Of (Mark) and (Anne)

I had a book binge last week, which included a second-hand copy of 'Winter Trees' by Sylvia Plath. It was SUCH an unnecessary purchase, seeing as I already own her complete works in a single volume, but there's something about a novel-length collection of poems that I find endlessly daunting. Not to mention the way it seems to obliterate the individuality of each separate collection. So it looks like I'll be making up the complete works a second time.

It's a nice-looking book. I was pretty happy. What I didn't notice in the shop was the inscription. It's written on the first page, in loopy blue biro.

(Anne) to the most adored, loved, mentally bejewelled person this side of anywhere - with lots of frog-freckled love, not to mention hugs, kisses, smooches, cuddles, the odd rummage and so forth - Mark xxxx 9/11/81

The romantic in me wants to believe they had some star-spangled giddy love affair culminating in the untimely death of Anne (Mark) and the dispersion of all her worldly goods (given her by Mark) to the winds by her (his) grief-stricken lover. The cynic in me suspects they had a star-spangled giddy love affair culminating with graduation and disillusionment with the real world, followed by a period of cold unnecessary bickering and painful drift. Then they would've parted ways; Anne probably found some lover in the corporate sector, got engaged, and came across this slim blue volume while cleaning out all her old junk in preparation for moving into her fiancee's sleek inner-city digs. Preferring to disavow her romantic/literary/bohemian past, she chucked it on the 'out' pile along with some Ginsberg, Kafka, Beauvoir et al. Not usually one for sentiment, she couldn't quite bring herself to throw them out; instead she bundled them up and left them outside a second-hand bookshop in the dead of night. She drove off slightly flustered and stopped for takeout on the way home.

There is a particular term, Valerie, which strikes terror in the heart of small Penelope:

early-onset Alzheimer’s. Does that not send chills of the highest order down your spine? Now as you surely know dear, I have always been one of the more scattered of brained beings, but not so long ago I was beginning to have serious doubts about whether, in fact, this affliction were less incidental than pathological. Take, for instance, the time I accidentally booked a flight to Bangkok instead of Brisbane. Or the way I consistently confuse tomatoes with potatoes, cherries with grapes, washing with shopping. Or any one of the several times last year that I accidentally made saucy little hatinators for staid old biddies, and giant feathered monstrosities for the high-at-heel and young-at-heart. Or the way I can never seem to remember what I did yesterday. Or what the book I just finished reading was about. And then there was the mortifying confusion of Susans Sarandon and Sontag at a dinner party once.

I was spiralling into a full-scale panic about my mental faculties until I read an editorial by a lady who is prone to leaving books in the vegetable crisper. She could trace her absent-mindedness right back to her grandmother, who one day was chopping soap for the copper and vegetables for the soup at more or less the same time. Needless to say, the soap ended up in the soup, and the laundry turned into minestrone.

Until such an occasion eventuates, darling, I think I can relax a little.

A learned woman I met once had been reading a book about the human brain. She told me that the brain is plastic: in other words, mutable. When parts of the brain sit disused, they are trimmed away to allow development in other areas. What worried her was the state of education in relation to our cranial development. When she was at school, she said, students were forced to memorise large chunks of poetry, Shakespeare, the Bible. Most of it was irrelevant, of course. Whoever quotes tracts of Hamlet in everyday speech? What counted was the process. The act of recall. How are younger generations supposed to gain the capacity for sustained, concentrated thought, she asked, when memorisation is reduced to an English oral with palmcards, television is presented in bite-sized chunks of entertainment and advertising, and the internet is a tangle of hyperlinked info-bytes?

I have heard a similar argument put forward in relation to literacy in ancient societies. Someone once told me that some civilisations preferred to maintain illiteracy amongst the general populace so that their memories would remain supple (amongst other, less noble reasons, I’m sure). Now, I haven’t been able to verify this yet, darling, but it is a fair point: writing something down immediately gives us license to forget it. Why bother remembering when your Blackberry can remember for you?

Really, Valerie, I ask you: is it any wonder our memories are getting worse by the day, when our brains are trained to receive and dispose of morsels of information within the same heartbeat?? Like the time I walked through customs on my arrival from an overseas trip, chatting merrily on the phone to one of my dearest friends. An official kindly informed me that I could earn a $250 fine for having my mobile on. Hadn’t I seen the sign? Of course not, or if I had I'd forgotten: I was jet-lagged, and blinded by the posters promising duty-free delights around the corner. Another time a railway official roundly abused me for taking my suitcase up the escalator. I was meant to use the lift; hadn’t I seen the sign? Of course not, or if I had I'd forgotten: it was obliterated by ads for Frangelico and a forest of whipper-snappers waving copies of MX in my face. Valerie, we are simply glutted on a neverending smorgasbord of textual fragments which are so small that we cannot help but read them. Most of them, of course, are useless, so what happens? We become trained forgetters!

I went to Taiwan not so long ago. I don’t know a word of Mandarin, and I can’t begin to tell you the relief of not being able to understand a single sign in the city. It had its navigational disadvantages, of course, but oh! The serenity! The sense of calm that comes from not having words flashing into your head wherever you look! The luxury of following a train of thought from A to Z without the distractions of inane, unrelated text (shop names, ads, slogans, news headlines, latest offers, menus in the window, today onlys, bargain buy now cheap cheap cheap)! I came home and almost began to wish I were illiterate, just to enjoy the freedom of a single uninterrupted thought.

Darling, I think I will pretend to be blind. I’ll walk around with my eyes shut wearing dark glasses and swishing a cane at people’s ankles. I will starve myself of all written materials save those that I expressly choose to partake of. I will take control of my cerebral diet once and for all! And just think what will happen to my intellect!

