Rachel Cusk, Second Place

A mother's growing daughter... on loving and releasing. 

Selected passages from Sylvia Plath's Three Women

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now. I am not at home.
How white these sheets are. The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me: they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life. They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

...

I did not look. But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces. The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.



---



FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales. He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.



---



FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

[Bold text my own.]

Never Done, Christine Smallwood (Harper’s, April 2018)

“A mother’s job is to love her child in such a way that he can love other people, specifically other people who treat him with kindness. It is an insane task to undertake, to give (almost) everything to someone who will, without thanks and probably with some rudeness, depart and go live his life elsewhere. It becomes easier to bear if one takes up [Jacqueline] Rose’s image, seeing the child not as a thing you own but as a person passing through, in need of temporary refuge. That you will fail at providing this refuge is part of the deal.”

D. W. Winnicott, Primary Maternal Preoccupation (1956)

"I do not believe that it is possible to understand the functioning of the mother at the very beginning of the infant's life without seeing that she must be able to reach this state of heightened sensitivity, almost an illness, and to recover from it. (I bring in the word 'illness' because a woman must be healthy in order both to develop this state and to recover from it as the infant releases her."

[...]

"I have implied this in the term 'devoted' in the words 'ordinary devoted mother' (Winnicott, 1949). There are certainly many women who are good mothers in every other way and who are capable of a rich and fruitful life but who are not able to achieve this 'normal illness' which enables them to adapt delicately and sensitively to the infant's needs at the very beginning; or they achieve it with one child but not with another. Such women are not able to become preoccupied with their own infant to the exclusion of other interests, in the way that is normal and temporary. It may be supposed that there is a 'flight to sanity' in some of these people. Some of them certainly have very big alternative concerns which they do not readily abandon or they may not be able to allow this abandonment until they have had their first babies. When a
woman has a strong male identification she finds this part of her mothering function most difficult to achieve, and repressed penis envy leaves but little room for primary maternal preoccupation."

Caroline Walker, Daphne (2021)

Victorian hidden mother photography

Madrid on film

Lindisfarne on film

Staithes on film

Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry

Eula Biss, On Immunity

Joan Raphael-Leff, Absolute Hospitality and the Imagined Baby

On the paradox of pregnancy: "Novel and heightened sensory experience comes to the fore, challenging her complacent embodiment. As long as two beings continue to occupy one body, personal boundaries shift and blur across her ballooning shape-changing exterior and the unfamiliarity of her over-stimulated, increasingly constricted interior. She is no longer herself. Inner privacy is violated by a constant presence. Her private sexual activity is revealed unbidden. Ordinary social interchange alters as teenaged boys smirk and even strangers feel free to touch her laden belly. Furthermore, for many months, the pregnant woman not only“contains” but serves as both hostess and hostage to one who extracts nourishment from her internal resources and spews waste products or disposal through her own bodily system."

On the importance of perinatal ambivalence: "Likewise, awareness of her own healthy ambivalence toward the inordinate demands of hospitality, which leads her to fluctuate between feelings of acceptance and enjoyment, annoyance at disrupted sleep and sharing her body with a baby, who, however lovingly anticipated, disconcertingly squirms, kicks and hiccups inside her."

[I read and blog this at 37+6 weeks pregnant, 2:30am.]

Raphael-Leff, J. (2020). Absolute Hospitality and the Imagined Baby. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73(1), 230–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2020.1690906

Helen Redman, In Utero (1964)

From http://birthingthecrone.com/pages/utero/index.html

Womb space, coloured pencil drawing

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

Moving musing on being a mother to a daughter:

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

On shame and friendship:

 On dependency, partnership and loss:

More photographs of Picasso by Robert Capa

Robert Capa, Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot (1948)

"At first all the viewer registers is the lit-from-within triumph of Gilot's smile; and right behind it Picasso's amiable servitude. But keep looking and you'll see in Gilot's eyes that she believes her power to be everlasting; and then you'll see the cold wordiness behind Picasso's play-acting deference. It hits you full force: Gilot is Anne Boleyn in her moment of glory and Picasso the appetite-driven king before he's had his fill of her. 

The photograph is so richly alive, it is actually shocking: it both excites and appals. Most days I don't even glance in its direction, but on the days that I do take it in, it never fails to arouse pain and pleasure, in equal parts. It's the equal parts that's the problem."

- Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City, 2015

Caroline Walker, Theatre (2021) at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Ken Currie, Three Oncologists (2002) at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Shon Faye, Love in Exile

I really loved Shon Faye's non-fiction book of personal essays on love and explorations of different kinds of love beyond romantic love. I found compelling her arguments around how the fetishisation of the nuclear family and heterosexual romantic love and 'failure' to find this as not evidence a personal or intrinsic shortcoming, but as markers of a failure of society. 

Depictions of heterosexual love and partnership have been (falsely) elevated to the highest judgment of one's worthiness in books, films and television. Faye proposes that not only have these illustrations in media set unrealistic and unhelpful expectations, but that this obsession with securing romantic love is indeed a byproduct of late stage capitalism where the nuclear family and romantic love have served as a refuge and space of leisure away from the grind of work and productivity that exhausts and alienates us. Love has become more private as a result, and has shifted away from community oriented environments where different and more diverse loves previously flourished - for example, love in lasting friendships, which has been devalued in favour of a laser focus on finding and keeping romantic love, and nurturing this love in the confines of the private domestic sphere. 

I wanted to save the following page for two reasons: (1) because of its acknowledgement of the "crisis in male friendship" that has led to a rise in misogynistic views and violence against women, and (2) because of Faye's inclusion of the quote by Jo Spence, one of my favourite artists on the importance of female friendships. For Spence, it may have been "too late to be [her] mother's friend" but for many of us, the opportunity remains not only to be our mother's friend, but also that of our daughter's and to impart new teachings on ways to love. 

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Strange Beach

Snippet from the poem 'More Night' that I enjoyed: