The House of Pure Being Read online

  And just like truth, my spirit seems to escape capture, no matter how carefully I try to control the various arbitrary syllables being taken together in phrases. I feel like a composer jotting notes of music onto a stave. When they’re read horizontally, they sound vertically down the page, down through the memory of the years which are immediately present to me: they make my being sing. I catch myself, hearing myself say ‘I be’s, employing Hiberno-English usage. It permits my voice to inhabit the patrimony of the verb, and be more emphatic. ‘I be’s’ gives body to the tenuous pointillism of those dots of living colour, truths that briefly break cover as I watch them. They coalesce into a luminous ‘present continuous’ stream that can sweep me along in its wake for the length of a breath: my singular contribution to the symphony of life. The choir has been singing for millennia in a fusion of instrumental and vocal forces, but without the addition of my individual voice or that of my mother, until recently.

  My mother is ninety-three years old, and she dwells now in a house of pure being. She has only the present tense, because she forgets what is past, and I’d come to believe she no longer had any idea of the future. Certainly, the logical structures of time and of space don’t define the world that she’s living in, which is that of the dreamtime. People who aren’t fixed in her memory appear randomly in the three or four seconds of the now that draw her attention. They’re without a context, and speak to her in puzzling fragments: ‘… well today …’ ‘… milk in …’ words detached from meaning that are sent skimming over the waves like fragments of slate until they sink into the deep, phrases that pat lightly over the top of her head with the same childlike tones, before evaporating into the ether above. The imaginative thoughts that participate in my mother’s overflowing reality are like that medium, which was once believed to fill all space hypothetically.

  When last I saw her, I hadn’t recognised her at first. I retreated from the large lounge where she usually sat, and asked the nurse at the nurse’s station, ‘Where’s Sue Murphy, please?’ She brought me back almost to the door of the room, and indicated towards a huddled figure lost in a corner. My mother was sitting alone, slumped on a settee in the nursing home lounge, and her shoe was off. Framed by the doorway, I was removed from the static scene within, a dispassionate observer of inanimate objects, a still life by Cézanne, dull and without colour. My expectations were of an encounter with a neatly dressed, alert woman, a person of note who would continue to carry the weight of her ten decades with elegance. I walked across the room until I appeared in front of her, and she recognised me: ‘Well I never think about the boy visiting me …’ she announced smiling shyly with delight, rising to the occasion as I bent down to kiss her puckered lips. It was the only coherent sentence she was to form that day, but to me it was like opening up the score of a Bach cantata, a revelation inscribed in the master’s handwriting with ‘soli Deo gloria’, for the glory of God alone. I savoured in my mind the concerted collection of utterances she brought forth: ‘Well I never … I never … I never think about the boy … the boy visiting me … visiting me …’ The additional voices with their different emphases chased each other putting the previous one to flight and resonated around the room, interweaving a counterpoint with the main subject in their various combinations, and adding layers of harmonic complexity which continued to build for the duration of my visit. They also formed an airy counterpoint around the rapid assortment of syllables, the neologisms that she began to create in my presence and continued to say. Nothing was dwelt upon: the notes were left as soon as they were sounded.

  Her speech is now reduced to a substrate of language that she urged on me, cupping it together in her hands: ‘Tissue Paris laboringly taoiseach taoiseach …’ she said, English words and Irish words that appeared to be spilling out from between her bony fingers. It was a sieve I made from the rushes up in Flannery’s field as a boy that she placed trustingly into both my hands so that I could buttress it, and catch the runoff of what she was saying. ‘You, you, you …’ she said, re-affirming in votive speech the umbilical cord that tied a mother to her son in a rainbow of love. My mother was performing a religious act for me, a sacrament, because in that gesture she was gifting to me a ciborium, and entrusting me with her being, whose fragments she was holding tenuously between her thumb and index finger. From now on I was to be the golden container who was her salvation; it was up to me to make sense out of the babble she’d placed before me. I was to separate out the extraneous particles that cluttered up her speech, and give birth to the truth of what she had to say, because in that ritual she was demonstrating to me that she was no longer able, that it was beyond her. She needed the containment that a mind ordered by time and space could provide. I felt the responsibility of her heartfelt cry as she desperately gripped onto my hands above the abyss. It overruled the pressure that deadlines can enforce on me, and the exertion I can feel from trying to attain to some other place. The ambiguous bestowal of these gifts has been cruelly confiscated from my mother.

