ABIGAIL GEORGE - STORIES

Pushcart Prize nominated Abigail George is a South African-based blogger, essayist, poet and short story writer. Recipient of two  grants from the National Arts Council in Johannesburg, one from the Centre for the Book in Cape Town, and another from ECPACC in East London, she briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg.

​Mulatto You Are Loved (Don’t Give Up)

​I hope you have the sun. I long for the sun today. Yes, I’m thinking of you. You and moonlight. You and tenderness. How you express yourself. How you make me feel from my smile to my soul. Only you know what I want the world to see. So, you took me and then you left me. You were mentally cruel to me. I love you anyway. I accept and understand that it is part of your genetic makeup.  I accept and understand that that is just a part of your personality. You bring out the best in me. You bring out the worst in me. You’re holy even when you’re holier than thou. I accept and understand that we can’t be together. You’re not here. I’m here. The sea is here. Driftwood is here, my love, but you’re not. Are you drinking again? I know that you are. Of course, you don’t have to explain anything to me. You are my beloved. I understand. If there’s another woman, other women in your bed, you’re a man, I understand and accept that that will always be a factor in your life. I will never cut you. Understand that. I will never wound you for the sake of wounding you. You want me conveniently out of your life now. I understand and accept that. I will be writing to you to try and reach you for the rest of your life. Understand that. For you are my kind, my beloved, my kind of man. You will always be my type. Unfortunately, I will always be a stereotype. What do you see when you look at me now? Is she, your wife just a few years older than me? Both of you thought you’d be safe. That she wouldn’t fall pregnant. You did not use condoms. This is what married people do. I understand. You’re lovers. I understand you needed someone. I would not give in. I tried to tell you that I loved you. I just couldn’t put it into words, you see. Do you understand? Is it fine where you are? What is the weather like? Is it hot there? How are you? Are you coping? I am trying to make things happen. If I was your woman, and you were my man, life would have been exciting all the time. Interesting all the time. My sister is in Europe. That is her life now. Which is why I contacted you. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to her. I’m really in the depths of despair, which is why I tried to contact you. I wanted to hear the sound of your voice on the other side of the telephone. I wanted to hear all of your voices. I feel the ache in my lonely bones most of all. Yes, the loneliness is getting to me once again. Here I will pause; will you think my hair looks pretty like this. Do you still love me? There are bowls of fire in the linings of my heart. They are burning for you. You’re the enigma. You’re the enigmatic prize. Other men look at you envious. Other women want to be at your side. I know you. I know you. I love you anyway. You’re breaking my heart again. You’re walking away again. We must stop meeting as lovers. We have to meet as friends now. Friends who sleep together occasionally. I love you. I love only you. You are gone to the afterparty. The wrap parties. The social function.  I could never host anything. Just thinking about it makes me feel tired. She’s at your side. You have pulled me under again, my love. Your beautiful wife is at your side. You make quite a handsome pair. I have to let you go again. This time for good. You’re beautiful, and once you were mine. You’re not mine anymore. I will love you all for eternity. The ghost of man. The ghost of the man you were when I met you. I won’t keep you waiting. This is your time. This is the woman you have chosen to build a life with, it is her life too. She’s your human shield. I am anti-matter. I am non-existent in your world. We can pretend we feel nothing when we look at each other. But everyone can see our chemistry. How good we would be together. When I look at you, when you’re on television, all I see or feel is electricity. You’re angry at me that I can’t be more discreet. I can’t do your bidding anymore, my love, my love, my love. You’re gone. My sister is gone. Mike Murdock, American television evangelist is gone. I know the whisky tumbler is in your hand. There’s a woman lying next to you. You kiss her hard. What are you doing? You don’t love her. If I phone, you’ll answer. You’ll make me the happiest person in the world. I’ll make you the happiest person in the world. I meet so many people. All I want is you. You made your choice. You live like a family man, which is what you always wanted. You live like a free man. Perhaps one day I’ll see you again. I’ll see you and I won’t see you. You’ll see me and you won’t see me. Thanking you for your time. I can’t thank you in advance for your reply anymore. You won’t see this letter. I love you. I love you. I love you. Understand that. You’ll never let me down. You’re not going to answer the phone if I reach you. You’re gone. You hate me. I need you so much. You’re gone. I tell myself that you hate me. You loving me is impossible. Me loving you is impossible. The woman lying next to you. Well, this has always been your modus operandi. I miss you. You miss me. I don’t know how to be wife, mother, or lover. I’m sorry. I should call. I don’t have airtime. I don’t have data. Can’t give you a baby. I don’t feel that I am woman enough for you, because I can’t give you a child. There you go, you are breaking my heart again. You are my miracle. You are really gone this time. You have no need for me to substitute anything in your life. I am scared. I’m frightened. I’m running scared. I’m alone, but it is not the first time in my life that I am alone. Everything is in my head. I’m a mess. I’m a mess. We don’t even talk anymore. Those days are gone. I wish you well, my friend. The passion is still here. What am I going to do with all this passion that I have for you? All this feeling that I have for you. You’re gone. Yes, yes, yes, I know I keep saying that. I have to remind myself of that fact as if it is alive, as if your departure it is temporary when in fact it isn’t. I’m crazy. Crazy for you. All you have to do is touch me once, and you know that what I am saying is true. My sister is such a talent. She has the potential to make it. To become an honest woman. To become lover. Somehow, she was saved from the kind of life that I live. Falling in love with emotionally unavailable men. There’s something else I wanted to speak to you about. I have to write something. Do I write something serious or light-hearted? Do I give the game away? Do I show and tell? Or let the audience in the theatre connect the dots. I trust your judgement. You have to explain the situation to me now. We are not on speaking terms anymore? Can I contact you, because you said that I could? You’re not free. You’re not available. Perhaps you’re not in the country anymore. Perhaps you’re at home with your family. This is my message to you. I love you. I inhabit you with every force. You’re embarrassed and insecure and shy. You were always shy. I loved that about you. I’m embarrassed and insecure and shy. I love how you make yourself vulnerable to me. You’re with someone tonight. It’s Saturday. Love is just a game. And to you, loving is just a game. Call the police. Call the memory police. Gosh, you are so beautiful Robert. You still take my breath away. Be safe. You made me feel safe in your arms. No worries. Love who you want. Take to bed who you want. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t behave. Otherwise tonight, tonight, and all the nights after that we would have been together. I just wanted to say that I’m thinking of you. I just wanted to say that you were the greatest love of my life. But tonight, tonight you are on my mind. So, I relax into the dream of you. Smoke a cigarette. Pop a mint in my mouth. The sun is setting here. I know I can’t just show up again in your life. Unannounced and uninvited. You make me so happy. And all I am doing is just sitting here, thinking of you. You’re the man. You’re the man. You will always be the man in my life. I’ll go on pretending for your sake. I won’t pretend I know who you are if I ever see you again. I’ll avert my eyes and walk on by as if we never even met. I think of Brink and Jonker. How brilliant they were together. How brilliant we were together. Who is holding onto you now? Who is wrapping their legs around your waist? I’m missing you badly. Of course, I know this depression won’t last. It will pass the thought of the holy perfection of you. The man, the man, the man. You were the man in my life once. All the life in me has died. All the love that you had for me has died in you. I don’t regret anything, love of my life, light of my life. Perhaps they will say this one day, that my characters are complex. Males living in a reality of their own making. Will they ever know how true that is? Will they ever know your potential to be both lover and husband? Will you ever know? Yes, I have no one. I always have had no one. No one is in the picture. Except the master of the universe. Christ, the Saviour. I’m not coping. I’m waiting here for someone to take this pain away from me. Yes, yes, yes. I know that person has to be me. I know that now. I have to save myself from this flux. You’re loving someone. Your mouth is on her mouth. Your lips are on her lips. Your warm breath is on her neck. The nape of her neck. When I think like this, I think of us. I think of us together like that. I’m a big girl now. No longer naïve ingenue. Am I confident? Looks can be deceiving. You see what you want to see. The world sees what they want to see. You don’t want me for some reason or other. You don’t want me. I accept this now. Do you understand this now? I am telling you that I accept this set of circumstances. I feel so rough, frustrated at myself because even after all this time I’ve isolated myself. I haven’t fallen in love. No one really cares about me, the way you cared about me. I can’t remember now what I was protecting you from. I was so poor. Perhaps it was my own poverty. I felt ashamed. You did everything in your power not to make me feel that shame. I absolutely hated you seeing me like that. That was not who I was. All I want to do is sit here now with you. Look at you. Look at you. Look at you. The way your eyes crinkle up at the corners when you’re thinking, when you’re laughing, when you’re with your friends. That is your life. I won’t ever be a part of that. I’ll do this any way you want me to. Now comes the leaving part again. The departure. And I know the reason why we’re not together. You’ve got your life back in order now, you complicated, complicated man. I don’t want you to change. I know who I fell in love with. Rich man. Poor girl. Older man. Girl in her early twenties. I will love you for the rest of my life. I just wanted you to know that. I’ll go on saying that until my last breath. No answer. Silence. You wake up in the morning and greet me with silence. You go to bed. Silence. Silence is also an answer. You are saying that you don’t love me. That’s okay. I’m okay with that. I’m scared. The demons come at night. There’s a struggle. Always this struggle. They’re calling it body dysmorphic disorder. Do you understand? You are the only one who understands me. You are the only man who has ever touched me. I am old. Old. Old. Old. A woman’s body falls a part when she becomes older. Oh, quite literally. There’s no getting used to that. To the fact that girls stay young and in bloom forever. Let her love you instead of me. She will love all of you in her own way. That’s the most important thing to know. That she will try. I can’t let you see all of me, but you know me so well. You’re in my head again. You’re in my head again. You’re the only one who sees me. The real me. You’re the only one who listens. The only one who will ever understand me. I go everywhere and I see you everywhere. Oh, I know they’re just a pale version of you. But understand this, it is my pale version of you. All that they are doing, these men, are living vicariously through you. I asked God, to give me something to remember you by, and He did. For me, you will be my reflection of eternity.
 
