Human Remains

around to a particular way of thinking using NLP – you have to at least try to believe what you’re saying or else the message will be diluted and might not get through. I knew I had a long way to go and that I needed to refine my technique, but that ‘yes’ from Eleanor gave me the confidence to work at it. If I could get a woman to agree to meet me, the possibilities that opened up were beautiful and endless, a warm sea lapping against a tropical island.
    The classes were due to begin and the refectory was starting to empty, chairs scraping noisily on the tiled floor. We both stood up. What was I supposed to say now? How could I reinforce it?
    ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘See you later, then.’
    ‘Sure. See you later.’
    Dammit. ‘Thanks’? How lame! Still, she went off to her class and I went off to mine, and all through it I could hardly keep still, writing notes in my book about what I would say to her, topics to keep the conversation flowing, and notes in the margin… ‘own it’… ‘be the message’.
     
     
    The situation with Eleanor was I believe what they call a good start. It’s hard to pinpoint where exactly things went wrong, and I’ve considered all the possibilities many, many times in the months that followed. I did not rush things with her; I thought about everything I said to her and the implications. If I met her again tonight, I doubt I would do anything differently. I have refined things since then, of course, made adjustments to my technique because of what happened, and I’m certainly much more skilled in adapting my responses as required. Of course, it’s worth considering that I did not achieve my desired results with Eleanor because, at that time, I did not fully realise what they were. I had this clumsy, eager desire for an attractive woman to find me cartoonishly irresistible when in fact my calling was an altogether higher one.
    Perhaps Eleanor was given to me for just such a purpose. She engaged with me without being interested. She and I connected but we did not kiss or touch or become intimate in any sexual way. Instead she threaded her soul through mine and met with me in a far more intimate place than we could ever have achieved through physical contact.
    I suppose what happened was that she was already too far down the path.
    I read a lot of Eliot and Rilke after my father’s death, attempting to achieve an understanding about this process that we all endure eventually and to which he had been called earlier than might otherwise have been expected. Eliot’s perception of birth and death as being essentially one and the same resonated, and I twisted my way through the
Four Quartets
night after night, looking for my father’s soul and occasionally feeling I was catching a glimpse of him, his shroud a wisp of smoke behind a door, his scent in the air like a warm current in the sea.
    My favourite poem of Rilke’s was the one where Orpheus heads off to the underworld to reclaim his lost love Eurydice. He is charged with looking only forward, trusting that his wife and her companion are following behind; when he cannot stand it any more and chances a look at her she has already turned back – what was it he said? ‘Her sex was closed, like a young flower in the evening.’ Orpheus’ So-Beloved was inaccessible, her virginity retrieved through death. She was rooted in death. She was heavy with her great death (birth and death again, inextricable, as with Eliot) – as though she was pregnant with it, pregnant with sweetness and the dark.
    And so it was with Eleanor. She was too far gone, rooted in death even as she was still alive, still walking and talking and carrying on with it, day after day, heading towards the end without any desire to turn back.
    I recall standing with her in the car park behind the pub. She seemed uncertain, dazed, as though the night spent in conversation with me had dulled her senses and made her oblivious to the world around her. ‘I can take you home,’ I said to her, my hand gently resting on her arm. It was quite dark, the only light from the windows of the pub. They had a security light that kept coming on and off every few minutes. I thought about what I was doing all the time, listening to her, trying to tune in to her thoughts and hoping that what I was saying was having an effect. She listened to me and heard my instructions but for some reason she was not responding in the way I’d hoped. There was a barrier between us.
    I did