History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
First, there was a South African woman. She was the first experience of history as I mean it here.
The greatest humiliation, steering a shopping trolley around a car-park and being screamed at, in public, as though I was an ill-behaving child, and not, instead, someone doing his best with the very limited tools with which I had to work.
With a sigh, in the present, I reflect sadly on the limited tools I speak of.
Your author is capable of much - I can produce stellar academic essays in a single evening; I can at times write with clarity and purpose; I can become sometimes so close to other people or animals that it is enough to draw tears.
And yet, just as those talents seem certain to flower without limit, I am immolated by an inability to perform everyday, obvious tasks.
It is beyond me to steer a shopping-trolley in the right direction, even when mentally steeling the self for the task ahead; even with the caveat that such a simple task cannot possibly fail to be accomplished. With a pump of the fist and an invocation, I inevitably fail, every time. There is a inverse break between the magnitude of a task, and the efficiency with which it is carried out. At 13, I could speak perfect French, but could not draw a circle with a compass, dress myself, or tie up my shoelaces.
History repeated itself with Bluefish. I made it my obsessive goal to immortalise her. I will write you into permanence, my darling, even if it should kill me. You were born in the waters of a creation-myth, but your name is not writ upon water.
That I could not do so is still painful. There should have been a book written at least two years ago, a story of a pretty Australian woman's metamorphosis into the prophetic, painful Bluefish, and the stages of development therein. I wanted to save you, and observe with sad eyes and held breath the astonishing creature you had become. It never happened.
On a flight to Budapest, I shamed myself by being unable to stow our luggage into an overhead locker. I stood, watching others do it, and when it came to our turn, I failed magnificently. Don't fail by a whisker, do it properly; turning around and looking hopelessly, staring at the floor, shaking the head. Yet I used to be able to express you with such intensity that you would cry, and the wedding vows we got part of the way to constructing were heart-breaking, at least for us.
History repeated, first time as tragedy.
I lost you over nothing. It was a temporary blip, I think, and I wouldn't permit it, even though I told you to expect them from me.
Superior and haughty, I would declare - the fact is that I orbit you, Bluefish, and, like the planets, my orbit is elliptical. Some days I am in such intimate proximity to you that you'll be aware of it every moment that you wake, and at other times I am more difficult to detect. Be patient, and I shall inevitably swing back towards you.
I could not allow you to have an orbit of your own. No, you must be static, else I shall begin to fear that you no longer love me. Be static, else I'll kill us with my striated, polymorphous inadequacies. I lost you when I typed the words: get out of my life! after a drunken evening when the pain of the previous few days had at last caught up with the private, internal imperatives which had been hammering at the consciousness, and we never spoke again. The jolt into action comes at the moment when pain superimposes itself on the imperative which asks: for how much longer can this be allowed to continue?
Then, for night after night, I wound myself, snake-like, around the leg of the kitchen table, and screamed my loss at the ceiling, the indifferent ceiling. No God existed up there to listen to my cries. Even up in the heights, wherein the religious figures are supposed to be, there was no consolation whatever.
