In control

 In control 

Yesterday.

     “What are you reading these days?” Dr. Feight asked - out of the blue. Or, it felt out of the blue because he never asks anything.

     “Women in Love,” I said, turning and looking back at him, his pen scratching on his paper on his clipboard. “D. H. Lawrence. Why?”

     He nodded. As if that explained it. But explained what? “Mmmm,” he said.

     “I’m at the point,” I went on because I felt compelled to go on. “I’m at the point that Thomas Crich is dying, the old man.”

     “Mmmm.”

D. H. Lawrence, thinking about sex,
or death, or sex and death - and horses.

“And Gerald, the son, has asked Gudrun Brangwen to stay for dinner. And then he’s invited her to stay for coffee. And they’re drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in the library. And it’s to hold onto something rather than be taken over completely by his father’s death - that’s why he’s invited her.

     “And he’s telling her about it all that ‘you don’t know what to do’; and she says, ‘What can be done?’

     “And he says he doesn’t know but something: you’ve got to find something to resolve the situation, otherwise you’re done. It’s not that you want to, you have to. You can’t give into it. Or, you can’t if you’re Gerald. You manage it.”

I stopped. I was thinking about her funeral, Moira’s, which Hannah managed - because Mom couldn’t at that point. Where was I? On my way from somewhere to somewhere else, knowing nothing until I got home. 

It’s at this point in the novel that Gerald’s mother comes in and suggests he go away somewhere: there’s nothing he can do at Shortlands but work himself into a lather about seeing it through - the death - as if that were doing something, seeing it through.

     “There’s the thing, isn’t it?” I said to Dr. Feight. There are those people that know that there’s nothing to be done about some things and those that must do something about the nothing that can be done.

     “And then there are those like Rupert Birkin,” I said. “Do you know the novel?”

     “Yes,” Dr. Feight said.

     “There are those like Rupert Birkin that will talk even death to death. They will figure out what it must mean, and when they don't, they think they will yet if they put enough words to it.”

“Well,” said Dr. Feight, “those are the last words for today, I guess. Time’s up.”

     I got up, thinking, “That’s all too convenient isn’t it.” And as he always does, he walked me to the door.

02.09.18