johnAnchovie
Still raging
I wanted to share an excerpt from the evolving opus that I hope will soon sit snugly on bookshelves across the literate world. Its relevance here is only that the complete work traces my life through many a turmoil and one bit of that was a long old stretch in Hubbard's lunatic asylum. A volitional incarceration I shared with all of you now emancipated loonies.
I hope to have the book completed to coincide with a mini documentary I did over the summer that will be out on Irish TV - RTE - in December.
Madeline’s Diary Tuesday 11th Feb 1947: Our Lady of Lourdes Feast day, you would have thought that they might have given us the day off, don’t you think? Not a bit of it. Mister Austin is sick and so we got off being given homework. That was the only consolation.
Reading my 2008 book, ‘The Complex’, Carmel, a woman who had been a close friend of Madeline’s since she first arrived in Stirling in 1958, said that I had been too hard on Madeline. Carmel was one of the very few consistent friends that Madeline had. I was very fond of her as a child; she often would come over and take us older kids off Madeline’s hands; loading us on to the bus to spend the day in Edinburgh. She would buy us sweets and treat us to lunch in a restaurant before taking us up to the castle or the zoo. Her husband had been a violent alcoholic and she had suffered much. Yet she was a kind and dignified woman, despite all that he inflicted on her. My fondness and respect for Carmel gave her comment some weight and to be honest, it left me quite shaken. I was thus moved to re-examine how I remembered my mother. I realised that in the main I had very little recollection of her, and little or nothing by the way of emotional memory. It was as if I could only recall her in the abstract.
Memory and sense of place in time are, it seems, malleable and not fixed in stone as I had previously believed. Professor of neurology at New York University School of medicine, Oliver Sacks, opens an article on this topic rather poetically.
‘We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorised with every act of recollection. ’
Could it be that I did not really know my mother? It seems obvious on reflection that this is indeed so. I was a chubby, self centred eleven year old boy when I last saw her. I knew her only in terms of what I needed from her. I have to suppose too that there still exists a considerable degree of emotional shut-down. How could I have endured life through all those years if I carried with me the raw agony of our perpetual separation?
I wonder how it would be had she not died, how it might be if I were to meet her today? What would it feel like to lead her to sit with me over a glass of wine in a piazza café in any of the beautiful Italian cities that I love so much? What would it be like to share with her all that we have lived through? I try to imagine sitting and sharing my broken life with the woman that nurtured me, that held me to her when I was a baby. Madeline’s was the first face that I recognised; her voice was the first that I trusted.
A concentrated effort to recall her produces only frustration. Memories of her are fragments, like a pile of torn up photographs. This is the task I am engaged in: a composition in collage. Here a woman in a turquoise mackintosh. There is an image of a worn and lined face; Swedish Scholl clogs and a black dress. But I can’t find all the pieces I need to put her back together again.
I completed my final exams in May. June found me in France with Rose and her children. There were tensions between the boy and I. The rapidly developing teenager had begun asserting his manly agency. I, the imposter father, was the target of his raging, inarticulate emotions and derision. I was too hurt to tell him that I was in awe of his keen wit, his sharp intelligence, his quick apprehension. I withheld from him that I loved the passion with which he embraced things that caught his imagination.
When he was twelve it was model trains and he collected the best Hornby examples and interrogated the minutia of their history and construction. I bought him a replica 1955 Italian locomotive from Padua for Christmas. It was complete in every detail except for the ubiquitous graffiti that defaces just about every surface owned and managed by Trenitalia. He liked the locomotive, but it didn’t buy me friendship or trust. I had squandered that marvellous opportunity a couple of years before.
Model trains made way for music as he turned fifteen. He unearthed rare pre-Gilmore Pink Floyd albums and built a knowledge base on PIL, Iggy and the Stooges, Bowies Spiders and Lou Reed that could put an accomplished biographer to shame. I admired him, but I began to resent him. We were in competition for his mother’s love.
Of course this created difficulty between my wonderful woman and me. While I enjoyed the lovely villages, the beaches and wooded landscapes of coastal Brittany, I was not enjoying the family situation. I could not really openly express to her what I was struggling with. She had the first duty of care and protective mothering to her gifted, fantastically intelligent boy. The girl, beautiful, shy, deeply intelligent and wise beyond her years, but reticent in expression held her voice. So I suffered through this holiday and when we got back to Ireland I fled to the solace of my bachelor apartment overlooking the park. That August we ended our five year relationship. I have as yet not granted myself permission to grieve this terrible loss.
Carmel’s comment still disturbed me and so in 2010 I began trying to write about my mother. I carried note books with me everywhere. I jotted ideas during extended visits to Venice and Padua. I scribbled notes as I crisscrossed the flat Veneto plain in search of Dante’s contemporary and in his eyes, not very worthy rival, the poet Petrarch. I wrote pages when I found him. I tried to connect him and the journey I was on with Madeline as I sat on his terrace at the house he owned and died in atop a hill in the village of Arqua Petrarcha. His poetry often moved me to that well of grief and tears I could not otherwise access.
Back in Ireland I recorded my thoughts in Kinsale. I would look up from my pages every now and again to watch sail driven yachts heading out and weather beaten trawlers returning from days at sea. She had walked these little winding streets. She might have stopped where I sat, gazing out from the pier.
August 2012 comes to a close as does my four years as an undergraduate. With my regretful return to single life I cut myself off from humanity and I start in on gathering these jottings and sitting at my computer and writing.
I work hard to decode my indecipherable scrawls and these began to take form in Word documents as I order my three years worth of scattered thoughts and musings. The transcript grew and began to feel more solidly anchored as I researched into the background of both sides of my parental history. I drove my aunties to despair as I dug up the minutia of their childhoods with my mother and how it was that she ended up so broken, ill and dead when she was rushed away from us on that awful night.
It was not very long after I began getting stuck into the story and the peace that I was, and still am, trying make with Madeline, that my skin broke out in painful rashes. Sleep would not come to me and I had to get medical attention. It was as if I had dug up a poison that had lain dormant all these years gone. I had pierced an abscess and its puss spilled out, infecting my blood and burning my skin. The rash remains though partly controlled by medication, yet sometimes I still wake up in pain and torment. Sometimes I simply cannot sleep. I feel as if I am one of Dante’s damned in 10th ditch, the Malebolge, where the falsifiers suffer itching skin and other degrading conditions that allow the sufferer no rest. Maybe I am I a falsifier? Something is nagging me, something is trying to get out.
It was early October when I scraped together a few hundred Euros and bought a cheap return with Ryan Air to Pisa. I had come across a website that described the restoration of the Via Francigena indeed I had come across mention of this ancient pilgrim route as I studied Chaucer and caught glimpses of it in medieval Italian literature classes. I had even walked a few of kilometers of it as it wound its way between the chestnut wooded hills of the lower end of the Garfagnana then crossing a 12th century flag stoned bridge, as many a medieval penitent pilgrim had, disconcertingly called Ponte del Diavolo, ‘The Devil’s Bridge’.
The bridge arches over the river Serchio about thirty miles out from the walled city of Lucca. I found that I could today follow a largely restored section that runs through the wooded hills, ancient walled towns that are both guarded and decorated with those 14th Century towers that keep a watchful eye over the Tuscan landscape.
