Reading Virgil, the First Eclogue, On a Salary

Abstract

Reading Virgil, the First Eclogue, On a Salary ANNA JACKSON In exile from my jasmine-covered hut with mildewed carpet on the floor, and exiled from the body that I used to live in, with the treasured scab on my left knee, my honey-flavored finger, and the glassy hairs across my arms, I am a ghost of who I was. I asked my father once, when I had only just grown up, whether he missed the child I was, and he said no he didn’t, and I asked if he would choose to be young once again, if that meant never having us, and he said yes he would. And I was even then in exile from my childhood, as I now am exiled from that questing, questioning self I had become, exiled into an adulthood that’s pretty much the adulthood I dreamed of then: I sit and type on my white laptop at a small, white, wooden desk, and fill the screen with my increasing lines. There is an essay by a poet, Joshua Clover, which discusses writing on a salary when he was used to writing piece by piece, and getting paid by word count. Writing on a salary is more like walking through a swish department store, he writes, and all the clouds of perfume in the air dispersed by those nostalgic atomizers settle on you as you pass. There settle on him, everywhere he goes, atoms of salary. They settle if he writes or not, and when he sleeps, and when he peers down on container ships. And equally, as he explains, his sense of discipline is also aerosolized. He feels, he writes, in thrall to “money’s dream”—a dream arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 of constant productivity—and feels it “more insistently than my own waking life.”1 There’s nothing settles on a child. It is no dream of money for a child, just wanting life to be more real. It’s all pretend, when you’re a child, the school you run, the pupils that you teach, the lesson plans, the natural history and the penmanship, all as unreal as flying. That was something I half thought I might achieve. Instead I got told off for climbing trees. I could have got quite good at climbing trees, but if I could have looked ahead, I might have practised dancing. By the time it mattered more to dance than fly, the other children somehow had already learned— it was too late for me. How can a child ever catch up and have a childhood when they always, every minute, get pushed onwards, leaving every last minute behind? What moment is it I am exiled from, when any moment I might look back at was dying from the start— a goat just newly born abandoned on bare flint, the mother goat by desperate goatherds driven on? And now, adulthood. I do not believe that it is education leads the child down narrow paths till all the playfulness is left behind, the art, the songs, the skipping rhymes. I look at lambs who leap up onto upturned troughs while sheep around them step from one patch of the field on to the next, or kittens darting at the twitching tail behind an irritated adult cat. When I was twelve, reading virgil, the first ECLOGUE, on a salary 16 and hardly any friends still wanted to pretend, just when our games were starting to get really good, I made myself a promise not to change. I thought I could walk into adulthood and still be who I was, just later on in time. Then love takes over for a while, and what was going to be real—the work, the making of a life— becomes a curious distraction from the sudden vivid passion for one person then another. There was the night when Lisa dropped me off down by the docks where in a warehouse filled with salvaged lockers lived a boy I had a passion for—she waited in the street below, and if it turned out I was going to stay, I’d take my red dress off, and wave...