You see, all I want to do is call you by your name. I want you to break through to me. My sin is great. My sin is great. I’ve filled journals with my sin. Who the hell am I putting on this act for? There’s nobody here. I feel wretched. I feel nothing inside. I feel four again. Being called into the horror chamber. The bathroom. My mother is waiting there for me. She wants me to wash her back. I need to talk about this to someone. Nobody wants me. Nobody loves me. The loneliness is getting to me. I need a friend. Perhaps it’s true. Jesus Christ is my only friend. Shame. I think of what my mother did to me. It was done to her. The only life she knew as a child was the one that she was given. The life she gave to me. I need someone to talk to. I want you to understand me. I want you to love me. I want you to be my friend. Most of all, I want you to protect me with your life. I am Hemingway. I am Updike. I am Rilke. I am Bessie. Be mine. Man, of every season. My brother’s girlfriend is pretty. And she’s nice. She wouldn’t like me if she knew the real me. I try so hard to make new friends, meet new people. Where are you? Come to me, my love. Stop this death. Please stop this succession of deaths. My life is awful. When I woke up this morning, everything was in a new light. The day was breaking. I thought of you. The light in your eyes. The sexual energy poured into your body. You’re chemistry. You’re physical. You’re confident. You know what you’re doing, and you look sexy doing it. I’m the gone girl. Remember me, when I’m gone from your life. Even the writing has become bipolar. Multi-polar on the page. I’m the girl you used to phone. Now you’re the one walking away from me. You are leaving me again, again, and again. I will never feel that fairy tale feeling again. I always wanted it to feel like the movies the first time I made love. You all made a fool of me. I thought you desired me. You wanted me on the backseat of the car. You wanted me to suck you hard and give you a blowjob. You called me a lesbian because I wouldn’t make you come. You grabbed my crotch. You, you, you finished my sentences, teased me about Antigone. I still tell myself that you were my prince. That you were the love of my life. You wouldn’t, couldn’t accept my lies and deceit. And when I told you the truth. You hardly glanced at me. Looked my way. You could have pretended to care, but you were to cool to care. You have all found your way in the world. I am in his study again. His wife is in the kitchen. He takes out the photographs. Again, he says, because he is horny, again, he asks me looking at me curiously through his spectacles, what are they doing. I don’t want to play this game. I start failing fast after that. Losing interest in everything. I don’t know how to cope with being a woman desired, because I am a child. Inside I am still a child, can you see. Can’t you see. This idea that I’m a woman, I might look like a woman, but inside I’m a traumatised child. I hate myself tonight. The world is spinning around me. All I see is words. People can see. People can see. The words are Dadaist-surreal. The world I paint is the world of the mentally ill. I look to Adeline Virginia Woolf and Hogarth Press when I want to feel brave. Brace myself for the glacial walls of this emptiness. There’s this flux. Tonight, the stars are aligned. That couple are holding hands. My first boyfriend abused me. My first sex act sealed with utter humiliation. He liked it like that. Control. He had to be in control. He’d call me sweet little names. I suppose to make up for it. There’s no place that I can call home. There’s no place I can call sanctuary. I will stay in your arms for the rest of your life. Will I ever move on? I refuse to be happy. I choose the life-world of unhappy people. For my whole life. Inside I am dead. I feel nothing. The couple on the television, they are kissing. I can’t kiss. I have been kissed many, many, many times. I’ve never kissed someone that I love before. Don’t know how to love, to kiss, to make love, to even make out.  I’m terrible at this love game. Like I said, there’s no fairy tale feeling left inside of me. Where are you tonight? Out with your wife and daughter at a burger place. You’re laughing. You’re smiling. You’re the gone man. You were the perfect man. To me, I knew you well. I can’t say after all this time that we’ve known each other. Every day now I have to wake up and tell myself that I can’t be with the one that I love. You’re not looking for me anymore. You’ve found the woman of the dreams. She’s given you a child, a daughter. Oh, I know I’m being dramatic, but you see I miss you. I need you. Your family needs you more. My family, on the surface it seems as if they care about me. But they don’t. This love is not an unconditional love. My mother loves me for my money. Other than that, she doesn’t talk to me. There’s no love. There’s no affection. I must behave. I love you. I love you. I know what is on the line for you. We never went to bed. But you feel like my lover. I am in a bad way tonight. Perhaps, perhaps I won’t wake up tomorrow morning. Heaven doesn’t want me. Hell welcomes me with open arms. I dream at night in non-reality mode. Dream of being an actress like Kirsten Dunst and Taraji P. Henson. I miss Karen Carpenter like she was my best friend or something. I am losing it, because I lost you. Stay in my heart, my love. Don’t go away. But you’re looking into your daughter’s eyes, not mine. My brother is going to marry this girl. I am tired but I must carry on for my own sake. There’s so much writing to be done on Africa, on South Africa, on patriotism. I have to accept that this is me. I’m older now. You only date girls. Men. Men are impossible. I feel no love and affection towards women. I only feel love and affection for men. Unavailable men. Men who do not want to be attached to the likes of me for long. All they want is the sexual stimulus and impulse sated. Do you pray? You need to pray. I need to pray to have love in my life. The world is a beautiful place. You’re not in my arms, my life anymore. I have come to life too late. Much too late. He doesn’t phone. They all feel sorry for me. Once I was beautiful. Desire is such sweet sorrow. Someone loses out in the end. I have lost. No winner am I. I’m pathetic. The day is gone. I need you now, but you’re not here anymore.
Love, love. What is love? You are love. When I look into your eyes, I see love. All I see is this thin sea of love waiting for me. You captivate me with your inviting smile. And all I want to see is that smile. Am I trouble? If you see me in a new light, will you still love as much? Will you believe in my reality? Will you take me on and be my man? I’ll take your name. If you want children, I’ll give you children. You make me happy. You make me the happiest woman in the world. This blood that runs through my veins is there for you. I need you. I want you. I desire you. Only you. The other men are forgotten. All those older male father-figures. Where are they now? I’m not thinking of them. I’m thinking of you. Of how you’re going to hold me when I cry in your arms the first time we make love. I think about the things we have in common. I think of kissing you. I can’t take my eyes off you. You’re the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen. I’m a flawed individual. He’s a flawed individual. I want David. I can’t have David. He can’t have me. He’s moved on with his life. I haven’t. I’m afraid it is always going to be this way. Men leaving me. Me being the other woman. Talk about it. Talk about the rape. I can’t.  I can’t. Nina Hastings spoke about it. You can see it in her eyes. Brilliant and bold and brave and beautiful now, she is wanted and loved and adored by men. I have that. I can sense it when I walk into a room. I don’t want to be Fiona Apple. I want to be the Duchess of Sussex, but I will never be the Duchess of Sussex unless I deal with my past. Unless I talk about the rape. Unless I talk about being molested and being, feeling so ashamed to tell anyone, anyone, especially Robert. I look desirable again. I feel as if I want to be desired again. I am red sparrow. I am Jennifer Lawrence in that film. I look and I look and all I see are certainties of the life I lived before. Being taken by a man. Being taken in by a man. And this man gives me nothing in return. I love him, but it is over. I won’t see him again. I know this is a lie. I will see him again. For, after all, we are friends. I am trying to survive. But some days it feels as if I am fighting a losing battle. I think of them touching me, laughing. Making a joke out of me. The condom in the suit pocket. Me undermining him in front of all his friends, his work colleagues. I can’t take being hurt again. I just want to be free. Free to write. Do whatever I want. For now, I am incommunicado. I am silent. Tomorrow God will give me a voice, and I will speak. Today I’m in a million different pieces. Two suns inhabit this world. One day I will be desired again. Looked at, but in my head, they are always laughing at me. Tearing me apart. They see my pain and they laugh at me anyway. I have to be brave. It has been a long time. The rape. I remember nothing. Someone put something in my drink. I was out for hours. I will never know what happened. I want my life back; I tell the universe I want my life back. The universe doesn’t answer. There’s an enviable silence. I take long, hot baths now. I want to be free. Help me. Save me. I pray. I pray. I pray. I meditate. The last thing I want to do is talk about the rape. I will never know my assailant. I will never know the assailants. In my head I call myself hundreds of names. How could this happen to me. It happened to me. The quintessential good girl. I was saving myself for marriage. I was saving myself for marriage. I was saving myself for marriage. I understand sexual violence now. That it is all about a patriarchal system. It is all about lust, perversion, greed, jealousy, sexual inadequacy, clinical depression. Men want love and acceptance and approval too. It is all about control. Understand this, you are not alone. You are not alone. I tell myself that over and over and over on the good days. I want to remind myself that there are millions of me out there that cannot put a face to their rapist.
 
I slipped away into the underground for twenty years. Longing to hear your voice. I’m longing, I said, to hear your voice. Save me from drowning in the sea. You’ll find me there on the beach of my childhood sea.

THE WAY THINGS ARE 
​A NOVELLA

​There is my reflection in the window. She dances. She dances. She dances. Look at me, Master. I am wearing my dancing shoes. I am dancing. I am dancing only for you. Emily Dickinson has fallen in love in the prime of her life. Although the bloom of beauty has fallen away. Tell me what you want to do. And then I’ll tell you what I want to do. I just want to sit here and look at you, Master. I love only you my love. Despise all other men who think that they are above your station in life. For you I would burn in hell for an eternity. Be the love of Satan. For you I would live in the paradise valley of heaven. Sheltered by the highest angelic hosts. The angels. I would spend my days and nights singing alongside choirs of angels. It is as if the world in its entirety is mentally ill. There is Lavinia, there stands Austin, there stands the congressman, my father, my mother is wrapped up in her little universe. She is nothing but a weakling. Infirm and unable to even stand looking at my father. She has refused for the longest time to sleep in the same bed as he does. Lavinia and I tend to her daily upon the hour. I do so love her. What is the feeling, I want to ask my mother, the sensation of carrying a child in your womb for nine months? I daren’t ask anyone else for they would laugh in my face at this silliness of a spinster called Emily Dickinson. What would I do without you, Master? What would I do if I cannot see you, talk to you, Master? How can you leave me in this state? In this frame of mind, it feels as if I am losing my mind again. It happened once before. I needed the still and tranquil surroundings of Amherst to keep it in check, all the expensive doctors that father sent me to said so. You’re an omen. You’re the hourglass that I am holding onto. Master, you are loved. Even above that, you are cherished. You’re the winner that takes it all. I am humble servant. I am savant. Do you remember when it rained, I called out your name. I desire inspiration. You provide the desire. I want my imagination to soar, to fly, to have wings. You give me everything that I have ever needed, ever wanted, ever desired. You are the love of my light, fire of my loins. I am Elijah in your arms. Prophet and seer. Oracle in this winter maze. The tears I cry now are tears of hope. I did everything for father, but he does not love me anymore. He has never protected me. He has never sheltered me. He has isolated me from people. Which is why I am so withdrawn and serious. He has locked me into this house. This Pandora’s Box of conundrums. Austin needs me. Lavinia needs me. Mama needs me. Papa needs me. It has all become to much for me to handle I’m afraid. I’m afraid of being left alone. So, I retire to my room to write. The poetry comes. The poetry is always there. It is wonderful. It gives me courage. I’m totally alone in that space. That space. That heavenly space is sanctified by God. I wish to give the people what they want, but it is difficult. The men that I have loved before are nothing compared to Master. Master and I make new worlds together. In one night, I can four or six poems done and dusted. Put away to be sewn together. That is the legacy that I am leaving to the world. Perhaps one day it will be significant to someone out there. Perhaps a young woman, younger than I am now. Perhaps it will impact her creativity, her imagination. That is all I want. For the legacy of my work to prosper. You’re a maze, Master. For the longest time you have only believe in me and that was enough for me. So many people have come into my life. So many have become socialites, lovers, mothers. I haven’t become any of those beings. I simply find this need within myself to write everything that is gifted to me. I look to nature. To the ancient mists in the garden air in the mornings. No more will I protect you. No more. No more. No more. It is done. It is over. No more will I love Austin. It is done. It is over. I think of the February song in nature. Married to nature in the natural. Married to nature in the supernatural. I can handle the summer son just fine. Today I must rest. Even though it goes against every bone in my body. Yes, Master. It is my fault to worship in the totality of the inter-dependence of the birds and the sky. Birds flapping their wings. The blue light coursing through day, navigating its way like arrows. Everything must find its place in time. Once I was a beauty. Then illness struck at me fiercely. It made my blood boil. My platelets go pop. There’s a fire in my soul. I am dragon beast. Take this all my enemies. A blast of fire from my mouth. They say that I am unwell again. Sometimes I sit at my window in my bedroom and just stare into space. The words in all their vision of loveliness comes to me then. This life, this world makes me content. I mean, sometimes I am afraid. I become frightened of the future when I will be alone. I make your life possible Austin. A father in Washington, I make his life possible too. My spinsterish life makes Austin’s life possible. My old-fashioned ways make papa’s life possible. My caring for mama has made her life easier. Her days of childbirth and child-rearing are gone away from her now. I hear voices now. Master’s voice is not so clear to me anymore. The voices are here. I tell myself they are angels. That it is the angels telling me to write. Be gentle. Be gentle. Be gentle culture. Be gentle background. Most of all I must be gentle and kind and considerate. Accommodate the afterthought that is me. These insane molecules that is inside my head. I am jaded. I am moving mountains. Elijah fills my physical body to capacity. I am loved. Treated in much the same way the prophets were. The Amherst community of men jeers at me and all their socialite wives mock me now. As girls we were certainly friends. We are not friends anymore. I am no longer a socialite. All I wear is white. For I am in mourning. The light of day is exquisite here in Amherst. This is how I live now. The sound of silence in the rooms are invincible. I walk through the house, adjusting my eyes to the light. It is dark out. I think of the people. Their restless dreams of Amherst, the relationships that they have with their families, the hard pews in the church that made me fidget as a girl. I am cold and undone. My lover has gone. He does not telephone. He does not write. What is wrong with me? I fall in love so easily. I trust so easily. I have no mother to talk to about this. Lavinia is even more of a child than I am. The voices in my heard share their worries and their cares and their burdens with me. I write everything done. It could be God or the angels talking to me. I am winter. Cold and undone. I am muse. I am my own muse. It comes and it goes like a flash of neon light. I want to touch the sun. I want to burn up like a volcano. Until I exist no more, no more, no more. I touch the sun. I reach out to daylight, to the light, to the sun. I will do the same. His wife is now with him wherever he goes. I will do the same one day when I am married. Master and I are no longer lovers. No longer are we girlfriend and boyfriend. Made for each other. We don’t talk anymore. I have lost my best friend. To Master, I am just a girl, even though I am middle-aged. A girl who is still in love with him. Some girl who is still in love with you. Welcome darkness, my friend. Here I am here to talk to you. A vision moves through me. Through my brain. I wanted to love you. Give you my heart. Story of my life. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat when I’m waiting for you to appear, Master. Can you also see all these inter-connecting patterns? Can you also connect the dots? Master, I am waiting here for you.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fossils and bones can inspire. Night and day. Future self, present self and past self. The words come like a typhoon. They seem to say, to tell Emily Dickinson, Alba in another lifetime that they have known her since she was a child. Emily wants to hear her soul sing of nature, of God, of spiritual progress, of the once tender eyes of Eden. She thinks of the space that the typhoon that enters her room nightly inhabits.
 