The route follows the undulating contours, vineyards and olive groves of central Tuscany. I could hike the route very cheaply thanks to a network of very basic but affordable pilgrim hostels. It seemed the perfect way to cap off a tense four years of university and make good use of the Italian that I had sweated blood over for my degree. But it would in the main give me time and space to absorb the dissolution of a relationship that had anchored me these five years past.
I don’t handle the emotional well. And I shut out any emotional shocks; actually I bury it as a dog might a bone. I only unearth it when it feels safe to do so, and that is not very often. It is not a healthy practice. The feelings that such experiences engender will invert and manifest as depression. It is healthier to cry and rage in the moment. But I don’t know how to do that.
I stayed overnight in Dublin’s Liberties and in the morning the plane flew me away from that cold, damp city to a warm, sunny Tuscany. I took a bus to Florence where I stayed the night in a dodgy hostel with a bunch of Aussies and a couple of Argentines. Later in the day I grabbed the train on to Siena and began my pilgrimage proper. The culmination of that adventure is as I have described in the first chapter. But something happened on that sleepless night and in its dawning that I am still trying to make sense of.
Locked out of the warmth and protection of Sister Caterina's hostel, I was condemned to endure the night traipsing the darkened Siena streets and byways. So it was that I would spend the duration of that long, lonely and chilly night wandering like one of Dante’s shades. I resolved that I would use this night and focus on dredging up all the memories that I could of Madeline. I wanted to concentrate on her and clear away all the rest of the noise.
The bars were all closed by three in the morning. I had been popping into those that I happened upon, as I walked the darkened streets, to warm up and grab a sweet and intense espresso and maybe something to eat as long as it did not look too stale.
The city was completely deserted by the time the last bar pulled down its shutters. I met the odd insomniac pigeon, but otherwise my companions were grim statues and ghosts. I did not find her as I followed the narrow winding lanes defined by buildings that had seen eight hundred years of humanity in all of its glory and its depredation pass through; beer makers, priests, whores and bankers and even the great poets. Dante met the pitiful La Pia, in purgatory. She was a tragic figure and I read into his canto aspects of my mother.
I cannot say that the illness I suffer and my need to reconcile myself with my mother are related. But there is a relationship between emotional state and the body. I do not trust the mystical. I put a lot of thought into the possibility of Dualism. I discarded that too. It is part of the package that we inherited from Greek thought.
I have a sense that this dualism has detrimental effect on humanity. If we accept the premise of there being a separate ‘soul’ residing like a machine operator in a throw-away body, then this is surely divisive. The body and the world that it lives in becomes a mere stopping off point, like a hotel room. Throwaway, indifferent, paid for. There is no sense of the ownership, care or responsibility that we tend to put into our own houses and gardens.
We check out, pay the bill. That the room is mess does not bother us. But if it is that we and our world are intrinsically bound then we would be motivated to lavish it with love and to nurture it, for it gives us life. I have over time wrongly ascribed transcendent moments to the Christian God and the distinctly unchristian Hubbard. But I think that in truth these were junctures in which I grasped the innate connection I share with our Earth and all of the trillions of symbiotic interconnections I have in common with all life, animate and inanimate.
There is plenty that is not yet explained by science. Even as an atheist, one freed from the crippling anxiety that is the sole gift of superstition, I admit I am still susceptible to wishful and magical thinking; not two years ago I was seduced by the now well discredited notion that the body looses 21 grams at the moment of death. I later read a synopsis of the 19th Century experiments carried out by a Boston physician, Doctor McDougall, in which he purportedly conclusively proved the claim. His methods were clumsy and there was no peer review.
Some years after he published his paper his methods and conclusions were closely interrogated. The subsequent debunks were far more convincing. Not unlike the good Doctor McDougall I clung onto flimsy mystical experiences because of a premature need to believe that I had sensed the presence of Madeline, my mother, over the decades since our separation.
There are always going to be charlatans claiming divine enlightenment. They will exploit the credulous. It is our fearful ignorance that grants them authority. Many of us give more credence to Bronze Age myth than we do to empirical science, to prescience. There is a prori knowledge stamped within our DNA. I don’t see why robes, rites and hollow pronouncements should entitle charlatans to influence and direct public discourse.
Humankind has a sense of the transcendent. It has inspired magnificent art and literature. I have derived comfort from the Christian psalms; religious architecture often leaves me awed. I am transported by religious music. But I equally have been inspirited by the writings of Karl Marx, Heany’s poetry and Van Gough’s paintings. Artistic inspiration is rooted in our natural world. The expressive arts were co-opted by powerful religious patrons, real and ethereal. I would not describe Caravaggio as devout.
I made my exclusive transition through the medieval to a renaissance of self discovery in concert with the sloughing off of the burden of religious superstition and wilful ignorance. I entered my personal Enlightenment as I cast away the dark shroud threaded with dire pronouncements and the heavy pawl of a terrible afterlife. I felt myself empowered as the hold the robed men had on me waned. I still have pockets of superstitious thought. It seems that there is a credulous core in me that wants magic to happen, that wants the laws of nature to suspend so that I can heal. I am not yet an adult.
I am sojourner. I seek honesty, truth and my sainted city is the endlessly elusive connection with life around me. I look back with shame at the narrow prejudice of my once blinkered gaze. There lingers a sense of disgust at the self that sought comfort in various sects. The only faith I needed was in my own capacity to self-actualise.
The existential emptiness, the dislocation I experienced in those wilderness years was nothing more than the echoing cries of the little boy. This ten year old me was the source of my incessant, restless discomfort; it was a child in pain; a soul in perpetual foment.
In the wreckage our violent separation I cut Madeline from memory. I denied her the right to be my mother. She broke the contract. We, her dispossessed children, were left bereft and unnurtured. The bitter seed of her betrayal was buried under strata of bereavement, anger, confusion and misplaced loyalties. We orphans owe her nothing. She owes us everything.
The bitter taste of her betrayal incessantly corrodes our ability to love, trust and to give. We, her children, are emotional cripples. My efforts to cotton-wool the caustic truth with faux love and respect was failed from the outset. This attempt to find her in this Tuscan landscape, to give her the chance to make up; to show her love for me, was ill-conceived. She colluded with my narcissistic father in the destruction of her children.
I wanted to believe that Madeline was somehow present in my life. But if something of her resides in me then it is an abject and self abasing ghost. If she is an intrinsic aspect of who I am then I know why what is for others a gentle slope or a nurtured cultivated woodland path is to me the forbidding aspect of a rock face, a harsh mountainous landscape. Filigree threads that formed the wonder of our mother to child attachment are severed. The connection is irretrievable broken. I turn my face from her.
Fragmented childhood memories have me helping her pull a case of daddy’s beer down from the top shelve of the pantry on a sunny April afternoon. We haul it over to a dry flowerbed where the wilting daffodils gleefully revel in this shower of foamy sustenance. Our thoughts turn to him as we pull back the tabs on each can and gift his drinking and womanising the parched soil. He had been gone off with some strange woman for over a week. Later she asks if I would choose to stay with her or Daddy if he started a new family with the stranger. I told her I would go with daddy.
