This Too Shall Pass

SJ Finn is a social worker and writer.

THIS
TOO
SHALL
PASS

SJ FINN

Sleepers Publishing Pty Ltd

PO Box 1204

Collingwood Victoria 3066

Australia

www.sleeperspublishing.com

This Too Shall Pass

ISBN: 9781742700380

Copyright text © SJ Finn 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published by Sleepers Publishing, Melbourne Australia, 2011.

Printed and bound by Griffin Press.

The publishers wish to thank Luke Meinzen, Rafael Ward and Anton Sirianni.

This Too Shall Pass
is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters depicted here and any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The text in the epigraph is taken from the introductory lecture presented by Jacques Lacan to the Vth James Joyce International Symposium at La Sorbonne, Paris on 16 June 1975. Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller on the basis of notes taken by Eric Laurent. Published with JA Miller's consent in Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin, 1987).

Lines throughout are taken from TS Eliot's ‘The Love Song ofJ Alfred Prufrock'. The lines on p. 172 are taken from Jorge Luis Borges's ‘Adrogue' (
Selected Poems,
edited by Alexander Coleman, Penguin: 1999).

The lines on p. 233 are taken from Sylvia Plath's ‘Lady Lazarus' (
Ariel,
1965).

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australian-its funding and advisory body.

Sleepers Publishing is a proud member of SPUNC - the Small Press Network

To Billi.

For all sorts of reasons I'm not in the best of
shapes today.

Jacques Lacan

ONE

T
hrough my bay window the sky is blanched and vague. Maimed beech trees flank the street, their branches parted around electrical cabling like giant skyward pigtails. I don't know why I find them appealing, their limbs having been hacked away like that. Maybe it's their ghostly centres, the
suggestion
of their shape that endears them. After all, my insides have become similarly nebulous and ill-defined, held together by an equally teetering outline.

Comparing myself to a tree? The part of the tree that's missing? I shake my head, snort a laugh, but I'm unimpressed, seriously wondering if I can form a thought that will go some way to explaining. You could say I'm a walking mirage, a hologram that from certain angles you can't see, and before my powers of reasoning dissolve – before I vanish altogether – I'm going to attempt to take stock.

Of course, there's the possibility my efforts will come to nothing. Trying to round up details, to calculate their impact, could prove as productive as watching sand fall through my fingers. But excluding the bashing-out of a few choice chords on the guitar, the carolling-up of some anguish-filled lyrics to fit the key, I'm pretty much devoid of tricks. And the thought of talking to a professional – despite
being
one of those professionals – makes me feel bone weary, a little nauseous. So, what remains? Floating as I am on this unmarked day, the light flat and lacking expectation, I guess I've concluded it's better to bleed on the page than in the brain, if that makes sense.

I inhale. Realign my chair, which slides a little too easily under me. I do have one niggling concern (there are probably several but this is the one that comes to mind): while
I
will go on feeling as transparent as air, what I'm about to put in writing will show itself in a dense hue, one that might even shock me. The alternate plan? Spending the day in a catatonic fugue metaphorically propped on my haunches. Well, (and thank God for saving graces) I'm a doer and the prospect of inertia won't suffice.

So, with a saying to bolster me…
to take the tide at theflood…
I'll not dally. And given that – given everything, actually – I'll begin at an intersecting point, at a place that cleaves right through the middle of it all.

TWO

I
‘ve heard people say there's no nice way to leave a marriage. It's something I hang onto as I scour the details of my own departure. I wish I could claim to just having left on a train – that after careful consideration, the giving of explanations and apologies, I coolly slipped away. But while the actual exit was carried out with some semblance of calm…
guilty on many counts but free to go…
I left under the illuminating glow of fecklessness.

It had been fourteen years and a good swag of happiness that had tied my husband and I together. I'd been in love with him – the father of my child, which is how I now describe him. Back then his name was Dave.

Dave was a moderate person, stable. (Still is. He's good.) In fact before things fell off the rails for us he was – almost – the perfect husband. He absorbed stress well, responded caringly, never lost his temper, and he was measured when faced with the most challenging people. Certainly on the surface, Dave was mature, deeply mature, while I. well. I had a lot more of the eternal adolescent in me.

One characteristic of his flew in the face of this goodness. Under some odd illusion that he was being humorous, usually to people we didn't know, he had a tendency to say inappropriate things. When asked, for instance, what he'd been up to, he'd respond with a common conversation-stopper like, ‘Minding my own business, ever tried it?' Or conversely (clearly not taking his own advice) he'd turn to a woman we'd just met and say, ‘I don't understand why women worry about hair on their upper lip. You obviously feel the same way.'

After clangers like these, the fact that I was associated with him, let alone intimately connected, would resonate in me like a gong going off, long-lasting embarrassment vibrating percussively. Ears ringing, face glowing, I would look around hoping to be subsumed into the closest physical object.

I can't say this led to us splitting up. After all, most of
our
conversations were composed of intelligent and insightful communication.
So? The reason?
And I hesitate to put it on the page…
the gauntlet already showing its gnarly protrusions…
because it makes me sound capricious – worse than that: unreliable. But there wasn't any getting away from it. Still isn't. Therefore, appeals aside, admissions pecking…
write it!…
I woke one morning with a well-defined sexual attraction to my next-door neighbour who – and you've probably guessed by now (as if I expect that sort of thing to be tattooed between the lines) – was female. This was the beginning of the end for Dave and me, except that somehow – some gaping black hole appearing in my frontal lobe, perhaps – I completely missed that subtlety and thought it was just a middle part, an along-the-way distraction.

In defence of my ignorance I'd always been someone who'd assumed and said “forever”. Perhaps that's why I didn't catch on when “forever” began failing, first by temptation and, in the end, I do admit, from necessity. Nevertheless, I was faltering; the fast held principle of tenacity was disassembling in me. I was trampling, not so much over myself as inside myself, up and down on beliefs I'd steadfastly held.

The trampling.

The dreadful trampling.

THREE

C
all it coincidence, but I was thirty-three when this epistle kicked off: the age of rebirth, apparently – so called because Jesus was thirty-three when nailed to the cross.

Rebirth? Bet the Christian fraternity wouldn't like that. Then again, there's a type of Christian in the western world – indeed the born-again type – who may well embrace the idea. These Christians surreptitiously smile at the sound of an exclamation such as,
Oh my God!
In fact, these expletives are, with the slightest adjustment, no longer blasphemous or profane or even irreverent but prayerful: a calling up, a raising to halleluiah, a salutation!

Rebirth? I'd decided to change my name from Jen to Monty. I can't explain this fully except to say that for a long time Jen had felt wrong and, like an apotemnophile with a leg that shouldn't be there, I wanted to get rid of it. I needed, I told myself, something with greater specificity (I knew six other Jens at the time, four of whom were in my workplace) and given that my surname is Montgomery, Monty seemed like the natural choice.

Despite the name thing, I'm not known for being superficial and frivolous about things or for being merely my persona. Actually, I'm mostly seen as serious, a little dour and in need of a good dose of lightening-up.
Don't worry so much,
my friends have often said to me.
You can't fix it.

But there it is: I have a tendency to belly-on about prejudices and inequalities, oppression and unfairness – all the negative ‘isms' that circulate our human world. And who knows, there may never have been enough of us pushing for social justice. Even harping on about it may have become a lost art. After all, in the middle class, misanthropy floats easily. I've heard the choruses:
Same opportunities exist for everyone! No one MAKES the poor poor!