Midnight Mass
Question:
The best of all possible worms on 27/10/2005 1:08 pm wrote: >> Loneliness is the privilege of the leisured. I wish I had time to be >> lonely, or to discover that I’m not. > Well, that’s been answered for me. Mum died in hospital at 2pm last > night, local time.
Condolences. From your previous emails I thought there would be more time. I hope it was what they call "peaceful" in the end… I mean painless for her. I’m really sorry to hear that this has happened, no matter how expected it was. Or how prepared you thought you were. I can’t help you with any of this I’m afraid, because I’m one of these people who doesn’t feel very much or very deeply, mostly. I’ve not really had to cope with the death of a loved one. So I’ll leave all that to others who know their stuff. All I can say is, I’m sorry. *** I was having a day of leisure today too and spent it all afternoon with my mum, dad and brother. Partly because I could and because I like them a fair amount, but generally because it was necessary to pick up a china cat. You’re right about mums like that. My mum’s mummish mantra is "As long as you’re all happy, and "settled". "Settled". like we need to be put in position and set in stone, a place for everything and everything in its place. She’s great though, and so’s dad. No matter, or more likely because of, how "comically" [IMO] incensed they get over the government, and GWB, and kids today, and how I’m being treated and how my brother’s getting on alone. It seems to be an extension of how protective they’ve been over the years about me and the others; stifling as it’s felt at times in the past, I’d miss it. I’ll stop rambling. I had a good day today. Sorry to hear yours was at the other end of the scale.
Response:
"The best of all possible worms" (nevilemo…@yahoo.com) writes: > The best of all possible worms wrote: >> Loneliness is the privilege of the leisured. I wish I had time to be >> lonely, or to discover that I’m not. > Well, that’s been answered for me. Mum died in hospital at 2pm last > night, local time.
…………………………… I am not at work today either… F cleaning, F the cold and rain……. Infinite hug…………………………….. 
……………………….~~OB~~…. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> I am not at work today. I care how pissed off this will make people, > but only slightly. > Mostly, I’m like my Dad. We maintain, for this reason, a cautious, > embarrassed, ceremonious non-relationship. We have the same voice, > stature, eyebrows, neuroses, egotistical blind-spots, and predatory > tastes in women. We’re too alike to be at ease together. The genes I > got from my mother are the ones that occasionally complicate and > paralyse the smooth running of the resulting "life" I’ve apparently > had. I’ve gone through it seeing people look surprised: "But what does > your mother think? Doesn’t she mind?" when I’m recounting my latest > stupidity or self-destructive eccentricity. "She doesn’t mind. She only > " (this part always comes out kind of apologetic) "wants me to be > ‘happy’". Mothers like that are apparently rare. I seem to have > inherited this odd, mild preference for seeing people happy rather than > the reverse, coupled with the baseless and rather childish conviction > that everyone is his own best judge of what makes him happy, but it’s > (fortunately) a recessive gene, easily swamped by more urgent > requirements such as sex. Still, it complicates things occasionally. > I’ve been scrupulous about not passing it on. It doesn’t really fit in > with society, or with anything, really. As she didn’t. > Mostly, what persists (me, three sisters, offspring thereof) is an > obstinate, dogged insistence on not trimming feelings to the allowed > categories supplied by novels and soaps: expressed, frequently, in > refusing to talk or say anything, rather than say something simple and > inadequate. And an extremely subtle sense of the humorous absurdity of > just about everything, rarely glimpsed and rarely on cue with the > conversation.
Some of the ast part e thins you still have to find to be your dad;s indluence…;-) But what do I know……. My heart still is stopped right now…..ears falling down my cheeks…. Tried till exaustion, dear friend…So did your mom…….. > She collected objects, some of which were objets, some just whimsical > acquisitions. These were arranged in the same kind of instinctive > furnishing plan that drives my new stepdaughter to line up all her toys > into fortress walls around her bedroom floor. How they were arranged > was a difficult language like that of bees: a dead one, now. The > objects will be scattered around various charity shops in South-east > England. They will keep their patina of nicotine, their unscrubbed, > reassuring, sticky belovedness, for a long time. My mother belonged to > the last generation of people who enjoyed smoking and insisted on doing > so in public, without apology. I shall probably stop now: there’s no > one left on this earth I could enjoy a cigarette "with".