We are in the kitchen, she and I, she is explaining to me why the old man in the flat cap had cursed us and told us to take our bombs back to our own people in Ireland. Then months later was her terrible distress at losing her wedding ring while we were on a day trip to the sea. We are standing together at the table and she is showing me a newspaper picture of some beautiful Ethiopian women in tribal dress. She teaches me that African people were just like us and not scary creatures from another world. These images conflict with this well of bitterness and betrayal.
After she died I was told that she was with God in heaven. I formed an image, that thirty five years on, I encountered in Dante’s poem. His transcendent Beatrice crowned with stars and sitting in the presence of God in a sky infused with heavenly light while angels sing Hosannas. But I have long since torn Madeline down from there. She is viscerally human and riddled with stupidities, blinkered vision and perversity.
By six o’clock in the morning I was very cold and very hungry. I had now walked the whole city; I knew its alleys, byways, little parks and piazzas intimately. But she remained dead to me.
Chiesa San Francesco commands the Eastern half of the city. It looks out over the old main road from Florence as if expecting a repeat of the ruinous siege of 1554 that destroyed its formerly magnificent banking and commerce and locked it in this late medieval garb. The now impoverished city was not able to afford the grand and gaudy architecture that marked the renaissance of Florence, Rome, and Milan. It was on the broad steps of this grand building that I found myself at just after six of an October Tuscan morning.
I pulled on one of the huge oak doors. It gave way and I crept in. This is a church connected to a monastery. Monks of varying ages, in the main quite elderly, formed a semicircle around and behind the grand and ornate altar. They were praying in chant, one old fellow nodding off. It was in the interests of physical rather than spiritual warmth that I found myself kneeling in silence, listening and looking at the beams of sunlight that streaked through the stained glass windows that followed the circle of the vaulted dome.
Contemplative and alert my thoughts meandered through the events of the preceding ten hours, the refugees, the care taken of them by the Sorrelle dei Poveri, the long night wandering silent byways and parks and now this place with its sleepy monks humbly chanting.
I do not consider myself a Catholic despite my upbringing. But remain on the Church’s rolls, a Catholic by default and until I follow through with the onerous Defectio ab Ecclesia catholica actu formali, the procedure required in Canon Law to relinquish my membership, the Church still considers me one. I hold firmly to the decision I made when I landed, a broken man, in that rain swept Cork airport at midnight on July the 15th 2006. I would from that moment eject from my life the mystical, the contemplation of and abjection to a God and to men who have used the ruse of a magical afterlife to enrich and empower themselves; men who have exploited the unknowable to lord over people. I would no longer degrade myself to the status of a vassal in thrall of the theatre of the blessed.
Religious belief and the search for spiritual relief for my tortured soul had on more than one occasion driven me to the edge of madness. The scriptures that I followed now were those of the secular Humanists, my high priests being the far more approachable Stephen Fry, Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins and even Derren Brown. But in this place, in this most religious of settings, I began to pray.
‘Mum, I have long since rejected your God and the religious faith you hoped to instil in me. I tried to follow it, I tried to decode and rationalise the worldview. I couldn’t. I looked for some justification for the moral and intellectual compromises I was being asked to make. Belief demanded I surrender to another man’s narrow interpretation of everything I encounter. I searched within your faith for the gentle spirit of kindness and goodness, I did not find it. You directed me once to The Beatitudes. I looked at them again and I was reminded of a political rally and empty promises.
Your Jesus is reported to have addressed a crowd from a hillock. The exhortation that became ‘The Beatitudes’ promised comfort and joy once The Father’s avidity for human suffering was satiated. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled’. This gem reported by one of his chief propagandists, a man called Matthew. I saw you die broken in body and spirit. You were drained of your last vital spark. Was this a righteous filling? Not here, not with your shell shocked children. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’
I look up at repulsive sentiment depicted in iconography. It is the Catholic archetype, a study in abjection. The Virgin Mary graces me with her sweet, sentimental gaze from a plinth bolted into the marbled pillar; a pastiche of bereavement and sorrow. It is a Trojan horse. Its pathetic eyes mock the visceral truth of womanhood. You never read Paula Meehan. You would reject her sublime excoriations. Platitudes shored you against verity. You would have blurred the Ryan and Murphy lens too.
Brought up to submit, trained to avoid. They taught you to believe that there was virtue in ignorance. I have rage in me, mother. I externalise it, direct it out against power balances skewed to a narcissistic elite. My computer beeps with an endless stream of reports clamouring for my attention; a river of globalised misery, exploitation and injustice. I rage at my impotence. I hark back to your saviour’s political rally on the mount. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ What comfort? Where?
It comes back to you and me in the end. Your third child is here. I built an impenetrable wall around me so that I would not ever get hurt again. I had no say in your decision to remain with him and I had no say in your decision to die. The child is still there in his safe dark cell. I am trying to free him. He is frightened and lashes out at me.
‘Here I am in the echoing silence of a Siena church. The bowed and humble monks are observing a meditative ritual of prayer and chant. My head is full of noise. In the darkness I hear the child sobbing. In an explosion of impotent frustration I beat at the wall. The child retreats. What you did and what you did not do thirty seven years ago is killing me.
‘Do I have to go back there and exhume your long interred corpse? Must I dig this cold, cloying clay with my hands? I see your coffin. Look at your hollow skull and yellowed bones. I have to face the full horror of your death, the atrocity you inflicted on your children.
I breathe deeply and I look back up at the ceiling arched above me. I take in the fine stonework and the pristine spacious floors. Everything about the design, peaked frames that hold the images of saints that look heavenward with steepled hands, forced the worshipers’ thoughts upwards to the vastness of space where God resides. I imagine you slipping into a place like this to get away from six noisy, disordered, demanding children; away from that chaotic, cramped council house. I see you sheltering here from your dangerous, fickle and unfaithful man. I see you in a pew across from me; crushed, despairing, exhausted.
There are choices that we can make, even if it does not look as if there is any. She had choices despite the conditioning, the vitiating the Catholic social order enacted on the young girl. I can forgive her for not seeing what was happening. Circumstances mitigate judgement because she tried to balance bringing up six children in poverty while managing a schizophrenic, petulant child-man. She attempted this in circumstances of crushing poverty. I vacillate in my condemnation. The child rocking back and forth in his lonely cell deserves justice. I let him speak.
‘Why did you leave me? Why is it that all you left me with is rage and despair? Look at the mess you and stupid daddy made; the fallout we your children have had to contend with. We are devastated. We have had to struggle daily just to function in this world. We are malformed, wounded. So don’t you ask me to forgive you. Don’t you tell me that I have wronged you.
A surge of wretchedness and tears burn my eyes. ‘I have somehow managed to live long enough to find this place where I can talk to you. That living has not been easy. It has taken me thirty seven years of living hell to arrive here. To arrive at a place that is both substantial and essential; a place where I can allow this child space to cry. I cry for me for you, my sisters and my brothers. I cry for your stupidity, your obstinacy.
