Christine Brooke-Rose - Life, End of

On-going business. That too becomes an unexpected problem. These O.P.s, and there are several more over the last year, either still on-going or finally dealt with, don’t for a moment realise that involving an invalid in giving time and energy to an unending correspondence for their advantage only, they are depriving him of the last two little freedoms. First, the freedom to devote what tiny time is left to his own writing, his last pleasure, thanks to realising a degree of comfort, leaning back against soft cushions with a light board across the lap sustained by the arms of the armchair, rather than tensely sitting at a computer desk that brings at once the chest-tearing horror; writing just for fun, for therapy, for the happiness of wordplay, the deep joy of sentences creating other sentences, just half an hour a day, not for publication or posterity’s unimaginable and unpresent existence. And the second freedom, to take the self off, before the pain and the total dependence destroy even these capacities. Not at all as a suicidal person. But simply as a freedom, long prepared.

A well-known teledoctor makes an interesting point in a programme on euthanasia, a long time ago but taken in and remembered. One of the witnesses is a thirty- to forty-year-old lady in bed, unable to move a muscle, who says: I want to die on the day I choose. Later the doctor remarks: You notice what she says, on the day I choose. Not today, not this minute. There is, you see, something mysterious about life, however useless, however painful, however ghastly, that people cling to. Perhaps: the way a beaten wife stays with her wife-beating husband.

Jean-Yves: There are always on-going businesses. People who really want to commit suicide do so.

True. But I don’t really want to. I’m happy with my last bit of world however filtered and commonplace as hero help against the self. But in such physical difficulties I need that freedom.

It’s an immense privilege to choose a day. Nobody else can.

Nevertheless, the personal experience these O.P.s give is deep deprivation of, okay, an imagined freedom. And there are others, as you know, a publisher, and a university on your side of the pond — well, that’s finally settled, but after months of exhausting anti-admin quibble.

Forget it.`

Oh but I do. I only mention them, and the whole topic, because you’re my literary executor, and I want to leave a clear situation for you. I always do forget. It’s the repetition that’s so hard… Oi, niña! Te gusta este librito? Lo quieres? Entonces, tómalo. Un regalito.

Jean-Yves is here with his young Argentinian wife Paquita and their four-year-old daughter Rosetta, already trilingual, more in French and Spanish than English because of two different-languaged parents at home, but school in America to change that soon. She is holding a two-inch booklet for children about a wolf and a cat, the wolf with a balloon tied to its tail. In Spanish, and lying in front of other books low down so within her reach. She doesn’t answer, gripping the tiny book. Paquita tells her to say thank you. She doesn’t, having already learnt that a pretty face surrounded with long curly brown hair is equivalent.

Mira. Es un lobo.

No, es un globo.

No, aqúi. Un lobo. With shrieks of pleasure.

So okay, she’s right: globalism is a wolf.

Onerous. Oppressive. Opinionated. For Omega people. Omega. The end of the alphabet. The end of life.

Come off it.

Have you noticed that omega looks like just a cosy rounded W? The real W comes from double Vs. As in vice versa and vice versa that is, verse a vice. Even if it’s pronounced close to O in some cases, such as the Gothic gw-sound, which splits into g- and w- according to the languages, gw- in Lombard, and so in Italian, but G in Frankish, so guerre in French, and garantie, gardien, but war, warranty, warden in English. And as usual English also keeps some of the French versions, like garantee, guardian, to enrich the meanings.

Are you trying to say you’re going a bit off your head, rather than dying?

Yes, but it’s all a game of mirrors. Alpha and Omega. War and Guerre. And so on. But often there’s a glitz. The mirror of Las Meninas according to Foucault reflects what in fact it can’t reflect. That’s art.

They loop, the embedded images of the embedded journalists. Looping also has a meaning in linguistics, to do with the deep structure of subordinate clauses, now forgotten and called embedded sentences.

Here it means that when images are fewer than words, for lack of freedom, facilities or facts, they get recycled over and over, dubbed by very diverging commentaries or none, aghast, just platitudes, repeated.

But what exactly then are embedded journalists, newly named in the latest war? Embedded or minor characters, so fiction? Subordinate clauses? or just bedded?

A tank snuffles its pinochionose along a river, another more noseless tractor tops a hill, soldiers cautiously enter an empty palace. Over and over. Script-girl non-descript.

Hundreds of planes crashing into hundreds of skyscrapers, a child is said to have said, grown out of thrice-told tales and precociously caught up in mere looping chronology, one plane, one skyscraper, another plane, another skyscraper. So, during wars and perhaps all the time, looping orchestrates a great variety of melodies with a quiet pom-ti-pom-ti-pom-pom.

Is that the rhythm of the world the galaxy the universe? It all happens so fast, the dislocation of languages and lies, technologies and truths, ideologies and dreams.

Does looping imitate life, a sort of metempsychosis, the faith of the East? But there an unillumined kharma can become a scorpion, a bull, a gnat, a llama, and only very rarely a lama. Metempsychosis is called reincarnation by Latin speakers, some of them Christians, who also insist that despite Incarnation the flesh is weak. What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch what, some of them may think, looping images?

In which young people die daily much faster than the old who demand only that, five killed today, twenty, two hundred, three to ten thousand, for nothing, no country right or wrong, no charismatic corporal, no identity idol, just cheats. Or sometimes nature, through man. There seem to be more and more floods, murderous heat-waves, droughts, eruptions, quakes despite the permanent promises in bubblespeak. But perhaps dying for nothing known is a high privilege? Too sudden to be known. So the world doffs its ozone hat and says goodbye.

On ozone one telescientist says on the watchbox we can end up with a problem that takes a hundred years to put right. What optimism, when a hundred years of leaping progress cause not one problem but many more, hundreds perhaps. And can they be put right? As for the warpeace front, that of wanton destruction, man has moved from nails knuckles and knives to nuclear knick-knacks, still used as threat so one day as full thrust. There is an engraving of Nature sitting like Britannia, holding a shield-shaped image of Newton. Could Newton hold a shield-shaped image of Nature? Or just the apple?

The ipomea now jungles over the whole wall of stone ghosts, save for the watchful top heads. Perhaps it does so as a small example to show that the steady disjungling of the planet isn’t necessary. Here it merely stifles the climbing roses further on, but then these are few, just one or two and wall-pale so invisible. They deserve it. So there. How foolish anger is.

At the end of the top heads, in a deep step down formed of a large inner curve ending with a snubnose then in again and down to the thick lips of a half-open mouth, a chin and a neck, alone occupy the space of the three-storeyed heads, now smothered under large parasol green leaves. Gone is St Paul and the wide-hatted vampire or drunken tortoise, back into the jungle the tiny tyrannosaur.