My Mother's House

Book The First

The sunlight attracts. The sunlight and the shadows. The shadows play with the sunlight and they dance. The light dances. The motes dance. The warmth is good though I don’t have a hold on that. It’s too distant. Too of the ordinary. I dance without knowing it amongst the old stuff. Boxes, furniture no one wants, strange things. Strange bits and bobs that had their time, were top of the class once. Had their day and sauntered, frolicked, began to fade, be forgotten. That’s what happens. I’m not sure who I am. I mean I know who I am but I’m not sure who that is and why. I am and it’s peculiar. I have an inkling but it doesn’t stay, doesn’t muster. It clicks into view for a second, now and then. Occasionally. Occasionally I see something, someone does something, says something that I don’t understand, don’t comprehend and it jars. I look at it inside and wonder what it is, what it means. It goes somewhere and I move on.

Everything moves on here and you have to learn about moving on or you might vanish and God knows what would happen if you vanished. It might be horrible. It might. I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t know and they only tell you on a need to know basis. They hide all the other stuff. You and I both know there’s far more other stuff and they don’t like to spill the beans, not all at once. They have this crazy way of syphoning everything, filtering it in dribs and drabs that make little, or no sense and you’re supposed to pick it up and run with it, hold it, learn it, know it, and keep it for another time. Usually, I forget, then something happens and I wonder about it, wonder what they said and by that time I’ve forgotten or I may have an inkling. I have an inkling. Sometimes.

I talk with the invisible ones but it’s not my new language. Not the one I’m learning. It’s the old language. Not the brain language. I don’t know, really, I just don’t know why I have to learn the new stuff. The new stuff makes me cry, makes me want to scream. Makes me so angry inside and out but they don’t like the anger. They try to smooth it down. It doesn’t work. Anger doesn’t vanish. They seem so solid here, so square. There’s not much flow and they clash. Christ do they clash and bang and hum and fizzle and all the time the singing of the other, the old stuff is calling them and they’re deaf to it. I do feel for them. That’s the thing. Here, there’s a wrong way and a right way to feel. In the old place there was none of that. There was, is, only the flow which is good, right, fine and silent. Silent singing. Always empty. Lovely and blank, yet full of all the light. I can’t tell them that. They’d think I’m insane.

There’s a movement that’s fluid that I love and I move with it. I move, fall over, pick myself up, move again and I’m okay with the movement. I love it. The light is sweet and humming and I feel the warmth now. I know the warmth and the motes and the beams. The beams are wonderful. I love the beams. Dance in and out of the beams and we laugh. My body’s soft. It’s pudgy. I love that sound, that word. There are advantages to the new language but it aches. It tries to get into my blood and bones. It’s doing a good job. It’s a snake that twists, hides, curls away inside me. I know it’s there and it knows I know. The snake is okay. It hides. It comes out when the moon shines. I make things up, run away. I love to run away. I play all on my own because there’s no one else and it’s okay. I love to play and I’m never alone in a lonely way, not how it is with the others. They talk and they’re alone. They eat alone together. They breathe alone and they’ve forgotten one another and they’re alone. They seem so far away from each other and themselves. I look at them and they can’t see me. I play with them, on their terms. They seem to have fun. For a while. Before they go and they always go and I’m alone and I find the corners. The shadows and the angles and the furniture that’s old, new and shiny. It speaks to me. Says things in the old language that they’ve forgotten.