Emily Dickinson enters the kitchen at the homestead in a happy mood. She hums under her breath, and lights the candles for the evening. Her brother is also there. Austin Dickinson is in an irritable mood. He is moody and pensive, because his wife has just found out about his mistress. Emily on the other hand ignores her brother’s foul mood. She has written four wonderful pages. They seem exquisite to her.
 
And fill her with elation. It is as if the words have solid bodies that dance cross the page. Even in the folds of a night sky, or, dawn, they no longer belong to her, but to the larger world. “Mum why didn’t you love me?” was the question on Emily Dickinson’s lips every morning. She was a child. Her mother was also a child. Her mother was a grown woman trapped for eternity in a child’s body in all of her madness.
 
She is my protein and my angelic conjured-up myth. She is my extended piece of poetry. But now there are glaciers between me and Mrs Rochester in the attic. There’s an ice picnic. Nothing made up of childhood chronicles remains only the great thought of a child, and the movement towards the bright lights of a city warms her heart now, that gives her hope. She thinks of the ocean she has never seen. Austin. Austin.
 
Warm body, cold hands, cold feet, cold heart, blue, blue, blue but I want justice. We’re civilized now when we meet. No more tea parties in the garden for us serious ladies, Emily and Lavinia, in our mother’s church hats and shoes, lipstick on our teeth, our cheeks are pomegranate-red and our perfumed hair that smells like flowers, our happy reflections in the mirror. The smell of fresh air. Before the typhoon comes memory.
 
Before the art, the vision comes rain. Emily lies on her bed and can hear the downpour from her ceiling. She lies completely still in the middle of the bed and drowns. Her porcelain mouth open. Strands of her hair escaping from her bonnet. Mud at the bottom of her shoes. Even in her boots her toes inspire her own loneliness. She pretends that her brother is in the kitchen. That he is very, very angry with her.
 
 
I think of the tortured loneliness of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound’s Alba. Modern-day. Alba is a woman who has had visions from childhood. At night she always left her bedroom door ajar, slept with the light on, with the bible under her pillow. She is visited by men and women who have passed on to the hereafter who think that they are still in some indefinable way connected, tethered to this world, this earthly plane and to the ones they have left behind. Children, husbands, spouses, pets.
 
She believes her auditory hallucinations are very, very real and that it is her duty, her moral obligation to record the conversations that she has with them be they writers and poets who have suffered the anguish and despair of suicidal depression (Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, and Anne Sexton). Be they South African men and women detained during apartheid.
 
(Dulcie September, George Botha, Biko aka Frank Talk), men and women of African, British (Anna Kavan, Ann Quin), North American, Dominican descent (Jean Rhys) or from the Biblical era (for example Moses, Jonah and the whale, Elijah, Job, Noah, David, Solomon, and Jesus. Key figures in the history of civilization). This, she does fastidiously handwritten, in black Croxley notebooks.
 
But when people around her can see that she is different, special in a rather extraordinary way they begin to doubt her sanity and she is found to be certifiable, told that she should get plenty of rest, be put under psychiatric treatment and put under the care of a team of doctors. She soon though discovers her identity. Its borders in the powers of her own feminine sensuality, her ego.
 
The perpetual balancing act between the psychological framework of her intelligence, and intellectualism, and the final analysis of the sexual transaction.  With that said she rises to the occasion and meets her new life head under feet. She soon finds herself in the tiny one roomed library of the hospital and begins to read everything she can get her hands on from Doris Lessing but most importantly the genius poetry of T.S. Eliot.
 
Once she surrenders to the fact that everyone around her thinks that she has lost touch with reality she pursues love with an art second to none. She is or rather becomes Orlando in an asylum and finds that she must play her role in this establishment’s class, gender and economic system. She becomes a phenomenal African version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
 
Beautiful, wanted, adored, worshiped by men and women for her intellect in a dazed, confused world where pharmaceuticals, head doctors with textbook knowledge of case studies are the elixir, the essence of life. She negotiates the shark infested waters of having intimate relationships with both men and women acutely aware of the danger she finds herself in of engaging in licentious behaviour.
 
Of losing more than the fabric of her psyche, her soul. The safe world as she knew it as a child, youth and adult in her twenties. She finds herself in danger of losing everything. In the hospital Alba has flashbacks, embodies another personality that she, and her psychiatrist Dr Naomi Prinsloo calls ‘Julia’, she writes and she journals.
 
In the bedroom of the poet (novella excerpt)
By Abigail George
 
 
 
 
If you are a poet, then you are family, then you are my family. You will forever be alive to me in the years to come, part of my history in life, and death. It is a sign of the times, my hot aching-masculine throat chanting, and chanting, and chanting into these early hours of the morning. There’s distance between us. Madness. This is madness. This engagement, this relationship can never be. You’re a man that I used to know when the bloom of youth was on my side. Now I’m old. Older. Less sure. You’re a memory, or, rather a figment of my imagination, an illusion, an apparition like the half ghostlike-figure of Mrs Rochester gone mad in the attic, that nasty and miserable attic. I don’t feel like writing today. It is cold out. Humble leaf falls to the ground. Oh, even a leaf knows about the game of humility. After the winter, there’s harvest. There’s earth, and life, precious matter that survives the cold, the winter. I remember loneliness very well. Its slow torture. Its machinery like the wheels of a bicycle. Master, will you still think of me as bliss, as all of the above. You are, you will always be beautiful to me. Undecided, your mind filled with uncertainties (so, familiar to me, but unfamiliar to you), you left. In other words, father sent you packing, so, no romance for me, no courting, or engagement. You left me. The friendship now totally, totally forgotten, but the poet in me speaks, the woman in me listens, the class system I belong to tolerates, and my heart, and mind understands completely. You had to wound me, to save yourself. I know I am intense. I have a hectic personality that no man will ever find attractive. This I know. This I have some knowledge of. I am shy when I meet new people. I don’t go out much. I don’t go to gatherings. I was an excellent student at the seminary, but that was a world that too soon came to an end. I had to move on, live my life. Understand this. I chose this life; this life did not choose me. I have mastered the artistic life. The periods of mental wellness I find invigorating. The periods of creativity, they come, and they go, and they bring me much torment, feverish distress that can only be broken by the company that I keep. Imagination is a spell, or rather, spells. Tea leaves at the bottom of a porcelain teacup, but no fortune-teller am I. I am just a daughter who has that most rare of commodities, a rebellious nature, a perfectionistic-streak within her. Master, tell me all the ways that I have to love you. Your face is cherished. It is the one face I want to see for the rest of my Amherst days. Be my friend, or, nothing at all, because friendship is all that I can offer you.  One day, perhaps they will say that the only males in her life were men old enough to be her father. She gravitates to them, they in turn gravitated towards her, her virginal-innocence, her thoughts, youth, the bloom of youth, and I suppose that, yes, there was an absence of that in their lives. You see, they were middle-aged, reaching that crisis of faith in their lives that all mean reach in middle age. They will, the critics, the public, will say that she loved them, in return they gave her the world that her childlike-possessive mother had not given her. Sadness, vast disagreement, an intense, yet natural reaction to difficulty, a brief history of melancholy, dark fluid inside my body. My diet governs my body, clinical depression, brain chemistry balance of chemicals our response, discerning the value of sadness, inevitable, you've missed out, in gaining wisdom, increase wisdom increase sadness, profound joy, here comes the cycle of life, needs, evolutionary level, stages of bonds, familiar and comfortable, balance, temperament, sadness measuring grief probing its structures, gathering pain like a net of fishes, feathers, heartbreak bird in the bush, bird in the universality of my hand, emotional pain, don't suffer. You don't have to suffer, her eyes seem to say, articulate, express, hope, let me write a poem about hope. Shades of bloom govern. structures building a muscle, the muscle of the poetry. What happened, what happened to you. pay attention to me, give me your approval, your sincerity. I am feeling lost, withdrawn from the world, an average life, who wants an average life, only the followers, only the disciples, not the saints. question of pain, existential identity, what can i do, stuck, rat in the wheel, bird in a cage, other goals, plans, results, take responsibility move repetitively, logically, hymn, with force I take you, sounds, sounds, sounds, quiver, tomb, winds, rain, weather forecast, Outcast, caravans of it, knit, company close afterlife immortality flood, composed death in sensuous ironic stages untouched roof of scooped surrender snow field harvest, mid-19th century, way of life, her room looked out at the cemetery like me, tomorrow I might be gone, or survive to live another day, to see paradise, she/I writes about death, the perspective of the majority of death, the scarcity of life, the minority of love, minor is loneliness major is the brethren at the Assembly of God, major is the earth. So, I have this room. I wake up in the morning and the first thing the room (yes, the room speaks to me with a voice as loud as thunder), the first thing the room says to me is, “So, when are you going to start afresh, write something new.” Or it is just a voice that says, “Write! The world is waiting upon you. It is necessary for you to write.” The verses are always wholesome. I don’t have to negotiate too much between reason, and doubt, being outclassed by other young women of this era, financial security (we are quite well-off, father is prosperous, my brother will soon follow in his footsteps), and the insecurity the work of writing brings with it. I don’t feel the need to go out into society, be the most beautiful, or sophisticated young woman in the room, asked to dance, or walk outside, and take in fresh air with a male companion. Why bother? The family, father, says I pretend not to care. That I’m too rebellious for words. That I should accept the Christ as my living Saviour. As soon as I accept Jesus Christ, father says my loneliness will disappear as if it never existed. But I know through trial and error that although I despise the loneliness sometimes, I must live with t, submit to it, obey its calling. It is service, under my jurisdiction. I already have the world, you see. In my frame, in my psychological makeup, in the capacity of my physical body, my intellect never wanes. I think of the wildflowers out in the fields of Amherst. From them there is no escape. Do I long for an exit, the way I long for my father, and brother’s approval, sometimes, sometimes. In the hush of the moonlight when I am writing, I am utterly alone, the house is asleep, but I don’t feel timid, or feebleminded when I write. I’m beautifully composed. The words come to me as a flood. Their clarity of vision, movement, and moods are distinct, and I am calm, utterly, utterly calm, charmed too by the rhythm of writing. The voice, and the vision of the writing. Oh, how I do love that word, ‘vision’. Its wakefulness, and process of reckoning, it’s a sacrifice to be a woman on your own, its progress, the pace of its world that comes in vibrations of sea waves, in oceanic patterns. No Ophelia am I. I am as calm as the storm whenever write. Sometimes I think I am a woman, but when I write I become a man, mannish, because in these days it is only acceptable for a man to write. I am the volcano lover versus that storm. One day I will be gone forever, then father says to me, asks me plaintively, “Emily, my daughter that I love so, so, much, my dearly beloved that is the apple of my beguiling eye, will you go to heaven, or will you go to hell. Hell is damnation. Your soul will be damned.” I say nothing when they all start behaving like this, or, I go to my bedroom. Sit, wait, and the ‘flood’ comes. I thought, once, there would come a day when I would captivate a man, set his world, his soul, his spirit on fire. That we would become engaged for a year, or perhaps longer than that, give or take a few years, but I’ve had to move on, with difficulty, with a kind of tenacity that I never knew I had within me, I clung to life sometimes, frightened of the low depths I sometimes go to, that abyss, that territory, that darkness. I know I have shamed our family in this close-knit community by not going to church with my family, but I think that God understands what matters to me after all. Art, art, art, I come undone under the touch of your nimble fingers, your beautiful hands, your sensitive, and engaging face. All art s life lit up for the entire world to see on public display. I have such an undying affection for the ‘flood’. It is like the garden to me. It is precious seed. And I am, of course I am, the seed thief. A seed thief who lives in both reality, and non-reality. On display, on exhibition, subject to judgemental indifference, and moods, and disapproval. As a child I looked up to father, but now we have words. He cross-questions me about the church, don’t I want to have a relationship with the son of David. I tell him, that in no uncertain terms do I want to be indoctrinated by rhetoric. And who created man, did God create man, or did man create God in his image. I can’t stand those stories of temptation in the garden. I think to myself, ‘poor snake, poor serpent with the forked tongue, maybe you got the raw deal, instead of Adam, and the Eve created from his rib’. Sometimes I think aloud. I shouldn’t misbehave, or throw tantrums, or fits, but I do when I reach the end of my tether. I have to write. It keeps me sane, and awakened to the intrinsic environment around me. I internalise, internalise, internalise. What else can I do? It keeps the ‘flood’s’ vein sated, and alive. There is a golden reconciliation there between the education of the mind, and the psychology of the brain. What is intelligence anyway, does it make father, or my brother happier entities? They look the same to me. Stressed by the burdens, and cares, and triumphs of the day, in much the same way as I am. I think of the careless whisper of the day, the way the sunlight touches every surface, corner, angle, circumference of my room. In my bedroom, I am finally free to be me. Freedom in a sigh, I must be so patient, work, work tirelessly, this poetess of Amherst. If it wasn’t for my education at the female seminary would I still, perchance, have all of this happiness, all of this pleasure writing. Nature does seem perverse sometimes. Master’s name can be found everywhere, in every possession I own, everything material, everything earthly. How beautiful is the day! The light threatens to overwhelm me, and everything with it. Master, is of course the ‘flood’. Master, is of course, my first love, now, if only I could master everything. If only I could master the substance of real life, if only love, (perhaps in the near-future). Perhaps someday I will be admired, loved even.
 
