I have not been here for a while but my thoughts have not left these pages blank. In my mind I have indulged in therapeutic ramblings, remedial rants and have written post upon post unleashing the furies of heightened emotions and agitated thoughts. Sometime, as I go through each day life seems slow and unchanging. However, a lot can happen in two months and I am not my grandmother’s granddaughter for nothing. So, life may be slow and ordinary yet full of adventure! A paradox, a delicious contradiction.
Take my grandmother. A paradoxical figure dependent on the relationship. A grandmother of mirth and escapades to my sisters and me. A figure moving in a constant cloud of cinnamon and icing sugar, leaving flour footprints on the parquet floor of her hall. A figure that cooled jelly on the windowsill in winter, pushing it overboard to make room for piping-hot stewed apples. An avid spectator and art critic of our Saturday night theatre, as well as a musical director of numerous concerts on winter evenings.
But on the other hand, a dismissive mother far more interested in her younger children. A woman overly passionate about all things culinary, forgetful and eccentric, ripening cheeses in her pantry and filling the house with a smell of things going off..
Even to me, she was a paradox. Loving and nurturing but not above stooping to emotional blackmail when faced with my rebellion. "When I'm dead and buried...” So, who was my grandmother? And does her contradictory nature make her more or less dear to me?
My mother came to stay with me for a while two months ago.. If my grandmother is a rainbow difficult to capture, my mother is a shattered prism of searing lights and odd shadows. Brave and hardworking one moment, sliding into dogma of her strange logic and paranoid childhood memories next. Her relationship with our grandmother was a photographic negative of her daughters'. For her picnics were a chore of carrying younger siblings to the river; a house full of song an embarrassment when friends called; her mother's relaxed attitude akin to indolence.
L P Hartley's "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" aptly describes our inability to grasp the differences of individual memories of the same person or the same time dimension. As an abstract, I understand the differences in the perception of the past underpinned by memories and stories re-told countless number of times. And I know my mother understands the same but I can see her struggling with my enthusiasm for summers past, recollection of baking aromas, preserving autumnal bounty in hot kitchen and singing into the night to the sound of a mandolin. I can see her shying away from images of sugar dust on rose jam pastries, exciting railways journeys and the comfortably frayed furniture. Her experience of the same woman is as foreign to me as mine is to her so that our reminiscence takes on a fascination of watching a bird of prey swooping in for the kill. Disturbing in its intensity but not quite comprehended.
In "The Language of Paradox," C Brooks talks about mutability of words as their meaning shifts when placed in relation to one another. Paradox is used as a method of extracting such meaning and it is critical in reading of poetry as it is its very contradiction that illuminates our comprehension. It is as crucial in understanding of our past and present where an existing contradiction does not necessarily lead to hypocrisy and all is not just as I, an individual, see it. It is far richer, more complex, less ordinary. The woman my mother knew is the same woman I knew. And yet, she isn’t. She is the wondrous anomaly observed both from the earth and from its perihelion. Whether I am the earth and my mother is the sun, that’s immaterial.
