three drafts of the same poem: Drew Connor Holland

Concerning three drafts of the same poem

When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

I don’t believe in ashes; some of the others do.
I don’t believe in better or best; some of the others do.
I don’t believe in a thousand flowers or the first robin
of the year or statues made of dust. Some of the others do

- Fanny Howe I carried your name

like a huge shield.
- Susan Howe

In the future all our love will have been proven as an accumulation strategy; the source a place we can all recognise from the heart but cannot bane, a well-spring of recogniseable materials. Over time we respond to the ineffability of this call and interpret it as a test.

My grandmother on my mothers side, in times of need, then ordinary times, not so ordinary times, in times of trouble, then, in all the empty space that remained, took us children that were not hers but were her progeny, told my working mother: I will raise these children like they were mine. To have been told this would have been the relaying of obvious information; in this evidence I am not the only component. On either side I have two siblings. On no more than 5 days a week we would have seen her more than our own parents. If I am being indulgent I will ask people to guess who is the oldest. A fun game! If I were to ask them to compare details, it may be the case that we find overlaps, and on other days, wide berths between the kind of descriptions we give to those years. Our innerness is our protection. Conflict rarely comes from the trouble that might arise between our testimony.

Still when I described the nature of her care, on the phone to my own mother recently, she said she had offered those exact words as a way to countenance assumed fact. The world is a blueprint, you look at others around you and think it is only the makeup of your life that is true, and then you grow old and try to accomodate the million ways it is not. These divisions challenge the rigour of our value systems. Other children were not raised, strictly, by their grandparents. It helps to be able to describe the things you can do to others.

On more than one occasion when I was old enough to look like her son we might have been out at the central markets. We might have been out somewhere at the local deli which always felt somewhat unilluminated, pellucid, for all that it was worth. The aisles were safe from the harsh sunlight of the outside, posters and great plastic and rubble doing its best to keep the temperature inside chill. You’d look to them and see the faint outlines of Italian branding, green colour filtering the space to make it feel, almost, somnolent. A shopkeeper said to me - here is one for you, and one for your mother. She handed over two tangerines. I immediately corrected her, this is not my mother, though to my grandmother the shopkeeper appeared deferential. Who was I to decide how true the category might be? Perhaps expecting something closer to an exclamation, a rebuttal, the shopkeeper was instead met with an unblinking woman. Her image never seemed as clear to me then; she could only smile in response to such an assumption, that expression a break from the expected. It strikes me as incomprehensible that my grandmother would have been in her late 40s when I was born. Impossibly young! That was how she appeared to others, only her style betraying her age. Jacqueline Rose writes that the figure of the mother is widely understood - or misunderstood - as the person who repairs the world to make it safe, but by asserting my self worth through their own acts of preservation I understood grandmothers as something else. Like lighthouses, maybe: they could have done nothing but beamed their light through the world, offering no movement, lighting the way while you move toward the source which teaches. They may do this simply by being their best selves. Years have passed before one can realise, up late at night, that such a thing is in itself an act. I wonder why they seem so much more secure in their role even without the privilege of experience?

We remain lucky to know our grandparents long into our adult lives, if we are lucky enough to know them at all. Lucky, lucky, lucky - it felt like the only word I could think of the other day, when at my other grandmothers funeral people sobbed around me, and I felt paralysed, because it describes nothing. It gestures to the after effect. This sentiment, a divining rod toward the remnants of which we’ve lost. You cannot attach to it. You are powerless to take it with you.

My grandmother on my father’s side had a long commodore, a white vehicle which toward the end of her life would not have been driven more than once or twice a week, at most. Around the body, it felt more like a warm capsule than a car. I can remember it because it might have been sitting in the driveway when our uncle ran over her small terrier jack, breaking it’s back. He was destined, I suppose, for less worldly things. Strange - he seemed absolutely devoted to them. Jack, who delighted in catching vermin, small birds, maybe even some domesticated ones, rats and rodents and mice, even some domesticated ones, did not survive, and he is in heaven now playing ball. A Celtic name, it mirrors the commonalities of its parent name, John: two of the most shared, proletarian ones to have. Soon after, my grandmother got a new terrier. His name was jock. Some use one vowel, some use another. As it were, my grandmother’s methods at naming her pets were not exhaustive.

