Chapter 3. My Mum's Eldest Daughter
Happy New Year.
I hope you had great hols. I had a great rest. Back to our book. Yesterday, I loved writing it more than I thought I would. I’d got used to Baileys, 8 hours of Netflix, and a daytime fire.
1. What I Want
My New Year’s Resolutions. This time next Year:
· I will be the author of '12-Words. 8-Stations. The Geometry of Art.'
· I will be the owner of a '12-Words. 8-Stations. 96 Artists' A £50 a month, tribe, who practise 12-words, and 8-stations for 12 months. Our exorcism will be in a real forest.
· I will be the creator and host of 'The Dress' highbrow meets lowbrow reality TV based on my 2024 immersive theatrical installation ITROTBH at Factory International, and my 2025 immersive psychology installation MMIW at HOME MCR Art Gallery. Both are created by and use 12-words and 8-stations.
· I will be the partner of a creative producer who secures & sails these commissions, enabling me to conjure my visions. My dreams may seem unrealistic. I know they are coming. I am creating my life all the time. 🩷 I've been doing this for years:
· I tell people my first play will be on at the Royal Court. It is.
· I tell myself I am going to excavate the Reno nightclub. I do.
· I get 3 Reno ladies who have never written before to write TWELVE WORDS, using 12-words. Published by Bluemoose Books. Read it.
· I ask a psychology professor to grow a forest of 8-station mind-maps. We do.
2. Strategy
Each chapter of this book will follow the same formula.
- What I Want
- Strategy
- Personal
- Craft
- Eureka
- Muscle Memory
- My Discovery
- Your Discovery
3. Personal
Title. My Mum's Eldest Daughter
Object: A Wall-to-Wall Cast Iron Grate.
12 associations:
- Bedroom
- Fireplace
- Slate grate
- 12 seated table
- Black Edwardian Silver-Cross pram
- In the box — the good box
- Inside the wardrobe
- His wardrobe — his suits
- Her scrap of clothes
- Even the way she was buried
- The Last Supper
- A tantrum
I have 15 minutes. I must use my object. And all 12 association. Under the title.
My Mum's Eldest Daughter
How do you stop someone who has tantrums? How do you get them to settle? How do you not sacrifice your life to theirs? Why do you imagine you have to?
'You had one grey blanket,' She loves to shout at him to bring him down. To humiliate him. To make him small. He always remains big by not answering. He may have stopped answering when he drowns our Dachshund. In the drain in the backyard of Maine Rd. Around the time Angie shows up. My mum's eldest daughter. I have to be 4 years old. Angie is 12 years older than me. 12 when my mum leaves her after Angie sees her and him leaving the pictures They are in love.
I know they are in love. I am there. I am there when they leave the pictures. I am in her tummy. 1959. She already knows she is giving up a 12-seater in a kitchen with fireplace in a wall-to-wall black cast iron grate. That has a slate, grate bread oven. And her husband and his brothers in their handmaid suits. Maybe that's why my dad has handmade suits, and she only has scraps of clothes. Crimplene. Polyester. Drip dry. Suits live in his wardrobe. Magnificent — the dapple-grey blue one is the best. A Zoot suit.
I wonder what they have just watched — the day they come out of the pictures. She won't be in her scraps yet. Her father-in-law brings her back what she wants from his department store. 'All you had to do was put a docket on the kitchen table and Mr Stanners would bring it home.'
Was her husband an alcoholic then? Or did she not notice because it is not the same when he can still afford the drink. Her husband and his 2 brothers against a door in O'Connell Street, Limerick. Maybe, that's why she left the 12-seater table? And Angie sitting bald round-headed in her Edwardian Black Silver-Cross pram. Are photos in the box, her good box, inside her wardrobe with the necklaces, costume jewellery, and the white, real leather shoes she must have owned when she came here.
They ship her 4 kids back. To the spinster aunt. Madeline. 'That bitch!'
He has suits. I have a blue trike. My brother has a red trike. With boxes on the back. My mum has costume jewellery he bought her. The day 16-year-old Angie knocks on our door. Maybe her scraps are the remnants of the sackcloth Angie hands her. And she refuses to wear.
She's buried in them. Something we take out of her wardrobe. He's buried in a new handmade black cashmere suit beneath a hand-painted Last Supper. To keep his tantrum at bay.
4. Craft
I am definitely showing off because I can't believe I did this. But I also know my limitations, so I study a book that 0'Level students probably study. Zelik's the Evolving Universe.
It isn't enough that I have the 12 elements. The fucking elements come from somewhere. And like travelling to the 5th floor to look up the addresses in the lanes of little drawers, I travel back in time to see how creation begins.
Because if I know how it all begins, I will have the faith to allow mine to begin too. Creation cannot have known over 13 billion years what it was creating. But what it can know and can enable is a chain reaction. Free will. And then there is light. The 380,000-year-old universe begets hydrogen. That begets the first stars. That beget the first galaxies. That begets a chimp with opposable thumbs and vocal chords who maps the 380,000-year-old hydrogen.
2003. I must read 10 pages of Zelik’s Evolving Universe every day. I mind-map physics principles to ingest and translate them into writing principles. You've got it. It takes 3 months. 90 days.
5. Eureka
Gravitational lensing.
AI: 'Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon predicted by Einstein's relativity where massive objects (like galaxies or galaxy clusters) bend spacetime, causing light from distant sources behind them to bend, magnify, distort, or create multiple images, acting like a cosmic lens to reveal faint, faraway objects and study dark matter and dark energy. This 'natural magnifying glass' allows telescopes to see deeper into the universe and understand its expansion and structure.'
You-tube children’s animation explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMAv880v6s
My explanation. Excerpt from 'First I Had to Find Her. Today, as I am generating my 8-stations mind-map to help me write this newsletter/chapter, I discover I do not go down into the underworld to rescue my subconscious, but to rescue traumatised 16-year-old me. First, I have to find her. That quest has taken 25 years, through 8 major art projects.
This chapter implies I am trapped behind the massive astral body of my dad. 12-words and 8-stations are the telescopes I am employing to see me.
6. Muscle Memory
I want you write down the first object – you have to be able to touch it — the first object you see when I say, 'My Mum's Eldest Child.'
Example: I see the wall-to-wall cast iron grate in the kitchen of the house Angie grew up in. It is real. I saw a photograph. Her aunt Madeline is sitting at the end of the 12-seater table. What do you see?
List the numbers 1 — 12.
List 12 things you associate with the object you see.
Your title is: My Mum's Eldest Child. You have 15 minutes to write. You must use your title, your object, and your 12 associations. Strike them off the list when they are used. Type it up. Date it. Log it in your file.
A word of warning, don't edit it, don't fancy it up. What you have written is the truth — anything you add is a lie. To impress your audience. It will stick out like a sore thumb.`
7. My Discoveries
I am hidden behind the massive astral body of my dad. 12-words and 8-stations are the telescopes I am employing to see me.
This implies I am trapped here forever.
The 8-station mind-map this triggers, shows me I am not just the other woman to Pauline and Ivan. To Angie, I am the other child.
8. Your Discovery
· What have you discovered?
· Journal about it.
· Choose one hour each day when you will do this. We want to set up a habit.
· Complete 3 pages — except Saturday — at the time you have chosen.
· Julia Cameron's Morning pages. In the author's words.