Ode to Morning Ablutions: An Essay

My mother who was an occultist, who was neurasthenic, who set fire to the wee leprechauns simply by staring—my mother was fond of saying that one day she would write a book. In turn she said her father had always vowed that he’d write a book. “He said he’d call it Thoughts While Shaving and so that’s what I’ll call my book,” she said.

(Her father couldn’t write that promissory book owing to his love of dynamite. His hobby, such as it was, was blowing things up. The man had several incidents with the blasting caps. In summary he was missing multiple fingers, though not whole fingers, just the ends of his fingers. I saw his diary once, all cuneiform penciled landscaping, a devotional book to the horizon.)

Now and then my mother would sit down to write her book. She never got very far but she meant well. She had plenty of material. Her problem lay in earnestness. This is the difficulty for most novice writers. A Victorian gassing occurs as they sit before the tablet or typewriter—soon they imagine themselves as corseted bindle stiffs so that by turns they’re looking for the diction of corseted bindle stiffs for they sense a metempsychosis with Swinburne, rum ti um ti um, until they’re all worn out with interiorized anal retentive marching. Away from her desk my mother would say things like: “Hooray, hooray, the first of May! Outdoor Fucking starts today!” But at her desk she would write things like: “Indeed the love of this world is far more laborious than the abundance of natural beauty would suggest.” Sitting at her Royal upright my mother became a cross between St. Augustine and Schopenhauer. That’s of course a tough act. My poor mother. If she were alive today and here, well, I’d tell her that language itself is essentially poetry though the observation isn’t mine, I think it was Heidegger’s but to hell with Heidegger. Talk about interiorized anal retentive marching!

My mother would have been better off writing of the whippoorwill. Of the time she stepped out of a rowboat to walk on the water lilies. Of feeding caramels to the squirrels just to see their jaws tighten. Of breaking her father’s Enrico Caruso records by the novel method of spreading them out on the big four poster bed, then jumping up and down until her trajectory was right, sitting suddenly, popping the disk with a satisfying snap. Oh how good that must have felt, shattering Victrola records with her buttocks.

My mother would have been better off writing of the delectable dead people who wandered haphazardly in and out of her consciousness. (That, by the way is what dead people do for they have all lost their bus tickets in the immense stillness of death and so they walk over to your house. Many of them get stuck on the wrought iron fence.)

She saw ghosts all the time. She was a regular August Strindberg of the suburbs. Ding-dong! Who’s there? No answer. Open the door. Look! It’s the great longing of invisible things to see themselves in your countenance. Not even a footprint on the door mat. Strindberg scratching his head. Strindberg who never knew whether it was morning or evening. Who knew the dead the way the rest of us know naughty boys from the neighborhood. Ding dong. My mother opening the door. My mother lecturing traveling salesmen about the dead. My mother who could make the Fuller Brush man run like an infantryman, struggling over the lawn with his cumbersome sample case. Who dropped a whisk broom by the Forsythia.

Her television was the Ouija board. “Come in Sophocles!” she’d say. She always connected with “the Greats”. My sister and I would have minor figures from some sloped attic of the afterlife but our mother always got in touch with people like Shostakovich. She’d ask him if he knew Madame Blavatsky now he was dead, etc. She didn’t have any aesthetic propriety. The dead were all fair game for her relativism. Now that I think about it I believe my mother invented post-modernism long before Pentti Saarikoski. “Hey, Shostakovich, how’s Rasputin doing?” she’d ask. And her Ouija board was always conclusive. “Grimy pillow,” said the Ouija board. “Rasputin has a grimy pillow.”

Thoughts while shaving: I am my mother’s son and have inherited three out of four of her eccentricities…Once, while dining with an alcoholic and retired ballerina at some arts occasion I deliberately and ever so slowly ate the flowers from the center piece, daisies and nasturtiums, baby’s breath, a lily…She didn’t notice. As in, she genuinely did not see me do this for I was a man of stealth, though I was quite in the open about the thing. You can make yourself inconspicuous you know. You can be a shadow puppet in the finest of restaurants. That’s number one.

I can also row a boat at night and find my way back across wide water even though I am what they call nowadays “visually impaired” and I can do this because I believe in the process. So, yes, I too can talk to the invisible. Hint: you have to be fast about it.

Additionally I can champion giddiness and reject the obvious dolor of photographs and the talk of my neighbors.

My mother however genuinely believed in the dead. I believe only the breeze parts the curtains. She thought that Toulouse Lautrec was sneaking into her boudoir. Really. She could think things like that without much effort. There are people like that. They have imagination but no sense of civics. By this I mean she would neglect daily life for Toulouse Lautrec or the captain of the Titanic and by turns she didn’t know who was ringing her door bell which is to say she just didn’t care.

Thoughts while shaving: you can live a long time with your own homemade beliefs. I know a man in Scandinavia who returns each year to a certain part of the forest to talk to a particular stone. The man’s an executive in a famous electronics company. The man believes in something. The man is happy. One could say that he has less imagination than my mother and this makes him happier. Or for the sake of argument you can say that he has more imagination than my mother. Either way the man doesn’t believe in disaster worship which was of course my mother’s problem. A rock after all is just a rock; it’s not always sneaking into your boudoir.

Thoughts while shaving: I miss my mother.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto