My Animal Life (30 page)

For us, someone living had died, though in each case the babies were less than three months. I support women's right to abortion as a very poor second to contraception, but I cannot accept that no one is killed. I don't buy the claim that the child in the womb is any
less alive than the child outside. It would simply be more convenient for us if we didn't have to think of what we kill as living.

I have friends, atheist scientist friends, who stop still and physically stiffen if I inadvertently, in their presence, say something about the soul or the spirit. There's a war on, at present, between science and religion, only partly because of the advance of creationists. My generation took it for granted that the theory of evolution was true: who could really believe that, as the Bible says, the earth was made in only six days?

Yet can't scientists make a distinction between private and public kinds of knowledge? Do they feel, when someone near to them dies, that only something material is lost? Is one beloved dog the same as another?

I don't find it easy to define a soul, which is why I have left it till nearly last. In a way my own formal beliefs are not useful, because they exist in a different space. I was confirmed into the Church of England. What do I cling on to, of those beliefs? I think Jesus Christ is a perfect model: of kindness, empathy, lack of pride. His parables speak to the artist in me, as do the beauty of the hymns and the psalms. My father's love for ‘Morning has broken/Like the first morning,' is everyone's love of, and longing for, renewal; his desire for a new self is my own. I am moved by Matthew Fox's version of the faith, where the
anawim
, the humble and excluded, are always at the core of it.
The first shall be last. Be as little children
. A mirror reversal of the world we know, quietly radical, the gentlest miracle. An image, an otherworld that hangs there, beckoning, beyond the hills of hurt and worry. I take communion, though rarely;
I kneel with others to say we are linked, this is the face of the faith I grew up in. I sit, grateful to be welcomed.

But since I was sixteen, and ‘lost my faith', I cannot literally believe in a paradise with God and Jesus and the saints:
where would it be
? is my problem. Where am I to imagine them? It falls apart, it turns to cardboard. More seriously, for this means that most Christians might see me as inimical, I cannot believe that there is only one God who happens to focus on our planet, our species, one species among so many species, one tiny planet in this vast universe of galaxies and stars and countless planets which surely, certainly harbour other life-forms. Why would that wide glory of light, space, matter, have a God centred on our little earth? Our Christian God looks suspiciously like us. If God exists, he must have many faces, so everyone can find their own face. Besides, as I learn about other faiths, I see they have aspects of the same beauty, speak to the same needs and longings. It isn't only Christians who value
compassion, love, forgiveness, charity. Who speak to the best in us, and face the worst.

I think of the Thai pendant I wore on the night when I felt I was saved by an answer to prayer, when the conscript threatened to rape and kill me. At the time, I had no idea what it meant, whose image it was. I bought it as fashion. Only writing this book have I realised that I wore on my breast that fateful night the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, Kuan Yin, who is described as ‘an incarnation of Mary', whose person embodies loving kindness. Kuan Yin hears the cries of the suffering; her name means ‘she who hears the sounds of the world'. She is said to have refused to enter heaven when the cries of the living came to her ears. Which compassion saved me? Kuan Yin's, or Jesus's? I would say, compassion in the universe; though in another universe, perhaps I was killed, in the universe I live in now, I was saved. But behind that larger claim there are real, small facts: compassion from the French boys who worried about me, who came and interrupted what was happening; my own compassion for myself, which made me hold on and hold off my attacker; even some buried restraint or pity in him which stopped him raping me straightaway. (But think also of those who are not saved, who are cruelly killed, tortured, murdered, who suffer for years, with no remission, who pray in terror and are not answered.)

I would say that life split in two that night, is always splitting, an infinite regression, and that often I have been in the luckier half, often my need has called forth an answer—when the young Frenchmen arrived to save me, when my rejected novels were finally accepted. Because of the images I grew up knowing, the face of compassion for me is Jesus, but who is the god of birds and insects,
or of the life-forms who were once on Mars? I believe that God is in all of them. I feel God is in each living instance. And so I return to my quest for the soul.

Perhaps it is the organism's track through time and space, its particular, detailed, unrepeatable plait of image, memory, and emotion? Its unique path through the universe, even if that is only across a village, across a field, across a stone: or briefly flickering inside another's body, carried wherever the mother goes. Maybe all memories are inscribed somewhere—some say they are coded in the proteins of the brain, that everything is there but ninety-nine per cent of it is stored invisibly and silently, or we would be maddened with memory, like Borges's character, Funes the Memorious. When the organism dies, all its memories are lost, and that is part of the ache of bereavement.

My name for what slips out of reach is a soul. Its lustre comes from our love of it, our helpless sorrow when it has gone. Respect for other living things—the respect that should always be there, but which fails us—might be easier to maintain if we granted every other being a soul: what my hero Kurt Vonnegut's invented artist, Rabo Karabekian, described in
Breakfast of Champions
as ‘an unwavering band of light', invisible but real, shining at the centre of us all.

For me it is also the net of connections that haloes every consciousness, linked to the future as well as the past, streaming both towards and outwards from our bodies. It's our sensitivity to what's outside us: pain and joy, beauty and horror, a capacity that differs for every living thing. It's also our power to generate surprise: to move at a tangent, to be ourselves, to sing, bark, swing, laugh, play, sulk, fall, to improvise our role in the great living tapestry that makes our planet extraordinary,
its whole restless surface a sea of souls. Babies in the womb are already unpredictable, kicking and turning, dancing on their cord, and then sometimes that sensation, magical but brief, that Fay Weldon wrote about in her novel
Puffball
: sometimes, inside me, the baby was happy; as Weldon describes it, the baby is laughing; the glory of laughter not laughed by me. And every animal on the planet emanates livingness, which is change. In that uniqueness, the soul pulses.

