tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66458883758757841242024-02-08T07:53:18.805-08:00 Weird and wonderful days. Dancing monkeys, talking heads.Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.comBlogger139125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-1995115488450421952022-03-02T04:49:00.000-08:002022-03-02T04:49:04.120-08:00I mean WHY ARE YOU EVEN TALKING!!!<p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">DONE WITH THAT NOT DONE WITH THAT </p><p style="text-align: center;">You know the <i>hardest thing </i>I tell my best friend (on the phone), the thing coming back at you, <i>every</i> time? It's this, that somehow, anyhow, you still have to navigate, I mean, connection? to have the conversations? </p><p style="text-align: center;"> like I mean with all those sad souls gone the other way?.... and there <i>you </i>are traversing like a rickety bridge over a widening ravine, and I mean walking on eggshells and dancing through minefields and riding lightly <i>lightly</i>, over rough terrain? All that, and, I mean, verbal fencing? With you know, tact, calculation, self censorship? All that just to hang on in there by your fingernails, keep your friendships, relationships and all, I mean, your lifelong loves?... the cruellest thing (it is ) that love becomes the hardest thing, though still the only thing to keep you there?... attached and holding fast the fractured space where once was holy ground... </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">She sighs, she knows. I'm not done yet. Like <i>listening</i> I say, that all that's left? Don't speak! The thing is who would actually hear you if you did? Who would or could hear what it is you have to tell them? So <i>listening</i>, don't speak! don't scare, don't bring the bad thing in the room. Just hold the line? observe the SOS in skittering eyes, touch terror under the safe and effective, bear....the glazed eye stare, judgements about conspiracy theorists. And just... don't speak! don't name the thing that can't be named, that can't be told. </p><p style="text-align: center;">Oh... well I'm done with that, she says. I'm done with them, I'm done with that. I'm never no-more looking back. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">......................</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"> COULDN'T DO ANOTHER PLEASE DON'T SAY WE HAVE TO HAVE ANOTHER, LOCKDOWN </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Hello, how are you, (you say)... they say grand, you know yourself, hard times! I'd say they would, they could, they might now, lock us down again next week, next month, again, or would you say? or Christmas, after Christmas,....sure they have to let us, let us... have the Christmas? surely let us have the Christmas let us ......let us. <span style="text-align: left;">Hopefully ( you say), Maybe, (you say ) yeah they know... you need the Christmas? </span><span style="text-align: left;">Yeah, ah, no, we </span><i style="text-align: left;">couldn't </i><span style="text-align: left;">like, I couldn't me, I mean I WILL NOT DO another lockdown? no, they wouldn't say another lockdown, no, I couldn't no..... they wouldn't... try..... like could they? ...would they? ... </span></p><p style="text-align: center;">I know (you say) I know and yeah <i>they </i>know we couldn't, <i>mightn't, </i>stand for that? Well yeah, (they say) I mean I'm fully vaccinated now? I've done my bit you have to do your bit, the Grannies, Daddy died... he died I don't... feel... safe, you do it for the others like, they.... haven't... can't get...vaccinated...we all <i>have to,</i> or it won't be, won't feel, isn't, safe... </p><p style="text-align: center;">oh right (you say) so does it actually, I mean, work?</p><p style="text-align: center;">DO IT FOR THE OTHERS AND YOU'LL BE SAFE (FOREVER)</p><p style="text-align: center;">Does what.. it works! It works! It works... you won't get sick, too sick, in, hospital, die! Only the unvaccinated....like, if only <i>they</i> would... far right terrorists you know....tin foil hatters, conspiracy theorists they are, heard about it on the Television like, those people? get their information from the internet you see, the <i>science </i>says, the TV says, I mean the papers say the science says we have to yes, my doctor says.....you do it for the others and you don't get sick! Or only like a cold... the radio says... </p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">BREAKTHROUGHS</p><p style="text-align: center;">The break through cases now? (you say) like everywhere, they aren't best described as <i>breakthroughs</i> now?</p><p style="text-align: center;">THANK GOD THANK GOD SO LUCKY HOW WE TOOK THE COVID VACCINE </p><p style="text-align: center;">I know I <i>know</i>, my friend, her neighbour, Mammy, all the teachers at my daughter's school got ....yeah but sure you catch it, spread it sure you do, of <i>course you do,</i> it doesn't... matter, doesn't.... <i>everybody</i> knows you won't get actually sick? or really bad, or go to hospital, things like that, I mean people, everyone I know, has covid yeah. So all us are....vaccinated, yeah, and John, like after, he was really sick, ...and someone that I know's in <i>hospital</i> now with covid, and her heart, her heart.... but thats not anything to do with....vaccines, no, imagine just how bad it would have been, it could have been if we hadn't all, we didn't have the ....don't you <i>see. ..</i>like everyone I know is vaccinated! No, they weren't sick before but anyway I mean they had to get the covid sometime?....lucky like it's lucky...that....they got the covid <i>now,</i> after being I mean vaccinated, ....like we have to follow ...I mean s<i>cience, </i>everybody knows...</p><p style="text-align: center;">THE SCIENCE SAYS</p><p style="text-align: center;">Science is a work in progress though?....I mean things change...and scientists differ, learn from one week to the next, contradict each other, TAKE the money from the global groups you only hear....the <i>media pets </i> (you say) ( you're off again) , (you're saying way TOO MUCH again )</p><p style="text-align: center;">Well, I believe the Science? sure it's in the NEWS, and Luke O'Neill... Clare Byrne and Nephet know The Science. All that other stuff is.... just the right wing, racist, TERRORISTS on the... on the <i>internet</i>. My doctor, and my TD, sure the TV, say...!</p><p style="text-align: center;">But now, (you say), it's looking like the vaccinated need the booster, would you, will you... take the ....</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">AND LINING UP THE VULNERABLE FIRST, WHY DON'T WE</p><p style="text-align: center;">Boosters? ah I wouldn't want to take another, thats for older people sure, with like I mean <i>co-morbidities</i> like I shouldn't..... <i>have to</i>, really, like the first one wasn't bad, the second though....I mean it only meant it <i>worked</i> but still......I'm done, my mother now is going for it when she's called, <i>she</i> should ... <i>she's </i> vulnerable... old, it's better than the covid... eh?</p><p style="text-align: center;"> you wouldn't think to... stand with people choosing not to have the vaccine, would you? maybe... stand with them against the vaccine passes (you say... softly, <i>softly</i>)</p><p style="text-align: center;">TRACK ME </p><p style="text-align: center;">covid passes!... I have mine, the QR code it's on my phone, it's shocking handy, all your info's there about like vaccinations.... for travelling like, your boarding pass, it runs like clockwork, straight through airports, no delays, the ones without the passport have to wait ...they have to... queue?...</p><p style="text-align: center;">Was it to travel then, (you say), why you took the shot or, I mean, on account of covid?</p><p style="text-align: center;">Travel? yeah, I never got to go away, like ANYWHERE for two whole years and now I can, and so can you and anyone, if only you would, they would do the right thing stop the spread the SCIENCE says...</p><p style="text-align: center;">TRACE ME </p><p style="text-align: center;"> but still, (you say) like, contact tracing means you never know the day the hour you'll be locked down again, and so it's never I mean, ever, over, <i>dearest one</i>.... </p><p style="text-align: center;">the Contact tracing? sure you have to really, like my kids are home from school 'cause some one had the sniffles. Then you have to, I mean get them tested too, to see if they'll, like, <i>have to </i> be like quarantined... the testing? no, the kids don't mind, they have to sure, the covid's bad in all the schools...</p><p> PASS ME ONE MORE ANTIGEN TEST WHY DONCHA</p><p style="text-align: center;"> but testing, like inserting swabs up, up, your nose, til tipping off the blood brain barrier, daily, up, your children's nose, its tipped with ethylene oxide <i>dear one</i>, hydrogel, it's carcinogenic, (you try)</p><p style="text-align: center;">MASKS ARE PRETTY </p><p style="text-align: center;">Ah no... I never <i>heard</i> of 'ethylene oxide', anyway how else can they I mean find out, if you have <i>it, </i> covid? Blood brain barrier? no! they wouldn't send us tests that....no... I mean, the kids do sometimes cry, a nose bleed maybe but... sure what else can you do... <i>the virus </i>...never isolated? ah now, get a grip! the science knows. The kids are just <i>protected</i>, by the tests, the masks... </p><p> MASKS ARE WARM </p><p style="text-align: center;">So what about bacterial pneumonia, from like breathing back you own breath's waste? <i>dear heart</i> (you say) </p><p style="text-align: center;">bacterial pneumonia, naw... they don't <i>mind</i> wearing masks? The little children have to be reminded, yea, but covid's in the aerosols you know, you have to stop the <i>aerosols.</i> Waste on your breath? now who says that, the internet? like, sometimes I feel faint in supermarkets or at work but so? I go outside? I take a breath, don't make a fuss.... they make you wear the masks outside? Well, sure there's <i>aerosols</i> outside... hello! Stay home, I'd say, just order in your food and watch netflix, how hard is that? it's there for you, if you just won't, you can't, you WILL NOT do your bit. Can't do your bit? ah now I kinda like the masks myself, you don't want people always looking at your face, and sure its even warmer in the cold, It's grand, its fine, it's pretty!</p><p style="text-align: center;"> SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN/VACCINATE THEM ALL</p><p style="text-align: center;">The kids get vaccinated, yeah, to keep them safe? already safe? not <i>necessarily</i>, like, some end up in the <i>ICU</i>... it said that on the news, and, like, we <i>have to </i>vaccinate them... they can spread... infect us all? I mean I have, like, <i>vulnerable people in my house, I'm </i>living with my granny and you have to have your children done...to save us, save us, save us... all?</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">CHOICE</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"> I blame <i>unvaccinated</i> people, spreading, getting, passing covid, stopping this from ever being over, yeah, the Taoiseach says, sure only lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations works with them, I wouldn't want to... even mix with <i>them</i>, the anit-vaxxers, indoors... don't feel safe, I always ask in restaurants, bars, say ' have you checked their covid passes', first, <i>insist, </i> my friends and me... before we'd even go inside...</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">IMAGINE IF WE HADN'T GOT THE VACCINE </p><p style="text-align: center;">So now well yeah, you might get sick....but not too badly, not enough... to fill up hospitals, infect the <i>vulnerable </i>people...and, I mean, of course, of course you DO still get it, I know lots of people got it after their vaccine ....at home with symptoms, lost their sense of tase and smell, your mouth all sore with blisters, stuck in bed for weeks with weakness, yeah, but just imagine how MUCH WORSE it would have been without your.....yeah, at least you know it won't be fatal, if you're, <i>fully ,</i>vaccinated, yeah at least you know...you don't...you won't...</p><p style="text-align: center;">DYING</p><p style="text-align: center;">Never over? yeah, but no but yeah at least you know <i>you're</i> safe. I mean so many people sick, with heart attacks and strokes, my boss at work, my neighbour, friends, the priest is dead... they're in the hospital with strokes and blood clots, heart conditions.... dead, it's like... it's scary now. They say, the TV says, it's lockdowns, covid....normal. Normal. God oh god, you know, I'm sick and tired of going to funerals? </p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">.....................................................................................</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">IN THE SLIPSTREAM </p><p style="text-align: center;">Leave them at it my friend says. It's, basically, not your business anymore? </p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>But </p><p style="text-align: center;">People (yours) they tell you now they can't eat dinner with their family Sundays, Christmas day. They can't go home, or even talk to former friends... or brothers, sisters. Can <i>not</i> bridge the yawning chasm now, they fall...let go.... They tell you how they stand for reason, truth. So here are Truthers. here the Normal People... call each other names. break ties of blood and heart, and still you must, you have to try... to bypass ranting, raging politics, downloaded narratives... seek and look for, offer, to your loved ones all your good attention....I mean, love?</p><p style="text-align: center;">The children argue with me, buy their antigen tests, and speculate. Our good friend Ursula is sick, her kind heart crushed, (a huge blood clot). So was it Covid caused it did <i>they say, </i>my son is asking his sister here in my house as I sit at my kitchen table writing. No (I say) no, they don't know that! You can't say that! He looks at me, he turns his head away ... I mean, he says, whose talking to you anyway?,....I mean, <i>why are</i> <i>you</i> <i>even talking</i>? </p><p style="text-align: center;">.............................................................................................</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Yeah I tell my most beloved friend, I said that yesterday, tomorrow maybe, '<i>done</i> with it! I'm done with that, I'm done'. Today I'm trapped here in the slipstream, voices of the people rushing though my blood like water, tinnitus, hopeless,....unconditional,... <i>confounded, </i>you know, love? </p><p style="text-align: center;">l</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-53646292139637539412021-08-27T07:01:00.001-07:002021-08-27T07:01:36.916-07:00A Mother's prayer before Winter, 2021. <p><br /></p><p><i>WINTER'S COMING</i></p><p>Sunday morning, August 16th, 2021. It's chilly here, it's raining, grey. Autumn's here. Autumn! you realise it reaching for a jumper, socks. Summer's gone and winter's shadow darkens warp speed Autumn in these strange, unlooked for times.</p><p>On the way to the shop for water, eggs, no newspapers, (the chanting propaganda in the paper makes your teeth ache, your head spin, triggering an actual cortisol flood? ) you step aside for nervous people needing distance. You step aside for the other kind, the likely inoculated. Like you know the inoculated now? Loose limbed and grinning, vague, relieved. Something's gone they haven't missed and something's added you don't recognise. </p><p>You take the river walk your earphones in, walking, walking, walking, wanting ...this, headspace. This only safe space. You listen to the talking heads, alive across the internet, the Indie news. They are here, on air, awakened to dystopia. Men and women, medics, truthers, ranters, priests and preachers, immunologists... fathers mothers, they have gone to the edge, they have looked into the abyss for you... Your attention moving in and out, you sometimes only see the river tipping gladly, trees, allowing the rattling breeze, serene. Able, (you are able in the moment) not to know. You are able to let go. Detach, from information wars, the walking wounded, and all the energised truthers whose time has come round at last. </p><p>You know it all, the great reset, magicking of the 'rona numbers, programmed fear in people. All of it. You see it too (this) Hypnotic dance of Mainstream Media and The People. oh The People are that girl, they're in the Red Shoes now, dancing helpless to their doom. Hans Anderson take a bow. You watch them, disappeared, an endless stream, behind the media piping Panic, follow! follow! follow here. You see, you see...you can't unsee... lost souls, lost rhythms after lockdown, snuffed out weeks and months in time, Energy diverted, human schemes and plans, adventures, dammed. Denied. </p><p>You find you do not understand the fear, not really, until a woman jerks away you, recoils, at the bridge, her eyes skittering over the rim of her mask. </p><p>The breeze is singing for her, water flows, and here she takes her air through a mask fashioned in India by children sitting on dirt floors caught smiling by the camera of a truther as they fashion graphene oxide,...other particles, into the grubby gag she fastens on her face. Shuttering her airways, she allows...the blowing back of her own excreted waste. Back, back inside to clog the lungs to fog the incredible shrinking brain. </p><p>You find you do not understand the fear, not really, not... until you see hysteria, relief, in people telling you they've had it, yea, the first one, second one... the double vaxxed. They call it "my vaccine". You didn't ask. </p><p>You steady your own foreboding, your runaway catastrophising, with research. Yes. Independent Media. Doctors, Scientists, Legions of the Censored (there are legions) offering frameworks, understanding, sanity here. There is sanity here, beyond the gaslight. </p><p><br /></p><p>so <i>WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS</i></p><p>I do this some of the time, I look for truth, I search for... something... approaching an explanation?</p><p>I listen/learn. I do this on my Sunday walks, my earphones in... but always, ever, past engagement with like minded, past, yes, comfort of like minded, is only sorrow (in me), mourning grief. For what is gutted out, what's lost, what's human; work, small businesses of busy humans, parties, joyous drinking, all that restless vibrant stuff. Withheld. Snuffed out. No, never, (actually) coming back? No snuff movie ever quite as final, frightful, as this dying of the light </p><p>FOR WHAT FOR WHY!</p><p>for entertainment, the satisfaction of an insane, meglomaniac plan, effected by surrendered governments, media, doctors, captured regulatory bodies, boastful billionaires ....all the willing foot soldiers to effect a (unworkable) global plan.</p><p> </p><p> and <i>WHAT IN GODS NAME HAVE YOU DONE</i> </p><p>Always, always, the political, the critical understanding is swept aside, it falls away, returns to this; my loved ones <i>splitting</i> from me, enacting a shocking surrender. the fear for them, the vision of them, rolling up the sleeve, succumbing, lost the knowledge that they will, they will, they likely will, (regardless of my best, oh carefully construed, arguments, anit-vaxxer! conspiracy theorist! she wears the tinfoil hat) swallow unexamined, <i>lies,</i> they will, they will, fearing death, disease, embrace that... they will, see only here!, accept the dissonance whole. This glassy eyed turning away from what you have to tell them, cognitive dissonance, this adamant <i>shutting down</i> that neither you nor they, it seems, can help.</p><p>so I AM YOURS AND YOU ARE LEAVING</p><p>All I care for these days, really, are my children, each and every one, (MY die is cast) my eldest, and the boy, my beautiful girl, her knowing dreaming sister. Scattered from me in this, taken, by the whirlwind of false narrtive/dystopia, the pied piper.... promising... travel, nightclubs, college, inclusion in a herd. Our children, <i>all our children</i> challenged, by lockdown, exclusion, lies...lies. Lies. Taken as effectively, as shockingly, as in war or death... but always held, here where you can't reach Klaus Schwab inside the heart. I am yours, and you are mine and we are family. Yours. I am...your own nut job, your tinfoil hat if ever you look to wear it... brought you in, I brought you in, the hours and days and years of making, minding, marathons of planning, holding space, and meeting trouble for you at the pass. mother.</p><p>oh <i>WONT YOU AWAKEN, AWAKEN, AWAKEN</i></p><p>I want a bomb, a gun, a sword of ages to defend you, ready here for those who hold the needle, push the serum into my children's precious blood, their every miracle organ, body, brain that held the living spirit spinning as I'd nurtured, watched. </p><p>I want the universe, the heavens vengeance be there such, for those who mean to steal the flame that lights my children's eyes, to take from them that which is theirs, and only theirs to flame..</p><p>I want, must have, the strength of armies, angels, to dispel the cozening lies that lure my trusting children, to blow apart these systems.... (cunningly) placed, in play over decades to allow, create, this evil, poisoning trance. this narrative leading to this place... where all our human children walk in blind to the tent, the needle waiting .... see here they roll up the sleeve themselves... so eager are they, for the holiday, for ersatz life and light, <i>so willing are they for the deathly mrna, the graphite oxide, </i><i>serum of nanoparticles of luciferase, generation of spike protein,</i> <i>til darkness has them.</i></p><p><i> </i>I pray for a great awakening... before Winter comes and they are gone beyond my power to follow and winter comes and they are gone beyond my power to mind. </p><p> </p><p><br /></p>Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-85054792255736528112021-02-24T05:15:00.005-08:002021-02-25T09:40:03.924-08:00 A Child in a Yellow Blanket Gripped by a Nun. Snapshot in Time. <p>I went to Temple Hill Catholic Adoption Home to visit my baby every day for the week after he was born. We left the hospital separately. It was 1979 and I was not married and babies were adopted from that place. If I did not let the adoption go ahead I would become an unmarried mother.</p><p>There were two long bus trips across the city to reach the place. The bus fare had to be carefully budgeted for. I remember, I will always remember until my last day, the nuns there. One of the indelible memories. The pale closed faces of them, as though they rarely saw daylight, when they brought my baby out to be viewed, tightly wrapped in the yellow blanket I had bought for him. The brief time they allowed me hold him, the detached tone they used in refusing to let me feed him, one time I asked. I will always remember that. At that time I was detached from myself. I see that now. The intense, one-on-one and no other, bond forming between my baby and me in the hospital, the tearing apart when I handed him over to them, headed back to the suburb where I had found work as a nanny, all that intensity had deserted me. I had handed him over and gone back to the only refuge I had, raw with loss. I had only a flickering hope that there would be help for me there to keep him. By the time I got back there everything, what had to be done, seemed immense. To prepare a place of him, to stand my ground, to recover in my body from the birth. Immense. I was, simply, burned out. </p><p><br /></p><p>I used to be thinking, on those bus journeys, that I ought to be feeling something. Recalling over and over the day when I had left the hospital, had handed him over, the agony and the wrongness of it. The crying jag that had lasted into the evening when I got back, a neighbour handing me one of her valium in the end, so that I crashed. I had fallen through the floor of loss and it had emptied me. I was numb.</p><p><br /></p><p>I told myself then that, no matter what, no matter my numbness, no matter the nun's contempt when I had said I was keeping him, no matter the shame at having nothing for him, no matter the illegitimacy of keeping him, no matter, no matter, I would bring him home. This time would pass, this emptiness would fill, and he would be home with me.