………………………. > She sang too loud in church, or later, wherever communal singing was > called for, and dared to go out dressed in canary yellow dungarees. > This at least is a common attribute of mothers: the embarrassingly > loud, out of date warbling. It seems to develop as naturally as > lactation, friends say. But she never went off key.
That too the you take from your dad;-)……;-) Like me, she also > wanted to explore and be different and out of date, and didn’t care > whether a bird glimpsed in or a feather picked up under a hedge was > collectable or fit to be conversed or written about: nobody but her was > allowed to decide what should interest her. Whoever empties her flat > will find a lot of feathers, a lot of pebbles, a lot of stuff which > wasn’t meant to concern anyone else.
………… > She fabulated about her past, like everyone in the family. I’ve > forgotten most of mine and don’t pretend that what I remember is other > than hopeful fiction with dabs of reality here and there: like her, I > have no coherent "childhood" left to talk about. In her fabulations, > the borders between truth and fiction were constantly shifting: she > didn’t really respect fiction as a category. She wanted to have lived > something more novelesque than memory allowed or supplied: in the end > she did, in her imagination, which people were only allowed to peer > into obliquely on odd occasions.
………………….. > She missed out on the kind of relationships which reconcile people to > social conformity and inflate their self-esteem. In the end, it didn’t > matter: the payback was that there was, finally, no-one around asking > or bribing her to be other than herself, a form of company with which > she was truculently content a lot of the time. I don’t have to > extricate what was really her from what was just habitual polite > deception. It was all really her, and it’s all gone.
……………. There are no words when the most important one of our vocabulary leaves: "mom……….." …I am so so so so so so sorry…………….:( Yet so so so so glad you could go spend time with her and have those moments together…That *she* could too!!! As "a" mo I can say this" it is kayof our kids cry and sob.Yes, we want them to be happy. But not repressed and not carruying the sobs forever inside, exactly *cause* we wat them to be happy! And so say, sir… Your fear of making a child that would bring such sentiments in the world for resembling your mom…. Perhaps you can re-evaluate it…. For the sentiments seem more than just noble, and what this world could use more of…… Like she was the product in part of her own parents genes, she is in yours…. Like she is part of every single cell you are…. -With or without child…. Your mind must be everywhere…… ……………………………………………. so so so s so so so so sorry, OB….:(…………….. ……………………………………………….. …………………………………………. …………………………………………………….. ………………………….. Chloe —
Response:
The best of all possible worms wrote: > Loneliness is the privilege of the leisured. I wish I had time to be > lonely, or to discover that I’m not.
Well, that’s been answered for me. Mum died in hospital at 2pm last night, local time. I am not at work today. I care how pissed off this will make people, but only slightly. Mostly, I’m like my Dad. We maintain, for this reason, a cautious, embarrassed, ceremonious non-relationship. We have the same voice, stature, eyebrows, neuroses, egotistical blind-spots, and predatory tastes in women. We’re too alike to be at ease together. The genes I got from my mother are the ones that occasionally complicate and paralyse the smooth running of the resulting "life" I’ve apparently had. I’ve gone through it seeing people look surprised: "But what does your mother think? Doesn’t she mind?" when I’m recounting my latest stupidity or self-destructive eccentricity. "She doesn’t mind. She only " (this part always comes out kind of apologetic) "wants me to be ‘happy’". Mothers like that are apparently rare. I seem to have inherited this odd, mild preference for seeing people happy rather than the reverse, coupled with the baseless and rather childish conviction that everyone is his own best judge of what makes him happy, but it’s (fortunately) a recessive gene, easily swamped by more urgent requirements such as sex. Still, it complicates things occasionally. I’ve been scrupulous about not passing it on. It doesn’t really fit in with society, or with anything, really. As she didn’t. Mostly, what persists (me, three sisters, offspring thereof) is an obstinate, dogged insistence on not trimming feelings to the allowed categories supplied by novels and soaps: expressed, frequently, in refusing to talk or say anything, rather than say something simple and inadequate. And an extremely subtle sense of the humorous absurdity of just about everything, rarely glimpsed and rarely on cue with the conversation. She collected objects, some of which were objets, some just whimsical acquisitions. These were arranged in the same kind of instinctive furnishing plan that drives my new stepdaughter to line up all her toys into fortress walls around her bedroom floor. How they were arranged was a difficult language like that of bees: a dead one, now. The objects will be scattered around various charity shops in South-east England. They will keep their patina of nicotine, their