 
The sun is a laughing, talking, walking miracle today. If it shines, it shines only for me and Lavinia. What perfection, because it shines with an otherworldliness. It is a forceful warrior, (and I’ve known prayer warriors in our community here in Amherst). The sun is like a woman who is a siren, in the company of other men. The sun is fire, means fire, is powerful, a powerful commodity. It grows during the day, ablaze with heat, eddies of dust rising up from the floors of the homestead as I walk, as I wander from the downstairs to the upstairs. It is much like me, much like I was in my early twenties, popular and admired at dances. It is a dazzling sun. It dances in shadow. It plays with leaf, another omniscient miracle. Leaf, and leaves, tree, and trees, those most ancient, like the instrument of change, like a symphony orchestra, a violin being plucked at repeatedly with expertise, a composer being, again, plucked from obscurity into fame, and fortune. The wildflowers found in nature, the most natural feeling in the world is to feel as if I am like that wildflower. Built temporarily to sustain the hidden energies of beauty, wonder. Am I wise? But am I wise? Am I courageous whenever I’m articulate? Austin, my brother, does not belong body and soul to me any longer. I can only imagine what his life is like now, shielded from the view of sometimes perplexing me, intense me, playing with ideas, bringing life to words, awakening a truth in them. No man has ever said to me that he loved me. Taken me in his arms, but understand this. I am a token soldier. I can see. I can hear. I have this powerful knowledge within my bones, planted there, and it resonates through the entire marrow of my being, season after season of this terrible war that they call the American Civil War. Men are dying. Boys are dying. Can I trust in the knowledge that I have the personality of a wildflower? I like the expression. I can guess at its hidden meanings. I can trust myself in the daylight. I don’t cower away from the light, from the life, from the wakefulness that it gives me. The sun is divine. On it lives fire. On it burns a volcano. I only want the freedom to be an individual. I dare not call my writing art, for art’s sake. My vision is my own, and, yet, it is not my own. It has something to with divinity, those strongholds, those realms, and my own intuition. The process is for me to make as much progress as I can in the afternoon, work in the evenings with the lamp at my side guiding this process, navigating the trajectory of the moonlight. Yes, yes, I am fond of working my nimble fingers to the bone until the early hours of the morning. Until daylight breaks into a kind of passive resistance against the night sky, the unfolding and putting away of the stars under the jurisdiction of God’s grace, and His supreme mercy. I need clarity and vision when I write. There’s a brightness lit in my brain, every living, breathing cell. I worship every crack in this system, watch every nerve tick like a clock chiming in on every hour into homestead life, into Amherst, and with writing comes despair. There is hardship. I don’t want to fool you about my preoccupation. Perhaps one day my childhood home will be a museum that people will all come to explore. They will see my life for what it really is. Loneliness personified. They will say I lived like a recluse. I don’t want anything to be published while I am still alive. That is strange. Stranger than fiction. For all poets want is an audience to tell them how wonderful they are. How wonderful it is to be published. I often ask myself, Emily, Miss Dickinson, where does this gift of poetry, of writing about minor flora, the wolf begging, knocking at the backdoor come from. My soul begs my spirit to answer. I live in a just world. I am robust. I have health on my side. I am neither superstitious or sentimental. Why do you call it both terror, and Master? Deceit, well, it never rises to meet me when I wake n the morning. Yes, I am a difficult person, don’t ask me to transform my personality. This is bone season, feast season, meat country, the communing of the brethren meeting on every Sunday morning without fail. I have to wear a hat, that’s how hot it is now outdoors. I want to say remember me, or, do my words, does my poetry frighten you. Give you cause to think that because of my output of sometimes three poems a day, that perhaps I am touched with madness, or playing with madness. Making it ally, instead of foe. Oh look, how crestfallen the tomato plants look in their green finery. As if they are all dressed up with nowhere to go. As if they are living in a dream. I keep waiting to hear the words said, told to me in secret, or, conspiratorial whisper, or, confidence that I am special, (yes, that I Emily Dickinson is special, is beloved, is a saint after the outcomes, and aftermath of this mad war, young men dying like flies, maggots in their wounds, ) nobody has ever said that to me, or, that I’m shy, miserable at holding a conversation when meeting a stranger for the first time. The work, the passion that I have for it, I fall under its spell. Never to forget, always to be quick to forgive, to be cunning, and witty in my letters to male friends, male counterparts. I share my life’s work with my sister-in-law. Love. What is love anyway? It can strike you infirm. Its possibilities are endless. The limits of the work are totally up to you to a point as poet. It is exhausting. The hours that keep. I see no one now. Nobody comes to the house. Nobody visits. My close friends are my family members. It sometimes feels as if I have a dune to climb. It is giant. The sand is so hot I have to wear my walking shoes in this pretend reality. Everything I do, which concerns the family, I do out of love. It is a spectacular giving, and forgiving love. I study it from afar first. The first line of the verse and so on, and so forth. I am small in stature, but my words make up for that fact. I take it by the hand, kiss it ever so delightfully, remembering the church doctrine, the minister, the sermons delivered as lectures to the congregation that I adhered to as child. Summarily, I would adjust my behaviour accordingly. And sometimes at the end of the day I feel tired-happy, or, mentally exhausted, physically drained, and please, please don’t tell me that they are only words, for they are my life, they are my very breath, every inhale, every exhale. The words are lovely. They are truly perfection. Meanwhile it is I who is imperfect. It is I who is the sea, and the words are like a mountain stream in the dead of the wild. You’re something else, you’re the love of my life, I say to my children, the poems because they are. I birthed them, gave life to the words, before abandoning them in a bureau drawer. I become someone else when I write. It’s completely absurd to me to even to be thinking of another life. I cannot say I have been persecuted. By whom? Nobody in my family has ill-treated me badly in any way, shape, or, form. And then I think of how courteous and professional spring is, the wildflowers, the lavender, everything in the natural. Am I behaving these days? Sometimes I have my bad moments, but my family is good when it comes to forgiving me, forgiving the words spoken in the heat of the moment in a fit of anger. I am a flame. I am a flame. The snow will fall and I will still freeze out the winter, the layers of soppy time, and I, the poetess of Amherst will still be a flame. Star bright in the paradise of the homestead. I sometimes will look at what I have written, weep a little, be overcome with emotion, or stare in awe at this feverish creation on paper that will stay alive forever in my heart, and nature, and life. I think of the rain sometimes (when witnessing a downpour that seems to eclipse everything in my brain, like for instance the language of blood, the comfort of strangers). How wise, and thoughtful, and knowledgeable blood is. I think of this spitting rain in a half-condescending way, in an itinerant fashion, in the manner of a non-believer, because I cannot work for the very life of me outside, or go exploring Amherst with my sister, Lavinia, or work in the garden, toil the land, survey the landscape that was built by my grandfather.  I do not often think about my lucky circumstances, and I try not to think, but it does come to my mind from time to time, I do think often that I am wealthy, or rather the word that I’m looking for is, ‘prosperous’, because of my family name. It is the work, the love of my life, the master of my life that yields those results. The reward at the end of the day is my angelic tongue, which is connected to my brain, which is connected to my thought patterns, and every living soul in my world. Even the wildflowers that Lavinia and I pick have souls. She declared this to me one day in passing, and I thought what intelligence you have for someone so young. I can’t imagine a day without the sun. And after I have put in a day’s work, I think to myself that this has been a remarkable progress, an enchanting journey from beginning to end. I think to myself, what direction will tomorrow bring. For if I had a compass, which direction would it face, to the west, or, the east yonder, and how to navigate the unknown without a foe in the world. When I write, it seems my mind is as ancient, as darling, as fetching, as beguiling, as fertile as Eden. It is evergreen there, and for the rest of the day I am not stuck in a rut, I am inside a valley. Just adding life to the joyful activity of writing, scratching out that which does not please me. On the inhale the sun hits my desk. The heat of the day seems to warm everything up. Joyfully, I start a new page, give my all, give my everything. I am a woman on a mission. There’s a peace of mind that comes over me, and everything about life that has somehow altered me for the good, all of my sheltered intentions, and protected me humbles me, stares me in the face, hunting me down. Where am I to go? I only have this desk. I only have my older brother. I have Lavinia. The page, the page. I see the dune again. It splits my brain into intelligence and stupor. I freeze suddenly, helpless, I feel I am not alone in the room. I turn around but no one is there. I am alone, sitting at my small desk, polishing what I did the day before, or settling own to work on the latest poem. I think of botany and nature, geography, time, and place, fire spilling over from a volcano, geology, the face of a rock, and the mountains of my imagination are breath-taking. Nothing can break that spell, transform my mood when I am working, when I am writing. The world is a beautiful, sensuous-filled place. But I am alone. I am quite alone.  I am in my palace, sitting on my throne, king and queen, and my words are my loyal subjects. The terror of before passes, creativity comes upon me once again. I begin.  Begin to write until I am sated. Until I am quite thrilled, quite elated with what I have in front of me, what I own. I am both (speaking here of my mood) is high and low, mad and sane, ruthless and determined in the composed hush of the silence in my bedroom. The air smelling like damp and rust, the heat of the day and citrus, a forest deep-deep in the Amazon. I am in a rainforest. Then I am in a jungle. Then I am standing next to a volcano breathing fire. Then I am in nature, the place where I most want to be. Then I am in a small room in Amherst, that is all mine. Then I am explorer. Then I am scholar deep in the frame of my textbooks. I am Keats studying medicine. Then I am Keats the poet. Of course, I relish all of this. This world has nurtured me since birth. Father and I, we have our discussions about church and the larger than life Christ-figure. There are times when I myself don’t understand why I don’t go to church anymore. Father doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand him. He is a law-man involved in politics, carrying on his father’s legacy, in the same way my brother will one day in the not too distant future. I want to be great friends with his wife. I now we will be. Already she has expressed an interest in the poems, but she doesn’t understand why I don’t publish them. The sun is romantic to me. I want every bite of it. Look, it is a new day that has come upon all of us. I can feel it. I can feel it. The sun, as it plays upon my hair, every silken thread of it. I think of the nocturnal. I think of all the sights in the moonlight that is so charismatic. I think to myself what would feel like to be an owl, or a bird. What would it feel like to flit like a bat, to stare death (open and wise and vulnerable) in the face, celebrate the verbosity of life, to acknowledge that women have it differently in the world than men do when they write? I am life. I am life. There are no other words to describe this beginning, or this end. In another place, perhaps not this lifetime, but the next one, I will find love, and truly captivate a man. A man, a love, a master even greater than the poetry itself, than that heavy burden of suffering, and all the sorrows that I feel I must accept if I am to pursue this course of life. The writing life. I must always take this swift action when it comes to the demanding work of the writing of the poetry, and not the other. The writing of the poetry is my shield, and master now. The sun, this bewildering sun. The strange thing is, is how it makes me feel inside of myself. That today of all days it gives me such satisfaction, such closure, and even such mirth in the face of the loneliness I must tolerate, and understand, and live with on a daily basis. Don’t think that I’m tragic for one minute. Don’t, please, make a fuss over the writing of the poetry. It is mine. It is all mine. It is my gift to either want to share it with the world if I want too, or to not share with the world. The sun, this bewitching sun in my room that hovers, that hovers over there nearby my desk. Look at me. Look at this feast of the day in front of me. In this place in time, there is wonderment, childlike wonderment at the world around me, at the worlds and realms and empires found in Amherst, the worlds of the homestead. In my writing, the world opens itself up to me, offers itself to me on a silver platter. I make myself open to it. I must. For there is simply no other way to get the work of the day done, the chores, the kitchen, reading the newspaper to Lavinia, going out on the town. I remember in my twenties how I was a socialite. When I am writing it feels as if wave, after wave is breaking inside of me. Vibration after vibration. The sun is a miracle. I am ethereal. I am emotional. I am sensitive. Does, can the world understand that, can, does the world see me as special, as a wonder. Some days I am high on life. Other days I am as low as the branch that can bough down to major earth meeting minor sky. Distance meeting the remote. Sky meeting brides. Earth meeting grooms. Sky meeting the wolves of the earth. Amherst is my country. Perhaps, perhaps one day the world will be my country. Perhaps, perhaps one day I will be loved by that world, that country. It feels as if I am pulsating with a kind of natural rhythm. As if I am almost being pulled and pushed in all directions. In life, I must go several ways. In the writing-life, the world of my poetry, that pulls me down another rabbit-hole (a kind of black hole) trajectory. My course is set. My voice is stone. My voice belongs to the wilderness, overshadowed by absolutely nothing that I can possibly think of. My voice is like the wind. My voice will one day reign supreme, but all of these are just thoughts processing themselves repeatedly. I think of seduction too. How words can evolve. How words can seduce vision into art. They are beautiful, aren’t they? They are magnificent, remarkable even. For sometimes it feels as if I am standing too close to the edge. That this precipice, or whatever it is will mark me for life. Oh, how I want to glorify the page. Perfect it. How I want to be cleansed of that vision of what comes after winter. Master, master, the writing of the poetry, my correspondence too, are the greatest loves of my life. My eternity come close, come even closer to me. Let me kiss thy cheek, and do thy will. Amherst, you are muse. I am a visionary in your hands.
 
