supplicium post mortem

Today I received an email from Chris Baty, Daddy of NaNoWriMo. Maybe you received one, too. Here is how it began:

I ran into your 2009 NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, and it said that you two are currently “taking a break.” I offered my condolences and mentioned that I’d probably be seeing you today. It quickly scribbled out a note for me to give you. The note seemed kind of personal, so I didn’t read it. Here it is!

“Hi! Come back to me. I’ll be better this time, I promise!”

Maybe Chris sent this email to every one of the 166,700 participants, or perhaps he limited it to the 32,000 ish “winners”. Whatever. He’s trying to encourage people to finish what they began. My book and I are indeed currently “taking a break” for the holidays, but it’s like the kind of break M and I used to have to take in the first year, when he was still living in Englandland. Anyone who’s ever carried on a long distance love affair will know what this feels like. Time is always your enemy. It’s forever and ever before you see each other again, and then when you’re together, time evaporates. Even after he had moved here and moved in with me, I would still feel traumatized when he had to travel, even for a short time like a week. On some level, I think, I couldn’t accept that I really had him–and since that sounds as though I considered him a possession, let me rephrase: I couldn’t entirely accept that something this good, someone this good, far and away the best thing that had ever happened in my life–that it was for real, and wasn’t going to be taken away like other good things. That I could rely upon it.

As I’ve written before, we got married after being together six years, and we were married for seven years before he died. I think it was really only towards the end of that, in the last couple of years of marriage, that I began to treat him–us–as a real, permanent, true, reliable thing. The rooms inside me that reserved themselves, reluctant to surrender to the good thing lest it disappear, even they gave in. When he died, I found I didn’t have anything reserved anymore. All of me was with him. We had become us.

I am thankful that I haven’t become the kind of person who is afraid to give in like that again. I want to. I need to. I was more myself then, more truly me than I’ve been before or since.

long winter, long path

We are knee deep in winter. I thought last winter was the longest winter of my life, but now, here is another one, no less cold, no less long. The thought of my book sending me a little note saying, Please come back, I’ll be better this time–it makes me cry because I love that book, and I haven’t left it, I would never leave it, and it doesn’t need to try to be better for me, because I love it in all its messiness, and it’s up to me to clear the beds around it so it can come up and grow right.

But if there was someone to take a note to that other shore for me, I would write the same thing to him: Please come back to me. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I won’t fight for so long. I won’t fight at all. I won’t work so hard at stupid things. And did you know, yesterday when I had the Host in my mouth, all I could think and feel was you, your tongue on my tongue, you inside me, and it felt like you were there somehow in that melting, wine-tinged substance in my mouth. If you would come back I would kiss you all the time. I would make love to you all the time. I want to touch your eyelids, your cock, your hands, your bottom, every bit of you, even where your hair is thinning and where the skin is red from your wrist watch. I’ve learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’m smarter now. I can do more things. I take up more of the bed, but I’ll move over again. Your son has got so tall.

Please come back. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I promise.

What has Casey Morgan been up to the last thirty days? Has Supplicium Post Mortem indeed died, or is it like the plant life all around us here in Gotham, dead-looking, but not in fact dead? As with the plant life, only time will tell.

The short answer to what Casey has been up to is NaNoWriMo. Don’t run away just yet. Rest assured this is not one of those posts that will go on at length about how Stressful, how Angst-ridden, how Amazing-Super-Awesome, how Challenging this Incredible-Amazing-Super-Awesome-Herculean-Insane-Really-Insane month was. No offense to any NaNo pals, but even when I feel that way myself, reading about it from other people makes me secretly want to slap them. So, I won’t whitter on with the breathless, flushed, nauseatingly healthy glow of the physically fit after a bracing run. Screw those people (again, no offense to the fit amongst you).

As you might have gathered from the NaNo widgets, I did in fact “win”. That’s right, kids, I am a Winner. Please remind me of that when I feel like a Loser, which is pretty much all the time. When M and I used to play, often we would have to time-slip a scene. For instance, maybe the board said Marky was to report to TL at 7.30 pm for a Report, but then when 7.30 came around, M wasn’t in the right headspace, and since I wasn’t willing to have TL take the rap for screwing around with kids’ Reports, we just time-slipped the scene, i.e. did it another time, but said it was the original time. When you’ve got a constant fluid narrative going on—some of it actually acted out, some of it just discussed with each other—the time slip is an indispensable tool for keeping play and life in balance.  So (this was not actually a non-sequitur) if the actual completion of the 50,000 words was every so slightly time-slipped by a few hours (but less than 12), because we found it shockingly difficult to pull the kind of late hours we used to pull, well, then, the Office of Letters and Light* neither knew nor minded. Anyway, since we were officially NaNo rebels, writing the 50K on a pre-existing project, the little time-slip fit right in. And the point is that we wrote that many words, new words, and more importantly, we finished the key plot arc in the book. Win. *rotates finger ironically*