I like to explore and pick things up and feel them. Touch them, smell them and wonder. They’re all things and they’re not me. They’re different and what are they? They’re things. I like to sing, hum, listen to nice music and dance and I do. I dance and the others laugh at my dancing, look at one another and laugh, say things in the new language. Encouraging things that make me warm, make me tingle. Things that sound good, things I’d like to hold on to, have more of, always. But it never lasts and the tingling fades after a while and I move on, have moved on without knowing it and the corridors. The corridors and the marble floors and the breeze. It all makes me a bit dizzy and I sit sometimes and fall asleep and that’s good and okay until she comes and lifts me into her. She loves me. Somehow she is me and I’m her and she smells like me and she smells good. She kisses me, holds me gently, talks to me softly and I love her, hate her. I’m learning to hate her when she goes, when she stops speaking to me, giving to me. Why does she do that? She goes and that’s all there is to it. There’s other places and I don’t know them. I know here and it’s small and I’m quite small but getting bigger, fitting into bigger and bigger clothes. They rub sometimes and hurt and I love the smell of them. I love the feel of silk.

The chasm. The sea waits to be traversed, parted. It’s monumental. An abyss whose essence is natural disaster. Its existence is outrageous in form and manner. Look at it for Christ’s sake. It moves. A leviathan of power that cannot be understood, rationalised. It is the sickness that overtakes the guts, the brain, with a death that ensues when one hovers over its outer assemblage and pauses. Involuntarily pauses. Robotically, animalistically, intuitionally, instinctively stops and waits for death. What else is there but death when faced with the storm, the monster that is unknowable dimensionally, chthonically. It is and it eats the space. It decimates the brain, the thinking stupidities that puff, triangulate in an abysmal effort to make sense. There is no sense to chaos. It is and you’d better run, better have some way of flying above, around, through. The chasm must be bridged in time, in the passage of futility that is civilisation. The incremental illusion that pervades all society in an effort to keep away the black hordes of Freud’s unconscious. We fill the void with tradition and food.

One minute I’m in bed with her and the next I have all sorts of things in my mouth and they’re all laughing and eyeing one another. There’s a monstrosity about this place. About them. They appear from somewhere and have been somewhere and are going to another place somewhere that I know nothing of. The table shines. The cutlery is ominous and the air shimmers. There’s a singing in the far distant. A sort of low hum and gurgle of angels. Is it their wings, their laughter? Who knows? I certainly don’t. My clothes are rubbing. They’re tight, uncomfortable and itch and I’ll never be able to convey that except by crying and I’m tired of it all. I’d like to know and be known as I was and here there is nothing but space and animosity. The language of lies manifests from the others with its obvious duplicity that is ghastly. Why do they do that? Why lie so blatantly, so obviously? Their masks are hideous.

The moon is a dark thing. It shines but it’s dark. It has an edge of curiosity, a dismalness. All the time it weeps and waits. There’s no end to it’s obfuscation. If I were capable of anything in my form and ability, if I could make it laugh and dance, if I could reach out and hold it in my pudginess, with my warmth that flows so vibrant, so dynamic, I’d hold it to my chest, sing it to sleep and humanity would pause. The silence that ensued would be daunting. It would envelope the stars, make the mountains shake, ever so slightly. The shaking of mountains happens distantly, in some other place. They laugh invisibly, without saying a word, without answering all those questions. Oh, so many questions thrown asunder, cast to the winds that howl, tremble along the paths. They’d finally go quiet. The others don’t hear their screams. They think mountains are silent.

In the motes that dance I listen to the space and feel my innerness. My openness to the space is intrinsic. I lightly move through beams, the motes, the earth, the floor. The marble attaches to my skin in love and sweetness. I wander with the space, with the solidity of the earth and connect with its magnetism. The humming enters my bones with its cold. It reaches my internal organs specifically, aligning my dynamics, corroborating the flow. The flow is eternal. It hums in my ears. I reach for one ear with a pudgy hand and flick my upper lobe. I sense the essence of things, smell them with a deftness that is sharp, acidic. Sometimes the juices dribble from my nostrils in anticipation, in ecstatic joy. Here I go. Over here, over there and never any substance to stop me. Nothing to hold back the void of my being, my movement into space. It enfolds me in a love that is obvious, allowing, filled with the gentle laughter of stars and flowers. I play with the stars. Play with their songs and they often tickle my toes. They often allow me to stop, pause and wait so lovingly, wait for my next adventure, my foray into time.

