by Marc Nash
While school exam papers were being assessed, my family were making assessments of their own. Risk assessments. The larger picture of small-town little girl in the big city, that kind of thing. I mentioned that my in-laws liked to bet. Why not, after all I firmly believe the fluttering gene is something all the races of Ireland inherited from a common aleatoric atavist. Such tidings would incite both lots to go nap! A throwback to times when the only bones of contention were those being cast and rolled at the foot of the Cross. Eyes down for the main chance. And while our novice Lord chanced to look up to the heavens from behind his blinkers, they had the shroud off his back.
Well, if the in-laws launched the odd flier, my family liked to speculate. Dad always backed the grey horse in any race. Whatever the odds. Game of fluctuation and chance, sure, why not try and inject some constancy? What dope needs form, breeding and race conditions when you can chuck pure arbitrariness into the pot? Wouldn’t stir it much, though. The solitary book my family could make was a ghost-written money-spinner for their turf accountant.
I don’t know, maybe my father was actually ahead of the field. Perchance he’d unwittingly intuited a scientific truth to rewrite the pre-historical form guide, hit upon a DNA strain containing the variable allele coding for grey pigmentation, unfolding it back, back, way back to the first accidental mutation yielding that allele. And it just happened to be in some sort of a ‘superhorse’. Maybe a horse with another genetic mutation for swifter glucose release, or greater aerobic capacity, or more efficient muscular recovery tensions. And always passed on down the line in greys. Or maybe it just had an allele providing a greater rectal capacity for shitting on you.
Finally, the man who always bet on the grey completed his risk assessment for me. In dichromatic black and white. His stark speculation decreed that it would be too dangerous for me to go to Belfast. Too threatening out on the streets and the subtext of too hazardous a chance of religious miscegenation with some Taig. Caught him bare-faced in a red-handed lie. But even this I knew not to be the prime mover in circumscribing me. ‘You know, there is such a thing as too many dead languages.’ I think he felt I had already gone some way over the side. Greek and Latin (scrub my mouth out with carbolic) were bad enough. But Ogham had some proximate link to Celtic culture (that is, the older bunch of Scottish immigrants to our isle, as against the more recent stock from which we were extracted). And that had to be expunged right here and now. Switch off the Catholic oncogenes that were dividing in order to multiply, so rapidly as to conquer and rule. Zap the teratoma before it spread inside their own cell walls. Their prescribed dose of chemotherapy was enough to make anyone tear their hair out. Meta stasis.
They did manage to move me out from home soon after, however. I was married off to a local boy, my husband. Not quite a shotgun wedding, since I wasn’t pregnant, and I managed to countermand the paramilitary salute of rounds fired into the air. We settled on walking under a triumphal marriage arch of hecklers and kochs. But the bastards’ balaclavas didn’t match the bridesmaids’ dresses.
(Some of the above is fictional. I’ve got the hump with my husband, a.k.a the troubles {small ‘t’}, right at this period in time.)
Part of me was cheerfully complicit anyway, since at least I was removed from their immediate sphere of pare-rental control. A few streets away at least. Far enough to have a different local boozer. Not quite my dream of another town. And not quite my idea of freedom either. Small town mentalities have led to the perfection of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticism. Albeit a net curtain panoptica. Nowhere are you free of the potential of being under observation, though of course at any one moment, you do not know if you are being scrutinised. Soviet Russia employed it on a large scale I believe; though I wouldn’t know, since I have never visited there. Or anywhere. Since I have never passed through a single port.
(Mind you, panopticism does not work. I mean, the army watchtowers here still can’t prevent things happening on the ground, can they? This lattice of Babel Towers, looming hunched giants, merely shrugging their own baffled fi, fie, foe, fum along the skyline. Their oppressive, penal imagery is all encompassing. You can see how the other side may have a point there.)
Having submissively allowed social expectation to tamp down every one of my instinctual attempts at self-definition, I meekly succumbed to the most dominant yet self-effacing instinct of them all. Motherhood. And I instituted a panoptic system all of my own to vouchsafe the safety of my little girl. Only she really was being watched all hours of the day and thereby I incarcerated myself, since I didn’t know any better and I certainly didn’t know any different.
