Feed them on your dreams

 

I remember well the feeling of being really sick and taking care of a baby, small children – when you’ve got the flu and are too pestilent and achy and exhausted to move, it does indeed feel impossible: the little ones’ routines with their painstaking successions of trivial yet gravely consequential tasks, ad infinitum snack prep and juice dose, toy recon and bath admin, all the motion and wrangling and crisis management, the ceaseless vigilance and perpetual disarray, your newfound fervour for sleep. 

You realize why having a big extended family around makes so much sense – it’s really not a one- or two-person job. How frustrating in these ostensibly comfortable and abundant times that so many of us yet abide that most wearying deficiency – a critical absence of nearby kin. Our people are all back East, out West, down South, up North, some are overseas – and nowadays we find ourselves out of reach and unrelieved, marginally self-sufficient yet spun asunder by the dizzying tedium of early parenthood. 

I feel it is only inevitable, as every family subsides to diaspora and daily life is subsumed by fiddlesome gadgetry, that women’s bodies will evolve to grow an extra set of arms during pregnancy. It’s the only biologically rational response to modern motherhood. Maternity tops one day will have four armholes and there will be no end to the confusing advice for pregnant women about everything from throwing a frisbee to putting on a seatbelt to not constantly smacking a funny bone. A formal anatomical designation would be something like lesser medial antepartum/partum forelimbs (people would just call them “marms”), and they’d eventually fall off a few years after the baby is weaned.

I used to think it was a missed opportunity on the part of nature that this doesn’t happen, but then dealing with everything ourselves is a relatively new phenomenon: we now unfurl across ancestrally unbridgeable distances, find work and habitation, settle fondly in nodes of nuclear autonomy that will one day each unfurl anew. So I guess we should give it time – there is the incomprehensibly vast continuum of evolution to consider, and this scenario has only emerged in its latest glimmer of nanosecond. Maybe one day years and years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren may finally be well enough isolated that our genome’s best bet for survival is a handy doubling of the maternal arm. 

It's also possible that our disassociation from one another and the ludicrous overwhelm of modern life will eventually render us entirely incapable of infant care and child rearing; soon a kind of gestational overdrive adaptation will kick in, and we’ll wind up as a species bearing perfectly invulnerable young that exit the womb in the same state of development as today’s average 24-year-old. They’ll be competent and enthusiastic from moment one, singularly revolutionary in all that they do. They will drive us home from the hospital, nurse us through our postpartum convalescence with cups of instant ramen, lull us to sleep with breathless accounts of their weekend revelry. 

They’ll begin looking for work, the job market will be cutthroat and demoralizing, and then late one night they’ll stumble upon something gripping and irrefutable, a theme that rewrites the story of their lives. Bildungsroman is become Manifesto: an arresting translation of history’s shifty fine print, the final revelation of bullshit everywhere. They will devote their energies to grand pyrotechnical feats: torching our institutions, incinerating our armies of straw men, minting new currencies from the tarnished trophies of our myriad pyrrhic victories. Only two weeks old, our newborns will pledge to undo a host of our generational sins; they will see to the end of fast fashion, industrial farming, gun death, televangelism, light pollution, celebrity skincare, and more! 

We will never need to potty train them or puree their food or keep them away from things like batteries and plastic bags and light sockets. They’ll stay for about a month and then move out to fulfil their ambitions and unmake our mess. And the nest will at last be empty again.  

Get on with it

 

A generally uncool week has led me here to an uninspired Sunday morning. I am listening for the words, but they’re just not there. Cellophane dreams blew out early when I woke at six with the spaceship alarm. There was nothing left to work with. A small moon, gauzy and full, sets behind the mountain across the valley and now the sky slowly intensifies, my new favorite color: electric tangerine.

One week back from Mozambique and I’m talking to myself again, grappling with crying jags. Tangible details – dogs and sunglasses – will do this to a person. There is a growing preoccupation with changing the insular, disconnected life I’ve wound up living, tethered to this house and the kids, wrapped up in work that’s not even really mine. The plan is to try to meet people once lockdown is over, to stride out into the starry, frenzied night and find myself a friend or two.  

Also trying to work out where to set a story: USA feels unknown to me now, my position in SA irrelevantly specific. It’s possible to put things in the past, that other country, or into temporary places where nobody is meant to stay long, where nobody really belongs… it will come to me soon, I hope, just need to keep listening.

Quiet now, o foolish heart

 

And now how to tell it, the metastasizing tale? However to render the astonishing mutability, all the subtle varieties of shock? Slurs you've never heard before yet can intimately recall... There's no chance of mastery or any lasting form of defense. But my heart doesn’t seem to mind right now, has ceased, however briefly, in this obligation. I feel now often that I am mining my own life for material, that I am but a poised and acquisitive observer: at once blood and fever and gossip and ink. The challenge is in the daily framing, in deciding how best to dress the stage of the mind. And yet the heart is no actor, cannot do the seeming for long without faltering… without dreaming, without wondering. What do they laugh about? What have they shared? What carried them in the first place beyond routine, formality? And I suppose the reason that these questions persist, that this doleful preoccupation endures, has something to do with love and also something to do with ego. Love, for me, has always been tethered to language, to expression, to the ecstatic security that arises from airing our most discreet and cracked affinities: jokes, songs, abusive nicknames. How every moment but begs now for our arch, uncouth revisions... There is esteem in it for sure, and pride - an only child’s sense of jester kinship: mirth that stands in for siblinghood without the crucial other face of ever-ready, natural challenge. I have to accept that so much of love for me is about laughter and entertainment, and that perhaps my foolish ego has languished too long in a daily, nightly dream of peerless glee. Perhaps I am to be undone at last by hilarity, unlaced and flayed: it is not at all impossible that she is funnier than me. Comedians are cursed with heavy, competitive hearts, tremulous in their ambitions, ever checked by clock and hook and fellow clown; we are abominably insecure yet perversely righteous, incessantly tending to the lifeline of our act. You blink into the boiling, prismatic spotlight and will that something, anything will land, stand up. You are blinded and utterly beholden to the light. And then something lands, finally, and you’re deserving of that place, and in fact there is no you anymore or any other thing but laughter and the absolute tenet of a focused lens, a radio tuned. It happens all the time, so why should you feel special? Humans are social animals, after all, programmed on a cellular level to belong to one another. And if we are fortunate, we have many opportunities, many ways to feel replete in this instinct: families, schools, churches, pubs, volunteer fire departments. And yet, somehow, none of this is ever enough. You long for something closer, a counterpart, unfolding ally - lover, companion, cosmic match - that trusted other who makes it all seem less fraught, who is for some reason wired to bear you back to a time before language, before light, before all your snowfall jokes. Hold my hand, dear tyrant, let our fingers entwine as we walk along these cock-eyed small town streets. And let me whisper to you in our precious, only tongue... But, nevermind - there is an alarm ringing somewhere and the car guard’s dog has lost it against a mean, loose-jeaned drunk. The cook at the German place has been clocked in a fistfight and it’s ladies’ night at Mexicola. The goddamn sea will not stop churning, again and again against the uppity dune. Your phone is ringing now, my love. You have problems to solve, so answer it. Tomorrow, I will make you smile, I hope. Tomorrow I will tell you a funny story about our days before Babel, when our language was still private, before our laughter got so tired.