“Where I am folded, there I am a lie.”
This quote by Rainer Maria Rilke was printed on a narrow slip of blue paper and tucked into a brown paper lunch bag, together with stickers and vibrant string and coloured cards as writing prompts, which was given to me in June 2012 at the very beginning of the women’s walking and writing retreat in southern Tuscany.
The entire poem is this:
I Am Too Alone in the World, and Not Alone Enough
(from “The Book of Hours”)
I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that took me safely
through the wildest storm of all.
And I would add, amongst many things:
Like the freedom in letting go, slipping sideways, stepping forward, cutting off, opening up, loving.
Like the second language learned that soaked through the sheet of me into the tidal mudflats of understanding and culture.
Like the tiger-type fearlessness to write and create into the real and veering from the dread of error or need for perfection or for what they might cobble together about me after I die.
We keep ourselves – and others – “safe” when we barricade all of our unfoldedness in the foyer of our beings. We keep it beige and tasteful, G rated, full of fluff when we know full well it’s not. But whatever would they say? How would they react? They might they see me as “bad”.
The fold I feel most keenly is the need to write, and subsequently not writing. As well as needing to art and not arting, and endless screenshots of jewellery designs, and not being at the bench. It’s not just “showing up for work’, but the reaching deeper than that. All the way deeper; the make-my-toes-curl kind of deep.
Journalling can’t keep up with the gallop of inner dialogue, those parts of me clamouring to have their say appeased to a small degree if I move over to the inks, or I go and swing the hammer.
The curiosity remains, always, and the fold is infinitely folding because I haven’t quite written what I really could have – words hackneyed, incommensurate to feeling – and when reading back on my journals, they’re rendered foreign to me. I can remember vividly some of the dreams I wrote about 11 years ago, but not the whole set of circumstances in that shitfully scribbled piece in an abandoned exercise book about how I’d “felt” about a person who stood me up at the last minute for a better offer than me, and how I was too folded to speak up truthfully about that hurt. Until years later when I hadn’t learned the first time and let it happen again.
Do you still see the fold? Dancing across the surface right there, in the reluctance to tell all while it’s fresh? Gender, situation, the outrage outpaced by the fear of hurting someone else, the fear of the wrath of another, of sounding as though I’m writing it out of revenge, of wearing it all on my sleeve because I was hurt? The best I could do was to tuck it into the lining of poetry. Does that count?
Once upon a time in an attempt to unfold, I travelled to Italy in 2012 to write and walk for 10 days, and then fell in love with the place and the culture and my driver, and after 6 weeks at home I went there to live with zero plans beyond attending a language school in Siena for 3 months. In that decision – just for a while – I was unfolded. I wore that little slip of paper wrapped round my heart. If you believe in astrology, 2012 was the Chinese year of the Dragon – my “birth beast” – and apparently when you meet with your birth year animal, it hails change and growth. Didn’t it what.
“Life is a series of concentric circles, opening and closing, quietly or violently splashing into one another all at once. The dance of a sudden downpour across a lake’s surface.”
Today, alongside the Rilke quote and a nest of old writings, I rewrite the above words, written last year while I was curled into the spare bed, unslept and still sleepy, at my parents’ place.
While Mum was convalescing post (gnarly, life-changing) op I was staying with them, installed as chief salmon chef, chauffeur, and all-round third wheel bossy boots. I was there for 6 weeks, away from my then-fiancé (now hubby) Richard, at a time when all was a little bit wobbly for both of us (there, see that fold?).
During that time I’d be some aware I felt I’d irrevocably lost a large part of myself and, along with that, the fire that fuelled the need and desire to write and make art. Staying still for me is hard. For an age I’d been pootling about at a level of discomfort I’d gotten used to, that being, the kind that keeps one moving: into; away from; toward; repelled. The busy-ness of a body and a mind being relentlessly hornet-loud on the inside. To a certain degree I can observe it’s a familial trait and I wonder how much of it is DNA deep, or learned? The bone-deep urge to travel, a soul’s yearning for a particular type of upheaval, for the thrill of the all-encompassing terrifying experience of the complete new, to dandelion or tumbleweed one’s self in the un-rooting from one soil and re-planting somewhere else.
When I made the decision absolute to return to Australia in mid 2023, I was determined to finally “stay still” and just let the paper aeroplane of my life (and inevitable reverse culture shock) unfold. And then… along strode Richard, I swooned and – stillness be damned! – I said yes, and precisely two years and one week after we reconnected, we find ourselves married 6 months and about to move into our house that is a mere kilometre, as the crow flies, from the home I left behind back in 2012.
While I was staying with my parents, I had all the grand intention of writing it all out, to journal good and proper, while hiding from Victoria’s wintertime still. But that fire was just too low to stoke and out of all feeling that was dammed up to the elbows, the only writing I achieved was a trite muttering about concentric circles and life. I was folded, sure, but it was a time dedicated to Mamma and the jig of unpredictability that an iffy diagnosis brings. That time seemed to protract while I was in the middle of it – as time does. Looking back, it’s been concertinaed down, file compacted, condensed to a singularity of memory and all that brings with it – and what it mostly leaves out.
I notice that trait of time even more so when thinking over the time spent living and working in Italy. Often I ask myself: did those 11 years actually happen? In answer I find myself still speaking (and dreaming) in Italian. I also recently found my old Ali in Italia blog posts, filed away and deemed long lost. Reading through them, if I can evade cringing long just long enough, I am grateful for my retrospective enthusiasm, for the eagerness and naivety that urged me to write it ALL, duly unfolded as instructed by Rilke and all the other writers who have mastered the craft of writing fearlessly, while I consumed and captured every aspect of my new life through prose and photographs. I knew that, before long, it would all fade into the daily ho-hum of familiarity. Those unfolded parts of me were more aware than I was that the realestate in my head would soon be required for the enormity of a new language and culture, and of being “other”. Before too long, my brain jettisoned the “boring” details as I stepped from behind the screen and lived and breathed amongst it all in my quest to be accepted into this new old world. From there, the crosshatching of folds just appeared.
It has been 13 years since I first opened that brown paper bag of writerly prompts, and I still have that slip of blue paper. It has followed me everywhere, all the way round the circle of “woowoo” (and there is much woowoo indeed!), pressed into the middle of the old journal I’d given the side-eye to in Victoria last year. I’d photograph it now for this post I’ve packed it away with my art studio, in storage while we wait to move into our new home in a few weeks.
You’ll have to take my word for it, but if looked at under a microscope, it resembles a map.
“I don’t want to stay folded anywhere[…]I want my grasp of things true before you.” More words will unfold. I will unfold them.
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