</p><p> 11</p><p>Everything about being pregnant in Ireland in 1978, for me at least, from the time I was sure that I was, was about managing it for myself. To prevent everything being taken from me (was how it felt). The loss of autonomy, of self control. I wanted to do the best thing, whatever that was, for the baby. I wanted to do the right thing for myself. I did not want to be interfered with. I did not want to be controlled. That prospect was a horror to me.</p><p>I was a little adrift back then. I had left school, passed the Leaving Cert more or less, with no sense of what could come next. Also, and increasingly, I was having panic attacks, some very grey days too. It wasn't like there was a name for those days, back then. Though people had them just the same, and doctors knew about them. But you had no words then for anxiety, depression. You were given none. I remember going to a doctor at that time, on my own (there was no-one you could tell or take) and being asked casually whether I had been studying too hard. That was all he asked. He gave me a prescription which I was too terrified to take. He gave me no understanding about what was happening to me. No answers to what I needed to know. I mean, whether I was mad or not, whether I was broken as I feared. Or whether he knew the answer to that. Or if you could become addicted to the Ativan he gave me. If you could get even more lost in the hell you were in. He gave me nothing. </p><p>Life went on. Anxiety didn't, entirely, define it. I read my books, went drinking with my friends, helped out at home with the younger children, got a job as a kitchen porter. I went, uncertainly, to random interviews. And, as it turned out, got pregnant. </p><p>Missed periods were the only way of knowing, at that time. And so I didn't know for sure until I was three months on and a doctor confirmed it to me. He asked me, casually enough, if I felt <i>it</i> moving yet. I assured him that I did not. Horrified at the reality of it, confirmed at last, unable to imagine a child's presence in me. There were no scan pictures then, no peeking ahead for the sex. </p><p>The doctor seem to be oblivious to my situation. </p><p>I was not oblivious. To any aspect of it. A girl, I was 19 years old, did not have anything in those days, not in my world. A job until you married. Or after you married, maybe, if you had a professional job. A job that paid you properly, that was. A job worth having. Otherwise, and far more likely, you had a little job, a part time job to keep you going. Your best ambition was to get out of home, achieve a little independence for yourself. A slice of life if you were able. To live in a city, Dublin maybe, where you could breathe. To support a child on your own was not an option in that world. House sharing with other girls, breaking even, was all you expected until maybe you married. </p><p>And then there was your shame, your sense of aberrancy, working away at you on the subliminal level, judging. You did not need your parents, the priest, to judge you. You judged yourself. </p><p>And yet, it seemed the very job of having to manage this gave me a sense of purpose. I got a job as a childminder in Dublin, (getting myself to Dublin after all). I found the phone number of the Catholic Adoption Society in the Dublin phone phone book at the post Office, arranged an appointment ahead of time, packed my bags and left. Told my sisters before I left. We made a pact of silence outside the sister circle, they gave me what support they could mange within. It was the best that we, all of us, could do.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the ensuing months of pregnancy life was good. As it turned out. The couple I worked for would not let me stay alone in my room in the evening, when I attempted it, insisting that I live with them as part of their family. They were engaging, kind, and in time started to feel like my tribe. At the six month mark, when I told them about the pregnancy, there was no change in their attitude towards me. That I could detect. Other women I had gotten to know there all expressed a kindly sort of interest, a benevolent kind of curiosity.</p><p><br /></p><p>It, the baby, would be adopted I told them, told myself, with confidence. I <i>had this. </i>I was in charge of it. There was still some panic, still the grey days, but less than I had experienced before. As though the competence I felt in me about managing this, diminished the other, unnameable, afflicting fears that had dogged my days back home. </p><p>The day came for my meeting with the Catholic Adoption Society. A tense bus trip into town, to the massive Georgian building where they were, the solitary wait to be called into a room there, the two nuns facing me over a heavy oak table, had the air of a summonsing. Even though, I reminded myself, I had made the appointment. They pulled out forms from a drawer, asked questions, ticked off boxes, about myself, my family circumstances, our financial and social position back home. It was very smooth, very professional, and they were asking the questions. I was answering obediently enough until I hesitated at the box stipulating that the adoptive parents should be Catholic. They were incredulous. Insisting that I would say yes, that I could only allow adoption to a catholic couple. </p><p>The tone of incredulity, the message in it, hardened my will to assert myself in this. I had thought about it before I came there. I had bought into the narrative that the decent, moral thing to do was to allow an adoption, but also that this was my choice, and that the best people would not necessarily be Catholic. The child did not have to raised as a Catholic at all. His life need not be controlled in that way, prescribed as mine had been. As catholics required. I suppose I thought that life should be different fo him or her, the child. Life should be broader, more expansive. I felt this on an instinctive level. His life would be better. He would not be hobbled by the elements shadowing mine. Otherwise what was the point?</p><p>I stuck to my guns on that at least. Of course I have no idea whether they respected my choice, whether they ticked that box. They moved on to the next question smoothly enough. They assured me at the end that I was doing the right thing. I remember feeling very small on the way home. </p><p>I mostly felt that the child in me, it's welfare, was paramount and that my aberrancy, carelessness was atoned in putting the baby first, I can see in retrospect that that view of things was detached, logical, and apart from the growing reality of the child. I can see that it could have been described as a sort of conforming acquiescence dressed up as logic. Expiation for my sins, at work. A loving sense of the child, my son as it turned out, formed in my mind and my heart as the months passed. He grew, started moving independently, made his presence felt. It became an interaction, a dance with two. </p><p>At six months I sat before a Community Welfare Officer after a long wait in a longer queue, wanting to get in and out again, as soon as he would release me. (at that point I was applying for welfare payments as my agreed employment period had passed and, while I continued on with the family much as before, we had agreed I would do this) He asked me all the questions I expected. And then he asked me why I was giving up my child.</p><p>Just that, and the whole edifice of my plan, the projected adoption, became makeshift, a house of cards and a possibility only. I answered quite as directly that I couldn't afford to keep a child. I did not realise until I said it that it was that simple. I could not afford to keep him. The Welfare Officer wouldn't have it, went on to describe the kind of social welfare supports available now, the allowances and rent subsistence I could look for. It would be hard, he told me, but it could be done. You did not have to give your baby up. You had a choice.</p><p>I mulled it over, agonised, played with this idea of having a choice for the rest of the pregnancy. Should I? Could I? Would they let me? And that was the head stuff. In the heart a web of connections grew between the child and myself. I suppose a problem with this see sawing was that I wasn't able to do any actual planning, preparing for a child I would bring home with me. Other than the adoption planning I mean. I couldn't sit with the decision to keep him with me. I did not feel empowered sufficiently, entitled. I did not feel capable. </p><p>It only needed the birth, all 24 hours of it, the emergence of the baby into the world, his firm little body, his head of long dark hair, the <i>vision</i> of him tucked in one arm as I had a cup of tea afterward...yes it took that, to confirm what I already felt. I would not, should not, <i>could not</i>, give him up.</p><p>The Dublin neighbours rallied around. Someone had heard of a woman wanting to let a room in her house, there were baby clothes, all the baby stuff, aplenty on that estate and they gathered it up for me. I would have a place to live for now. A way of taking care of a child. </p><p>The Community Welfare Officer was right, it <i>was </i>hard. Very hard. A series of dark unheated flats, in one case mice infested ( I was grateful to find it), the bleak queuing for welfare payments, isolation, and an ever present threat of homelessness. Ever present money worries. The worsening of my panic attacks, my grey days shading to black. But then, one red letter day, I stumbled on a book called Self Help for your Nerves. A book of revelations about what ailed me. I began a slow trip back from fear to wellness. The relief of what the writer, Claire Weekes, had to say in that book! A ripple expanding to heal, to transform my ocean of torment and ignorance. And the child thrived. He inspired and motivated me to battle and batter my way into University, a Profession afterward. I was determined to find legitimacy in the world for him, and for myself. As I recovered and thrived people were prepared to give me ground. There were always the helpful ones to extend a hand (there were always the others).</p><p>The tide was on the turn in time for Unmarried Mothers. The status of illegitimacy was abolished as a legal status in 1983. I joined a group called Cherish at that time. We were activists, making the personal political. Illegitimacy as a legal status was to be abolished, maintenance payments from fathers enforced in law for the first time. I vividly recall the long and impassioned arguments at meetings about that, the fear that these changes might mean that a man could claim access, custody even, could take control. Particularly if they had to pay. Because they had to pay. No one wanted that. The experience of patriarchal control had been too powerful, too damaging for most of us. The battle for agency, to keep your child, to live as you choose, too hard fought for. Our view of men forever coloured by their behaviour up to that time. Many of us had experienced a blank wall of rejection and denial when the fathers (who would not be fathers) were told about our pregnancies. Accounts abounded about this, about men bringing their mates to court in maintenance applications to say they'd all slept with you. Yes.</p><p>DNA testing put paid to that kind of denial a few years later.</p><p>My son is a father himself these days. He is successful in the world, a very good father, a good person and what more can any of us hope for in our children. I know that that might have been the story anyway, if he had been adopted. But that was the story when I kept him. And I never doubted the decision. In time our bond was restored and the damage of that final interview with the nun, after he was born, healed. The memory of it never leaves me. </p><p><br /></p><p> 111</p><p><br /></p><p>She is ensconced in another tall ceilinged room, barricaded behind another oak table in a room in the hospital, when I am again summonsed on that last morning. Not smiling now. No-one is smiling now. I walk in stiffly, injured form the birth. </p><p>(In those days there were humiliating enemas beforehand, administered when you went in, along with rough shaving, so that your first hours in the delivery rooms were spent dashing to and from the toilets in your dressing gown, your stomach cramping alternatively from birth contractions and bowel contortions. I am there still, crying in humiliation, rinsing my dressing gown out at the sink when I don't quite make the toilet bowl as another mother bangs on the door. At the other end of the delivery, vaginal cutting was the order of the day. There were many stitches following your average birth. In between, your crying, howling, or any other eruptions of pain were firmly hushed, were not encouraged, as part of your birth experience. Your plan made not for you)</p><p>The thing I say to her, straight away and as I walk in, is that I am keeping the child. I know that this, that she, is the rock I'll likely perish on. I have to come in strong and certain. At first she doesn't seem to hear me, does not respond. She does not look at me. There are more forms, her pen busy ticking, underlining. "And how could you mange that!" she says at last, still looking down. I I tell her how I could manage that, stumbling over my words, delivered to her bent head. She looks at me finally, tells me how inadequate, how lacking my child's life will be, how selfish my choice. I am afraid that that is true but I hang in there anyway, "You'll surely put the child first. It's all arranged. We have very good people for him" she says. "You can surely see it's the right thing to do". And I can see the good people, decent, married, comfortably off, people who deserve a child, unlike myself. I decide to keep it simple, accepting that there is no way I'm going to feel good or valid about this. "I'm keeping my baby' I say to all her objections and persuasions after that. She asks me where I am going to take him, what I have to offer him. I tell her that I am going back to get a place sorted, that there are some people who will help me. She stares at that. </p><p>She says that they, the nuns, will take him till I've managed that. "A week, at most, I say. "Oh, we will see," she says. It's all in the tone, what she thinks of me. It seems to me, as I walk out of that room, that her will, her righteousness, will previal no matter what I try to put in place now. But I have her measure and the measure of my own vulnerability, my weakness, in this, and somehow I will do it. I will keep him. I will not give him up.</p><p>I go back to my Dublin refuge, and he to their holding centre. I start the work of bringing him home. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>......................................................................................................................................................................</p><p><br /></p><p>Check out Anna's book, " The Chemical Angels Came for Us " (available on Amazon book, apple books, and other platforms.) </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-8623364999973278312020-10-24T10:52:00.000-07:002020-10-24T10:52:34.574-07:00Shroud Waving Days.<p><br /></p><p> Look away look away</p><p>People talk about death these days as though it was a threat, a promise, a consequence of, a punishment for. A badly made bargain. Better house arrest than a coffin, better absolute isolation than turn, turn again helpless, on an ICU bed. Better beggary, lining up for hand outs allowed to you, than ending. Better breathing back your own food smells, subverting breath's need to exhale through your sweaty, your slipping down mask, hours into your masked working everyday, Better that... than chancing infection. Better not looking in somebody's face, than suffer the small dislocation, the instant impression of facelessness? Subliminal strangeness. Better not stare at the jaws outlined by the face cloth, all massive, receding, unsmiling bone, than slip a notch more on the rope from all that was decent and normal.</p><p><br /></p><p> Close down your poor ears </p><p>Better not hear the dissenters, deniers, contrarians, they being, all being, far rightists, covidiots, something like that. Better not hear; for a thing once heard is hard to un-hear as you're walking the line. When you're marching in tandem, line dancing, warmed at the hearth of inclusion. Better not hear (I can't hear you) else a coffin awaits you. </p><p> and no need to think about Science is Science...</p><p>Better not think: or aspire to know better than Nephet, or doctors or science, least people will die. You will make people die. Better not read, or consider, the terrible story being told, Better not question...what's told to you... eyes straying over the contrary articles, videos, doctors dissenting the light of hysteria, resolve in their eyes. Factually fake stuff awaiting to trap the unwary, seduce the too careless down paths of heretical, just isn't possible, alternate facts... that way waits a shroud.</p><p><br /></p><p> oh why would you speak!</p><p>Better not speak: give a voice to a doubt, a stray thought, a discrepancy, ah would you upset and perplex the dear people, your family, the neighbours, all stumbling though Measures, down shop isles, strung out along paths, county roads as they mumble through masks, use their words, about pulling together, and when will it end... Better far better admire all the face masks, the blue ones, the flowers masks, pretty masks, black masks, the ones in the gutter, the ones cradling chins, slipping down below noses, impeding the eye-line. </p><p>Don't speak! least you send a dear heart to the coffin, you murder the vulnerable, hasten the end of all things. </p><p> most secret and shameful pleasures</p><p><i>Better not see though you saw, oh you did, the young, partying just down the road, the neighbours, out laughing in groups on the green, the call of the seagulls, the screams of delight from your kids on the beech back in August, your women friends chilling and laughing together in somebody's garden last week, how the coppery leaves fly out spinning in front you walking these days in the fields, those times thinking nothing, of covid, or dying, or measures, that dream of your throat stretched open and screaming, your breath given back to the universe, hands holding hands in a circle of randomers, lit by the moon. </i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p> Better not better not better not better.... </p><p>hear daily the death rates, infection rates, something called R rates,... You <i>will </i>see you <i>will </i>hear you <i>will</i> speak. You <i>will</i> play your part and you <i>will</i> do your bit, you <i>will</i> ...come together in this marvellous collaborative WILL to eradicate Virus. Infection, disease. And all death. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-51640047629683783422020-09-15T03:31:00.003-07:002020-09-18T15:17:09.362-07:00Staycation. Kiss a human. Bury a Friend. <p>So I and some other exhausted members of the extended Fam did a Flight Into the West before Kildare County locked down (though not entirely). For a staycation (native hol) in August. I, having taken three days in Cork in July with Beauty and the Boy, was having a second staycation ( holiday at home) to be truthful. Three nights in Galway, Spiddal, was bought and paid for, to top us up to a week away from Our House. Our cave and our prison, where we'd all spent more time than we'd ever foreseen or asked for. Five strange months. Co-exisiting. Sheltering in Place. Within walls we'd left behind a year before.</p><p><br /></p><p>I mean, hey, it wasn't so bad? Not for us. We <i>were</i> adults all. We knew how to ignore each other when it was required, come together when it was needed. It was, I mean, bonding? Over Netflix, online yoga, knitting (ah yes), messing about in the back garden. Books. Coffee brewing, and shooting the breeze about the crazy pandemic tornado, howling past Our House, swirling around our boundary line. Out there, at bay. But still, and anyway, time and living in this manner takes its toll We were getting a little reluctant to leave the house at all, in the end. In a way. We were obsessing, overthinking things we had to learn to leave alone...</p><p><i>...will I die, will I soon, intubated and drugged, will I scream, inside will I scream? will I....have only strangers masked strangers, masked strangers are turning me turning me turning me... and I'm done? will my mother, my father, my children call out for me, dying, call out for us ...stop! all that fuss, all that hope coming in, coming here, now masked strangers who don't know or forget we must pass with our people....and can I or do I exist now? beginning or ending, if no-one contain me...infection I am..</i></p><p><i>We must behave like everyone we met including ourselves are infected. I am infection. </i></p><p><i> </i></p><p>We were looking at the world from a position of retreat, peering out at a place at the end of a lengthening tunnel....had to get out!</p><p><br /></p><p>And how my lungs expanded as miles flew, fields streamed past the car on the motorway. Speeding. Probably. A little. Being anywhere, away, was exhilarating, kickstarting, strange, scary-strange. Scary? Well, the gutted towns we slowed for, shop fronts boarded up on high streets in towns. in a city, gaping absences on main streets like missing teeth, exposed, down an out, were disturbing. Edgy waiters washing down your seat your table, before you crossed the threshold, dis-infecting your seat your table after you had eaten, was that, scary. Chilling even. The sense of dystopia was there and everywhere. Like you're getting back to normal, not. Never. You're on the road to nowhere, or somewhere not mapped (maybe in horror movies?).</p><p>But, you know, the Family was there. Those dear familiars, to meet for meals out, to walk the beech with, and wander through the streets. To drink with, and debrief. Despite that invisible fence hampering essential connection. You know the one. You've learning not to cross it. A scared new world. Where you can't have a drink, in a dark warm pub with your people, a mate. (you can't) Just drink together and talk, and your talk getting wilder as pints flow, til you're in the zone? If you're Irish, if you're human.</p><p>Well I knew where the invisible fence was, and didn't expect to leap the perimeter in Galway. But walking through a properly cavelike lounge, as we checked into the hotel, I realise it is not empty, as all pub lounges have become. There is the brother in law, gazing philosophically at the far wall, nursing a pint. At 4pm in the day! Hurrah! Turned out there was a way of having one, or a few. If you were eating, like later, or staying, or something like that. "Come join me" he called like the Host of Drinking, only waiting for us to arrive.</p><p>So we joined him and once I got over my fear of the barman snatching the second pint from my hand, or the third, had the most fun I'd had in I mean, five months? A seriously laughing dissection of everything, happening or stalled. Interrupted, finally, by dinner when we absolutely had to shift ourselves into the restaurant. How I used to take this, connecting, for granted. How it is judged by the non-partakers, naysayers, as valueless, dispensable, <i>not allowed, </i>in these long dark days of panicked pandemic. </p><p>That, my dear readers, was an an actual session? And then there were communal meals, cooked and served up to you in actual restaurants, while all you had to do was eat, talk and smile (like a good thing). Compulsivly. Your grown children arranged at the table behind you, distanced, their chairs shifting closer and closer to the adults to join in the talk. </p><p>My sister, her daughter and my daughter, eat with me the night before we leave. Just us, at our socially distanced table, marooned near a window, well served by a not busy waiter. We are all still giddy/happy to be able to do it, to be in. All animation, forthcoming and confessional, that night. My sister and I talk of secrets, family things, happenings, only ever taken for an airing in closed door spaces. Spilling beans as the wine flowed, the food came and went. The time when someone's mother, on her tenth birth, did not recognise the child the nurses brought... or so the mother said said.... "Apparently, the nurse said that that was a thing, you know, if your own mother died when you were expecting" my sister says. But the child who was not recognised felt this deeply, enduringly, for years and years afterward, when a chatty aunt spilled the beans about it.</p><p>...and then there was the Uncle Misplaced, a new born babe given to another mother in a nursing home, whose own mother took the stranger baby to her breast, took it home. A fact the lost child never forgave when the mistake was uncovered, the babies replaced. </p><p>....my own memory that may not be a memory, (the chatty aunt again) of hanging upside down from my pram by my pram-straps for an eternity, as I screamed and choked, no one coming, in a field. Mother having left me in my father's care, the pram parked in a corner of the field he was ploughing, his eye trained on the churning earth. His mind fixed on... ploughing. Evidently. "I didn't remember this, til I was told about..I mean. Then I did?". I explain. And, (explained) that I figured it may have given me an interesting and permanently upside down view of life...at the best view of things...</p><p>Our daughters listen carefully, silent for a change. As though they are imputing information, receiving key instructions concerning themselves, for their journey. And they are, and so it goes. We pass it on, we rid ourselves of memories that laced, curled about and floored their conception, their making. One day maybe, they will pass on such stuff to their daughters, to shadow, or illuminate the way. Of course, they will, in telling, medicalise, catgorise each perfect story, as people do now. Instead of leaving it perfect, released in it's telling. Illuminating all around it happening in that time.</p><p>We left there replete, unequivocally happy and hugging like Americans at the door, tipsy and sure that we'd covered all bases. Like, we said, who knew when we'd do this again? Precarious good times! Giving urgency, heat, to the good food we eat, to everything said. A glorious airing of things needing presence, close contact, the smile in the eyes and the head cocked for listening. The energy linking, co-mingling your body my body, the only way ever we humans connect. </p><p> .........................................................................................................</p><p><br /></p><p>Visit my site annacoganwriting.com to access my latest book. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-70046644428763011442020-07-31T09:53:00.032-07:002020-09-01T08:30:07.732-07:00Who sees The Crow. A Suicide. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
seeing though a glass darkly<br />
<br />
A messenger call from the Angel Girl. I remember at the time I was easing off my shoes, the kettle singing in the quiet of my room. The soft whirring ring persisted as I sat thinking about where my bag, the phone was, exactly? Stupified, I guess after a day in the sun, in the city with her. A bit reluctant to bestir myself although I did. "Mum?... Mother? (heightened) and she was straight into it, some unlikely story about a crow attack?<br />
<br />
"Yeah, I was like minding my own business? waiting, on my bike, when he, when <i>something</i> hit me hard, on the back of my head... so...so, it was a crow? a big black crow, and he <i>hit</i> me, hard?"<br />
<br />
"Oh...um, a... a bird?"<br />
<br />
"yeah yeah, a Crow! I <i>saw</i> him flying back unto the sign above the bins, after. Sitting there, <i>staring</i> at me."<br />
<br />
"oh...well isn't that kinda strange and..."<br />
<br />
"It hurt! It really, really hurt. He <i>meant</i> it to hurt? Like I don't mean that he...I mean he probably has a nest or something in the bins, and <i>babies</i> that he has to, he has to, you know, feed? protect? He has...he has to... to <i>guard the food</i>. And I was, I was standing in his...like his food source, so he had to..."<br />
<br />
"Oh. Well... anyways (the Angel Girl puts all her felt experiences through a sort of conscientious, analytical wringer of logic and gives you the politically correct fully analysed version on sharing ) are you, you know, all right?<br />
<br />
"I mean he hit me hard.? My head's... still... So what should I <i>do</i>."<br />
<br />
"Oh well, right, (Angel's fears of damage/danger are an undercurrent to her cognitive analysis in these kind of situations. She wants to understand, she wants you to understand, she wants to cry her a river of tears. But she will not)<br />
<br />
"I mean, you know, why not have a little lie down... to get over the...I mean shock, sounds shocking (I know so little about crow attacks really, but it does sound that. And I try) Shocking!"<br />
<br />
"Oh well, It's not actually the crow's fault? if he, I mean, had to protect his territory? I mean Crow Attacks are becoming <i>common</i>, I've been looking it up. (Sternly) ( Had I been, in sympathising, in fact judging the crow?)<br />
<br />
"Well, yeah, but still and all we can't have crows going around attacking..."<br />
<br />
"Reports of Crows Attacks are increasing, online? Look it up! Cos birds are I mean, they are <i>driven</i> out of their habitats. By humans? Left with no option but to defend, like, their food sources?"<br />
<br />
"Right. Good to know know (mea culpa) So hey, kettle's boiled here and I want to make some...I mean make some..."<br />
<br />
"So what about my head! Infection! from it's you know, claws?"<br />
<br />
"Oh well (robustly) my darling, I daresay you can hold your own against bird germs? Sure we'd all be dead long ago if it was that easy for...birds. Sure they'd all be at it. (I think the sun had worked on me like cannabis resin here)<br />
<br />
A wave of exhaustion then. I assure her glibly that birds are harmless entirely, to apply a damp cloth to the affected area, update me tomorrow.<br />
(I heard the underlying note, the pain, the panic without words, but I'd kinda run out of road on this one, to be truthful)<br />
<br />
in fact I'm actually bleeding...<br />
<br />
Next evening she comes and sweeping back the hair, shows me her wound. A bloody cut where Mr Crow has scraped her skull.<br />
<br />
"But...you didn't say he had cut you?" I protest, feeling that I had less than kind.<br />
<br />
"But I didn't know! only felt it. There was <i>no one</i> to look at it, then." she wails "Is it bad!"<br />
<br />
Her friends had had a look while drinking in the park I discover (sprawled under the kindly sheltering trees, toasted by the sun, knocking back cheap wine from Albert Heijn). They had located the wound. It was in fact a super cool story necking wine, laughing at your war wounds. Anaesthetised to any consequences.<br />
<br />
We look at ways of cleaning the cut, discuss infection. I notice her pallor, her forehead clammy. She wants to talk, to process. She describes the blow's force when the crow swooped, behind, how she didn't see it coming, how she was unaware of <i>what</i> it was. I listen. I see that I haven't understood this properly, if at all. Somewhere between her hurt and her indomitable logic, and my shrinking from her inconvenient need, I failed her here. Failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. I am more culpable really than the Crow.<br />
<br />
Facebook death notification<br />
<br />
Unsettling days, that one and the one that followed. I learn that a very good friend has died by suicide some months before. I learn of this on the day after the crow attack via a FB notification that it is his birthday! Wish him happy birthday! facebook thrills. His page, still up, contains one message, wishing him a happy birthday in heaven. Right. Heaven. I knew something was up. He had not contacted me at Christmas as he always would. I message the Facebook poster who messages back to tell me that he has died, a few weeks after we, he and I, last met in fact.<br />
<br />
The realisation then that I knew, some instinct told me, he was gone (which I had dismissed), got me to thinking about our last meeting. Recalling the meal, (last supper), our interaction, looking for clues. Wondering, not about what I didn't know but rather what I knew and did not acknowledge, swerving maybe to avoid.<br />
<br />
Thinking long hard on this one, wanting to understand if and how I'd failed him on that night, at least.<br />
Thinking about him...<br />
<br />
oh, I remember you<br />
<br />
<br />
He was a good friend, same age. He fought the good fight and was functional in the world, at some cost to himself (I see) ( No, I always knew that)<br />
<br />
you started here, you ended over here<br />
<br />
He worked, had worked from when he was 16 years old. His father showed him how to sell things and that's what he did. He sold, bibles at first, really well. He progressed to Life Insurance. On the road, touching base with people, persuading, advancing, serving people. Good at it. So good he got promotions, more and more of it, hours and hours of it. And then he stopped. He had to stop. He <i>had</i> the health insurance, a pension fund to stop, you might say. He started a new self help group which seemed to work, people were sent to him, OCD sufferers, people tormented with panic. He began a Masters as a therapist. He hadn't finished that. It was his first experience of third level education. He took it on, puzzling over assignment referencing, memory sticks, continual and unrelenting assessments.<br />
<br />
He had distracting demons. He had to travel miles to and from the college, negotiate with college tutors, explain his methods, persist in his self belief. Sometimes his demons ruled. Mostly he wrestled with them, carried on. He never would let go. <br />
<br />
you lived for this<br />
<br />
He was gregarious, a drinker, who denied himself that solace when unwell. He was a talker, loving pub talk, connection. He lived to connect, to fellow sufferers, to all the people hobbled by OCD, panic, to his many and varied friends and acquaintances, to me. He was passionate, a passionate man. He lived for his GAA, the matches, the players, the dissections afterwards. And Leonard Cohen. He came with me to see Leonard in Dublin, and to Lisadell where he sang the songs all through that magical night, while ferrying drinks for us, chatting with randomers, surrendering happily to every good thing. He came to Seville with me one fine summer, happy as any child with the city, the people, our dinners in the warm evenings, walks in the shadow of the Alhambra, sucking on an ice-pop in the heat of the afternoon. The warmest, sweetest of companions.<br />
<br />
you suffered, died, for this...<br />
<br />
He suffered, always, all his life. In his forties, when I met him, he was a slight, open faced man walking crookedly, from backache. Meetings with him involved an exhaustive search for suitable seating. I, never having suffered that, indulged him (I felt)<br />
<br />
In time he told me why he spend so long in toilets. Washing his hands over and over. Never having suffered that, I listened patiently (I felt) He went to therapists, messeuses, doctors seeking alleviation, with energy, purpose. And this is true, he never ever allowed his torments ruin a good night out. Nor did I (allow his torments ruin a...). He lived, like a marathon runner, keeping on keeping on, pushing through the burn, until one day he was fished out, extracted, from the ocean. A bottle of whiskey in him, having, as he told me later, made up his mind.<br />
<br />
He went patiently, afterward, back to the drawing board. Starting an actually effective OCD group, applying for his course, and always and ever seeking love, a woman, a life. His lifelong quest. The road he travelled (never to arrive). I was not she, although it would have suited him and me if I had been. I was his friend and there were times when I relied on him and he on me.<br />
<br />
Before our last supper, he had fallen again into a black hole of depression. He didn't see me for a year or so...and that last night, he told me about it. He had crawled back doggedly from the brink, was planning things again, deciding to stop the meds, to resume his course. Because, he told me, he was better, yes, he was, and did not want to heed the warnings to hold up, wait up. All the cautions to take the meds and keep to the shallows in the future, hereinafter. And I, I told him what he wanted me to, agreed with what he said he wanted to do. Understanding, I thought, his need to live his life, if life was to be worth living.<br />
<br />
We eat and drank, talked, listened, happy for that night at least. I'm sure of it.<br />
<br />
He was not his suffering?<br />
<br />
<br />
wanting to live wanting to die<br />
<br />
But when he didn't call, or sent his inevitable Xmas card, his new year's text, I knew. I didn't heed my knowing, didn't actively grieve. Aware, if it were true, I might not actually be told. Not knowing anyone, really, knowing him. I housed an elusive ghost of loss regardless, and on this year, on his birthday, he managed, I think ( maybe) to let me know his ending. At last. <br />
<br />
I recalled that last time we met, re-called and again re-called it. And I see oh yes I see how sad he was, how depleted, how eager to get past it, to connect, with food and talk, with me, I was always good for that, for talk and fanciful forward planning.<br />
<br />
I wonder if I'd asked him, how he actually felt ( he didn't seem to want to go there though he would have gone anywhere I asked him to...) (but if I'd asked, would he have said?) He and I so busy, busy, there, sailing into the mystic, having raucous <i>craic</i>, while all the while his poor sad child was sitting numbly on the restaurant seat, awaiting him. I see it now, I see myself unwilling to connect to pain, his sorrow. Least it took me too, maybe. (and what good would I have been to him then?) It took him, anyway.<br />
<br />
so don't be bothering me with all that now (I CAN'T?)<br />
<br />
I think about that, about gliding over peoples dreadful sorrow, taking them to other places, they eager for it as you yourself, wanting only to be transported. I think of a girl attacked by crows, who could not say the words 'I'm wounded', whose wound I could not/would not see. I would not look. There, but for fortune.... Sometimes you will not <i>look</i> at suffering humanity, lest they drag you down there with them, or, blindsided, hobble you, so that you cannot haul them out? A polite refusal to connect with suffering, drowning, begging humanity, the dreadful inability to connect.<br />
<br />
The knowledge is heavy in me, when I find the painting in the Van Gogh Museum, The Cornfield. I stand before it drowning in the vibrant corn, his shimmering blues, the colours pinned and pinched to canvas by the crows. So many of them. Hovering, poised against the deep blue sky to fall on, to devour, the harvest of a life.<br />
<br />
(Note to Angel:I do not mean to blame the crows. Also, what doesn't kill you makes you laugh)) </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><i>Do visit me at my writing site to see my latest book at </i><b>annacoganwriting.com <i> </i></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b><br /></b></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-6153096418717030182020-06-20T11:20:00.001-07:002020-06-20T11:20:57.604-07:00Necessary Journeys . A Haircut. Naked people.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Necessity.<br />
<br />
Last week I set out out on a Necessary Journey, to Amsterdam. Yes, I <i>was</i> needed, but I will not lie to you dear readers, I was glad glad glad of the necessity. The sense of being herded, detained in my own home for weeks on end ( home's your castle) by <i>other parties</i> was doing something to my mind's peace...my maybe soul. Grinning guards at check points when I had to travel, queues cattle-like at supermarkets, I accepted, with its consequential cortisol spikes, helplessness...(the curve the curve). The news, the newsfeeds arguing the toss, disputing fatalities. The helpless old in nursing homes. Collective Guilt. Mea culpa mea culpa.<br />
<br />
I accepted it, all.<br />
<br />
And now the oh so reluctant opening up (dance of the seven veils) complete with doom laden warnings to the restless, squeals of refusal from the people thoroughly spooked and BLOODY WELL NEVER COMING OUT AGAIN, PERIOD!<br />
<br />
And science as news, as newsfeed, as irrefutable, with its contradicting, blaming, framing messages:<br />
<br />
There <i>will</i> there <i>won't</i> be: second waves, antibodies, cures.<br />
There <i>is</i> there <i>isn't</i>: alleviation in hydroxychloroquine, remdesiver, masks.<br />
Locking down, or kind of not, <i>has </i>it <i>hasn't </i> saved the people, flattened the curve.<br />
But facial Masks are useful, useless, helpful, pointless to prevent your spreading, <i>but not breathing in</i>, a virus...<br />
droplets, droplets travel many metres, wait to ambush, hoover, hang, athough they don't... they may... they are...dissolved... they are too fine for masks to stop them... <i>not</i>, they're <i>not</i>!<br />
Just wear the masks? Yes, wear them anyway. Ok?<br />
<br />
Me, I took positions on this virus, like you do. I got behind the immune system coping, the right to prudent autonomy, that kind of thing. Behind questioning <i>everything </i> spinning from the panicked government, irrefutable scientists, news, the newsfeed. I wasn't scared, or any more than I am always scared of life's incalculable shifts and endings.<br />
<br />
But then, days were weeks and weeks were months of lockdown. Fear comes to you anyway. Hysteria, a kind of madness flying out from all the shifting narratives, sticks. Even as you try to hold your ground, sustain your people. The point comes where you can't sustain this flight from normal, or say the words ( flattening curves, in it together, stay safe stay safe) ( you never said the words). You must resume your everyday, or spiral into some basically unhinged.<br />
<br />
A Haircut.<br />
<br />
And so I walked from Centraal Station into the enlightened city of Amsterdam, blinking at bodily proximities of 1.5 mts, fumbling for masks for trams, and breathing, breathing mouthfuls of lung expanding air. Walking, walking as you do in cities always, taking in the city vistas, its canals and buildings visible anew in the absence of the tourists. Only the locals out and shopping, walking, talking in their native tongue, the strong stretched vowels prevailing in the soft warm air.<br />
I listen, soothed, on my way to have my hair cut on my second day. I had a sense that I would be renewed, made good again in the sanctum of the salon, the snip snip of the stylist's scissiors. Accumulations, dead ends from the lockdown falling from me as the stylist layered and washed and combed my Irish hair.<br />
<br />
And so it was. I walked back up from Prinsengracht, crossing the Kalverstraat to Dam Square so free and fine and easy, light as air. I felt my head sit lighter on my shoulders, cleaner, sane.<br />
<br />
<br />
You pay your money and you take your chances...<br />
<br />
Days pass, and we grow accustomed to the freedoms here, the restrictions too that have become the price of freedoms. Coffee in a cafe, dinners out, apologetic waiters limiting numbers, murmured reminders of social distance as we the Grateful Customers smile assent. The people walk together in the public spaces easily, reminded of the virus by shop assistants, waiters wanting so to have you in. Observe the rules...oh yes, oh yes, but nonetheless entice you...in. Come in, come in, oh careful does it; this way, <i>do come in</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
Nudists,<br />
<br />
The angel child and I take the train to Zanvoort aan Zee, on Friday. The Zee the Zee, I say, it's been forever dearest (corralled in midland locked-down Ireland) since we've been and seen the sea!<br />
It is divine, is all. The sun shines kindly, warms our pallid Irish skin, the breeze blows back our new cut hair, the sand gives gently to bare feet, we walk the shoreline, talk, the two of us, content. We turn at midday, cross the sand for coffee, walking through the people sun bathing. I pay them little mind.<br />
"So um, why are they all, I mean, ah, naked?"<br />
Huh?<br />
The dear girl's face is creased with distaste at a solitary naked man stretched careless on a towel. Full frontal, to be clear. There are a few of these guys, as well as little groups of men and women comfortably naked, unbothered in their skin. We agree we must be on the <i>nudist stretch</i>, and to get our coffee back the way. And she, the dear girl, asks me as we hasten ( she more disturbed than I) if I would, I mean myself, be into that, because she most definitely would not. I say I think I would (among congenial people). I say I think, after the initial awkwardness I'd be ok with it. She <i>definitely wouldn’t be. </i> I cannot say I blame her really, observing the ever so slightly predatory solitary man. The fleeting facial smirk, the calculating eye. But ah, the little laughing groups!<br />
<br />
I talk about about my naked dreams over coffee. (We’ve done her dreaming on the walk) Dreams of the recurring kind where you are shoeless, barefoot, sometimes naked, in the public space. Where you are OUT, too late to dress, go back, or find your shoes... your clothes. Self conscious, feeling foolish, solitary, shamed and naked in a public place. We ponder on it, poke at it, consider exhibitionism, shame, or boundaries, <i>appropriateness, grounded ness. Thefeartheshame. </i><i>Re</i>currence, and what it is that I'm (just) not getting here, why doomed to dream the dream over and over.<br />
<i><br /></i>We shift to Normal People which she is re-reading after the TV show. It turns out to be, basically, related, we decide. Connell and Marianne and intimacy in bodies, minds, the heart. Baring body baring heart. The desire for it... fear of it. (And still the public discomfort about...naked need?)<br />
<br />
I wonder later if in fact the dream discomfort’s with vulnerability, openness. Not leaky boundaries, sagging gates, between public and private, as I had loosely guessed. Not a dream of jeopardy, abandonment of lock downed, closed off, safety ( we hysterically require) The <i>feartheshame </i>neurosis. <i> </i>Not that at all. I wonder if in fact being naked, honest/open with all others is the last frontier? Connection, laying bare the body/heart. The feartheshame neurosis. Being able for it, being willing, to try. </div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-41897410714881202152020-05-24T09:45:00.000-07:002020-06-07T05:26:43.930-07:00 Where do you go to (my Lovely). <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Unmoored<br />
<br />
"So, we'll all break for coffee...ah... will we," the hostess says self consciously "...and we'll all I mean go down to our kitchens now, from wherever you are, in your (chuckle) socks, and, you know, make yourself a cup of coffee, or tea even, make <i>tea</i>, and come back...from wherever you are in the house in your...your PJs" She chortles at her own insouciance, trials off...<br />
And I'm pushing up from the desk in the box room, the play room that was, shelves still holding children's books, splashy children's paintings. I am disorientated in place and time, yanked from aural connection via tele conference, and in need of strong coffee.<br />
'Wherever you are in the house' 'our kitchens??' Oh. The words erase my inner visual of colleagues in a room around a table, besuited, a secretarial station humming just down the hall. Like I know <i>I'm</i> in my socks in my boxroom, but <i>they</i> were at work where my mind had placed them. Picture perfect, arranged, never disturbing me with visual cues or body language. My captive audience. Not. And I'm shocked into body, pins and needles, real.<br />
I need an <i>infusion</i> of coffee. (not <i>tea</i>).<br />
<br />
Stunned<br />
<br />
I offer that palliative to my younger daughter, passing her room, her open door, where she is a pale silent presence hunched over a desk. She looks up and through me, failing to connect. She's online at a lecture, the lecturer's voice grown familiar to me over weeks, catching stray words, dutch accents, intoning on physics, micro-macro duality, vectors and whatnot.<br />
She beats a path every day of this lockdown from kitchen to garden to bedroom, listening, writing, staring at a screen. Connecting for lectures sometimes in the early morning, sometimes in late evening. The Dutch are always ahead of us. Or behind us... They're down with an early start, anyhoo.<br />
"But, so, I mean... what about dinner... the hoovering... your washing? (spilling untended from the washing machine) I variously ask, forgetting that she is not really here, in my house. She's in a lecture. She's not really there either.<br />
<br />
Days she has a stunned look, like a bird smacking hard on a windowpane. Times she grows wild and rowdy on zoom calls, only wanting to connect, hysterical in the emptiness of virtual presence.<br />
The Garden is taking shape under her restless fingers, strawberries forming, tomatoes, lettuce tips peeping from the raised bed. She grows the vegetables, leaves the flowers, the grass cutting to me.<br />
She is a lover, a hugger, a dancer with dancers, given <i>pacifiers</i> of virtual meets, netflix, lectures online. Tossed back and forth from virtual interior to empty exterior, each and every day. Sometimes suspended in the transition. Lost.<br />
<br />
<i>All night she dreamzs</i>, <i>creates...</i><i> astonishing astonished scenarios to locate herself, somehow, in this bizarre and total up -turning of her everyday life</i>.<br />
<i>Dreamzs. She dreamzs, and in her dreaming leaves her lockdown, travels far and wide and seeking.</i><br />
<br />
Barbarian<br />
<br />
I stand and stare at the kettle thinking this, and remember the other one, the sister. In virtual college too, bedroom door closed, desk neat, pencils lined, computer placed, content I think you might say. Her papers submitted in a timely fashion, her grades looking good, at ease with this slowing down of every day tumult, worldly invasions. At ease at the wheel that lockdown has placed in her appreciative hands. I wonder if Beauty in her tower, Rapunzel and Sleeping were just as <i>OK</i> with it, were humming and upbeat in the cool quiet space created by bricked walls, lockdowns.<br />
She comes down, steps out, slips away periodically to meet her BF, her lovely boyfriend, quarantined<br />
in similar rooms, <i>waiting</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Evenings she comes down from the mountain, sits with us. Knitting, headbands, scarves, a shoulder bag, her needles weaving blues and greens and reds, her eyes fixed on the TV screen as she dissects narrative arcs on box sets, Game of Thrones rehashes, Normal People. Scherezade distracting us.... </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I wonder how the hell she'll ever go back to clamour, non verbal communications, the great unwashed humanity. If she ever has to. I expect she <i>can</i> do it, she's done it before, (if she ever has to...)<br />
I roar, invasive, from the kitchen "Hey, d'u want a cup of Coffee! Hey? Hello?... Answer me when I'm talking (shouting) to you!"<br />
I am the Barbarian (at the gates)<br />
<br />
Dreaming<br />
<br />
I'm spooning Lavazza into a jug when a phone call comes in, from the boy, in the moment as you might say.<br />
I ask him how he's going, how he's spending his days. He has refused to come home, preferring the pandemic payment, rent assist, long days fishing, long nights talking with mates on his xbox, his snapchat, his facebook page. Unwilling to give all that up. DOH! Unable to see any down side, I suppose ...<br />
"yeah, good, yeah, I mean weathers good? I'm, like, fishing, on the river all day... in the evening I yeah, talk to the lads on the xbox?" he offers me. "Right". <br />
A silence... "So, the days are like melding? one into the next? in a dream, like, a daze?..." he says<br />
slowly. Hmm.<br />
<br />
He is a poet, a baulker, a bird you toss strategically, tenderly, from the nest. As I <i>had done</i> a while back, watching keenly from back here on the nest's rim as he got on top of routine, got into having to work every single solitary day <i>even summer</i>, got his head around paying for things. Which he managed, pretty well.<br />
Until now. When he doesn't have to manage anything at all. Uncongenial, I mean. <br />
We talk some about his (maybe) Masters, his (kinda of) notion to do an MA in the Autumn. About getting going at it, taking steps, that sort of thing.<br />
<br />
I mean I talk, and he (half) listens...<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I Will be your Virus.<br />
<br />
<i>He tells me how he won't come home, start yet, infect me maybe...maybe? baby!, I think, truly, you've got nothing I've not given you? and maybe I won't call you out on that (just yet) ( I'll wait) (timing's everything) Yeah. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><br /></i>
In the kitchen the Caged Bird has taken over making the coffee, and Beauty has the cups.<br />
I catch them eye rolling as I say goodbye to the Boy, remind him to switch off the Xbox occasionally, eat Good Stuff, wear Sun Block, come Home (occasionally)<br />
<br />
<br />
Enmeshed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Somehow we've slipped back in time, in years. I have put on the halter of Mammy and they the mantle of adolescence, as though leaving home, growing up, flying solo had never happened at all... has to happen all over again.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I slip into my car on my own and drive. For foodstuffs, or medical supplies or, I mean<br />
essential business. The car is my Oyster, my Chariot to Nowhere, my own crazy headspace. My own.<br />
<br />
And just when you're thinking you're getting away with it a txt flashes in on your screen which you decide not to read and you read...<br />
"where u? in town? u nvr sed!!! <br />
You stare at the screen.<br />
And another<br />
"We'd hve likd 2 go 2? get out of here 2!!!"<br />
And another<br />
"U nvr sed?"<br />
I am barbarous...keepy...viral... I am.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much about them. I wish that they didn't know so much about me either...<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<i><br /></i>
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<i><br /></i>
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Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-1375504172446335502020-04-16T04:22:00.001-07:002020-04-16T12:24:33.961-07:00It’s a Catholic Thing. Holy Week. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<i>ENDING, DYING, KNOWING.</i><br />
<br />
When I was twelve year old I spent a year in a place of terror and anxiety, preoccupied, haunted by the prospect of dying. Of death. Ending. You would die, no matter what. You could die, at any time. I struggle now to remember what it was exactly that took me to the edge of that abyss, what thought, what feeling got you there. Where you could not look away to manage the all consuming fear. It was the not knowing when, maybe. It was letting the knowing in, perhaps. Yeah. The facing of the fact. It was the horror of not being, of annihilation.<br />
<br />
<i>CATHOLICS AND ALL THAT JAZZ</i><br />
<br />
I stumbled on for another year, and for another after that. Looking back now, it seems a bit like depression, a touch like panic, obsession, all the labels. But. Things, perspectives, were adjusting in me. Ground slowly gained. Some spirit of survival whispered. Something. Oh not Catholicism, all that jazz. <i>That</i> turned out to irrelevant to what ailed me, the spectre dogging my waking footsteps, tormenting dreamtime, nights. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>IF YOU WOULD ONLY LET ME IN </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I can recall my thirteen year old self, can see her clearly walking, back and forth and back again before the gates of our local Monastery, hesitant about going in there and <i>asking</i> <i>them</i>. On one muggy Sunday when I really couldn't stand it anymore. I did not go in. I did not know how. I figured they'd have nothing. None of them, monks or parents, family or priests. Adults, being being only a source of pressure and reproach at my irritability, my preoccupation, distraction. <i>Judging</i> my increasing withdrawal, anomie amplifying my fears of madness now, in the dark terrors of nighttime, <i>beset</i> by the sense of being stalked by something inevitable, incalculable.<br />
<br />
But things were shifting somehow... anyhow. The more I could hold the idea of <i>ending</i> in my mind, could look at it full on, the better I became at imagining a life, and getting on with things and having things, of doing things, <i>even if and even though the truth was always ending, dying, death...</i> the part of me that could look at that, bear that, becoming a ledge to crawl back onto.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>SO, HOLY WEEK REDEEMED THEM</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
And so for a few years, I was buzzed and frantic with doing, racing against time, getting things for myself, having life. But learned, you learn in time, to slow down, to visit the quiet place where death is, and I am, and life waits. And being Catholic was not entirely useless as it turned out. They do Holy Week.<br />
<br />
I mean Christmas for a child was all sweaty excitement, anticipation, a giddy high, but Easter, Holy Week, was hiatus, timeout, a quiet space. Scary, yeah but safe enough, familiar enough, contained in ceremony and in time. You'd get your Easter holidays, run free and happyish on the farm all the lightening lengthening day ( except when your Mother caught you, put you to work at something needed) and in the evenings you'd go to church.<br />
<br />
Memories were filed and stored, places to visit. Ah there you are, your Sunday Coat, your polished shoes, squashed happy in the family car, a sibling on your knee your mother fussing. You'd go, all go, all had to for, Palm Sunday, Confession Tuesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. Confession, praying, kneeling, penitent, copying adults who <i>knew</i>. Snickering, yawning, poking a sister, saying the words of the prayers, tickling the baby, maybe. Sacred and boring, thrilling and mystery, all in one. It was all consuming and everything slowing and stopping, for Christ dying nailed to his cross. Crucifiction. Stations. The Stations of the Cross.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>FORSAKEN </i><br />
<br />
Ah, Stations of the Cross. Our shuffling procession past shadowy pictures of Christ's flayed and splattered agony. See there he staggers under the cross, there falls, he falls, first, second and third time, he falls, he is pierced in his side. 'My God my God' he cries, 'why? hast thou forsaken me..." When I was eleven years old I related.<br />
<br />
Easter Sunday, after the chocolate eggs, the chicken dinner, was anticlimax. Resurrection, Christ strolling from his tomb was just another thing they all believed, it didn't resonate. I always hated Sundays anyway. The slow winding down of hours, gateway into Monday and the workaday week.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>LOOKING THOUGH YOUR FINGERS FIRST</i><br />
<br />
Every year has Christmas, Easter, Summer, School, and here in Ireland, Holy Week. Still hanging on, a relic of the past, and this year roaring back to meaning in Lockdown. We are given, whether we wanted it or not, space, where all things stop. We are obliged to look. See here the beast is caged or over there becalmed, at the heart of darkness. Obliged to feel the tenderest, darkest, terrors lurking at the hearts deepest core. We have to look. To hold.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>IF GOD CANT HAVE YOU DEVIL MUST </i><br />
<br />
If Covid 19 keeps you up at night, impels your run like blazes to your holiday home, or fuels your rage at random cheaters, consider this. It's <i>ending, </i>death, that stalks you, really. Death, and this your opportunity to face, embrace and take it in. Don't blame, don't run, or close your inner borders tight. Embrace the darkness. In this thoroughly modern Holy Week.<br />
<br />
<br />
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"<i>And I will show you something </i> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>different from either </i> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Your shadow at morning striding</i> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>behind you</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Or your shadow at evening rising to </i> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>meet you</i></div>
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<i>I will show you fear in a handful of dust</i>.</div>
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(T.S. Elliot. <i>The Waste Land)</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Do share my post from your social media page or by any other means, dear readers. And comment if the spirit moves you! Anna. </i></div>
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Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-69741837521310607042020-04-02T10:11:00.000-07:002020-04-02T10:11:31.828-07:00All the Good Boys Bend Over. Degrading Democracy.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Permitted exercise<br />
<br />
Pulling the door behind me and stepping out on to the path, I take a breath of the good clean air. I check to see who's in my path, who's breathing my air as they pass, and who might object to the space I'm intending to claim for a walk. Permitted Exercise.<br />
<br />
cocooning<br />
<br />
Navigating the brave new world ordained by our (good boy) Government is not for the fainthearted, people. It's a trip down the rabbit hole where the public space is forbidden the Over 70s. Period. Regardless. Well or ill or robust, doesn't matter. Makes no difference. They can stay in their houses can't they? They can be left in there alone, can't they? Just a few months we can steal from what's left of their good living days, can't we? Sure, it won't be the same for them, Limbo. Not as though life moves with any <i>felt tumult </i>through their ageing veins. Not as if the sweet song of sound and vision, birdsong and burgeoning nature sings to them <i>or for them. </i> Nor connection, fined tuned over a lifetime, with God in the ground you walk, the long line of trees on the river road, the first pale pink hint of the apple blossom, needs preserving. Cocooning.<br />
<br />
within two kilometres <br />
<br />
I am developing an etiquette out there on the open ground. Sometimes its like Easter. Open-ended Easter. The light, the calm quiet spaces you find on that holiday, that gift of days when work stops, schools close, traffic thins, a holiday without Christmas frenzy, summer crowds. It's Easter, there are only chocolate eggs and Christ dying and rising again in the gentle melancholy of Holy week. On those days, my brain says <i>it's Easter! I'll take it!</i><br />
<br />
Sometimes it's End of Days, Mordor. You are a wraith meeting wraiths and Winter is Coming. Grey sky only slightly less ominous than the silent spreading gloom in your house, the stale air in your living room, redolent of sanitiser, bleach. Your hands in your pockets close-fisted, skinned red. Within two Kilometres.<br />
<br />
with (un)social distancing<br />
<br />
Days where the people cross the road 20 metres back when they see you, when you see them, or else shuffle out to the edge of the pavement as you segue unto the grass margin, to pass. When you catch the eye of the other out of stubbornness, need, exact a wavering smile, a blank nothing, depending.<br />
<br />
Days you reach Main Street, hear your shoes slap the pavement as you pass shops shuttered, doors closed, an emptied out world. But wait, just up there on the corner, a gang of men calling loudly, talking loose, claiming space. You will <i>not</i> cross the road, you do <i>not</i> walk around them but though them to throw them off course as you have learned to do. Scattered, they separate, the sense of tension that is not quite menace, easing. For that day, for that time, at least. Social Distancing.<br />
<br />
and tell on your neighbours (do)<br />
<br />
A speeding jogger, a flying cyclist, two girls softly chatting, a woman pulls out her phone...to report them? Well maybe. I listen to one such on the radio yesterday, enraged by joggers, indicting flying cyclists, pleading for policing, arrests! You are invited, no, encouraged! to unleash your inner paranoiac, your instinct to judge, your will to control. All the glad haters come in from the cold! The Swedes says their people have judgement, discretion, control. Go, Prime Minister Loften! They hold the line, the public space, as the rest of Europe watches and waits for them to fail. Anticipates failure. And tell on your neighbours.<br />
<br />
<br />
necessary journeys<br />
<br />
I remember the scattered men later, alone in my car on my solitary shopping trip for groceries, medicines. Alerted, the hair standing stiff on the back of my neck, as a lorry drives tight to my bumper, trailer rocking perilous behind, never once falling back on a ten km journey. I speed up, he speeds up, he does not pass. I slow below the speed limit, grit my teeth and watch him through my side mirror as he watches me, slowing, revving, slowing, bumper to bumper until I turn off the road for the shop.<br />
<br />
A few days later I get out of the path of a carload of howling boys, slipping unto the hard shoulder sharpish from necessity. Necessary Journeys.<br />
<br />
so why as I doing this again?<br />
<br />
I'm going with this lockdown, this shutting down, for now. This slowing down of a lung eating virus, dispatching those of us already in the departure lounge, threatening those beloved others living by grace of Vaccine, Transplant, Chemotherapy, but tell me this <i>good boy</i> Varadkar, all of you good boys voting in your emergency laws on Friday last, giving way <i>everyway</i> to a virus, (as you gave way to Bankers, a decade ago) to whom do you imagine we're ceding our public space. Who and what will colonise, gain ground, in the spaces we have so obediently vacated. Every idle bad actor, every dispossessed, untethered soul, rocking up from the highways and byways vacated, that's who.<br />
<br />
<br />
Even as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, gain ground in the world. While we carry on carrying on, turning back a Virus that keeps on coming regardless. About which the science is <i>not clear. </i>You think you can easily turn back this tide boys? can whistle back an abandoned economy, throw in a shifting Sunset Clause to a Charter for a Police State, an Autocracy. And afterwards, Pandora goes obligingly back in her box? Do you <i>know</i> you don't know what you do? And why am I doing this, again.<br />
<br />
degrading oppression. <br />
<br />
I talked with a man last year, a refugee to whom asylum was granted after long years in Direct Provision, after endless Requests, Appeals, and Court applications. He told me every counted hour of trying, waiting, disappointment, was worth it to be here and not there under the dictatorship he escaped. He told me how the very air in that country was poisoned from top down, how the stealing of personal space, of any say, of human rights, degraded all. All. Those who assumed the power and those who allowed it to be taken from them, whether they could stop it or not. You did what they said until you could not, he told me, and then you ran for your life from your own hopelessness, depression, despair. Degrading Oppression.<br />
<br />
... only for a little while...<br />
<br />
Back home, my daughter's days are entirely virtual. She sits for her virtual lectures, has virtual chats with her struggling, jittering friends, consigned all to virtual reality. She sings like an angel alone in her room, Billie Eilish today. She uploads on Instagram, for her friends, for her virtual audience, for me. For us, who have failed to hold the space for her and for all the jittering girls and boys. Failed... as the good boys fail us.<br />
<br />
"<i>Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>....</i>only for a little while?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-74636347976665990652020-03-24T06:45:00.000-07:002020-03-24T06:45:35.788-07:00OH CORONA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Having a sustaining glass of wine, post shopping for (essential) supplies. Just a quick in and out I figured, just a few necessaries, bread, wine. I stand in a snaking queue for the check out, pushed and rushed and shaken by a panicked crowd, wondering whether, maybe, the universe had sent a plague to test us, shake us, hold a mirror to us, people. I have a notion that the Virus, all the Viruses, have a function, shifting, nudging body rhythms in effect, altering perceptions ( of survivors ). The Virus as an instrument that refines, retunes, reboots, releases, human bodies.<br />
<br />
Holding up a mirror, showing us what we are, or have become:<br />
<br />
1. Supplies.<br />
<br />
We are not short of foodstuffs people. We have <i>more</i> stuff stashed. Foodstuff, medications, sanitisers, tissues, loo roll, paper towels. We have warehouses, supermarkets, trucks a trucking across continents with stuff, more stuff, And yet, and still, and anyway here we are. Pushing, shoving, grabbing, emptying shelves so that we will have it before the next woman takes it. I WILL have my sliced bread and my loo roll in my bunker. I WILL ALWAYS eat (and wipe my bottom) whatever! Whenever! things run out...on you.<br />
<br />
2. Loving Care.<br />
<br />
Don't touch, don't hold, don't speak too closely, whisper kiss, go skin on skin. Don't <i>accidentally brush</i>, doors handles, people, petrol nozzles. I think of orphanages, in Eastern Europe before Glasnost, all the love lorn places, where infants, tiny humans, were driven mad, irreparably stunted by lack of touch. Forget the loo roll, people, grab a loved one, snatch a partner, take an infant, a random relative, into the lock-down coming down the tracks. <br />
<br />
3. Go Virtual (at your peril)<br />
<br />
And here we'll be corralled in our houses, <i>busy bees </i> remotely working, living, eating, safe removed from human contact, in the kind of isolated bubble Child Psychologists, Talking Heads, tell us leads to (has led to) to over-weigh, disabled, anxious teens. Teens are us.<br />
<br />
4. Avoidance. <br />
<br />
Is this lockdown for a week, a month, a year? Are we shadow boxing with a mystery Virus<br />
which may or (may not) have been here for a week, a month, a....since November 2019? Eh?<br />
Who can say? People have been dying, getting better, since November last (or forever). Of... well ...something! Influenza? No one panicked? No one knew back then to blame, to name, Corona.<br />
<br />
So now we know. What do we know? We know The Virus will be defeated by the young folk who are not, if they are not, immune compromised. There will be an uneven battle with the old, the sick, and all those people whose immune function has been messed up, broken down, un-underused. All the people insulated by vaccine from the common cold, the influenza, everyday infections, whose immune systems sag flaccid and unused. How many are there of <i>those</i> people? Do we know?<br />
<br />
5. Fear: <br />
<br />
The hardest thing to hold steady in the mind, for us poor humans, is that fact that we will die. So we do not ( hold it in the mind) We cosset children, prolong adolescence, hobble resilience, suck the marrow from the buzz of living, <i>rather than</i> <i>let life flow to dying when it comes</i>. We vaccine, insure, corral, distance ourselves to the point where children suffer anxious states, self harm to feel, grow into helpless half baked adults, narcisstic, lost, irresolute. We would not let them face the perils of the world and leave them reaching after chemical highs. We will not face the abyss, or accept the defining, life enhancing clarity, <i>that we will die</i>.<br />
<br />
6. Denial: <br />
<br />
I listen to the pundits, politicians on the radio, on the TV, Social Media, <i>getting off</i>, <i>enlivened</i>, as they talk talk talk. Oh, not about the Virus, no, but about the things we'll do to <i>stop this happening</i>, backs turned oblivious to the Elephant in the Room. We cannot stop this, people? We can delay it, yes, give the always patchy Health Service, our heroic Health Care Staff, a break, but can't, we can't close down normal service indefinitely, or turn the Virus back. And so we lock-down for a month, six months, a year, await a vaccine. And then the next Corona, and the next, and the next one after that. Each one oncoming sooner than the one before. Until we learn. We can only live, eat, mind ourselves cannily, <i>live</i>, until we die.<br />
<br />
7. Consolation. <br />
<br />
There is a strange strange turnabout just now between the minders and those who must be minded, that is truly rich. How often have I listened lately to the young ones blaming, claiming, wailing how I, and you, have stolen their future, wrecked their planet, used up all the good stuff leaving none for them. How often tried to soothe their youthful terrors, anxieties, about climate change, the carbon footprint, a planet dying <i>while they're on it</i>, quite before their time. Apologies, soothing, good attention, <i>silence</i> offered as they speak, accuse, indict. Rage, <i>against this</i>, that I have not and you have not prevented dying, ending, death. That we <i>will not.</i><br />
