the table. Voices had to be raised a bit to be heard over the music, so the atmosphere was jolly, light-hearted.

I was the waitress. Mum was the qQueen of cCups. In the tTarot, this is the qQueen who dispenses food and drink, poetry, music, and congenial talk. She loves poetry and art and will discuss these with anyone who has the same love. However, don’t bother disagreeing with her or you’ll be shut down with a withering glance. Whether your view is correct or not, Mother shapeshifts and becomes the qQueen of sSwords who shares much with Athena, Medusa’s decapitated head on her shield. Any varying opinion is petrified. The inanimate victim is then run through with a hunting spear, all in the same fearfully split moment.

She inspired fear. Even her gestures were intimidating as she would point her arthritically gnarled right-hand index finger right at a person’s face, puncturing holes in their aura like a bent hypodermic needle squirting her toxic attitudes into their often startled soul. This was one of her many tools for obtaining respect, fear-based respect.

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The dinner party clique was just one small group of her fan base.

The other was her friends in various photography clubs. On a routine basis, the meetings would be held at our house; maybe twenty people would come. Then all the cups and saucers, and mugs were appropriated from every cupboard even out of the picnic basket. People were encouraged to come into the kitchen to help themselves from the urn to hot water for their drinks. There was so much talk and mostly nice people too, so friendly to me. ‘Haven’t you grown!’ I would blush. ‘Such a big girl!’ I would feel sick to my stomach and want to run away. I swallowed my shame. I knew I was getting big as Dad always mentioned it, shaming me for my lack of willpower. Dad meant fat. But these people were not being cruel. It was just small talk. What do you say to a child you only know through social contact with the parents? At least I didn’t drop the angels on horseback (a bacon rasher wrapped around a prune, grilled with a toothpick skewering it together – very tasty). I had surrepticiously eaten nearly a third of the ones Mum made).

Before the camera club guests arrived, Mum would go through a ritual that in a way she had preserved from the days when I was a newborn. Her life motto she told me was ‘look after yourself first.’ The way this was interpreted by her was to get up earlier than the baby and wash, dress, comb her hair (or take out her curlers), put on lipstick (even if she knew she would be alone all day), have a cup of tea, even an egg on toast or porridge, and if I still hadn’t woken, start thechores.

She held to this principle all her life. She would say to me, ‘If you don’t take care of yourself no one else will.’ There was always an undertone of bitter disappointment. I would feel quite threatened by this mantra. I was a child. I thought adults were supposed to take care of me! Weren’t they? It seemed like there was nowhere safe to be where a person could safely let go of their guard. I am guessing Mum learned this harsh lesson as her marriage progressed and it became increasingly clear that Dad could not be relied on for the personal niceties. Well only rarely.

The club visitors would be due at about seven. There was much to do, arranging chairs and side tables, putting up the slide screen, and placing the slide projector precisely so the slide image would fit the screen and be easy to focus on. Biscuits and fruit cake were put out on pretty plates, plus olives, pickled onions, smoked oysters, and a variety of cheeses.

Again, I was the general helper and waitress.

I watched Mother put on her make-up.

She loved using lipstick. ‘I feel naked without it!’ She would lean forward close to her dressing table mirror and apply it carefully. ‘I have thin lips. They need bulking out.’ She preferred lose face powder was preferable to pancake. A cloud of pinkish-orange powder rose up as she patted the compact with the powder puff. I watched her apply it, carefully going over her forehead where she often had a bright red, itchy rash. Her glass-topped dressing table was now coated in a fine mist of powder one could and did write one’s name in.

Mum never quite got the hang of eye make-up. She applied a little lid liner and maybe a blue smudge across the eyelid. It was the seventies so as far as it went she was on-trend but not with finesse.

The air was suddenly awash with spray from the Tweed perfume atomizer, a woodsy fragrance that made me gag. It was as unsexy and un-seductive as any perfume could be. It suited Mum’s personality though since she loved gardening and walking in the forest.

Men found her very attractive; her very coldness made her a challenge. She was quite prepared to flirt and in front of wives. But the perfume set the tone, so close but no further.

As soon as everything was set for the arrival of the twenty, Mum would go to the hallway to the large oval mirror and preen, looking at herself from numerous angles, patting her hair, maybe making a last-minute alteration.

I could not reconcile in my child’s mind this woman who was vain and so concerned with making a good impression with the one I privately knew, who evermore chanted her trauma mantras about a body that throughout her life kept trying to kill her and if not for medical science would have.

We were both living on borrowed time. Mum threw herself into being in charge of things, including running our home like a minimum-security gaol. I floated lonely and as insubstantial as a cloud buffeted about by the air she displaced.

I would watch her as she mingled with her guests in the den, chatting merrily or meaningfully with each member of the club in turn. She was a sun with her own set of adoring male planets and equally (begrudgingly) admiring female ones. I was fascinated to watch. Was this my mrealother? In hindsight, it is clear to me that she was a shameless flirt who showed no regard for the feelings of the wives involved. Why did the wives keep coming? It was Except perhaps to make sure their husbands didn’t get enticed into an affair with her. I don’t think they needed to worry.