I recognise that car in my mind, now, because it is sentimentality manifest, something I would have not been able to say if I had been in it even more than 10 times; it had not bypassed the ongoingness of my own storytelling to become a backdrop. The power of any attachment is part forgery, only part real, the product of having to invest so much of my mind in making up the work of creating it. When I was back in that town for the funeral my aunt Jenny wanted to discuss what might happen to it now that she had died. She was in the middle of saying, a lady across the road not even ten doors down but maybe she moved since was need of a car that was not high powered, would make use of it, though I already felt myself growing defensive. I wished I could extricate myself from the sticky, unhelpfully finite way I’d learned to dictate values, to myself only, to say that I don’t believe in inheritance for marxist reasons but that I wanted something to remember her by, that objects are only objects and assigning familial value to them incites a paradoxical and real distance from the real person but that I wanted to have souvenirs from another’s life. What I wanted was to take it for a test drive. I cleaned some of the outside, extricating webs and a few spiders, though in a single day, Jenny said, given that this was in the country, they would return. I noticed her familiar pillows in the back seat, took them inside. In the glove compartment I found a mask, beautifully sewn. Why did I instinctively open it? I unfolded the two halves of the mauve fabric and saw the imprint of her lipstick on the inside of the mask. Something about it felt so fresh, this little anxiety of colour in a place I thought she couldn’t have recently been, intensifying a contradiction. It was that, small little discovery, absolutely mere, that brought the whole of her presence into the car, she was entirely there; a second ago she was being lowered below the astroturf. Now she was in the seat beside me.

It set me off. I had not been able to grieve - the grieving had found it’s tangled way back to me. It exists, of course, but the images it takes are ours to make up out of physical matter.

For some reason I thought to wait for nightfall. That is when I would move outside; that is when I would teach myself to operate the car and figure out how to turn the lights on. You look, for some reason, to the dashboard. You turn “a switch.”

My grandmother on my mothers side has a habit of correcting gravity’s mistakes. If a penny has fallen innocently from a shopper’s pocket, she will spot it and turn it the right way up before going on her way. (In these moments she is like secondary player in a Scorcese film that has fled the scene, and I am taken aback, in that distance assigning my own knowledge to her character like I am completing a character study.) These flippant decisions amount to, well, not much. A change in it’s citizens luck could mean the difference between finding yourself a millionaire or a pauper; it could mean not distinguishing one day from another. It is a common understanding that finding a stray penny is the most obvious sign of good luck, excepting that of the stray eyelash (though I think that is a wish), or the pigeon shitting on your school jumper, in third grade, while you steeled yourself in anticipation of that first bite of a finger bun, as if you were a cruel joke told somewhere between the seventh episode of Kath and Kim (which sounds like bad luck, but isn’t.)

Walking together one day across the strip of a suburb well known in Adelaide for having homed our most camp premier, (and one of the most bisexual premiers, who is more famous for wearing fruity little shorts and Bowie-esque expressions than he is for his peculiar, overzealous form of democratic socialism that involved spending way too much money) a suburb favoured for it’s cosmopolitan nature and free-spiritedness, at least in the minds of those above the age of 35 who found home decorating a worthwhile pastime, my grandmother came across an unlucky penny, facing incorrectly, which is to say, face down. Queen Elizabeth, who had still some degree of reign over royal affairs and appeared nationally on cheap rags for pensioners, pensioners who technically fulfilled the websters dictionary definition of modern terrorist, had hid herself away from the rest of the world on that overcast day. Nan paused, as if in the middle of a thought, then bent down to flip the coin over. Going to the trouble of actually flipping it over so that it might create good luck struck me as an obvious quirk. I immediately made a mental note of this behaviour: hilarious. “Now it’ll be good luck for somebody else.” She explained.

I have not seen many a 5 cent piece since then, but it is my ongoing project to devote myself enough to my surroundings with enough enthusiasm and clarity so that I might begin to see them everywhere. This project has largely been unsuccessful. Even on the mornings when my phone sits uncharged, when I am less inclined to check it habitually throughout my stroll of the suburb, I am unlikely to come across forms of good luck as they appear in the terrestrial world.

My grandmother on my fathers side instilled in me an appreciation for the function of “community.” When it comes the the deployment of the word itself, it’s shape rather than it’s content, I have certain doubts. Common amongst my generation is the fixation on it as a stand-in for a nebulously positive, collective feeling; there is no possibility for it to be located amongst any compassionate practicality, anything more than a suggestion, a half accomplished idea or meaning. Theorists argue that the primary way of arranging a self was once character, then personality, and now - I would argue - identity, so community begins to look, against our better instincts, like tidy categorisable consumer groups who look exactly like us. Generational politics leans into this abysmal framing. Helpful, in some ways, to have felt the guilt of only fooling yourself.

In the face of self serving language, which we have all begun to understand as powerful, it’s utility stands no chance. Once we have used the word in a descriptive way to dress our experience, (say, online) the dopamine is released; it follows through from its source to its destination without any idea of what is compromised. There is little reason to go through with the execution. One feels a little empty having performed in such a way, as the actual rewards of being loved, seen, encountered, and situated in a community, an actual community! are replaced by the more fleeting feelings of having imagined themselves in one. It is no surprise, then, that “imposter syndrome” (more accurately understood as the feeling that comes from having decieved oneself) has become the prevailing folly of our time.

Beverly seemed to know the whole town. She seemed to understand who married who and what their occupation was at this time and how long it lasted; she was liable to keep both herself and others in check. These entanglements, from the view of an outsider, may have looked a little strange Upon meeting her, a friend expressed their surprise at how able she was to recall how so and so looked on this day, who fell in the lake at someone’s christening, who made an appropriate comment at this time at the bowling club, who came in from which town on this month to claim which home, who showed up to the birthday of her 4th grandchild; to be accounted for in this way did not just enable belonging but the more neglected, but no less vital effect of enlarging one’s memory. It keeps you on your toes. This practice has the ability to make jewels out of time, one’s attention sharpening their glow beyond their destiny as cheap replicas. This attention is the kind that grants meaning. It is helped by the simple act of record keeping. You can assign your knowledge to external outposts. Her sense of space and time was dutifully accounted for, less able to be mythologised for one’s benefit (and stripped from others.) I might have thought that it would alleviate responsibility from tracking it yourself, but the act of recording sharpened one’s muscle so that you could recall it, being it forth once more as if it was your own event: finders keepers. Records are kept in written form, but you need not be the one doing the writing, if it can be called that - typing is a form of recording. My cousin said that there was many places in the house where she had hoarded all the usual ephemera one uses to keep track of things; dated letters, documents, birthday cards, funeral notices. One week after her passing I opened up the cupboard in her spare room and encountered the utmost limits of her world.

The years had passed, almost passing me by, and I felt a sense of melancholy about being soon forced to catch up with them. “A vision of life changing because we do nothing new, only shed some old detriment, gleams and beckons.” Writes Sarah Nicole Prickett. “But in the psyche as in the grandparents’ house, the most useless things are thrown out with the greatest reluctance.”

It helps, too, to be an enormous gossip, though she always had the dignity of knowing who to tell and what not to tell. Having worked at the telephone exchange early in her career as a mother, she had probably heard enough secrets to last a few lifetimes. All it took was one. When that one life ended, my dad said at her funeral that she probably took many of those secrets to her grave. As protection.