<br />
And now it's us, the minders, first, who face this grim and grinning Reaper. And I'm waiting for the Darlings to step up, get the picture, read the writing on the wall. See true and clear, unblinkered, for whom this great bell tolls.<br />
<br />
<i>My daughter, my cell mate in isolation, drops a Newspaper article from 2017 in my lap concerning long dormant Viruses </i>awakening....<i> from frozen places melting, from buried places unearthed, from forests burned for profit, headless hardcore fracking. Elephants in the Room. </i><br />
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Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-64629419830190308722020-03-06T08:42:00.000-08:002020-03-06T08:42:04.801-08:00Valentine's Day. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Another year, another Valentines. You think the day will come, has come, when all that jazz will pass you by by unnoticed! Irrelevant to you! A Marketing Nonsense! Remembering forever Valentine days when you were 16, 17, hoping for Valentines, just one, thinking one would do, as you watched Helen Moran counting hers at lunch time, waving red-edged cards with captured pink-gold hearts about for all to envy.<br />
<br />
You decide there might be maybe one small plain one later, slipping through the letter box at home on the wind of your want. You figure maybe next year, some year anyway, your's will come?<br />
<br />
Ah yes, the fevered expectation of school girls ready for the magic, for the love and the passion, all the dark mysteries, to start. The hunger for it! Life's essence in you and you might never get out from the traps to have it, to love, be loved, adored, have babies, kisses, tongue! Or ever get a single solitary Valentine...<br />
<br />
Decades later you find out, at the only school reunion you’ll ever do, that Helen Moran? she sent those Valentines to herself. That neither she nor we humble on-lookers, actually got any a single solitary Valentine between us. Someone get Helen another double whiskey! Not a pink heart, a black-gold question mark, a fat red cherub between us! Oh, we got 'em later on from boyfriends, husbands maybe...Duty Valentines! But hey, that never counted? And the mad wild longing on us every Valentine’s Day for something Other. A Secret card, Unknown Admirer, Arrow Shot Possibilities from the Virtual Universe.<br />
<br />
I totally get Bathsheba Everdene’s naughty giggling act in sending that Valentine to William Baldwin in Far From the Madding Crowd. And thereby pulling loose the thread of reason in his love lorn mind, unraveling painful until he murdered Captain Troy. I sent a few myself on that very principle?<br />
<br />
I used to think that it was all in The Waiting, for The One to find you, but now I'd see it’s the Found Fusion with the Mystic Other? Hah! Valentines means coming home at last. It's the falling into the abyss of the real true.... Chemical High. Valentines will come to you, I might have told my sixteen year old self, or even my sixteen year old daughter, yes! And you will ride the whirlwind, yes you will. Emerging bedraggled on love's withdrawal, grim and sober and swearing on a rational life.<br />
<br />
And also, I would tell her, age won't save you! Or Maturity. Valentine’s Day comes round each year for all of us and if you are not pierced to the heart, a little, with memory and longing I would not credit it.<br />
<br />
Or maybe even, looking at a small white card, a rose, a question mark... even, as you swear you won’t succumb, fall into the Irresistible Madness one more time. Oh yes, yes. yes.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-40276605825175499022019-10-18T10:26:00.000-07:002019-10-18T16:29:01.180-07:00This Butterfly Has No Wings. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>who knows where time goes, </i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<i><br /></i>
A year has passed since the Boss, my sweetest girl, left me to live among the Dutch people, spicing up the international melting pot at AOC Amsterdam University with a pinch of eccentric Irish. I sit and brood this September on all those things I didn't do, never got round to... actually abandoned... over this past year without her. All my projects half begun, my notions of things I would start at last, things dreamed up, half-visioned. New Dawns, siren calls to strange horizons, sit (going off) on the back burner. Unrealised, basically.<br />
<br />
I read a million online reviews on the eBike, chasing visions of myself flying past the hedgerows, peddling deep into the countryside, taking on the Waterford Greenway. My inner cynic boring on about expense, picturing the eBike cobwebbed in the hall. I read some more reviews, I never buy. All my Dreamzs! receding, fraying around the edges now. Where (oh where) has the year gone?<br />
<br />
<br />
Calling Paris<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
Where??? On Distance Parenting, that's where! Online Mammy, messaging, texting, skypeing, video phoning; firing out into the ether prescriptions, instructions, enquiries... care. "How <i>are </i>you now darling... <i>really?</i> <i>truly </i>how are <i>things</i>?" "So how are <i>things </i>now?"<br />
Long hours listening into your iPhone to the Beautiful Girl in Paris, to the Boss in Amsterdam. Troubleshooting. Containing crises; of confidence, of disasters pending. Hearing; urgent requests for advice, to discard later maybe, but to have <i>now</i>. Receiving; homesickness and sorrow and terror, happiness only real when it's told. The tug on the umbilicus across seas, a visceral need that you, neither of you, imagined on setting out, on kicking off giddy with Prospects.<br />
<br />
Time...looping backwards, sideways to circle my children, and never on the linear path I imagined.</div>
<br />
The Beautiful Girl, teaching in the Sorbonne in Paris, in deep in her beautiful life, done and dusted I'd thought. Actually launched to go anywhere, I'd figured? Not foreseeing, oh not foreseeing, landlords who failed to drop by with your keys, leaving you sitting on your massive suitcase weeping with exhaustion. Not allowing for tormenting employers, shouty contrary students, calculated to overwhelm your beautiful soul. She is the kind of girl who cries in sympathy with your (rare) crying, struggling to mediate her fine tuned sensibilities, her vulnerability, to live in this messed up, incalculable, crazy dumbed down world. And it's a burden, bascially, your Beautiful Soul. <br />
<br />
I have now stretched the boundaries of mothering to France. I have sternly lectured a French Landlord on the phone? I have menaced a strange and unsettling housemate at her house, on a visit? I have advised, on a loop, on how to dance your way around Snappy Parisians, oh yes. And I have sat quietly, on the cyber level, with the beautiful girl in her room on the fifth floor of an ancient Boarding House for Girls in central Paris while les Gilets Jaunes stormed, each and every Saturday past her window, past the streets where she liked to walk. 'So why not go out and have a look, maybe mount the barricades' I suggest one day as we, on a video call, watch from her window. 'Why don't you come over here and try' she answers, watching the massing howling crowd, the cops, <i>le Flic, </i>running with raised batons, automatic guns, on her screen. No princess imprisoned in her Ivory Tower spoke with such tragic dignity. My bad.<br />
<br />
I have visited, wandering enthralled in Paris with the dear girl many times. Often enough for the streets to feel familiar, the Seine a silver snaking glory I can find on foot. I went inside the warm dark beating heart of Notre Dam Cathedral with my daughter before it burned.<br />
<br />
<br />
And Amsterdam.<br />
<br />
And her sister, striding away from me in Station Central in September, rebounding rubber band like all through the year. Her disasters, her super marvellous experiences in equal part requiring a listening post, a talking head, a willing ear.<br />
"I mean, just tell me what you think... like, what I actually ought to do here?" And I tell her, carefully, thoughtfully. (I think!) And she is satisfied. (Although she never actually does it) Ah yes,<br />
<br />
She was a signal dish buzzing with incoming calls to join, partake, go out and meet, to <i>go; </i>to Berlin, for the Student Shadow UN Conference, to climate change marching (XR to you), to Paris to see the Beauty in her tower. And then to mix it up with Super Nice People at Parties, where she dances, sings, and takes in everything there is on offer (oh I know. ) She buys; a bicycle second hand, her winter clothes in the market. She scolds; on sustainability, on the sin of buying New Things, sustainable sins. She struggles; with the learning curves on her courses, with money. She refuses: to be less that the best, to live mindlessly.<br />
<br />
She crashes, burns, oh sometimes she burns. She falls from her speeding bicycle, saved by canny Dutch cyclists flying past who do not crush her. She slips, at Christmas, on impacted snow, coming down hard on her ankle, hobbled for weeks. And poisoned, yes she's poisoned, on a trip to the Netherlands countryside where she and her Hungarian friend Anna fill their eco bottles from a tap in a ditch, over which hangs a sign saying Don't! Drink the Water. So they do! drink the water. And that becomes a phone call at midnight from a weeping girl racked with pain, spasmodic vomiting. A horror show running for days, demanding random medical advice, careful emotional soothing, judicious bracing, from Mammy and a kindly dutch nurse. (It occuring to me later that she had never suffered in that way before, or in any consistent way at all?) (Though she would certainly not agree.)<br />
<br />
After Christmas she was, for a few weeks, giving up and coming home. And not just her I learn, but other girls, particular friends, all going home. All wanting a break from Education, they say. All yearning after time out, gap years, wanderings, romantically and experientially, in the Great Wide World. (Well, Thailand anyway, or Iceland possibly) 'But,' I offer, 'but... education!... is a...it's a <i>privilege</i>? Not a <i>sentence</i>? And The World is cold and bare and dangerous, essentially? Experience it where you are! Where you're warm and occupied and lucky. She doesn't think I'm, kind of, <i>getting</i> this? My cold dark world is not the world that was promised to her.<br />
<br />
So anyhoo, she doesn't leave. That passed. The year completed. She never was the kind of girl to permit herself slip lightly from the hook she's chosen.<br />
<br />
There were video chats between us on people's mental health, on minding it. (Which has become another thing you have to mind as it turns out. In this permanently switched on, wired up, relentlessly connected online world) The young, I think darkly, are led by the nose. Soon they will exist and have their being only in the mental (cyber) realm. Addled. Logged-in, stranded, and helpless in still forming minds. The heart becomes a mystery to them, the senses a little visited wasteland.<br />
<br />
<br />
Meanwhile back in Ireland<br />
<br />
At home, the boy was tipping along, smoothly, in the midst of all this overseas turmoil, dramas across the wires, distractions in myself, preoccupied with Distance Troubles. He stays with me for this, his final college, year, spending his days discussing his Thesis on the second world war, playing on his Xbox, watching his box sets. He introduces me to Peaky Blinders, The Lost Kingdom, Vikings, for some evening viewing together. And how he is content! How long has he waited for this, to be an only child? To have his way on Boxsets, Music, Food, at last. His sisters and their vegetarian ways, their female TV viewing, are just not here! Last year I watched The Affair, Victoria, The Crown, and only eat red meat with him when the sisters were absent. Now he and I, cheerfully carnivorous, spend our evenings having the chats about the Third Reich, rooting for Ragner Lothbrok in Vikings, binging on Peaky Blinders. It turned out to be unexpectedly delightful? I wanted to give him his year when I see that he wants that, and find myself drawn in too, richly rewarded.<br />
<br />
<br />
Choosing <br />
<br />
And where does the time go, when does it <i>end</i>, in a frantic, improvised, crisis strewn, busy busy year? When does your own stuff start? How can you locate and stay in the interior space where you can think, where you can breathe? <br />
<br />
Can you, a <i>Mother</i>, choose? Can you decide to hand back the dilemnas, terrors, devouring needs to the owners thereof. Can you ask <i>them</i> to mange these things for themselves, as you once had to? And is it true that young lives are so bleak now, so taxing, that they need, deserve, can't manage, without the constant support that you yourself were never given? I can't decide, a kind of paralysis grips me here. I find that to make my adult children care for themselves, to insist they try, is quite as challenging for me as it is for them. In truth. I seem to be unable to let that other woman, hovering in me now, <i>in. </i> She is <i>bad</i> Mammy, <i>non</i> Mammy. And if I am not Mammy <i>always, </i>who am I now? Who used I be before the children? How can I be the <i>unMammy? </i>And yet, I need to try, it must be tried.<br />
<br />
I wonder if it's guilt in fact, forced on women by the culture, swallowed whole, that holds me here. Expiation, because we, the adults, have personally and wilfully despoiled the planet. Mea Culpa. We have destroyed the future. Mea Maxima Culpa. And now we owe the children we have nurtured with lifesblood ... everything we can salvage in ourselves to help them through. <br />
<br />
I think of being young, that young. The adults overheard discussing Iodine Tablets and did we have enough to offset radium damage? Explanatory leaflets in the post on how to survive the fall-out from the Nuclear Bomb, as the world awaited a nuclear strike and devastation. <br />
<br />
And all the hobbling, pitch black Catholic Guilt, the leash of the Priests distorting every natural instinct, jerking on on your neck as you fought to have your hopeful life? We are all dying anyway. We were always, all, dying anyway and there was no quarter then or now for anyone except in the fragile succour of loving, the truth in creating.<br />
<br />
The pupae, incubated at last, must have its struggle to claw its way from your careful woven cocoon, and claim its place on the planet. Or see the Mammies everywhere disable the butterfly. Aborting Metamorphosis.<br />
<br />
So yes, my task is not to Mother, Mother, till death do part us. My task is to stop! To stop, and return to the notions, visions, dreaming. To be an example to my children in this, of what a woman is and who she is and what she may become. I decide that.<br />
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And yesterday I wave the children off. I buy the fleetest Ebike on review, and start my word press blog. I begin <br />
<br />
,<a href="http://annacogan.com/" target="_blank">annacogan.com</a> </div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-92205468925311306722018-09-09T10:00:00.001-07:002018-09-09T10:00:26.328-07:00The Heart's A Slave. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
It was the best of months it was the worst of months, August. A roller-coaster month and now it's done. We are, I am, drifting around psychic chasms, looking out at the trees on the road, the leaves beginning to turn, getting lost oftentimes in a Thousand Yard Stare. I'm counting on coming about in time.<br />
<br />
<br />
For today I am a Debutante.<br />
<br />
<br />
It all kicked off with a second hand Debutante's Dress, a handover at a hotel, a Saturday morning trip up the motorway. <br />
"I mean like, I'm getting something good? But not, I mean new? not wasting money? But like, <i>good</i>. I'm gonna sell it afterwards. We won't want it afterwards?"<br />
(Yeah, yeah, clogging up the wardrobe space with the others, her last year's satin affair for some hopeful lad's event, the beautiful girl's three floaty concoctions. Crumpled stained and forgotten)<br />
"I mean it's like a big decision to make on a Saturday morning early, darling girl?"<br />
I point this out, speeding up the quiet motorway in the brightest cheeriest morning sun, feeling quite unequal to the task at hand. She had a summer cold. I have a suspicion she is feverish. <br />
"so, will you like, will we, maybe...nip...into the hotel bathroom or something? Sort of discreetly try it on?"<br />
"Yeah yeah, we will, we could? I hadn't thought..."<br />
She only sees the big picture, this girl.<br />
<br />
And so we crowd into the hotel bathroom, me, the debutante, the owner of the dress (last year's debutante) and her Mammy watching the beautiful dress protectively. We wait outside a cubicle for the dear girl to change. And wait. There are many many hooks and eyes, tiny satin buttons, requisite arranging....<br />
I decide to take a walk down the thickly carpeted hotel passage for this bit, following the smell of brewing coffee, moving away from the other Mammy's breath hot on my neck as we wait.<br />
<br />
"Ah lovely! lovely! yes, ah yes. that's just...."<br />
A Man stands with the the other Mammy, looking in at the glowing girl in the champagne dress, the jewelled bodice flashing, the floating skirt hanging dreamlike under the garish bathroom light.<br />
He, moving in to catch this vision at a better angle, catches my eye instead and melts away from the ladies bathroom fast-ish. A remnant from yesterday's wedding, last night's bash, I'd say, dishevelled and wandering in search of the gents, falling into this bathroom tableau randomly, with lip licking acquesience you might say.<br />
Anyway, we close the deal, we have the best, the most perfectly wonderful Debutante's Dress. We take it home, she, satisfied that she has herself a really good dress without buying into uncool insane extravagance. Me, satisfied that she is satisfied. God is in the laughing morning sun.<br />
<br />
And perfection is fleeting. Champagne dresses invite staining, despoliation.<br />
The debutante, waltzing downstairs to the kitchen, modelling the entire ensemble, the beautiful shoes peeping out under the beautiful dress, stretches out an arm, long fingers finding the spoon, to stir the supper on the hob. She doesn't see the splash of blood red sauce flying faster that light to the beautiful dress. Taking the shine off things.<br />
<br />
A tiny <i>tiny</i> stain, I say. Minuscule! "sure you wouldn't know it was there unless you actually knew it was there" I tell her. She is distraught, distinctly feverish now, and sips sadly on the proffered mug of Lemsip. I try some anti-stain solution dabbing, but she decides that I am making things worse, that we may have to have it dry cleaned, but oh, wouldn't that be such a terribly uncool waste of time and cash and besides she doesn't want to think about it anymore anyway (putting the tainted dress away, across the landing, away away in another room)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Mitchelstown and Castletownsend<br />
<br />
And anyway, at that point she had moved on! projecting, anticipating the Indie concert in Mitchelstown, a late summer concert, a pre Leaving Cert results 'sesh' planned back in the dog days of pre exam cramming. I leave her and her dizzy dark eyed friend at the concert site, watching them melt into a multitude of carefully tanned girls in tiny shorts, of laughing boys, and breath a sigh.<br />
<br />
I am taking advantage of things, taking myself down to the sea to see my very good friend, knocking around West Cork for the warm glad weekend that's in it. I meet the lovely woman in Skibereen, and we sit basking, drinking coffee, talking for hours. Afterwards we go to Castletownsend to look at Harry Clarke's stained glass windows again. We climb the steep stone steps to St Barrahane's Church and watch the sun pierce the vivid blues and reds of the Nativity, Saint Peter and Saint Luke. We discover a window obliquely to the side of the alter, never spotted before, a picture of a slim and perfect man miniatured, delineated, stained in blue and pink. St Luke. We marvel at the things you miss, until you have eyes to see, mind to receive.<br />
<br />
On Sunday, I take the long road home, listening to the dazed and chattery girls in the back, telling in chorus, Indie stories of collapsing tents, Facebook friends met in tents, at sessions, wandering...and pushing upfront to hear, so close so close, <i>him, </i>Jake Bugg, they coulda shoulda <i>touched</i> him....they hear the music still, intoxicated yet with boys, attention, other stuff...<br />
The dear girl wants to keep on keeping on, hasn't slept for hours, for days! She messages friends at home about a gig that evening, unwilling, not wanting about all else to stop.<br />
<br />
<br />
...old stains forgotten...<br />
<br />
She was dissuaded. She was advised to save herself up, to keep her pagan fire for the Debutantes Ball, the Leaving Cert, the trip to Collage after? She was directed to the quiet of her room, to nurse the spiking temperature, to rest the whispery croaking voice, to still the slightly nutty light in her staring eye. Ah yes, the morning brings realisation. She was ill! And boy did she gave that it's due, gave into it until Debs night. But then, ah then, downing a Lemsip, sucking on a throat lozenge, she cast aside the fever, donned the dress joyfully, as thought the dash of ruby red had never stained the thread, or lurked in fold under fold of diaphanous creamy pink, as though it never was.<br />
<br />
<br />
Another window, another staining, <i>dear Harry Clarke</i><br />
<br />
And you, snapped back from murky dreaming by the singing iPhone, at 6am. ("keys? you have your keys? you won't forget, you'll bring your keys? my what? my keys? my....yeah, I will... I <i>wont... forget my....oh um Mum? f</i>orgot my... keys"?)<br />
standing at the window, waiting for her to walk in from the bus, behold her in the pearly morning light striding up the path, hair flying behind, a fistful of dress caught up casually in her hand, a white sock that may be a surgical dressing on the right foot, the feet encased in flat summer sandals. (the cruel heels for the photographs). An Amazon Girl, a Vision, back from the Bacchanalia, <i>from wars</i>.<br />
<br />
Inside the door, she stands talking breathlessly about the night, the people, dancing, as you take in the splatters of pink and red of blood...the champagne skirt... blood stained...<br />
"yeah yeah I was, we were, like, laughing? we were sitting for a moment and like, glass, a piece of glass? goes <i>up</i> in to my heel? and it was... bleeding? and a man, he had a first aid box, he wrapped my foot for ages, oh for ages, and the blood you know the blood it kept on coming, kept on bleeding, so I started feeling dizzy? I was crying? but it was ...<i>grand, </i>oh in the end he stopped the bleeding, he worked like <i>really </i>hard to stop the blood?"<br />
"Oh but...oh... did no one...I mean no one, call..."<br />
"and so then I went back dancing? when I saw no sign of bleeding, sure the bandage <i>held </i>till morning, and we danced, we danced <i>together</i>, in our bare feet, in our flats, I mean you only stopped for drinking, it was savage, it was brilliant, and I never, like I never felt...no... pain..."<br />
<br />
And afterwards they crowd onto the bus and sing, the whole way home, the whole ninety minutes of the journey in her bloody dress, it's thin jewelled bodice....<br />
(" a coat? you want I bring a coat? you wouldn't take a... coat!.. to your debs?")<br />
and she shivered for the journey, "kinda registering I was cold? really cold?"<br />
<br />
And so, dear readers, more August days of spiking temperatures, the dear girl valiantly feeding herself with vitamins, zinc, Lemsip, submitting to foot bathing and binding, ahead of the Leaving Cert exam results, the Leaving for College.<br />
<br />
<br />
... just tell us already? just say, how did we actually <i>get on</i>?...<br />
<br />