Of course, I’m alone and wait till she comes, wait till she picks me, so gently, as a lamb, as a flower to smell sweetly and intake its scent deeply, utterly. She connects. An instant overflow of warmth that is soothing, hums with love, bursts with the joy of life that is now and forever. Joy that encompasses the space and all is well and glows. All is as it is in glory and wonder and I am made new, complete, replete, with my other who is somehow one and yet separate. In my all-knowing state that is losing its knowledge, I allow her the simplicity of ignorance and enjoy it at times. Laugh with her wrinkles and grotesque masks. I touch her face with my pudgy hands, my softness, yet, at times, my motions are reckless. At times I cannot reach her except in ineptitude.

Brownie

The light here is flaccid. It heaves with a somnolence that fails to find rest. Not falling but vanishing back to the source through imploding death. It marks laborious time, a lonely toddler waiting for that special something and forgetting what it was, if anything. Space is always tender, an ever patient matter. Perhaps it emulates the divine in its apparent blankness. Allowing all and sundry to pass through, acclimate, ponder. All and sundry perpetuate, fill the corners and interstices, hide in the carpets of various dimensions, the inner recesses of drawers and cupboards.

‘Morning, Brownie!’

In her sad, colossal frame, the minutiae of sublime intelligence adjust to fractions that are unknown, unknowable, dark. The cosmos itself is merely here within her essence. The flow and harmony of the spheres align in grace that is whole, complete. The dalliance of hair follicles, muscles that synchronise angelic motion, blood and sinew course and twist demoniacally, ministering a million propensities, absolutions that defy the word.

‘You’re looking chipper, my love. Here, sit up and have your breakfast. That’s it, up you come.’

‘She walks like beauty...’

Myths have degenerated, taken perpetual leave. Ethereal creatures long forgotten by the sons and daughters of Eve and Adam. Made flesh, made matter the lightness of those early, timeless times, where all was a whisper, an unspeakable breath of Brahma on a good day. What is this karmic return learning? What astonishing epiphanies have the eyes of Care Assistant Julie Delany encompassed, ensconced into the heart of her, the fabric of her? Nothing. She walks without knowing she walks. This is not to denigrate her passage. It is merely to observe. A billion Julies mark the spheres and intimately know, albeit unconsciously, what they are, trace their movements, their dance ridiculous. A common destiny that is sublime.

I have tasted the flesh of this corpse, it is rotten and must decompose, enter the void, fly to the farthest nebulas, galaxies. Insane, swirling vortices, tennis balls of a God with so much time to play with. It could be argued that I am that God. I am all there is, after all. In here, in this inner place where I am, have always been. I know nothing of you. Nor do I wish to. Forgive my arrogance, put it down to dementia, Alzheimer’s, old age.

‘Verse! A breeze mid blossoms straying...’

‘Do what, dear? Now be a good girl and eat your scrambled eggs. I’ll be back in a mo, and we’ll have a wash.’

Geurdjief could tell what another was thinking. Said it was easy. Julie’s thoughts are gossamer. Stardust kissing sparkling dewdrops on a lawn in Massachusetts in early spring, when the morn is waking gently, sweetly and the crickets rouse, carouse. I digress, of course. What else can an old woman do? The space knows of Julie’s duplicity. It knows and I know and the walls of this establishment know. The stuck together with Sellotape furniture, it might as well be. Not going to last, is it? Not going to be written about by Keats or Shelly. Powder and rouge. I like that. Powder and rouge. That’s what I’ll call the café-come-deli-come-jazz get together in Montana somewhere, some untouched place of contours and rolly polly meadows. Some fairyland of smoky chimneys atop the loved and cherished wooden houses of New England, Nantucket, and Maine. Some place with acres of space. The intellectuals hid amongst the trees of those lands and cut them down. The history of humanity is cutting down trees. Strange that we bred the cerebral strains of Northern European migrants and turned them into facsimiles of a dream that could not come to life. The dream of a happy hunting ground costing millions of indigenous wanderers who loved the earth, lived the earth. We kill what we do not know and then some, that we may die in dreadful decrepitude and loneliness.