As the photography club meetings did not start until 7pm, I was often presented to the group on my way to bed. I was bathed, in my jammies, gown, and slippers, my short hair combed (a haircut designed for efficiency rather than style). My innocence was on display.

The club members were always very welcoming to me, showed an interest in my schooling or my latest drawings. It was nice to be an honorary grown-up for a while.

Mother would signal me into the kitchen and hand me a platter of cheese cubes with a chunk of pineapple skewered by a toothpick. Again, it was time to wait on adults and receive praise from them.

Year after year these same people came to the house for club committee meetings or do’s. There were photographic outings. Then lots of kids would come with their parents, often reluctantly. Being with a bunch of adults mooching about in the bush with their cameras around their necks ready for that great still composition of a native orchid or maybe a lizard was none too stimulating to us.

The adults in the clubs became a sort of loose extended family, just because of the number of years (my life until my twenties) and the number of contacts. They provided a background of friendly folk who seemed mostly harmless and were above all kind and non-judgemental towards me.

They are all dead too, a whole generation gone, passed over. It is a strange experience to live on when all the people that defined your life, gave it shape, a flavour, a fragrance, and values are dead.

A teacher once said to me that having a friend or relative die is like going swimming with them, looking back to see how close they are, only to watch them disappear below the waves, no struggle, just gone, no reprieve.

Physically the dead are recycled back into the macrocosm. Yet they are in my mind. I cannot escape from the fact I knew them. Psychically they are with us. They are like the camp followers of pre-twentieth-century armies.

I was a strange child, shy but wishing so much to be included in adult their conversation, watching them from the sidelines as an observer of human behaviour, detached. Those I felt affection for, I had to feel it at a distance. They were not real relatives after all.

There were men amongst them I felt distinctly uncomfortable with; they had hair in their ears and growing out of their noses often with snot stuck to it. Their eyebrows grew every which way, and blackheads had oiled their way all around the nose. Or they had the big red veiny noses of alcoholics. Maybe their breath stank, and their teeth were yellow. I was surprised when Mum was charming to these scary men with rheumy eyes and long filthy nails, fingers yellow with cigarette tar.

I concluded after some years that photography was a field that attracted some strange men.

I had some instinct that these were dangerous men. Their motives in fussing over me were not clean. I could feel their sleazy intentions. It wasn’t so much that they were ugly that bothered me as that they had clearly decided to completely give up on themselves and that this served some obscure and unhealthy agenda. Some vanity is useful. It oils social encounters.

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MYTHS ARE OF US

The myths are of us. They emerge from the depths of who we are as humans. The Greek myths apply to the Western consciousness and are specially written through the inspired creative impetus of humans to inspire terror, bloodshed, and bravery, all of which is stereotypically masculine, macho.

There are some powerful feminine goddesses and even mortals but through the patriarchal rewritings of these fables. Even the powerful feminine beings are subject to violence by the gods and male mortals.

The gods Zeus, Pluto, and Neptune raped goddesses and mortals, often when in the disguised of as some animal. Bestiality, consent, it is very doubtful. But their status has never been diminished by this crime. If anything their disguises, stealth and aggression have culturally been esteemed as part of their heroism. Subconsciously giving men who studied the Classics a licence to rape.

During the classical age—right up to today—the female victims of these violent encounters were described as surrendering, swooning, submitting, playing down any unacceptable level of sexual pleasure for a female to experience.

The violation by the male entity was expected to act as welcome freedom, however momentary, often leaving the woman pregnant and alone to birth a half mortal half immortal child to raise.

The females both immortal and mortal, birthed, nurtured, and mourned. They were as vulnerable as they were beautiful. Their beauty made them vulnerable. Their intelligence expressed itself by magic, by an intuitive relationship with the earth, underworld, and the heavens. They knew herbs and cures and ways to poison.

Through the crazed windows of thousands of generations, the myths have permeated our Western subconscious right as we burst into the world gasping for air, oxygen flooding our brain. Impressing it with the signature of the zodiac constellations, we are marked for by our fate.

The myths we must live through, this lifetime may be the same as a previous lifetime or different, a succession of tests.

Like Odysseus, we have a memory of home to inspire us to live through the struggles our personal myth presents us. Did Persephone have a memory of her devoted Mother Demeter, to keep her strong throughout her incarceration in Hades?

We can arrive home in our lifetime. It can take some effort to bring it into focus and see it for the first time clearly, know it for the place that had all along been calling to us.

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The form of telling a myth, the language, and the culture, it is spoken in,represented by may change, and time affects it too. But myths are homoeopathic; they hold up a mirror to our soul and challenge us to look deeply into who we are, to identify what needs mending.

Every one of us is caught up in playing out a myth; in each lifetime we have to resolve the dilemma faced by each character in the nexus, the dynamic interplay.

Until we have moved through the entire playlist of characters and understood them we are unable to be who we were born to be, agents in our own right, artists of the matrix we were conceived into, gestated in, birthed into.

