Tag: Mary Oliver

Ignorance and Hormones

 ‘Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking and touching and loving…’ Mary Oliver

My impulse is to say I know nothing, but that’s not true. I know things. We all know things. Some we know with almost absolute certainty no matter what philosophers might say about the nature of reality and its inherent uncertainty.

Other things hint at us. We might fathom something is going on or something is there, but we cannot be certain. 

When I was small, I knew almost nothing unless I learned it by rote, piggy backing on the shoulders of others. I could retrace their words out loud and this way sound as though I had some knowledge. But understanding was something else again. 

Understanding came late to me. It did not reach my shores until as late as my early thirties when pennies of understanding began to drop. Not everything, mind.

There were some basic things I understood.

A crying baby needed comfort, and how to offer this comfort, but I did not understand why lightning strikes precede the boom of thunder. Something to do with the speed of light. I have no idea why there’s a difference. Between light and sound, and my geography is appalling.

The other day I pored over maps with my visiting five-year-old grandson who is interested in all things, animal and land. He asked which country began with the letter L. I imagined because his name begins with an L. I could only think of Lithuania. But no idea where it was located on the map we laid out on the table. In the form of 25 large jig saw pieces, all connected to reflect the world globe. 

It only showed the continents in bold, and excluded the names of all other places. I couldn’t even locate the Netherlands, my parents’ birthplace, relative to the broad outline of Europe.

The only country I can map out with any degree of accuracy is Australia and even then I have trouble situating places like Cairns and Darwin, the Northern Territory. And please do not talk to me of places north, south, east and west. I have almost no concept of such directions in the abstract. 

I know the zones when I stand in my house. Can get some sense of where to point my finger when it comes to the sea in the south; where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But even then, even as I know the north is the opposite of south, it still feels wrong to point in this direction. Even as some of my children live in the north. And I wonder from whence such ignorance derives. In other words, why I should be so stupid when it comes to important matters of place. 

Why did I not pay more attention when we studied geography at school all the way up to my fourth form, year ten today? I remember rote learning the imports and exports of countries by heart, their population size, and the like. But it was knowledge I could not retain even now as I try to evoke images. Mostly it was things like coal and steel. The great necessities of the twentieth century, the stuff that today might be killing us.

When you’re a child and young person living in a type of ignorance about the world around you there’s a sense of standing on shaky ground. 

The same with my body. I did not understand how it functioned. The fertility cycle in females baffled me. All those hormones at work to produce things like a fertile ovum. The luteinising hormone through the fallopian tubes. Gigantic words that I could not attach to any images even as I write here. 

That’s the trouble with hormones. I have no image of them. Are they like sprinkles of hundreds and thousands that enter our blood streams? Are they like spurts of liquid from a water pistol? Or do they shed into our blood stream like those new-fangled sheets of laundry powder you can buy in the supermarket that dissolve in water to clean your clothes.

I bought a pack of laundry sheets recently because they argue they’re better for the environment and don’t make so much mess, at least for top loading washing machines. They seem to work.

They remind me of the hosts we swallowed at Holy Communion, only they’re much bigger. Square, white and fragile, they crush easily in my fingers. 

Are hormones like this? Are they invisible to the human eye? I expect so if they’re small enough to enter our blood streams to make a difference to our bodies. 

When I was eight and recognised how useless I am in the body God had given me. In those days I blamed it on God. I decided to practice the art of running. There was a laneway at the back of our front garden that ran the length of a block all the way through to Alexandra Avenue, the road that ran parallel to our home in Wentworth Avenue. It was knotty with grass tufts and rutted dirt on either side where cars could drive. It sheared off at one point into the driveway of one of the houses on the left and had other tributaries on to the line of houses that ran in front on Canterbury Road. To my short eight-year-old legs it was at least a mile long. To run the length and back was a mastery. 

I coaxed my younger sister to act as timekeeper and every evening after school before dinner, before my belly was heavy with food, I got her to stand sentinel as I ran my laps. My time never improved and my determination and hers lasted only a week or so before I decided my fate was sealed. I would never be a runner, able gazelle-like to cover vast tracts of land, land I could not even identify. No matter how hard I tried. 

Ignorance is a funny thing. It can inspire you towards a deep curiosity and will to know more, or it can leave you feeling trapped in a confusing world that refuses to yield its secrets. 

For a long time, I elected to stay in that world, relying on rote learning to get me through. But once I reached university and discovered rote learning was not enough, I was forced to take a stand. 

Drop out or begin to understand. I chose the latter – or it chose me – but only after tumbling many times on the way to knowing just a tiny amount, enough to get me by. 

A child in transit

There was the time, many years ago, when I woke one morning to a dream. One that was murky and unsettled in the way of dreams and the only thing that remained were the letters of one word. PHALANX.

At the time I had no idea what it meant. I was not even sure it was a word.

I took it to my analytic session the next day. Mrs Milanova sounded intrigued. It was indeed a word and she was surprised I did not know its meaning. A line of men, usually a term used in war.

Vintage engraving of a Macedonian Phalanx. The phalanx was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar weapons.

It’s not a word we encounter often in the everyday speech of our lives and in later years I came to imagine I first saw it in my eighteenth year when I studied books like Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin. 

Phalanx is a word that must have featured often in Virgil’s many discussions on the antics of the armies, the language of battle.

Dreams are like that. I wake with a start and Mary Oliver’s poem comes into my head ‘One day you finally knew what you had to do…’

Get up and now despite it being the first day of holidays.

Get up now because your youngest daughter is about to travel in a car with family friends and drive for seven hours and all day long she will be there in the back of your mind in the way each of your children are there in the back of your mind when they travel far from home. Whether in a car or on a plane or boat.

The sensation is the same, at least until they reach their destination, and your mind can settle into the usual stuff of life. 

A child in transit is a scary thing. A child who might not reach her destination. A child who takes themselves far from you. As each child must.

And Mary Oliver’s words come back to me: ‘though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice’. 

Their bad advice on how to live your life, for Mary Oliver on how to save your life. Your ‘one precious life’. 

There’s not a lot to it in the scheme of things, this one precious life. Not a lot to hold onto but it’s the most you have in life, this one precious life. 

Use it wisely. Whatever bad advice those voices throw at you. Whatever admonitions come your way.

In school holidays I read the Scarlet Pimpernel in advance of my year ten days and took notes at the end of each chapter as a refresher for when we would study the book in the year to come. The Scarlet Pimpernel, a dashing man who saved the lives of those hapless royals in fear of the guillotine. 

I tried to imagine the world of these people, alongside the images of those old hags who sat knitting beside the guillotine, teeth rotted in their mouths as they crowed with delight whenever a royal head fell to the ground at their feet. There was much trampling of horses’ hooves in the night, and many clandestine meetings behind the backs of those who sought their revenge. 

It taught me about the confusion you can encounter between good and bad.

Why should I identify with those flamboyant royals with all their money when the peasants were starving? But I did. 

Around this time my mother began her special pleading for my father. He was troubled, she told us. He’d had a latch key childhood. A terrible time with parents who were never there for him.

Mother Mary John’s pronouncements came into my head. The colours yellow and purple when placed together signify an unhappy childhood. It became a secret code in my mind and I used these colours often in my childhood illustrations, a hint to passers by, a hint to the nuns and priests that I too had endured an unhappy childhood but I was nothing like the royals in The Scarlet Pimpernel. 

Their fate was worse unless the Scarlet Pimpernel could save them. I was more like the wretched peasants hell bent on revenge against those who had wronged them. Hell bent on letting those, including my father, know how much I had suffered. Only I could not let my father know these things. His vengeance was greater than mine. He smashed into walls. He stripped himself naked to punish us with the sight of his unclothed body. He cursed ny mother as a whore. He threatened to be rid of us all, one by one beginning with my mother, going through me and my sisters and ending up with my brothers.

And my brothers could hardly form a phalanx against him, strong man that he was.

We could only do our best to survive our one precious life.