Beginning

“For do you not see how everything that happens keeps on being a beginning… and beginning is in itself always so beautiful?” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

FOR THE past four years I have been working on a manuscript. This is another memoir, which is the form that suits me best. I enjoy writing from life – but with a poetic slant, a look at the world with a certain dreamy, distant gaze. It is unusual for me to spend so long on a book – the two before this one were each written in less than a year. But then I had the luxury – or threat – of a publishing deadline. This time I have been working to my own, somewhat maverick inner timetable. There is, as yet, no publisher, no commission. This is, entirely, a venture of the heart. I started writing in the summer of 2019. Not long after this came Covid, and a global hiatus such as we have not known in modern times. My world – as for everyone – was turned upside down. A theatre life was stopped entirely in its tracks, never to be resumed. A travelling routine, between Eastern Europe and the UK, was stopped short. The easy rhythm of teaching classes and socialising disappeared entirely. In the midst of this lacuna, I sometimes wrote, but often did not. I found myself marooned in a life that was no longer one that I recognised, and I had no idea what shape a future life might take – on the other side of quarantine, and of such bewilderment and loss.

Dancing with bruised knees

Finally, I am here. Beyond Covid, and in a completely new phase of my life. Released from the threat of serious disease, a lightness has returned to my days. And the manuscript is finished at last. Throughout this coming year I shall release extracts from each chapter in turn, with a little bit of commentary on the side. Today I start – appropriately enough – with the opening words of the introduction. Having written before about grief and recovery – in ‘A Handful of Earth’ it was the making of a garden that saved me; and in ‘Old Dog’ I paid tribute to a wonderful rescue hound who brought love and restitution to a family stricken by illness and death – I turn now to my own journey through life. The focus is on the body itself here: my experience of illness and loss, and the things this has taught me. The body has a wisdom without words, but I have tried to find a language for it, nonetheless, for the strange, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful meanderings we experience in our lives, not just on a physical level, but down into the depths of psyche and soul. Here it is then: ‘Dancing with bruised knees: a memoir of loss and recovery.’ The introduction.

Introduction

‘ What a beautiful and fascinating thing it is, the human body. Powerful, mysterious, full of rhythms and pulses quite outside our understanding mind. If it could speak, what tales would it tell? If the strange pains and pleasures we feel on a daily basis were converted into words, what kind of poetry – dissonant or lyrical – would they make? These are the questions I have asked myself in this memoir. And the result is a story of the body – my body – and the way it has shaped my life, pushing me in directions I never imagined I would travel, and leading me to places I never expected to explore. It has been, above all, the experiences of falling apart – through illness, loss and bereavement – that have been the most transforming. Illuminating, even. Our first and most fundamental experiences as babies are of needing to be held: body and mind. When we are tiny, physical holding is also an emotional holding. We need to feel strong arms around us, to contain the brimming and overwhelming life within us – so that later on, once we are grown, we can internalise that feeling, and withstand whatever crises we have to face as adults. Falling apart is an inevitable price of being alive, but how we come back together again is the interesting part of the journey.

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‘ Although the writing here is born from many endings, this is actually a book of beginnings. I have a deep fascination for birds, both real and mythical. And there is no more powerful avian symbol than that of the phoenix: the legendary firebird that is consumed in its own flames, only to rise from the ashes, in perpetual and magnificent renewal. The phoenix, as an image of strength and regeneration, seems particularly pertinent to women, whose body shape and metabolism changes profoundly through their lifetimes, from pubescence to womanhood, through pregnancy and childbirth, and then into the fires of menopause and beyond. This last stage, when the uses of a woman to the wider world, as wife or mother or worker, fall away, and she becomes more socially invisible, requires a certain courage – whilst releasing a sly, subversive energy in its wake.

But at every age, whatever your sex or gender, it is imperative to live as fully as you can. Expand into the smallest spaces. For even the very last days of a life – as I saw when my husband was dying of cancer, and when my young friends were succumbing to AIDS – can be a revelation. And I have learned that my own body is capable of being regenerated, phoenix-style, from collapse and confusion, over and over again. Just when I think it’s the end – that I must sit by the hearth now, and watch the world go by, with someone else steering it on – something wakes me up and pushes me forward. And I know enough people in their seventies, eighties and nineties, living lives of purpose and creativity, to realise that I am just beginning at this game.

The dance of life is a surprising one, which twists and turns, right to the end, but we need to pay attention. Only with our last blink, our last breath, is that game up. My experiences of illness, of grief and struggle, have not shaken my confidence in the human body and spirit, quite the opposite. I am gathering a deeper and deeper compassion for our fragile physical form. And the collective suffering brought about by Covid and its repercussions, has only heightened this tender sensibility. In the end, it is the lessons of the body that have taught me more about living a rich and soulful life, than the acres of words I have read and studied through the years. And with this gift from the body, comes responsibility. As the buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh said, “It’s not enough to suffer. You also have to touch joy.” Pleasures come round every corner, but first, you must lift your gaze from the ground.’