I can see it in Suzanne already. At four years of age. The indelible impress of my overanxiety. The imprinting of our habitat. An inbred sense of threat. Her father would be so proud, if he had even an inkling. How she cannot bear conflict. Covers her eyes with her small hands, but she cannot eclipse it in darkness indefinitely. For I know what she sees. Some rebarbative relative, visage contorted in a rictus of sectarian hate, breathing fiery vitriol that illuminates the red blood vessels of her eyes. Searing. That is too powerful. Her brain emptied of everything but red. Red is visual danger. Tinged entirely green. Red-green colour blindness, of the genetic variety, is usually restricted to boys. The Chinese bind the feet. We bind the whole of ourselves. The inner judge now in place on his bench. Clad head to foot in red. Even his ermine is bloodstained. He will legislate from now on jus prudence for my Suzanne. She will merely play his tremulous usher. And if ever she feels the urge to legislate for herself, little pinpricks of guilt will stab her. Redden her skin. Since it is the underside of her flesh which burns, she will appreciate that she must be doing it to herself. The paternity suit passed on through the mother’s susceptibility.
Most, if not all, parents like to dream on ahead for their offspring. To fantasise and speculate how they will develop and fare. Not here in Ulster. They get call-up papers with their birth certificates. It’s safer to blow your investments and your hopes on the gee-gees.
Pin back your satellite hearing aids and let me spell it out for you Mr G-Man. And for all the other little G-gnomes out there. Get your hyper-space protective suits on, I’m hyper-linking you to prove this is a case of mistaken identity.
www.cultclassicks.com
The Aum Shrini Kyo doomsday cult wholly centres around the personality of Shoko Asahara. A man whose genes did for him at birth, or at least did for his clear sightedness. But no genetic glitches made him into a despot and mass murderer. That came from his environment, where, like any charismatic cultist, he obviously learned that he could influence and manipulate others. (His egotistical vanity led him to stop sporting his bottle-thick glasses, predators don’t pander to prescriptions.) From there on in he improvised his script. He riffed. Free-formed. Free-wheeled and three-wheeled. Made it up as he went along. Lifted ‘AUM’ from the Hindus. Forged death-dealing by perverting the Buddhist ascension teachings; to wit, accelerating salvation through murder of those less enlightened (enough to wipe the Serene One’s smile from his face). The self-justification of every common or garden psychopath and religious bigot.
Now, hold on to your helmets, we’re moving on again.
www.omcosmogenius.com
AUM. Not a word or a name at all. Except that it is. Aum being the entire Hindu Veda scriptures, bound up in three letters. Aum, or its ameri-anglicisation Om
(which is where I nearly fit in)
represents the entire gamut of vocalisation, behind what we humans like to daub ‘words’.
(I’ve done my research, looked into this, see. I too have combed out the internet during my hair in curlers moments)
The ‘A’ of Aum is produced by the throat, the ‘U’ and ‘M’ through the palate, to the tip of the tongue. And then dies on our lips
(see, I could almost buy into this, because it’s dealing with language as acoustic and physiological, as well as idiomatic and symbolic. Altogether beyond some binary-operated, statistical a
nalysis of resemblance. Only a crumb-bum computer could digitally finger me for some criminal mastermind)
only, it keeps resonating in the silence. The space after the spoken intonation. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was–’ why, ‘aum’ of course! The primordial sound even before the primordial soup. From the supreme silence that predated creation came the ‘Unstruck Sound’; an elemental vibration that is the energy of all life, that does not require two bodies to rub together to manifest itself. Meiosis. The silent sound of the sun, of light and of God’s creative principle. The word ‘om’ both embodies God’s name (and the name of every one of the multifarious personal deities favoured by individuals within Hinduism) and the way of invoking Him. True attainment of the wisdom of om confers a state of immanence with God. This is not the God of the Hebrews who jealously guards his name–
Yada, yada yada. Nor, is it the bastardised ‘god,’ of a poison-wielding, poisonous Japanese, poisoning young minds to follow him in mayhem. And finally, granted though the ‘H’ is silent, nor is it my bloody name either! So please take your unmerited attention elsewhere. I’ve got souls to save.
