Second class, emotion and detail

Second class last night of the Unlocking Creativity course, aimed at “Emotion and Detail”. I didn’t really understand what the moderator/teacher Roland Fishman was saying; he never completes a sentence, gets lost half-way through his sentence. I was also suprised to find that I was irritated that I wasn’t chosen to read my work out loud; how desperate I am for some outside approval or validation of my writing. But I got it at the end, when Kathleen, the other course instructor, dragged me aside as we were leaving and said how much she’d enjoyed my pieces on the on-line writers’ board, how impressed she was by the quality and variety.

Still, even though I got this validation, it didn’t really slake my thirst. I am so insecure about my writing. My only consolation is that I know a lot of writers feel this way. Focus on the writing though, that's a relief. I just love doing the writing exercises. So much more rewarding than promiscuous sex. When I write something that I think is OK, I practically cream my jeans for joy. Two exercises, both of which I loved writing, the first on "what I want to write" and the second on a "strong emotion". I chose grief, anticipatory grieving. I was really proud of this one, particularly the description of the old mother as a "unbearably delicate, like a cosmos flower at the end of the summer season, petals ready to blow away in the wind".

Week 2, number 1, "What I want to write"

I want to write something that pierces the skin of this world. Something that I can seize like a life raft in the waters of my life and say, “So it is. I have written this, it is something. Something a girl will read while sitting under the boughs of a linden tree. Something that when she closes the book she will feel an urgent need to read some of its lines to her grandmother.”

I want to write about how each life sings a song, be it a fado or an aria. The mother in the endless suburb, drinking coffee laced with scotch, waiting for her teenage children to come home. The child-soldier crouched in the African bush, cleaning his gun. The psychiatrist on Wimpole St who wants to hit his patients. The man whose days in the munitions factory in Topeka are spent thinking of breasts. The gaucho on the pampas, who loves his horse and the grasslands more than his family. The ladyboy on Patpong Road, looking for another 100 baht trick, dreaming of the day when she can afford to have her penis cut off. The zoologist, studying nematodes in seagull guano in the Keregulen Islands, hands blue with cold. All the lives, one truth.

I want to write about the connection between you and me and everyone we know. I want to write about Max, about when he first called me his Popo, the heft and heat of his hand on my back at night. I want to write about my father, lost in a bottle, and about my mother, finding her first love at age 77. I want to write about the smell of salt and wild sage and pine in the Capetown summer air, as I cycle down the long hill to the bay. I want to write about the first time I heard Kate Bush sing Eat the Music and what it felt like to leap around that fisherman’s cottage over and over again, dancing to the music, and how good it felt to be alone for those two weeks. I want to write a novel about how the heart exiles itself. I want to write one sentence, one idea that is beauty itself. I want to write.

Week 2, number 2 "A strong emotion"

My mother is so old it seems impossible, unreal. She has a red sore on her shin that won't heal. The doctor here at Hollyoaks Care Center says, "Why worry about it? I don't like the sound of that, but he is a kindly man and I think I understand what he means. Hollyoaks smells of disinfectant, boiled vegetables, rosewater, with a faint overlay of urine. It is the exact smell of people waiting to die.

Mother thanks me for coming to see her, graciously, as though I've done her some sort of favour. The light streaming through the window of her room sets the white nimbus of her hair aglow. She is so unbearably delicate now, like a cosmos flower at the end of summer, all the petals ready to blow away in the wind. Yet her green eyes remain preternaturally bright. It's as though all the vitality that once coursed through her is now somehow consolidating in her eyes. Neither I, nor my sisters, nor any of our children, have her green eyes. I cannot bear the thought that one day fairly soon they will be gone forever.

A wash of grief overwhelms me like a flash flood when I notice that one of the mother-of-pearl buttons on her cashmere cardigan is missing. She always took such exceptional care with her dress. She put lipstick on even to go to the Save-on-Foods.

"Would you please help me up, dear? I need to use the restroom.I take her hand, with its tracery of ancient blue veins. The effort of rising from the brown armchair where some Filipina has deposited her hours ago is visibly draining, but her pride will not allow her to stay in bed or to use a bedpan. She would call it a chamber pot, and say that chamber pots are for people who can't manage.

When I'm with her, I feel tectonic forces folding my heart, an igneous pressure behind my eyes. I have this urgent need to seize her and to press her scant body to mine until all her bones break and our flesh merges. I confessed this ridiculous and disturbing urge to Rose one night over a bottle of pinot grigio. She threw a strange fierce look at me from under her pale bangs, grabbed my hands and said "Oh my fucking God, Alice, what are we going to do?" and started to cry.

The sound of my mother on the toilet is frailty itself - a delicate tinkle, followed by a huff of pain as she pulls herself up on the steel handrail. I am not allowed in the restroom with her. She says that there are some things a child should be spared and assisting a parent at toilet is one of them. This argument gets nowhere with Rose, who bosses mother around terribly. But though I have to hold my breath and though I'm rooted to the spot with visions of a fall and the splintering of bone, I respect the closed door. Each single day the scope of her privacy shrinks enough as it is. I offer up a wish that she dies in the silent dark night, when no one is looking.