  I’d sat companionably beside her on the couch, so that she could lean back into the hammock of my warmth. I’d brought with me some regenerating cream, whose cold drops I began to massage into her dry and misshapen hands. This was an anointing, which even today in a mirror image still tried to facilitate my living by gifting to me all that she had to offer in return: rubble from the building blocks of words that formerly had upheld the architecture of her life. Once upon a time these hands used to play the piano so expertly, hands that bestrode the keys generating music of the highest rank from deep within, soul-feeling which still poured out fluently even as her grasp on words had become hesitant and faltered like her skin, which to my horror began to disintegrate and peel away into slivered rolls of worked clay beneath the vigour of my kneading. I looked up, anxious lest I hurt her, and her blue eyes were scanning my face. ‘Are your hands sore, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied. Then, ‘Tissue, tissue, tissue …’ she instructed, as I modulated my touch so that it became gentle, warming the coldness of her confounding world, supplying for a few moments a familiar, external reference with which she felt secure. I hoped my presence could give back to her once more the consistency of sameness, without me having to immediately move away from her as the busy carers in the nursing home have to do. Held now in my gaze, and embraced by the loving tones of my voice, the flesh of her flesh, I hoped that I could keep her from disintegrating, from being drawn in different directions: someone sitting talking to her, a plate with biscuits, then coming into her line of sight, sitting up close and saying to her, a hand being rubbed of skin: fragments of being from the outside imbued with the nonsensical logic of dreams.

  Like an author writing down the words about one of his characters and plotting out their lives, I was unsure whether it was I or my mother who was in control of the dictation. At least I could continually be there for my mother to keep her in mind. My thinking about her wouldn’t be as alienating as that ‘soothsayer’ phrase which was chosen for me by my publisher, who knows me professionally, but who doesn’t know me at all. I could be her voice, in a method which is familiar to me from my psychoanalytic work, where the stream of a person’s being is gathered together under the constraints of the couch so that as much as possible is channelled into speech, in a message sent to the analyst, and back to themselves by way of my interpretation, which punctuates the discourse suddenly belonging to both of us.

  There’ve been many occasions, a falling down in wonder, that have witnessed the daily miracle of my mother issue forth from my behaviours. I move food around my plate with a fork, before isolating an irregular object, ‘What’s that?’ tapping at it like her. I also do her reproving glare, a fierce look which I see in the photograph of her McGauran grandmother, and which unmistakably says, ‘Never make noise!’ I register her bodily delight at rag-time, stride piano, and dance an impromptu Charleston with my hands as she plays the piano. I can also sit rapt, carried away with spiritual awe at t
he complexity of Bach’s music, which is an advance on what would’ve held her interest. But the grounding we have in common is a similar, reverent attitude towards all forms of music, sounds in time that always belonged to the Muses. These are the inheritances which have anointed me my mother’s heir. But to incarnate a voice that is so characteristically hers is of a different order of magnitude. And now that she’s fading, the task of travelling that road takes on increasing urgency. I always remember the colour of her voice speaking Hans Christian Andersen’s words aloud to me slowly, so that I could understand and live within the dream world of his fairytales. But what I remember most is the quality of her silence, clasping me to her, underpinning with bated breath and delight my excitement at telling her my own stories, the fantastical adventures which happened for me with her in mind.

  Recently, when she’d had a short stay in hospital to regulate her Warfarin, I was talking away at her bedside, filling up her silence with how well she was looking, that I hoped she was trying to eat what they gave her because it was good for her – maybe she would try some of the jelly? – and I caught sight of her peering at my leather jacket. She reached forward with her hand and fingered the soft brown leather appreciatively. I broke off from what I was saying to ask, ‘D’you like that, Mum?’

  She looked up and into my eyes: ‘It’s wonderful to be loved,’ she whispered to me.

  The misalignment in our conversation, the shock of the truth had the effect of repositioning me within a flow of words that I realised had never ceased for my mother, despite her confusion. I saw that it would continue on for as long as she drew breath. It was immaterial whether she was referring to me, and to my partner Terry’s birthday gift of the leather jacket, or whether she was the person who felt loved by the presence of her son: the import of her narrative embraced us both. After all, love is love. And love matters.

  The hi-fi in the nursing home began playing a CD from the wartime era, when my mother was in her early twenties. Vera Lynn sang slowly in her clear, determined voice, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see …’

  I started singing it for her too, and quickly faltered to a mumble, choked with emotion, overwhelmed by the sudden grief. It pained me that we didn’t have any more tomorrows, and that we’d come to the end of the idyll. The poem that was our lives together had been simple and charming, and short. The promise of tomorrow which the song held forth wasn’t the truth. My mother would never again take her place at the head of the dining table in the big kitchen of the family home on the Mall, empty now, cold and succumbing to dampness.

  ‘There’ll be love and laughter and peace ever after, tomorrow …’

  The love and laughter which had once echoed off those plastered walls blistering with rusting, brown patches of damp belonged with the cobwebs, and with the dust settling silently like Dickensian fog onto the old-fashioned furniture that nobody wanted. There were going to be no more tomorrows for the Murphys of the Mall. The song mustered courage to help people face the burdens of the day, but as I held onto my mother’s hand, I heard an ironical lament for an era of family which had begun at that time, but which was now, some seven decades later, definitively over.

  I looked around the day-room at the helpless, elderly patients, some of them dozing, slack-jawed in their chairs, others moving restlessly, muttering out loud for nobody to hear them, or to pay them attention. I could clearly see our irrelevance, numbering myself among those in the frontline facing ‘peace ever after’. That was to be our tomorrow, and the implication of the relegation brought me up short. It shocked me to observe that today’s generation bustling about, helping patients out to the toilet, wheeling some of the chairs with their protesting cargo in to the dining-room for lunch, had within the unthinking possession of their youth the many tomorrows that had been taken from the two of us in a re-distribution of realities. My mother and I were suddenly left alone in the empty lounge. The valley would indeed bloom again, but we wouldn’t be there to see it. And I was surprised to feel pangs of jealousy at being displaced.

  Before I left, Aileen took me aside and said that they’d increased the number of times they changed my mother’s pad during the day, because her incontinence was getting worse. I know it wasn’t Aileen’s intention, but I felt berated by the effort of care that the Polish assistants were giving to my mother. Not one of them had passed us by as we took tea and I fed my mother the buttered scones topped with strawberry jam from the generous tray they’d provided for us, without saying a loudly cheerful ‘Hello, Sue!’ And yet, they were the ones who were ministering to her in private several times a day. As I drove back to Dublin after my brief visit, I was tormented by the thought that I’d profaned my mother. After she’d twice attempted to boil the electric kettle on the range, compromising her safety, I was the one who’d been instrumental in turning her out of her home, so that she was abandoned to this life of exile among strangers. The shock to her system had so affected her that she’d progressively withdrawn her interest from the surroundings of the nursing home, and lived amidst her memories turning deep inside her being. Suddenly my voice seemed to take on an added importance, if only to undo what couldn’t be remedied.