All the main people of our lives are ours to interact with from the heart and deep in the soul, over and over again until year after year and time and lifetime again we begin to perceive patterns and repetitions.

We are born to understand, to stand under and look up into the cCosmos, knowing our self and soul. Nnow we look home towards spirit as it displays itself before our eyes from which the scabs have fallen

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hHere is the time to stop the destruction and embrace love.

Hell is what humans inflict upon each other.

While living in the by compulsions and vicious egotism, blind to the myths we are caught in, humans are dizzy with fear. We flail about, lashing out at whoever or whatever is nearest. We insist we have no choice and lay the blame on people, institutions, and nations. Anything that absolves us of taking responsibility of embracing humanity.

Our most fundamental fear is that there is no meaning.

The flip side of fear is faith. But first must come trust. Trust doesn’t occur, however, until one gets some distance from the myths we are born into.

Trust in praxis acts like prayer. Good things come. Changes are sweet.

Faith is that wonderful feeling of being enveloped by a huge embrace that will always keep you safe..

Faith means no anxiety or vulnerability. One is at peace with the great and only First Cause.

To understand is to stand under, look up to see the cosmos scattered with lights of which we are tiny embers

We have to love the crucible to allow ourselves to be resurrected anew, find an obedient harmony with the far-flung heavens where we long to return.

But not until we fulfil our contribution to heaven on Earth.

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Trust and faith design and build the synagogues, mosques, cathedrals. Masons and carvers manipulated stone into beauty.

Their faith had them barely supported on scaffold hundreds of feet from the ground. Some fell to their death, but maybe their reasoning allowed them to die in the service of God.

Those who carved the stone or crafted the stained glass windows might accidentally slash an artery with a glass cutter and bleed out, another life dedicated to the Great Spirit.

So the buildings are so much more than their beauty and stillness. They carry truths people were prepared to die for. The oldest temples and cathedrals, mosques—these were built where magnetic lines in the earth converge. Humans have always worshipped at these points, creating little altars covered in bunches of meadow flowers, runes or a crucifix, a moon and star, the six-pointed star.

Where does the line exist that delineates myths from truths? It is not a line so much as a library that contains all human experience.

It is crucial to be discerning about which texts you believe and those you don’t to not too speedily dismiss the unexpectedly inventive.

It is great when just the book you need falls at one’s feet! Our guardian angel intervenes.

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MEMORY ISN’T LINEAR

Remembrance isn’t linear. My memories and the manner of recalling them do not respond to or correspond with calendars.

A release of fragrance, a caress or an association of colour, a word or an atmosphere will open up my consciousness to images and feelings, new acts, and past actors long out of view.

So it was recently. The smell of peppermint toothpaste took me back in place. I was in the kitchen, maybe six years old. My Mother said, ‘It’s bedtime.’ Possibly I protested mildly—as a matter of course. ‘Come on! Toilet, teeth, and bed!’ This was her bedtime mantra. Her tone was harsh and flinty.

Perhaps I lingered a second too long. But suddenly she had me in her grasp, literally. She held me by the back of the neck in a vice-like grip that caused extraordinary pain, so intense my knees began to buckle. I was barely able to put one foot in front of the other as she propelled me up the hall into the bathroom. She released me. Only once she had me firmly pressed against the basin.

Mum roughly squirted toothpaste on my brush, ran it momentarily under the tap, handed it to me, and in that way she had of conveying fear without raising her voice said, ‘Brush!’

It is no wonder I don’t like peppermint toothpaste. It occurs to me she often behaved like this like a raptor that swept down from behind and grasped the unaware victim (me) by the scruff of the neck and hauled it away to a place where it could best, in my case, be psychically devoured.

This was not a solo event. I never knew when the neck grasp would come and strangely, innocently had no conscious expectation it would be repeated. I figured I had learned my lesson and was forgiven and was back on track as far as obedience went.

But it was repeated. It is true then that a child’s love for a parent far outstrips adult love in their capacity not so much to forgive as to not judge and blame in the first place.

When Mum wore Medusa’s head on her shield, the punishments meted out far exceeded the crime.

I learned though that I had my origins in Medusa. That my only means of self-protection against Mother’s frequent misjudgements—she punished me for what she assumed I had done or not done—the injustice of this was an appalling affliction to me. To be wrongfully accused, especially when one couldn’t answer back, since that was forbidden, caused a great burden of guilt and shame.

Consequently, I grew up deeply afraid of authority figures. I was obedient to a fault.

Anyone with power over me smelled like a raptor of feathers and stale blood, rotting guts tangled in their claws. Silently they descend on you from behind, take a grip and jerk you lose the ground, lose peaceful stability. They rip out your trust in what is and where you are. You lose all agency in their grasp. Lose all self-control over your life on their nest-ledge where they mercifully break your neck with their blade beak.

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Memory is identity. Total loss of memory would be sheer terror because everything around you would be nameless, undifferentiated and apparently have no function. Without memory, we don’t exist to ourselves.

There would be no refinement of definition. Yellow would be a colour simply as a visual experience without a name