My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  I would say that life split in two that night, is always splitting, an infinite regression, and that often I have been in the luckier half, often my need has called forth an answer—when the young Frenchmen arrived to save me, when my rejected novels were finally accepted. Because of the images I grew up knowing, the face of compassion for me is Jesus, but who is the god of birds and insects, or of the life-forms who were once on Mars? I believe that God is in all of them. I feel God is in each living instance. And so I return to my quest for the soul.

  Perhaps it is the organism’s track through time and space, its particular, detailed, unrepeatable plait of image, memory, and emotion? Its unique path through the universe, even if that is only across a village, across a field, across a stone: or briefly flickering inside another’s body, carried wherever the mother goes. Maybe all memories are inscribed somewhere—some say they are coded in the proteins of the brain, that everything is there but ninety-nine per cent of it is stored invisibly and silently, or we would be maddened with memory, like Borges’s character, Funes the Memorious. When the organism dies, all its memories are lost, and that is part of the ache of bereavement.

  My name for what slips out of reach is a soul. Its lustre comes from our love of it, our helpless sorrow when it has gone. Respect for other living things—the respect that should always be there, but which fails us—might be easier to maintain if we granted every other being a soul: what my hero Kurt Vonnegut’s invented artist, Rabo Karabekian, described in Breakfast of Champions as ‘an unwavering band of light’, invisible but real, shining at the centre of us all.

  For me it is also the net of connections that haloes every consciousness, linked to the future as well as the past, streaming both towards and outwards from our bodies. It’s our sensitivity to what’s outside us: pain and joy, beauty and horror, a capacity that differs for every living thing. It’s also our power to generate surprise: to move at a tangent, to be ourselves, to sing, bark, swing, laugh, play, sulk, fall, to improvise our role in the great living tapestry that makes our planet extraordinary, its whole restless surface a sea of souls. Babies in the womb are already unpredictable, kicking and turning, dancing on their cord, and then sometimes that sensation, magical but brief, that Fay Weldon wrote about in her novel Puffball: sometimes, inside me, the baby was happy; as Weldon describes it, the baby is laughing; the glory of laughter not laughed by me. And every animal on the planet emanates livingness, which is change. In that uniqueness, the soul pulses.

  And that is why killing is the great taboo. For humans, at least, of other humans. But we deem non-human animals less living than ourselves, so we can farm them and kill them for our use.

  When my mother died, I felt lonely because she could no longer react to me, or enjoy change, or look forward to things. Because my mother would never be there again. I would remember her, and I would love her, and I would try to tell her story. But her soul was not with me, and so I was lonely. And so was everyone who loved my mother.

  When the embryos inside me died, we sorrowed because they had lost their future, they had slipped silently into dead matter, their bright capacity for change was stilled. We had lost the mystery of their transformation, and with that, we lost part of ourselves, the part that had hoped to move into their future, and our darling daughter went on alone. Infinitely precious: alive, alive, with her generous capacity to surprise, as she placed the frail cut-out child in my arms, and her love wished a soul into that crumpled paper.

  Ubi sunt? Where do they go?

  If I knew, I would tell you. I would go to find them. I would meet my mother, as she said we would. And yet I am not ready to go beyond, to that place from which it seems we cannot come back. Do they look across the bourn? Do they still see us?

  All I know is that my parents, my grandparents, my aunts, my little band of dear dead friends exist somewhere, as long as I do, transformed into longing and regret, which brightens, at times, into happiness. For they were here, when I was here. We saw each other, we held each other.

  I think of Turner’s Italian paintings, which I have just seen again in Edinburgh, drawn by his skill with tiny, far-off detail—he sometimes used a very fine reed pen. The effect of this is astonishing. Distant islands of sharpness emerge from his mists, clearer and more compelling than his foregrounds. That restored completeness speaks to my desire. As if parts of the past hold more light than the present—an energy which could bear them on into the future. It is not a mirage, it floats there intact, a blue sunlit shore beyond the grey middle ground where a tiny band of souls is still waiting to go forward, about to set sail across the evening for Venice. An afterlife that Turner has saved from dissolution. It shines in water, like a lost pearl necklace.

  There is a bleaker strait where it is hard for me to go. It is a place of unknowing, where only pain is. Though I see how in the scheme of things—whatever that phrase means—it’s an apology, a lie—though in the lying scheme of things, our grief was as nothing, or something small—though other people’s pains are often much greater, I yield to them, concede to them—though I agreed blindly when kind friends said, ‘You are very lucky, you have one daughter’, though the logical side of me assents to this—part of me has never ‘got over’ the miscarriages; ‘got over’, as if they were a stone in the road; as if my mind had returned them to the non-living. I did not know them; I could not touch them. But they lived in me, and were real to me, and in this blind mad part of me, which I never let out into the light, I believe that as I die I will find those children. They will wait for me, and I will hold them. I will know them. I will love them. They will not be lost, for how can they be lost, for if souls can be lost …?

  I don’t know the ending.

  My animal luck (ix)

  the dance, the dance

  I don’t know the ending. Because there is none, until our planet is absorbed by our star. Our lives are so short, a breath, half a breath. This moment soaking up the sun.

  Here and now. The bright shock of the present. I began this memoir two years ago, at St Cuthman’s retreat, near Billingshurst and the ghosts of my girlhood, the village where I lived from seven to seventeen, and I end it in a second retreat, in Hawthornden, Scotland, which is free of memories and ghosts. Perhaps I am free-er than when I started. I look back on the life I have written down, brief bits of a path mostly hidden by trees. I was given much; I have little to forgive.

  Another bee fumbles outside the window, a big heavy visitor, trying to get in. All round me, glorious April has begun. Spring is running away towards summer. The buds of the sycamores along the winding drive were like pale yellow pointed light-bulbs when I got here, slanted every which way on the black wire twigs like the snake of lights on our Christmas tree. But already they have burst into pleated green fans, miniature fingers pushing eagerly outwards, and the bud-cases lie like small wings on the ground. I must not think, as I see the sap rising, that if I die at the same age as my mother, there will only be fifteen more springs. Stay in this moment, the budding moment, the day still pregnant with tomorrow.

  My animal luck: my living body. The living bodies of my husband, my daughter. The chain of three hundred generations of couples, linked in the dance, in the heat of the bed, all of whom were lucky, who begat children. Link after golden link: my luck.

  Thank you, my parents, my grandparents. The two families who joined in me, and before them four, eight, sixteen …

  All that fucking. That blood, that heat. That animal life. Quarrels, laughter, but the business of pushing life on got done.

  Thank you, my friends, my dearest friends. Barbara and Hilary, my sisters, Jim and Grania and all the others who proved to me what kindness was. Thank you my teachers, who saw something in me, that white-haired, skinny, solemn child with her sudden fits of dancing and laughter. Thank you, Mai, who is just out of reach, and Musa, and André, for saving my writing.

  Thank you, Rosa, for being my heart. It is too full to say any more. Thank you, Nick, for giving m
e Rosa. Thank you, Nick, for my animal bliss, for sharing this life with me, this breath.

  Before I go, before you go, I place my story in your hands, the wonder of your living hands.

  This have I done for my true love.

  Tomorrow shall be my dancing day.

  I would my true love did so chance

  To see the legend of my play,

  To call my true love to the dance.

  Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,

  This have I done for my true love.

  (Anon)