The Cerebral Mum

I have no idea who I am. I am in stasis. I interact with few people. I am not working. I do not see my friends. They are ghosts. They live in the world I used to belong to. The only human contact I have apart from my son is Big Sis whom I am both too close to and a world apart from.

Of course, I see other people. I pay the check-out clerk for my groceries. I say, Have a nice day. I speak to the Maternal & Child Health nurse as she weighs Caspar and checks his head circumference. I watch the audiologist as she moves the dials and records Caspar’s reactions on a photocopied form. I ask for a locker key at the front desk when I go to the gym. I say, Thank you.

But these people are nobody.

Because I am nobody.

I blame the suburbs, but it is I who is to blame. I am a snob.

I was always a snob. I liked large things. I liked words which could be capitalised. Truth, Beauty, Art. The people I loathed were those who went to the opera so they could say, “Last night I went to the opera”, those whose tastes were formed by magazine and newspaper reviews: What’s hot? What’s not?

I liked the way the world flooded my mind, rushing through it like a braided river, sometimes of water, sometimes of blood. Everything moved me. Everything was made of words.

When I read Henry Miller I would salivate. Even the bed lice and the pissoirs would make me salivate. Miller said:

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. _{Tropic of Capricorn}

And I was.

I am no longer. I do not want to be aware of the minutiae of life. I reject it. I am self-destructive. I can no longer even feel the Nausea.

I want to feel ill again at the sight of my hand. I want life to be large again. I want to be that girl again, who, when she walked down the street, felt so huge that shop windows would explode and cars would burst into flames. Years ago, in my novel, I wrote:

...I have been trapped here in this silent inertia by my desire to drive earth’s gears into reverse and nothing – nothing! – can be unmade in this world of time. It will not devolve for me.

Writing is prescient.

There is nothing I can do except write until I am true again.

It’s too long since I’ve written. It was never this hard. It was never this hard knot in my chest that feels like tears. I’ve have too much to say. I have forgotten how to say it.

It was never this hard when I made myself jugs of coffee and brandy and typed through the night with the city lights creeping through my apartment, knowing all the while there were people still awake, still out in the streets, still living. It was never this hard when I was sitting in a corner of the Supper Club at 3am with my notebooks and a Pedro Ximénez, surrounded by people, alone but never lonely.

I hate living in the suburbs. When did I decide to stop being? I didn’t. It just came creeping and that’s far, far worse. It’s easy to live with the consequences of decision. You have answers to all your whys; you can respect your choices even when they’re wrong. But this creeping passivity, this loss of passion, this degrading slide into conformity…

I hate living in the suburbs. I hate this lack of will in me. I hate this non-entity I’m trapped inside. I hate being surrounded by clean concrete and new bricks and people who speak in nothings. I hate my hollow voice.

I guess there are things that have happened in my life, there are people, I could blame for where I am and I see the temptation but I refuse attribute my life to others. I refuse to abdicate. So instead, I don’t like myself. I am ashamed.

And after stating so categorically that I am a writer I cannot find words. There are times when reading breaks me down, breaks through that barrier freezing my fingers at the keyboard, but today was not one of them. Today, reading Girl’s Gone Child’s past and present futures, reading that she’s on the road again with a Kerouac quote in her pocket, I saw the sad echo of myself and had to face my stasis. Even her predilection for guitarists and Henry Miller was a mirror, an accusing reflection of who I am, or who I was, or that person I’ve failed by no longer being.

But the future is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and life doesn’t have to creep in this petty pace from day to day. Somewhere in me there is a breath. It is a hard knot in my chest that feels like tears and I will write it until I am no longer a walking shadow.

I’m in the middle of moving house and it’s not an out- of-here into-there kind of deal. The house I own is already empty (of people, at least) and Cas and I are living in my sister’s spare room until it is renovated and sold. My things currently have no home so I have to pack everything away for what may continue to be months (renovating is a slow process with a ten month old) and scale down my three-bedroom, double-garage, outdoor-entertaining contents to suit a city-size apartment.

No problem there. I can’t wait to be living close to the people who know how to make coffee again. The problem is that when I said three-bedroom, it was slightly misleading. My master bedroom hasn’t been a master bedroom since I moved in. The first thing I did was rip out the built-in robes to make room for The Library.

I have books. I’m not sure how many. I stopped counting a while ago.

Now, there is no chance on this green earth that my (partially Dewey Decimal catalogued) book collections will be scaled down but I can’t keep them with me while I’m in the in-between. They have to be boxed up and put into storage. I’m not a particularly dependent person but this process seems to engender a great deal of anxiety in me. What if I need one of them?

I have the capacity to be a very efficient person (Yes, Mum. I do.) but this particular part of packing up my life has been trying.

Yesterday I packed three boxes. Three boxes should take, say, ten or fifteen minutes all up? Unless of course you’re me and each one takes over an hour. Surely I could justify holding on to just this one? And that one… And that one…

There were a few I had no problems boxing. The red velvet covered book of love potions someone gave me? Nope. Don’t need that. The Complete Family Guide to Natural Healing? A quick flick through it, just in case. Herbs for anorexia and and go smell a flower, it will make you feel better? Nope. Don’t need that. Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha? No, thank you. As a mum I get more than my fair share of scatological humour daily. Into the box with you.

But then there were the more obscure things like Back to Basics and the time it took me to convince myself I didn’t need to know how to pasteurise my own milk or build a self-composting dunny if I was moving back to the inner city.

Or there was my Asana Dialogue which, when abridged, went something like this:

Hatha Yoga?
=> No. You just joined a gym.
But it doesn’t have yoga classes.
=> You have a DVD.
But…
=> No.
I could feature a posture each week on my blog…
=> Your blog is not about yoga.
I could use the symbolism of each asana to discuss different aspects of…
=> No. No. No.

Pausing to consider the fat Genet biography I’ve yet to get around to reading was perhaps more reasonable. It didn’t smack quite so much of desperation. But why does not having all my books on hand or, at least, just around the corner, make me feel so desperate?

Well you see, right here is where I would mention a passage from a novel. The narrator grew up in a house where the all the walls were lined with books, as I did, and she remembers wondering as a child, when she visited bookless homes, what it was that held the walls up. And that is symbolism which resonates with me.

But I can’t share that passage (which I think is in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Truce) because the book is locked away in a cage made of cardboard and packaging tape.

You never know which book you might need.

There is a happy ending though. I kept aside three books while packing my three boxes. The Penguin Opera Guide and Prima Donna: A History, which I need as reference materials for my own novel, and Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems, a book I will be using to write a weekly feature on my blog, unlike the awful asana disaster.

I think three books for three boxes is fair. So I’ve made a deal with myself and tomorrow when I’m packing I get to hold on to fifteen extra books to make up for the boxes already lining the hallway.

The Camus doesn’t count of course. There can never be a cardboard cage for him.