Christine Brooke-Rose: Life, End of

It’s the eastern wall of the other house, however, which makes the startling difference on eye-opening. It is now rooted in the pineal gland, to the hypothalamus of intellect and light that transmits to the topbrain, the other downstairs to the kitchen (the scullery? the pantry?) to food, friends and flowers, controlling the sex-drive, pleasure, pain, hunger, thirst, the world of others and all the rest, all quiet now but permanently present on the left of the bed here, then gone. It is the whole psyche, once described by Jung as a house.

At every eye-opening the wide vision is felt indulged in, then brutally clammed here by the one door, the red wall, the dark bookcase. Openness and light versus enclosure here. Both welcome but not always chosen. An echoing mixture of the same differences in the two Paris flats.

But why this haunting by a late and previous house? Why not the Paris flat, with its inebriating second life, slight loves and warm friendships? Why not the Hampstead flat with its views over all London and its seven remaining years of marriage and late collapse? Why not the earlier fifteen years of that same marriage, idyllic in a rent-controlled Chelsea lodging, one and a half rooms with toilet and bathroom on the landing shared by all? And so on. Nostalgia moves in zigzags, or in leaps and bounds.

Still, the haunting experience is mysterious. Very strong. Stronger than the dissolving visitors. More perturbing. Whereas the stone ghosts are not in the least perturbing but entertaining. They give no notion that they can pierce the mosquito-frame, though the frame receives the shadows of the laughing devils when the sun moves west.

Seeing too big is bad at all levels of life. Every ambition reached creating another. Like the zimmer. So life gently puts down. A lifetime of put-downs and sufficient lift-ups to build a blithe indifference, transforming put-downs into smiling self-recognitions and the lift-ups into flights from hype. Not much prancing here.

And that big house is the greatest prancing. Over now. But still there in the waking dreams. Like Nietzart, Artemis, Athene and the rest. It now represents the sequence from large house to smaller house to two-roomed flat, for the one-room or two-roomed flat is the norm of a whole lifetime, unconsciously recreated here as the top studio becomes unreachable, as is now the empty garage, the boiler-room and the guest-room. House to flat to room to bed to coffin to urn.

The stone ghosts are the entertaining changeable friends. Changeable yet immutable, plentiful. The dissolving visitors are the O.P.s. Whereas the deep experience of lying in two rooms different in time and space, is closer to the feeling True Friends give. Other but there. A mirror. Pleasure, shock sometimes, on waking up to something unfamiliar, but itself quickly pleasurable again.

So, Montaigne: but then what is the purpose of death if it needs so much preparation? To prepare us for an aferlife? All afterlives are cultural products. Or a black hole, simple extinction.

A child tends to think it’s impossible for every individual mankind has ever produced to have found an afterlife somewhere. At least the Hindus are eco l no g mical and recycle them through the whole of nature. Naturally Montaigne is more pre-pineal and means pure spirit. Or mind in the east. Not soul, like the west. Or is dehors now before de cart?

It’s time for the zimmer. Durch das Zimmer, pun the German friends from Samoa or somewhere, on a world trip. Ah, the Germans, ex-enemy Best Friends. They learn from history, as others don’t.

There is a slow progress, in that several steps can now occasionally be taken zimmerless, carrying it ahead. But the feet are still fireballs, both of them, sending up flames in the legs, just as the big swelling still on the sprained foot is now imitated by the other unsprained right foot. This double scourge implies that old friend Polly New-Writis is back, well, in fact there all the time but overwhelmed by the sprains, and now returning full force, two stages further, further it seems than before. As feared. As half-denied by the physio. The mixture it creates of brimstone, total insensitivity to carpet edges and trouser entrances, together with the imbalance, are now totally familiar, and stronger, like an old friend, dear Old Polly. The bad foot seeks entry into the trouser-leg of the good foot which doesn’t like it. As in life.

It’s all to do with messages in the brain, the physio repeats, in other words not vertigo but losing one’s footing from the hips down. Now the zimmer is only for practising alone, forbidden before, and his visit, after six weeks, is wholly concentrated on walking without it, either with his strong clutch of the left hand, or with only the cane, his hands behind, lightly on the shoulders, which rouses terror at first, of imbalance and one-sided help only. As before he forbids this exercise alone, and this time there is no hope of disobedience.

Polly’s symptoms resemble those of osteoporosis, as seen on an old age programme.

Still, learning to move on feet again is a childlike experience, forgotten but daily remembered, except that a child’s fall is frequent and seems less catastrophic than this one would be. Valérie is taking a much needed ten days off in a week, so that being able to zimm to the kitchen, zimm between the freezer and the stove with a packet of veg in one hand, or lean against the sink to free the hands for the minimum preparation from frozen food to flame and tray-laying is essential. This means once again finding the physical contact with the floor the earth the world the universe. Today is the first time, and effortfully managed, with dangerous gymnastic leanings, but the lunch tray has to remain in the kitchen till Valérie arrives, to bring the wheeled table with the old tray back from the bedroom. Things will have to be better worked out. These trivial problems are not those dealt with before.

For the wheeled table has not, during these nearly seven weeks, served as a trolley but as a table near the bed, to hold the three trays she prepares every lunchtime and brings in, the way any tray can be carried by anyone, except a wafting creature on two pillars of fire. And other Old People, Osteoporosis People. This feels a bit like Jerome K. Jerome in the doctor’s waiting-room, imagining he has all the diseases he is reading about.

So even the human templates between trolley table and room are now broken bridges, their personifications gone. Sur le pont d’Avignon, the dancer and the dance. Facing north-west, to Paris.

Now a new system must be devised: she will bring the garden two-wheeled table she’s not using now and wheel it to the rooom for local tray use, but leave the prodigal one in the kitchen for trays to be brought to the bed or the armchair as before by hand. If anything in this long-lived final stage can be called as before.

Autonomy! Self-rule. Same thing. Etymologically correct.

In fact we revise that system too. No need for the garden table in the room if all three meals are taken in the living-room and not in bed. Of course. Being now up and dressed has been temporarily (provisionally) forgotten in that second plan. Amazing how quickly the provisional (temporary) union of bed and board, or bedriddance, has settled in to difform thought, which slowly awakes now that pseudo-normality returns. The zimmer, unknown before, must first go to the kitchen, where the trolley awaits, permanently there, a tray put on it and taken to the armchair, and afterwards back to the kitchen, where the zimmer awaits. The trolley regains its universal prodigality. But more dangerous since the trolley is too light for real support, and must be pushed with one hand, the other on the walls and furniture. That’s the third plan, adopted and to be tested.