‘Thanks for the example. That parental modelling you and that idiot you married provided took me down the path of a pretty fucked up life. ‘Do you know that they told me you were in heaven? Ok, look down from your cloud at the mess you left behind. Look at your children now. ‘Look at the seven shades of shit we have been through. Are you proud? Do the angels and saints pat you on the back and tell you what a good job you have done? ‘Well fuck you Mother, and fuck your angels and saints.
‘I did not want to end up talking to a dead woman. But here I am. You made your choices; we know where responsibility falls. I was a child. I had no control over what you did; no say in your decisions. You could have left him. You could have moved us all back to Ireland. Fuck you and your weakness. ‘I needed you to mother me; to look at me, to comfort me and guide me. How many millions of mothers do that every day? Why didn’t you? I needed you as my mother, not as dead saint rotting in a graveyard. ‘I needed you as my friend.
I broke down, collapsed on the pew back. Gut wrenching sobs and hot, bitter tears. I wept for all the could-have-been: I wept for my succession of debilitating depressions, for the string of inexplicable illnesses. I wept for the eleven year old child walled up in his lonely cell. Bewildered and hurt at his mother’s betrayal. I wept for my inarticulate teenage self and his rage and his acute sense of isolation in this world. I wept for my adult self and the years spent wandering in the wilderness of blame and self hatred; for his life draining twenty two years of abjection as a slave in Hubbard’s cult and for the hollowed-out creature that emerged. I wept for my siblings and the desolation they suffered and suffer still.
Thirty seven years of bottled up rage. I see us, her children, stumbling through our malformed lives. Four of us still look to the same God that fucked us up so mightily in the first place. In my ignorance I once prayed for his intervention, prayed that he would make it all better. I imagine this God now, his malicious, psychopathic face twisted in glee at the wonder that he has wrought in our lives.
‘If I could leap back over the decades I would shake some bloody sense into you. I can’t though. I can only take these threads of memory, fragments seen through the child’s eyes, and imagine what I might say, what I might do.
‘Look at you, broken and cowed. What loyalties did you grapple with? What was it that you tried to coexist with? The Catholic social order distorted your native view. You came to believe that your suffering was good and right in the eyes of that malign God they taught you to worship.
‘Sanctimonious priests and bishops counseled the fourteen year old you to submit to His will. And submit you did - body and soul. You trusted them when they told you there was virtue in baring as many children as your weakened physique could stand. You were an old woman at forty two. Perversely, those holy men ravished the fourteen year old you.
The rapist blames his victim. True to form it was the priests, when you died, who said it was part of God’s plan. Did you even conceive of another option? Who am I to talk? I was true to type and behaved as modeled, fortunate only that I did not have children when I enslaved myself; when I bought into my own Church of Abjection. I did as you did. I trusted, I hoped and thought that my good efforts and self sacrifice would in some mystical, magical way lead us to a beautiful and a better world.
I was obtuse. I begin to understand you, your blind, unexamined faith. It is all that you had left. Religion did not teach self empowerment, it did not encourage self actualisation. You grew up in the society that gave us the Magdaline Laundries. In your day the liberated and articulate woman was dragged off to spend her disintegrating days in the red-bricked asylum that glares out still over Cork City. The nun and the priest colluded in de Valera’s Ireland. Countess Markieviez and Mrs. Woolfe were Protestants, were they not?
Even in my day we were not taught to think. Like you we were trained by priests in the art of ignorant, blinkered devotion. It is just that I never had the dark prospect of the asylum or the laundry keeping my head bowed. It seems that I share more parity with you than I care to imagine. This is our mutuality. It is small wonder that the moment I was of age, I put as much distance as I possibly could between us. And all that time we suffered in our respective hells. Is it that I need to forgive you before I can begin to forgive myself? Or is it visa versa? Just to function within that system, to survive, you made yourself meek, stupid and submissive. How could anyone flourish within that paradigm? Now I am ashamed. Carmel was right. I am as much of a brute as my father. I have perpetuated the abuse you suffered.
I am talking to a shade. You are a memory that I have conjured up from the depths. But I am of you. Genetically we are inextricably linked. Your blood courses through my veins. I am who I am as a man because of you. Like it or not. The essence of my emotional world comes from you. You are real. They told me that anyone that passes on must spend time in purgatory. Ten times ten life times is what they had me believe you must suffer. Then the German Pope cancelled it. In my world though, purgatory has not gone. You remain there, a sad and incomplete person. You don’t laugh, you wear black and you are suspended there between that damp, ugly council house and the cold, institutional graveyard.
I sense that in freeing you I can free me. I remain dogged by low self worth and the lens I am looking through makes small things look huge and it makes a pleasant gentle landscape appear rock strewn and imposing. If I can fix how I remember you then I might begin to build something good from the wreckage you left behind. Emotionally I am numb to you. Yet on some level there must be a love.
Should I feel something more when I turn my thoughts to you? The pock-marked walls of this sealed alcove you built around this hurt and distressed child remain as impenetrable as ever. It is just that now I am beginning to feel gritty texture of the bricks and can crumble bits of loose plaster between my fingers.
If I felt nothing, if I had just dismissed you to your self-created hell and left you there, if I considered you dead and unreachable then there would be no hope. In lacking hope then I would be as well to take up the drink or seek out some other form of liquid or powdered oblivion. But I want to live; I want to find the home I lost. There is enough life left in me that the retrieval of all that was destroyed in our private tsunami, remains a possibility. It is that oft maligned word ‘hope’ that keeps me alive.
It is no small task for me to forgive you. The implication is that I must stand down from this edifice of wrong and hurt that you inflicted on me. Forgiving you demands that I have to become bigger than you; it is I that must reach down and offer my hand to a frightened little girl called Madeline. It is me, the man, who must offer you comfort. I must pick you up and hold you tightly and hug away the terror and the hurt as sobs wrack your little body. And I must gently wipe your tear stained face. You are three years old and you did a hurtee. I promise to keep and protect you from harm, little Madeline.
Emptiness, loneliness and hurt, such hurt, wells up and flies out from me. Banished demons flee, they wail and they scream out to the four corners of the vaulted roof.
Peace then envelopes me. I see something greater than my miniscule perspective. A shared life energy that links me with the chanting, sleepy monks, the ever driven, self-sacrificing Sister Caterina with Katya and the refugees with the grumpy barman and the pigeons that cooed from the rooftop; the stray cat and the Tuscan hills. I sense a community with this humanity making its drunken way through the centuries. I sense that I am inextricably linked with the gentle old Alsatian on the six o’clock morning beach in Pineto. With little, lost Jason in a forlorn MacDonalds on a grey Santa Monica Christmas morning. With two bashfully smiling Somalian boys and a football, with the soil this church is built upon. I am at one with the carved saints and with a humbly robed Saint Francesco. I am at one with my mother, my daughter. I had found her and forgiven myself for abandoning her.
I sat then, the noise in my head silenced for once. I drank in the stillness and beamed sunlight streaking through windows set high in the vaulted ceiling. I allowed the mumbled prayers emanating from behind the altar to wash over me. Time stretched, there was no hurry, and there was no need, in this calm and quiet now.
I walked down the aisle to the big oaken doors. I paused and I lit a candle to my mother, to Madeline.
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I hope to have the book completed to coincide with a mini documentary I did over the summer that will be out on Irish TV - RTE - in December.
