Remorse

You know those days, the days when you want to say sorry to everyone you have ever met and print out apologies to people you have yet to meet so you can hand them out before a word is exchanged, those days when every single choice you have ever made looms up and shouts at you what a chump you are?  You do?

Those are the days when every bite of meat before becoming vegetarian feels like an untenable error of judgement, every mouthful of cheese or butter before becoming vegan is a crime against humanity.

” Regrets, I have a few (million) but then again, no time to mention (them all because they would take years just to articulate)”

The weight of all the animals slaughtered to feed me is unbearable; the cruel words I have used towards people I love parade through my head just quickly enough to allow a lot of them, but slowly enough for my guilty head to savour and feel them and become increasingly crushed and penitent. The neglect, avoidance, failures, all those memories line up to take a swing at me.  POW! That’s for when you ignored your Mothers grief. WHAM! That’s for when you said those ghastly things to your husband. BAM! That’s for not listening to your colleague who was distressed.  BANG! That’s for that ugly arrogance you carry around. But this isn’t, really, about me. Not really.

“Penitent: feeling or showing sorrow and regret for having done wrong; repentant.”

“Repentance:  the action of repenting; sincere regret or remorse.”

“Remorse: deep regret or guilt for a wrong committed”.

Maya Angelou was potentially comforting: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Except when one does not believe one has done ones best.

First world problem, of course. Self-indulgent breast beating and a way to avoid actually doing anything about it. Those words, Penitent, Repentant, Remorseful, are feelings with no real action attached. Where is a hair shirt when you need one? And yet, again, what would that achieve other than a middle class privileged satisfaction in self-abasement?

Johnny Cash knew a thing or two:

Hurt

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end

So, we do stuff, we join groups, action groups, civic groups; we take part partly although not entirely in the hope that it will wash our sins at least a lighter shade and remove some of the surface grime. We Atone.

ALERT: recovering Catholic here. Guilt was my major. Sins reported and regretted were sins absolved, so perhaps marginally better than no religion at all when personal responsibility is flung back into your sorrowful self-indulgent face. Of course there is more to it than that – hopefully we also do things altruistically trying to making things better for others as well. I think so. I hope so.

DH Lawrence poem, Piano, is more about nostalgia than remorse but regret is its underblanket. Regret for all the spaces and times between that childhood and the moment inside the adulthood of now. It speaks.

Piano
by D. H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

And finally, in this attempt to express and perhaps contain guilt, one of Frosts incomparable descriptions of self-alienation and the deep grooves and welts that form in the self when insight and self-awareness open the eyes to regrets and darknesses. There is more than one darkness…

Acquainted With The Night
Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

The darkness fades when the light finally seeps in through the cracks, and gets folded away onto a shelf in the back of the head, tidy and parked for future use. We regret and move on, or not. There are some regrets that sit perfectly in amber radiating a toxic beauty of their own and remain impervious to atonement or remorse. They are the regrets that wait comfortably in their lovely prison, judging the best time to re-emerge and remind us of our fallibility. They serve a purpose. Humility is a gift. Love is our forgiveness.

How it is

Spooling down, further down, where the air clogs the lungs and the blood thickens

And the dark slips over the shoulders like the arms of an old friend helping towards the edge, slowly, easily.

I thought I saw you there but no, an illusion. Of course, it always is.

Dark folds itself into more dark and there is nothing.

 

 

For the many

Smoke drenched skeletal cities, skies smeared with fear, streaked with grief.

Faces on the telly, hard, clenched and primed for war, wallets primed for lucre.

For the few, not the many.

Faces ready to shoot words that kill, to use words of death, destruction, fear, the psychopaths  idyll.

Faces that only ever bleed sweat and epithets.

Seedy greedy souls on the halfshell, half finished, half cocked, halfway to hell, lead humans towards a new battlefield. From behind. From home.

With a grin and a song, a bribe, a joke, Variety Hall statesmanship. Cheap seats for us, cheap booze, cheap fags, cheap lives.

Ideologies R Us, Pound stretchers in a B&M ambulance.

And still we rise, the many, not the few.

 

Bosom buddies over the years

My bosoms have been around the block a bit.

Early development brought early attention from older men as well as other students, long bus rides to school being littered by moments of leering and lurching, scary intimations of what being a grown up would be like. I was not alone in that, it just happened a little early for me, while I was still colouring in my future and playing with dolls. Fascinated by the appearance of maturity I soon became shy of the evidence, covering them up to stop the leers, rejecting them as evidence of change, and slowly having their deficiencies brought to my attention. Too big for comfort when horse riding, too small for instant popularity, too this, too that, two much.

And then I began to understand they could be fun as well. If I chose to share them it could be quite nice and they have joined me in a few lovely moments bringing some happiness to me as well as to someone else. Large and juicy and bouncy they caused me some joy, and spread a little of that stuff too.

And next thing I knew they were useful. I fed four children with them, nourishing my children, making them strong and healthy, bonding with them deliciously and creating memories for me and relationships for us all.  I spent a decade or so either pregnant or breastfeeding and it was, perhaps, the best time in my life. A wanton, verdant space in which my body made things right and that was all that mattered.

And after that, another opportunity for some joy. Short lived, but memorable. Because then I noticed things of all kinds changing, a little less overall bounce and more wobble and not just in the bosoms, part of a generalised weary reduction in joy and upswing in tasks and a tangible draining of verve, less noticeable purpose and a slipping away of meaning and value. The devaluation of the bosoms echoing a reduction in worth. The bosoms that had created such fear, then joy, then deeper joy and meaning, were entering a new and unexpected chapter. Cause and effect, or effect and cause? Outwardly so much was satisfying, so many achievements, but inside there was a little necrosis every day, a spreading of the dark shadows and the loss of significance, the essence bleeding away into a sticky vacuum of regrets, guilt and exhaustion.

But then, with little ballyhoo but with such a warm and welcome relief, it stopped mattering. My bosoms – MY bosoms – triumphed and became part of my story. They were mine and I dressed them for me, washed and cared for them for me. This old feminist remembered who she was and hacked and whacked through the  flourishing detritus uprooting the pernicious growths of expectation and control, flinging them onto the waiting pyre and planting nutritious saplings and mature thoughts in their place, where they have established and now thrive giving me colour, energy, the scent of a life to be lived. These bosoms have been through the mill, alongside the rest of me, and here we are having emerged from that vacuum into glorious sunshine and promise, with some beautiful hands to hold and memories, some obscured and some hovering on the surface, waiting patiently for me to sift and sort and calibrate them with proper reflection and some context. It may take a little while but I know now I am up to the task.

Two of my favourite, doubtless irritating, phrases are A Work In Progress and Onward and Upward. I have come to realise that both are applicable to almost everything, including me. And you.

Whoever you are, if you feel the pull of that vacuum, the quicksand beneath your feet, please: remember your unique merits, own your Self, live your life. It is yours, colliding with others but yours to fit into whichever jigsaw you choose, yours to steer or not, to enjoy the ride and harness the journey as well as savour the peace when it happens. Hard to see when the waters are closing over you, but swim upward with all your might and take the hand that opens for you. It is there.

Onward and Upward.

 

 

 

 

Two thirty a.m.

How dank is the darkness at two thirty a.m.,

Suffering little children to enter the nightdream.

Shackled to memory

Pierced by evil

Nailed to eternity

Howling down into the deep

At two thirty a.m.