My grandmother on my mothers side instilled in me the value of waking early, catching the animal of the dawn’s open with your fingers, how you might grip it by its throat but softly now, see that you have done it, gaining temporary control over the ceaseless moment, excised it from your responsibilities. It will offer, if you are up for it, frigidity. It’s a dusting of frost on your miniature suburban lawn, and microscopic layers like icicles across your plants; it will gather across the herbs in your pet garden. It will slick the thatches on wood with the finest of dew drops. It douses the air with a moodiness you might have once thought to resent about its timing, plumes of something, condensation yes but something more, barely fragrant, rising from your mouth and nose. Gradations of wakefulness becomes its game, and once you get in and amongst it, taking tentative steps around the edges, all you can think of is how little this will last, how precious the stillness, the birdsong, actually is. It might bite, if you step outside, it’s wintery sting, but having known a hard thing that early will make all endeavors henceforth in the day more possible. Wim Hof, that famous spokesperson for early morning cold showers, might agree.

Maybe she was not teaching me the power of the morning, or of being in the garden, as I had thought but of being awake in the morning, specifically in her garden. When I am in other places, other beds, I struggle to determine the force which she rightly pledged herself to. The other mornings do not shape up.

I have been following this screed, my grandmothers distant echolocation: telling me what I have to do. Yet, I am a horrible student, and a much worse riser. How would I describe her? I would use words like attentive, kind but firm, often unadorned, hardy, more like a much older sister than a guardian. Has the temperament of a teacher. Has the temperament of someone who is used to giving orders in a non-corporeal way. Diligent, perhaps in another life, communist. Even now I am setting an alarm to give me the minimum amount of sleep (8 hours.) What feels like the average amount, when restricted to those contained hours where only such a thing is possible, is never really enough.

My grandmother on my fathers side was, in her youth, a great swimmer. At her funeral I said her languid, unhurried way of moving through the world as an adult seemed so obstinate, real, unshakeable, that I struggled to imagine her carving herself through the water, much less anything else. The place where I am from carries a great river through its provincial identity. I could have never imagined swimming in it. It carries the river as if the passageway from one inlet to another was a quill forging out some kind of falsified idea of a country prior to “discovery.” Note how euphemistic some words sound, based on the weight on their consonants, and how their pronunciation deftly evades the palmisest of a well written sentence.

When my brother cut his knee open on a splintered branch, the wound so deep that blood no longer leaked and all once could see was congealed fat and exposed bone, she did not call for help. I could only have looked at it, and gaped (indeed, I probably did that, and not much else but use my 6 year old mind and voice to describe how disgusting the colours looked to the one suffering from them.) When she went on her way to get assistant, she did not heed common advice to “run, not walk” to the hospital. She sauntered off down the lane, her silhouette disappearing into the sun like a character in a Western.

Perhaps she had a conditional, as of then not understandable resistance to pain, something my child logics could not find themselves in.

There is no such thing as a pain threshold, my sister said, in response to some offhand thing my dad had likely said on the topic, driving us back from that town. It is disproven, we don’t need to go over this. The land in those parts is like the flatlands of a place on Mars, utterly dry and swamp-like at the same time, the result of “the biggest meteor to ever hit earth” impacting there millions of years ago. My sister’s tone was not insistent, incorrigible - it was final. As if enduring various major unthinkable traumas throughout one’s life could ever be measured in such a term. That is always the word. Some opt for wound, and though I like the way it denotes something physical, as in need of attention, treatment, speculation, care, and recovery time, I prefer the way my dad described her succession of losses - the loss of her young brother, chronically ill, at the age of 30, her parents soon after, my dads hand (severed in a word accident) her son to a car crash at 55, then his wife at 60, then her husband at 75 - as arrows in her heart. It conjured the image of that life saving organ punctured, adhering to itself and its mechanical parts but not bleeding, only compromised, slowed. The image is not sterile, but full of its intertwining associations. Near mythological. Post-Catholic. Assumptions of a medieval conflict abound. I suppose now I understand why she chose not to run.

– Jonno Revanche