Ed ei surgendo: ‘Or poi la quantitate comprender dell’amore ch’a te mi scalda, quand’ io dismento nostra vanitate, trattando i’ombre come cosa salda’.
Canto XXI
And he rising: ‘Now thou canst understand the measure of the love that burns in me for thee, when I forget our emptiness and treat shades as solid things’.
Canto XXI
And he rising: ‘Now thou canst understand the measure of the love that burns in me for thee, when I forget our emptiness and treat shades as solid things’.
Madeline’s Diary Tuesday 11th Feb 1947: Our Lady of Lourdes Feast day, you would have thought that they might have given us the day off, don’t you think? Not a bit of it. Mister Austin is sick and so we got off being given homework. That was the only consolation.
Reading my 2008 book, ‘The Complex’, Carmel, a woman who had been a close friend of Madeline’s since she first arrived in Stirling in 1958, said that I had been too hard on Madeline. Carmel was one of the very few consistent friends that Madeline had. I was very fond of her as a child; she often would come over and take us older kids off Madeline’s hands; loading us on to the bus to spend the day in Edinburgh. She would buy us sweets and treat us to lunch in a restaurant before taking us up to the castle or the zoo. Her husband had been a violent alcoholic and she had suffered much. Yet she was a kind and dignified woman, despite all that he inflicted on her. My fondness and respect for Carmel gave her comment some weight and to be honest, it left me quite shaken. I was thus moved to re-examine how I remembered my mother. I realised that in the main I had very little recollection of her, and little or nothing by the way of emotional memory. It was as if I could only recall her in the abstract.
Memory and sense of place in time are, it seems, malleable and not fixed in stone as I had previously believed. Professor of neurology at New York University School of medicine, Oliver Sacks, opens an article on this topic rather poetically.
‘We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorised with every act of recollection. ’
Could it be that I did not really know my mother? It seems obvious on reflection that this is indeed so. I was a chubby, self centred eleven year old boy when I last saw her. I knew her only in terms of what I needed from her. I have to suppose too that there still exists a considerable degree of emotional shut-down. How could I have endured life through all those years if I carried with me the raw agony of our perpetual separation?
I wonder how it would be had she not died, how it might be if I were to meet her today? What would it feel like to lead her to sit with me over a glass of wine in a piazza café in any of the beautiful Italian cities that I love so much? What would it be like to share with her all that we have lived through? I try to imagine sitting and sharing my broken life with the woman that nurtured me, that held me to her when I was a baby. Madeline’s was the first face that I recognised; her voice was the first that I trusted.
A concentrated effort to recall her produces only frustration. Memories of her are fragments, like a pile of torn up photographs. This is the task I am engaged in: a composition in collage. Here a woman in a turquoise mackintosh. There is an image of a worn and lined face; Swedish Scholl clogs and a black dress. But I can’t find all the pieces I need to put her back together again.
I completed my final exams in May. June found me in France with Rose and her children. There were tensions between the boy and I. The rapidly developing teenager had begun asserting his manly agency. I, the imposter father, was the target of his raging, inarticulate emotions and derision. I was too hurt to tell him that I was in awe of his keen wit, his sharp intelligence, his quick apprehension. I withheld from him that I loved the passion with which he embraced things that caught his imagination.
When he was twelve it was model trains and he collected the best Hornby examples and interrogated the minutia of their history and construction. I bought him a replica 1955 Italian locomotive from Padua for Christmas. It was complete in every detail except for the ubiquitous graffiti that defaces just about every surface owned and managed by Trenitalia. He liked the locomotive, but it didn’t buy me friendship or trust. I had squandered that marvellous opportunity a couple of years before.
Model trains made way for music as he turned fifteen. He unearthed rare pre-Gilmore Pink Floyd albums and built a knowledge base on PIL, Iggy and the Stooges, Bowies Spiders and Lou Reed that could put an accomplished biographer to shame. I admired him, but I began to resent him. We were in competition for his mother’s love.
Of course this created difficulty between my wonderful woman and me. While I enjoyed the lovely villages, the beaches and wooded landscapes of coastal Brittany, I was not enjoying the family situation. I could not really openly express to her what I was struggling with. She had the first duty of care and protective mothering to her gifted, fantastically intelligent boy. The girl, beautiful, shy, deeply intelligent and wise beyond her years, but reticent in expression held her voice. So I suffered through this holiday and when we got back to Ireland I fled to the solace of my bachelor apartment overlooking the park. That August we ended our five year relationship. I have as yet not granted myself permission to grieve this terrible loss.
Carmel’s comment still disturbed me and so in 2010 I began trying to write about my mother. I carried note books with me everywhere. I jotted ideas during extended visits to Venice and Padua. I scribbled notes as I crisscrossed the flat Veneto plain in search of Dante’s contemporary and in his eyes, not very worthy rival, the poet Petrarch. I wrote pages when I found him. I tried to connect him and the journey I was on with Madeline as I sat on his terrace at the house he owned and died in atop a hill in the village of Arqua Petrarcha. His poetry often moved me to that well of grief and tears I could not otherwise access.
Back in Ireland I recorded my thoughts in Kinsale. I would look up from my pages every now and again to watch sail driven yachts heading out and weather beaten trawlers returning from days at sea. She had walked these little winding streets. She might have stopped where I sat, gazing out from the pier.
August 2012 comes to a close as does my four years as an undergraduate. With my regretful return to single life I cut myself off from humanity and I start in on gathering these jottings and sitting at my computer and writing.
I work hard to decode my indecipherable scrawls and these began to take form in Word documents as I order my three years worth of scattered thoughts and musings. The transcript grew and began to feel more solidly anchored as I researched into the background of both sides of my parental history. I drove my aunties to despair as I dug up the minutia of their childhoods with my mother and how it was that she ended up so broken, ill and dead when she was rushed away from us on that awful night.
It was not very long after I began getting stuck into the story and the peace that I was, and still am, trying make with Madeline, that my skin broke out in painful rashes. Sleep would not come to me and I had to get medical attention. It was as if I had dug up a poison that had lain dormant all these years gone. I had pierced an abscess and its puss spilled out, infecting my blood and burning my skin. The rash remains though partly controlled by medication, yet sometimes I still wake up in pain and torment. Sometimes I simply cannot sleep. I feel as if I am one of Dante’s damned in 10th ditch, the Malebolge, where the falsifiers suffer itching skin and other degrading conditions that allow the sufferer no rest. Maybe I am I a falsifier? Something is nagging me, something is trying to get out.
It was early October when I scraped together a few hundred Euros and bought a cheap return with Ryan Air to Pisa. I had come across a website that described the restoration of the Via Francigena indeed I had come across mention of this ancient pilgrim route as I studied Chaucer and caught glimpses of it in medieval Italian literature classes. I had even walked a few of kilometers of it as it wound its way between the chestnut wooded hills of the lower end of the Garfagnana then crossing a 12th century flag stoned bridge, as many a medieval penitent pilgrim had, disconcertingly called Ponte del Diavolo, ‘The Devil’s Bridge’.