Depression, anyone? I was talking to my spiritual director about the annoying neutrality that has ensued. I ought to feel at the very least grateful because I wrote more on my real writing in November than I wrote since M died. I wrote a piece of narrative I’ve been thinking and wondering about for more than ten years. I’ve been praying for help getting that writing started again, injecting some life there, if possible. And, look, it happened. So why does it feel like it’s nothing?

My spiritual director is wont to draw upon literature for illustration (whether he does this always or just with me, I don’t know), and his view was that a) feelings at the end of things were unpredictable, and b) not being able to value the valuable was, simply put, a maneuver of evil upon us when we are vulnerable. He recalled The Screwtape Letters, which I adore. In them Lewis so dramatically and comprehensibly helps us imagine the way evil works upon us. I love Lewis’s imagining of Satan as a kind of drab, far-removed civil servant jeffe, Screwtape. The hapless Wormwood is coached on his almost medical mission viz. his Patient (i.e. the person he is attempting to corrupt). Screwtape and Wormwood are not inspiring murder, rape, fornication, theft, genocide, destruction, or anything particularly dramatic, but instead they work upon the Patient by gently suggesting things to him that lead him by hairs away from what is true and ultimately good.

by Moro Rogers http://kambodiahotel.blogspot.com/

So here am I, 50K later, and do I feel satisfaction at good work? Do I even feel gratitude? No, I don’t, because the Wormwoods of this world are whispering in my brain: It’s not that big of a deal. You’ve done that before, so big whoop. 50,000 horrible words are nothing to be proud of. You may have written all that, but it’s not a book, and since you remain entirely confused, will probably never become one, especially as the one person you could rely upon for good advice is dead. And anyway, even if you did finish it, it will just go the way of the last one—nowhere.

Recognizing this as a form of evil helps, I think. Self-doubts, perhaps, ought to be analyzed, disputed, argued around. Evil, however, must simply be turned from. And so I turn. It hasn’t brought an onrushing of joy. I’m not sure I’m capable, yet, of such an emotion. But it has allowed me to start rereading the drek that was so unbelievably bad it felt that my fingers should fall off from typing it. And, you guessed it, the drek is not as bad as it seemed at the time. In fact, it’s good in places. I say this not to brag, but to encourage those of you who wrote some or all of the 50K, but are so embarrassed by your efforts that you can’t bear to go back and read it. Something happens to work written that fast. It may not be brilliant, and large swaths of it may call for laughter, but when you go back to it, the writing will contain things you have no memory of putting there. So, if you don’t reread, you can’t enjoy them. Message: man up and read the shit. If you are thinking to yourself, Well, it’s fine for Casey to say that, she’s a good writer, but I’m not, I have one word for you: Screwtape.

Those of you who aren’t into all this writing business, normal service will resume… at least I hope it will.

* The HQ of NaNoWriMo

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. The motto of Peter Donne’s confessor when he entered the monastery, thirty-nine years old, hot-headed, clever, bereaved.

The Abbot at Lunsford had taken particular interest in him, as perhaps he ought, Peter being his nephew. He had persuaded Peter to come to Lunsford and then assigned him Barnabas for his confessor.

“He’s tried to harm himself,” the Abbot told Barnabas.

“With intent?”

“I fear.”

Barnabas intertwined his fingers and exhaled. “Will you permit the Norwich Discipline?”

The Abbot hesitated, a qualm for his nephew, but then nodded, recognizing what could be the only hope for his novice.

Days for Peter began an hour before anyone else rose. Barnabas woke him and supervised his milking of the cows. In that bleary-eyed hour, Barnabas exacted a kind of confession as he demanded an account of the night’s dreams. Confession and discernment of spirits, combined with milking—the ultimate monastic efficiency, Barnabas claimed.

“I saw her again,” Peter said one dark morning—his third month? thirteenth? what difference, really?

“Yes?”

“Her body warm and unclothed against me in our bed, soft, so alive…”

“Yes.”

