*
As well as trying to contemplate the terror experienced by those prisoners subjected to the torture legitimised by Jay Bybee’s and Steven Bradbury’s memoranda, I also find myself thinking about the families of those two lawyers. Aren’t they also victims here? I wonder what the Bradbury family think of their father’s legal work. When the memoranda came into the public domain, were they angry? Did they confront him? Or did they try to pretend that nothing had happened?
Jay Bybee has stated publicly – as if expecting sympathy – that he ‘regrets … the notoriety that this (case) has brought me. It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family.’ He doesn’t go into details, but I would like to understand the effects that his words, when they became public in 2005, actually had on his young family. How could a man whose job was to uphold the law have contributed to legitimising the practice of torture? Would you ever be able to trust a man again who writes that it is not anticipated ‘that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.’fn4? And that ‘because ‘no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted … the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.’ If your father had written such words, would you ever be able to look him in the eye again?
PART SEVEN
* * *
Time and Love; Memory and Looking
18
Past Continuous
I trace the gradual lengthening of winter days, after the turning of the year, as I once traced the hair on your sleeping head. Gently. Not wanting to wake you in the night. Or stop the simple miracle of our breathing together. My finger lifts a single, coal-black curl away from your eyelid. Then, only millimetres from your skin, I trace a line down your nose, almost brushing your lips (fractionally parted, as if in concentration), down to your stubbled chin. Wondering if you will wake. If your dreaming state can feel my wandering finger, so near. Each breath in the dead of night a pulse of warmth. Us together. Brief travellers on this earth. I can feel the blood moving inside you, see the twitch of the artery in your neck, feel your heart beat. Corazon. The word you wouldn’t translate. Blushing, turning away from me, your face to the sun.
And now you’re sleeping on the other side of our turning world – summer to my winter. I’m back by the western sea. Trilling of curlew, urgent lapping of water. I sit on a fallen willow trunk, listening to the wash of the tide, reaching higher and higher over these mudflats. Each day now three or four minutes longer. Even in the middle of February the sense of spring, coiled and ready to sing, is tangible. Unstoppable. A tang in the air, a fractional lightening of green in the hedges. A mile away, on the other side of the bay, I watch a tractor moving patiently in the dusk, flashing yellow lights along the lane that leads back to the village. From there another pool of headlights moving. I guess they’ll find each other at the corner by the farm. The lights momentarily pause as they meet, then move on again, resuming their journeys, lights searching out again, spooling into the darkness.
But you’re with me again, in spirit, as vividly as this dusk. You were with me on waking, I think you visited me in the night, came into my dreams. I know one day we will be together again. Are. Were. Will be. But today these tenses are all one. Meaningless to separate. Thinking and writing about atrocities makes it even more urgent to love. And in my mind, inhabited for years by words and images that attack the human spirit, there are also the faces of all those I’ve ever loved, their voices, their laughter, their touch.
All that we carry inside us. Our pasts not past at all.
*
Is there any relationship between writing and happiness? Or is the opposite true? I know of very few writers, either living or dead, who could be described as being genuinely happy for much of their existence. Though perhaps the same could be said of everyone. After all, happiness is an elusive state for most of us. But the difference between writers and others, it seems to me, lies in the repeated activity of trying to fix in words emotional states which, by definition, defy the permanence of words. So writers, at least those skilled enough to have humility, are always coming up against the reality of their failure. Are always aware of the provisional nature of what they’ve written, the way their words slide away from their subjects, ending up somewhere unintended, only occasionally, perhaps, capturing some inner truth. So the majority of time is spent in states of differing levels of frustration; a restlessness that knows the destination is always just out of sight, just around the next corner – but, in reality, unreachable. The sedentary nature of the writing life also doesn’t seem to contribute much to happiness either. Staring at a screen most days, you might as well be in an office, the only difference being the scope for limitless procrastination at home. Then, forcing yourself out for a walk in the last of the light, you’re confronted by other people who seem to have busy lives, places to go to, tangible objectives to achieve. You find yourself thinking: ‘God, what a relief it must be to have a job that has a beginning, a middle and an end! Something tangible like delivering packages in a van. Or repairing broken pipes. Selling shoes. Anything that means at the end of the day you can shut up your shop, go home and not think about work until the next day …’ And then the writer returns home, and is confronted by the paltry amount of text generated in the course of a day’s ‘work’ – and the spiral of self-loathing only increases …
I wonder what Epicurus, that great thinker on the question of happiness, would have thought of writers and their solitary pursuits today? He identified three factors as being significant influences on people’s abilities to find contentment – freedom from authority, a community of friends, and time spent reflecting on life with others. On the first, writers might score relatively highly, for the generally high levels of autonomy they have around their work; but on the second and third, I’m sure Epicurus would have found the focus on individual creativity, above everything else, to be quite misconceived.
I’m also intrigued by the question of writing about the subject of happiness. While all of us could immediately name numerous novels, songs or plays which have suffering at their centre – after all, this is the essence of tragedy, the foundation of most literature – I’m certain that if we were asked to think of writing that portrays happiness in a vivid way then most of us would struggle to identify even half a dozen books where this state is written about convincingly. There seem to be two possible explanations for this: either that it is exceptionally difficult to capture a state which is essentially ephemeral; or that we as readers bring to such descriptions a strong degree of scepticism, no doubt partly based on our own experiences of such states. And this scepticism works against any writer’s attempt to communicate happiness or joy.
There might also be a third explanation. At times in my own life when I’ve been either wildly happy, or in love (or, just occasionally, when these two states have coincided), I simply stop writing, because I’m too busy living. Fortunately or unfortunately, these states are by their very nature temporary – a matter of weeks sometimes, a few months at most. My last period of extended, total happiness tiptoed up on me two years ago, and for six months I wrote almost nothing.