The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals. Elizabeth Smart
beside me at dinner parties.
‘How do you do, dear one,’ I say, wanting above all to be brave, dandified, unobtrusive; to smile like the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing his intestines: saying, ‘It’s nothing! It’s nothing! I don’t feel a thing! Pay no attention! Please continue our conversation!’
But I vomit at the side when I notice his decomposing face. Especially in dreams. All feeling shall cease like the grinders and I shall be cold, cold, and everyone will examine my private papers.
Besides, what is the end of the story?
Boring and gory by turns, painful, repetitive, the story goes on, leads where?
Curiosity, ignorance, humility, pride, lead one to take the next step, and the next, and the next.
Only the prisoner understands the meaning of freedom. What if he speaks with embarrassing passion? What if sometimes his bias is bitter? Little by little such great flapping words come flying home to roost.
Yesterday from my office window I saw a crippled girl negotiating her way across the street, her shoulders squarely braced. At each jerky movement her hair flew back like an annunciatory angel, and I saw she was the only dancer on the street.
All right. We begin. We take our hypothesis: Everyone must work; nobody must loaf. ‘Pull your own weight,’ my mother repeats. And Henry Vaughan, that dear beauteous jewel, says: ‘Keep clean, bear fruit, and wait.’
This seems to cover housework, childbirth, sainthood.
But money must come into it.
One man I saw, though, if I may bring in a feudal loophole before we examine the working proposition, who strung exquisite beads together. He lived in a tenement and was called Goofy Al. A certain Lady Elixir walked by there one day to take some Robert Greig seedcake to a dying charlady, but didn’t know of his existence. Otherwise she would certainly have arranged, by a little more whoring and a little less charring, to have eased the lot of a master craftsman.
And since, then, Lady Elixir’s seedcake might have kept poor Al alive, when a public vote would not have; and charity from a less picturesque hand might have warped his mighty spirit, I am reluctant, until we know more, to see the future so drearily laid out like an allotment garden, with each to his patch of work.
It was to work that the serpent hissed them out of Eden.
Adam delved and Eve span.
In their sorrow they brought forth children.
But in Adam’s absence, Eve has much to do.
Too much? We’ll see.
It was up those tenement steps where the children sat, waiting for things to happen, and the stale curtains blew out so intimately above the tired geraniums, that I heard a young girl ask: ‘Mother, what is happening to my breasts? Two little knobs have appeared.’
Far away, long ago, the first rumbling intimations of the cruel sexual bargain to come.
Once, at my window, looking for relevancies, I saw a church through ferny leaves of a tree, and a five-pointed star embellishing a rooftop venthole.
Faintly I heard the congregation singing. The white sang flat. The black sounded like an orgy. I thought this last might lead somewhere.
Might lead the daughters to the sacred grove?
Maybe.
God likes a good frolic.
But enough. All this is leading us, with unsuitable sighs, to the bird’s-eye view, the aftermaths of love and adolescence – that pair we deride when we are impotent and consequently jealous. That’s for later.
There are long years to slog through first.
‘The spectacle of a young woman so obsessed with her own emotions revolts me.’
Is it possible in the midst of the battle to view the war with a larger perspective?
We’ll see.
After being knocked out on the battlefield (of love? of passion? – never mind now), I lay a long time like Lazarus waiting for Jesus to come and tell me to get up. He may have come. Or he may not. Or he may have come and I have moved to another address. Or maybe he kissed me in a spot where too much local anaesthetic lingered. Anyway, there has been no resurrection.
It is not as if I hung upon a cross saying, ‘Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’; for none of my wounds, if any exist, are bleeding. I sit at a desk in an office, making out shopping lists, adding up my bills.
When Jericho fell, weeping was permitted, and in Babylon it was fashionable to make a memorable moan by the retreating waters. But here you must go to your office, looking sprightly, with a sparkle even if synthetic in your eye. For who dares to stand up and say ‘We are weary! O Christ but we are weary!’
I must keep my eye on the object, which is: the annihilation of love, so that love may be suffered; or, rather, the cessation of feeling, so that suffering may be borne, and love, possibly, reborn in a new form.
In the meantime I smell spring flowers, but fail to cry out luscious gratitude like Whitman. If I say, ‘My love lies three thousand miles away’, that is merely to say, ‘It is so many miles from Clapham Junction to London.’ If he were here he would be no nearer. If he took me in his arms I should say ‘Two bones meet.’
That’s a burnt-out comet.
Even though I know, among the other statistics, that the rousable senses lie volcanic underneath, it is not this May that the flowers will sprout on me.
But we are getting away from the object, again, always into this obsessional fog. (I am the obsessional type. Which type are you? If you are the butterfly type you will never forgive my intensity.)
Has anyone ever been this way before? There are no signs.
An obsessional fog, even if it is made of a flock of holy ghosts, is not the sort of thing we can put before the members of Parliament. The domestic details, yes, if suitably arranged, but not the mad moment, not the electric revelations that cause the soul to seize up.
Is it a certain shyness on their part that makes them unable to take in these trembling statistics, too fleshy too flighty too messy for debating floors? Could they be leaving out some crucial bits? They could be. But that’s the way they are. Facts must be your friends.
At the corner of the roof, two sparrows make love just outside their nest. The male cleans his beak and looks abroad after each bout. The female, though, quivers and continues to chirp a low note, looking round in fearful expectation for the next act. She is fearful in case there will be no next act, and the future suddenly cease.
I am in England, where I longed to be.
I escaped by a hair’s breadth the torpedo that seemed at the time to be a friendly if banal ender of my story. When the alarm sounded, I waited, with my daughter strapped into my lifebelt, full of relief, a kind of wicked joy, that I should be offered such an effortless way out of my pain.
But that was not to be.
Abandoning love as a comfortable kind of completion, a double or nothing; forgetting the nights O the red nights under Brooklyn Bridge; memory must memorize only a way to live or go mad; and forget the rest.
To dare to be born.
To bear love.
Notice how nature makes therapeutically blurred all visions until one has served her