{"id":16279,"date":"2020-08-01T00:00:11","date_gmt":"2020-08-01T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=16279"},"modified":"2020-07-31T23:55:20","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T04:55:20","slug":"commoners-ring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/16279","title":{"rendered":"Commoner’s Ring"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe funeral made the boy very sad, even sadder than a real funeral, he said.\u201d
\n-Mary Ruefle, On Imagination
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I want a funeral for my mother\u2019s mind. It\u2019s partway gone and not coming back. Even a sailor lost at sea is given ceremony, despite his missing body. What if the body\u2019s here, is living, but the mind is drifting? Let\u2019s make it official. Let\u2019s have a funeral.<\/p>\n

Funerals are just theater. A funeral for my mother\u2019s mind would be like that\u2014a play\u2014only my mother will act all the parts: king and country, horse and sword, Falstaff and Catherine, the French wife who can\u2019t speak an English word.<\/p>\n

Involved would be the incidental and counter-factual, the simultaneous and historical. We\u2019d need everything in: ocean creatures, cardiologists, cinnamon-flavored coffee left on a counter to cool, drinking fountains in elementary schools, saddle shoes, bad perms, cesarean sections, sleeping pills. We\u2019d need also civil unrest, mass shooting drills, wars, wars, wars, and the long, undisturbed sleep of old dogs.<\/p>\n

Time is of the essence, in other words.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying it can\u2019t be done. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s never been done. Adam Long, Jess Winfield, and Daniel Singer crammed all of Shakespeare\u2019s plays into a single, 97-minute show called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged <\/em>(I\u2019ve seen it; we\u2019ll come to that).<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll need props and costumes, of course. The mind wears and wields them too, and if the mind is diseased, then it\u2019s a matter of provenance and persistence, as well as loss. Even the diseased mind must have something to put on, something to carry, something to do.<\/p>\n

A wedding dress, for example\u2014every wedding dress starts somewhere. The one I have in mind\u2014my mother\u2019s second\u2014is sewn by a single mother, then hung on a rack until it\u2019s worn, then hung on a rack again for days, for weeks, for years, until it\u2019s a ghost that only fairly disappears.<\/p>\n

For this play, we\u2019ll need the ghost and the rack. We\u2019ll need the daughter and the dress. We\u2019ll need the days and the thread and the house. We\u2019ll need the mother who grew up in pain. We will need her pain, need to make it live again.<\/p>\n

And it all must happen in the present tense\u2014in the present as we watch, because it is always happening and has already happened. Let\u2019s have a funeral.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s cry for fields. Let\u2019s cry for houses. Let\u2019s cry for trains and disembodied bruises. Let\u2019s cry for our thoughts. Let\u2019s cry for action and for deadlock. Let\u2019s cry for our missing, our aimless and accumulating. Let\u2019s cry for weeds, for spiders, for broken glass. Let\u2019s cry for the no-one-there to pull, to crush, or be cut. Let\u2019s cry for a woman\u2019s mind. Let\u2019s cry for the mind that overspills its borders into another woman\u2019s mind, then another\u2019s, and so on. Let\u2019s cry for the untended garden, arugula mingling with poppies, poppies with tomatoes, eggs broken then tossed on the compost. Who cares? The worms care. Cry for the garden. Cry for the worms.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll be an artistic breakthrough, also a natural progression. Let\u2019s call it A Funeral for My Mother\u2019s Mind.<\/em><\/p>\n

Curtain-up the day Princess Diana dies. (We must start somewhere.) Or, better yet, curtain-up on a cabinet in a house on a cul-de-sac, and find inside that cabinet a jewelry box, and inside the jewelry box, the spoils of three marriages (all ended), including a ring like Diana\u2019s: oval sapphire in the middle, a queen\u2019s ruff of diamonds around the sapphire, but fake. Fake as in not the princess\u2019s, yes, but fake as in glass stones? I couldn\u2019t say.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s from this ring the rest emanates.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s second husband bought this ring for her.<\/p>\n

No, again, but in the present tense, please:<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s second husband buys this ring for her. Later, when she leaves him for her third husband, he throws his body on her car as she tries to drive away. There is screaming\u2014her screaming and the screaming of wheels.<\/p>\n

The chorus steps on stage. The stage is a tumult of wet wood, old dirt, and fabric. The chorus is trying her best to make something out of it: \u201cThe flat unraised spirits that have dared \/ On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth \/ So great an object\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

She holds up a ring so all in the audience can see it.<\/p>\n

The play about my mother\u2019s mind offers us no clues except the ceremony of the thing. As her second husband chases after her car, he acts the scorned lover, plays the paparazzi chasing a princess through a Parisian tunnel. A hounded princess is mythic<\/em>, an abusive man chasing his wife is sad<\/em>. To gift a real ring to a princess is ceremony<\/em>, to demand a fake one back from an ordinary woman, melodrama<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Now we arrive, as promised, at The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged<\/em>:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s August 31, 1997. I\u2019m nineteen and at a matinee performance in London\u2019s West End. <\/em>We are waiting. We are restless. The stage manager emerges from behind the curtain, and he says, \u201cIt is with great sadness I must report that Princess Diana has died from a car accident early this morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show goes on, as it does.<\/p>\n

Titus Andronicus<\/em> is a cooking program. Othello <\/em>is a rap. The histories are a game of American football, only instead of pigskin, a crown is thrown around, with words like \u201cDerridean,\u201d \u201cjejune,\u201d and \u201cmetaphysical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ophelia runs screeching onstage, her arms above her head, sporting a manic blonde wig. The audience laughs. \u201cAll is not well,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

But the histories are a game. They are fake\/real and real\/fake. A quarterback may fake a pass. A king turns the line of succession into a game. History is written by the winners, never the superfluous. A superfluous soul can sometimes win, but only by lying very, very still, or by lying. Which of these was a real king, the play asks us. Foul! Lear must leave the field. Lear is a fiction.<\/p>\n

Hear humming under the stage business:<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is dead and gone, lady. She is dead and gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

And like a slide clicked into its viewfinder: everything turns blue, blue, blue. I hear slides click into place all over the theater as the audience lets her death bruise the scene. Diana is dead. Diana is dead. <\/em><\/p>\n

Hear humming under the stage business:<\/p>\n

Poor Diana.<\/em><\/p>\n

Poor Thing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Actors toss the English crown back and forth. Henry V passes to Henry VI. Meanwhile, I sense the weight of the princess\u2019s body, something she was always trying to lighten, prone in the middle of the action, the players constantly stepping over and around it.<\/p>\n

The body is everybody and has no mouth for speaking.<\/p>\n

What the hell do I care about Diana? Diana is bulimic and so am I. I say we are, <\/em>because you never fully excise the bulimic. She just finds a new bathroom in which to throw up. Inside a palace, this isn\u2019t difficult, but the mind isn\u2019t a palace. It\u2019s a suburban house, and Diana is a postcard taped to my bedroom wall.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thirteen. My mother indulges me: a whole pizza, frosted sugar cookies, bagels with cream cheese. She doesn\u2019t forget she\u2019s already fed me, but feeding me again makes her feel she\u2019s doing something useful.<\/p>\n

The second husband will always have something to say. Having caught me throwing up, he backs me against a wall and says, \u201cWhy are you doing this to her?\u201d He points to my mother who is teary in a corner.<\/p>\n

Even the tragedies are comedies. The histories, too. And the romances are strange equations: something plus something plus the supernatural. A ghost is always part human. If the dress becomes a ghost and only fairly disappears, then my mother is somewhat the woman she was.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s feeding her cats multiple times a day. It\u2019s because she forgets she\u2019s already fed them, and also because feeding them makes her feel she\u2019s doing something useful. She likes to buy me clothes. (It makes her feel she\u2019s doing something useful.) But we need to hide the shopping bags from the second husband, else he\u2019ll get angry. My sister hides my mother\u2019s bank card from her, else she\u2019ll buy booze. She cries unconsolably for her lost cats and dogs, my sister tells me.<\/p>\n

She cries for her favorite dog. The dog is dreaming of her lost teeth. She\u2019s dreaming of a house where a ghost girl watches her ghost mother sew a ghostly wedding dress. Stitch. Stitch. Twitch. Twitch. The dog is dreaming of dream squirrels dreaming of her on a night full of painkillers.<\/p>\n

