Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (23 page)

(“kichin” in Emily’s spelling) where she

and Charlotte and Anne peeled potatoes together

and made up stories with the old house dog Keeper at their feet.

There is a fragment

of a poem she wrote in 1839

(about six years before
Wuthering Heights
) that says:

 

That iron man was born like me

And he was once an ardent boy:

He must have felt in infancy

The glory of a summer sky.

 

Who is the iron man?

My mother’s voice cuts across me,

from the next room where she is lying on the sofa.

Is that you dear?

Yes Ma.

Why don’t you turn on a light in there?

Out the kitchen window I watch the steely April sun

jab its last cold yellow streaks

across a dirty silver sky.

Okay Ma. What’s for supper?

Liberty

Liberty means different things to different people.

I have never liked lying in bed in the morning.

Law did.

My mother does.

But as soon as the morning light hits my eyes I want to be out in it —

moving along the moor

into the first blue currents and cold navigation of everything awake.

I hear my mother in the next room turn and sigh and sink deeper.

I peel the stale cage of sheets off my legs

and I am free.

Out on the moor all is brilliant and hard after a night of frost.

The light plunges straight up from the ice to a blue hole at the top of the sky.

Frozen mud crunches underfoot. The sound

startles me back into the dream I was having

this morning when I awoke,

one of those nightlong sweet dreams of lying in Law’s

arms like a needle in water — it is a physical effort

to pull myself out of his white silk hands

as they slide down my dream hips — I

turn and face into the wind

and begin to run.

Goblins, devils and death stream behind me.

In the days and months after Law left

I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.

I had no home in goodness anymore.

To see the love between Law and me

turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another

towards some other hunger was terrible.

Perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought.

But what love could be prior to it?

What is prior?

What is love?

My questions were not original.

Nor did I answer them.

Mornings when I meditated

I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul,

not the complex mysteries of love and hate.

But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind

as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight.

There were in all thirteen of them.

Nude #2. Woman caught in a cage of thorns.

Big glistening brown thorns with black stains on them

where she twists this way and that way

unable to stand upright.

Nude #3. Woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead.

She grips it in both hands

endeavouring to wrench it out.

Nude #4. Woman on a blasted landscape

backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch.

Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption

like the top half of a crab.

With arms crossed as if pulling off a sweater

she works hard at dislodging the crab.

It was about this time

I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes. She said,

When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?

Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.

Go away where? I said.

This still seems to me a good question.

But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light

is filling the moor with gold milk.

I have reached the middle

where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water.

It is frozen.

A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.

Certain wild gold arrangements of weed are visible deep in the black.

Four naked alder trunks rise straight up from it

and sway in the blue air. Each trunk

where it enters the ice radiates a map of silver pressures —

thousands of hair-thin cracks catching the white of the light

like a jailed face

catching grins through the bars.

Emily Brontë has a poem about a woman in jail who says

 

A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me

And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.

 

I wonder what kind of Liberty this is.

Her critics and commentators say she means death

or a visionary experience that prefigures death.

They understand her prison

as the limitations placed on a clergyman’s daughter

by nineteenth-century life in a remote parish on a cold moor

in the north of England.

They grow impatient with the extreme terms in which she figures prison life.

“In so much of Brontë’s work

the self-dramatising and posturing of these poems teeters

on the brink of a potentially bathetic melodrama,”

says one. Another

refers to “the cardboard sublime” of her caught world.

I stopped telling my psychotherapist about the Nudes

when I realized I had no way to answer her question,

Why keep watching?

Some people watch, that’s all I can say.

There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.

Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment,

as with a very difficult sister.

“On that mind time and experience alone could work:

to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,”

wrote Charlotte of Emily.

I wonder what kind of conversation these two had

over breakfast at the parsonage.

“My sister Emily

was not a person of demonstrative character,” Charlotte emphasizes,

“nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings,

even those nearest and dearest to her could,

with impunity, intrude unlicensed….” Recesses were many.

One autumn day in 1845 Charlotte

“accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting.”

It was a small (4 x 6) notebook

with a dark red cover marked 6d.

and contained 44 poems in Emily’s minute hand.

Charlotte had known Emily wrote verse

but felt “more than surprise” at its quality.

“Not at all like the poetry women generally write.”

Further surprise awaited Charlotte when she read Emily’s novel,

not least for its foul language.

She gently probes this recess

in her Editor’s Preface to
Wuthering Heights
.

“A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly

from the introduction into the pages of this work

of words printed with all their letters,

which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only — a blank

line filling the interval.”

Well, there are different definitions of Liberty.

Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying.

I took this to be more a wish than a thought

and changed the subject.

But blank lines do not say nothing.

As Charlotte puts it,

“The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives

with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse,

strikes me as a proceeding which,

however well meant, is weak and futile.

I cannot tell what good it does — what feeling it spares —

what horror it conceals.”

I turn my steps and begin walking back over the moor

towards home and breakfast.

It is a two-way traffic,

the language of the unsaid. My favourite pages

of
The Collected Works of Emily Brontë

are the notes at the back

recording small adjustments made by Charlotte

to the text of Emily’s verse,

which Charlotte edited for publication after Emily’s death.

“
Prison
for
strongest
[in Emily’s hand] altered to
lordly
by Charlotte.”

Hero

I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast

whether she had a good night

and is about to say a happy thing

or not.

Not.

She puts her toast down on the side of her plate.

You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins.

This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments,

from what I call The Rules Of Life series.

My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible.

I like to see everything, I say.

What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.

All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.

I like to wake up.

At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta

and may advance along one of three channels.

There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel,

the Stubborn As Your Father channel

and random channel.

More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair.

Those women! says my mother with an exasperated rasp.

Mother has chosen random channel.

Women?

Complaining about rape all the time —

I see she is tapping one furious finger on yesterday’s newspaper

lying beside the grape jam.

The front page has a small feature

about a rally for International Women’s Day —

have you had a look at the Sears Summer Catalogue?

Nope.

Why, it’s a disgrace! Those bathing suits —

cut way up to here! (she points) No wonder!

You’re saying women deserve to get raped

because Sears bathing suit ads

have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious?

Well someone has to be responsible.

Why should women be responsible for male desire? My voice is high.

Oh I see you’re one of Them.

One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it.

And whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year the green one?

It looked so smart on you.

The frail fact drops on me from a great height

that my mother is afraid.

She will be eighty years old this summer.

Her tiny sharp shoulders hunched in the blue bathrobe

make me think of Emily Brontë’s little merlin hawk Hero

that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte wasn’t around.

So Ma, we’ll go — I pop up the toaster

and toss a hot slice of pumpernickel lightly across onto her plate —

visit Dad today? She eyes the kitchen clock with hostility.

Leave at eleven, home again by four? I continue.

She is buttering her toast with jagged strokes.

Silence is assent in our code. I go into the next room to phone the taxi.

My father lives in a hospital for patients who need chronic care

about 50 miles from here.

He suffers from a kind of dementia

characterized by two sorts of pathological change

first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer.

First, the presence in cerebral tissue

of a spherical formation known as neuritic plaque,

consisting mainly of degenerating brain cells.

Second, neurofibrillary snarlings

in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus.

There is no known cause or cure.