The bridge arches over the river Serchio about thirty miles out from the walled city of Lucca. I found that I could today follow a largely restored section that runs through the wooded hills, ancient walled towns that are both guarded and decorated with those 14th Century towers that keep a watchful eye over the Tuscan landscape.
The route follows the undulating contours, vineyards and olive groves of central Tuscany. I could hike the route very cheaply thanks to a network of very basic but affordable pilgrim hostels. It seemed the perfect way to cap off a tense four years of university and make good use of the Italian that I had sweated blood over for my degree. But it would in the main give me time and space to absorb the dissolution of a relationship that had anchored me these five years past.
I don’t handle the emotional well. And I shut out any emotional shocks; actually I bury it as a dog might a bone. I only unearth it when it feels safe to do so, and that is not very often. It is not a healthy practice. The feelings that such experiences engender will invert and manifest as depression. It is healthier to cry and rage in the moment. But I don’t know how to do that.
I stayed overnight in Dublin’s Liberties and in the morning the plane flew me away from that cold, damp city to a warm, sunny Tuscany. I took a bus to Florence where I stayed the night in a dodgy hostel with a bunch of Aussies and a couple of Argentines. Later in the day I grabbed the train on to Siena and began my pilgrimage proper. The culmination of that adventure is as I have described in the first chapter. But something happened on that sleepless night and in its dawning that I am still trying to make sense of.
Locked out of the warmth and protection of Sister Caterina's hostel, I was condemned to endure the night traipsing the darkened Siena streets and byways. So it was that I would spend the duration of that long, lonely and chilly night wandering like one of Dante’s shades. I resolved that I would use this night and focus on dredging up all the memories that I could of Madeline. I wanted to concentrate on her and clear away all the rest of the noise.
The bars were all closed by three in the morning. I had been popping into those that I happened upon, as I walked the darkened streets, to warm up and grab a sweet and intense espresso and maybe something to eat as long as it did not look too stale.
The city was completely deserted by the time the last bar pulled down its shutters. I met the odd insomniac pigeon, but otherwise my companions were grim statues and ghosts. I did not find her as I followed the narrow winding lanes defined by buildings that had seen eight hundred years of humanity in all of its glory and its depredation pass through; beer makers, priests, whores and bankers and even the great poets. Dante met the pitiful La Pia, in purgatory. She was a tragic figure and I read into his canto aspects of my mother.
I cannot say that the illness I suffer and my need to reconcile myself with my mother are related. But there is a relationship between emotional state and the body. I do not trust the mystical. I put a lot of thought into the possibility of Dualism. I discarded that too. It is part of the package that we inherited from Greek thought.
I have a sense that this dualism has detrimental effect on humanity. If we accept the premise of there being a separate ‘soul’ residing like a machine operator in a throw-away body, then this is surely divisive. The body and the world that it lives in becomes a mere stopping off point, like a hotel room. Throwaway, indifferent, paid for. There is no sense of the ownership, care or responsibility that we tend to put into our own houses and gardens.
We check out, pay the bill. That the room is mess does not bother us. But if it is that we and our world are intrinsically bound then we would be motivated to lavish it with love and to nurture it, for it gives us life. I have over time wrongly ascribed transcendent moments to the Christian God and the distinctly unchristian Hubbard. But I think that in truth these were junctures in which I grasped the innate connection I share with our Earth and all of the trillions of symbiotic interconnections I have in common with all life, animate and inanimate.
There is plenty that is not yet explained by science. Even as an atheist, one freed from the crippling anxiety that is the sole gift of superstition, I admit I am still susceptible to wishful and magical thinking; not two years ago I was seduced by the now well discredited notion that the body looses 21 grams at the moment of death. I later read a synopsis of the 19th Century experiments carried out by a Boston physician, Doctor McDougall, in which he purportedly conclusively proved the claim. His methods were clumsy and there was no peer review.
Some years after he published his paper his methods and conclusions were closely interrogated. The subsequent debunks were far more convincing. Not unlike the good Doctor McDougall I clung onto flimsy mystical experiences because of a premature need to believe that I had sensed the presence of Madeline, my mother, over the decades since our separation.
There are always going to be charlatans claiming divine enlightenment. They will exploit the credulous. It is our fearful ignorance that grants them authority. Many of us give more credence to Bronze Age myth than we do to empirical science, to prescience. There is a prori knowledge stamped within our DNA. I don’t see why robes, rites and hollow pronouncements should entitle charlatans to influence and direct public discourse.
Humankind has a sense of the transcendent. It has inspired magnificent art and literature. I have derived comfort from the Christian psalms; religious architecture often leaves me awed. I am transported by religious music. But I equally have been inspirited by the writings of Karl Marx, Heany’s poetry and Van Gough’s paintings. Artistic inspiration is rooted in our natural world. The expressive arts were co-opted by powerful religious patrons, real and ethereal. I would not describe Caravaggio as devout.
I made my exclusive transition through the medieval to a renaissance of self discovery in concert with the sloughing off of the burden of religious superstition and wilful ignorance. I entered my personal Enlightenment as I cast away the dark shroud threaded with dire pronouncements and the heavy pawl of a terrible afterlife. I felt myself empowered as the hold the robed men had on me waned. I still have pockets of superstitious thought. It seems that there is a credulous core in me that wants magic to happen, that wants the laws of nature to suspend so that I can heal. I am not yet an adult.
I am sojourner. I seek honesty, truth and my sainted city is the endlessly elusive connection with life around me. I look back with shame at the narrow prejudice of my once blinkered gaze. There lingers a sense of disgust at the self that sought comfort in various sects. The only faith I needed was in my own capacity to self-actualise.
The existential emptiness, the dislocation I experienced in those wilderness years was nothing more than the echoing cries of the little boy. This ten year old me was the source of my incessant, restless discomfort; it was a child in pain; a soul in perpetual foment.
In the wreckage our violent separation I cut Madeline from memory. I denied her the right to be my mother. She broke the contract. We, her dispossessed children, were left bereft and unnurtured. The bitter seed of her betrayal was buried under strata of bereavement, anger, confusion and misplaced loyalties. We orphans owe her nothing. She owes us everything.
The bitter taste of her betrayal incessantly corrodes our ability to love, trust and to give. We, her children, are emotional cripples. My efforts to cotton-wool the caustic truth with faux love and respect was failed from the outset. This attempt to find her in this Tuscan landscape, to give her the chance to make up; to show her love for me, was ill-conceived. She colluded with my narcissistic father in the destruction of her children.
I wanted to believe that Madeline was somehow present in my life. But if something of her resides in me then it is an abject and self abasing ghost. If she is an intrinsic aspect of who I am then I know why what is for others a gentle slope or a nurtured cultivated woodland path is to me the forbidding aspect of a rock face, a harsh mountainous landscape. Filigree threads that formed the wonder of our mother to child attachment are severed. The connection is irretrievable broken. I turn my face from her.
Fragmented childhood memories have me helping her pull a case of daddy’s beer down from the top shelve of the pantry on a sunny April afternoon. We haul it over to a dry flowerbed where the wilting daffodils gleefully revel in this shower of foamy sustenance. Our thoughts turn to him as we pull back the tabs on each can and gift his drinking and womanising the parched soil. He had been gone off with some strange woman for over a week. Later she asks if I would choose to stay with her or Daddy if he started a new family with the stranger. I told her I would go with daddy.
