The Breech-Birth of Super-duper Male
on a half-shell (Invisible detail)...
Pre-History, and all that palaver, even.
Rack: I’m not sure if you can see it, but the writing keeps evolving. When I read the above, having just read the bones of it yesterday, I was completely absorbed and compelled to keep on reading. This whole exercise between us is hard to describe or define. I think we are doing something very good for each other. An active expression of our care for each other.
Anyway. I am a little verklempt this morning. A tear or two has been elicited from my dry old súile donna.
Ruin: I understand verklempt, and yes, I see it, both evolving and supporting each other.
Rack: Good to see the photos of your sister’s visit. How was it? Both of you have a handsome refinement that belies your beginnings (as you describe them). As if there was some lost in your mother or father’s status. That Joycean inexorable spiral downwards that his family experienced.
Ruin: Yes, I am convinced I was given away by royalty to a family of paupers, with some evil twin or other sitting on a throne somewhere.
Rack: But your sister looks sophisticated too.
Ruin: She is unbelievably right wing, Loves Gov. DeSantis, and hates Biden.
Rack: It’s like Séamus and his family. Oh!!! Yikes!
Ruin: She also thinks we are all being killed off by a Jewish Cabal. She has researched it too, apparently, she informed me.
I just smiled, inwardly aghast.
Rack: Well, appearances can be mightily deceiving. Oh fucking lordy!
How does she square your life choices with her disbeliefs?
Ruin: She loves Gays too though, her son came out as Gay recently, her only son.
"they're so gentle".
Ruin: she's in trouble when our memoir come out. No, I will leave this out, change it, not attack, find a way to understand it.
Rack: Well, there you go. Look at those 12 Republicans voting to enshrine marriage equality.
We’re you ever close?
Ruin: Yes, way back, but then I left, and when I got back there was something amiss, but that was some years later.
Rack: So, she felt abandoned by you.
Ruin: she was 14 or so, when I left, next I knew I was finding her an apartment in ‘Battery Park City’ for her honeymoon.
Rack: Have you ever asked?
Ruin: I am sure she did. They all did, feel abandoned I mean. My feeling was that at least they had each other. I was setting out completely alone. No, I have never asked directly.
Rack: Where do you fall again in the line up?
Ruin: Oldest boy, with one older sister, the other three following on, Paula next to me, followed by two boys.
Ruin: It's very hard to get anything out of her other than Oirish platitudes.
Rack: Maybe you should?
Ruin: I have had pains in my heart, and tinges in my arm all day, post-Paula panic attack, probably. Family! Spared of that one now. Paula ‘caused’ my first panic-attack. I refused to see her after that for 5 years. Having her in our apartment was the first time since that last ‘event’. Perhaps I was heading towards those palpitations anyway, but they were hastened by a very strained interaction. I will go there, if you want to understand more, but it will recur in those sixteen months I spent nursing my mother later.
Just in case, I am moving the latest writing onto that external hard drive as we speak
that's what I was doing when you popped up.
Segueing, the twist in the ‘Maeve’ story is also strange, the part I haven’t written yet.
Rack: OK, but you better not croak. You’re just getting up a head of steam. The Paris bit? Or later?
Ruin: I brought a huge heaving portfolio of art with me, one of those back-breaker over-stuffed jobbies, thinking I would drop it off in London, to apply for college there. I was lugging it with me, when Maeve turned up 4 hours late.
It was so heavy, I decided to drop it off at ‘Liverpool College of Art’ as soon as we got off the ferry. I took it there, and left it with the janitor, to the aptly named ‘Hope Place’, the Alma Mater of a certain John Lennon. Every second easel there had his name roughly carved into it, the collective vandalism of the students from whichever years that followed on. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Rack: Twist of fate there.
Ruin: He, the janitor, said it was too late to apply, and I would have to have an interview anyway, there was an application procedure. I left it with him, somehow convincing him to take it, and pass it forward, and headed towards the south, hitching, in the direction of Dover and eventually Bergerac. I knew I wouldn’t have dragged it much further, it would have ended up in some hedgerow or other before we reached London. Bergerac was never an intended destination, that just happened.
Eventually, when I got home from Bergerac, though I don't like calling Clondalkin home, there was a letter telling me I was being offered a studentship in ‘Hope Place’.