No one likes any aspects of the Amherst Emily Dickinson, the poet in her bedroom marked for life. I am just a poor girl. Criminal. If you choose not to marry, not give into societal norms and values, they will self-sabotage you at every turn in society. And that is what they will call you to your face, behind your back, around the corner as you turn the corner, that, I, Emily Dickerson, is a criminal. It is, of course, a criminal act not to have children, not to want to have children, not to want to be spouse, happy, you’re happy if you’re spouse. It is criminal if you are not intended for grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But I am unbreakable. The stigma of my lonely days before and after me, wherein lies the truth, the power, and the challenge?
 
If you are a poet, then you are family, then you are my family. You will forever be alive to me in the years to come, part of my history in life, and death. It is a sign of the times, my hot aching-masculine throat chanting, and chanting, and chanting into these early hours of the morning. There’s distance between us. Madness. This is madness. This engagement, this relationship can never be. You’re a man that I used to know when the bloom of youth was on my side. Now I’m old. Older. Less sure. You’re a memory, or, rather a figment of my imagination, an illusion, an apparition like the half ghostlike-figure of Mrs Rochester gone mad in the attic, that nasty and miserable attic. I don’t feel like writing today. It is cold out. Humble leaf falls to the ground. Oh, even a leaf knows about the game of humility. After the winter, there’s harvest. There’s earth, and life, precious matter that survives the cold, the winter. I remember loneliness very well. Its slow torture. Its machinery like the wheels of a bicycle. Master, will you still think of me as bliss, as all of the above. You are, you will always be beautiful to me. Undecided, your mind filled with uncertainties (so, familiar to me, but unfamiliar to you), you left. In other words, father sent you packing, so, no romance for me, no courting, or engagement. You left me. The friendship now totally, totally forgotten, but the poet in me speaks, the woman in me listens, the class system I belong to tolerates, and my heart, and mind understands completely. You had to wound me, to save yourself. I know I am intense. I have a hectic personality that no man will ever find attractive. This I know. This I have some knowledge of. I am shy when I meet new people. I don’t go out much. I don’t go to gatherings. I was an excellent student at the seminary, but that was a world that too soon came to an end. I had to move on, live my life. Understand this. I chose this life; this life did not choose me. I have mastered the artistic life. The periods of mental wellness I find invigorating. The periods of creativity, they come, and they go, and they bring me much torment, feverish distress that can only be broken by the company that I keep. Imagination is a spell, or rather, spells. Tea leaves at the bottom of a porcelain teacup, but no fortune-teller am I. I am just a daughter who has that most rare of commodities, a rebellious nature, a perfectionistic-streak within her. Master, tell me all the ways that I have to love you. Your face is cherished. It is the one face I want to see for the rest of my Amherst days. Be my friend, or, nothing at all, because friendship is all that I can offer you.  One day, perhaps they will say that the only males in her life were men old enough to be her father. She gravitates to them, they in turn gravitated towards her, her virginal-innocence, her thoughts, youth, the bloom of youth, and I suppose that, yes, there was an absence of that in their lives. You see, they were middle-aged, reaching that crisis of faith in their lives that all mean reach in middle age. They will, the critics, the public, will say that she loved them, in return they gave her the world that her childlike-possessive mother had not given her. Sadness, vast disagreement, an intense, yet natural reaction to difficulty, a brief history of melancholy, dark fluid inside my body. My diet governs my body, clinical depression, brain chemistry balance of chemicals our response, discerning the value of sadness, inevitable, you've missed out, in gaining wisdom, increase wisdom increase sadness, profound joy, here comes the cycle of life, needs, evolutionary level, stages of bonds, familiar and comfortable, balance, temperament, sadness measuring grief probing its structures, gathering pain like a net of fishes, feathers, heartbreak bird in the bush, bird in the universality of my hand, emotional pain, don't suffer. You don't have to suffer, her eyes seem to say, articulate, express, hope, let me write a poem about hope. Shades of bloom govern. structures building a muscle, the muscle of the poetry. What happened, what happened to you. pay attention to me, give me your approval, your sincerity. I am feeling lost, withdrawn from the world, an average life, who wants an average life, only the followers, only the disciples, not the saints. question of pain, existential identity, what can i do, stuck, rat in the wheel, bird in a cage, other goals, plans, results, take responsibility move repetitively, logically, hymn, with force I take you, sounds, sounds, sounds, quiver, tomb, winds, rain, weather forecast, Outcast, caravans of it, knit, company close afterlife immortality flood, composed death in sensuous ironic stages untouched roof of scooped surrender snow field harvest, mid-19th century, way of life, her room looked out at the cemetery like me, tomorrow I might be gone, or survive to live another day, to see paradise, she/I writes about death, the perspective of the majority of death, the scarcity of life, the minority of love, minor is loneliness major is the brethren at the Assembly of God, major is the earth. So, I have this room. I wake up in the morning and the first thing the room (yes, the room speaks to me with a voice as loud as thunder), the first thing the room says to me is, “So, when are you going to start afresh, write something new.” Or it is just a voice that says, “Write! The world is waiting upon you. It is necessary for you to write.” The verses are always wholesome. I don’t have to negotiate too much between reason, and doubt, being outclassed by other young women of this era, financial security (we are quite well-off, father is prosperous, my brother will soon follow in his footsteps), and the insecurity the work of writing brings with it. I don’t feel the need to go out into society, be the most beautiful, or sophisticated young woman in the room, asked to dance, or walk outside, and take in fresh air with a male companion. Why bother? The family, father, says I pretend not to care. That I’m too rebellious for words. That I should accept the Christ as my living Saviour. As soon as I accept Jesus Christ, father says my loneliness will disappear as if it never existed. But I know through trial and error that although I despise the loneliness sometimes, I must live with t, submit to it, obey its calling. It is service, under my jurisdiction. I already have the world, you see. In my frame, in my psychological makeup, in the capacity of my physical body, my intellect never wanes. I think of the wildflowers out in the fields of Amherst. From them there is no escape. Do I long for an exit, the way I long for my father, and brother’s approval, sometimes, sometimes. In the hush of the moonlight when I am writing, I am utterly alone, the house is asleep, but I don’t feel timid, or feebleminded when I write. I’m beautifully composed. The words come to me as a flood. Their clarity of vision, movement, and moods are distinct, and I am calm, utterly, utterly calm, charmed too by the rhythm of writing. The voice, and the vision of the writing. Oh, how I do love that word, ‘vision’. Its wakefulness, and process of reckoning, it’s a sacrifice to be a woman on your own, its progress, the pace of its world that comes in vibrations of sea waves, in oceanic patterns. No Ophelia am I. I am as calm as the storm whenever write. Sometimes I think I am a woman, but when I write I become a man, mannish, because in these days it is only acceptable for a man to write. I am the volcano lover versus that storm. One day I will be gone forever, then father says to me, asks me plaintively, “Emily, my daughter that I love so, so, much, my dearly beloved that is the apple of my beguiling eye, will you go to heaven, or will you go to hell. Hell is damnation. Your soul will be damned.” I say nothing when they all start behaving like this, or, I go to my bedroom. Sit, wait, and the ‘flood’ comes. I thought, once, there would come a day when I would captivate a man, set his world, his soul, his spirit on fire. That we would become engaged for a year, or perhaps longer than that, give or take a few years, but I’ve had to move on, with difficulty, with a kind of tenacity that I never knew I had within me, I clung to life sometimes, frightened of the low depths I sometimes go to, that abyss, that territory, that darkness. I know I have shamed our family in this close-knit community by not going to church with my family, but I think that God understands what matters to me after all. Art, art, art, I come undone under the touch of your nimble fingers, your beautiful hands, your sensitive, and engaging face. All art s life lit up for the entire world to see on public display. I have such an undying affection for the ‘flood’. It is like the garden to me. It is precious seed. And I am, of course I am, the seed thief. A seed thief who lives in both reality, and non-reality. On display, on exhibition, subject to judgemental indifference, and moods, and disapproval. As a child I looked up to father, but now we have words. He cross-questions me about the church, don’t I want to have a relationship with the son of David. I tell him, that in no uncertain terms do I want to be indoctrinated by rhetoric. And who created man, did God create man, or did man create God in his image. I can’t stand those stories of temptation in the garden. I think to myself, ‘poor snake, poor serpent with the forked tongue, maybe you got the raw deal, instead of Adam, and the Eve created from his rib’. Sometimes I think aloud. I shouldn’t misbehave, or throw tantrums, or fits, but I do when I reach the end of my tether. I have to write. It keeps me sane, and awakened to the intrinsic environment around me. I internalise, internalise, internalise. What else can I do? It keeps the ‘flood’s’ vein sated, and alive. There is a golden reconciliation there between the education of the mind, and the psychology of the brain. What is intelligence anyway, does it make father, or my brother happier entities? They look the same to me. Stressed by the burdens, and cares, and triumphs of the day, in much the same way as I am.
Then, suddenly one afternoon, after resting, after working in the garden, (which is a labour of love to me). Unabashed spoke my mind, my dazzling mind that I find so hard to free sometimes, to let go of talked in the room as if there was another person in the room with me, covered up my lips, breath is warm and sweet, major is church, tireless community worker like my father, secure intrusion, moments’ of value, worthwhile appreciation, demands intense, letter after letter, they couldn't do it, stylistic brilliance, worm country is a vain country, subjects art is a motel, messy, angst, growing older, friendship failed, she asked too much, like me, parallel, question, solution translated into deity, the saved, i ask too much. I want it all. I need everything. I desire love, not the lack of it. society does not belong to me, unmoved, choose one, or don't choose at all, there were moments, anguish, withdrawal of love, speaking about being a poet, will to breath where you are, sorrow, suffering is nearby, thinking of you, yours forever, male muses, triumphant, paradise, is heaven, nothing does justice to your voice, your face, holding onto the past can kill you, futile, done with, the compass navigating me relentlessly like the spoke of a wheel, the normal non-existence, talk difficulty, exhausting, she exhausts you, encounter, great trees and a garden, flame of a girl, flame of a woman, bright, childlike. I will always be childlike, for that is what the life is like for a spinster, Mr Fatman also discouraged my poetry, fame, celebrity, world, world famous, spasmodic, uncontrollable, no master in my life, organize to bare my soul, have it out if you will with rebellion and, interior power lies risk, taboo, unnatural to be alone, it would be real life to love you, to long for you, to belong to you, the gaze, the gaze, the gaze, your face full of grace, your shoes caked with mud, sun slinging warmth, the heat of the day, give me the light of the day over and above despair. creativity in crisis, in hallucination, distress, distraction, separated, detached, feeling powerless, no self-possession. salute me, freezing, salute me joyful, or don't salute me at all, the hours, the hours touch equality, liberty, noon is paradise, euphoria, drama of the short story, one pities her, one pities me, much more urgent, saying something, requires urgent attention, the nerves Egyptian like Cleopatra, a wooden, stale piece of bread recollected, stupor, do you know of it, want of it, master. kidneys, Emily Dickinson, mental state, Elizabeth bishop, Plath, early Sexton, early poems, girlish, those general attractive, penetrating, 70 years after her death, altered, 2000 poems. So, I add titles, punctuation, authentic and sincere was her offering to the world, voice of Eve, Eve’s seed, thirst, common sense, found in that voice, what it feels like to be alive, march to progress, marked by process, circumference, equilibrium, greater than the loss of my master, is the craft, is the imagination, crowned, erect, equal, living, the props, the posture of the house. i withdraw into my bedroom, my desk, just like her, just like her, see, see my soul, look at my hurting, my suffering, my shame is hard too, lot worse background, you were saved, restored, reconcile, personal views taught, learned. We built Amherst. This is our town, my town. You’re brave, and bold, and a brilliant thinker, Master. There's a funeral inside my head. Solitude is important to me. The soul, the poet, Abigail George, in her bedroom. Both women, set in their ways, and habits, set categories for their poems. One, with the bright flame of her lamp light, the other with Edison’s lightbulb. Alone in her bedroom daylight turns into hours, into afternoons. Emily Dickinson, not the poetess Emily Dickinson to be sure, is finding herself gardening, doing household chores, this genius by lamplight, who first defined farewell to a dark idea, and then the sea of farewell to visions and voices.
 