“I knew she was dead, that this was a visit from beyond the grave, but her arms wrapped around me so…”

“Did you make love?”

“Not this time. But…I asked her to use her magic eyes, to… bring something good to me. ‘You can’t want me to live my whole long life without you and alone,’ I said.”

“And now?” Barnabas asked. “Mind the bucket!”

Milk sloshed across the dairy floor. Peter winced, knowing his confessor’s answer to inattention at milking.

“We’ll deal with that later,” Barnabas said dryly. “For now, finish, please. Your report, and your cow.”

“There was a later part, in the refectory here. I had just arrived, with the boys.”

“Your boys, or the boys you used to teach?”

“A blending, I think. I was worried over what they would eat and was bustling about trying to find them what they’d like. Then the Abbot reached over my shoulder and dropped two pieces of toast on my plate. They were hot, hot enough to melt the butter between them, and it was toast with the kind of bread she used to make, the best bread, the best toast.”

“Perfect toast.”

“Yes. And I wanted to blub because of the toast, and because of the fact that he’d been watching me all along, when I’d been busy with the boys, and he’d taken it upon himself to drop on my plate–no word, no fuss–the perfect toast.”

Barnabas nodded but said no more until later that morning–after Matins, after morning work, after Peter’s particular exercises–when Peter stood before him in the confessional cell, struggling as usual with the submission his confessor requested. Barnabas waited, as usual, without speaking, without removing the birch from its bucket until Peter had prepared himself. When the time came, he applied it with the force of radical mercy, until the fight left, and a bit beyond.

After saying the absolution and allowing the novice to rearrange himself, Barnabas fished a tin from his habit, an incongruous, luridly colored object containing ginger pastilles. He opened it and held it out to Peter Donne, who seemed to regard it as a sinister trap.

“Go on,” Barnabas said.

Sweets of all kinds were forbidden at Lunsford, and almost every other indulgence forbidden to Peter under the Norwich Discipline.

“No, thank you.”

“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Afraid of what will happen if you have it.”

Peter braced himself to deny it, but then shrugged.

“You aren’t the author of your life,” his confessor said.

“No,” Peter replied, as if he were only just realizing it.

“Someone else is writing your book.”

Peter frowned as if he had received crushing news.

“Someone who watches you. Someone who, unbeknownst to you, has taken time to prepare perfect toast, from perfect bread, and to drop it on your plate.”

The novice fell back to his knees, tears pouring suddenly from his eyes: “Please, Father, change me. Make me a man who no longer asks to have her back.”

Barnabas rested a hand on Peter’s head. “He is changing you. Your book is being written, even now.”

“And what does it say, this page?”

“This page?” Barnabas placed the open tin on the kneeler. “So I did sit, and eat.”

This piece turned into a little back story about Father Donne from Keep Calm and Carry On, though a much younger version of the man.

Note: Bookends will be suspended for the month of November due to NaNoWriMo, as explained here.

Read other folks writing this week:

• PapaTomLA

I’m reading Charles Williams for the first time, his Descent Into Hell. Williams (1886-1945) was editor of Oxford University Press and one of the Inklings. His prose is dense and hard-going, but frequently astonishing. He writes what Eliot called “supernatural thrillers” about characters in the modern world interacting with the divine.

I was slogging though it this week and gradually had my breath taken away by a most extraordinary scene in the chapter called “The Doctrine of Substituted Love.” The scene is a conversation between Stanhope (a great poet) and Pauline (a nearly agoraphobic young woman) on the sidelines of a play rehearsal. Stanhope is a quiet, self-effacing writer who knows about things like a goodness so powerful that it induces terror. This he has mentioned in passing to Pauline before. Here, he tries to get her to tell him what has been bothering her. Eventually, she spits it out: she sometimes sees her Doppelganger at a distance and is tormented by the fear that it will one day catch her up.

At the core of the scene, Stanhope offers to “carry her burden” for her, to be afraid for her, in her place. Pauline struggles to understand what he means. He explains:

“When you are alone,” he said, “remember that I am afraid instead of you, and that I have taken over every kind of worry.”

Pauline demurs, worrying that she will be pushing her burden on to other people.

“Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself,” he answered. “If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and anger, you can. But if you will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed with us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s burden.”

It is hard to write about this because Williams says it all so expertly, but I find this paragraph at once immensely satisfying, as if food, immensely relieving, and immensely hot. It gets at the deep communion I hear about in church. It gets at the notion that submitting to this communion is a natural order of the universe. Yes, we are free to refuse, to “live in pride and division and anger,” but this is to live unnaturally, in a state of sin.

