fresh shoots

The dream last night was a tangle of aspirations for the future. I was sleeping on the couch since Mike was snoring.

I was reading (among other things) an article on memoir-writing from an academic point of view, yesterday. Ms Buss has much to say about it, as it appears, including that "women end in this way" whilst "men traditionally end in that," in general terms.

Buss, Helen M. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2002. 232 pp. ISBN 0-88920-408-X, $39.95

Now, it seems to me that my memoir does not wish to renegotiate any kind of relationship at all. It is a book that demands a final sense of closure (with no interventions from its readership, please.)

My writing is not open-ended, as I had expected it to be when I first started writing. It is very definite about its demands -- and they are, from a bourgeois perspective, rather large demands at that. "I do not wish to be troubled by any further perspectives. I have made my estimations, and I am now fully done with this."  One has to cut and store.

Editor X had requested me to put more in about relationships -- and I have done so. Buss says that women writers underestimate their relationships with their mothers, but not with their fathers. I was reluctant to put too much in about either parent. Yet now, I have a great deal of information in there about my father (less about my mother). And it is far from all I know. My writing is not intended as a machine for evisceration. I would be disappointed if this is how it ended up.

In last night's dream, I'm dragging my mother on a travel-trip with me. There are weird things happening at the hotel -- I have been given a token to spend more than $700. Yet I can't work out why I didn't use this token. It is too late, anyway, as I am in Perth. Now I have gone back to Melbourne to see what it was all about. "Ah-- a fight show, but it's sleazy. No wonder I turned it down."

My mother is hardly aware of these complex questions going on inside my head. She is just there for the trip. Only now, she is lamenting the cutting of the lucern for winter. I have ordered that it should be cut down really low, so that the storage sheds for winter should be full. But she wants the tender shoots cut only half down. What sentimentalism!

They are beautiful green shoots, and as we harvest them, Robert de Niro is in the background going "You talking to me? You talking to me?" and I break into song, designed to carry all these other peasant worker women along with me: "I will survive!"