Liquid Genesis by Miranda Abbott
CONTENT WARNING: This memoir piece contains direct mentions of pregnancy loss and deals with themes of death and grieving.
Liquid Genesis
The story of Genesis begins like this:
[1] God created the heaven and the earth.
[2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
My Genesis began like this:
[1] It was a summer, long overdue. When it finally arrived, light carried lines across my face as I read on the tram. Sand followed me everywhere I went.
[2] Hands sticky with tobacco and coarse with salt; the taste has stayed under my tongue.
[3] No 16-year-old knows any better.
o
My Genesis took place on October 7th in 2020.
In and out of lockdowns, I knew first of people coming out of hiding by hearing them. Terrace windows open on balconies, dinners and jazz. Privacies now exhibited to the street.
I moved into a unit in a housing refuge near the beach, and watched my skin grow wrinkled and wise from the hours spent in water.
o
Here are the metaphors:
- The unit a bird nest: borrowed blue things and cracked walls (light will reach you through these gaps).
- Everything is a womb: the building, your body, the sea…
- The man who lived on the other side of the wall (the obviousness of this only shows itself to me now).
o
After Genesis I moved into a damp Richmond share house, with high ceilings and cupboards soaked with garam masala. I started studying counselling.
In one counselling class we were shown Japanese researcher, Masaru Emoto’s studies of water. Emoto repeated various phrases into dishes of water. After freezing, he photographed the different icicles that formed in each dish.
I stared at each image, repeating the phrases in my head as I moved along the photographs: ‘thank you’, ‘I love you, eternal’.
‘You fool’, and the accompanying icicle photograph is burnt into my memory. The milky cosmic pattern that it formed, the whirlpool that drew me into the centre like a rip.
You fool, you fool, you fool.
o
The narrative dualities are obvious: warmth and cool, away and toward, him and I; both of us needed to create life together, both needed to form the origins of this story, yet I am the only one left telling it.
Not only is it strange because it leaves out your perspective, but I am not sure— even though the story took place inside of me— that I am the best one to tell it. I have always been impatient to know, and I’m still not sure that I have reached the ending.
o
In an article from The Guardian, Gamilaraay-Yuwalaraay woman, Brenda McBide confirmed something I have long felt: that water carries memory.
I remember the blue air, the light landing on my face at night. Your kitchen tap running on the other side of the wall. The drip of leaking water, rhythmic and painful like a song.
But I don’t remember how long it was before meeting and making. I don’t remember what the doctor said to me when I sat in her office a week after the miscarriage. I don’t remember why I still went to work that day.
I remember the blood, such a specific red that I am sure I will always remember it.
The blood on my underwear, in the toilet, on my hands. My eyes in the mirror the next morning.
A deep wine red, something that in other circumstances, I might have consumed in a glass at dinner or together with you.
While you can’t embalm liquid and can’t hold onto something that has already slipped through your fingers, you can carry memory.
Carrying holds permanence. The way we carry our bones as we move into old age, more brittle and less dense, but the same bones nonetheless. Carrying is an act of moving into after with something from before. Carrying is a meeting of past and present, where rigid lines of time become porous.
Only 8 weeks old.
Only 12 hours between discovering my pregnancy and it ending.
These 12 hours is where Genesis begins and ends.
o
A poem from that summer:
I don't want to feel better; I want to know better.
I should have known that God is not in the meal but in the sharing of the meal.
I should have told you that holiness resides in needing each other, in acts of
survival made generous.
I see less massacre in Genesis now, and more generosity.
So much generosity that the grief no longer needs to be written.
Each day in the shower. Red running down my legs and circling the drain, each drop a second longer with the life just missed.
o
I ask my 16-year-old self, tell me again what you were waiting for?
A: The Big Thing. The Beginning. The End. The Event. A different kind of birth – a metamorphosis.
Why me, why now, why this…
Somewhere in the years following Genesis I stopped asking these questions.
In my waiting, did I bring this upon myself? Through my fantasies of homemaking, coming home to the lights on. Through my desire to caretake, while staring at empty hands, did I hope something like this would happen?
Asking these questions instead was the most generous thing I could do for myself. No longer passive in the events I experienced. I realised I contributed, can contribute to what happens to me.
Maybe some 16-year-olds know better. Maybe I did. Maybe I am a fool. Maybe it was my fault.
Maybe this was the beginning of what I had been waiting for. Maybe I had been granted more years of childhood. Maybe now the hunt had stopped. Maybe now my own mother would be less foreign to me. Maybe now I knew where all roads lead.
Maybe fault doesn’t lie completely with one or the other. Maybe narrative dualities don’t apply. Maybe they leak into each other and obscure the divide.
Maybe light is neither solid nor liquid but moves through both. Perhaps in the same way memory moves through time and blinds us while doing so.
o
In Taoism, to be liquid is to be ‘the best of [wo]men’.
Water is the softest and most yielding substance. Yet nothing is better than water, for overcoming the hard and rigid, because nothing can compete with it.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78.
o
I return to Genesis, the thin flat beach, the seagulls, the repetition of the waves: in and out, in and out.
I cup my hands, fill them with saltwater and prepare to carry, this time more gently as I repeat into them, eternal, eternal, eternal.
References:
Allam, L. and Earl, C. (2019) For centuries the rivers sustained aboriginal culture. now they are dry, elders despair, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/22/murray-darling-river-aboriginal-culture-dry-elders-despair-walget
Jarboe, J.K. (2020) Everyone on the Moon is essential personnel stories. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press.
Legge, J. (no date) Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching chapter 78, Tao In You. Available at: https://tao-in-you.com/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-chapter-78/
Manaff, Dr.A. (2024) Unlocking the secrets of water: Dr. Masaru Emoto’s pioneering experiment, LinkedIn. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unlocking-secrets-water-dr-masaru-emotos-pioneering-dr-abdul-manaff-oirsc/