I was on the lemsip myself when that day dawned (for nerves), watching again though the window as she in the midst of a jittery chattering rabble set off for the school, for the envelopes solemnly handed out one by one, while we waited to hear. I waited for the last time, for my last childs' exam results. And the phone's incongrous sweet song came quickly, my faint voiced girl calling, to say "Yeah. Yeah....it was... good<i>...</i>it was...<i>grand</i>...?"<br />
a silence while I marshalled my resources to respond <i>appropriately, </i>no matter what..<br />
"So um what... what did you... how did you exactly ... <i>get</i> <i>on"?</i><br />
Anyway, she got on superbly, so much so that she was for once and only once, silenced. Monosyllabic in her response.<br />
<br />
There followed a day of events, an interview with a journalist, a photographer from the paper, (her results were very good indeed), visits, congratulatory messages and the evening's great big Party of Parties. You were uttering grim warnings to the dear girl though the car window, as you delivered her (again, again) to the gathering for Prinks, before the Actual Leaving Cert Party. Afterwards, climbing grimly to your bedroom, slopping your yellow Lemsip, you felt the same alien virus that had grappled with the debutante for the entire month, stirring ominously in you.<br />
<br />
And that night she came home early-ish. "Hot! It was too hot! and I mean crowded?"<br />
In the morning she began the packing for College and for her actual leaving. I was taking her to University in Amsterdam in two days time.<br />
<br />
Leaving Home Forever.<br />
<br />
We flew out in the morning and I came back on an evening flight, thinking how utterly pointless it would be to stay over, having left her and her massive suitcases at her college apartment? Thinking how I'd deliver her, (carefully planned out in my mind) via plane, train and tram to that place, and then, after dinner together, would just, I mean, go? Never actually coming in my mind to it, to that final leave-taking at Station Central in Amsterdam, the convulsive hug, the look-back at my Amazon Girl standing tensed, upright, like the child I left at the primary school, the girl I left at the secondary school gate, and so here we are, here we are, now, where I can't bring her home again, ever. The tannoy blared, the people melded, losing edges as I walked, my back against her. Walking blind for the airport train. ( <i>dont look back)</i><br />
<br />
Her summer cold hummed in my blood all the way back on the plane, spiking on arrival so that I slept in my car in the short term car park for the few hours till dawn and drove home in the kind of rain that feels as though its been flung sideways from a bucket at the windscreen of your car.<br />
<br />
Home. <i>People</i> <i>murmuring, sympathetic, about nests? empty nests?, </i><i>you are not, you say, a bloody bird? a stepford, sad sack Mammy, you are not! even while, ah, getting ambushed by her book on the kitchen table where she left it after breakfast, and her shoes, under the radiator, her recordings on the sky box for that show we watched together, and her coat, her old cream jumper hanging at the end of the stairs, until you realise you're living now, that you live now, in her abandoned house. You live in her abandoned house, with everything unpicked and flittered by absence. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>Oh get a bloody grip you tell yourself, just get a bloody hold. And it isn't as though it's the first time, after all. After all, the Beautiful Girl, she went to college? Up to Dublin, student lodgings? Ah but <i>she </i>came home for weekends with her stories and her laundry till we more or less could manage being apart for each and every livelong day. And besides, you could always get in the car and get her, if she needed, if you needed. And you <i>always</i> had another one at home. Until now, until now...<br />
<i><br /></i> It's a hardy women who has children, I say now. And a hardier one to lets them go.<br />
<br />
<br />
Anyhoo. September's here. At last. Just about. There are things that I've signed up for in the great wide vacuum left me. I am going to Australia, at last, at last. And to Holland in October and to Paris in the Spring to see the Beautiful Girl.<br />
<br />
Still, you wonder, all that loosing, all that flying, all that texting, all the talking on the phone,<br />
surely something's gotta give... gotta fail, gotta break...<br />
surely. Surely...<br />
heart's a slave. Heart's elastic, beating helpless, it's a universe expanding. It's a slave. It's a slave.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-58740386089780641682018-05-23T14:15:00.001-07:002018-05-23T14:15:23.215-07:00CHOOSE NOW CHOOSE NEVER, DEAREST HEARTS.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
We will be stepping out from this house to vote on Friday 25th May 2018. The boss has been resolute in getting herself registered to cast the first of all the votes she will make in her life. My daughters have made up their minds now and I knew my mind on this for years. There has a lot of talking between us. Respectfully mostly, heatedly too. Sometimes, looking up mid rant, I catch a wry look telegraphed from one to the other. They do not understand. They think that this is new to this generation, this decade. Women, older women, old women can not speak to them. One way or another. They are indulgent.<br />
<br />
I shove a scissors in my bag and march to the village and a massive low-lying billboard with the words 'licence to kill' in bold over a great fat baby <i>in utero</i>. The thing is at eye level, deceptive, offensive... manipulative. I cut it down and fling it over a wall unwilling to hold it for long. Another one, too high to reach, on the main street, likewise uses the image of a woman's body, her pregnant belly to depict a child, who looks to be at least eight months old though still anchored to the umbilicus. Deceptive, offensive... manipulative.<br />
<br />
"The thing is darling" I tell the boss on our Sunday walk "the thing is I can't get it out of my mind, this vision of them coming by night, in the dark, with their ladders...or...or cranes, to plaster, insert, shove into my eyeline this nauseating horror show. Uninvited. The visual mugging... using women's bodies, <i>every</i>woman's body..."<br />
She laughs at me then, at my hissing, and points to a poster high over our heads. It shows a man talking <i>at</i> a small girl. She looks back at him smilingly. The word NO hovers over her shining head.<br />
"I mean that one? Look at that one? What's the point of that one. You think like he's saying<br />
'when you grow up little girl, you too might want to kill babies? may not be trusted? and, I mean, <i>Daddy</i> says no? <i>Daddy</i> will protect you... from you?"<br />
"And that one" she points upward at a sleeping infant who at least seems to be born and wrapped in a blanket.<br />
"..like that one? like someone took a picture of their baby and used that? For that!"<br />
When we get home the boy is in the kitchen frying sausages, lost in his leisurely Sunday drift, unperturbed by any of this, or anything at all.<br />
"I mean posters? what posters? never noticed any posters. Are there posters? Have a sausage? There's a few over there I don't think I'll eat..."<br />
<br />
The thing is I remember, I was there, when the wretched article went into the Irish Constitution in 1983. I wasn't much older than they are now. I lived in that time. That time of college, of wry acceptance that there would be no job for you when you were finished, when the idea of an income, a car or, one day, a house was a dim chance in your worldview. And the Church, the Catholic Church was everywhere, fingers poking into everything still.<br />
<br />
Your best aspiration, your most hopeful gameplan was to travel, to leave, to go to England, America, Australia. You'd go to work, for a laugh, for a life. For a termination of pregnancy should you need that when and if you were raped, caught, found yourself accidentally and disastrously pregnant. That too.<br />
<br />
In Ireland, a conforming elite mopped up the good stuff, hoarded from scarcity, stayed.<br />
<br />
And then came, who saw that coming? the Celtic Tiger and the Internet. Access to money and discourses, the possibility of choice. A way to live in your own country, whoever saw that?<br />
And the Catholic Church losing its stranglehold, slowly, slowly, and now with dizzying speed. Our minds, opening like flowers, expanding, understood. Our eyes opening, saw. We saw at last the women imprisoned and abused in the laundries, the babies taken for rich catholics, 'unsuitable' infants neglected, starved. And finally we saw the culpability of the church in sheltering paedophiles, sadists, predator priests. A patriarchal state in a dark willing waltz with the church, the priapic hypocritical priests.<br />
<br />
And since then I have had children, I have struggled, I have prospered, suffered dark days and good ones. I've had decades of bloody periods, bloody childbirths, hormonal tides. I have had beloved sons and daughters. Above all else, I have chosen. I have chosen each childbirth, each relationship, each passion I followed. And that trip to England when, disastrously pregnant, I travelled to end it, I have chosen that too.<br />
<br />
I choose that. I tell my daughters that:<br />
<br />
"You get to choose, dear ones. You carry your babe in your body, in your mind, in your heart, in your soul. You must choose that. Pregnancies happen randomly, accidentally, deliberately, thrillingly, and sometimes as a result of a criminal act. You are not (actually) Handmaid, Incubator, a Vessel of the Lord. You are a woman. You know. You know when a pregnancy will damage <i>you</i> in your own heart's core. And you terminate. You choose and you terminate, and you know that is the right thing for you and an embryonic being burrowing into your body. Sometimes you cannot deliver, and you choose."<br />
<br />
When I woke up that time in London I was crying. Lying quiet, staring out at blurry leaves shifting in sunlight through the long french windows on the ward. The voice of a nurse, strange, kind english vowels, behind me asking if I was all right, if I going to be all right? "Yeah... no... I'm not... but I will be. I will be all right." Thinking how I didn't know where this place, <i>somewhere in London, </i>where I was leaving my blood and my embryo, actually was. Didn't know where I actually was...<br />
<br />
And afterwards, long desolate months of the massive hormone fall, the bleedings I was glad to suffer. Knowing, at the end of it I would have my life back. And so it has been.<br />
<br />
And now, with this Referendum, you tell yourself that this is not 1983? That's what you think, before the posters, the No-screaming naysayers, the singleminded absolutists come back again among us, roaring about unreliable, helpless, infantile women, who have terminated 'boys and girls' for 'social reasons'. Who must not the <i>allowed'</i> to choose. Not to choose. Never to choose. Choice, the final frontier for women in casting of being 'less than' womb bearers. In rejecting patriarchy, catholic control.<br />
<br />
They come on from the Church, the IONA INSTIUTE, the Catholics. Maria Steen, David Quinn, Patricia Casey et al, directors named. You find the website. They describe themselves;<br />
"The only organization in the world designed exclusively for top-ranking Catholic business-leaders and their spouses' Also 'The Iona Institute promotes the place of marriage and religion in society. We defend the continued existence of publicly funded denominational schools. We also promote freedom of conscience and religion'<br />
Top Catholics then, (your everyday souls need not apply ) seeking to speak for us, act for us, choose for us, same as it ever was.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
They scream like demons, when Google, Facebook ban adverts from abroad. They have the money, the power, still.<br />
<br />
Will we let them do this again? Will we insist that our democratically elected government legislate as we direct, to regulate Abortion. Will we allow this Diktat to remain, this law beyond the reach of <i>our</i> laws, in the Irish Constitution. Will we let the catholic church or any other church continue to control what happens to women <i>by stealth</i>? By ruthless barracking, posters, lies?<br />
<br />
Will you walk to polling booth on Friday, will your children walk with you, your people, your men, and vote for this, only this; for women's personhood, women's experience, women's choice, for women and only women's right to decide?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-84515371454368665522018-05-12T19:03:00.000-07:002018-05-12T19:03:14.846-07:00 Vicky Phelan. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
...so everything enraging here, so much so (headlined),<br />
Cancer! Cervical! False Negative!Screening. (smearing)<br />
smears.<br />
So having up your tender insides, smears.<br />
<br />
Cold metal instrument you cannot see<br />
so helpless so<br />
don't! tense. T'won't hurt...much.<br />
A scrape across the flesh is all,<br />
so who would want that, who? You? do that, though. You do. You.<br />
Have to. Or not; no sex no HPV the paralysing vaccine risk<br />
Oh hush! Don't speak...that,<br />
you must be mad or bad to say<br />
That.<br />
And after That,<br />
false negatives.<br />
no telling<br />
Anything true.<br />
No telling...you...you have your cancer now its yours.<br />
<br />
Is it 'cause you're Herd?<br />
<br />
I mean like Cervicalcheck?<br />
they must protect<br />
the screening plan?<br />
The herd immune?<br />
fake news about false negatives.<br />
<br />
strategic stoopid...<br />
<br />
No, that's not it, Oh that's not...it. not that. it's...<br />
Slippery diss-ingenuity talk,<br />
it's talkin' on the TV talk<br />
<i>it's</i> talkin' talkin'<br />
(smiling)<br />
The herd the herd the good work<br />
Done.<br />
The innocent failure of planning after the inevitable errors in screening after the perfectly predictable<br />
misreading of your unfortunately misleading...smear. <br />
The way no woman wasn't<br />
treated.<br />
The way every woman was<br />
done.<br />
Your cancer. Y<i>ours</i>.<br />
<i>White elephants dance behind him on the TV screen, the hospice rooms.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
It's this I mean, it's this. I mean<br />
...the three year wait to have another scan.<br />
American systems scraping less<br />
Flesh. America having yearly scans.<br />
They knew they knew they knew they<br />
resigned... figured...did the math...<br />
You tell the herd, it only takes one headline one, dying woman one<br />
to find us.<br />
<br />
She found you anyway,<br />
Vicky Phelan.<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-84571695774944975052018-03-31T10:30:00.001-07:002018-04-14T03:29:18.350-07:00WLTM A NICE RUGBY PLAYER.... (for dancing)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Two things that really piss me off, just now, like badly, like snagging on barbed wire every time you hear it fury, like hijacked derailed fury... when I really need to be thinking about something else...<br />
<br />
<br />
this.<br />
<br />
middle men, talking, talking about the Belfast Rape Trial, saying girls (these days) go on like groupies don't they? they're up for anything aren't they?,<br />
game for anyone, bait for everyone, asking for anything, aren't they. Basically.<br />
...from I mean celebrities? from rugby players? presidents? producers! All those guys, like... everyone knows, these girls they go to tents, to bedrooms, hotel rooms, buses, parties after,<br />
because they're, THEY ARE, basically, UP FOR IT...<br />
<br />
group sexing,<br />
<br />
spit roasting,<br />
use. <br />
<br />
...you have to see the gleam in everyman's eye in giving this recital, this declaration, this charter to abuse.... to understand the comfort all this BULLSHIT gives them, not to mention the vicarious sexual buzz (let's mention that)<br />
<br />
I asked my daughter about it, this fine and self serving argument that girls can't wait to give group head to strangers, lie down to be devoured by braying men, gratify without being gratified...<br />
she shuddered, and not in anticipation either,<br />
" oh no, ah no, ah no one... no one, no girl wants, would want...ever.. that... not drunk of sober, single or no....you wouldn't want that? it they paid you, even, you wouldn't want that? never, ever, no!<br />
<i>"I mean you might go out in carefree casual anticipation of a...like encounter?...with a sort of...like nice rugby player? for maybe dating? or like dancing? or maybe to walk you home, I'd say, or loving if you really really liked him, maybe, maybe?" </i>so, <i> </i>that's all?<br />
<br />
that's all guys,<br />
that's really,<br />
truly<br />
all.<br />
<br />
and this<br />
<br />
the middle class male barristers talking, talking, questioning, oblivious, (to their own unconscious bias) girls. About rape. YOU WHAT you smiled, you touched, you simpered, stumbled, followed, danced with, smiled? you smiled???...<br />
YOU DID NOT go home early, stay on bitter lemon, move in girl packs, go home early, punch him, kick him, go home early, have a, measured, conversation during which you told him no? OH NO? You what you FROZE? you say YOU FROZE??? <i>convenient no? when all you women make your fake claims, yes you, yes you say you, FROZE?.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i> .... so he was </i>tired <i>of your teasin'.....</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>OH BOYS OH BOYS IF EVER ANY ONE ONE OF YOU DIG DOWN INTO YOUR OWN DEPRESSING BIAS YOU MIGHT SEE ALL THOSE MEN requiring alcohol and paralysing fear TO KICKSTART PREDATORY SEX. </i><i>A FULL GROWN MAN CAN HURT, CAN WOUND, CAN INCAPACITATE A WOMAN, CAN </i><i>KILL, DOES KILL, DOES INCAPACITATE.... a woman. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>it's fright or flight for women, women, adrenaline floods and paralysis, in this uneven battle. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Now get the hell out of my road to Dublin for this march today...<br />
it's just a march, a lot of shouting, chanting, <i> </i>placards, useless, maybe. Useless...<br />
But what else is there here between you and the picture of some violated girl with torn vagina, shattered (shat on ) in a cracked mirror held up by Law, the Courts, the country...<br />
....(all the) spit roasting men.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-55949049848497530372018-02-07T05:20:00.000-08:002018-02-07T05:20:04.106-08:00Saving Snowflakes. Old Feminists.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Old Feminists<br />
<br />
I was siting in the cafe at the National Art gallery, on a visit with the Turners before January was out, thinking about old feminists. Old women, Catherine Deneuve, Germaine Greer, Margaret Atwood, criticising, ridiculing even, the #MeToo campaign. Snappy accusations tossed about, that the young women were, actually, party to a sexual exchange which was mutually beneficial. Young women were Snowflakes, precious, needing to toughen up. And they, Catherine, Germaine, Margaret, why they would have seen those guys off with a razor sharp quip, with sheer force of character. And without, never that, <i>whinging</i>.<br />
<br />
Hmm. Old women will be dead soon enough, and sooner anyway than all the spinning tumbling Snowflakes, still obliged to be out there in the world. <br />
<br />
All the hopeful snowflakes wanting...<i>aspiring...</i>to be asked. To consent to any (sexual) mingling of the body or the heart. To consent? And <i>not</i>, as you go about your daily round, toiling in the Work Place, getting there and back on the Luas/bus/train, buying groceries, having a drink, drunk and sober, concealed in coats or lightly clad in your best pretty dress.... <i>not</i> to be troubled by predatory raids, disrespect.....not to be hobbled by blind assaults, rape.<br />
<br />
J.M.W Turner (Radical Watercolours)<br />
<br />
I was thinking I drowning in there for a while, with the pictures. Drawn into the canvas, helpless at the way things were blurring into other things, towards a hinted at mystery spilling from his painterly precision, immense, overwhelming the small human figures<br />
<br />
And now in the cafe queuing for coffee, all the way along the narrow chrome counter, the clatter of crockery bouncing off the walls, the steam hissing from the machines, taking my place at this table, cup cupped. I am thinking, tranced, brooding hard about blurred lines and paintings. Turner's delineations, visions of vastness hiding in plain sight. And all the young women, their ecstatic vigour touching on magic, exposed, always exposed....always vulnerable. Needing boundaries sharp as knives to keep boys at bay, parasites out.<br />
<br />
Thelma and Louise (not asking for it)<br />
<br />
In the week after Christmas, wallowing in afternoon ennui, filler movies, idleness, the Beautiful Girl and I found Thelma and Louise and we watched it together at my urging<br />
"Yeah, You'll like this. Saw this in the cinema, yeah... we... all of us, went to see this back in the day...in the cinema...we loved it, when first it was out?"<br />
I said.<br />
So her channel flicking slowed, she went back and we watched.<br />
'So yeah, it's Brad Pitt? Brad Pitt's hot in it! ...and the women are <i>cool</i>.<br />
And it's .... about rape? Yeah, <i>two</i> rapes. And, but... like Redemption in... Suicide? Isn't <i>that </i>how it ends?<br />
"Um, well..... but, I mean, they refused to be caught, to go back...?"<br />
A silence<br />
"to the prison of roles or the, you know, <i>actual</i> prison awaiting, darling girl? They were brave! It was resolved! In um transcendance and glorious um...yeah, I guess, <i>suicide</i>."<br />
Another silence.<br />
"But, anyway dearest, are things different now?"<br />
"Umm yeah? Surely? Better than that anyway?"<br />
"So... is your college having one of those classes on Consent then?"<br />
"Oh no! I mean maybe, not sure. I mean I don't think...we hardly need..."<br />
<br />
I remind her then of a recent magazine article we read about a very modern student who could not prevent and felt she could not report a gang rape by boys she was drinking with, boys she knew...<br />
"Yeah, I know. I mean....I <i>know, </i>almost <i>everyone </i>I know, has had, has been...forced? ....to do things. Like assaulted, or didn't know what to...how to stop...it. Or do anything after...complain...?"<br />
<br />
We wonder then if those traumatised girls could not stop it, could not report it, because, like poor Thelma, they figure that everyone will always say that... will always say "Yes, but, wasn't she... asking for it? ...<i>asking...</i>"<br />
And the sleepless nights afterwards, trying to figure out <i>what it was</i>, what happened, how it happened, when you're all torn up in your mind, your vagina, is the same <i>still</i> for all of us... our good women friends giving tea, kind words, solace.<br />
<br />
<i>and did i, consent, to a kiss yes a kiss to a fumble, a cuddle, yes maybe some groping the sex i said no i said no i said God was i asked though i froze God i froze i was deep under water his hand gripped my neck was a vise till the last one the pause i got over the waterline then and i ran i said no i said no i said no</i><br />
<br />
Oh Catherine, Germaine, Margaret Atwood, we were smashing through purdahs, glass ceilings, confinement, tossing corsets and bras in our outrage but we did not had internet porn?<br />
Nor suffered this wild-west unbound, this free-for-all heaven to predatory males.<br />
Give over the wallowing in ballsinees (yours), giving comfort to oblivious men.<br />
Our girls are in trouble<br />
Get behind them.<br />
Get beside them,<br />
Support the #MeToo.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Storm at the Mouth of the Grand Canal.</i> <br />
<br />
And back you go flying up white marble stairs, like an arrow though hushed gallery hallways, to the Turners.<br />
A last glimpse for this year of the best loved, the same one,<br />
you come like a lover at last.<br />
One last tipping over,<br />
to vision, <br />
the boundaries, the ego quite gone.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-16143151743013727972017-12-01T12:33:00.000-08:002017-12-01T12:33:08.138-08:00In Amsterdam the Women Wait / Anne Frank <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Things to do in Amsterdam... before you die.<br />
<br />
We went to Amsterdam at Midterm, the girl and I, wanting to get away but not too far away,<br />