We are in the kitchen, she and I, she is explaining to me why the old man in the flat cap had cursed us and told us to take our bombs back to our own people in Ireland. Then months later was her terrible distress at losing her wedding ring while we were on a day trip to the sea. We are standing together at the table and she is showing me a newspaper picture of some beautiful Ethiopian women in tribal dress. She teaches me that African people were just like us and not scary creatures from another world. These images conflict with this well of bitterness and betrayal.
After she died I was told that she was with God in heaven. I formed an image, that thirty five years on, I encountered in Dante’s poem. His transcendent Beatrice crowned with stars and sitting in the presence of God in a sky infused with heavenly light while angels sing Hosannas. But I have long since torn Madeline down from there. She is viscerally human and riddled with stupidities, blinkered vision and perversity.
By six o’clock in the morning I was very cold and very hungry. I had now walked the whole city; I knew its alleys, byways, little parks and piazzas intimately. But she remained dead to me.
Chiesa San Francesco commands the Eastern half of the city. It looks out over the old main road from Florence as if expecting a repeat of the ruinous siege of 1554 that destroyed its formerly magnificent banking and commerce and locked it in this late medieval garb. The now impoverished city was not able to afford the grand and gaudy architecture that marked the renaissance of Florence, Rome, and Milan. It was on the broad steps of this grand building that I found myself at just after six of an October Tuscan morning.
I pulled on one of the huge oak doors. It gave way and I crept in. This is a church connected to a monastery. Monks of varying ages, in the main quite elderly, formed a semicircle around and behind the grand and ornate altar. They were praying in chant, one old fellow nodding off. It was in the interests of physical rather than spiritual warmth that I found myself kneeling in silence, listening and looking at the beams of sunlight that streaked through the stained glass windows that followed the circle of the vaulted dome.
Contemplative and alert my thoughts meandered through the events of the preceding ten hours, the refugees, the care taken of them by the Sorrelle dei Poveri, the long night wandering silent byways and parks and now this place with its sleepy monks humbly chanting.
I do not consider myself a Catholic despite my upbringing. But remain on the Church’s rolls, a Catholic by default and until I follow through with the onerous Defectio ab Ecclesia catholica actu formali, the procedure required in Canon Law to relinquish my membership, the Church still considers me one. I hold firmly to the decision I made when I landed, a broken man, in that rain swept Cork airport at midnight on July the 15th 2006. I would from that moment eject from my life the mystical, the contemplation of and abjection to a God and to men who have used the ruse of a magical afterlife to enrich and empower themselves; men who have exploited the unknowable to lord over people. I would no longer degrade myself to the status of a vassal in thrall of the theatre of the blessed.
Religious belief and the search for spiritual relief for my tortured soul had on more than one occasion driven me to the edge of madness. The scriptures that I followed now were those of the secular Humanists, my high priests being the far more approachable Stephen Fry, Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins and even Derren Brown. But in this place, in this most religious of settings, I began to pray.
‘Mum, I have long since rejected your God and the religious faith you hoped to instil in me. I tried to follow it, I tried to decode and rationalise the worldview. I couldn’t. I looked for some justification for the moral and intellectual compromises I was being asked to make. Belief demanded I surrender to another man’s narrow interpretation of everything I encounter. I searched within your faith for the gentle spirit of kindness and goodness, I did not find it. You directed me once to The Beatitudes. I looked at them again and I was reminded of a political rally and empty promises.
Your Jesus is reported to have addressed a crowd from a hillock. The exhortation that became ‘The Beatitudes’ promised comfort and joy once The Father’s avidity for human suffering was satiated. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled’. This gem reported by one of his chief propagandists, a man called Matthew. I saw you die broken in body and spirit. You were drained of your last vital spark. Was this a righteous filling? Not here, not with your shell shocked children. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’
I look up at repulsive sentiment depicted in iconography. It is the Catholic archetype, a study in abjection. The Virgin Mary graces me with her sweet, sentimental gaze from a plinth bolted into the marbled pillar; a pastiche of bereavement and sorrow. It is a Trojan horse. Its pathetic eyes mock the visceral truth of womanhood. You never read Paula Meehan. You would reject her sublime excoriations. Platitudes shored you against verity. You would have blurred the Ryan and Murphy lens too.
Brought up to submit, trained to avoid. They taught you to believe that there was virtue in ignorance. I have rage in me, mother. I externalise it, direct it out against power balances skewed to a narcissistic elite. My computer beeps with an endless stream of reports clamouring for my attention; a river of globalised misery, exploitation and injustice. I rage at my impotence. I hark back to your saviour’s political rally on the mount. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ What comfort? Where?
It comes back to you and me in the end. Your third child is here. I built an impenetrable wall around me so that I would not ever get hurt again. I had no say in your decision to remain with him and I had no say in your decision to die. The child is still there in his safe dark cell. I am trying to free him. He is frightened and lashes out at me.
‘Here I am in the echoing silence of a Siena church. The bowed and humble monks are observing a meditative ritual of prayer and chant. My head is full of noise. In the darkness I hear the child sobbing. In an explosion of impotent frustration I beat at the wall. The child retreats. What you did and what you did not do thirty seven years ago is killing me.
‘Do I have to go back there and exhume your long interred corpse? Must I dig this cold, cloying clay with my hands? I see your coffin. Look at your hollow skull and yellowed bones. I have to face the full horror of your death, the atrocity you inflicted on your children.
I breathe deeply and I look back up at the ceiling arched above me. I take in the fine stonework and the pristine spacious floors. Everything about the design, peaked frames that hold the images of saints that look heavenward with steepled hands, forced the worshipers’ thoughts upwards to the vastness of space where God resides. I imagine you slipping into a place like this to get away from six noisy, disordered, demanding children; away from that chaotic, cramped council house. I see you sheltering here from your dangerous, fickle and unfaithful man. I see you in a pew across from me; crushed, despairing, exhausted.
There are choices that we can make, even if it does not look as if there is any. She had choices despite the conditioning, the vitiating the Catholic social order enacted on the young girl. I can forgive her for not seeing what was happening. Circumstances mitigate judgement because she tried to balance bringing up six children in poverty while managing a schizophrenic, petulant child-man. She attempted this in circumstances of crushing poverty. I vacillate in my condemnation. The child rocking back and forth in his lonely cell deserves justice. I let him speak.
‘Why did you leave me? Why is it that all you left me with is rage and despair? Look at the mess you and stupid daddy made; the fallout we your children have had to contend with. We are devastated. We have had to struggle daily just to function in this world. We are malformed, wounded. So don’t you ask me to forgive you. Don’t you tell me that I have wronged you.
A surge of wretchedness and tears burn my eyes. ‘I have somehow managed to live long enough to find this place where I can talk to you. That living has not been easy. It has taken me thirty seven years of living hell to arrive here. To arrive at a place that is both substantial and essential; a place where I can allow this child space to cry. I cry for me for you, my sisters and my brothers. I cry for your stupidity, your obstinacy.