unscrubbed, reassuring, sticky belovedness, for a long time. My mother belonged to the last generation of people who enjoyed smoking and insisted on doing so in public, without apology. I shall probably stop now: there’s no one left on this earth I could enjoy a cigarette "with". She sang too loud in church, or later, wherever communal singing was called for, and dared to go out dressed in canary yellow dungarees. This at least is a common attribute of mothers: the embarrassingly loud, out of date warbling. It seems to develop as naturally as lactation, friends say. But she never went off key. Like me, she also wanted to explore and be different and out of date, and didn’t care whether a bird glimpsed in or a feather picked up under a hedge was collectable or fit to be conversed or written about: nobody but her was allowed to decide what should interest her. Whoever empties her flat will find a lot of feathers, a lot of pebbles, a lot of stuff which wasn’t meant to concern anyone else. She fabulated about her past, like everyone in the family. I’ve forgotten most of mine and don’t pretend that what I remember is other than hopeful fiction with dabs of reality here and there: like her, I have no coherent "childhood" left to talk about. In her fabulations, the borders between truth and fiction were constantly shifting: she didn’t really respect fiction as a category. She wanted to have lived something more novelesque than memory allowed or supplied: in the end she did, in her imagination, which people were only allowed to peer into obliquely on odd occasions. She missed out on the kind of relationships which reconcile people to social conformity and inflate their self-esteem. In the end, it didn’t matter: the payback was that there was, finally, no-one around asking or bribing her to be other than herself, a form of company with which she was truculently content a lot of the time. I don’t have to extricate what was really her from what was just habitual polite deception. It was all really her, and it’s all gone.
Response:
You are soundlessly flashed out of sleep and, with a slight stumbling sense of tinsel and presents, drugged downstairs and into your wellies. Then into the overstuffed with muttering family car, and off to participate in the ritual. Half way through which you get bored, lose your faith, and have the notion of entertaining yourself. Vaguely wicked things occur between your surprised hands. Then the ritual gets fainter, dribbles and sighs into a vague melchisedech; a doll is shown your unwiped lips, you are bundled back to your Home, crawl back into bed and die. Night time then was always all about Ritual. In Barcelona airport, at a certain hour of night, everyone in the single open overnight cafeteria simultaneously gets out a notepad and paper and starts writing. I saw it. A lady I quite liked the look of also came and sat at my table. It was nice being married and not having to say or try anything. I love all that, always did. The not sleeping, the coffee, the wandering out into the taxi bay for a smoke, the exclusiveness of the not sleeping set all painstakingly ignoring one another under the oasis lights in the terminal corner. By that witching writing hour I’d also got through, bar the last chapter, an interesting sex ‘n’ shagging book by a high-class Barcelona callgirl, smugly empowered by opening her legs into an alternative dimension of yachts and clothes. Of course the book did not do justice to its blurb ("the hidden world of…") but what book ever does these days? bloody blurbs. It did remind me, though, that there are people around who live (according to their lights, which in her case were Habitat) all the time, not just in occasional terrified crannies behind work’s back. I spend my time re-evaluating why I hate my job. At the moment, I consider that the vermilion flycatcher on the phone wires outside represents all wisdom, but amiable as it is, it’s not giving much away. It just sits there, darts around and looks infuriatingly halcyon. I have made a new friend. She is a virgin on a bus. She is dark-haired and has a kind of "I live in a large country house" air about her. Perfect skin, though inappropriately white for the time of year. She appears to be a ventriloquist, since she comes with a glove puppet dummy that looks like a young Mozart. On her head there is a crown so big that if it were made of anything but cardboard it would probably shorten her neck by several inches. She also comes on a kind of silvery mounting, maybe intended to represent a throne. She would probably look kind of stuck-up if it weren’t for the crown and the throne which have the effect of dwarfing her and making her more fragile and well, quite nice and approachable. She is the "Virgen del Cisne", and appears to be a big hit round here. Lucio, who was president around the time I arrived, is currently in jail in Quito. He’d been doing the Dad’s army thing, prodding Ecuador with sinously curling arrows, first from Peru and then from Colombia. The Colombia visit was less than smart, since he had managed to piss off the FARC while in office, and they dumped a fatwa on him, hence Quito and jail. "I’m safer here," he muttered on being shown his cell. Unfortunately, there’s no legal justification for his being in jail beyond a trumped-up treason charge