wanting to loose ourselves among strangers, though not too strange, the Dutch, and (handily) english speaking.<br />
<br />
"You know my friends? the girls? ah, they were telling me, like, that I <i>should</i> buy you a sneaky Space Cake? for the, I mean, craic?"<br />
the dear girl smiles... looks at me quizzically.<br />
"Huh? Buy me a huh? Oh... right! and catch me on camera, eh? kinda spaced? Eh? put it up on You Tube, eh?"<br />
She grinned.<br />
"Hmm, well... you can tell your friends, my darling, that <i>if </i>I'm having Space Cakes or weed in any other shape or form I'll get it for myself, in Amsterdam? No You Tube clips, no sneaky snapchat shots, no dizzy laughs..... except, perhaps, by me...?"<br />
Her beautiful eyebrows lift, disturbing the perfect lines she'd drawn in her bedroom, communing with the mirror at the crack of dawn, her half packed, unzipped suitcase gaping on the floor, her passport 'somewhere' 'probably' 'in the drawer'? <br />
"you wouldn't though...actually...wouldn't...<i>ohmygod...</i> "<br />
"<i>Like </i>maybe. Possibly. Depends. In Amsterdam...."<br />
<br />
We did the things you do in Amsterdam. Oh yeah. We walked the streets, we pilgrim tourists, charmed, by elegant gabled houses, individual, solid, other,<br />
stopped, to eat at vegan, chinese, danish, eateries, better than Dublin, better than home, we swore, sauntered, over arching bridges lost,<br />
and gloriously rudderless over water cleanly flowing in stone canals,<br />
sitting dreamy at last with aching feet by water.<br />
<br />
The mild grey weather folding us in. . .happy.<br />
<br />
We saw no desperate drinkers there, no wild eyed down and outs, no huddled shapes under sleeping bags in doorways, thrownaway, homeless, in Amsterdam, not one. The streets were easy, clean and thronged with people going somewhere watered, fed.<br />
<br />
The Men look out, the Women in....<br />
<br />
In the Rijksmuseum I let the girl off to find her pictures, see her way.<br />
I found her by the Night Watch, standing with all the dwarfed observers, absorbed. <br />
Drawn in so deep she didn't see me,<br />
caught in Rembrandt's light and dark; locating each man in the frame, she told me after, <br />
the place and shape and face,<br />
of every man who fought to catch her eye.<br />
<br />
Afterwards she found the great Dolls house,<br />
stood, head to one side smiling, lost.<br />
<br />
I saw the other pictures too. The women. Women, waiting, watching, writing letters. Thinking. A woman warms her hands, absorbed. She wears Pearl Earrings, solemn.<br />
Women in the windows waiting. <i>In the red light district women wait for johns </i><br />
<i>to buy, to stare.</i><br />
<br />
Out on the streets you have another brush with sudden death by bicycle,<br />
adrift on the bicycle lane, unable to distinguish the walking path.<br />
Saved by skill of cyclists,<br />
dazzled by the silver streams of pretty boys with man buns,<br />
glowing girls,<br />
the sturdy middle aged, the children perched up high in baskets,<br />
front loaded.<br />
<br />
<br />
Secret Annexe<br />
<br />
Hours fly, days disappear, in Amsterdam. We go to Anne Frank's house on that last day.<br />
I was there, I, in a snailing line of silent people moving through the dim and empty annexe, the yellowed light,<br />
staring, at Ann Frank's pictures on the wall of 1940's movie stars, and snapshots of her people as they lived,<br />
wall markings of the growing young who lived there between July 1943 and August 1944, (stretching like angel weed in the darkness)<br />
Ann, Margot, Peter grow taller, nurtured, somehow, anyhow, in the claustrophobic space, waiting for the end of war.<br />
<br />
Pictures there of the lived-in annexe rooms before the Nazis came and took the furniture,<br />
the people..... they took Anne Frank, her passionate living voice that called all day long in the secret rooms,<br />
silenced,<br />
tossed down the death camp's filthy maw.<br />
<br />
Released into the bare and sterile space of the museum, we watched ancient crackling film of lamb-like humanity, men, women and children wait for the train to Auschwitz and such places,<br />
grainy pictures of clothes collapsed on bones,<br />
poor murdered fragments of the Jewish people. <br />
<br />
The scattered pages of a young girl's diary waiting in an empty room,<br />
falling slow from stolen furniture, settling on bare trampled floors.<br />
The legacy of a writer. Undeniable. Accounting.<br />
<br />
<br />
A Haunting <br />
<br />
Afterwards we talked about the future, the girl and I,<br />
walking through Museum Square, past the pretty houses, over the tidy humming water serene in the canals,<br />
the Christmas lights twinkling in still fading glory of Autumn leaves, <i>already... already</i>...<br />
Drinking coffee, talking, mind tugged, a little absent, a little still in Ann Frank's House.<br />
(You bought the book to read again, last read in adolescence when you were the fiery writing girl)<br />
<br />
And now, this eve in Amsterdam, you are all of them,<br />
All. You are Margot, Anne and Peter, Otto, Edith, Hermann, Petri, <i>Albert.</i><br />
You sit in the house in Prinsengracht, on the Merwedeplein Square and wear the yellow star of David, waiting. <br />
For the war to end and your life, your precious, precious life, to start.<br />
<br />
<br />
In Amersterdam the women wait, they wait<br />
for johns complaining after on internet <i>rating </i>sites.<br />
You weren't warm or loving for the money,<br />
there were cracks high up there on your ceiling.<br />
(and the act, the sex itself, was only average)<br />
<br />
<br />
In Amersterdam, they stand,<br />
in windows, rooms, they warm their hands, they do not speak, they think, they read, they write, they wait.<br />
<br />
They wait (for you)<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-80995443226470009062017-10-30T04:46:00.001-07:002017-10-30T04:46:24.318-07:00Trolling the Ancestors. Hanging Harvey Weinstein.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
How <i>Could</i> this have.... <i>actually</i>.... <i>happened</i>?<br />
<br />
<br />
Everyone ( a swarm of Facebook and Twitter bees ) is outraged about the Irish Famine just now.<br />
Oh yes. The Great Famine. One million people starving to death when the potato crop failed?<br />
And the English, the English Government, refusing to give the starving people the food taken from Irish land as a cash crop for english landlords?<br />
The potato crop failed for three years running.<br />
It would have been too costly to keep all those people alive.<br />
<br />
Everyone knows this now on account of the TV series 'Victoria', wherein television Victoria, coming to that calamity in time, brings our modern values, our virtue signalling, to bear on the crisis.<br />
A bit of remedial time travelling, as it were.<br />
<br />
And what else could they have... <i>Actually</i>... Done?<br />
<br />
The killer lines, sounding from the mouth of a stony faced English MP, came in the blunt proposal to let starvation do its job in correcting inconvenient overpopulation. As opposed to wholesale redirection of the fruits of peasant labour, to feed the starving people. A game of cheap labour, profit margins and famine by inaction, was all. A game of feckless peasants, over-breeding and failing to put a little by for bad years. You could take your pick, your preferred narrative.<br />
<br />
Charismatic ( Unconscious) Bias<br />
<br />
Why, I believe that Mr Kevin Myers had a similar argument about the flow of overseas aid to Africa. Moral Hazard for poor people, people breeding fecklessly, living of the milk and honey of overseas aid, fodder for famines when the famines come.<br />
He showed a similar and energetic delight in blaming the victim on the subject of pay inequality for women. Let's see how that went. Oh yes.<br />
The women, being less charismatic, less able, than the men, were paid less. The market place decided. A stranger then to the concept of unconscious bias, our Kevin...<br />
But hey, they didn't have to off him, did they? He honed my thinking, sharpened my perspective on the subjects of women's rights, multiculturalism, gender bias with his jaudiced, choleric diatribes.<br />
<br />
<i>And once he wrote a most beautiful piece, in 2012 I think, about the glorious Autumn of that year, the collage of red to gold to bronze leaf drift, that year. God in the turning of the seasons.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Poor Harvey's (sorry) in a Safe Place ( purging and praying), People.<br />
<br />
He, Kevin, might have been purged, redeemed, brought at the end of the lash to Political Correctness. Like Harvey Weinstein, who has taken himself off sharpish for therapy (in a safe environment) (ah bless). Safe from outraged judgements, the virtuous ire of the righteous, bringing current mindsets to bear on ancient sins.<br />
<br />
Our outrage is exhausting, avenging, absolute. Never mind that the casting couch, the sexual preying on the hopeful young was a cliche, a joke, a fact of life for years and years before, even, the birth of Hollywood, celluloid, <i>acting.</i> It was the way of the world, the law of the jungle, the natural order of things.<br />
<br />
Worthless Women/On the Couch<br />
<br />
It was all that. The conviction that everwoman's shaking humiliation, her humiliated powerlessness as she lay herself down on the casting couch, was valid, real, legitimately felt, is very <i>now</i>. The understanding that it is not a question of being a good sport, being serious about your career, being copped on, being hysterical, is slowly settling still. The truth that we are being preyed on, abused by a man given all the cards, is shining clear at last.<br />
<br />
How long has it taken women to catch hold of that truth, to unearth the unconscious bias of men and women. To nail the lie. Centuries, seasons, generations passing, to learn that essential thing.<br />
<br />
Worms, Hooks, and Optics.<br />
<br />
Weinstein is a canny man. He know about the optics, how to loop back in time and explain himself. So, like, that was then and this is now? he offers. I mean, why, wasn't he a victim too! Of those outdated notions obligating you to molest, to <i>season</i> the young. To message their ignorance, exploit their ambition. But now, ah now, he's (absolutely) having therapy, if we will only let him (slip) off the hook from which he hangs.<br />
<br />
He dangles on the hook of time, caught on the turn, misfortunate Harvey. The neural pathways burgeoning in the minds of women, flowered in a narrative, a vision, a refusal, to be treated as meat.<br />
<br />
And we're coming for the English, <i>after</i>!<br />
<br />
You wonder what the English might be made to do, now they've been shamed on Social Media. About the Famine that is, and never mind Brexit. Luckily (for them) all those monstrous ministers from Peel's Tory Government are long dead. They can't be made pay. Or, um, can they? Well, yes in a way. The spectre of Compensation for the Irish People is rising fast, taking shape, I tell you! A grovelling apology may be on the cards here too.<br />
Wait and see!<br />
<br />
And poor penitent Weinstien will have to take one for the team of male sexual predators stretching back behind him, dead and gone, beyond the reach of outrage. Hmm.<br />
<br />
"Yet another fine mess ye made, Mary!"<br />
<br />
'So, yeah, one million dead... two million emigrated to America?"<br />
The boss looks up from her google search and I loose the thread of 'Victoria' again, just as she, Victoria, is proposing to take herself over there to Ireland to find out what in Hell and Damnation was, actually, going on?<br />
"Yeah. Yeah, we all used to know that. Every Irish school child used to know that?" I offer to her pained, considering face. (she has paused the TV show)<br />
"Sure, the Irish people? they were <i>taller, </i> and, I mean, free and fluent in the Irish tongue? until the Famine..."<br />
<br />
And so they were, we were told. That and a bunch of other stuff about the Easter Rising, 800 years of oppression by English colonisers, and being an island of all Saints and Scholars (no, really)<br />
<br />
"Haven't you ever heard of the Wound of the Colonised, darling? The dark dysfunction behind our drinking, our sexual repression, the way we lost the Celtic Tiger?"<br />
"No," she said calmly. "No I haven't. But don't you think it would have changed history, like. I mean if the English <i>hadn't </i> let the Irish people starve? And, I mean, all those <i>tall</i>, Irish speakers had lived among us keeping the language going, here and present, and never going to America at all?<br />
Never, I mean, <i>dying</i> in the Coffin Ships, here with us, swelling the numbers, having our backs..."<br />
<br />
Never adding Irish to the melting pot, the sky scraping buildings, the American police.<br />
<br />
<br />
A Parallel universe, Yeah.<br />
<br />
How everything would have been different, had the potato crop not failed, and failed, and failed.<br />
<br />
So that now <i>tall</i> ghosts walk among us, nudge, murmur 'as gaelige', detonate little bombs, from time to time, least we forget the nature of human nature, forget who we are and what we are and where we came from.<br />
<br />
All that preying on the young and pretty, sucking substance, joy and confidence from their precious core?<br />
That was us, doing that people, not he or she, or bad people, us. Own it.<br />
<br />
At least the young reach beyond us, always. Nothing is ever written in stone. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-89995568591308188992017-09-15T14:10:00.000-07:002017-09-15T17:03:58.819-07:00Bullets and Bloodlines and Marrying your Cousin.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Get back inside your Box there, Lovely Girl.<br />
<br />
"<i>I</i> could've, I'd have <i>liked to </i>have, done that! That would have been something really <i>cool...</i>interesting... to do?"<br />
The boss and I watch 'Victoria' on Television, who, newly crowned, is busy signing documents from The Box. We know all about The Box having watched 'The Crown'. I figure that the Boss would have insisted on reading everything first, on giving the Prime Minister a thorough grilling before she signed any papers, if she had being doing that.<br />
The Boss and Victoria are on the cusp of eighteen years, both on them on the cusp...<br />
<br />
I say we watch, but its way more interactive than that. The Boss likes to compare, contrast, relate, run her TV viewing though her various mental apps as she watches. She likes to talk talk talk while she's at it it. It's pretty much Instant Feedback fired out to myself, struggling all the while to keep up with two eighteen year old women. Yeah.<br />
<br />
We move on fairly quickly to the fact that it wasn't supposed to be Victoria on the throne at all, at all. Oh no. The ghost of poor Charlotte shimmers. Poor Charlotte, dying in childbirth, clearing the way for Victoria. Her shade thickens, darkens, as Victoria is impregnated by pretty boy Albert. (Oh how I miss Lord M). The Boss mulls over how that would feel...love, virginal sex, and pregnancy with an even chance of being a mother or dead...<br />
<br />
<br />
Bloodlines, Jeans and Refugees.<br />
<br />
<br />
But first, there was marrying your cousin.<br />
"So okay, they wanted to marry only other Royals, but your <i>euuugh,</i> like, first cousin? Hello?"<br />
"Um. Depends on the cousin, darling?"<br />
"No! It doesn't!"<br />
"Well now, it's all in how you look at it, isn't it? I mean you have to remember the Bloodlines!"<br />
"The Bloodlines?"<br />
"Yeah, the Bloodlines. You want to hear some Irish families talking about that, <i>the bloodlines</i>!"<br />
I mean, like, not just funny anachronistic Royals care about Bloodlines, ye know."<br />
"Yeah, but, it's genetically like, <i>a really bad idea</i> marrying your cousin isn't it!!"<br />
"Yes and no, my darling" I say, warming to my theme. <br />
"In Ireland not so long ago, down on the farm where most of us were, lots and lots of people got married to their cousins! Well, their second cousins, anyway..."<br />
(I'd say now <i>they'd say </i>sure it never did 'em a bit of harm either. (Like being whacked at school or forbidden to have, speak or think of sex)<br />
"Also it preserved the Bloodlines, the good old family genes?"<br />
"Jeans? Genes? Why would anyone care about that. Who would <i>care</i> about that?"<br />
"Very many people baby, then and now. Enough to treat women as breeding vessels to control outcomes. Enough to treat the Browning of this end of the world as a tragedy and a very bad thing.<br />
Enough to watch refugees drowning out there in the ocean, or corralled in offshore camps to exist, just about. (Protecting us from the the distressing sight of the drowning children)<br />
<br />
Down at the Graveyard / all the Lovely girls.<br />
<br />
"Well anyway, back then I would have done something else, avoided baby making. Like, I mean, Jane Austen?" the boss offers, tired now of the Bloodlines.<br />
She's finished Sense and Sensibility, moving on to Emma. She filters it all through her own female experience, snags on the cognitive dissonance between biology and individual being.<br />
She loves the romance, the will she won't she get the guy. She has been briefed (by mother) about the graveyards back then crammed with first wives, killed by childbirth. She has been left with no illusions about the liklihood of being married off to a monied old man (on his third wife), on how you might come to the graveyard on your sixteenth child, your body giving way at last.<br />
She knows that no one questioned that.<br />
<br />
"I guess poor Tom could've got himself a fresh faced eighteen year old if he's only lived a hundred years ago" she remarks, interested. (Victoria's been forgotten in the conversational back and forth). Quite. She heard me on the phone on that one. Talking to (poor) Tom, middle aged, alone again and swearing no, nay, never, internet dating (for the middle aged) no never no more... Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
She definitely would have dodged that Bullet so she would...<br />
<br />
She tells me, cheerful now, thats she's off to bed, clutching the book, shrugging off graveyard shades, tragic girl brides, death by childbirth, as she goes. Clearly thinking that that was then and this is now, and anyway she would have been Victoria! or Jane Austen! or somehow anyhow bucked that trend, if <i>she</i> had lived back then. And also that that has nothing to with her as a girl/woman. Not. Anymore.<br />
<br />
Biology being Destiny (<i>not</i>)<br />
<br />
But not so fast my pretty. Is there a world of difference in fact between being a breeding machine bought and sold, and a girl obliged to give two hours and counting every day to making up her face, conceding comfort to tiny dresses, thongs! Girls do that in a a far more driven, focused way now than back then when we were marrying our second cousins. Our girls are subject to Expectations (of acrobatic sexual titillation) from boys weaned off Mummy's breast (finally) via internet pornography. Biology no longer destiny? Think again sister. The struggle to be a person, individual, is as bitter as ever it was I say.<br />
<br />
I think about that as I listen to the media storm about the HPV vaccine. Ah yes, the HP virus, spread by sexual activity. The vastly increased exposure of girls, young women, to cervical cancer as a result. We used to be told to have regular smears, and that the early stages of cell mutation was easily treated. You had to take responsibility for that, but it was easily treatable. You <i>had</i> to take personal responsibility if you had sex! Oh.<br />
<br />
There are some halfhearted proposals to inoculate the boys now. Ah yes, the boys, who are also at risk of cancer of the penis and other cancers from the same virus, as it turns out. They haven't been in the firing line to date. I guess they're home free if the girls take that bullet. Unless you are gay indeed. I wonder, and hope I'm wrong here, but I do wonder if there would be the same refusal to consider/acknowledge adverse reactions to the vaccine if we inoculated the girls <i>and the boys. Just sayin'. </i><br />
<br />
<br />
Hysterical women / Uterine.<br />
<br />
Now, and yet again, we have a medical establishment arrogant and adamant that there are <i>no adverse effects </i>from the Gardasil vaccine. Despite the actual experience of girls and parents, the reports and lived experience of women. Nope! They don't accept it, won't believe it. So, there are maybe 800/900 young women out of 250,000 (or so) reporting adverse effects? Well, you <i>will</i> get that! That's no reason to refuse! Refuseniks! So, the reporting of adverse effects is not monitored, collated? Well, so what! Had anything been wrong we should surely have heard. From rational folk. From doctors and such like. Yeah.<br />
<br />
There is clearly a cohert of young women who are vulnerable to adverse effects from this vaccine. If that was even acknowledged by the medical establishment we might see an effort to pin point who might be at risk and and why. Instead they insist <i>all</i> take a chance. And rush to shut you down if you don't accept that position.<br />
<br />
<br />
It's a Cost Benefit Calculation Stoopid!<br />
<br />
The good doctor is the one who admits to the limits of medical knowledge. Owns failures and harms occasioned by some medical treatments, initially based on certainties. There has been many such catastrophic failures. Thalidomide anyone? Narcolepsy following on the Swine flu vaccine (which, is at least is under investigation) The second rate close their minds to argument, opposition. And who is on the receiving end of this blind and lumpen arrogance? Why women, yet again, that's who. Women, who can't be trusted to have a view on this, can't be permitted to criticise, to question the medical sacred cows. Women, who can be bludgeoned with statistics about cancer deaths. Women, who have been driven like cattle from all the early graves to the hospital wards and over-medicalised childbirth.<br />
<br />
The Medics have your Uterus, Lovely Girl.<br />
<br />
It is a hazardous business, being a woman, Always was and always will be. It must be driven by women's voices, women's lived experience. We have to listen to what those girls and their families have to say about the HPV Vaccine. We have to explore <i>all</i> <i>and alternative </i>options to counter the threat of cervical cancer. We have to discuss why the virus is more prevalent now. Contrary to Minster Harris's toadying suggestion that only doctors, the medical establishment be allowed to speak, we have to open up this debate.<br />
<br />
We <i>could</i> push the medics firmly back in their Box, find the best way for women to manage the hazards, traps, enigmas of womb, sexuality, and gender.<br />
<br />
<i>a girl is not an (empty) vessel, instrument, fool, </i><i>only green is all. A girl is green and being... </i><br />
<i>individual.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-36622530098534540722017-08-11T18:38:00.000-07:002017-08-11T18:38:28.781-07:00Sticks and Stones and Words and Bones.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>And you can wash your mouth out ( with soap) Babycakes!</i><br />
<br />
Once we were children told;<br />
to pay no mind to unkind words,<br />
calumny, swearing, curses, lies.<br />
Nor were we to speak any such;<br />
unkind words, calumny, curses, lies, <br />
(evil).<br />
<br />
It was a Catholic thing, a moral thing, a christian thing, a matter of good rearing thing.<br />
<br />
Now, you are likely to be told that,<br />
anything anyone ever<br />
says to you,<br />
is actually, <br />
about the speaker.<br />
<br />
Not personal. Not to be taken on board. It's only... words.<br />
Exposing the speaker....using his words. Only. Words. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i>you are dead to me, dead to me, dead to me Delia.</i><br />
<br />
Yeah. My children have all used their words from time to time to tell me how very badly they hated, you, and why it was they didn't love (you), and how they just<i> wanted</i> to get away (from you)...<br />
and, like, so maybe they were adopted?<br />
In the hothouse madness of teen-age.<br />
"And so, like, do you hate being a Mammy, Mammy, or what?" Beauty once asked me passionately.<br />
"Hate you, hate you, hate you, hate...." the Boss spat from the top of stairs, choking on the last <i>I hate.</i><br />
