Tag Archives: mothers

Garland Makers

By Posted in Life, Music, Poetry Tagged , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Emerging from my early morning train I follow the subterranean tunnel that will lead to a city lane and daylight. There by the stairway stands a figure in the dimness, a fiddle at her chin, a bow in her right hand. I catch a glimpse of a t-shirt emblazoned with a black skull on a ground of brilliant white. A musician is playing Bach in a catacomb in Melbourne.

 

 

The musician plays. Later she will answer my query: “It’s Bach, one of the minuets.” Like any commuter I hurry by. A piccolo latte later I return to the tunnel. I have, after all, ten minutes of leisure, ten minutes free from scampering from screen to screen. I stand at a remove where I watch the slow bowing of her right hand and the nimble darting fingers of her left.

 

 

The musician plays. I don’t recognise this music, something slow and languid; liquid sounds flowing, flowing, peak hour crowds hurrying, hurrying. The musician plays, the commuters exit and I stand and I listen. In my hands I hold ‘Review’ from the weekend paper. Between melodies I read a poem by Judith Beveridge. The poem, titled ‘To a Garland Maker’ starts:

 

 

‘It must be good to be a garland-maker –

Your daughters carrying water, working with you

Braiding feathers, shells, leaves…’

 

 

Somehow the poem clinches the moment for me. Some obscure connection takes place. Perhaps it’s simply the gladsome encounter, unexpected, with the beautiful. I drop a bank note into the musician’s empty violin case. Between pieces I approach: “Please forgive my enquiry… what else do you do? In music, I mean?”     

“I’m at the Conservatorium. I’m studying.”

     

 

I withdraw and the musician plays again. Once again sounds drawn by slow bowing to an unhurried tempo, once again sounds not of this century nor of the last. Is there perhaps defiance in her choice of the unfashionable, of the non-popular? Most mornings the busker in this tunnel is a singlet-clad Springsteen, twice this girl’s age. But his music is far younger. His guitar case fills quickly with coin and notes.

 

 

My ten minutes of slow pass quickly. I’ve been in reverie, prompted by the playing and the poem:

 

 

‘Daughters

who will adorn you at your funeral with blossoms

picked at dawn.’

 

 

 

Following the poet’s images of daughters and aged mothers a vision comes to me of this same girl, three score years in the future, her delicate face coarsened by years and care. As I walk away my mind takes me to an elderly lady I know. She suffered a stroke a few years ago and recovered all movement but her speech was affected. Now words tumble from her mouth in lively disorder. My friend knows what she wants to say but her brain plucks the wrong word from her lexicon. The old lady has much to tell but her speech trips her up. She lives alone in the old family home, her gaiety unquenched.

 

 

 

In my reverie I hear the fiddler with her slow music, I hold the poet’s images of garland-making daughters, of disfiguring time, and of an old lady who cannot talk straight. Yeats wrote of ‘Gaiety transfiguring all that dread’. It is art I suppose, the access to beauty, that brings us to the sunlight.

Watching Women Drowning their Babies

By Posted in Childhood, Life, Travel Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

London, heart of anglophone civilisation, cradle of British culture? ‘For british’ read ‘brutish’.

See below. This is a true story.

This morning I watched a group of six young mothers and their babies, aged six to fifteen months, in an indoor pool in London. The pool was heated: they’re very considerate here when they set out to torture their young. The mothers undressed their babies and clad them in little wet suits. Entering the water they held the babies close to their perfidious breasts, murmuring the tender endearments that loving mothers do. They walked backwards in a circle, bouncing their babes in the water, hoisting them high, beaming, beaming all the time. Choreographed by Nicola – that’s the name of the licensed water torturer – the same cooing, smiling mothers all splashed water into the faces of their young. Spluttering, the babes looked up, discomfited. Their mothers chorused “hooray!”, made loving whisper and song, reassured the children that what had passed was not real, then splashed them again. After half a dozen such passes it was time for holding on. Holding on is taught by placing the babe, until now an entirely earthbound being, facing a horizontal railing just inside the margin of the pool. The mothers all sang “Hold on! Hold On!” Nicola sang the same. A sweeter chorus you never heard. Then the mothers let go of the slippery bodies, singing gaily as the newborn of their flesh slipped below the surface. Here the babies enhanced their education by breathing in water. After a little bit of this, desperate bodies surfaced, flailing arms found the railing, and most survived. None looked happy, but the mothers beamed and sang and cried “Hooray!”