They say everybody has at least one book inside them.
And mine is gestating. Continuously. As we speak. Ongoing, but not outgoing. Seeing that it’s my personal journal.
For my Confirmation, a wizened aunt bestowed upon me a beautiful calfskin covered notebook. I was in the dark as to her predetermination; whether I was supposed to relive and relish my secular sins, or solemnly to contemplate and renounce them like an account-keeping Protestant (i.e. we don’t service wash our dirty laundry like the Taigs). Which was it to be: God and ink, or nod and a wink for squirreling away girlish secrets? Confirmation, capital ‘C’ or lower case? She had given me no guidance, just this richly aromatic leather-bound book between wax-paper protective covers. In a world of wood-chip, formica and crimplene, this indubitably was an object of pulchritude. Not one I could gaze upon and be enchanted in any ornamental way, but one I could appreciate for its exquisite elegance all the same. So I never dared remove it from its waxy sheath. Its fresh, otherworldly waft never stopped calling me every time I opened the drawer in which it was cradled. Nonetheless, it was far too sublime to stain with any of my inky swell. Until I fell pregnant.
Not that I conceived of it as a personal record of joy, either for me or for my issue to come. There is precious little to savour in here. (Good gracious, no, neither Suzanne nor I must ever be allowed to read back on it.) For any such brooding sentimentalists (thin on the ground in an Ulster ruled by more categorical passions) there are baby books which require far less exertion. Though, after a while even this was ultimately too much for the troubles (small ‘t’) for all the alacrity he evinced on being bequeathed one from his mother. A trip to the Town Hall to register Suzanne’s name left him too emotionally played out to lovingly duplicate the details on Page One of our own private muster. All that marks her entry in the world of the book, through on into the World, is her pointillist attribution through Ultrasound. Like an unfinished jotting. A sketch. That would be about right then, where he is (un-)concerned.
Who am I to talk? For I’ve just owned that my journal is hardly intimately shipshape, nor fondly Bristol fashion either. Due, in the main, to it arising out of a poser of post-natal, deep-impression. The mound of flesh that was me, sinking submerged into every reclining chair fabric we were possessed of. Mushily up hard against the low mental activity that was silting up my champing mind, during the vacant-stared chores of nursing. There were only so many nano-seconds available in the day. Pelvic floor exercises, or turning my hand to re-engage the cogs of my brain? It was no decision to be made really. Yes, why not, let’s properly record this new ordering of the cosmos. Of my corner of it at least. And so I finally took up the hallowed journal. An inhalation of the leather deep into my lungs. She still smelled divine (pray banish the faint ichorous fume, still attending to each recall of inaugural contact with my firstborn). A fresh start for all of us, anointed in the blood of slaughtered infant innocent (er, of the donor calf that is, not my daughter).
But what to write? Write wrongs, gibberish, write anything. Any manipulation would serve as physiotherapy for a debilitated mind. Any verbiage can be sown in the hope of bringing forth life in a desert, should life-affirming waters chance percolate to yield them nourishment. But I needed more than chance. I needed to ratify certitude. I may not presently have much sense of myself, nor an outline of my pneumatic form, but if it has palpable solidity, there in my journal, I must bear some tangible existence? I needed to begin with some brass rubbing over the crypt in which my gist had been consigned. I’d start with shadings. Sketches. Impressions. Steer clear of fully-formed words at this stage. Just something to get my fingers cupping a pen. To flex some feeling back.
XV.III.MCMXCV
When one becomes gravityless; stripped of your entire array of self-expression; and cast asunder in a meaningless world of insignificance; dig deep. Retrench. Stick with what you are assured of. Archeological tongues. Primal tongues. Mother tongues. As against mother-in-law’s tongue (the familial bayonets and bowstrings poised to cut the cord). A hushed tongue, but not one that is mute. A breathless tongue, but not strained. A tongue that is etched in our imaginations. Or one that is just etched in order to be attested. This tongue that flows at the end of my nib.