"Irrational! Mad you are mad do you know you don't even know that you don't actually... <i>get it...</i> "<br />
the Boy, sixteen, managed through gritted teeth as I confiscated his Xbox, beer stash, cigarettes, in one fell swoop. One long and shouty afternoon.<br />
<br />
<i>hold me close don't let me scream</i><br />
<br />
Did it hurt, did it hell. It, basically, hurt like hell. But, hell, you take it on the chin.<br />
Your children are in a kind of make or break process in teen-age. They <i>have</i> to cast you off, to seek, to find, locate, themselves. And you, my friend, must suck it up, must stand your ground, contain it. Wait. You have to sit it out. You wouldn't call that domestic abuse now, would you? It's about Context?<br />
<br />
All that door slamming? distempered screaming, <i>door slamming</i>, knives quivering in the breadboard, (no really!) <i>door slamming</i>, howling contempt, <i>door slamming</i>, passionate blaming, <i>door slamming</i>... the soundtrack to the rite of passage. When you were teenaged.<br />
<br />
Short of actual physical violence, you wouldn't say any of that's a 'domestic'.<br />
You wait for the quivering shivering teen to crawl out of the bedroom <i>afterwards. B</i>ereft, confused. Sorry even. You just... wait. All Context. Yeah.<br />
<br />
Coercive Control to be Out-Lawed.<br />
<br />
I think about that as I listen to a Radio discussion, on Pat Kenny I think. He's being told that we, the Irish, lack an actual law? against Cohersive Control as an aspect of Domestic Abuse? They have it in the UK, they have it in America, other places, but we do not. We have something in draft...is all. <br />
Our Judges do not understand, are unable to grasp the dynamic binding victim to perpetrater. Judges don't have any <i>range</i> past actual violence.<br />
Maybe.<br />
But what are we talking about here?<br />
Words, verbals, that's what. Words as your weapon of choice.<br />
<br />
A (mostly but not always) man gets into a (mostly but not always) woman's head with his loaded, knowing, manipulative, words. His wordfeed garnered from intimate knowledge. Oh, he may break her down with the shadow of the threat of violence, but soon, in time, he only needs to use his words to make her dance to his tune.<br />
<br />
<br />
.....if only<br />
<br />
<br />
The Judge just can't see it. It's not an <i>actual</i> crime. So right, we <i>make</i> it a crime. We teach the Judge, we criminalise the behaviour, no? Coercive Control. I can't see it.<br />
A dodgy definition, running like sand though your fingers, impossible to prove. It will catch a handful of extreme cases maybe, extreme behaviours. Requiring Guards to observe and gather incidents for proof, without, dispensing with the need for, the victim's complaint? That's a profound intrusion on personal autonomy, calling for big brother type judgements from <i>Guards</i>! (gawdhelpus)<br />
<br />
So, right, we <i>instruct</i> the Judge, the Guards, the <i>People...</i> and afterwards no one is ever <i>allowed</i> to say 'well hey, she went back to him, didn't she? Didn't she?'<br />
That'll work!<br />
Can't see it.<br />
<br />
I think we already know what happens here. You can't, we can't, protect a (mostly) woman from this kind of possession. Can't interfere with and regulate personal interactions in this way. It's slippery treacherous territory. Its behaviours easily concealed by any abusive Partner on top of (usually) his game. It's words. It's control, Pavlov's dog style, behind closed doors,<br />
<br />
And there's this. No woman is here unless she has chosen to be, <i>in the beginning</i>. And you may advise, prescribe, support until the seas run dry, until the coral reef is finished, but she and he will take up again the fatal dance as soon as she walks through her own front door. Like vampires, she's let him in, and now she's his.<br />
<br />
......and so, back to the drawing board.<br />
<br />
You can't legislate for all the twisted, complex human behaviours. You can't stop words arrowing home to detonate with infinite effect in the mind. Blows are easy, words are incalculable, infinite in effect. Think of the internet. Tweets, posts, snapchats, Soundbites... words. Unstoppable.<br />
<br />
The only salvation, the only way out for anyone here is <i>on their own steam</i>. The only way to help is in consciousness raising. Expanding the minds of Everywoman; about what happens, how it can happen, how it can enslave. The only way to facilitate a release from this particular version of hell is in giving support. Providing practical support, money, Women's shelters. The only way to intervene is to ostracise the abuser, recognise it when you see it, hear it. Call them on it. On the killing words. Remember context? Context is all.<br />
<br />
One day (your reward will be in heaven, darling)<br />
<br />
And as for you, one <i>awesome </i>day your tortured shambling teen will walk back through your own front door, down the stairs from the bedroom, disentangle from her twisted sheets a smiling rueful adult. The little man, the tiny girl who loved you lurking in the deeps of a becalmed and balanced gaze. Never to utter the killing words no more, whats more. Mostly never. Hopefully never. Nevermore. And in the words of the inimitable Bell XI<br />
<br />
"All my distant sons and daughters/<br />
I hope you can forgive yourselves/<br />
and I hope you can forgive me/<br />
(Sons & Daughters. ARMS. 2016)<br />
<br />
Or this little verse I stumbled on;<br />
<br />
<i>Hurt you</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Sticks and stones may break your bones/<br />
words will never words will never/<br />
Sparked your heart down through my own/<br />
words could never words could never/<br />
Caged you in your brace of bones/<br />
words did never words did never /<br />
Left you barely beating strong/<br />
left you left you left you/<br />
Bring it on, your sticks and stones/<br />
Words <i>boomerang</i> words (<i> echo)</i><br />
(anon)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-1719517694921039362017-06-16T10:59:00.000-07:002018-11-03T18:41:43.453-07:00 Murdering. Allah on London Bridge.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I was a man, I was a fighter, <i>suicide</i>....<br />
Bomber of lover of.... virgins.<br />
Soldier.....of caliphate,<br />
walked out that night, strapped in my best... fake suicide belt.<br />
<br />
Planned for it,<br />
dreamed of it,<br />
imagined it,<br />
<br />
In red hot heat for it,<br />
dreamed,<br />
<i>I dreamed of it</i>.<br />
<br />
It was all,<br />
I had left,<br />
in my head.<br />
<br />
I was a man, I could....I would<br />
act.<br />
I would kill for it.<br />
<i>Kill</i>.<br />
I would finish the Infidel.<br />
<br />
<br />
For Allah who choose me.<br />
He choose me,<br />
at last, he choose me.<br />
He saw<br />
me.<br />
At last.<br />
<br />
<br />
In the shadow days drinking and drugging and jail<br />
he called to me, <br />
sang to me,<br />
Better than meths when he called to me<br />
<br />
better that sex with whores, the hard drinking,<br />
Pure. It was pure,<br />
burning,<br />
love.<br />
<br />
That's me in the picture,<br />
there<br />
I am,<br />
there, shot to pieces,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I am down,<br />
I am down on the ground,<br />
there's no heaven,<br />
the virgins<br />
are clawed howling sirens.<br />
<br />
No Allah.<br />
<br />
all screaming and muddle,<br />
the people go under the wheel.<br />
I see them, see,<br />
a child slipping, down<br />
to be ground...<br />
I see<br />
<br />
the divine vision wither, and Allah abandon me then.<br />
<br />
All noise and confusion and screaming. Then.<br />
<br />
In the van I am,<br />
screaming,<br />
there,<br />
to go back,<br />
make it stop,<br />
but we had to go...<br />
on. <br />
<br />
We are stabbing at throats we are missing our mark we are stopping the wide open mouths of the infidel.<br />
<br />
I am waiting for<br />
hoping for<br />
listening hard<br />
<br />
for the high holy roll,<br />
come again to me<br />
back to me.<br />
<br />
I call to him, <br />
then.<br />
<br />
see myself in the eyes of the people I cut<br />
I am (<i>monsteralieninhumanthing</i>)<br />
<br />
when they got to me,<br />
shot at me,<br />
finished me<br />
then.<br />
<br />
I lie, I lie.<br />
<br />
I go back, I try...<br />
<br />
to go back to the first flaring fire of the ecstasy,<br />
<br />
<br />
turn,<br />
<br />
<br />
to turn back from the lie,<br />
from becoming<br />
this shit sodden thing,<br />
on the road.<br />
<br />
no woman, no loving, no warm beating heart,<br />
I have cut myself <br />
off,<br />
from connection.<br />
<br />
I have snuffed out my own slice of life.<br />
<br />
Allah too he,<br />
forsake me,<br />
never came to me,<br />
here,<br />
like they said to me.<br />
<br />
<br />
....promised me.<br />
<br />
Is he here? Is that him in the Infidel's eyes and I finish him too.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-90134435817104261282017-06-02T15:04:00.000-07:002017-06-02T18:06:04.770-07:00Party Death and Dreaming (dreadful sorrow)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<i>MORNING AFTER</i>...<br />
<br />
<br />
"And so he's <i>barred, </i>I'm telling him <i>you </i>say<i>... </i>he's <i>barred...</i> from the house!" The beautiful girl hissed sibilantly from where she, on hands and knees, rubbed and swabbed at the floor with towels (all my store of towels!!!) Out in the hall her siblings, like galley slaves, sighed and groaned in sympathy, a row of bottoms swaying as they worked on an oil slick of washing up liquid splattered, no, poured, over the floors downstairs in our house.<br />
<br />
... the party planning<br />
<br />
Beauty, 21 at last, had thrown a party. And I had taken myself off on request until the morning after. After all, it was not her 18th? I mean, not another night of neophyte drinkers, no, scantily clad and all geared up for a bacchanal, not... this time. Now, they knew what they were about, they were <i>seasoned</i> in all sorts of ways you'd rather not go into. So, yeah, the afternoon before? I tore myself away from party preparations, locking away of valuables, that sort of thing, put it out of mind (with kind friends and strong drink)... entirely.<br />
<br />
... the giddy anticipation.. <br />
<br />
On Sunday lunchtime, stepping tentatively though my front door, I picked my way past the swaying bottoms, climbed onto the sofa with the Sunday papers and hoped they wouldn't tell me how <i>that </i>happened.<br />
<br />
....<i>THE NIGHT BEFORE!!!</i><br />
<br />
So they told me how that happened. Guess I was looking too detached (serene) for them, by then. They told me that and other things I didn't necessarily want to know. Some guy, Ryan take a bow!, brought in the withered Christmas tree from the garden, where it awaited the skip (hey, it's been a really busy year) and set it up in the kitchen in the middle of the revellers. Someone, Ryan take another bow!, then poured a fine layer of washing up (fairy) liquid on the floors. To set the scene I'm guessing, to up the ante, give it <i>tone</i>. The party carried on regardless. Like an Art Installation as it were, glistening, sylvan, interactive <i>craic</i>. And Ryan! not satisfied, feeling there was something more, planted a For Sale sign in our garden from next door.<br />
<br />
"Right, yeah banned..." I say absently, "definitely, darlings. Eh, was there any more?"<br />
<br />
Turned out the boy showed up with at least <i>six</i> sidekicks (he was allocated two) and commandeered the party space with uncouth louche behaviour, beauty went on, furiously wringing my best bath towel in a bucket of water as she did. And she was obliged to evict a number of them, <i>screaming</i>, because they drove the <i>seasoned</i> civilised <i>invited</i> into the living room for refuge from their shouty commandeering of the music.<br />
<br />
"I <i>said </i> you'd said he couldn't have that <i>many</i> of them. Mother? Mother!"<br />
"Yeah, appalling darling, untterly unacceptable, yeah"<br />
" shut up shut up shut <i>up!</i>" the boy hissed from the hallway "the tree is back outside, and I'm working on this f***kin floor, and any way it was a <i>party!"</i><br />
<i><br /></i> AND <i>THE CONQUERING NORMANS? THEY INTER-MARRIED</i>........<br />
<br />
Turns out it all turned out for the best of all possible worlds? The uncouth boys eventually mingled, the sophisticates put down their cool and let them into the party space. Like the invading Normans, they became more Irish than the Irish themselves, as you might say.<br />
<br />
"Yeah, 7.00 am, I want to bed at seven?" beauty finished proudly, brushing a strand of long brown hair from her sweating brow, smiling at some sweet and private memory.<br />
<br />
"Hmm, right, very good, ah, carry on" I murmur, turning on the sofa, stretching discreetly, carefully thinking nothing at all. It <i>had</i> nothing to do with me. <i>I am </i> (they are adults, 21 years old!) <i>not</i> <i>responsible</i>. Not responsible. Anymore. No one died, no (actual) bad thing happened. I am <i>basically </i>not responsible... anymore.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>PUT DOWN YOUR JOB AND TAKE ME SHOPPING!!!</i><br />
<br />
I see text flashes, peripherally, on my phone on Friday, as I wrestle with a case I have to make for someone anxiously hopeful on the outcome. Six texts I find, when I take a moment. <i>Peremptory </i> texts, from the boss who wants, she <i>needs, </i>to go, no, to be <i>taken</i>, shopping. Whenever. When, eventually, I make it home.<br />
"I have nothing? to wear? for, you <i>know, </i>I'm going to a party? Will you/ won't you, take me? late night shopping? When you get, like, home?"<br />
"Hello! Only take an hour?"<br />
"Hello! yes or no?? Hello!"<br />
"Just an hour? Yes or No?"<br />
"Yes or no! Hello?"<br />
"Hello!!!"<br />
<br />
No. I have hours and miles to go before I walk though my own front door and I won't be turning out again to buy some barely decent piece of clothing for a party. No. I text, no! distracted by the job at hand, and something else. A conversation I am having at the time with a random man about the little child who died, her lifesbreath sucked out slowly over four hours, strapped in a car on the hottest day of the year.<br />
<br />
<i>responsibility</i><br />
<br />
"Yeah. I mean the father? mother? Tragedy... <i>awfulness.... </i>of it..." I say to him incoherently.<br />
He actually shudders "I know...I know. Awful, <i>awful</i>... but... still, how <i>could</i> he, <i>what...</i> was it?... to forget?... happens though, to...happens,...<i>it happens</i>...though..."<br />
"Yeah, it does, it <i>does..." </i>I say not saying, neither of us saying, not wanting to, say, blame, judge, when some poor devil has lost a child. Knowing that country of <i>Painandhorrorandguiltandshame</i> the father lives in now. So we don't. Say.<br />
<br />
(<i>thinking of our own deficits, our lucky escapes... that time you lost the kid in the shopping centre, </i><br />
<i> fell asleep with the baby on your lap, your breast, your bed, small woebegone faces at the school gate when you were delayed at some meeting, caught in the traffic, distracted. Lucky...our lucky escapes...)</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
That's the thing though, about children. The weight of responsibility you bear is staggering, all encompassing, and the younger they are the heavier the loading. I vividly recall the haunting of being a mother of infants, my preocupation with wars, nuclear spills, electric pylons, <i>hovering</i> dangers, peril by virus, traffic, child stealers. The first child, the first experience of not caring, not being consumed by your own mortality, but only about <i>this</i>, this helpless scrap you cast out of your body, <i>expelled</i>, into a world of dangers. It's a whole other hell you don't anticipate when the blue line on the Pregnancy Indicator bathes you in a warm expectant glow.<br />
<br />
Once, one sunny too bright summer's morning when my children were small, I woke up gasping, weeping, caught inside a most terrible dream. I dreamed I brought one of them to work with me, and, caught up in a work thing in a vast arching hall, let the infant in the pram outside fall out of mind, of knowing. When I finished, still full of the work, I found her outside <i>violated </i> in some obscure irrevocable way. Damaged, broken, toddling towards me silent, small face bloated with lonely tears.<br />
<br />
My husband brought me many cups of tea that morning, puzzled, as I fought to pull back from a quagmire of guilt and shame and horror. "Only a dream" he told me "poor girl, only. A dream?"<br />
A dream, from the place you go to have the feelings you can't contain in the waking day and hang on to the fine thread of sanity.<br />
<br />
I surely hope the child's in heaven with angels as someone hopefully said. I hope that someone takes her father tea, kindwords, some shreds of solace. Her mother too. That, at least. I hope for them. I do.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6645888375875784124.post-80927230158113347182017-05-06T04:46:00.000-07:002017-05-06T04:46:55.227-07:00Pretty Boys in Frocks / Boys in Suits at the Races.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>So, </i>if it <i>walks </i>like a duck and it <i>talks </i>like a duck and it <i>looks</i> like a duck...it's <i>not</i> (a Duck)<br />
<i> </i> <br />
"So, yes, that's him! No, not her!, he's prettier than her! there, that's him, I mean <i>they. Thats they</i>!"<br />
The beautiful one is giggling hard, her phone wobbling in her hand so that I am looking at a dancing image of a very pretty young women with a placard around her neck, "My body my choice" the placard says. He/she is surrounded by women, in the middle of the Repeal the Eight march in Dublin.<br />
"Ah" I say, sagely "so, right, <i>that's</i> him"<br />
"Not him, <i>they</i>, he says he's <i>they</i>. Told you! he hangs out with the non binary... lesbians, gay boys and like former girls who don't identify as either sex and ...sometimes, <i>traditional</i> girls?"'<br />
She rolls her eyes,<br />
"Yeah, <i>and</i>, he ends up having sex with all the girls <i>anyway.</i>"<br />
"Right. The ah dress, darling, wouldn't it kinda put you off. Lovely and all as he is. Speaking as a girl I mean"<br />
"They mummy, <i>they</i>. And no, and even though they is a plural, he has his way with them anyway."<br />
Hmm.<br />
Beauty takes a breath, swells with disdain, incredulity.<br />
"I mean, like, what about the actual gay people, transgender, transvestite. He, they, wears their clothes, steals their struggle, it's like a game. And we all have have to play. Or, I mean, you are <i>judged</i>?"<br />
"Like the emperors new clothes, darling girl. You can't say what you see?"<br />
"Yeah. And besides, he hasn't actually got a womb? He doesn't seem to know he doesn't have a womb?"<br />
<br />
She walks away, swaying like models, like royalty, in the way she does. She has said all she has to on the subject of <i>they</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
Only Women Bleed....Period.<br />
<br />
<br />
"And anyway, they were all also, everyone I know, on that march to Repeal the Eight. You have to do that too?"<br />
<br />
She turns as she speaks, swivels to face me. Not quite done then.<br />
<br />
"It's ridiculous, you're not allowed to say, you don't agree. I don't agree. <i>I don't </i><i>agree</i>!"<br />
<br />
<br />
And a Working Womb is Required for this Argument....<br />
<br />
Yeah, the Beautiful one and her sister don't agree. Abortion is either in or its out. No<br />
half measures for them. A baby is a baby is a baby. No featus, no abortion, no exceptions.<br />
They like to pin me to the wall on this one. When I'm trying not to think. About that or anything at all.<br />
<br />
I am and always have been of the the view that Abortion is a woman's right to choose. Has to be. Full stop, end of story. But the thing is that they are oppositional. They will not be told how to think. Oh, I've told them that they haven't got the remotest notion on this subject.<br />
Not, I intone, until they have undergone the business of carrying a child can they understood why that has to be a conscious choice.<br />
They go at me hot and heavy then about my inconsistency, my illogic, the shaky ground of my thinking (allegedly). Oh yeah.<br />
Well darlings, I say, I've said my piece, and them's my words, and we must agree to differ?<br />
<br />
Anyway, as a race, we need opposition to counteract our sheeplike tendencies. It may save us even, from aborting babies at twenty weeks, or forcing women to carry the rapists child. <i>Opposition </i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
They doesn't identify with the Human Species (so they doesn't)<br />
<br />
I think how hard it is to know what you are, when you're young. How you should feel in your core as a woman, a man. How you adapt yourself hopefully to the norm. Is fluidity good? Deciding you are they? For the charismatic maybe, the grandstanders, but for the rest of shaky struggling humanity, not so much. We need our boundaries, and there it is. We are sheep. Once rigidly binary, now agreeing we are <i>they</i>. How derailing is that? Ho/hum.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Put down your job and find my....shoes<br />
<br />
<br />
I am at work before a meeting, lost in a knotty labyrinthine dilemma I must take a position on, go in and answer. The phone flashes briefly. I have switched off the sound, permanently, but its no good. I'm wired now for the most fleeting flash of a call. Unable to ignore it. I decide to ignore it, but I see it's the boy. It's the boy on his third attempt and I always answer his third attempt. If he troubles himself to persist then it's trouble.<br />
<br />
"Yes...what..." My mind so elsewhere.<br />
"Um, yeah, mother, d'ye know... can't find em anywhere, do <i>you</i> know where my shoes are." <br />
"Huh?"<br />
I can hear rousing male voices in the background, a gang of 'em obviously. In the house.<br />
"Why...what..."<br />
"The Races! I <i>told</i> you we're going to the Races. And I have my suit on, like, my waistcoat, but my shoes...my shoes aren't <i>anywhere</i>"<br />
I see him standing there in his socks, his version of a suit, grey trousers and waistcoat, as I ponder on the question of the shoes. The boys in the background banter against banging rap music on the sound system, urge him to hurry.<br />
"Um well, so , when did you last have them, I mean <i>on</i>, darling"<br />
"Well, so, last year? At the Races, last year? With this suit for the Races last year?"<br />
He doesn't clothe himself in anything formal, constraining, for the rest of the year, or submit his feet to shoes. But by God you have to have them for the Races. <br />
Anyway I have a brain wave then, a recollection.<br />
"The dog darling, didn't the dog eat the shoe? The right shoe, if memory serves. (I'm on fire now)"<br />
"The dog?"<br />
"You must recall how he eat it, and slept with the sole 'til I binned it. He slept on your soul. Hah"<br />
The dog missed the boy very badly when he moved out to college. The shoe seemed to help.<br />
"It's the leather " the boy said back then when I told him. "Not me, it's the leather!"<br />
"No, no darling, it's your sweat infused personal leather he keeps about him. Until you come home."<br />
<br />
Anyway, we decide that he should wear his darkest runners, and I hang on listening to them hunting for the runners, urging him out and away. I have lost my train of thought down the knotty labyrinth. Utterly.<br />
<br />
I saw you that day at the Punchestown Races<br />
<br />
I saw them later on, a gang of boys from the same tribe, as I drove home through Naas, my mind again grappling with the complexity of the question I had not been able to answer. They plucked me out of the brooding mind, tall, bright eyed, the air charged around them as they marched to the Races. Swaggering, open faced boys, ready for anything: girls in thin dresses/high heels, thundering horse hooves, the roar from the tannoy, the smell of meat frying, trampled grass, horse shit, testosterone.<br />
<br />
Oh sweet! <i>sweetest</i> sweet, animal essence of swarming humanity at play at the Races.<br />
<br />
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Anna Coganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07047111222854245568noreply@blogger.com1