12: elbowland

Adventures in chainlink-thinking – January 2023

Hello my love,

There was a night, long ago, when I was little, that Ouma visited people who lived in KwaZulu-Natal with the friends we’d gone on holiday with. I was the only child there. We didn’t know the people. Three things stood out from this evening.

One: How the night air became suddenly filled with the sound of drums thickening the dark. I had never heard African drums before. Someone explained that the drumming was coming from people who lived beyond the rise behind the house. The sound felt like it came from everywhere. Even from inside me. In my chest.

Two: How I sat on the floor attempting to keep hold of the thread of the conversation, backtracking two or three statements to figure how the adults had got to this point from … where exactly? I was entranced by conversation’s meandering nature. It was like water poured on dusty ground that runs and spreads, some of it penetrating the skin of the earth, some of it running and thinning to dryness in little cul-de-sacs.

Three: How, when the novelty of this discovery about the baroque nature of conversation finally wore off, I shifted on my bum towards a small bookshelf outside the circle of adult feet and looked at the books and discovered among them a cheap paperback about the Bermuda Triangle. I was nailed to the spot then and, when finally the adults made to leave, having to put the unfinished book back on the shelf took enormous will.

Of the three things from that night, the second one has been the most enduring discovery: how conversation – and how thoughts – shape-shift imperceptibly to deliver you to a surprise destination when you weren’t even intent on going anywhere. I always wish I could pin down the moment a thought hares off in a new direction. Or find the ground in which a theme takes root, endures and then grows new shoots, or withers.

Portrait: Elbow Touch, by Egon Schiele

On Wednesday, during yoga, Katie said, ‘Keep your elbows close to your body,’ and suddenly Yvonne entered the room and I heard her voice saying: ‘Elbows in Elbowland!’

Yvonne has been dead a few years. She would have been around 92 now, if I remember correctly. She was an Alexander Technique teacher and we had an arrangement: I brought her books to read; she gave me an hour’s worth of teaching a week. She was double my age when we met; lived in a house she’d bought on her own decades ago, with a beautiful garden and shelves of books everywhere. She’d never married. She had worked as a school librarian. She’d had an affair with a well-known writer in the Sixties. She had travelled around the world. She read all the time. She went to concerts. She wore a bun on her head and I liked her most when strands came away and blew on to her face, because she was so neat and trim and escaping hair felt like glimpses of her wild self. She moved with grace and lightness. She wore enormous silver rings designed by long-dead artists.

Nothing about her seemed 86.

When I said something Yvonne didn’t agree with, she would move her bottom jaw to the right and I knew, before she opened her mouth, that she definitely had an opinion on the matter. Sometimes we laughed so hard we had to take a break to wipe our tears. The time I remember best was when she told me she’d just read a book that she’d really enjoyed, but something about it felt familiar, so she went to look through her reading diaries and finally found that she had read the book many years ago. Under the title and author name she’d written: ‘Unforgettable!’ I laughed so much that we couldn’t get back on track again.

Mostly we operated in silence, though, with her cradling my limbs or head, gently pulling or rotating, teaching me how to place my body entirely in the hands of another. Teaching me how to move without effort.

I wondered what she had resolved to do with the many journals she’d kept over the years and was adamant she did not want her niece – or anyone else – to read once she died, but neither did she have the heart to burn them. I remembered a recent Instagram post in which I’d spoken about journals.

'When the dreams lie next to the fantasies, and political thoughts next to personal complaints, they all seem to learn from one another.' (From The New Diary by Tristine Rainer)

‘Elbows in,’ Katie said again, bringing me back into the studio where we were moving through Chaturanga.

Funny word, I thought. ‘Elbow’. Funny, too, how a word can zip open a different time and place.

Later that day, I read a manuscript in which the writer, a woman with a phenomenal brain, tells a story of standing among male friends having a conversation at a party, and a new man arrives and introduces himself and shakes everyone’s hands – except hers. The only woman. She writes: ‘I realised I was going to have to elbow my way back into the conversation.’ She stepped forward and held out her hand and said her name and the man said; ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t see you.’

Which reminded me of a conversation on my Peri-Peri group (my two besties from primary school and me talking about menopause) in which Rose said she found that she was having really hard days sometimes with all the losses that ageing brings. I wrote back:

Do you remember how I called menopause 'the uglification' in that essay I wrote? Later it felt more like a fade-ification. Like skin, hair, eyes are all dissolving into one bland colour; face melting into body. Ghostification. But I was looking through my journal earlier and I found this quote and it seems apt: ‘The habitual perception of ourselves, built up over the course of our lives, is being sorely tried, psyche and soma are being tested in ways that can be extremely painful.’ (From: Coming to Age - The Croning Years, by Jane R. Prétat)

The word ‘elbow’ used as a verb in the manuscript in which a woman had to elbow into a circle she’d already been a part of but had been expelled from by the entry of a woman-blind man feels more familiar than actual elbows do.

Elbows face away from us. They point behind, unlike our noses, which point ahead. And unless you have tennis elbow (here’s a wonderful poem by Jim Hall – make sure you read both pages of it), you probably seldom think about this part of your body.

I’d never thought of my elbows as the undemanding, independent little operators they are until I was 32. Ollie was just three months old and his laugh had emerged from the cypher of his baby self. Every time I changed his nappy, fiddling this side and that side with old nappy/new nappy, wipes and powder, I became aware that he would laugh when my elbows were inadvertently pointed at him. It’s funny to find that your elbows are amusing. After that, when I needed a shot of oxytocin, or whatever it is that gives you that special rush of making someone you love laugh, I’d suddenly point my elbows at him and he would seize up in fits of hysteria.

When you google ‘elbow’, two main things come up: the body part in a medical context, or the band. Elbow (the band) is an old favourite of mine and The Leaders of the Free World is one of my favourite political songs. Which, thanks to Katie, Yvonne, the manuscript author and the memory of Ollie laughing at my arm hinges, I listened to again this week. And while I was footling around, I thought I might as well see if I could find out why Elbow-the-band chose such a strange name for their outfit.

Apparently because someone in a show once said that ‘elbow’ was the most beautiful word in the English language. Well. I couldn’t find the clip of the show to hear that speech so I don’t know what the character’s motivation is, but I don’t think elbow is such a great word. It’s pretty pointy and bendy and fit for purpose, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful. Which made me wonder what people generally thought the most beautiful words in English were. Is there consensus? Doubtful. But I found a Reader’s Digest article that takes a stab at naming some of the best words in English.

On the list is a word that is not elbow but is associated only with elbows. ‘Akimbo’ is the word. It means to stand with your hands on your hips and your elbows pointing out. On the same list is the word ‘syzygy’, which I once used in a poem and which I wrote about here.

‘An alignment of celestial bodies’ is what syzygy means.

Alignment, like memories of one night long ago that holds three formative events in its brevity. Like something as pedestrian as elbows taking you on a little boat ride on a small river of water spilled on dusty ground.

Alignment – like elbows in Elbowland.

Bye for now, darling. I have to pack some more books into some more boxes at the somewhat worry-filled boundary of the next chapter of my life. My apologies if this letter feels obscure.

Say hello to your elbows from me.

All my love,

Kowski