The Last Stop on the Maternal Line

Oh this blowery bloody weather. I've been reading another Herman Hesse book, and rather than feeling my ususal literary whimsy, I keep wondering if it is, in fact, just fucking stupid. I want to believe what I read in books, I want to believe that it is possible, and that the stultifying and transcendental moments these fictional folk suffer is just as possible for me (as long as the eventual reprieve is too). In this book (Gertrude), the main character suffers from unrequited love, and rather than it humiliating him, and making him foolish and diminished, it enobles and drives him. Is this some kind of wicked distillation of errant* and sedimentary parts, or a truculent fantasy whose aim is akin to the religious fantasy of salvation and ok-ness?

And so, although it seems unrelated, I can't help but go back to Edmund White's comment ("I think sex is worth dying for" - in reference to having unprotected sex in the 70's and now having AIDS), and wonder why we seek worth at all. I have wanted to pin things on the significance of a comment like that before. But you can never count on consistency, and you can never count on other people to understand what you are saying.

Today is all about suffering for me. Not that I am suffering, just that it is concerning me, the idea of it. And it is also about living through the indignity of the body, and how it, in part, moulds our becoming.

This morning I think I found a moment of love and peace in the maternal line. Perhaps not peace, but quiet. My mother talked about an early memory of hers. She said that my grandmother had 5 miscarriages between herself and her younger brother, one of which she remembers. She was in grade 1 at the time. On this particular day she was confused because her mother did not come to meet her from the school bus, and so she walked the short distance home alone. She let herself into the house and found her mother on the sitting room floor crying and surrounded by blood soaked towels. She said she was terrified because she didn't understand where all the blood had come from. But my grandmother was too weak and bleeding to get up and use the phone. She asked my mother to run down the street and tell her aunt that my grandmother needed her. My mother remembers walking back home with her aunt, who was very serious. And eventually my grandfather and my grandmother's brother arrived at the house and lifted my grandmother up and carried her to the car. By this stage she was so weak she could hardly move. And then she just disappeared for about a week and my mother didn't know what had happened.

It is strange to think of this grusome, gory and humiliating thing happening to my grandmother. To think of her as a victim of her own body and its processes is strange (despite the fact that we all succumb to our processes eventually). To me she has always seemed impenetrable, rigid, and lacking in the kind of feminine vulnerability that seems to characterise so many women. She was fucking tough. Now I feel sad for this soft, crying, bleeding woman who has just lost yet another foetus. When I look down this line of women, as I am trying to do now, I am finding such resistence, but fear that it is on my part. Perhpas staying with the historical accounts is always easiest? And perhaps in part, a refusal to identify yourself as part of a lineage forces you to identify only with your own accounts of these people. For ZP and I to really understand and end the badness in our family's history, we need to accept our own part in it, and identify with it to some extent. You can't adequately reject something without sufficient knowledge of it first can you?

What was my grandmother becoming before she miscarried? She lived through that indignity, and then I saw her final indignity, which didn't seem so terrible. What was my mother becoing when my father left her? And what have ZP and I been becoming, and now wish to stop? In some small and triumphant way, I look forward to the final indignity, and living through it to die, because it is so satisyingly human, as if it is the culmination of the human experience, or the essence of what it is to be alive. I'll live through the death of my body, and show it off, in order to die. I imagine dying and thinking 'look, I'm dying but I'm still living, but I'm dying, but I'm still living, but I'm dying, but I'm still living.........'

*errant - to travel, travelling, to stray off the
right path, moving aimlessly or irregularly.