SALON

Thursday, Dec 16, 1999 5:00 PM UTC

Original Bliss

Original Bliss

By

Topics: Salon Book Awards, Books,

Original Bliss

Somewhere within her ten thousand million cells of thinking, she remembered when loneliness had been only an easily remedied misunderstanding of nature, because there had always been Something Else there, just out of reach. He had, at times, been more or less revealed, but had been always, absolutely, perpetually there: God. Her God. Infinitely accessible and a comfort in her flesh, He’d been her best kind of love. He’d willingly been a companion, a parent, a friend and He’d given her something she discovered other people rarely had: an utterly confident soul. Because Mrs. Brindle had never known an unanswered prayer. For decades, she had knelt and closed her eyes and then felt her head turn in to lean against the hot Heart of it all. The Heart had given round her, given her everything, lifted her, rocked her, drawn off unease and left her beautiful. Mrs. Brindle had been beautiful with faultless regularity.

Now she was no more than a bundle of preoccupations. She avoided the onset of despair with motiveless shopping and cleaning, improving her grasp of good cuisine and abandoning any trust in Self-Help books.

She had been told that her life in its current form represented normality. Existence in the real world was both repetitive and meaningless; these facts were absolute, no one could change them. Ecstasy was neither usual nor useful because of its tendency to distract, or even to produce dependency. Her original bliss had meant she was unbalanced, but now she had the chance to be steady and properly well.

Mrs. Brindle tried to seem contented in her suddenly normal life and to be adaptable for her new world, no matter how hard and cold this made every part of every thing she touched. She allowed herself to betray what she had lost by ceasing to long for it. But when her betrayal became too unbearable and she began to believe she was fatally alone, she tried to pray again.

At first her efforts felt like respectably articulated thought. No more than that. She found she had lost the power of reaching out. Now and again she could force up what felt like a shout, but then know it had fallen back against her face. Finally the phrases she attempted dwindled until they were only a background mumbling mashed in with the timeless times she had asked for help.

So Mrs. Brindle withdrew for consolation into the patterns of her day. She sought out small fulfilments actively. There were check-out assistants to be smiled for, chance encounters with cultivated or random flowers and overheard melodies to appreciate and, every week, she would do her utmost to find at least one new and stimulating, low-cost recipe. It was all bloody and bloody and then more bloody again, but faultlessly polite and inoffensive and there were no other bloody options she could take, but in her case, the path of least resistance was the one that she most wanted to resist.

More A.L. Kennedy.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
298 points299 points | 64 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
260 points261 points | 10 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
201 points202 points | 1 comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
55 points56 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
46 points47 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations