Dear Reader.
If you are new here, welcome to my Substack. For the next few weeks, every Friday I’ll be publishing writing that may become excerpts from the book I’m working on “Glottis: Love Letter to the Open wound”. It’s about grief, trauma, childbirth, singing and the erotic. If you are the kind of person who wants things to make sense, you may want to go back to the beginning.
Thanks for being here…
When I speak to experts on the topic they tell me: these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault. This is true. I believe it to be true. 3% of pregnancies end with baby death or stillbirth. There is no “real cause” of what happened.
But I cannot look away from this car-crash chain of events. I don’t have a cause but I do have a diagnosis: “Placental margin bleeding of unknown origin”. Which is extremely helpful. Obviously. It started in the 16th week. It was later explained to me that the “marginal bleeding” was what led to the premature preterm rupture of membranes (pPROM). Which in turn led to Leo’s being crushed and dehydrated and her organs failing, and my premature and prolonged labour, and her death. We do not know why I started bleeding. There are causes, conditions, usually associated with so much blood. I did not have any of those. There was no developmental or genetic cause on my side or hers. There was no "cause of the cause”.
If this were the end of the story, life would continue on, in a world where I have absolutely no control. That’s probably true whichever way you swing it. But humans are meaning-making animals. Somehow it feels better to think I might have had some hand in what happened. My body, my choice and all that.
I look for meaning. I plane away layers. I seek the grain as gently as I can bear. Ear to the surface, I wonder if I might have damaged the placental lining with the way I danced during the “Lay me Low” rehearsals? I questioned whether it was somehow related to our having moved apartments? I have thought about whether it was the kind of sex I was having? Or that my partner was having a relationship with someone else against my will? Was I exercising too much? I wanted to know if the degree to which I habitually move my pelvic floor, because of all the singing, made it impossible for the placenta to grow peacefully? Was it the stress my rocky relationship with the father had on my endocrine system? Was it that I’ve always struggled to “go with the flow”? The disappointment I felt at my failed experiments? The unratifiable family constitution?
“We of the chosen family, seek to create the conditions for one another’s equal, reciprocal access to (1) Eudaimonia (2) Creativity (3) and the easing of Suffering. “
My little love. Your coming into being was a miraculous inevitability. When I trace back the steps, the totality of “what led to what”, I get dizzy. I spin childlike. The probabilities lift my feet from the ground. Hands held tight in the good-enough grips of my illusion of sovereignty. What madness, this author, this singer, your mother, being here at all? Your Dad on earth? The day I walked into his lecture, not knowing what it was, and took over question time? Our falling in love? The exact moment of your conception and the humidity of the room and the angle of his thrusting into me, the position of my cervix, and lubrication just so. The ovulation later than expected. The accident-not-accident of this particular sperm making its way past every folded piece of flesh in which it was almost certainly destined to die. Finding its way to an egg, perched just right and ripe in my fallopian tube, after 25 years of eggs making that same journey to die alone. Those cells being compatible and growing together and implanting in the lining of my uterus and turning into you and you turning into you and all these parts of us becoming parts of you trying to become parts of you outside of those parts of us. Nothing at all along this path diverging. Not a gust of wind. Or a distracting voice. No piece of the story fitting differently at any point along in this journey of imminent impossibilities. Until it did. The blood. The pain. The interminable laying down. Your would-be mother casting songs to keep you safe against the unkind fractions, probabilities of your being or not being, seeing the stardust under the skin and the water in the blood and the majesty of being to die, to die, to die, in whole or in part.
das Teil – particle, piece, component, fitting, member, fragment, scrap
der Teil - section, portion, fraction, proportion
“Dear German, go fuck yourself, love Aaron”
(Aaron Cassidy)
Once my “premature preterm rupture of membranes” was confirmed we were made aware that there was little we could say for sure about Leo’s journey into this world, except that it would not be what any parent hopes for. That we had some choices, but more often than not, the choices would be out of our hands. Life. Death. What kind of life?
I don’t know if they keep this information from pregnant people until the worst case scenario has already occurred because the stress of knowing what might be waiting would create fear that could negatively effect the outcome, or because there would be nothing they could do anyway. The rules are strict in what they can and cannot offer. In this liminal space between having a fetus and a legal person inside you, the rules don’t bend for individual intuition. When I went into hospital for this long last stay Leo was about 400g. 500g makes you a German citizen. At one point I was told 24 weeks gestational age was my deadline to choose to terminate the pregnancy. Later, I was told the “real deadline” was 23 weeks 2 days, in order to ensure enough time to get the necessary approvals and paperwork. In the 23rd week, on the 1st day, I was told you were probably dying and in pain and dehydrated, and your spine was being crushed because my uterus was contracting around you without any wriggle room. For weeks the torturous question of “the right thing to do” had hung in the air. A decision only I could make. The next morning the “big meeting” was scheduled. I went shaking, ready to let go, to let you go. Only to be told by a new doctor, the senior-most doctor, that his prognosis for Leo was better than the junior doctors had made. With his superior experience, he estimated Leo was going to stay until 28 weeks, by which time her chances would greatly improve. Also, he was the one who had the final say on whether I would be allowed to have an abortion. And he wasn’t going to allow it. I had been told today was my deadline. But that had been a mistake. He was sure things were in better condition that we had thought, and he wouldn’t permit a termination in this case.
He told a story to illustrate his reasoning: “if a 75 year old man has a 50% chance of success in a heart operation, that could give him 5 more years of life, we do the operation. Of course we do it. No question. When your baby has so many more years of life to be gained, how could we even consider not to try everything we can?”
At the time I nodded, yes, of course. Yes. Dazed. yes. Grateful. yes. Relieved to have such a terrible decision taken out of my hands. I was overjoyed that someone so experienced had such a confident prediction. Oxytocin flooded my good-news starved system. Everything was going to be alright.
In the days and months after this conversation, it dawned on me that the senior-most doctor of gynecology at the biggest neonatal research hospital in Europe thinks that performing risky surgeries for old men who have lived a full life so that they can potentially keep doing that, is the same as performing surgeries whose risk is not prematurely ending an already-long-life, but prematurely forcing open the door to a life that was not ready or able to fend for itself. No matter the will and means of the mother to do the necessary caring. No matter the suffering of the child, the parents, and the personal and public networks dedicated to supporting that life’s living. Whatever life might mean in that case. For a baby born so early that they would certainly need a machine to breathe for months, perhaps years or decades? Perhaps until all these characters become 75 year old men in need of heart surgery.
I have repeatedly asked myself as each terrible step unfolded before me, if we had known how serious the situation could get, could we have acted differently?
This sudden change of prognosis nonetheless filled me with hope. At the insistence of the nurse on duty, I took a walk in the sunshine. My first in nearly a month. Then went back to my room to try to make a plan for being in hospital until the 28 week estimate the senior doctor had given. To try to figure out how I would manage the months of hospital visits we’d need to make after Leo was born. Now that we were confident she was going to live.
Around midnight, I went spontaneously into labour. At 23 weeks, 2 days.
A traumatized person cannot make sense of the traumatic event as a whole. They have to reconstruct themselves in the aftermath using parts and fragments (Richard Swartz). We try to thread together these recollected pieces into a shape, a broken, bodily construction we might one day recognize as ourselves. This process is one of feeling and reprocessing the suffering of the body (Bessel van der Kolk) but it is also story telling. We narrate in order to reassure ourselves of the presence of an ‘I’ whose truth is being told (Ruth Behar).
In the 1987 movie “The Princess Bride”. Cary Elwes (playing “the Man in Black”) challenges “Vizzini” (played by Shawn Wallace) to a battle of wits, in order to save Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright). Vizzini needs to guess which cup of wine the ‘Man in Black’ has poisoned with the deadly Australian poison, “iocane powder”. At the battle’s end, mid-maniacal-laugh, Vizzini falls down dead. He has just drunk from the cup he believed to be free of poison, the one that had been sitting in front of the ‘Man in Black’ throughout the scene.
Man in Black : You all right?
Buttercup : And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.
Man in Black : They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.
To continue to return to the scene of one’s pain, to palpate the parts and fragments, is to keep alive a little of their poison. I have always loved the idea that if I drink a little poison every day, I can develop an immunity to its worst effects. Taking the disarmed version of the dangerous cells into my body and learning to outsmart them before they can overwhelm my system. This practice of meaning-making might be understood as a vaccine against hopelessness. Building an emotional-immune system that can recognise, fight off, and repair the damage wrought by those who would do violence to us. So that each dangerous interaction with the external world, instead of making us sick, becomes a stimulus for reorienting our ways of knowing and being. A vector of disease becomes a catalyst for building a better compass of desire.
The week before I found out I was pregnant with Leo, I was on a writing retreat. I had started writing a book, it was called “Glottis”. I thought it was going to be a book about the connections between the vocal apparatus and the sexual body - I did not yet know it would be “this book”.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
The project of this text is idealistic, but I will do my best not to idealise the journey. This is not a fairy tale. There is so much to be done before we are safe enough to engage with many of these ideas in the real experiment of our lives. There is hurt and violence and oppression inscribed into our habits. This violence effects everyone differently. The more intersections of marginalisation and disempowerment that cohabit with the embodied experience of a subject, the higher the risk, if we get it wrong. These practices of voicing our desires are playing with fire. We need proper safety guards for that kind of play. I’ve burned my house down a couple of times already. But I was privileged enough to have the means to rebuild. So please, don’t take my words to mean I believe we should put into practice every freedom at once. That’s a pleasure reserved for aristocrats of desire and demographic. I hope instead you might take this text as an invitation to think about which poisons might be interesting to ingest, with shameless hope for building a body to withstand a bit more shattering. Drink a little poison every day to get immunity.
Leo is a hero’s namesake. Named not so much for the flesh of the man that was my Grandfather, but the bones of his story. A name is ink worn proudly. A mark from successful campaigns.
I did not consider drawing Leo’s name from the other branches of her family tree. Did you notice that? That there is only really one branch revealed in this story? Maybe I’m hoping that if I keep all attention there it will start to look and feel like the trunk of the organism?
The problem with the survivor narrative is that we get stuck in the loop of our traumas. Winners to the front, I shift oozing sores of incompetence, bad planning, and violence into the opaque space of my unconscious. Only to return again and again to the point of amputation. Should I push deeper now into the wound of failure? I might lose an arm, elbow deep in the gaping wound of my family’s failures. You know, I can’t resist.
The truth is, love, that our family roots go darker places than the triumphant refugee story. And those roots feel connected. Under the ground. They talk to each other in languages beyond me.
Leo’s Father’s father was born in 1939 into a family of committed Nazis. His dad was in the SS. Not just a collaborator. He was an ideologue. He was not the kind of person that just happened to “find themselves accidentally German” in evil times. Your Dad’s Dad believed in National Socialism. He was a mass murderer. He remained committed to the cause, and drank himself to death after the Germans lost the war.
In those same years, my mother’s father fought on the opposite side, in the same war, on the opposite side of the world. Grandad fought in the Australian brigades on a lesser discussed front in Papuan New Guinea. He had an accident while fishing. Incorrect use of a grenade. Lost his arm.
When I tell Europeans this story they often seem surprised to hear Australia was even in the war. In 1940 Australia’s population was about 7 million. Approximately 1 million of them served in world war two. After the war the government refused to pay out Grandad’s soldier’s pension. They said the loss of his arm was his own fault. He shouldn’t have been using grenades to fish. I mean. Sure, it does have an air of the ridiculous. But they were city boys starving in the jungle. Grandad Sweeney had been a brick layer. He returned to Australian life with a hook where his arm had been. My uncle speaks of determination. Of finding a way. Of watching his mother dress the oozing wound on his fathers stump after work breaking rocks at the quarry. They had 6 children.
I stand in the hallway of my memory in Grandad and Nanna’s house. Cool white walls, painted brick. Always colder than you’d expect. A singular circular window. A brick-layer’s detail? A hole for spying through to children to imagine their magic and imagine their feelings in the air, back then, my mother’s childhood, and the childhoods that remain unnamed in my imagination, breathing in hot air, reeking of wasted potential and their rage and their fear and their having nowhere to run and it chills my bones.
Viktor Frankel wrote “Man’s search for meaning” in 1946, the same year my father was born. Having emerged from the same labour camps as my father’s father. He said that happiness can’t be pursued. That meaning rather than happiness is the essential ingredient, and that it’s to be found in focusing on something we believe to be of great importance, and that that something needs to be outside of ourselves. I have always been of the opinion that it is meaningful to work towards creating conditions that would bring about liberation. Unfortunately it is difficult to know what to prioritise, when the need for liberation from whatever immediately troubles us is an irrepressible drum beat drowning out the need for creating the conditions for general and lasting freedom. Which sounds like the end of history. Or grenades of grandads fishing. Blowing the arm clean off.
One of the founding ideas in Western empirical thought is that we are born empty and innocent into this world. The concept of tabula rasa can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle. His treatise De Anima ('On the Soul') describes the new-born mind as an "unscribed tablet." That babies are born innocent and that we can actually control the thoughts that pop into our minds and bodies. That we are, in a real and actual sense, free and responsible for ourselves. I’m not one of those people.
Art history abounds with those who believe they can free themselves by rejecting, erasing, or pretending to erase what came before. That through their revolutionary and singular work we might reach for increased freedoms and indeterminate outcomes. A famous example is the reactions of composers of classical music after world war two. Traumatized by what they had lived through, and attempting to expunge the horror, they turned to the concept of Tabula Rasa. Two very different camps formed, exemplified by the followers of Pierre Boulez in Europe and John Cage in America. The two men started out as friends.
Boulez’s group seemed to take the view that neutral abstraction was the way forward. They thought if they could only remove the irrationally emotional human element from music that we would be prevented from infecting music with our evil. They exchanged the excessively-bodied vibrato of the operatic voice for pure, unvibrated sounds whose pitch purity could be assured. Boulez worked to bring about a democratisation of tones, rhythms and forces, creating beautiful objects in the spirit of equality. A spirit he was of course the boss of.
Cage’s camp looked eastwards and invited in chance, spaciousness, and a relinquishing of control. After more traditional beginnings, Cage began to want to take “life” as musical material. Mushrooms, pianos, nails, cacti, violins, radios, voices, stones, hay, stars, dice and dancing all found their way into his music. He was influenced by Taoism and created musical situations for surrendering to life as an open listener.
These freedoms and openessness were happening in a communities whose power-brokers were all white men. Mostly straight. Mostly middle or upper class. There are examples of things getting ugly when women or people of colour sought entry to their cliques. In 1975, Julius Eastman (a black, openly gay composer) got into a rather famous fight with John Cage via a performance of Cage’s “Songbooks - Solo Number 8”, when Eastman provocatively used his homosexuality (and in a sideways rebuke, also Cage’s closeted homosexuality) as material in a performance fueled by uncompromising, lustful politics.
“…I am here to teach you a new system of love….There have been many systems of love in the West which have been sort of degenerate, should we say. The first system being the main system, the In-And-Out System, which I have now revised... to the Sideway-and-Sensitive System.”
(text spoken by Julius Eastman, in his realization of “Solo for Voice No. 8” from Cage’s “Songbooks”)
In 2012 I performed in concerts of music with the International Contemporary Ensemble called “Correspondences”, inspired by the letters between John Cage and Pierre Boulez. They centered on a major work by Boulez “Le Marteau sans maître” (the Hammer without a Master). Music by the two composers were juxtaposed beside one other, movement for movement, throughout the evening. Creating a profound counterpoint between Boulez’ control and Cage’s surrender. That was the year of Cage’s 100th birthday. Boulez turns 100 next year.
The friendship between Boulez and Cage broke down, when Boulez grew frustrated by what he saw as Cage not “taking responsibility” for his music.
When I was 18 I lost a friend over my love of John Cage. He wanted to be a great conductor. Cage did not have any value in his artistic world-view. During our argument he seemed particularly annoyed that a musician he otherwise respected (me) would waste their time on music that “gets me no where”.
At least, at the time, I credited that conversation with the ending of our friendship. It might have been more complicated. The young conductor was very concerned with getting somewhere. Boy did he.
“Memento mori, amor fati” (“Remember you will die; love your fate)
Friedrich Nietzsche
I freely determine there was no more glorious fate than the brick-layer’s blown up stump. These decades later, against all probabilities, here I am, intact body and mind, responding to this choiceless compulsion to stay in the gleaming loss. I spread lips and legs wide and eager to cross the productive negativity of the glottis. Holding steady the vibrant gap of true contradiction between free will and determinism. A glottis straddler if you will. An excess of life projecting from inside to outside of me. Hope and hopelessness resonate in the wet flesh of my throat and mouth and inner parts and departs. I repeat the steps. Refine the choreography. Discipline the body. Fit to purpose. Tuning. Revising. Amplifying. The technical work of interdependent indeterminacy. Just like everybody else.
Solo for Voice No. 8 - From John Cage’s “Songbooks”
“In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or in part, an obligation to others.”
(Excerpt from Cage’s performance instructions)
When I speak to experts on the topic they tell me: these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault. 3% of pregnancies end with baby death or stillbirth. This is true. I believe it to be true. There is no more real cause than any other. I don’t want to know “why” Leo died. That would be too awful. But there’s a long way between knowing “it was all my fault” and waking up each day to numb the pain of total pointlessness.
What I need is story. One that binds me here “in whole or in part and in obligation to others”, at least something strong enough to get me through the day. So that as dusk falls, and the owl of Minerva unfolds her wings, I might be able to say: I lived this - this knowledge came from my marrow. I share it now sincerely with hope for creativity, eudaimonia, and especially the easing of suffering.