‘Thanks for the example. That parental modelling you and that idiot you married provided took me down the path of a pretty fucked up life. ‘Do you know that they told me you were in heaven? Ok, look down from your cloud at the mess you left behind. Look at your children now. ‘Look at the seven shades of shit we have been through. Are you proud? Do the angels and saints pat you on the back and tell you what a good job you have done? ‘Well fuck you Mother, and fuck your angels and saints.
‘I did not want to end up talking to a dead woman. But here I am. You made your choices; we know where responsibility falls. I was a child. I had no control over what you did; no say in your decisions. You could have left him. You could have moved us all back to Ireland. Fuck you and your weakness. ‘I needed you to mother me; to look at me, to comfort me and guide me. How many millions of mothers do that every day? Why didn’t you? I needed you as my mother, not as dead saint rotting in a graveyard. ‘I needed you as my friend.
I broke down, collapsed on the pew back. Gut wrenching sobs and hot, bitter tears. I wept for all the could-have-been: I wept for my succession of debilitating depressions, for the string of inexplicable illnesses. I wept for the eleven year old child walled up in his lonely cell. Bewildered and hurt at his mother’s betrayal. I wept for my inarticulate teenage self and his rage and his acute sense of isolation in this world. I wept for my adult self and the years spent wandering in the wilderness of blame and self hatred; for his life draining twenty two years of abjection as a slave in Hubbard’s cult and for the hollowed-out creature that emerged. I wept for my siblings and the desolation they suffered and suffer still.
Thirty seven years of bottled up rage. I see us, her children, stumbling through our malformed lives. Four of us still look to the same God that fucked us up so mightily in the first place. In my ignorance I once prayed for his intervention, prayed that he would make it all better. I imagine this God now, his malicious, psychopathic face twisted in glee at the wonder that he has wrought in our lives.
‘If I could leap back over the decades I would shake some bloody sense into you. I can’t though. I can only take these threads of memory, fragments seen through the child’s eyes, and imagine what I might say, what I might do.
‘Look at you, broken and cowed. What loyalties did you grapple with? What was it that you tried to coexist with? The Catholic social order distorted your native view. You came to believe that your suffering was good and right in the eyes of that malign God they taught you to worship.
‘Sanctimonious priests and bishops counseled the fourteen year old you to submit to His will. And submit you did - body and soul. You trusted them when they told you there was virtue in baring as many children as your weakened physique could stand. You were an old woman at forty two. Perversely, those holy men ravished the fourteen year old you.
The rapist blames his victim. True to form it was the priests, when you died, who said it was part of God’s plan. Did you even conceive of another option? Who am I to talk? I was true to type and behaved as modeled, fortunate only that I did not have children when I enslaved myself; when I bought into my own Church of Abjection. I did as you did. I trusted, I hoped and thought that my good efforts and self sacrifice would in some mystical, magical way lead us to a beautiful and a better world.
I was obtuse. I begin to understand you, your blind, unexamined faith. It is all that you had left. Religion did not teach self empowerment, it did not encourage self actualisation. You grew up in the society that gave us the Magdaline Laundries. In your day the liberated and articulate woman was dragged off to spend her disintegrating days in the red-bricked asylum that glares out still over Cork City. The nun and the priest colluded in de Valera’s Ireland. Countess Markieviez and Mrs. Woolfe were Protestants, were they not?
Even in my day we were not taught to think. Like you we were trained by priests in the art of ignorant, blinkered devotion. It is just that I never had the dark prospect of the asylum or the laundry keeping my head bowed. It seems that I share more parity with you than I care to imagine. This is our mutuality. It is small wonder that the moment I was of age, I put as much distance as I possibly could between us. And all that time we suffered in our respective hells. Is it that I need to forgive you before I can begin to forgive myself? Or is it visa versa? Just to function within that system, to survive, you made yourself meek, stupid and submissive. How could anyone flourish within that paradigm? Now I am ashamed. Carmel was right. I am as much of a brute as my father. I have perpetuated the abuse you suffered.
I am talking to a shade. You are a memory that I have conjured up from the depths. But I am of you. Genetically we are inextricably linked. Your blood courses through my veins. I am who I am as a man because of you. Like it or not. The essence of my emotional world comes from you. You are real. They told me that anyone that passes on must spend time in purgatory. Ten times ten life times is what they had me believe you must suffer. Then the German Pope cancelled it. In my world though, purgatory has not gone. You remain there, a sad and incomplete person. You don’t laugh, you wear black and you are suspended there between that damp, ugly council house and the cold, institutional graveyard.
I sense that in freeing you I can free me. I remain dogged by low self worth and the lens I am looking through makes small things look huge and it makes a pleasant gentle landscape appear rock strewn and imposing. If I can fix how I remember you then I might begin to build something good from the wreckage you left behind. Emotionally I am numb to you. Yet on some level there must be a love.
Should I feel something more when I turn my thoughts to you? The pock-marked walls of this sealed alcove you built around this hurt and distressed child remain as impenetrable as ever. It is just that now I am beginning to feel gritty texture of the bricks and can crumble bits of loose plaster between my fingers.
If I felt nothing, if I had just dismissed you to your self-created hell and left you there, if I considered you dead and unreachable then there would be no hope. In lacking hope then I would be as well to take up the drink or seek out some other form of liquid or powdered oblivion. But I want to live; I want to find the home I lost. There is enough life left in me that the retrieval of all that was destroyed in our private tsunami, remains a possibility. It is that oft maligned word ‘hope’ that keeps me alive.
It is no small task for me to forgive you. The implication is that I must stand down from this edifice of wrong and hurt that you inflicted on me. Forgiving you demands that I have to become bigger than you; it is I that must reach down and offer my hand to a frightened little girl called Madeline. It is me, the man, who must offer you comfort. I must pick you up and hold you tightly and hug away the terror and the hurt as sobs wrack your little body. And I must gently wipe your tear stained face. You are three years old and you did a hurtee. I promise to keep and protect you from harm, little Madeline.
Emptiness, loneliness and hurt, such hurt, wells up and flies out from me. Banished demons flee, they wail and they scream out to the four corners of the vaulted roof.
Peace then envelopes me. I see something greater than my miniscule perspective. A shared life energy that links me with the chanting, sleepy monks, the ever driven, self-sacrificing Sister Caterina with Katya and the refugees with the grumpy barman and the pigeons that cooed from the rooftop; the stray cat and the Tuscan hills. I sense a community with this humanity making its drunken way through the centuries. I sense that I am inextricably linked with the gentle old Alsatian on the six o’clock morning beach in Pineto. With little, lost Jason in a forlorn MacDonalds on a grey Santa Monica Christmas morning. With two bashfully smiling Somalian boys and a football, with the soil this church is built upon. I am at one with the carved saints and with a humbly robed Saint Francesco. I am at one with my mother, my daughter. I had found her and forgiven myself for abandoning her.
I sat then, the noise in my head silenced for once. I drank in the stillness and beamed sunlight streaking through windows set high in the vaulted ceiling. I allowed the mumbled prayers emanating from behind the altar to wash over me. Time stretched, there was no hurry, and there was no need, in this calm and quiet now.
I walked down the aisle to the big oaken doors. I paused and I lit a candle to my mother, to Madeline.
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I await the book. 