The surviving remnants of Ogham script, as far as anyone can tell, seem to denote little more than Celtic versions of ‘Kilroy was here’. Graffito pronouncements of presence, lost to posterity. Literally a scratching, rather than a biography. Though superficially they could be seen to resemble DNA analytical printouts, these are not depositions of genealogies, nor territorial ownership. They do not deal in laws, religion or other administrative regularities. Neither do they proffer up calendars or numerical systems, as with most ancient scripts. And yet, since the Ogham alphabet is ineluctably tied to the names of trees, it sort of does both too. A census of trees. A register of arboreal genera. A counting of time by fruits and seasons. All wrapped up and encysted in a resonant alphabet. The scratchy writing, vertically upwards, venerating the configuration of the tree itself. Furnishing the jottings of a wood people, musing on the knotty world that girdled them, yet simultaneously communing with it like a suitor.
Priests, men of God, are imbued with the Word. They live, eat, drink , teach, instruct and recite it. They order both their own and our world by it, though they are able to stand from the vantage within. They are able to compute, to reference any section of the Book at any moment, to confront liquid reality and wring out the Truth. They have it all, every word, every syllable, at their fingertips. No, beyond that even, inside, the whorls and eddies of their prints, tracking back deep inside their fibre, their bundles and fascicles. (XIII.VI.MMI – Would that I had my own life so readily indexed and referencible, instead of having to cast back in my mind for a date and flick through these careworn pages.)
This is the annealing of their vocation and their training. Written in the very tissue of the priestly body. This is how men give birth and mock our life-giving magic powers. They write down formulas for our incantations and summonings. They explain away our enchantments and disarticulate our charms through articulation. (XIII.VI.MMI – I know this, since I have just returned from consulting one, a clergyman that is, in confidence, about some connubial problems.)
But this is my volume now. As a way of pouring into myself. My story. My prompt. My transmission. I don’t appeal to God or any externality. I appeal to myself. My knotty musings and self-wooing. Reaching out to take the hand of an unseen chaperon beckoning me. I make notches on the tree bark so that I will be able to trace my way back home. Since my enclosure has yielded its purpose before another who is now out in the world, I seek to return it to me via my journal. I’ve gone in search of it. My portfolio. My contents. My stock. I need to reinternalise myself. Reorient my vestibule, repossess my atrium, recondition and redecorate my wardroom. Impo
se my taste on it once again. This journal is the moulted skin of my life. My depilation. I have neither saved nor preserved any hair or nail clippings from Suzanne, despite the supplications of the abandoned baby book, for the same reason we don’t possess a camcorder; couldn’t imagine any occasion I’d whip them out for perusal. Too redolent of saintly relics. Or crime scene forensics. But I will still maintain this log.
XXIX.II.MCMXCIX
And, right at this moment, it might actually come in rather handy. I do not hold it up in competition with all those published manuals I mentally shredded. But as I flick through its leaves, it might refresh my memory as to certain timings. Like a baby cook book.
Not that I am particularly concerned as to whether Amy is early or late with regard to some key developmental stage. Not being one of those mothers who marked each of Suzanne’s achievements, by dashing to the phone to elicit intelligence as to the present disposition of her nearest rivals. Due, in the main, to neither Suzanne nor myself having much in the way of peers with whom we rubbed up against socially. Suzanne is and will forever be, in my eyes, peerless (just so long as it is only I who remains friendless).
No, this is with reference more as to how long I have to endure the current, particularly doleful cycle. To wit, teething (grit I, through unflossed and nightly ground gnashers). This one is for me. As I lie back in a warm bath. My first protracted soak (as against skinny dipping my fat flesh under the showerhead) since being wreathed in sweat with Amy’s birth. I’ve brokered a watching brief from the troubles (small ‘t’), primed to respond to any baby monitor incursions (murphy’s law they’ll both sleep through blissfully this evening). Actually, the negotiations were instigated by him, having remarked that I was beginning to reek. In an environmentally-redolent sort of way, rather than his nose being helplessly led by some favourably sour hormonal hook. How did things get to such a pass? Now would be a good time to review. I don’t intend to leave this tub until the immersion tank can no longer revive the water that lavishes on me its sheen of mock sultriness. By the cold light of day, I want to have been rebaptised into life.
