Switching Off The Television
It’s 1:42am and I’ve just finished my entry for the Denis Butler Literary Awards, which are due in tomorrow (today). It’s a nice feeling to actually finish something. And I actually like this story. Hopefully I still like it in the morning…
Switching Off The Television
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? (Job 38:16-17)
In the sunroom at the back of the house, a sunroom that was built with money earned many years earlier, and now rationed on the basis of a regularly re-evaluated life expectancy, the old woman reclines into her chair. A cup of coffee on a small table leaves trails of steam to disperse in the dull warmth of the sunlight, and the old woman now and then leans forward to grasp the cup carefully with two hands, to prevent a spill. The muted sounds of a television chatter through the thin walls, blending intermittently with passing cars. The old woman blinks slowly and the afternoon sun lends her thin eyelids a soft internal light, like the abandoned chrysalis of a butterfly. The old woman thinks about the passing of her husband and about the impermanence of everything, looking through the steam. The gauze covering the sunroom windows filters the light into angular rays which carve up the steam trails and gradually collapse as night draws closer. The old woman doesn’t watch the television, but still switches it on every day, changing through the channels to follow the shows her husband used to watch, even as they too gradually pass away, creating for her the strangely unsettling decision of whether then to leave the television on or off. The old woman is not oblivious to the sadness permeating all of her efforts to conserve the memories of her husband, and it is the more abstract questions of impermanence and memory rather than any specific sadness that are preoccupying her afternoon thoughts as she sits alone in the sunroom.
The old woman has difficulty recalling images of her husband, even with the aid of the photograph collection she has stored in the small chest of drawers beside her bed. It seems the harder she tries to animate the photographs, the more they stare back at her with the static mask of the dead, even her own face beside his, frozen to time and irrecoverable. Without the photos it is worse. The old woman is finding it more and more difficult to conjure the image of him in her mind, and it seems to her that he is becoming increasingly defined by his absence from her altogether rather than his presence to her in her thoughts. This inability to crystallise images to herself lends her past all the transient clarity of a dream, and the old woman feels that she is constantly waking into a present with not only a diminishing future, but also a diminishing past. Thinking about this as she sips her coffee carefully, looking across the sunwashed rooftops through the steam and gauze, leads the old woman to think of her life, rather than being a procession towards an end, as a wandering inside a closing loop, though the thought touches her only briefly, before subsiding and giving way to others.
It might seem that the process of forgetting should help alleviate the pain of loss, and the grief and loss seminar her daughter had forced the old woman to attend, before they stopped talking again, involved many metaphors of resignation such as letting go, putting behind, and facing forwards. The other people attending the seminar by and large took notes on these words lit up on the overhead projector as if loss was something you could learn about from someone else, something there was a process for, and a solution to. The old woman’s daughter had told her that she would be much better off with some help, and even stopped working late Wednesdays to go with her to the little church community hall in the next suburb. As the notes in the folder handout instructed, the seminar had been built around a concept of group interaction, in order to help start the resocialisation process. The group activities were extremely painful for the old woman, who felt as alienated by the rituals as she did from the daughter who drove her to them week after week. The first of these had involved splitting into small groups and recounting memories of the person each had lost. The person she had lost! What a phrase! As if her husband had been merely misplaced, as if by stretching her memory, she might yet recover him. And what a vicious irony, the old woman thinks now, slowly turning over her hands in the last heat of the afternoon, that this memory comes so vivid now while the others, the ones she searches for every day, cower beyond view.
On that night, she had been merely able to remember fragments of memories, slivers of intensely personal moments that floated before her awareness like debris from his death, and she had stuttered on her turn, feeling the futility of trying to bring these out of herself into the other faces that closed in sympathetically around her. She could feel too, and felt again now with the recollection, the nervousness of her daughter, the pressure to somehow speak words that could fully measure themselves against his absence, to bring him vividly back to life right there for these strangers. But she had stuttered, and that was all, and turning to her daughter, who was looking expressionlessly beyond the small group as she fumbled, she stopped the attempt, and with a sigh let her face drop towards the floor. The fact of the matter was that the old woman felt her resignation to her loss so acutely precisely because she could not let go, put behind, or face forwards, since then she would lose herself, too.
Now, as the afternoon slips away, her thoughts pace around in the shadow of this predicament. Experiencing her loss as a slipping and a falling against her will, as if her whole life were being torn away from her, leads her to agonise ever more intensely over the few remaining fragments of the past she manages to retain in her consciousness—a spiral of memory like an addiction, each effort towards her goal displacing it ever further from reach. The old woman hates that death has to be so slow, hates her husband dying slowly inside her mind every day, amid her own struggle to keep him alive, hates that it repeats in a twisted echo her struggle to keep him alive as he was dying, the human body being a source of signals about a person but by no means their only one. She hates that his passing left at first merely a distant emptiness that gnaws gradually and incessantly at everything that was wrapped up into it, meaning just about everything inside herself. If only he could have been taken away from her surgically, instead of by this terrible, endless force. She hates more than anything else the dying inside herself, the real truth of it, the subjectiveness of it, the way it drives her apart from the sensible world, the way her family feel that her once boundless love is slowly being withdrawn from them as she mourns, their interpretation of her withdrawnness being that of a retreat from her real self rather than the retreat into herself that it is.
These thoughts pass through the old woman rapidfire like pins, the coffee cup still steaming into nothing, the sun still carving up the room, the television still crackling away in the other room. On or off? The only consolation is that you can’t think about everything at once. You can think the thought of everything, but that is just one thought among all thoughts. The mind, the old woman now thinks, is limited to flitting through thoughts like a pond skater along the fragile surface of a pond. The skater always has to keep moving or it will sink, and so can never stop to look at the depth of the pond, or the radiance of the sky, except in dying. She feels like that, the old woman, and not only with her thoughts. She feels now that her contact with the world is slight, that she is losing her grip on it. Losing her grip, another phrase, as if we must cling to the world like a bullrider to stop being thrown off onto the dirt. Bullriders, and dirt, and, wait, it comes to her now as if from nowhere like a bullet, one of the old shows her husband used to like watching on the television—the rodeos, even if they were no kind of substitute for being there. They were more a trigger for his memory, arousing the smell of sweat and dust and cattle from the recesses of his mind, arousing the tension of competition and the screams of the crowd around him, rather than at him, as they came from the television. That was the function of the television for him, to trigger his own memories. And as each television show that had resonance with his youth was cut, and replaced by something new, he had felt that he too was slowly being phased out by the world, left more and more to stare at the blank screen as just one more surface inside the small house, the world once again just a rumour of an outside, nothing vivid, just the source of light and darkness through the windows day by day by day.
The rays of light have now completely dissolved into dusk inside the sunroom, and the pleasure at having remembered the rodeos has pushed the old woman over towards sleep while she remains in her chair. She had once read somewhere that a small amount of the pattern of television static on a blank channel is caused by the radiation from the birth of the universe, left flickering in the background across all of space and time. As the old woman slips down into sleep, the silence of the house is actually a background noise too, rather than a real silence, her ears picking up a tiny flickering that permeates her fading consciousness. Small shifts of light flit across her vision inside her closed eyes. The skin around her frame becomes more loosely coupled to it every day. It is unclear whether since all existing things end, existence itself must also end, it being unclear whether existence is a thing, as such. The old woman once read that God is everywhere centre and nowhere periphery, this being perhaps connected to that question, to every question. The old woman is now asleep. She has forgotten to switch off the television.