And that is why killing is the great taboo. For humans, at least, of other humans. But we deem non-human animals less living than ourselves, so we can farm them and kill them for our use.

When my mother died, I felt lonely because she could no longer react to me, or enjoy change, or look forward to things. Because my mother would never be there again. I would remember her, and I would love her, and I would try to tell her story. But her soul was not with me, and so I was lonely. And so was everyone who loved my mother.

When the embryos inside me died, we sorrowed because they had lost their future, they had slipped silently into dead matter, their bright capacity for change was stilled. We had lost the mystery of their transformation, and with that, we lost part of ourselves, the part that had hoped to move into their future, and our darling daughter went on alone. Infinitely precious: alive, alive, with her generous capacity to surprise, as she placed the frail cut-out child in my arms, and her love wished a soul into that crumpled paper.

Ubi sunt
? Where do they go?

If I knew, I would tell you. I would go to find them. I would meet my mother, as she said we would. And yet I am not ready to go beyond, to that place from which it seems we cannot come back. Do they look across the bourn? Do they still see us?

All I know is that my parents, my grandparents, my aunts, my little band of dear dead friends exist somewhere, as long as I do, transformed into longing and regret, which brightens, at times, into happiness. For they were here, when I was here. We saw each other, we held each other.

I think of Turner's Italian paintings, which I have just seen again in Edinburgh, drawn by his skill with tiny, far-off detail—he sometimes used a very fine reed pen. The effect of this is astonishing. Distant islands of sharpness emerge from his mists, clearer and more compelling than his foregrounds. That restored completeness speaks to my desire. As if parts of the past hold more light than the present—an energy which could bear them on into the future. It is not a mirage, it floats there intact, a blue sunlit shore beyond the grey middle ground where a tiny band of souls is still waiting to go forward, about to set sail across the evening for Venice. An afterlife that Turner has saved from dissolution. It shines in water, like a lost pearl necklace.

There is a bleaker strait where it is hard for me to go. It is a place of unknowing, where only pain is. Though I see how in the scheme of things—whatever that phrase means—
it's an apology, a lie
—though in the lying scheme of things, our grief was as nothing, or something small—though other people's pains are often much greater, I yield to them, concede to them—though
I agreed blindly when kind friends said, ‘You are very lucky, you have one daughter', though the logical side of me assents to this—part of me has never ‘got over' the miscarriages; ‘got over', as if they were a stone in the road; as if my mind had returned them to the non-living. I did not know them; I could not touch them. But they lived in me, and were real to me, and in this blind mad part of me, which I never let out into the light, I believe that as I die I will find those children. They will wait for me, and I will hold them. I will know them. I will love them. They will not be lost, for how can they be lost, for if souls can be lost …?

I don't know the ending.

I don't know the ending. Because there is none, until our planet is absorbed by our star. Our lives are so short, a breath, half a breath. This moment soaking up the sun.

Here and now. The bright shock of the present. I began this memoir two years ago, at St Cuthman's retreat, near Billingshurst and the ghosts of my girlhood, the village where I lived from seven to seventeen, and I end it in a second retreat, in Hawthornden, Scotland, which is free of memories and ghosts. Perhaps I am free-er than when I started. I look back on the life I have written down, brief bits of a path mostly hidden by trees. I was given much; I have little to forgive.

Another bee fumbles outside the window, a big heavy visitor, trying to get in. All round me, glorious April has begun. Spring is running away towards summer. The buds of the sycamores along the winding drive were like pale yellow pointed light-bulbs when I got here, slanted every which way on the black wire twigs like the snake of lights on our Christmas tree. But already they have burst into pleated green fans, miniature fingers pushing eagerly outwards, and the
bud-cases lie like small wings on the ground. I must not think, as I see the sap rising, that if I die at the same age as my mother, there will only be fifteen more springs. Stay in this moment, the budding moment, the day still pregnant with tomorrow.

My animal luck: my living body. The living bodies of my husband, my daughter. The chain of three hundred generations of couples, linked in the dance, in the heat of the bed, all of whom were lucky, who begat children. Link after golden link: my luck.

Thank you, my parents, my grandparents. The two families who joined in me, and before them four, eight, sixteen …

All that fucking. That blood, that heat. That animal life. Quarrels, laughter, but the business of pushing life on got done.

Thank you, my friends, my dearest friends. Barbara and Hilary, my sisters, Jim and Grania and all the others who proved to me what kindness was. Thank you my teachers, who saw something in me, that white-haired, skinny, solemn child with her sudden fits of dancing and laughter. Thank you, Mai, who is just out of reach, and Musa, and André, for saving my writing.

Thank you, Rosa, for being my heart. It is too full to say any more. Thank you, Nick, for giving me Rosa. Thank you, Nick, for my animal bliss, for sharing this life with me, this breath.

Before I go, before you go, I place my story in your hands, the wonder of your living hands.

This have I done for my true love
.

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day
.

I would my true love did so chance

To see the legend of my play
,