  When I sat beside Mary, a bookshop owner, for dinner in an Italian restaurant after the intimate signing of my book she’d organised in Village Books of Malahide, and she asked my partner, Terry, about his work with abuser priests, and whether those who’d been abused went on to abuse, my mind went directly to my mother, and how she was folded into my earliest decision to go live with my Granny in the house next door, and apart from my immediate family. As the conversation continued on around the table, I wondered whether I was avenging that hurt by visiting the same exclusion on her. The son on whom she believed she could depend had robbed her of what she’d made known to me about her being. I’d taken with me the supplement of continuity, the joining together of moments of being that enabled her to connect with a son whom she continued to love, and driven it back to Dublin, forgetting my mother to the care of strangers for another fortnight, leaving her bereft of meaning, because she has no context.

  During those first few months of settling in, when we’d arrive back at the nursing home following an afternoon drive, my mother would protest as soon as she caught sight of the building. ‘No, no, no …’ she’d cry out, distressed. My mother is lost, and I’ve deprived her of the future hope that she could re-find herself again in my continuous presence. Even in the etymology of the verb ‘to be’ in Old English, while it didn’t have a past tense, I could see that it was always open towards the future. My mother had clearly demonstrated to me on more than one occasion in the nursing home the possibility that she was about to be in language, and I’d pillaged that from her by walking away. I’d turned my back on her again, a rejecting action that is replaying on a loop in my life, and that’s beginning to infiltrate my text like a virus. By continuing to involve her in what was my own fractured response, I’d committed a sacrilege. ‘Tu es ma mère: tuer ma mère’: according to the French homophone, in affirming my mother, I kill her. I’m guilty of murder.

  Occasionally I suffer visitations at about a quarter past three in the morning. There’s no aura, no warning of any kind to prepare me as I make the ritual preparations for bed. At three-fifteen on the dial, I blunder into instant wakefulness, panicked from a nightmare, when the default setting of not being able to pay my way, the ghost of money, is rattling his chains around my bedroom. A catastrophe which is beyond rectification – exceeding the overdraft limit at the bank, the important receipt I sent without a record, the unexpected invoice – will have wormed its way into consciousness as I slept, and poisoned my mind with certainty. In the dream I’m swimming and swimming in an ocean too far away from a glimpse of land on the horizon, when the unreasoning terror begins to weigh my body down, and I can’t shake off his unwanted attentions. The ghost of despair ducks my head over and over under the water, but still I swim, slo
wer and slower and with greater effort, until I start to sink into the measureless depths from exhaustion. I wake with a start to find I’ve wet the bed, an occasional side effect of the prostate surgery that has saved my life from the clutches of cancer. I get up, and out of my pyjamas, wipe myself down and the bed, spread out a clean towel on the sheet. I lie down again on the dampness. In that twilight hour before the dawn, I can see with enhanced vision the truth of myself that I’m able to suppress during the day: as a person without the distraction of my clothes and the roles that they imply, I’m beyond forgiveness. I lash myself with condemnation for having abdicated my responsibilities on so many levels, particularly with regard to my mother, and for having failed in my task, that ultimate concern around which I built my life. Loving and the grief surrounding it, latterly bitterness, even disappointment, hurt my heart so much that I hesitate to give it voice. The ghost of death insinuates that I’ve come to the end and have ceased to exist, and that this suffering I feel is the pain of non-being, that instant at the point of death which flashes into an eternity. I’m no longer able to preserve my being against the all-engulfing threat of danger, and my anxiety is naked now. For sixty years it had been eating away at the centre of my existence like the hidden, slow-growing tumours of prostate cancer, which have recently erupted in my flesh, to be laid bare in all of its ugly messiness upon the bed. Other ghosts lose their form, and I sink back into a spasmodic, dreamless sleep until the radio alarm comes on with news of the latest atrocity, followed by the collapsing economy. It’s a daily lightning rod for the projection of unmanageable feelings of paranoia, to which I know my mind is vulnerable as I take my shower. I’ve learned from experience not to entertain these thoughts before noon, when the day takes on a different temper, and the effort of upholding my being buries the terrifying potential of non-being into an open hole in the ground, and covers it over with a comforting cushion.