How could she...

                                                           Broken promises

​I have an addiction: Last Thursday I arrived at Waterloo Station forty five minutes before my train was to leave. I had three books in my bag. Two I had already started.  I was enjoying both. The third I was excited to plunge into. Three potential companions for the wait and the journey down to Portsmouth. I spotted a free seat and started towards it. The hankering stopped me.

I have time, time to slip into the bookshop - not buy anything - just see what’s lying on the tables for future days. I mumbled the mantra: You will not buy a book, not one book as I skipped towards Foyles. *

​What’s it like to go through a life unloved: To live for eighty years, to have been a child, to have been married, had children; to have worked alongside people year after year after year; to retire to a community in the sunshine and sit with the same people night after night over a Cristal, and not once found the care, the attention, the valuing, the intimacy, that we clumsily call being loved?

                                                                               Sien with a cigar, Vincent Van Gogh

In a letter to Theo - his brother, his confidant and constant support - Van Gogh tries to justify and persuade his family that he is right to marry Sien, a prostitute he was living with. In it he wrote something I have never forgotten: How can she be good when she has never known good? When I think of my mother, these words come back to me and I think, how can she love when she has never known love.

Didier Eribon’s rousing, pain-ridden, vital new book, The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman. which I bought that afternoon (a victim of seduction) brought images and ideas of my own mother in its wake. Eribon draws us close to the agonies of his mother's existence : her marriage to an unloving, controlling and violent man, "unhappy her whole life" as she trudges from domestic servant at fourteen, to cleaning lady, to factory to worker and ending with sliding into un syndrome glissement. (A beautiful French expression for the slipping into the arms of death through a sense of sheer hopelessness). He unpicks the ambivalence at the heart of his relationship with his mother. His yearning and education has taken him far from his family and the distance of deracination is difficult to bridge. He writes about their tempering of  language in an effort to connect:

                                  I changed my voice, my sentences, my words... of course
​                                  without being able to modify everything… I spoke to her
                                  in a mix of her language and of mine, or to be more
                                  precise: a mix of her language, which had also been mine
                                  earlier in life and which I still knew, and the language that I
                                  actually speak today. Did something similar happen for her?
                                  Did she adapt her language when she was with me in order
                                  to come closer to what she imagined to be correct usage,
                                  which she didn't fully control even if sometimes she would
                                  do her utmost to talk the way they talked on television?
                                  Perhaps she did.
​                                                                                                                             - Didier Eribon

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​Page after page could almost have been lifted from my own filial life, watching a mother blanked by the world and shrinking from enagement as I drifted elsewhere.
The omnipresence of the televison. The battle against its prattle, where conversations are smothered and die. Whether there is any interest in what the highly flexed voices from the television are saying or not is irrelevant; the television will be on and we must search for a response against the garish bonhomie of a gameshow. Our presence leads to no pressing of the off button.

                                                                             The degeneration  will not be televised

Is the television a comfort or the easy curtailing of thought? Distraction is the greatest defence against what we cannot bear to think about; and what we cannot bear to think about is probably what we should be thinking about. But, - and the saddest thing is how many - there are lives so raddled and ravaged by circumstance and society’s weighted indifference that the strength to think, and to think that you might matter, are shredded. The bleat of television dissolves the screams.

Eribon’s work, a contending with Simone de Beauvoir’s little known yet magnificent book Old Age, ends with a cri de coeur, a positioning old age in relation to political philosophy. De Beauvoir advocates a staving off of decline, at least a slowing of cognitive decline, through attachment, an active engagement with ideas, people, activities and remaining curious. (What health hangs in curiosity). Eribon wants to broaden the view to take in where the elderly sit or lie in the ideas that forge society.

There is no pioneering, provocative, demanding voice for the elderly. No transforming ideology encompasses them. They have no ‘we”. They have no future and futurist manifestos have no need of their fading hearts. Eribon demands that they need more: if they have no 'we', we must become their voice and we who become their they, must fight for their place in a society that must be shaped to care more than it does. We will, if we are unlucky to live long enough, become increasingly dependent, our lives increasingly impinged by physiacl ailments, our existence fade to invisibilty. Does it have to be?
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                                         This is, after all, the fundamental political question:
                                         Who speaks? Who is able to make themselves heard?
                                         And if this fundamental political gesture remains
                                         inaccessible to so many people who figure among the
                                         most dominated, the most dispossessed, the most
                                         vulnerable, does it not fall to writers, artists, and
                                         intellectuals to speak of them and for them, to make
                                         them visibleand to "make their voices heard," to take
                                         up Simone de Beauvoir's expression again? Perhaps
                                         it is even necessary to "lend them a voice," the voice
                                         they do not have, the voice they no longer have
                                         -indeed, in the case of dependent older people, the
                                         voice they can never have again.
                                                                                                                    - Didier Eribon

                                                                                 My mum, aged ten

​My mother has never had the urge or the ability to take hold of her place in the world and fashion it so that she might fit more comfortably within it. She has allowed it to shape her. She has incorporated, interiorised, the way women like her are circumscribed by society. Circumstance and the hands of men formed her: her spirit squeezed and misshapen by an indifferent mother, an absent father, a mocking husband, a lack of educational opportunity, childhood abuse, post partum depression and that constant lack of love. Untended soil bears no fruit.

​Now she is ill and facing death. Her body is blighted by swelling and disease and her response to it is the refrain of relinquishing which she has sung all of her life: What will be, will be. It is the defence of the impotent.

I have written many poems about my mother. She has never read them, she has no interest in reading them. When I'm with her I try to draw her into a space where she might shine: her thoughts, her feelings, her laughter. She steps into this space tentatively, unsettled by its strangeness.  A son's love is perhaps too late. The die cast.

She will die soon and her death will mirror her life: she will die without valuing herself, without being valued. How could she have loved when she never knew love.

​* Although it is now part of the Waterstone’s monster, I hold a memory of Foyles when it was owned by Christina Foyle. Then, they had no idea what books they had. Once you found a book you wanted, you would take it to a little wooden booth and receive a chitty to take to another wooden booth where they would take your money and send you back with another chitty to collect the book from the first wooden booth. Often, shuttling between the booths, you would lose your way and end up at a booth where they claimed never to have seen you or the book you have come to collect. It was delightfully slow pandemonium.
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