Pauline wonders what will become of her self-respect if she leans on someone else in such a very great way.

He laughed at her with a tender mockery… “If you want to respect yourself, if to respect yourself you must go clean against the nature of things, if you must refuse the Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you should want so extremely to respect yourself is more than I can guess, why, go on and respect.”

This, to me, encapsulates part of our modern dilemma, with our fixation on self-respect, self-determination, self-authorship, self-esteem, choice, independence, and so on—all excellent qualities, but when taken to excess, as I believe they often are, do they not lead us into the divided, un-natural condition which has made Pauline suffer? It sometimes seems counter-cultural to accept, indeed to submit to the idea that goodness involves sharing one another’s burdens, and further that this is no progressive modern concept, but in fact the ancient order of things which we have only temporarily forgotten in our contemporary egotism. And, to give over to it is not only to give over to each other, but to move into communion with something people have known for many centuries, many ages.

The mercy involved in this submission reveals itself as the scene continues:

She stood up. “I can’t imagine not being afraid,” she said.

“But you will not be,” he answered, also rising, certainty in his voice, “because you will leave all that to me. Will you please me by remembering that absolutely?”

“I am to remember,” she said, and almost broke into a little trembling laugh, “that you are being worried and terrified instead of me?”

“That I have taken it all over,” he said, “so there is nothing left for you.”

Oh, how I long to have someone again to carry my burden as I carry his; to take over my worrying for me; to bear my fear.

Stanhope tells Pauline:

“Ring me up to-night, say about nine, and tell me you are being obedient to the whole fixed nature of things.”

You can’t get any sexier or more spiritually authoritative than that, in my book. He is compelling her obedience, not by force, but through her free will. And her obedience to nature, to the great reality, will consist of relinquishing her fear into the care of another, who will faithfully feel it on her behalf.

I think that people who take part in tgi (in its several forms) understand this. TGI scenes are often dramatic enactments of this submission to one another, and to the truth of our human condition. This is why I don’t see any contradiction between my “kinky” practices and my quite orthodox religious practice. I see them in service of the same thing, the great reality, which has at its heart self-giving love.

Stanhope goes home and concentrates on Pauline’s fear:

“The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He endured her sensitiveness but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never understood, nor can.”

Full text available on Google books.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead, it seemed. Her stomach clenched, a passing fancy, and she stretched her arm across to see that he was still breathing. His chest did, in fact, move. He wasn’t to die yet, though when he did, he would look the same as that twilight on their bed.

The Pervy Hour had past. He lay naked, the duvet twisted at his feet. She still wore a shirt. The room cold now, she pulled the covers over them, as much against the air as against her own eyes. What had seemed a part of them now felt incongruous, like Adam and Eve felt towards each other after eating the knowledge.

Was it part of their fallen inheritance that she should always feel naked after? She had no Puritan admonition against making love with her husband, but always, after – either quickly or some time later – a self-consciousness would come over her, turning their acts into something faintly repellent. Before the arrival of the observing mind, the relentless panopticon, she could love him with her body, as she had promised at the altar; but, that Eden always fled, like a fawn, before the cold gaze of reason.

He jerked awake with a sharp intake of breath and turned to her, resting his head on her chest, curling a knee across her, his arm encircling her as if to keep her from rising, then or ever. Life had been long, so long for both of them, before they finally found each other.

“You were late,” he would tease, “as usual.”

They had been together before, in the distant past. “Last time,” he said, “I think I was the girl.” Or was the last time when they had both been boys? It was hard to remember precisely. Once, visiting the chapel of his Public School, she had been possessed of an eerie familiarity, as if she were recalling long ago, before her childhood, as if the memory resided just behind her eyeballs, if only she could see it there.

Later, once he actually was dead, she would discover that Anglican belief did not include reincarnation as such. “What do you make of it, then?” she would ask her theologian curate. “We both thought we remembered the same thing.”

The theologian would touch his index fingers to his lips and look at the ceiling, silent for a spell. “I think,” he would reply, “that it was a kind of spiritual gift, a blanket of Grace, perhaps.”

The blanket of Grace was large enough to cover the two of them that twilight, to extend the unspeaking respite. Holding him and being held by him was like being able finally to breathe, like stepping down into fresh, thick air after a lifetime at altitude. They exchanged no words, but the way he held her fingers said more than conversation. They were thinking the same thoughts, the same thought, as it sometimes seemed they would dream the same dream, not separately in their own heads, but tandem, one mind.

