Elizabeth Smart - The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

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 purpose. Notice how pregnant women move in a slow stately way as if they were moving in deliberation to the Last Judgment sure of their good marks. They may desire to be avenging and decisive like tigers, but the waters that hang in the womb, cocooning the embryo, cast their influence on their taken-over body too.

Useless to invoke God then. He stands awkwardly aside like a husband at a birth, and nature like a red-cheeked midwife flounces flamboyantly round.

Will you let this rough woman have command, God? Will you leave me to her mercy as she puts dust-sheets over my eyes and folds my mind away? He will. He does.

I try to remember how, when birth comes, the dams will break, and God will assume His majesty and roll in pain like an avenger over my drenched soul, and love and blood flow back into the world.

All this will be, I suppose. But I remember a hole in my body through which the four winds blew cruelly. I remember a vulnerability against which a spring leaf made a too-serious attack. O God I remember your appraising finger going over my ruined but conscious frame.

Waiting for a birth I hear the bells ringing boringly. Church bells, hospital bells, ship’s bells. They tell me that boredom is a helpful retreat for the aged. They tell me that the endless repetitions of life and death are soothing, rhyming lullabies, patterns in the jibbering void. They say peace has sometimes been obtained. Pacification is possible. Flesh can be sweet.

But peace and erotics are far far from those parts that now strain like Hercules in labours almost more than they can bear. They are at work! THIS IS WORK! Serious, gigantic, absolute. All other occupations seem flibbertigibbet by comparison with the act of birth. Love and all its flimsy fancies are rolled under this mighty event, rolling all before it: crushed like straw conceits. Even the love of God is steam-rolled aside, as the job that must be done is done.

Thus, in the twentieth century, is born a son of man, while above the agony shrill women request time off to go for a cup of tea. Slapdash he is thrown among the muddle, while harassed apprentices jostle the bloody pans.

But celebrate! Celebrate! Celebrate!

It is not too much to bear a womb.

Out in the garden it is May, but the sun keeps going in, and I have been frustrated too many times to be able to withstand its uncertainty. The lilacs and the fields of buttercups and the birds’ eggs in the hedges are mere statistics, like the inventory of a house whose inmates have no meaning or connection, a catalogue of the world, without passion or caprice.

Who can I talk to? Who can I be angry with?

At night, the pressure of my captivity, and my helplessness, make my brain reel, so that I feel dizzy and faint. Rats and rabbits die of indecision when an experiment forces them two ways. Why shouldn’t I die from the insolubility of my problems and the untenability of my position?

Nevertheless, on this lovely afternoon, what is left of my youth rushes up like a geyser, as I sit in the sun, combing the lice out of my hair. For it is difficult to stop expecting ( What my heart first waking whispered the world was ), even though I am a woman of 31½, with lice in her hair and a faithless lover.

(I remember those long summer evenings you told me about when the holiday music made you nostalgic and restless to go to America and find your bride. Those wastes of Sundays, stretching through the suburban streets, where nothing could ever happen. Mother, may I go now? May I take my ticket and begin? The holidaymakers return from the country with amorous remembrances, because the fields were full of flowers. But the tin music of the organ-grinder reminds them of something late, too late, in beginning.

The days are going by. Nothing has happened. I am too old now to wear a floppy beribboned hat and innocuous sandals. I can no longer carry off the precocious gesture I learnt so well as a child. Why has no one leaned down out of a waterfall and covered me with blood and bliss?)

I cannot bear the lilac tree now. Even while I look it goes brown. Before I have taken the path across the field it will never be summer again.

After I had given birth to my first child, I felt time and space come whorling back into the empty space where it had lain. And Einsteinian demons came rushing to attack me with the terrible nature of the naked truth. But now I sit in country kitchens, discussing the minor discomforts of childbirth, and the domestic details of love.

Was it for this that so many miracles came roaring like bombers across the wilderness of America?

Down the Pimlico Road and across Ebury Street, the buses cluster like vultures in the open spaces where already forgotten bombs brought disaster. But who listens to history? I too have chilblains and a faithless lover and trouble making ends meet, say the women in the fish and chip queues.

Over the uncooperative landscape, inertias and despairs find their way, make nests in every likely corner, so that none can hold a hopeful surprise which might, at the last trump, have come running with a golden solution held up in a happy finger.

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