As it turned out, with that springing eternal, I was the only student in the year who hadn't had an interview, and this, of course, went to my head. I have always groped feverishly for any vestige that might suggest that I was capable of being somebody, though at the same time never really felt that I was worthy of it, that I had somehow slipped in under the line. Of course, at that age we never see the somebody that we actually are, it’s all aspiration. This must have generated a certain obnoxiousness, a certain strutting and insecure posturing. Well, that’s part of my excuse for me, for most of my life, anyway. This alone would have been reason for quarantine. But then even quarantine doesn’t stymie those tendencies whilst writing. It will out it seems.
I love the word ‘whilst’, I like its sound, its cadence, its longing. I read somewhere that you shouldn’t use it, it being outdated, or pretentious or somesuch (another non-word I love). But I use both, they are sort of comfort-words for me, though I don’t know why.
Hence my heading off to Liverpool, eventually (coming to a Cineplex near you), with a pregnant ‘Sorcha’, and never really returning, that final rupture. I didn’t actually leave with her, she followed on a few weeks later, before her belly started to show.
Rack: The leavings.
Ruin: That's the next part of the story, slowly getting to you, and your verklemptness?
Rack: There’s a lot in between. How old were you when you arrived in NY?
Ruin: I was 34. Yes, London was a white-knuckle ride too, of course, but a wondrous one.
Rack: That “verklemptness”. My mother had it worse than me. Always weeping at the sink and during the hymns at church.
You were so young. I would have said older.
Ruin: and there’s me just after writing that about our 'Annie' (Ernaux), that “I am sitting here with tears in my eyes”, and not wanting to write that myself.
Rack: There’s 9 years between us?
Ruin: Born in 54, met in 88.
Rack: 8 years.
Ruin: yup
Rack: but I knew you as Kim before that
Ruin: True. A hound at your heels. A bitch at your breeches.
Rack: I would love to hear the story from your side, the same story, with you getting there, and beyond, both totally contradicting each other, of course. We do that anyway. It’s that ‘Rashomon deal’, the same story told by all the protagonists, and each story being completely different from the other.
Rack: I’m going to approach it. I do remember feeling huge relief when I met with you and the joy of being able to offload my recent news.
Who was the other person with us in the Moondance?
Ruin recoils in shock and horror. Ruin recoils in shock and horror. Ruin recoils in shock and horror. Ruin recoils in shock and horror. The room spins. Breathless, he continues.
Ruin: Was there someone else in Moondance with us that day?
Rack: In my memory, yes. I could be wrong.
Ruin: That day, when you told me you had just found out? about HIV, I mean.
Rack: Yes, very recently, I think. I might have to open diary from 1988. My Pandora’s booklet.
Ruin: I have no memory of anyone else being there at all. I only saw you! This is very shocking to me, I have the memory of us there, but we are alone. I love/hate this confusion.
Rack: I found out 3 days before my 25th Birthday.
Ruin: Yes, but was it not just the two of us there at the table? It does make me less special than I was, this makes me laugh openly now, or at least chuckle away to myself. “I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, laughing”, as our Annie might have wrote.
Rack: Mmmm. I’m going to have to look. Might never be able to corroborate that one. Memoir is as much about memory as what happened, of course.
Ruin: Anyway, he or she is not getting in the book. I would scratch their eyes out (whilst in the meantime putting him or her in, right here, right now). I do 40 shades of green as well as you do, that green-eyed monster is always there.
Rack: I have a wildly unreliable memory. Partly why I resort to keeping a diary. Demented from the get-go.
Ruin: I am demented, unravelling, as of recent, but it is galloping nicely apace.
Rack: No need to be a slave to the facts.
Ruin: absolutely, as if I could tell truth from lies anyway, then throw delusions into the mix and Bob’s your uncle, and not James at all, at all.
But so far, it's all as I remember, recovering misremembered memories even, as I force myself to recall 'Maeve', and discover at the same time that I might have ‘disappeared’ some innocent bystander at that birthing table in the ‘Moondance Diner’. Some survive, some don’t. If I could forget my whole family for 40 years, I could forget anyone, even James, who trained me to forget, to never tell anyone. But no, I decided to carry him forward on my back, attached, even, ‘siamised’ beyond the call of duty for fifty years.
Rack: Yes, people say writing it dredges up a huge amount.
Ruin, Yes it dredges, but then it sets you free, adrift even, at last.