Yours in imminent genius,

Penelope.

Literary Orgasms: A Brief Footnote

… so I wasn’t reading erotica. And I wasn’t hunting down once-banned books. But I was still pretty surprised at how hard actual orgasms are to come by in your average novel. Most authors seem to draw a tactful curtain over that particular aspect of existence. It reminds me of a letter I read in a newspaper once, from an old lady complaining about the explicitness of sex scenes in the movies nowadays. And she wasn’t being prudish. Things were way more saucy, she said, when the hero and the heroine shut the door on you and left it up to your imagination.

She had a point. I’m endlessly intrigued by the seen/unseen divide. The ways the hinted-at can be so much more erotic than the explicit. Maybe the Victorians were onto something with their floor-length skirts and oft-elevated necklines. In the absence of cleavage and acres of skin, apparently, the humble shoe achieved unprecedented erotic significance: the merest curve of an instep or glimpse of a shapely ankle was enough to make a Victorian gent cream his woollen drawers.

So in the spirit of the gently seductive, I’m widening my search. Expect metaphor, innuendo and plenty of drawn curtains. But in the meantime, here’s a little gem I stumbled across in the course of my summer reading -

“then he pulled his fingers very slowly down my face, lightly tracing from my jaw to my throat and then all the way down to my waist. My eyes rolled back into my head a little.” – Stephanie Meyer, New Moon

Have you heard of the Rushdie Affair, Valerie?

If not, I’ll condense it for you: Salman Rushdie published a book that angered a far-away man and many adherents of a not-at-all-far-away religion. Then, in an utterly ridiculous twist best contained within the bounds of awful fiction, a bounty was placed on his life.

Now I don’t want to quibble about his suspect innocence here – although personally, I think he could have been a wee bit more sensitive – but you have to feel for the man: the state stepped in to keep him under armed guard, sleeping in a different hotel every night, staying away from the windows lest someone catch a glimpse of his infamous head. People in the publishing industry were stabbed, shot, killed in the name of a novel. Imagine the weight on his shoulders, darling!

Now the salt in the wounds of the offended, dearest, was that before he defected to England, Rushdie grew up in India, immersed in the very culture that he criticised in his book. What was he thinking? they cried, and, how dare he?! and, he should have known better! And as if that weren’t enough, people in his adopted country started griping about the cost of his protection. Turn him loose! they cried, and, let him fend for himself instead of wasting taxpayer’s money on his room service (he wasn’t, incidentally. Being a famous author has some financial perks). Now, it probably didn’t help that in said novel he’d referred to their – his – prime minister as “Ms Torture” and described a nightclub where her lifesize waxen counterpart was ritualistically nuked – amongst certain other unfavourable comments upon the English. Nevertheless, darling, the poor man was caught in quite a remarkable bind unique to the emigrant: first you get criticised for turning your back on your birthplace, then you get eaten up for daring to make insinuations about the culture that has so graciously accepted you as one of its constituent citizens.

It makes me sick, Valerie! The very concept of emigration is predicated on a myth: the myth of nationhood. Firstly, we don’t get to choose where we’re born. Secondly, we have never met about 22 million of the people we share our vast continent with, and we never will. Yet this myth is perpetuated to make us think we have something in common with every one of those 22 million others (except the paedophiles. And the rapists. And the serial killers, street artists, crack addicts, shoplifters, armed robbers, gang bashers, gang bangers, child pornographers, photographers of naked children, and Collingwood supporters). The myth says: this is what Australians value! You live in Australia! Therefore, this is what you and everyone you know values!

Do you know, I used to think I was immune to that myth? I refused to attend Australia Day celebrations, I scoffed at overt displays of patriotism, I even donned a jersey with the stars and stripes when everyone else was wearing green and gold for some sports-related hoo-ha. Then I went overseas. It is interesting how subtly nationhood insinuates itself. The only times I’ve ever felt Australian, dear, were when I wasn’t in Australia. People say, Oh look! An Australian! and, Say something in your accent! and, We bought kangaroo steak because we thought you might be homesick! And it’s all fun and games laughing at people’s stereotypes of us until someone says something critical. All of a sudden you become staunchly loyal. It’s like the bathmat wars of 2000, dearest. Have I told you about them? It happened like this: my mother was away and a relative stayed over to keep me company. Now, I am a solemn believer in leaving the bathmat on the floor after use. It is, after all, a mat. She, however, preferred to drape the bathmat over the towel rail. I was, at the time, very defensive of my household systems. On finding the bathmat on the towel rail, I would immediately lay it flat on the floor. On using the bathroom after me, she would immediately pick it up and pop it back on the rail. This continued for some time. And don’t think it was a twice-daily occurrence, dear. That mat would have shifted fifty times a day. It was a case of all-out passive-aggressive bathroom warfare that only ended with her visit.

What did I learn from that little episode? Simply that we are outrageously defensive of our own little systems and outrageously incapable of weighing two methods impartially if one of them is our own. Now, if I had decided to hang the bathmat on the towel rail, I could have left it there all day. I read a little editorial the other day by a man who had just returned from England, where ATM withdrawals are free. He complained about his accumulating $2 fees to a friend, and do you know what his friend did, Valerie? He defended those pesky little fees, just because the alternative was to acknowledge the English way over the Australian.

See? This is what we need writers for, Valerie: the dissemination of perspective. A reprieve from the political, national-mythical biases of the popular media. And we need to give the poor writers a break. Calling them ingrates for critiquing their culture, or their adopted culture, or somebody else’s culture – so long as they do it with balance and sensitivity – is just one step away from censorship and propagandism.

Yours from a very high horse indeed,

Penelope.