‘Aw, Brownie... you haven’t touched it. What’s the matter, darling, ain’t you up to it today? You know what day it is? Clown day! Bertie Bonk is doing his music show after lunch and being as it’s Friday, fish and chips, Brownie, fish and chips!’

‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...’ No shadow here. This is the real thing. Death itself. I’ve always been obsessed with it. It amazes me how so few are. The bareness of it, the ludicrousness of it. Death. None can escape it’s delicate fronds. None run from its cyclonic devastation. Unable to make sense of it, the intellectuals became obsessed with thought, their bony skulls, and left, forgot their divinity, their bodies. Bodies that died in their own sickly, pallid stew, turned into skeletal coat hangers. Dried old bones that mean nothing, meant nothing, learnt nothing.

The South Americans move with a different tenor. Their body is the Amazon. Twisting and turning, it winds and surges. Into the light, the dark, the mystery. The birthing place of snakes, alligators, birds of paradise. The swamp of sex and sensuality. No intellect here. Nothing to spoil the undulations, ululations of glottal, febrile openings. Here there is only one God. Forgotten, perhaps, intellectually, but ever present. The idea, notion, of good and evil are anathema amongst the reality of life that is death that is life that is death. Abraxas. The name terrifies the Western brain. Lays it bare and passes on. Here, the passion of life is known as a smell, aroma, a scent that defies definition and must be taken in one gulp, one lunge at the God of fire and blood.

All tribes disintegrate, devolve into softer copies of the original caste. Yet there is a secret in the heart of the Earth’s kind, her kinder, her darling children. Similarities and differences that cannot be dismissed. The area you are born into is your closest mother. Are you of the mountains, the arid desert, the jungles? What is your colouring and here, colour is not the outer camouflage. It is the inner flavouring of essence that is of this portion of the one orb that ambulates through the cosmic dark. It is created, lavished by a sun with warmth, light, and turns to hide from the creator’s glare. Be nice to talk to someone intelligently.

‘Right, come on, Brownie... up you get. This is Cheryl. She’s new, aren’t you Cheryl?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Now, Brownie’s a goodun, Cheryl. Compos mental and that. All there, I mean, you know... with it. Aren’t you, Brownie? Right. Grab her some clothes and follow us into the shower. Come on, Brownie. Togs off. We’ll show Cheryl how it’s done, eh? Show Cheryl! I like that. Show Cheryl the shower! Haha! Right come on, get a shimmy on! Then down for a cup of tea in the lounge.’

I often wonder about Copernicus, Galileo, De Vinci. They must have been ordinary in many respects. They must have mingled with the vile and the beastly, yet such sparks of wonder, illumination. How to compare their intellect with those around them? Mystery of mysteries, as Lao T’su was fond of propounding and by golly she propounded. The feminine she espoused could not be sanctioned in the patriarchy so she transgressed, trans-dressed. The answers are all in the words and not that butcher, John. Was it John or Johanna? Yes. The only gospel worthy of mention. Even then the church brothers and fathers destroyed any vestige of truth, muddied the waters with their obvious, abject ignorance. Phatasmagoric ignorance, endemic sexual frustration unleashed towards their mothers, sisters, daughters. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.’

Book the Second

There’s a certain sound they call me. It’s mine. They use their mouths and eyes and not much else. Well, they do have extensions, like mine, that do this and that, seem to have a mind of their own. They walk, sit, move here and there.

