Christine Brooke-Rose - Life, End of

The hip bone is the articulation between downstairs and upstairs, between the fiery feet feeling the floor the ground, and the cool hesitant brain feeling the world.

Valérie has become more and more precious as the dependence grows. But we get on well, she has problems too, which she likes to discuss, very dramatically and with much humour, the greatest having to do with a building permit, essential for a loan, to build a house on her vineyard, which is going through the usual French obstacle crawl, each phase contradicting the previous. It is good to listen and respond, be genuinely concerned with these rather than with the body bits.

So many joys. Yet all of them, those perishable joys such as love and laughter, or watching two cypress trees as mistralometres swaying to say here I am again or see you soon, has itself gone. Or else degrees, publications, small successes here and there and all the rest, though so important once, become meaningless when facing old age, degeneration, death. Yes, the first person singular is not singular, but trivial, not spiritual. I is O.P. to all that, the temporal (provisional) versus those who are lost in the dusks of faith, perdus dans les ténèbres de la foi , as Bossuet calls it.

But now the two separate again. The cowardly character, with a morasm of miseries ahead and above all boredom, all activities dropping out, wants to leave; the vain author wants to control at least time in the narrative, and on another level the rights, to finish ongoing business, ongoing so long it hardly matters except for leaving a clear situation behind. Remembering, however, that characters in fiction cannot be O.P.s anyway, since they can’t imagine the reader.

So many deadlines, as in journalism, killed off and therefore alive again. To be long or not to be long? Age favouring the second. Though dying digs infradig, but whose dig?

Globalisation. Ah, the globe. Or is it the lobe of the universe? The lob of a tennis star?

Neuronic games, games to exercise the neurons, see a guide to the type of questions least known by candidates: literary, historical, geography except for capitals, philosophy or rather philosophical names at that level, scientific names, economic and political names, in other words everything once considered as general culture. They are good on modern technology and modern idols and their doings, in other words People, chiefly starlets, pronounced peepall in French. Could traditional disciplines be disappearing? And will the slow educational systems be able to work out quickly what to do about it? The neurons threaten to go on strike, but it looks more like running away from the factory. A weird lock-out in fact. Just what memory does. Girls on TV all move their eyebrows up from low to middlebrow; leaving a shaven ridge and looking permanently astonished without creasing the highbrow. Neanderthal would be astonished. Men would never raise their eyebrows in this particular way. So much for the world at the moment.

The wheelchair is now yielded to. The physio is against it, because the wheelchair prevents exercise, but promises are made that the zimmer will be used for everything except kitchen work, which is totally impossible now without two hands free and a body steady, Whether these promises can be kept or not is dubious for the zimmer is dangerously unsupporting in the slightest walking activity. And when hasting to the loo the wheelchair at topspeed is essential. So much for loyal support when it becomes inadequate. ‘Remember that with the zimmer and me you have six legs,’ he says ‘whereas with only me you have four and with the wheelchair you have none. Keep your head up you’re leaning to the right.’

Oh, I thought I’ve always leant to the left.

For once he laughs. But then, he has to concentrate hard against another fall since Polly is burning up the legs and killing down the balance incurably. Polly is much stronger than Vasco.

But the wheelchair, though hideous and hard to get into or out of, is as magically useful as the wheeled table.

And then it happens.

From hip to eye, I eye sir. The glaucous glaucoming eyes now ready for laser treatment — on a special chair down the stairs and onto a stretcher as imagined once — have had an accident (he says, the opthalmo), a haemorrhage of the right eye which may have touched the left. Like an infarctus, like a heart-attack of the eye, you know. He laughs a lot.

Another body bit harmed.

How can the eye have a heart-attack?

Because it loves, it loves.

There are no feelable signs of all this though there must be visible ones. Visible to him. Not to the eyes. Both eyes receiving drops and regular consultations. By chair then stretcher then ambulance as usual. But within three days, fast, the eyelid lowers, as if a defective eye needs less space. A visiting friend is asked if the eye has dropped and says no. The high bathroom mirror, that thalamosaic one, looked at by standing against the wheelchair locked and hands on the washstand and the handrail, says otherwise. That otherwise means blindness, unnoticed since the left eye gives sight, a web-sight. Closing that left eye reveals the blindness of the right.

Perhaps that’s what leaning to the left means.

The laser treatment is in fact a cleaning up after the haemorrhage. If you get hideous headaches we’ll have to use surgery. What surgery? Well, taking the eye out.

Nelson. But it’s been recently discovered that the eye-story is a myth, so that he’s standing on his high column watching London while Londoners think that he can’t.

The eyes have it. Reading. Handwriting now unreadable and upclimbing. Printed columns move sideways and down as if consulting each other. Web-sight. Just like authors. The only place the columns don’t do this is the screen, but it’s gettng dimmer and dimmer, like the keyboard. Typing on it now like a beginner, and getting worse. Anginally worse. Read read read, he says, exercise it. Eye eye, bye bye, die die, eye. I? Why?

Reading. The last pleasure.

Oh of course blindness is nothing, thousands of people are blind, even children. But are there many both blind and very lame? The two don’t go together. A blind person needs legs to learn from touching walls and furniture; a lame person needs at least one eye to guide the zimmer or the wheelchair. The two together mean total dependence, even guiding a fork to the lips or tea to the cup.

Stop Vasco de Drama. Death, like I, is trivial.

Yes, smaller and shorter miseries. The oesophagurks are back every morning.

Ah the very old baby?

At least fifteen minutes of violent nausea. You know, les hauts-le-coeur.

Oh, le coeur.

To pinpoin the punpoint.

It happens every time a capsule, as opposed to a tablet, doesn’t go down. The painkillers for instance. So what about thirty? Even if the two boxes are feelmarked for findability. It would be manic to bungle it.

Please stop.

(Is this an O.P. voice? No, this has moved to the cowardly character, with a little of a vain author hiding somewhere.)

The hair is now as white as Tim’s and Barbara’s, contrary to the hairdresser’s forecast of permanent pale grey. But unlookatable in the looking-glass, too high and dangerous.

Who drives the driving-mirror?

And now the computer is dead. No access. Mendable but what for?

The Morning Glory is dead.

Just like Others. Just like Life.

Legs are burning but dead, unable to stand a split second without support.

Friends, omens, countrymen.

Rien ne va plus .

Snorthing new technes are galloping by.

There’s a difficult way to go now, towards an uncluttered mind. Still countered by the floored, the grounded, the earthly, the planetary, the galactic, the universal.