Elizabeth Smart - The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

You expected a bill, and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it.

Left right. Right turn. March into this meadow, heaving your heavy rucksack full of the future, and see what the present brings.

I am friendless, covered in mud, cowardly, weak, untrained. But signed up for the duration.

You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame.

True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb. Just keeping them functioning.

In what direction?

Just avoiding the bogs, snipers, snares, enemy propaganda. Taking cover in skirmishes. Using techniques of camouflage. Lying low when the tanks roll out of the woods, squashing all before them.

A couple of decades will see you out of this bondage. A couple of decades will bring honourable discharge.

As I sat by my office window, I observed the generations, who are, after all, only the consequences of someone else’s desires, moving with fatuous smiles into traps.

I saw sad fathers and mothers moving patiently aside in buses.

And I saw myself spending my days punching holes in telegrams because of the consequences of my own desires.

I saw myself now ignominiously far from the bellowing Jungfreud with which I once leapt into the arms of circumstance.

And why should I file office books instead of putting my child to bed?

This question arose as I sat by my first office window.

Round and round like a frantic squirrel in a cage I chased it looking for a loophole. I found none. The exits were all blocked. Facts must be your friends, I said.

Panting, bewildered, I looked out to see the other prisoners, generations and generations, moving in a long queue through their unvarying days.

This cliff, I thought, this office block, would certainly suit a suicide.

After work, I dance in smoky nightclubs, swooning to jazzy versions of Liebestraum . What if next morning I look from my office window and say, ‘Shall I leap over the edge?’

The long fall is appalling.

Besides, I am afraid of death now, since he sits 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.)