I am looking through Leonora Carrington Paintings. There is a book of them on the table – I think referencing an old exhibition at IMMA: Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist. I come to rest on a painting entitled ‘The Hunt Breakfast.’ It is a dark painting, a table lit in the centre, emerging from a deep mauve wash. At the head of the table stand a man-figure and a woman-figure. She is brilliant. This figure is jet black with red serpent-like horns and a triangle face . Her neck is long and bony and her arms, lithe and fragile, disappear into the background. Her singular hand is white and has a stigmata. I think: her hand is nowhere near the table, near the food. There is something regal about her.
I realise that I am seeing this woman in a very specific light: I have projected onto her, and, probably onto Leonora, my own woman -my own idealised woman. It is stopping me from viewing anything else in the painting. It traps my focus. I am not even sure if I am seeing the woman that Carrington painted or if I am embellishing it, elongating her to fit onto something preconceived.
Patricia Beer said, in reference to her 1982 poem The Lost Woman, that this is something everyone has – a woman, lost, haunting and pervasive. Perhaps ‘lost’ is misleading: Beer’s woman snaps back at her, ‘You are the ghost/ With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not lost.’ I am reminded of this phrase in relation to this essay. My lost woman is loud and formative. During the lockdown, I was forced to confront her, to look her in the eye. This essay is an attempt to illuminate this woman – my woman – and move her from my mind onto paper.
When the coronavirus first emerged as a potential threat, a friend and I exchanged a series of fantasy-emails; “Send news of London… I have taken my Most Prized Possessions and fled to the countryside…what will it all become?” Drawing up an imaginary timeline, we predicted a global shutdown, a revolution, a return to the wild. We abandoned talk of lectures and, ‘Who-is-kissing-who?’ and reported planting onions and schooling pigeons to carry letters in their beaks.
In this daydream, we thought not of practicalities – not of health or government or money. We did not consider the imminent worldwide tragedy or fear. We whispered, embarrassed by its clear emergence from privilege, that we dream of ‘Something Big’ to take us out of ‘The Normal’ and ‘The Mundane.’ We crave interruption.
Then, when the virus did really hit, this friend came to stay for two weeks. We spent them in giddy alertness. We discussed action plans, things we could do and change. The day before he left, we listened to the announcement of a UK lockdown in my dimly lit kitchen, huddled around an iPhone. It felt like the beginning of a war from a film, that this was our Anderson shelter and we needed to ready ourselves to fight.
The morning that he went home I went straight to bed and slept through the whole day and night. The next day, the house was quiet. The excitement was over and the charade up: when there is no one to watch, there is no playing house. My sister and I ceased to find one another good company. Without an outsider there to put an Enid-Blyton spin on it, the fields ceased to provide adventure. To get caught in another’s view is transformative. Without it, life in the countryside is insular. The power of the dream or a fantasy is clear, even on this level.
It is possible, here, to lose all sense that other people exist. The weather has soured. I have been pushed back into the house.
*
So, I started tidying. There was a lot to do. My family is a family of things. I had a childhood of plastic and plush that now sits in boxes. I have kept, meticulously, every notebook and diary and scrap of paper.
What becomes clear, emerging from this haphazard collection of writing, is my first and most enduring dream. She is everywhere. She stands at the edge of my bed. She wears my clothes from years ago that I had forgotten about or that I thought had been given away: like, the bridesmaid’s dress from my uncle’s wedding when I was eleven. It’s short on her. She snatches it in with a pink satin ribbon at the waist.
I shaved my armpits for the first time the day I wore that dress. It was humid and I did not want to sweat. The girl my uncle was marrying was really beautiful. My sister and I went down onto the beach and collected different, severed bits of crab that had been dropped by the birds. We arranged them on a rock as a wedding present and I remember waiting, shaking, to see if she liked it. I knew that I was short and red and unimportant as I waited by the Frankenstein-crab for a beautiful aunt-in-white to stop talking to her friends.
They were only married for three years.
My dream-woman was born from a 1994 documentary on Peggy Claude-Pierre. I found it on YouTube a long time ago. I say this, but most likely she was born before. Most likely, she was always there – lurking, fiddling. In one scene, a woman is carried downstairs and propped up onto a scale, backwards, and then sat on the edge of her bed and fed with a soft plastic spoon. She is like a fishbone: haunted and anonymous. Her face is caved inwards and her skin is white like milk. It is like she is wearing stage makeup. It is clear she is dying. A shadow with golden hair holds this dying woman in her arms and cradles her skull. She feeds her something soft and sweet (honey, maybe)-with a plastic spoon.
I remember thinking as a nine year old the same thought that melts into me now: I could be her – if I were able to shed, like snakeskin, everything that made me unlikeable or tricky. I could be clean, like that, lined, like that, correct, like that.
My woman is not entirely that woman but she has the same peeling skin. Like the crab from the wedding, she is a collage. I grew her from books and films and inner neurosis. I coloured her in with Lifetime movies and nineties Oprah specials and she shines, now, in an up-lit sort of way.
She is in my house, wearing my dress. She does not sweat.
I cannot tell how tall she is. Sometimes she seems tiny, but when she stands up straight, she can rest her palms flat on the ceiling. She has long hands and long fingers with sharp knuckles that point out, not in. Her feet are always two sizes bigger than mine. She is curved and caved and taut. In the wind, she hums like the hollow carcass of a violin. She has some vapid, sing-song name.
She thinks that she is better than me or, worse, she does not care if she is or not, for she knows that we are not equals. I would say that she is my Lacanian mirror-girl: functional and whole and imaginary, etc. but I have never looked like her, even in a mirror, even for a minute. She is the body and the bread. The soul of the whole thing is in her dancing heart.
Surely, you might say, that phrasing does not make sense. I put her together, in my head and my heart and now, here, on paper: surely it is she who does not look like me. But it is not at all clear who came first or who-created-who. I begin to think that I am no more than a pale vision that she has when she blinks too fast or gets an eyelash stuck in her tear duct. In truth, it is impossible to tell if ‘I’ exist at all. She is a character in every story I have ever written. I could never write about myself without also writing about her.
I was told, as a child feverishly seeking space and place and acceptance, that I was an anorexic. That I was too thin. This was my first real self-descriptor. How does one progress beyond that? Who am I without Her?