Rivers hurry pass me by. Remote me marked with hope, sweetness, madness near, it either gives or takes. The skill of language, she was free, never scolded, restless, do justice to the poem, I tell myself, do a kindness on impulse, let that be the stimulus for the natural environment, the supernatural, anonymously, the mystery of the poet, Amherst, Massachusetts. Books, I am surrounded by a paradise that is all mine. Kept an eye, nobody ever said that the writing fit their reality, fugitive little waves making sparks of electricity, forgotten about when they vanish into thin air, waves, patterns of waves. There are more Christian sisters, more brethren, more non-supportive sons, more girls, more boys vastly mysterious to me, greater than fugitive. They laugh at me like, like the wilderness hums, suggestion, real life, real life, what is that, no control, powerful, optimistic, Kafka, Kant, riding peak, exploring wave, dynamic of the sea, the potential of sense, common sense numb, creep across my psyche, solitary, break through broke, plunged into abyss, the seed project, outside of that frame, that tradition, advanced, education, healthy psychological, emotional, husband father define who they are, as women, image of the girl, submission, Sir Thomas brown, mrs brownng, metaphysical not confessional, carpenter, bird, being, feeling and metaphor, feeling s metaphor, abstract, is conditioned-thinking, anoint, anoint, anoint, impatient, goal female missionaries like my mother wanted me to become, to marry an Irish missionary, walking to find flowers, wildflowers, I walk with angels, i talk to angels, the angels sing, i listen, nature was apart from her, nomadic here, there, science, religious lecture, botanist, she knew the stars, space gaps her peers had fellow pupils, love, love Jesus, doubt him, skepticism, only on faith, sound stands ghost-like, philosophy, guess contempt, cruxificton, redemptive, plucked in this vein, the soul, the soul, the soul, the art student, standing alone a rebel linger at doorways, pause with my lamp, it is hard for me to give me life Amherst, outcast like me, orthodox-belief, tragic christianity, like me daughter didn't go to church, the poetic life, name dropped like childhood, porcelain teacup, fall from grace into struggle, my rank now spinster, half-unconscious, erect, reject, isolate by will, by inter-faith, rhythm,  shadowy figure, invalid, bewildering, I never had a mother, what is a burden, never intimate, she became like a child in my arms.
poetry
that is a short story, obscure, ethereal flitting company childlike presence, strange
cracked
fragile girl, words have the power to see you through triumph and every break
embodiment of language, the first words
wallace stevens
frantz fanon
george eliot
karin borge
inclined to speak
exodus, system, privacy, comfort, numbing schedule, painful, to think, to write, to study, to observe, ordinary immense species, perishing, poverty, portion grace, and mercy, and hope, keeping a journal
well-established family
very deep, look very deep to the mountains, radiance found in corners, difficult, cordial emphasis
This is genius
Beautiful minds and creativity
A matter of genius
Beautiful Minds: The enigma of creativity
Madness is close to genius to some, not all
unprecedented
A man of genius
electric charge
painstakingly
concentration
no one alive has that expertise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbE_jVT1NiY
montage
the other brain creativity and intelligence factored into
rex young what ....  do well
marcus
what makes phillip glass
collaborations intellectual life of our times
genius discovered
what they faced
nature, aspects of genius
origins of genius
douglas
fields Beautiful minds: Aspects of Emily Dickinson, and the Northern Areas poet Abigail George
 
 
 
 
 
Amherst
By Abigail George
 
 
 
