We Are All Works in Progress

   WE ARE ALL WORKS IN PROGRESS

There is little in us that has been there from the start. Our cells are forever changing so that after a few years nothing is the same as it once was. So perhaps it’s not surprising that who we think we are changes over similar time scales. There are so many levels, from passing fashion to deep half subconscious identity.

I am an only child. Just about. My parents met before the War. A note for later generations. When old gits like me talk about “the War” they mean what is more generally known as the Second World War. Apart from many other more lamentable consequences of “Herr” Hitler invading Poland there was a common delay in the progress of relationships. And apart from that, the males in my family went through the early part of their lives (only) preferring older women. 

So my mother was quite old when I was born. Bless her, she thought it would be better for me to have brothers and/or sisters (“sibling” always strikes me as a bit silly as a word and a bit odd). But her biological clock would not fully let her and she miscarried.

As I say I am an only child so there were I think particularly violent changes in identity when I started school and starting meeting other children on a regular basis. And the first children who became my friends were not perhaps the ones I would have chosen, but I had to evolve further before I was allowed into their circles.

This I remember in snatches and more so if I concentrate. But in truth it is time for me to visit the wood. I have not been there for many a long year.

                                               *******************

It had changed; it had grown smaller as time had passed. It seemed untidy now, uncared for. It had not been coppiced for several seasons and the hazel was hidden under the dark canopy of the bigger trees. The woodman’s hut was derelict. That cheery fellow of my youth who made hurdles would long since have died.

But the paths were still navigable, those paths that criss-crossed their way through the wood to the outer banks where the pollards once stood. I took one and immersed myself in it. Then I heard a muffled moan. He was there at the side of the path, a boy struggling to look at me. He had grown into the wood and become part of it. His feet had already turned to clay and been absorbed into the mulch of the forest floor. He would never leave the wood now. Above the vanished feet his trunk had petrified. His coat had fallen to the ground and lichens grew on his stony arms. The petrification was moving upwards but his face still bore some of the moving features of living matter and his eyes could follow me for a short distance.

Then I saw another boy on a different path that had curved its way back towards me and as I took that path and then another and a fourth, I realised that the whole wood was full of these boys sunken into it, becoming part of it. A jackdaw perched on the head of one; bird droppings stained another. In all of them the eyes, the last remnants of what they had been, still flickered. They could all still look at me and all of them had the one expression embedded in them. That look, part sorrow, part relief of those boys who all looked alike and looked like someone else too, watchers and watched, will never leave me. I would have moved away but I could not- not yet. Not until that first boy to whom I returned closed his eyes for the last time. I watched as the lashes now like filigree wire collapsed upon them.

What they had been was now gone. No that was wrong. It was not what they had been, it was what they might have been. One could have wed Linda Rowlands, the most beautiful girl in the world. Another dreamed of table tennis championships he would enter. A third would have driven a van with a broken exhaust all along the Silk Road to Bukhara. But they did not, any of them, because I would not let them.

A wind was up in the high elms and it was time for me to go. I would not look back nor would I ever return there. 

                                               *******************

But that too is now many years ago, and written in the arrogant certainties of middle age. No, correction, just after. I do not think that tale is the product of arrogant certainty. Life was different when I grew up. It always is but the differences are of course different from one generation to the next. I was white, male and middle class- all the sort of things that make you a pariah these days. Ha! We watched Westerns on television and took from the Yankee the idea of manifest destiny. Our lives would get better and better as we matured. We would prosper in business (perhaps with the help of Rotary Clubs or worse) which would in turn lead to a “suitable” wife with jam and Jerusalem in her DNA. And our leisure hours would be spent on the manicured lawns of the finest golf clubs.

But life is not so accommodating nor should it be. Nasty things like bankruptcy and cancer lie in wait. Multiple more identities assume their position at the head of one’s affairs. Those certainties I spoke of above were too 18^th century, too gentlemanly, too manicured a la Capability Brown. Even God had become English. But God was never really one. From trinities to pantheons, to the ragged empires of sundry carefully structured mythologies, multiple identity was the real name of the game. Jung and Freud unlocked the gates of Olympus and allowed one lot at least to escape back into our psyches. Braque and Picasso took over the reins of their chariots and we entered the world of cubist nightmare.

Life is not a programmed walk along a gently rising path. Any ascent will likely plateau and a plateau is not forever. Soon we may be scrabbling down the other side, rougher, pebbly, the dust rising to choke us. Is that the end of the story? No of course not- only for the purposes of this tale. The contours of our lives, the identities we may choose or seem forced on us, keep changing. And blessed be the life that understands that.