Last night I woke and the dark embraced me. It spoke of its sweetness, emptied the new language easily and I was back, for a while, in the moonlight, with its sadness. Yet I was the nothing and loved it, wallowed in it, wanted it to last forever. She woke and held me, laughed at my aloneness, gurgled her sounds, whispered her love, caressed my outer pudge, tickled me. I gurgled back, laughed for her, laughed because it was excruciating to be tickled. I couldn’t breathe enough, nearly had a fit, an apoplectic fit, a seizure. She was instantly worried, changed her pallor, her demeanour. I settled down, reached for her hair, tried to hold it. It vanished as I pulled at it and she was hurt. Her eyes are soft on me. She raises her lips, a smile of love, of peace and I am filled with something that is warm, something that lights the darkness within and shines. It incandesces and all is well and soft and I love her. I am her still.

Time is a thing that I haven’t met before, not face to face. I saw it in the afternoon. In the garden. It was amidst the flowers and the soil and the breeze. It hurried along and never looked back, never paused to exchange in the mystery. I saw its wings, its fire. The fire was of many hues and it shadowed all that it passed. They have pigeons here. They are bright, fierce, fearful. They resemble the others in the way they size one another, shove, and push, then they go. They enter the sky, float in a most unusual, glorious manner and they peck, like chickens.

The earth is warm, so too the sky, the sun. So bright I can’t face it, never have a chance to love it enough and say something. It’s everywhere, its beams are overwhelming. I love the grass and the soil. It crumbles, tastes of time past. Time that’s rolled around, been a few places, learnt to sing and dance, tell old tales. She takes it out of my mouth with her fingers, gently and I wonder why. She laughs at me. I must be funny. Perhaps it’s my pudginess. They love that, love the softness, roundness of it, the life of it. Fresh life that shines with fresh life. I’m quite squishy, shining with the mystery and they are dry, dead, with no life to speak of. Let them have it. I give of myself to all. Have my life. Share it. Take it. I give it freely. I give all that I have. All that I am.

When I defecate the enjoyment is bizarre. Perhaps it will always be with me, the desire to release something, give something, my creation. My creation stinks to high heaven. I play with it sometimes. She catches me, laughs. It must be a good thing, this brown goo, rich and squidgy. So potent, yet it tastes ghastly. When I put it into my mouth, my face contorts beyond my ability to control. The warmth of it, the unusual propensity of its substance. It is a part of me that is satisfying to release yet seems abhorrent. Why? Why do I do it? Why does it exude at certain times and not others. There’s no rhyme to its appearance and differing aspects. From little rocks to a stream, the variations of colour, size, density, aroma are legion. She takes it, wraps it carefully and removes it, makes sure no iota of it is left behind. Perhaps it’s magical. Perhaps it has some part of me that is God, the emptiness of home, the silence. The urination I understand. I water the earth. I am the sky, the clouds, the sun in water form and I share the sweetness that comes from my penis. I must be a comedian. They all laugh at me continuously and I love to hear them. Their faces are frightening as I’ve already mentioned. Demonic, unconscious in their predicaments. Unable to understand the intricacies of gesture and communication that is at all subtle. Great, lumbering behemoths closed from the light. Still, they sustain themselves, appear content. Mostly. Of course, one can never tell the truth of what they are feeling, liars and performers that they are.

Brownie

Mother died of heartache. She wept at father’s death and died a little more. Wept and entered a little more into the dry land of dust and pain. Each segment of the brain contains a vestige of ancient passages, doorways to the many houses of our naming. The patriarchs did away with me. Did away with softness, sensuality. Sense. Sensuality. The senses. The senses of the body. The earth I am. The wild and wonderful gave way to the straight lines of a penis. It points somewhere. But where? Restless and forever seeking, wandering. Lonely and unloved. It creates out of its pain. Nothing but a ditch, a gulch, a road, a sewage system. Where are you going, my love?

‘Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere. Anywhere away from you. From thee. I have lost my path, my source and am confound. I am a rat in a desert that lives in my hands, my eyes, when they open and close.’

I’ve long given up on humanity. Yet the desire to merge is inherent in the blood, the rivers of my earth. I look away out of despair and know that all is well in this insane caravanserai. Time decimates windows and the stains on the windows. The light still shines through the grime and muck, darkly maybe, yet it shines, oscillates, reaches forever on and on. Whereto, beloved?

‘I shine that I may see thy dark my love. I shine that I may give life to death and death shall encompass me, take me home.’

Perhaps with time, the imbalance, the spectral inversions that give meaning to space and affect our somatic resonance, the black and the white, the colour, perhaps there might be a pause where, as with light, everything meets, unites, vanishes. Outwardly, the many colours fade, candesce, eventually seek solace, comfort, in the death of colour. The fading. It all takes time. The loss of original senses gives way to sex, the birth of the civil, the polite, the lie of insomniacs. They who collide as comets, meteors spat from the gory mouth of a demon who has left the grace of God. Light and dark. Good and evil. Nonsense. All a stylistic concept borne out of a desire to confound, be mysterious. The male is not mysterious. The male is a propagator. A symbol of nothing more than the need for more. That which is behind, beyond, beneath... that which is the ground, the space, the never ending dark that is infinite, colossal... that which entombs, in wombs, enfolds the tiny nebulae, nay, the whole idea of matter, be it atom, be it universe. All is birthed by my dark.

‘Lovely flowers, Brownie. Did your son bring them? Charlie? Did Charlie come and see you today? She’s in one of her waking sleeps.’

‘Creepy.’

‘I’ve seen it all, Cheryl. Seen it all. Come on, we’ve got fifteen minutes before teatime. Let’s have a fag. Have you seen the new one?’

‘What, the one with whatsisname?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No... haven’t seen that one yet. Might go this Saturday with bastard.’

‘Cheryl! Why’d you call him that? You are mean. Come on, she’ll be alright.’

‘Flowers are lovely. Love is flowerlike.’

‘She comes out with strange stuff.’

‘Poetry. Very clever is Brownie. Used to be a headmistress or some such.’

When I was young the fairies spoke to me, played with me, and mother would laugh, smile benignly. Through the kitchen window she watched as I played with my invisible friends. Oh, they were naughty! They teased and tricked me, yet all in love. All in sweetness and a light that passeth understanding and I was whole. My limbs were young and soft and the light trickled with time that was slow. There seemed no end. In those younger days I knew the sound of things, knew their weight and cadence, their essence. Knew the density of matter and how it affected space. All things wove around me. I was simply a star that had yet to find it’s resting place. My face open, unassuming. It smelt of sweet sweat, as did my hands and every part of me.

As I return to childhood, I have a sense of the grotesqueness of physicality. The ghastliness of ageing is obviously a divine comedy of some sort, yet for the life of me I can’t find the humour. Well, not so. Not completely. There is humour everywhere. One has only to look askance, askew, aside, astride, a skip and a fall. A tumble and hey presto! Laughter. The Chaplinesque, Keatonesque, Arbucklesque paradigm of self-deprecation, self-mockery, self-destruction of vanity, ego, personal aggrandisement. A mythical, archetypal drumming up of the fountain of insanity. From the sublime, the subliminal, the dark place of birth and sweat, blood and faeces comes the howl of laughter. Haha! Gotcha! Undoubtedly it points to the laughing Buddha, the Goddess of Catal Hoyuk. Life gives of her abundance and we abuse her. We laugh at the monstrosity of existence, our ignorance.

There’s far too much filler in every life. Points of cohesion, persuasion, alignment, occur rarely, fleetingly. Wisps of a dream that may have been dreamt in reality, in the psychic dream of reality, or perhaps only in an assumed reality, an image. Some imagined scenario that waits in some parallel somewhere. God save me from science and the dry, dead men of science. One or two write books aligning science and spirit, one or two lecture on television and give an air of exhausting enthusiasm to a dead whale. One, especially carries on his death, death as in decay and entropy, not the death of fecundity and rebirth, but an insipid, quasi grandiose fervour that is empty, vacant, has no root, no essence, and fades, vaporises. A puff of fart gas that leaves nothing but a beastly smell.

‘The moving finger writes...’