Twilight gave way to evening. Soon the dog would need dinner. Soon the phone would ring, and the traffic would resume outside the window. Soon they would resume ordinary living, side by side. For this moment, though, his arm still around her, his heart still pumping against her side, his cheek warm on her chest, duvet covering them, for this moment they lingered, ignorant of everything except each other. She breathed, sinking against him, no words, no self-regarding. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind.

Come read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi – yay!
• Tom - yay!

This has been a ropey weekend full of too much of my mother, too much nausea-inducing grief, and the strong desire to be dead. The weather has been made-to-order, cool, sunny, dry, lush. I brought the dogs up to my mom’s house (a.k.a. the house with the pink “whack me” pyjamas) and there was plenty of activity: attending a neighbor’s cookout (tiresome), buying plants and pots at 50% off (awesome), cooking (e.g. blueberry cobbler), watching stuff (Le Tour, Wimbledon, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger flick), hiking with the dogs (once getting lost and having to bushwhack), taking her wicked poodle out on the bike, trimming back her wisteria, and generally being fussed over and over-controlled by her.

Also, as she told me the story of her elderly friend who told the hospital their diagnosis wasn’t good enough and thus eventually got life-saving treatment for her husband, I spiralled off into a silent panicked freak-out. Because when they told me M was dead, I just stood there, trembling. I did not scream and raise the roof and say “That’s not good enough,” and demand to see their superiors and threaten to sue and insist they go back in there and revive him or transfer him somewhere that would. All this, I realized, he would have done for me. I did ask them if they were sure he was really dead, since he was still warm, but they told me yes, they were very sure, and I accepted this. He would have raised even Hell to bring me back, but I meekly accepted what I was told. Did I do this because I always suspected deep down that happiness wasn’t mine, that a huge tragedy would smite me because it always does when things are good? If I had known then what killed him (aortic aneurysm), I would have screamed and yelled and threatened and made their existence a misery until they sucked the blood out of the sac around his heart, put him on life support, and got someone in to fix it. Now, though, I can’t do this. I can never ever do this as long as I live. His body is ashes in the columbarium, and nothing can bring him back. I failed to stop the permanent ruination of his life and my own. And thus I want to go buy a bunch of sleeping pills and eat them. Really.

I am not doing this, however, because I believe it’s a sin, perhaps the only sin I’m unwilling to commit. And by sin I mean an active, willful rejection of and separation from God. So, to my atheist friends who silently wish I would get over my God delusion, know that God is the only reason I have not killed myself.

Today I drove by the house we were thinking of buying when he died last year. Someone else owns it now. We don’t. We aren’t raising our first child there. All the good things we were working to make happen are off the menu, for us, for me.

I’ve been reaching out a little bit to people in the tgi world (otherwise known as “The Scene”). I’m planning to go to the SSNY party next weekend, which will be the first event I’ve attended (save a brunch, with M, about ten years ago, hosted by a different organization). So, if you are going to the same party, find me and say hi! By all accounts, this is a nice group of people whose focus is old-fashioned spanking, which is pretty much my style. Reading Radagast’s recent posts about the nuances of communication with people in the scene (here and here) awakened all my social anxieties and insecurities. I think that at heart I believe that no-one decent would ever find me appealing and want to play with me. Certainly the only person who could ever love me is dead.

I’m sorry—I really am—for all of the depressing self-pity in this blog. I try to hold most of it in. I am certain it is unappealing to read. I wouldn’t want to read it. However, maybe there is someone who finds, or will find it helpful, for some reason. They say widowhood is the club you never wanted to join. I was not supposed to be this person. But since I am, friends (I can call you friends, can’t I, if you’ve read this far?), this is my dispatch from the edge. You don’t need to come here yourselves. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. And what you need to know is this: Love your people while you have them. Love them. Love them. Nothing else matters very much.

I feel despair, more than sometimes, at the prospect of ever finding a second husband. One thing that makes it seem even more hopeless is contemplating how non-overlapping certain aspects of my character are. This venn diagram shows what I mean (not to scale):

This doesn’t take into account the many other factors that make someone’s sensibility, humor, heart, intellect, habits, playfulness and imagination compatible with mine, let alone age, availability, location, etc. You can be friends with plenty of people who don’t share your politics, religion, and/or sexuality, but can you marry them? For me at least, I think there has to be a lot of overlap.