How am I supposed to live without father? He is passed. Gone into the hereafter. He is never to return. While, yes, I am still very much alive. This Emily Dickinson will outlive Amherst. The confines of her childhood home. I will live out the rumour that I was the poet marked for life in her bedroom. Sitting, sitting at her desk from the early afternoon, to the early hours of the morning. They will perhaps, perhaps speak about my voyage as poet into the known and unknown world, over terrain and republic, through familiar ground and unfamiliar territory, but that has now come to an end. My eyesight is poor. Yes, my eyes are weak. I cannot see the wildflowers so clearly anymore. Sometimes I dash my fist in a pathetic fit of frustration at what I have become on the kitchen table. I have over the years withdrawn from public life. I had life once. I had life in me. I had fire and hell and brimstone in me too, but this was at one stage in my life so far away in memory now. Yes, even my memory goes dim as time, dim as the hours in a day that go by. In another time, another place, another Amherst I was operated now. Father thought that perhaps would be best for me. After that, I was not the extrovert anymore. I did not travel. I became more inhibited. Wildflower. I think of the wildflowers of my childhood. I think of my sister, Lavinia, of us picking these wildflowers. Every heartache in this world is my heartache. Cracks are beginning to show in my armour. The helmet of salvation is still in a sturdy position on my head. I did not have any need, or, desire to speak in public anymore at functions. I did not want in particular to declare myself a missionary servant in the church. I stopped going to parties. Was no longer the most popular socialite in the Amherst community. People keep on leaving me in my life. Oh, there are so many kitchen teas, and too many weddings, and then there are the baby showers that I have never got around to ever going too. They are (the Amherst-community, the public, the Christian-folk) doing to me what they did to my father. Either full of praise, or, rubbing him up the wrong way. Spreading rumour after rumour. I am not strong like he was to take it all in, and then exhale. My father was an educated man. My father was an intelligent man with a robust energy for anything political. He was elected to congress because of that. I am just like a woman now (and a woman will always be a woman). A woman is emotional, so they say, whoever they might be. The woman is of course the one with the survival instinct. I am sitting (here as a woman) moaning about her lot in life. I am not educated in the way my brother was. He went to Harvard Law School. All I have had is self-learning. All I have reached is enlightenment. All that I am is lonely. The loneliness awaits me most of all in my bedroom. This, this is all I have. This sword. This pen is my sword. The terrors and the nightmares visit me at night. Without them, I am nothing. Have nothing but to question my own sanity. What have I done? I have isolated myself to the point of no return. I have no life. I have no function either than to be nurse and caregiver to the childlike woman who carried me in her womb for nine months. I haven’t become older, nor, wiser gracefully. Of course, I am frightened for the future. I am a woman alone in the world. No husband to offer me sanctuary, certainly there are no more friendships. No more correspondence with male editors. People move on. The girls I knew when I was a girl, they are all women now. I don’t want to be on my own anymore. I don’t want the hours. These hours filled with beasts of terror. The machinations of an insane person’s frame of reference. And I ask myself where is the science in all of us. It is science that keeps my brain in check, set in my ways, my habits, my very schedule that I keep lest I go out of my mind. For what happens to a spinster when she grows old. When men become weary of her. Wary most of all of her moods. Her waking thoughts keep going around in circles. I am going mad again. Do you know what it, what this life means to me now? I no longer have a purpose. There is no longer meaning in my activities. Even basic things, my temper (because I have one, because I am temperamental), I have to continually check myself. Remove myself from the situation before there is conflict. Before there is terrible pain. Loss of insight into how the conflict arose in the first place. Before there is even a choice in the matter, I have to leave. I have no father for companion anymore. No more mother to shield from the world. To love. To love is such a treasured thing. I, I am now Lazarus. I just am. I am Hamlet’s Ophelia. I am apostle, saint, sinner, disciple and follower. Life cursed me. It is a terrible thing to say. I take that back. I cursed myself. I am to blame for everything in the end for everything that has ever happened to me. To love is both a curse and a gift. Because eventually you lose the ones you love the most. There are funerals. And all the time there are funerals, there is a funeral in my bones. In this, this wildflower’s bones. Love me, adore me now, praise me, worship me, grant me a divine audience, or, leave me. Let me alone. Let me be. Let me go. Surrender me to the universe as all women are at some stage of their lives, whether they are mothers, or daughters, or orphans. There was always this key struggle in my life. To exist. To exist. I am truly an orphan now. Can’t stand my sister-in-law’s parties any longer. I will need a chaperone. Emily cannot be alone. Emily cannot walk by herself anymore. Emily must be calmed down when she feels the wretched distress of the terrors that come at night. Who am I? Who is this stranger dressed in virginal-white all these years? In mourning for her father. In mourning for a mother possessed with childlike qualities. No children to comfort me when I am elderly, infirm, weak. Who will look after me? Where will I go? I have flashbacks of the old me. The old life I led when I was young, calmer, more carefree, free in other words to do as I pleased. To love who I wanted to love. But that time has come to an end. There is something sinister about death now. Upon their arrival I prepare the house, I welcome them.  I welcome people who have become strangers to me over the years. They’re here now. Only stay for an hour or two. They take my breath away. There’s no escape. No room in the house that I can withdraw into. I don’t write anymore, you know. I have completely given that up. My wildflower. I am no wildflower in the full bloom of youth anymore. The people around me are mysteriously silent now. They say nothing. They do nothing for me. They do not speak to me, and if they do it is condescending. It is patronising. They sneer, jeer, mock, stare, glance my way, and say nothing. There is no communication. There is no connection there anymore that drives us together again. Just pain and bondage. More pain. More bondage. I think it all a trick of my mind. Must be, right? When I was a girl, I was happy. When I was in love, or falling in love I was happy. Now my mind is clouded. My judgements, what about it. I have no judgement on anything, anymore, anymore. No love. Only bitterness. No husband. Only regret. To think that now I am a joke. Well, that is how I feel. This emptiness rolling around with the birds and the butterflies and moths in the abyss of self, what is left of my ego. There is no longer an identity to speak of. No longer a charmed life with suitors in tow. No more marriage, or, even indecent proposals. No joke. Recluse. I’m a recluse. I don’t go out. I don’t socialise. Another break from reality, then another, and another, until no one is laughing anymore. They say prayers. They say prayers instead. They give me tracts. Reading matter for my spiritual progress. Readying me for my spiritual awakening, or, some reckoning made on behalf of the God of all matter and energy. There are variations in my behaviour now. Sometimes it comes on strong like a narcotic. It grows and grows and grows. Sometimes it is subtle, but it is always there. I know nothing of the world, nor do I want to now. It has come too late. Too fast and furious is the end times upon me. The end of my life. Rather the end of my life as I know it. No more father. No more father. No more shelter. No more sanctuary. Who is going to look after me when I am old and tired, and a white-haired lady whose hair is streaked with silver? The show must go on nonetheless. I must endure. The survival instinct kicks in. I must prepare my work for posterity. The legacy is in the writing itself. The hours I spent in my bedroom. Word after painstaking word. I am given orders. I am told what to do. What not to do. Nobody comes to the house. Soon, soon I will be the only one here. It won’t be a sad affair, I promise you. I have so much to do. I have to prepare an entire lifetime of work. Put it into order. You think I’m someone. I’m a nobody. I’m a real nobody with a nothing life to show for it. All these times I was hoodwinked, you see. I thought I was charismatic. I thought I would always be dear, one day be darling wife and mother. Now I have nothing but this for the world. This incredible body of work. The work must not be still. Must not be composed as I am. It must go out into the world. People must read it. It will be pushed. Pushed into the world. But not by me. By critics, and editors. By the working class. By the people who love me unconditionally, and without question. Unlike the non-supportive members of this society. Give me the working classes over the petty middle class any day. They love without expecting anything in return. They are so poverty-stricken, you say, what would they want from a recluse like me. What can they possibly offer a poet who has lived a ruined life? An unmarried life. A life marked by pain and terror at every turn. I have known what it is to be loved. Now no one can take that euphoria away from me. Not even the love of my life, the work, you see. The work, the writing of the poetry is the most important thing. It is not so important for it to be praised, for the writing life to inspire, for my own life to be admired anything like my grandfather’s life was, or my father’s life, or my brother’s life. Published widely. I know this for a fact now. My plan is my plan. My goal is my goal. My writing is my writing. Yes, I am helped financially. Yes, I am well-off in some ways, but life is getting tired of me, and I sometimes find people in society tiresome. Their notions are ridiculous. Wishing to turn me into something that I’m not. A Protestant. I was a no-hoper. Not part of the Christian revival scenario that overtook New England in my younger days. I rejected the church. I rejected the indoctrination. The lectures that were supposedly sermons. I never rejected the faith though, although it must have seemed that way to my beloved father. The one man in my life who loved me for me, I guess. Now I am alone. Utterly, utterly alone. I’m old-fashioned in my thinking, in my outlook on life, but not when it comes to spiritual matters, and issues of faith. I just no longer make sweeping statements with regard to Christ. The only people I do make sweeping statements about are those who wax on prosaically on the total annihilation of the human race because of the end times. Who want to quote the Book of Revelation to me of all people (as if I have never heard of the four horsemen of the apocalypse)? Speak to me of the prophets. Men of integrity. Speak to me of their depth of character. Their spiritual progress in the world. Elijah being taken up to heaven in dazzling chariots of fire. Speak to me of Ezekiel, his protégé. There was one minister who called the world an apocalypse in the making, an experimental dystopia that was a work-in-progress. I just felt that he was attacking the very cultural background of Amherst, and insulting my intelligence. I had just cause to do what I did. To turn my back on that world of the church. A spinster in distress. I am distracted by thoughts of my own mortality. I can hardly see the flowers now. I can hardly see them, but they are the first thing that I think about when I open my eyes in the morning when I wake. The very last thing on my mind when I go to bed at night. Wildflowers are a sight! A sight to behold. The wildflower is the hero in my life now.
The sun is a laughing, talking, walking miracle today. If it shines, it shines only for me and Lavinia. What perfection, because it shines with an otherworldliness. It is a forceful warrior, (and I’ve known prayer warriors in our community here in Amherst). The sun is like a woman who is a siren, in the company of other men. The sun is fire, means fire, is powerful, a powerful commodity. It grows during the day, ablaze with heat, eddies of dust rising up from the floors of the homestead as I walk, as I wander from the downstairs to the upstairs. It is much like me, much like I was in my early twenties, popular and admired at dances. It is a dazzling sun. It dances in shadow. It plays with leaf, another omniscient miracle. Leaf, and leaves, tree, and trees, those most ancient, like the instrument of change, like a symphony orchestra, a violin being plucked at repeatedly with expertise, a composer being, again, plucked from obscurity into fame, and fortune. The wildflowers found in nature, the most natural feeling in the world is to feel as if I am like that wildflower. Built temporarily to sustain the hidden energies of beauty, wonder. Am I wise? But am I wise? Am I courageous whenever I’m articulate? Austin, my brother, does not belong body and soul to me any longer. I can only imagine what his life is like now, shielded from the view of sometimes perplexing me, intense me, playing with ideas, bringing life to words, awakening a truth in them. No man has ever said to me that he loved me. Taken me in his arms, but understand this. I am a token soldier. I can see. I can hear. I have this powerful knowledge within my bones, planted there, and it resonates through the entire marrow of my being, season after season of this terrible war that they call the American Civil War. Men are dying. Boys are dying. Can I trust in the knowledge that I have the personality of a wildflower? I like the expression. I can guess at its hidden meanings. I can trust myself in the daylight. I don’t cower away from the light, from the life, from the wakefulness that it gives me. The sun is divine. On it lives fire. On it burns a volcano. I only want the freedom to be an individual. I dare not call my writing art, for art’s sake. My vision is my own, and, yet, it is not my own. It has something to with divinity, those strongholds, those realms, and my own intuition. The process is for me to make as much progress as I can in the afternoon, work in the evenings with the lamp at my side guiding this process, navigating the trajectory of the moonlight. Yes, yes, I am fond of working my nimble fingers to the bone until the early hours of the morning. Until daylight breaks into a kind of passive resistance against the night sky, the unfolding and putting away of the stars under the jurisdiction of God’s grace, and His supreme mercy. I need clarity and vision when I write. There’s a brightness lit in my brain, every living, breathing cell. I worship every crack in this system, watch every nerve tick like a clock chiming in on every hour into homestead life, into Amherst, and with writing comes despair. There is hardship. I don’t want to fool you about my preoccupation. Perhaps one day my childhood home will be a museum that people will all come to explore. They will see my life for what it really is. Loneliness personified. They will say I lived like a recluse. I don’t want anything to be published while I am still alive. That is strange. Stranger than fiction. For all poets want is an audience to tell them how wonderful they are. How wonderful it is to be published. I often ask myself, Emily, Miss Dickinson, where does this gift of poetry, of writing about minor flora, the wolf begging, knocking at the backdoor come from. My soul begs my spirit to answer. I live in a just world. I am robust. I have health on my side. I am neither superstitious or sentimental. Why do you call it both terror, and Master? Deceit, well, it never rises to meet me when I wake n the morning. Yes, I am a difficult person, don’t ask me to transform my personality. This is bone season, feast season, meat country, the communing of the brethren meeting on every Sunday morning without fail. I have to wear a hat, that’s how hot it is now outdoors. I want to say remember me, or, do my words, does my poetry frighten you. Give you cause to think that because of my output of sometimes three poems a day, that perhaps I am touched with madness, or playing with madness. Making it ally, instead of foe. Oh look, how crestfallen the tomato plants look in their green finery. As if they are all dressed up with nowhere to go. As if they are living in a dream. I keep waiting to hear the words said, told to me in secret, or, conspiratorial whisper, or, confidence that I am special, (yes, that I Emily Dickinson is special, is beloved, is a saint after the outcomes, and aftermath of this mad war, young men dying like flies, maggots in their wounds, ) nobody has ever said that to me, or, that I’m shy, miserable at holding a conversation when meeting a stranger for the first time. The work, the passion that I have for it, I fall under its spell. Never to forget, always to be quick to forgive, to be cunning, and witty in my letters to male friends, male counterparts. I share my life’s work with my sister-in-law. Love. What is love anyway? It can strike you infirm. Its possibilities are endless. The limits of the work are totally up to you to a point as poet. It is exhausting. The hours that keep. I see no one now. Nobody comes to the house. Nobody visits. My close friends are my family members. It sometimes feels as if I have a dune to climb. It is giant. The sand is so hot I have to wear my walking shoes in this pretend reality. Everything I do, which concerns the family, I do out of love. It is a spectacular giving, and forgiving love. I study it from afar first. The first line of the verse and so on, and so forth. I am small in stature, but my words make up for that fact. I take it by the hand, kiss it ever so delightfully, remembering the church doctrine, the minister, the sermons delivered as lectures to the congregation that I adhered to as child. Summarily, I would adjust my behaviour accordingly. And sometimes at the end of the day I feel tired-happy, or, mentally exhausted, physically drained, and please, please don’t tell me that they are only words, for they are my life, they are my very breath, every inhale, every exhale. The words are lovely. They are truly perfection. Meanwhile it is I who is imperfect. It is I who is the sea, and the words are like a mountain stream in the dead of the wild. You’re something else, you’re the love of my life, I say to my children, the poems because they are. I birthed them, gave life to the words, before abandoning them in a bureau drawer. I become someone else when I write. It’s completely absurd to me to even to be thinking of another life. I cannot say I have been persecuted. By whom? Nobody in my family has ill-treated me badly in any way, shape, or, form. And then I think of how courteous and professional spring is, the wildflowers, the lavender, everything in the natural. Am I behaving these days? Sometimes I have my bad moments, but my family is good when it comes to forgiving me, forgiving the words spoken in the heat of the moment in a fit of anger. I am a flame. I am a flame. The snow will fall and I will still freeze out the winter, the layers of soppy time, and I, the poetess of Amherst will still be a flame. Star bright in the paradise of the homestead. I sometimes will look at what I have written, weep a little, be overcome with emotion, or stare in awe at this feverish creation on paper that will stay alive forever in my heart, and nature, and life. I think of the rain sometimes (when witnessing a downpour that seems to eclipse everything in my brain, like for instance the language of blood, the comfort of strangers). How wise, and thoughtful, and knowledgeable blood is. I think of this spitting rain in a half-condescending way, in an itinerant fashion, in the manner of a non-believer, because I cannot work for the very life of me outside, or go exploring Amherst with my sister, Lavinia, or work in the garden, toil the land, survey the landscape that was built by my grandfather.  I do not often think about my lucky circumstances, and I try not to think, but it does come to my mind from time to time, I do think often that I am wealthy, or rather the word that I’m looking for is, ‘prosperous’, because of my family name. It is the work, the love of my life, the master of my life that yields those results. The reward at the end of the day is my angelic tongue, which is connected to my brain, which is connected to my thought patterns, and every living soul in my world. Even the wildflowers that Lavinia and I pick have souls. She declared this to me one day in passing, and I thought what intelligence you have for someone so young. I can’t imagine a day without the sun. And after I have put in a day’s work, I think to myself that this has been a remarkable progress, an enchanting journey from beginning to end. I think to myself, what direction will tomorrow bring. For if I had a compass, which direction would it face, to the west, or, the east yonder, and how to navigate the unknown without a foe in the world. When I write, it seems my mind is as ancient, as darling, as fetching, as beguiling, as fertile as Eden. It is evergreen there, and for the rest of the day I am not stuck in a rut, I am inside a valley. Just adding life to the joyful activity of writing, scratching out that which does not please me. On the inhale the sun hits my desk. The heat of the day seems to warm everything up. Joyfully, I start a new page, give my all, give my everything. I am a woman on a mission. There’s a peace of mind that comes over me, and everything about life that has somehow altered me for the good, all of my sheltered intentions, and protected me humbles me, stares me in the face, hunting me down. Where am I to go? I only have this desk. I only have my older brother. I have Lavinia. The page, the page. I see the dune again. It splits my brain into intelligence and stupor. I freeze suddenly, helpless, I feel I am not alone in the room. I turn around but no one is there. I am alone, sitting at my small desk, polishing what I did the day before, or settling own to work on the latest poem. I think of botany and nature, geography, time, and place, fire spilling over from a volcano, geology, the face of a rock, and the mountains of my imagination are breath-taking. Nothing can break that spell, transform my mood when I am working, when I am writing. The world is a beautiful, sensuous-filled place. But I am alone. I am quite alone.  I am in my palace, sitting on my throne, king and queen, and my words are my loyal subjects. The terror of before passes, creativity comes upon me once again. I begin.  Begin to write until I am sated. Until I am quite thrilled, quite elated with what I have in front of me, what I own. I am both (speaking here of my mood) is high and low, mad and sane, ruthless and determined in the composed hush of the silence in my bedroom. The air smelling like damp and rust, the heat of the day and citrus, a forest deep-deep in the Amazon. I am in a rainforest. Then I am in a jungle. Then I am standing next to a volcano breathing fire. Then I am in nature, the place where I most want to be. Then I am in a small room in Amherst, that is all mine. Then I am explorer. Then I am scholar deep in the frame of my textbooks. I am Keats studying medicine. Then I am Keats the poet. Of course, I relish all of this. This world has nurtured me since birth. Father and I, we have our discussions about church and the larger than life Christ-figure. There are times when I myself don’t understand why I don’t go to church anymore. Father doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand him. He is a law-man involved in politics, carrying on his father’s legacy, in the same way my brother will one day in the not too distant future. I want to be great friends with his wife. I now we will be. Already she has expressed an interest in the poems, but she doesn’t understand why I don’t publish them. The sun is romantic to me. I want every bite of it. Look, it is a new day that has come upon all of us. I can feel it. I can feel it. The sun, as it plays upon my hair, every silken thread of it. I think of the nocturnal. I think of all the sights in the moonlight that is so charismatic. I think to myself what would feel like to be an owl, or a bird. What would it feel like to flit like a bat, to stare death (open and wise and vulnerable) in the face, celebrate the verbosity of life, to acknowledge that women have it differently in the world than men do when they write? I am life. I am life. There are no other words to describe this beginning, or this end. In another place, perhaps not this lifetime, but the next one, I will find love, and truly captivate a man. A man, a love, a master even greater than the poetry itself, than that heavy burden of suffering, and all the sorrows that I feel I must accept if I am to pursue this course of life. The writing life. I must always take this swift action when it comes to the demanding work of the writing of the poetry, and not the other. The writing of the poetry is my shield, and master now. The sun, this bewildering sun. The strange thing is, is how it makes me feel inside of myself. That today of all days it gives me such satisfaction, such closure, and even such mirth in the face of the loneliness I must tolerate, and understand, and live with on a daily basis. Don’t think that I’m tragic for one minute. Don’t, please, make a fuss over the writing of the poetry. It is mine. It is all mine. It is my gift to either want to share it with the world if I want too, or to not share with the world. The sun, this bewitching sun in my room that hovers, that hovers over there nearby my desk. Look at me. Look at this feast of the day in front of me. In this place in time, there is wonderment, childlike wonderment at the world around me, at the worlds and realms and empires found in Amherst, the worlds of the homestead. In my writing, the world opens itself up to me, offers itself to me on a silver platter. I make myself open to it. I must. For there is simply no other way to get the work of the day done, the chores, the kitchen, reading the newspaper to Lavinia, going out on the town. I remember in my twenties how I was a socialite. When I am writing it feels as if wave, after wave is breaking inside of me. Vibration after vibration. The sun is a miracle. I am ethereal. I am emotional. I am sensitive. Does, can the world understand that, can, does the world see me as special, as a wonder. Some days I am high on life. Other days I am as low as the branch that can bough down to major earth meeting minor sky. Distance meeting the remote. Sky meeting brides. Earth meeting grooms. Sky meeting the wolves of the earth. Amherst is my country. Perhaps, perhaps one day the world will be my country. Perhaps, perhaps one day I will be loved by that world, that country. It feels as if I am pulsating with a kind of natural rhythm. As if I am almost being pulled and pushed in all directions. In life, I must go several ways. In the writing-life, the world of my poetry, that pulls me down another rabbit-hole (a kind of black hole) trajectory. My course is set. My voice is stone. My voice belongs to the wilderness, overshadowed by absolutely nothing that I can possibly think of. My voice is like the wind. My voice will one day reign supreme, but all of these are just thoughts processing themselves repeatedly. I think of seduction too. How words can evolve. How words can seduce vision into art. They are beautiful, aren’t they? They are magnificent, remarkable even. For sometimes it feels as if I am standing too close to the edge. That this precipice, or whatever it is will mark me for life. Oh, how I want to glorify the page. Perfect it. How I want to be cleansed of that vision of what comes after winter. Master, master, the writing of the poetry, my correspondence too, are the greatest loves of my life. My eternity come close, come even closer to me. Let me kiss thy cheek, and do thy will. Amherst, you are muse. I am a visionary in your hands.
 