That dog is buried behind the house, the one where my mother is no longer allowed. There\u2019s a stone with the print of a paw. There\u2019s kingcup, harebell, foxglove. The dog is drifting in a small boat under the grass. If only she might dig up the bones, my mother might take the dog\u2019s skull in her hands, and joyfully say how she bore her on her back a thousand times, \u201cand now how abhorred in my imagination it is!\u201d But my mother\u2019s third husband is done with her.<\/p>\n

Every ditched princess needs some sorcery. Enter Mary Ruefle, a real Prospero. In her book On Imagination, <\/em>ever the magician, she presents a trick of language. \u201cBeware the difference between real pretend and fake pretend,\u201d she says, but my mother struggles with the difference. She\u2019s sometimes frantic, sending multiple text messages in an hour. \u201cYou stole my jewelry!\u201d she types to her third husband. Where is the ruby necklace her grandmother gave her? Where is the Commoner\u2019s Ring?<\/p>\n

The missing ring\u2019s centerpiece is a sapphire\u2014blue, blue, blue\u2014but as a jewel, the sapphire is a shallow mutt, made of corundum and other stuff. Diamonds, however, are pure carbon. They\u2019re found deeper down, one hundred miles below the surface. She wants her mutt back, her glass gem.<\/p>\n

The whole thing is funny, if I let myself think like that. Romeo and Juliet <\/em>began as a comedy, I hear. All the comedies run together until the characters are interchangeable, the settings just backdrops to marriages. Then what to make of The Merchant of Venice? <\/em>It ends in (along with marriage) a forced conversion\u2014a sort of funeral for the mind. The daughter is a stolen gem and also has stolen gems. She is missed and missing. Beware the difference.<\/p>\n

They call it the \u201cCommoner\u2019s Ring\u201d because rumor has it, Diana found it in a catalog ordinary women read, opting for ready-to-wear in lieu of unique. Still, the jewelers who made it are jewelers to the rich and landed. They modeled it, in fact, after Victoria\u2019s brooch\u2014Queen Victoria who dressed her children as peasants in idylls then sketched their portraits. Or it may be called the \u201cCommoner\u2019s Ring\u201d as a smear on Diana\u2019s daughter-in-law who wears it now.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s second husband takes her to a jewelry store in a South Florida arcade. She chooses the ring. \u201cAn exact replica,\u201d the salesperson says and places it on the counter, \u201cdown to the cut and color.\u201d These jewels, however, were made in a lab somewhere in California. Beware the difference.<\/p>\n

If a mother is a sapphire, then a daughter is a diamond. Find her deeper down. She is born of great heat and pressure. If she won\u2019t crown, then cut her out. \u201cYour grandfather held my hand before the operation,\u201d my mother says. \u201cHe was there when I closed my eyes.\u201d I wonder, was he there when she reopened them? I was.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m forty-two and I have a daughter that I love \u201cpassing well,\u201d which means, in Shakespeare\u2019s language, more than anything. <\/em>Most mornings, my daughter lies awake in bed a while. I pass her room and put my ear to the door. I listen as she whispers to her stuffed animal the day\u2019s plans: \u201cAll things are ready, if our mind be so,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are throats to be cut and works to be done!\u201d I\u2019m suddenly embarrassed to be eavesdropping, and rush away.<\/p>\n

That is an example of history in a play.<\/p>\n

Now my mother reaches for her husband in the night and he isn\u2019t there. I don\u2019t know which one she means. She asks, \u201cWas I a good mother?\u201d I say, \u201cSure. Sure.\u201d We leave it there.<\/p>\n

It may appear the diseased mind has no agency, that a cry for <\/em>help is passive, that the diseased mind just is, <\/em>never does, <\/em>or if it does<\/em>, the doing<\/em> is dismissed as irrelevant, a miscomprehension, a trompe l\u2019oeil.<\/em> \u201cI want to do, not just be,\u201d Diana says. But we just are. To throw up after eating would be a cry-for-help. To bang my head against the toilet till I bleed would be a cry-for-help. To scream back, \u201cFUCK YOU,\u201d would also be a cry-for-help. It is never, simply, a cry. In the bathroom, I wield my toothbrush handle like a dagger, going for the throat.<\/p>\n