Is the way of writing okay, that weaving thing, chopping between descriptions and our conversation? I think it is. You know I like the epistolary. I remember saying in one of our first letters: “OK. I promise not to attain towards literature, but I did have this hankering Laclos’ fantasy of a book made up completely of e-mails. I'm sure it's been done already. In fact, I think you told me about one such tome previously. Anyway, my vanity couldn't accept being the lesser talent in the correspondence.”. On the 24th of November 1998, at 11a.m, to be precise.
Rack: I think absolutely.
Ruin: Tomorrow I will start to write about the fourth, and last, leaving. Then I will have a pair of bookends: A beginning, you licking your own bottom, and an ending, ‘Orphans of the storm’ arriving in Liverpool, as the closing of the first part. Then I can start to work into it.
I still think you licking your own bottom is an inspired opening, so to speak.
Ruin: I want to embrace all that new communication, though we do it in a rather old-fashioned sort of way, with punctuation and whatever
perhaps I can let that go too, in places.
Rack: Nothing wrong with punctuation. It is the tool of measuring thought.
Ruin: Yes, I know, it's considered rude in SMS's, apparently
Rack: I try not to be a snob about it. But I am. Only because it’s useful.
Oh, for god sake. Fuck them.
Ruin: But we are old geezers, so we can use 'em.
Exactly
I am sorry, but I find that full stop offensive
Anyway dearest, I am going to lie down for a few hours
afternoon nap
Ok. Going to walk the hound. xox
💪
🐕
Rack: What a fuckin day. I could write a book about it. But instead, I’m sending you an inspirational quote. Past midnight. Apologies. All round.
Ruin: Sounds like our type of girl, Lorde, Lorde. You shouldn't have your phone near the bed, I hate the thought of this waking you up, but I am compelled to send it anyway. My phone is usually on silence, and I don't get notifications. I never let the phone near the bedroom, and leave it at home, often, when we go walking. I want to read that book. Nearly finished Keegan, lovely book, but I don't want to write like her.
Caught you, sleep!
Rack: Hah! Can’t sleep. You’re right about the phone. Going to get up and deposit it elsewhere.
Ruin: groovy!
The Breech-Birth of Super-duper Male
on a half-shell (Invisible detail)...
Pre-History, and all that palaver, even.
Rack: I’m not sure if you can see it, but the writing keeps evolving. When I read the above, having just read the bones of it yesterday, I was completely absorbed and compelled to keep on reading. This whole exercise between us is hard to describe or define. I think we are doing something very good for each other. An active expression of our care for each other.
Anyway. I am a little verklempt this morning. A tear or two has been elicited from my dry old súile donna.
Ruin: I understand verklempt, and yes, I see it, both evolving and supporting each other.
Rack: Good to see the photos of your sister’s visit. How was it? Both of you have a handsome refinement that belies your beginnings (as you describe them). As if there was some lost in your mother or father’s status. That Joycean inexorable spiral downwards that his family experienced.
Ruin: Yes, I am convinced I was given away by royalty to a family of paupers, with some evil twin or other sitting on a throne somewhere.
Rack: But your sister looks sophisticated too.
Ruin: She is unbelievably right wing, Loves Gov. DeSantis, and hates Biden.
Rack: It’s like Séamus and his family. Oh!!! Yikes!
Ruin: She also thinks we are all being killed off by a Jewish Cabal. She has researched it too, apparently, she informed me.
I just smiled, inwardly aghast.
Rack: Well, appearances can be mightily deceiving. Oh fucking lordy!
How does she square your life choices with her disbeliefs?
Ruin: She loves Gays too though, her son came out as Gay recently, her only son.
"they're so gentle".
Ruin: she's in trouble when our memoir come out. No, I will leave this out, change it, not attack, find a way to understand it.
Rack: Well, there you go. Look at those 12 Republicans voting to enshrine marriage equality.
We’re you ever close?
Ruin: Yes, way back, but then I left, and when I got back there was something amiss, but that was some years later.
Rack: So, she felt abandoned by you.
Ruin: she was 14 or so, when I left, next I knew I was finding her an apartment in ‘Battery Park City’ for her honeymoon.
Rack: Have you ever asked?
Ruin: I am sure she did. They all did, feel abandoned I mean. My feeling was that at least they had each other. I was setting out completely alone. No, I have never asked directly.
