On friendship, suicide and Sigrid Nuñez

Several years ago, my best friend committed suicide, taking care to make her death appear natural. She ordered the expensive poison online. The third time, whoever got the money she'd paid actually sent it. 

She said she was lucky: she didn't care to spend the next thirty years in bed, immobilised, her likely future according to the Parkinson's specialist. She didn't want to be a burden to her children, she didn't want more money spent on her. Nor did she trust whichever system might end up caring for her to do so kindly. She'd always taken responsibility for herself, and she decided to put a stop to the pain and the sorry deterioration. The law did not permit a suicide in her case, though her doctor, a general practitioner, was sympathetic. The specialist had waved her away; "He was a prick."

She inconvenienced no one. She died at home, alone; no suspicion arose. We lived in different countries by then and we said goodbye on the phone just before she took the final drug. After the call I sat still for a long time, wishing her with all my heart the courage she needed and an easy exit.

When she was found, the police were called; they came and they went. They may have suspected the truth but if so, they wisely let it be. Celebrating her generous life, we didn't mention how she'd ended it. To be on the safe side.

I miss her a lot. During the last ten years, we lived in different countries. We'd phone, maybe once a month... Long conversations, about what had hurt us, what kept us awake at night. It made a huge difference, for I feel the lack acutely. She encouraged and supported me. She valued me more than anyone else, even my husband who loves me, though she would sometimes criticise me gently. (She was always gentle). She told me things I treasure, which I remind myself of, which glow in the dark.

We met for the first time in mid-life, at an afternoon seminar. During the discussion we'd each observed the other across the table, strangers in a strange land, our similar background evident to us both. The session ending, we left together, shoulder to shoulder for the first of many times, beginning an intimate conversation which was to last some thirty years. Standing in the car park, clutching our keys, we plunged into acquaintance, the words pouring out, the listening intense, until her eyes, the features of her face became hard to see, shrouded... 

The day had slipped its light away, darkness hiding us from each other. We'd only just met, only begun... was it really this late? Hours had passed... Bewildered, we stared at our watches, which said: "Go home."

A man I knew drove by; I caught his withering glance. He must have seen us earlier - Still gossiping!Unbelievable! Women!

* * * *

I read a wonderful book by Sigrid Nuñez, The Friend (Hachette, 2018) which won the National Book Award that year. There's a suicide in it, less central to the plot than in her following book, What are you going through (Hachette, 2020). According to my cousin who is a serious writer - more serious than I am - Sigrid Nuñez is the best writer in the USA today. Years after reading The Friend, I'm still under the influence, delighted by it, though it read almost but not quite like something fluffy, like a romance, fluid, light, funny in places. The suicide remains mysterious. 

I shall have to buy my own copy. I want to see how she achieves that lightness. I suspect she does what Hemingway recommends, cutting and cutting away.

An ordinary day

The painters have been here for four days, and there's more to come. They're in the lounge, in the hall, on the stairs, removing the old paper and plastering. Yesterday, a miracle happened: Peter and I agreed on new wallpaper, easily. It was not our first attempt. The paper may take a month or so to arrive, a breather from the tradies.

Since returning to my study, I've yet to clear my desk. Piles of papers. I don't know what they are.  I need to throw at least 50% away, clear space so that the children will not have to do it.

Two days ago I attended Renee's memorial. After mentioning Nicola Easthope because she couldn't make it, I read out the text Renee sent me when I was struggling with the book, telling me off for not working hard enough. It went down a treat, gales of laughter. Adrienne Jensen told me about the Landfall Press she and others have started. They're doing very well. 

I decided to keep a diary, to write like this every day as often as possible. I have now read two of Ian McEwan's books. He introduces evil into his stories, realistic and creepy. Not what I want, though I believe people tend to underestimate both its presence in our lives and its power. Then read Maggie O'Farrell's book I am, I am, I am. Seventeen brushes with death (Tinder press, 2017). Well written, but doesn't contribute anything, doesn't enlighten or surprise me.

I had been writing up my own near-deaths. Only five that I can remember. She got there first - and much better! Her early years, before she became ill, resemble mine, desiring to be free, to follow whatever impulse arises, a need for stimulation, for excitement. 

Many criminals have the same urge; one theory claims it lies behind the impetus to offend. In one of McEwan's books, the criminal character displays it, in his case due to Huntington's.

Harold Pinter's poems on death (p. 263 and 221)

Meeting

It is the dead of night,

The long dead look out towards

The new dead

Walking towards them

There is a soft heartbeat 

As the dead embrace 

Those who are long dead

And those of the new dead 

Walking towards them

They cry and they kiss

As they meet again

For the first and last time

  

Death

(Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953)

Where was the dead body found?

Who found the dead body?

Was the dead body dead when found?

How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother

Or uncle or sister or mother or son

Of the dead and abandoned body?

 

Was the body dead when abandoned?

Was the body abandoned?

By whom had it been abandoned?

 

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?

How well did you know the dead body?

How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body

Did you close both its eyes

Did you bury the body

Did you leave it abandoned

Did you kiss the dead body

I was careful about the punctuation: neither poem ends with a full stop.

Over the hill

I read this poem last night and it took up residence in my mind. I almost know it by heart without trying much, its rhythms natural, the words simple and familiar.


As you come over the hill

You'll see cows grazing in a field
And perhaps a chicken or a turtle
Crossing the road in their sweet time,
And a small lake where a boy once
Threw a girl in who couldn't swim,

And many large maples and oak trees
Offering ample shade to lie in,
Their branches to hang yourself from,
Should you so desire,
Some lazy afternoon or evening

When something tells the birds to hush,

And the one streetlight  in the village
To keep a few moths company
And the large old house put up for sale
With some of its windows broken.