 
I hope you have the sun. I long for the sun today. Yes, I’m thinking of you. You and moonlight. You and tenderness. How you express yourself. How you make me feel from my smile to my soul. Only you know what I want the world to see. So, you took me and then you left me. You were mentally cruel to me. I love you anyway. I accept and understand that it is part of your genetic makeup.  I accept and understand that that is just a part of your personality. You bring out the best in me. You bring out the worst in me. You’re holy even when you’re holier than thou. I accept and understand that we can’t be together. You’re not here. I’m here. The sea is here. Driftwood is here, my love, but you’re not. Are you drinking again? I know that you are. Of course, you don’t have to explain anything to me. You are my beloved. I understand. If there’s another woman, other women in your bed, you’re a man, I understand and accept that that will always be a factor in your life. I will never cut you. Understand that. I will never wound you for the sake of wounding you. You want me conveniently out of your life now. I understand and accept that. I will be writing to you to try and reach you for the rest of your life. Understand that. For you are my kind, my beloved, my kind of man. You will always be my type. Unfortunately, I will always be a stereotype. What do you see when you look at me now? Is she, your wife just a few years older than me? Both of you thought you’d be safe. That she wouldn’t fall pregnant. You did not use condoms. This is what married people do. I understand. You’re lovers. I understand you needed someone. I would not give in. I tried to tell you that I loved you. I just couldn’t put it into words, you see. Do you understand? Is it fine where you are? What is the weather like? Is it hot there? How are you? Are you coping? I am trying to make things happen. If I was your woman, and you were my man, life would have been exciting all the time. Interesting all the time. My sister is in Europe. That is her life now. Which is why I contacted you. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to her. I’m really in the depths of despair, which is why I tried to contact you. I wanted to hear the sound of your voice on the other side of the telephone. I wanted to hear all of your voices. I feel the ache in my lonely bones most of all. Yes, the loneliness is getting to me once again. Here I will pause; will you think my hair looks pretty like this. Do you still love me? There are bowls of fire in the linings of my heart. They are burning for you. You’re the enigma. You’re the enigmatic prize. Other men look at you envious. Other women want to be at your side. I know you. I know you. I love you anyway. You’re breaking my heart again. You’re walking away again. We must stop meeting as lovers. We have to meet as friends now. Friends who sleep together occasionally. I love you. I love only you. You are gone to the afterparty. The wrap parties. The social function.  I could never host anything. Just thinking about it makes me feel tired. She’s at your side. You have pulled me under again, my love. Your beautiful wife is at your side. You make quite a handsome pair. I have to let you go again. This time for good. You’re beautiful, and once you were mine. You’re not mine anymore. I will love you all for eternity. The ghost of man. The ghost of the man you were when I met you. I won’t keep you waiting. This is your time. This is the woman you have chosen to build a life with, it is her life too. She’s your human shield. I am anti-matter. I am non-existent in your world. We can pretend we feel nothing when we look at each other. But everyone can see our chemistry. How good we would be together. When I look at you, when you’re on television, all I see or feel is electricity. You’re angry at me that I can’t be more discreet. I can’t do your bidding anymore, my love, my love, my love. You’re gone. My sister is gone. Mike Murdock, American television evangelist is gone. I know the whisky tumbler is in your hand. There’s a woman lying next to you. You kiss her hard. What are you doing? You don’t love her. If I phone, you’ll answer. You’ll make me the happiest person in the world. I’ll make you the happiest person in the world. I meet so many people. All I want is you. You made your choice. You live like a family man, which is what you always wanted. You live like a free man. Perhaps one day I’ll see you again. I’ll see you and I won’t see you. You’ll see me and you won’t see me. Thanking you for your time. I can’t thank you in advance for your reply anymore. You won’t see this letter. I love you. I love you. I love you. Understand that. You’ll never let me down. You’re not going to answer the phone if I reach you. You’re gone. You hate me. I need you so much. You’re gone. I tell myself that you hate me. You loving me is impossible. Me loving you is impossible. The woman lying next to you. Well, this has always been your modus operandi. I miss you. You miss me. I don’t know how to be wife, mother, or lover. I’m sorry. I should call. I don’t have airtime. I don’t have data. Can’t give you a baby. I don’t feel that I am woman enough for you, because I can’t give you a child. There you go, you are breaking my heart again. You are my miracle. You are really gone this time. You have no need for me to substitute anything in your life. I am scared. I’m frightened. I’m running scared. I’m alone, but it is not the first time in my life that I am alone. Everything is in my head. I’m a mess. I’m a mess. We don’t even talk anymore. Those days are gone. I wish you well, my friend. The passion is still here. What am I going to do with all this passion that I have for you? All this feeling that I have for you. You’re gone. Yes, yes, yes, I know I keep saying that. I have to remind myself of that fact as if it is alive, as if your departure it is temporary when in fact it isn’t. I’m crazy. Crazy for you. All you have to do is touch me once, and you know that what I am saying is true. My sister is such a talent. She has the potential to make it. To become an honest woman. To become lover. Somehow, she was saved from the kind of life that I live. Falling in love with emotionally unavailable men. There’s something else I wanted to speak to you about. I have to write something. Do I write something serious or light-hearted? Do I give the game away? Do I show and tell? Or let the audience in the theatre connect the dots. I trust your judgement. You have to explain the situation to me now. We are not on speaking terms anymore? Can I contact you, because you said that I could? You’re not free. You’re not available. Perhaps you’re not in the country anymore. Perhaps you’re at home with your family. This is my message to you. I love you. I inhabit you with every force. You’re embarrassed and insecure and shy. You were always shy. I loved that about you. I’m embarrassed and insecure and shy. I love how you make yourself vulnerable to me. You’re with someone tonight. It’s Saturday. Love is just a game. And to you, loving is just a game. Call the police. Call the memory police. Gosh, you are so beautiful Robert. You still take my breath away. Be safe. You made me feel safe in your arms. No worries. Love who you want. Take to bed who you want. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t behave. Otherwise tonight, tonight, and all the nights after that we would have been together. I just wanted to say that I’m thinking of you. I just wanted to say that you were the greatest love of my life. But tonight, tonight you are on my mind. So, I relax into the dream of you. Smoke a cigarette. Pop a mint in my mouth. The sun is setting here. I know I can’t just show up again in your life. Unannounced and uninvited. You make me so happy. And all I am doing is just sitting here, thinking of you. You’re the man. You’re the man. You will always be the man in my life. I’ll go on pretending for your sake. I won’t pretend I know who you are if I ever see you again. I’ll avert my eyes and walk on by as if we never even met. I think of Brink and Jonker. How brilliant they were together. How brilliant we were together. Who is holding onto you now? Who is wrapping their legs around your waist? I’m missing you badly. Of course, I know this depression won’t last. It will pass the thought of the holy perfection of you. The man, the man, the man. You were the man in my life once. All the life in me has died. All the love that you had for me has died in you. I don’t regret anything, love of my life, light of my life. Perhaps they will say this one day, that my characters are complex. Males living in a reality of their own making. Will they ever know how true that is? Will they ever know your potential to be both lover and husband? Will you ever know? Yes, I have no one. I always have had no one. No one is in the picture. Except the master of the universe. Christ, the Saviour. I’m not coping. I’m waiting here for someone to take this pain away from me. Yes, yes, yes. I know that person has to be me. I know that now. I have to save myself from this flux. You’re loving someone. Your mouth is on her mouth. Your lips are on her lips. Your warm breath is on her neck. The nape of her neck. When I think like this, I think of us. I think of us together like that. I’m a big girl now. No longer naïve ingenue. Am I confident? Looks can be deceiving. You see what you want to see. The world sees what they want to see. You don’t want me for some reason or other. You don’t want me. I accept this now. Do you understand this now? I am telling you that I accept this set of circumstances. I feel so rough, frustrated at myself because even after all this time I’ve isolated myself. I haven’t fallen in love. No one really cares about me, the way you cared about me. I can’t remember now what I was protecting you from. I was so poor. Perhaps it was my own poverty. I felt ashamed. You did everything in your power not to make me feel that shame. I absolutely hated you seeing me like that. That was not who I was. All I want to do is sit here now with you. Look at you. Look at you. Look at you. The way your eyes crinkle up at the corners when you’re thinking, when you’re laughing, when you’re with your friends. That is your life. I won’t ever be a part of that. I’ll do this any way you want me to. Now comes the leaving part again. The departure. And I know the reason why we’re not together. You’ve got your life back in order now, you complicated, complicated man. I don’t want you to change. I know who I fell in love with. Rich man. Poor girl. Older man. Girl in her early twenties. I will love you for the rest of my life. I just wanted you to know that. I’ll go on saying that until my last breath. No answer. Silence. You wake up in the morning and greet me with silence. You go to bed. Silence. Silence is also an answer. You are saying that you don’t love me. That’s okay. I’m okay with that. I’m scared. The demons come at night. There’s a struggle. Always this struggle. They’re calling it body dysmorphic disorder. Do you understand? You are the only one who understands me. You are the only man who has ever touched me. I am old. Old. Old. Old. A woman’s body falls a part when she becomes older. Oh, quite literally. There’s no getting used to that. To the fact that girls stay young and in bloom forever. Let her love you instead of me. She will love all of you in her own way. That’s the most important thing to know. That she will try. I can’t let you see all of me, but you know me so well. You’re in my head again. You’re in my head again. You’re the only one who sees me. The real me. You’re the only one who listens. The only one who will ever understand me. I go everywhere and I see you everywhere. Oh, I know they’re just a pale version of you. But understand this, it is my pale version of you. All that they are doing, these men, are living vicariously through you. I asked God, to give me something to remember you by, and He did. For me, you will be my reflection of eternity.