Rack: Where do you fall again in the line up?
Ruin: Oldest boy, with one older sister, the other three following on, Paula next to me, followed by two boys.
Ruin: It's very hard to get anything out of her other than Oirish platitudes.
Rack: Maybe you should?
Ruin: I have had pains in my heart, and tinges in my arm all day, post-Paula panic attack, probably. Family! Spared of that one now. Paula ‘caused’ my first panic-attack. I refused to see her after that for 5 years. Having her in our apartment was the first time since that last ‘event’. Perhaps I was heading towards those palpitations anyway, but they were hastened by a very strained interaction. I will go there, if you want to understand more, but it will recur in those sixteen months I spent nursing my mother later.
Just in case, I am moving the latest writing onto that external hard drive as we speak
that's what I was doing when you popped up.
Segueing, the twist in the ‘Maeve’ story is also strange, the part I haven’t written yet.
Rack: OK, but you better not croak. You’re just getting up a head of steam. The Paris bit? Or later?
Ruin: I brought a huge heaving portfolio of art with me, one of those back-breaker over-stuffed jobbies, thinking I would drop it off in London, to apply for college there. I was lugging it with me, when Maeve turned up 4 hours late.
It was so heavy, I decided to drop it off at ‘Liverpool College of Art’ as soon as we got off the ferry. I took it there, and left it with the janitor, to the aptly named ‘Hope Place’, the Alma Mater of a certain John Lennon. Every second easel there had his name roughly carved into it, the collective vandalism of the students from whichever years that followed on. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Rack: Twist of fate there.
Ruin: He, the janitor, said it was too late to apply, and I would have to have an interview anyway, there was an application procedure. I left it with him, somehow convincing him to take it, and pass it forward, and headed towards the south, hitching, in the direction of Dover and eventually Bergerac. I knew I wouldn’t have dragged it much further, it would have ended up in some hedgerow or other before we reached London. Bergerac was never an intended destination, that just happened.
Eventually, when I got home from Bergerac, though I don't like calling Clondalkin home, there was a letter telling me I was being offered a studentship in ‘Hope Place’.
As it turned out, with that springing eternal, I was the only student in the year who hadn't had an interview, and this, of course, went to my head. I have always groped feverishly for any vestige that might suggest that I was capable of being somebody, though at the same time never really felt that I was worthy of it, that I had somehow slipped in under the line. Of course, at that age we never see the somebody that we actually are, it’s all aspiration. This must have generated a certain obnoxiousness, a certain strutting and insecure posturing. Well, that’s part of my excuse for me, for most of my life, anyway. This alone would have been reason for quarantine. But then even quarantine doesn’t stymie those tendencies whilst writing. It will out it seems.
I love the word ‘whilst’, I like its sound, its cadence, its longing. I read somewhere that you shouldn’t use it, it being outdated, or pretentious or somesuch (another non-word I love). But I use both, they are sort of comfort-words for me, though I don’t know why.
Hence my heading off to Liverpool, eventually (coming to a Cineplex near you), with a pregnant ‘Sorcha’, and never really returning, that final rupture. I didn’t actually leave with her, she followed on a few weeks later, before her belly started to show.
Rack: The leavings.
Ruin: That's the next part of the story, slowly getting to you, and your verklemptness?
Rack: There’s a lot in between. How old were you when you arrived in NY?
Ruin: I was 34. Yes, London was a white-knuckle ride too, of course, but a wondrous one.
Rack: That “verklemptness”. My mother had it worse than me. Always weeping at the sink and during the hymns at church.
You were so young. I would have said older.
Ruin: and there’s me just after writing that about our 'Annie' (Ernaux), that “I am sitting here with tears in my eyes”, and not wanting to write that myself.
Rack: There’s 9 years between us?
Ruin: Born in 54, met in 88.
Rack: 8 years.
Ruin: yup
Rack: but I knew you as Kim before that
Ruin: True. A hound at your heels. A bitch at your breeches.
Rack: I would love to hear the story from your side, the same story, with you getting there, and beyond, both totally contradicting each other, of course. We do that anyway. It’s that ‘Rashomon deal’, the same story told by all the protagonists, and each story being completely different from the other.
Rack: I’m going to approach it. I do remember feeling huge relief when I met with you and the joy of being able to offload my recent news.