based on his having said, while on tour in the USA, that he was still the President and that people should worship him accordingly (he’s cute like that). There are nine other charges, inc. "being a crap President" and "getting a Peruvian journalist killed", but those require the existence of a Supreme Court to be heard, and Ecuador ain’t got no Supreme Court at the moment. Instead, there is a TV show called "Looking Around for the Ideal Supreme Court" which discusses candidates for the Supreme-Court-to-fill-the-empty-building in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of a Miss World contest (seeing prospective members of the judiciary parading in swimsuits appears to be a very real prospect, way things are going.) The new president, Palacio, is staking everything on a plebiscite intended to allow the setting-up of a "constituent assembly". The idea, as far as I can make out, would be to replace the current democratically elected and universally despised Congress (which is blocking the motion, allowing Palacio to play the enviable role of People’s Representative against the Corrupt Politicians, a corrupt politician’s dream) with something more "of the People". No-one seems too sure how this would work. One "source" said that the Assembly would be only 50% elected, with the other 50% made up of "representatives of civil society", ie thugs of one sort or another. How this would help, I don’t know. The other day I turned on the TV news and watched in stupefaction as what appeared to be a professional TV camera crew (if it was amateur video, it was unusually well done) filmed the lynching of an presumed uxoricide in Esmeraldas. The guy was cornered by a crowd, tried to escape by jumping into a river, was met at the other side by more village folk, dragged out, beaten with sticks, and pushed back into the water half-dead. There was a close-up of a rock hitting the floating head, instantly staining the surrounding water a deeper red. The face of the (female) rock-thrower, moments before, had been pixelised out. Then the (probably dead) body was dragged naked through the streets. The newscaster’s comments were moralistic and gloating: there was no suggestion that perhaps it would have been better to have had, say, a trial first. Put this together with the baying crowds currently marching through Quito and Wirekill, and you’ve got where Ecuador seems to be going right now. Living in a country where a fragile democracy and the rule of law are breaking down before your eyes, to be replaced with stampeding mobs, is quite exhilarating: add to this the current foreign investment exodus, and the fact that we are running out of electricity, and it starts to get troubling. (It’s just been discovered that Ecuador’s generating capacity is inadequate to deal with demand, and that fixing this would require huge investment and hydro dam-building projects which would take 15 years to complete, even assuming someone had the cash. Hence, the country which is about to launch an ad campaign in the US selling itself as an eco-tourists’ paradise is hurriedly dragging in offshore floating generators that have already led to massive air and sea contamination around the Wirekill coastline, "don’t have babies" TV ads, etc. You also get ads all day advising you not to put warm food in the fridge, not to leave lights on. etc. The Wirekill council is planning to phase out street lighting, thus assuring the city its continued reputation as a thieves’ paradise. It’s still a happening place, all told.) I am still pretending to teach Eng Lit and feeling like I’m in freefall, as doing this job for another year is ruled out for mental health reasons, and there’s no alternative yet visible. There is a parrot in my street/alley, a couple of doors away from a shop. I suspect it of being a macaw. When you go to shops in Ecuador, you can’t actually go inside, since they are all fronted by iron bars: you stand in front of them and say "a ver" ("Let’s see") in a plaintive voice, repeating as necessary until someone appears. Then you ask for what you want and they invent a price according to how tall you are and shove whatever at you through the bars. Well, this putative macaw passes the time by saying "a ver" in about sixteen times as many tones of voice, from exasperated to ghostly and sinister to impishly gleeful, as the canniest human impressionist could invent. It also chatters away in what would sound like perfect Spanish, if only you could make out a single word: the syllabification is random, but the intonation is so exactly that of a scolding, rabbitting housewife making her kids’ lives permanently miserable that it’s quite eerie. You only have to relax slightly and your mind will fit words to the tune quite readily: I suspect the Apostles had a parrot like that (cept they pretended it was a pigeon, for reasons best known to themselves). Anyway, this parrot is the soundtrack to my guilty afternoons spent wishing I either did not have work to do, or had done it. I do not have Seven Habits. I do not have Seven Habits, yet I have a wife and stepkids. Is this allowed? Loneliness is the privilege of the leisured. I wish I had time to be lonely, or to discover that I’m not.
Response:
Filed under: Loneliness Lonely
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