I am always trying to die. But, \u201cNo one cares,\u201d my boyfriend says when I worry aloud about my body. He probably thinks it\u2019s only vanity. He probably believes saying so is a kindness. But behind what\u2019s expressed is real meaning, delicately wired, carefully calibrated, and not meant to be seen: my boyfriend is ashamed of me. Still, when I beg for it, he reluctantly complies. So that we won\u2019t be heard, we sneak out of our hotel room and slip into a utility closet. He props me up on a washing machine and fucks me like it\u2019s a chore, like taking the dog for a walk, like doing the dirty dishes. He does me, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to do, not just be,\u201d Diana says. People think the diseased mind has no utility, but I disagree. It satisfies a desire for unmooring everyone has, no matter their station. We become children again, and who doesn\u2019t want to be a child? My mother is like a teenager, pouring water into wine bottles to hide her drinking. We are, in a sense, on equal footing now, my mother and I. Dementia and bulimia: two abstract nouns, two spirits of loss past midsummer, cast as Fairy Cobweb and Fairy Moth, my mother, Moth, who throws herself against the glass.<\/p>\n

In my memory, my mother is usually looking at herself in the mirror: her thighs, her ass. \u201cSo-and-so says I have great legs,<\/em>\u201d she tells me. \u201cCan you believe it?\u201d Belief is what this is all about. Prospero tells his daughter, \u201cThy mother was a piece of virtue, and\u2026 .\u201d Prospero is mollifying her, setting up the story, weaving a tale.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I do know: my mother dives from a boat to swim with a dolphin. The dolphin swims away. Goodbyes take forever on a boat\u2014she can still see the person she left onshore as she rocks along in the opposite direction. She waves for a while at herself, but can\u2019t continue on like this forever, and finally lowers her arm.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope I was a good mother to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

I read the same sentence over and over and over again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope I was a good mother to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Queen Katherine wants to know how she can marry a man who lately stole her country. Queen Gertrude asks her child to cast off his mourning color\u2014not black, but blue, blue, blue.<\/p>\n

Poor Diana.<\/em><\/p>\n

Poor Thing. <\/em><\/p>\n

Never worked a day in her life<\/em>, but she was a teacher for a while, wasn\u2019t she? <\/em><\/p>\n

My mother has stopped working for pay. Now she works to kill time. She is a good gardener, but only ever plants flowers. She has a knack with them and works for a spell in a florist shop called Covent Garden, among other odd jobs: realtor, aerobics instructor, flight attendant, hostess, teacher. Every one, with the exception of teaching, is work, not vocation. <\/em>It is the teaching, she says, that actually made something, by which she means, broke something: her body carrying children up and down stairs, also her heart. \u201cThose kids,\u201d she tells me, \u201cjust need someone to love them,\u201d and \u201cDid I tell you I\u2019m walking a few miles every day? It\u2019s good for me mentally and physically.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a pause. Her mind resets. She says, \u201cDid I tell you I\u2019m walking a few miles every day? It\u2019s good for me mentally and physically.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am here for her, a doll to be talked to, the way my daughter talks to her panda bear. She says, \u201cPandy is scared. Pandy doesn\u2019t like bugs.\u201d But when my daughter digs in the soil, she finds bugs and isn\u2019t scared.<\/p>\n

Hamlet talks to himself and to a skull. Yet he is still afraid.<\/p>\n

My mother talks to her cats. One is called Pretty. One is called You. She is fine<\/em>, she says. Don\u2019t worry about me, <\/em>she says. Worry about Pretty. Worry about You.<\/p>\n

I talk to dead writers and sometimes living ones, too. I prop them up on a shelf like dolls and they stare down at me as I sleep. When I awake, I still don\u2019t know which words to use.<\/p>\n

Diana talks to the press, only rarely. She says, \u201cDon\u2019t call me an icon. I\u2019m just a mother trying to help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beware the difference.<\/p>\n

What if Diana has always been dead, but on August 31, 1997, everyone suddenly and at once agrees? We might throw a funeral for our years of misconception. We might sing an Elton John song, only change the address to: \u201cGoodbye, memory\u2026\u201d then continue with, \u201cThough I never knew you at all \/ You had the grace to hold yourself \/ While those around you crawled.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mind is in its body bag far from the palace and the Queen won\u2019t come down from Scotland to cry for her. There\u2019s no guard in a black box by the front door. There\u2019s no maid or manservant, no flag on the flagpole to lower.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorry about Pretty,\u201d my mother says. \u201cWorry about You.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ring was returned a long time ago.<\/p>\n

Now an abrupt change of scene:<\/p>\n

August 31, 2018: A group of artists and writers recreate Diana\u2019s funeral word-for-word, twenty-one years after the real thing, but in Manchester instead of London, a warehouse instead of Westminster, with a mariachi band instead of Elton John and an Uber for a hearse. People throw broccoli at the coffin, people who were likely too young to remember the real one. Actors play all the parts: Diana\u2019s brother, the priest, even the mourners, though they are just superfluous passersby, extras, ad-hoc, asked in fliers to come dressed in black.<\/p>\n

In the Manchester warehouse is a wrecked car\u2014not a Mercedes but a Volkswagen\u2014its roof covered over with cellophane-wrapped bouquets, parked indefinitely by a set of double-stacked speakers. The audience is forced to file past it as they claim their space on the pew. They are the sorts of people who huddled in throngs outside the cathedral then, and now are allowed inside, or, in this case, inside the White Hotel\u2014a rehabbed nightclub where they might go on a Saturday to rave and drink and score. This ceremony is called The Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales 2.0. <\/em>and they clap once it\u2019s all over. The Guardian <\/em>gives it five stars.<\/p>\n

In the play that is A Funeral for My Mother\u2019s Mind, <\/em>there would be no discernible difference between the first funeral (real) and the second funeral (fake). We would hear audio of my daughter\u2019s plush panda crying as my son transforms into a bird, as well as my mother forgetting their names.<\/p>\n

Now back to the top:<\/p>\n

August 31, 1997: We leave the theater unchanged.<\/p>\n

There are awestruck crowds formed in a ring around Buckingham Palace. There are flowers, teddy bears, and balloons; garrulous and beautiful, these are pain\u2019s byproducts built by ordinary people. The space between themselves and the dead seems impossible, still they try and try to reach her. They keep on, day after day, night after night, erecting their monument, weeping and bricklaying, weeping and hammering. If one weeps on another, all the better. If one forgets and loses herself in the weeping, then call it tenderness until the hammer.<\/p>\n

Later, in a Stratford hotel room, my boyfriend and I lie together on the bed, looking up at a TV bracketed and braced high on the wall. At Westminster Abbey, Elton John sits at the piano playing a song he\u2019s played thousands of times before, only now no one claps when he\u2019s finished. Here, then, is the moment I feel something, and I cry a little, my boyfriend\u2019s hand\u2014out of habit\u2014lazily climbing my thigh.<\/p>\n

Or, I\u2019m on a boat on a canal, and the canal itself is penned in by luminous green, stippled by kingcup, harebell, foxglove. The sky above is obscenely blue, blue, blue, like a sapphire, and the boat is moving so slowly, who would know or care if we are arriving or leaving, if we are riding on water, grass, or sky. I think to myself: this is such a happy boat, covered over in pots of tumbling flowers and painted a jolly red. There is white wine, bread, cheese, fruit on the boat\u2019s roof, towheaded kids onshore in wellies waving, waving, waving, and I see my mother, and it looks as if she\u2019s holding my skull in her hands. Then she whispers to me, where my ear would\u2019ve been.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LESLEY JENIKE<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe funeral made the boy very sad, even sadder than a real funeral, he said.\u201d -Mary Ruefle, On Imagination   I want a funeral for my mother\u2019s mind. It\u2019s partway gone and not coming back. Even a sailor lost at sea is given ceremony, despite his missing body. What if the body\u2019s here, is living, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[65],"tags":[24],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-4ez","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16279"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16385,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16279\/revisions\/16385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}