Who was the other person with us in the Moondance?
Ruin recoils in shock and horror. Ruin recoils in shock and horror. Ruin recoils in shock and horror. Ruin recoils in shock and horror. The room spins. Breathless, he continues.
Ruin: Was there someone else in Moondance with us that day?
Rack: In my memory, yes. I could be wrong.
Ruin: That day, when you told me you had just found out? about HIV, I mean.
Rack: Yes, very recently, I think. I might have to open diary from 1988. My Pandora’s booklet.
Ruin: I have no memory of anyone else being there at all. I only saw you! This is very shocking to me, I have the memory of us there, but we are alone. I love/hate this confusion.
Rack: I found out 3 days before my 25th Birthday.
Ruin: Yes, but was it not just the two of us there at the table? It does make me less special than I was, this makes me laugh openly now, or at least chuckle away to myself. “I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, laughing”, as our Annie might have wrote.
Rack: Mmmm. I’m going to have to look. Might never be able to corroborate that one. Memoir is as much about memory as what happened, of course.
Ruin: Anyway, he or she is not getting in the book. I would scratch their eyes out (whilst in the meantime putting him or her in, right here, right now). I do 40 shades of green as well as you do, that green-eyed monster is always there.
Rack: I have a wildly unreliable memory. Partly why I resort to keeping a diary. Demented from the get-go.
Ruin: I am demented, unravelling, as of recent, but it is galloping nicely apace.
Rack: No need to be a slave to the facts.
Ruin: absolutely, as if I could tell truth from lies anyway, then throw delusions into the mix and Bob’s your uncle, and not James at all, at all.
But so far, it's all as I remember, recovering misremembered memories even, as I force myself to recall 'Maeve', and discover at the same time that I might have ‘disappeared’ some innocent bystander at that birthing table in the ‘Moondance Diner’. Some survive, some don’t. If I could forget my whole family for 40 years, I could forget anyone, even James, who trained me to forget, to never tell anyone. But no, I decided to carry him forward on my back, attached, even, ‘siamised’ beyond the call of duty for fifty years.
Rack: Yes, people say writing it dredges up a huge amount.
Ruin, Yes it dredges, but then it sets you free, adrift even, at last.
Is the way of writing okay, that weaving thing, chopping between descriptions and our conversation? I think it is. You know I like the epistolary. I remember saying in one of our first letters: “OK. I promise not to attain towards literature, but I did have this hankering Laclos’ fantasy of a book made up completely of e-mails. I'm sure it's been done already. In fact, I think you told me about one such tome previously. Anyway, my vanity couldn't accept being the lesser talent in the correspondence.”. On the 24th of November 1998, at 11a.m, to be precise.
Rack: I think absolutely.
Ruin: Tomorrow I will start to write about the fourth, and last, leaving. Then I will have a pair of bookends: A beginning, you licking your own bottom, and an ending, ‘Orphans of the storm’ arriving in Liverpool, as the closing of the first part. Then I can start to work into it.
I still think you licking your own bottom is an inspired opening, so to speak.
Ruin: I want to embrace all that new communication, though we do it in a rather old-fashioned sort of way, with punctuation and whatever
perhaps I can let that go too, in places.
Rack: Nothing wrong with punctuation. It is the tool of measuring thought.
Ruin: Yes, I know, it's considered rude in SMS's, apparently
Rack: I try not to be a snob about it. But I am. Only because it’s useful.
Oh, for god sake. Fuck them.
Ruin: But we are old geezers, so we can use 'em.
Exactly
I am sorry, but I find that full stop offensive
Anyway dearest, I am going to lie down for a few hours
afternoon nap
Ok. Going to walk the hound. xox
💪
🐕
Rack: What a fuckin day. I could write a book about it. But instead, I’m sending you an inspirational quote. Past midnight. Apologies. All round.
Ruin: Sounds like our type of girl, Lorde, Lorde. You shouldn't have your phone near the bed, I hate the thought of this waking you up, but I am compelled to send it anyway. My phone is usually on silence, and I don't get notifications. I never let the phone near the bedroom, and leave it at home, often, when we go walking. I want to read that book. Nearly finished Keegan, lovely book, but I don't want to write like her.
Caught you, sleep!
Rack: Hah! Can’t sleep. You’re right about the phone. Going to get up and deposit it elsewhere.
Ruin: groovy!