A Performance Yarn.
© Copyright Elizabeth Routledge
1. The Breakdown.
The woman woke with a gasp and could not fathom how she got here, at this time; that the sum of all her choices had led her to the same place as those before her; trapped in a job that brought her no joy, on a financial treadmill, exhausted, anxious and full of dread. The conveniences of the C21st had become a burden, enslaving her. She had forgotten who she was.
There was something she must do… but what? What was it? She fed and dressed the children. She prepared her face to go to work; she wiped down all the kitchen surfaces. But where were the keys? A wild anger assailed her, time was getting away on her and she liked to be on time. She was responsible, had a good protestant work ethic! Finally the keys were located; in the car, but then she got in and could not remember how to drive. She wailed like a lost child or a child who had lost something precious … but what? She realized at that moment that she could not feel herself. She touched her face, her arms– nothing! The children were frightened which enraged her even more. “I hate my Life” she screamed. The words echoed around her like a curse and she dragged everyone back into the house.
She slept for three days. The children made themselves two minute noodles and opened cans. They watched as much TV as they liked, but were afraid that their mother would never wake up. She did wake, only at 3 am when they were sleeping, curled into each other like kittens, and she looked at them with a great love tormented with fear… that she was not enough. She cried at night, alone in the dark, breathing into a brown paper bag as the silent house pulsed with the pounding of her heart.
On the third day she drove into town, with a brave face on, because that is how she had been raised… The villagers exclaimed how well groomed she always looked and the children searching for signs, were relieved. But there were still moments when she walked into a room and forgot why she was there. She sobbed with such abandon- but never in front of the children now; she had regained some control, along with a tight and brittle smile. Her flesh withered as though she was starving, food tasted like sawdust and everything was grey, then her hair began to fall out in handfuls and vanity kicked in, convincing her that she must claw herself back to life.
2. The Dreaming.
The woman started to dream such vivid dreams and strange hallucinations. Sometimes she dreamt she still smoked, long charming cigarillos, inhaling deeply, Aaaahh! Exhaling clouds of bluish smoke into foreign landscapes, incandescent with internal sources of energy; where old lovers and acquaintances tempted her with analgesic cocktails and the majestic architecture in these strange cities called her to walk and walk and walk, until she woke with aching feet. Sometimes she flew, rising just above the trees or hovering in the thermals like a diaphanous bird diving suddenly into oceans, at home in the fathoms with sea flowers, sea creatures: giant blue jellyfish and singing whales.
There was one dream which came again and again:”She is on an old fashioned, Agatha Christie train. She is sitting in the dining car drinking, carousing, flirting and shooting the breeze with the party people. Suddenly the train pulls into a station. She sees someone she knows, calling out to them … but they can not see or hear her. She can not get off the train. She turns back to her companions and they have distorted… sinister dwarfs, giants, transvestites with smeared make-up, a bearded woman and a magician with a pencil moustache who leers at her. His eyes have no light and she runs into the next carriage … more strangers, a man with a stutter, an obese woman reading a romantic novella and a thin child who will not look at her. She feels so sad. The train rattles on; flashing past people she once knew and cannot reach.” She wakes from the dream and cries out. How many days can a person weep?
3. Remembering and Grieving.
Some days she felt her ancestors around her whispering, encouraging her to fulfill their lost dreams. She started to sleep walk again, driven to complete a task that had been started by her great aunt , or waking up under the mango tree or a peach in blossom, to smell those scents again, for her uncle who’d lived in Africa. She had irrational reactions to people with Germanic accents, a febrile hatred that belonged to her great, great, great, great, great grandmother and namesake, who had fled the pogroms of Europe and sought refuge in the misty lands of The Celts.
Could she ever be free of her up-bringing, her conditioning, her ancestor’s expectations? Hers had not been a land-working people for generations, but were of the middle class: polite, contained, respectful, respectable, conscientious and proud; who planted flags in foreign lands claiming all that one can see for King and Country! Bringing civilization and improvement, taming, carving boundaries, instigating rules and laws, attaining diplomas and degrees …indulging in the arts …expressing themselves! And all the while protecting those less educated, compassionate towards those impoverished and increasingly overwhelmed as the world went on its merry, helter-skelter way.
She grieved for her twenty something self, indomitable, indefatigable, invincible! She had been so curious, hitching a ride into life’s adventures, avoiding danger by sheer audacity.
She grieved for the young woman carrying new life in her womb, birthing alone, raising her child alone. She grieved for those child-rearing years so happy, seeing the world through fresh eyes, in microcosm, the innards of a flower, the first moon, the first taste of ice cream. Oh the beauty of a baby asleep at your breast, to sit and do nothing but hold them.
She grieved for the loss of ambition. Remembered friends who came and went, family busy with their own lives, in other countries, like strangers now and yet… her blood?
She grieved for lost opportunities, the things she might have done and said, all her mistakes, foolish impulses, unkind words and wasted days.
She grieved for her children, now growing, leaving, suffering and living their own lives… Her lost youth, lost passion, firm body and young, luscious skin now mapped and etched with all her travels and sojourns.
She remembered and grieved, grieved and remembered; and her memories jumbled and chattered and danced in her brain like a curious creature locked behind bars in an artificial homeland.
4.The Yearning.
The woman felt a great yearning to be better, to evolve, to smash through this crippling paradigm, but how? She was surrounded by others like her sleepwalking through life, eager for its magnificence, eager to experience magic; and eager to meet nature halfway, to hear the wisdom of the wind and trees, birds and animals.
Like her they too, no doubt, still felt trapped. Consuming crud in plastic shiny supermarkets with cheap goods that broke, crumbled, clogged and snapped into heaps of refuse where poor children in poor nations crawled abandoned or were forced to make the cheap clothing that frayed and unraveled like her life.
Like her surrounded by stuff, stuff that they never used and collections of things: knickknacks and boxes that, like her, they would gaze into, time–consuming, mediocre, unreal plasma reality - but they had to keep up with things, because time was running out, time was running away, time poor, time is money, it’s all timely!
The woman became obsessed with the legends of 2012. She began stockpiling cans and jars in an underground bunker. She was so frightened by all the ignorance and violence around her and equally so by her own. People like her drowning in this or that addiction, or compulsion, or succumbing to mental dis-ease and cancers, or cloaking themselves in citadels of their own flesh.
Her yearning took her on long walks into the bush where she cried out to Mother Earth or the circling majestic hawk. Help.
5. The Seeking.
She began to actively seek guidance and answers. Her mission led her to psychologists, kiniesiologists, massage therapists, NLP and EFT facilitators, clairvoyants and tarot readers, astrologers and Medical Doctors who reached for a script and wrote down the name of the latest anti-depressant that the drug companies were paying him handsomely to endorse, and which he furthermore, assured her, would have no effect on her libido.
She listened to any and every bit of advice. She worried a little that she was fair game to any charlatan who saw her coming, the proverbial middle aged do-gooding white woman, gullible in her longing; as dollar signs lit up in the vendors pupils.
She took colloidal silver, chia seeds, extra omega 3 and vitamin B … all the latest super foods, super fads, just in case she stumbled across the Elixir to Life.
She planted a garden, placing the seeds under her tongue to imbue them with her DNA, watering as she showered, wiping toxins from her feet, as she spoke out affirmations and set intentions.
Finally she travelled to the Land of the Gurus, walking through markets where the heat dragged on her like a fractious child, and beggars clung to her with their huge eyes. She climbed mountains where the air was so pure it made her ill and exhilarated at the same time.
The first guru was living in a cave. He ate the moss and drank the trickle of water that ran through there. He was green. He had green skin, long green talons and dreadlocks that hung about his face like snakes, like a Gorgon, a male Medusa, who had perhaps turned himself to stone. For hours she waited for him to stir, sitting under a tree, and then in the gloaming she thought she saw a flurry of devas, twittering about his head.
He opened his eyes; their whites also green. He began to lisp in falsetto tones a Sanskrit eulogy; and then suddenly without warning pushed his arm into the wall of the cave, through the wall. He smiled. His large yellow teeth had been filed to sharp points and his tongue flicked out like a desiccated lizard. Then he started laughing, hysterically.
She left the packet of pretzels that the locals had told her to give him as a gift,
and went on to find the second guru. She heard days later that green guru had died suddenly, and all the locals found when they came to cremate his body was a pile of rough hewn emeralds.
Guru number two had an afro and a fleet of Mercedes. He also had a round, shiny face, and full lips, too full, blubbery; he looked like a huge baby! His fingers were equally bloated, pudgy and manicured. He manifested for the woman a Gucci watch; he was quite pleased with himself, and the rest of the disciples in the room’ ooohed’ and ‘aaaahed’ at his tricks. Then he handpicked the youngest, prettiest devotee and led her into his inner sanctum for a little bit of extra… enlightenment.