I looked at my watch. We had been going for only seven minutes of the thirty that the mothers had paid for. I braced myself.

Now came swimming. Swimming is done by having your face pushed beneath the surface and held there for two seconds. To condition you for this submersion your mother calls your name, once, twice, then drowns you briefly, smiling withal. Mother Malvolio brings you to the surface, cuddles and coos. When you are a year old or a little more or a little less, you still can recall those aqueous moments of birth, when you suffered anoxia, your first near-life experience. Here, during the your seconds underwater you go through it all again. You’ve been flatlining: you never felt so thoroughly alive.

Throughout your thirty minute session of education you drink a good deal of pool water, chlorinated for your safety (and to foster your eczema). When you have drunk all your small tummy can hold, you pee, re-warming the water for the next baby to drink. The mothers never drink, their faces held above water level as befits members of an air-breathing species. Instead the adult female bodies shed their dribs and their drabs of belly button fluff and sundry fluids, augmenting the brew drunk by their young.

After too long the session is at an end. Money passes to Nicola. Stunned babies, shuddering, shivering as the cooler air hits them, blue of lip, mute with disbelief and moral shock, nestle in mothers’ arms. Those adults smile at each other in congratulation of their depredations.
Scot-free they’ll congregate here again next Thursday and do it all again.

On the Night Train to Jerusalem

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Saturday night. The late train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is sparsely filled and comfortable. Passengers sit and read and stare out at the darkness. They travel in private cocoons of quiet. The small world of the carriage snuggles into the bedtime dark. Children, slumped against parent bodies, rocked and clickclacked, fall asleep.

Tel Aviv, Lod, Ramle. The train climbs, winds, climbs again. Stations materialize in the unsuspecting dark. Doors open, passengers melt away, doors close and the dark swallows all.

A brief stop at Ramle, now the train resumes its smooth motion. A sudden hubbub. Fast footfalls tripping along the corridor, a young woman, fair, slight, twentyish, races, crying, protesting, her voice shrill. She comes to a stop before the closed carriage door. Indignantly, she demands the train go back to Ramle. She missed her stop.
Others follow her – mothers with children, one pushing a pram. All protest, all join in the demand that the train retrace its path. Remorselessly the train picks up speed.

A new arrival, a tall young woman, dark haired, wearing black, makes her voice heard. It is an impressive voice, strong, pitched a little lower than the others’, a voice that rings. Like the others, this woman is unhappy, like them indignant. The younger blonde lady is eclipsed, she and her group are anaemic in comparison; they lack her force, her intensity, her perseverance.

The collector arrives, a small man in a grey jacket, slight, inoffensive. The women batter him with their clamour, their remonstrances. He explains that it is impossible to return, unsafe.
The young woman in black assumes leadership. Decibelling her anger, she details the group’s grievances: the doors in their compartment failed to open; the women and their children were unable to disembark. It was not their fault but the railways’; they had paid for their tickets, there were small children who needed their beds, the night was cold, the train would dump them at Beth Shemesh, leaving them stranded.
The collector offers no defence. He melts away.

The train climbs towards Beth Shemesh where it will arrive in fourteen minutes. The leading lady performs through the fullness of this time. Her face is strong, passionate, her dark lipstick an exclamation mark, her muscular features mobile with the pulse and rhythm of her thundering.

She maintains her rage, augmenting it minute by minute, until it reaches a pitch where violence can be its only resolution. Roaring now, she silences her party members. Nessun dorma: all in the train attend or pretend not to attend to the woman and await a climax that must immediately follow.

The train slows. Women corral their young, hoist their luggage, prepare their escape. The train stops, the carriage door duly opens and the unwilling visitors to Beth Shemesh debouch into the dark.

Their leader makes her final address to the invisible collector, to the entire railway system. Continuing travellers brace themselves for her final explosion. With withering sarcasm she delivers her line: Thank you for kindly opening the door –
Last of all to exit, she stops in the doorway, turns back to face the interior and screams – Darling!

Copyright, Howard Goldenberg, 29 March, 2013.