                                  Charles Simic

Perhaps it spoke to me because I'm travelling over the hill myself, brooding on my life. A single sentence punctuated by commas. Youth, maturity and old age, one stanza each.

Habit

The end of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur  is mysterious, and seems like a key to everything I've read before and not understood or not paid enough attention to.

Narrator, grandmother and maid are spending what seems like several summer months at the Grand Hotel in Balbec. Siestas appear to be imposed by the grandmother,  though he comments several times how much he loves spending time on his own, the sweetness of it, and how exhausting it is to spend time with other people whom he always wants to please. He seems to succeed in pleasing very well, in fact something else is going on, because people mostly are attracted to him, desiring his friendship, for instance the painter Elstir - this is unexpected and unexplained.

At the end of the narrator's rest period, Francoise - the devoted family maid - opens the curtains. This is more complicated than one may think, as they have been pinned shut.There was a mention earlier about Francoise and the pins, but at that time it was unexplained. One has to forge ahead trusting that all will become clear. (I of course thought that I'd forgotten something or not read thoroughly enough.)

All along, in this section, Proust writes about the sun - how it slipped past the barrier of curtains, a golden bar on the wall, how it created a pattern on the carpet which he delighted in bathing his naked feet in and then finally when the curtains are fully drawn (open), the world beyond appears as a mummy which has been unwrapped - desemmaillotee - and revealed in its golden-ness. End.

The real world is from the past, dead and golden.

Proust wrote A la Recherche after the death of both his parents. He shut himself up, and wrote. In this book he describes separating from his mother at the railway station, how he wept leaving her. Once arrived in Balbec, he does not mention her again, she is gone from the story and he has adapted to the new circumstances. One understands better why he went 'searching for the lost past', recreating what had been through his writing.

Have picked up a short booklet by Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931, Grove Press) who writes learnedly - to my mind obscurely at times - about Proust, Time, Memory and Habit. Proust writes about habit and Habit, two different experiences. The lower case habit is what enables us to live our lives without acknowledging the fact that we are about to die, or could die at any time - to live as if our lives extended for ever.

Some people I know often make complicated plans for the distant future. The plans may even involve other people. They appear to believe that they are in control.

At the moment of giving birth, I experienced how much the creature of biology I am, not in control of anything at all. You might say, but that was a special moment...Our genetic makeup decides a lot for us. Free will is an illusion - see Sam Harris' recent book of that name.

Elevation

I finished a book and felt  I was a different person for having read it.

It is Justin Cartwrights's To Heaven by Water (2009, Bloomsbury). The story of a man who has just lost his wife. The story begins and ends with wonderful poetry, it makes me feel like sailing, like floating, like coasting on the wind, the word that keeps coming to my mind is swooning, but of course it is the wrong physical implication, though it's the right sound, as if one could say or chant quietly Swooooooon, and run very lightly, hardly touching the ground, wrapped and half-carried (?) by a diaphanous veil... It is by Gerald Manley Hopkins, it is The Windhover. Is this one of those cases where everyone else knows it already?

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of
daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing...


The book is about love and death (like the title of Amos Oz's book). The word soul keeps appearing.

On a different topic, about reading and books today, one of the characters, a writer, says: 

" ..those of us who love books, and I mean real books with long words, are a dwindling band. We're like the bushmen of the Kalahari desert [...], marginalised, even despised, as though we have a secret vice or carry a contagion.[...] a country without respect for its own literature is a country going to hell in a fucking handcart. We, the readers, are now like monks in the dark ages, keeping alive our culture. We are living in a new dark age, an age of mass ignorance; we are squeezed in the embrace of triviality and infantilism. I, for example, spend my days turning dumb ideas into dumber scripts that become even dumber mini-series. The BBC [...] has turned into a sink of touchy-feely mediocrity..."

I have been reading heaps of books, but not writing about them. Hopefully shall find more good ones.

Black lake

Today is uninterrupted, I can write. Am listing future phone calls and letters as I think of them. P guards the gate.

Yesterday evening, poetry reading with my Whitireia classmates at L's, a nice evening. We may keep in touch after the course is over.

The poem I read is called - for the time being - Away from here. Here is the last bit:

I would like to be that lake now -
black, silent, reflecting cloud, rock and snow,
the ruffle of a small sharp breeze, and then still
again. No fish, no bird, no other being.

Is it an ode to Death - frozen stillness except for the breeze? ...no fish, no bird... - so much non-life. Except for ...no other being... someone is there, maybe me? maybe not? The breath of air, wairua, ruffles the water.

Ruach noshevet al pnei ha mayim... A wind breathes on the face of the water, says the Israeli poet Rachel (my translation). Ruach can mean both wind and spirit, I realise. More and more biblical. Checking Genesis 1:2, and the words ruach and al pnei ha mayim are there - but God's spirit (ruach elohim) 'hovers' over the water, merachefet, not noshevet.

Or is this poem about longing to be a Zen person in a black robe, anchored on a black cushion? Noshevet has for me the connotation, the sound, of the passive tense of Yashav, he sat. In the feminine - she was sat.

~~~~

Watched the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm your man and the music is in my head all the time, wake up with it, go to sleep with it. I'm dying to sing that song- If it be your will. Found Anthony singing it on You tube, better than LC himself - took down most of the words. Seeing/hearing the MacGarrigle sisters in the film - a flashback. We must be the same age.

I set the timer for eight minutes and it rang - ages ago.