The third guru lived in an ashram in one of the largest, filthiest, noisiest cities in the land. She was a woman, who, it was reputed, could with just a smile heal, uplift or hypnotize. She was always followed by a bevy of believers who collected her words and her smiles like gleanings of stardust. Unfortunately (or not) for the woman, the female guru was out of the country and a heroin addict met over a chai, advised her to seek out one more teacher who also lived in that city.
She found the man making his daily ablutions in the sacred river. He was not annoyed, but he told the woman that he had nothing for her. “I am just a man” he said, “like you, living in this terrible, amazing world. Go, be the light to yourself. Be your own light.” He bowed three times repeating the one word. Namaste.He closed the door on her.
She returned to her home disappointed but curiously, calm. She regaled a larrikin she met in an airport bar with tales of her travels. He regarded her with sardonic humour. “Mate why do yer think yer need someone else to tell yer what you already know? trust yerself! Don’t give it away.” Then he leaned in and whispered in her ear “There are Secret Masters everywhere, but don’t follow anyone, be brave, ‘Toughen the fuck up’!” and he left with a cheeky grin.
6. The Surrender.
It’s always good to return home after travelling. The woman woke in her own bed and Let Go of all her striving. She embraced who she was, all her stories. She surrendered to a new journey in growing old. She forgave herself, was kinder to herself and her body, when it let her down… she let it lie down and rest. She softened, succumbed and stretched into new territory.
She took pleasure in simple things, the birds in the early morning, the changing skies and seasons. She stretched her body and felt it pressing into the earth which pressed back in greeting. The first swim of the season set her skin tingling. She sought solace in serving soulful meals that took all day to prepare, with herbs from her garden. She savored her first cup of coffee and hot showers and those moments where she felt in the flow. She was happy with an immense gratitude.
7. The Celebration.
At the end of that year she found herself in a beautiful place, an Auracaria forest where the bunya and the hoop pines sighed in the wind. People had come together to dance to house music, jazz, doof and folk music, whatever resonated in their souls. The woman thought they were dancing into being a ‘homo luminous’, or was that just another illusion to comfort from the truth - that we just don’t know… Then the chorus of an indie singer rang clear through the glade “When I grow up I’m gonna be an old woman…”
She smiled and meditated on the mélange of music that floated around her conjuring emotions, inexpressible desires and essences, yet remained remote from life’s pain. She wondered whether music was the key to the heavens and then… was distracted by the elemental call of the drums, a mass jamming session of djembe, conga and tabla, calling her to the dance.
She danced amongst those high on life and other things, and as they danced in unspoken celebration of being human, it’s pleasures and pains; the crumbling edifices of a millennia of thought gave way to a clarity, as the world crashed in on her and she was the world , she was the woman on the other side of the globe sighing, a war flaring, a man dying ,a baby crying… our individuality is but a guise in time and fear is time, and time is thought and illusion … and her brain cells exploded with the half remembered knowledge of bliss and she felt that she could dance all night !
And she heard in the shivering pines the voice and last words of the reluctant guru, whispered from behind the closed door.
BE AT ONE… NOT ALONE … ALL ONE. ALL ONE… WITH LIFE.
A wo/man woke with a gasp….
Prologue / Epilogue: (Not performed as part of story)
This is not an apocalyptic story, it is not about global warming, global financial collapse or massive solar flares that destroy our technology reverting us to bygone eras; though all those possibilities exist in the subtext.
It is a story about endings, beginnings, eternal be comings and constant beings in motion, perfect-in-motion. If we are co-creators of our own reality it offers … a meditation.
Like the 7 Stages of Grieving, The 7 Elements of Becoming* twist and turn and repeat themselves in a helix, or the sacred serpent devouring its own end in an endless cycle.
We feel that the lure of pleasure and the wonderment of love can never unite our earth with our glimpses of spirit, can never break through in conscious evolution beyond technology into something grander and more profound, which we have not the language for and maybe the symbols of speech are not the key … So we spin between essence and form, security and freedom.
We feel that we are no more than animals programmed by our genes, our hormones and our instincts, like creatures on a giant wheel in a giant circus, full of wonder, sparkling lights and glorious spectacle but longing for something we can barely describe or understand … peace, bliss, ecstasy, stillness… the liminal space, the threshold, the event horizon … to remain poised and certain, secure and comforted; but the whirling begins again and we accept that we are part of an evolving universe and must imagine ourselves into the future.
*
1. Breakdown; 2. Dreaming; 3. Remembering & Grieving; 4. Yearning; 5. Seeking; 6. Surrender; 7. Celebration.
