The Seducer's Diary

His overwhelming passion was for the young beginner.
Don Giovanni

Do people similar to Kierkegaard's seducer, Johannes, actually exist in real life?

Johannes' whole life is organised around enjoyment. (a bit like the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy. ) He is obsessed with seduction, not so much the content - the meaning - but the form of the thing. He manipulates artfully, he is totally self-obsessed. Can people really be like that? Can they really view another person as merely a prop, a walk-on character in the great big Epic that is Their Life, starring Themselves?

fate, chance, fortune (a woman?)

The race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9
So as not to rule out our free will, I believe that it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves. I compare fortune to one of those violent rivers which, when they are enraged, flood the plains, tear down trees and buildings... Yet although such is their nature, it does not follow that when they are flowing quietly one cannot take precautions, constructing dykes... So it is with fortune. She shows her potency where there is no well-regulated power to resist her, no embankments and dykes built to restrain her.

Machiavelli, The Prince

I actually really like what Machiavelli writes here. (He then spoils it by going on to say that fortune is like a woman, who needs to be dominated and subdued.) But I like the way that whilst acknowledging the potency of chance/fate, he doesn't allow us to become complacent and feel impotent about the role of our own responsibility in our lives. If it is all down to chance, we might as well just lie in a darkened room. Which is often tempting.

More from Mary

A couple of definitions, from A Vindication of the Rights of Women (full text of the book available here):

Dependence: to act according to the will of another fallible being
A Protector: a husband to supply the place of reason
Reason: the simply power of improvement, of discerning truth
Patience, docility, good humour: virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect

I like that last one best of all. Patience, docility and good humour aren't attributes commonly associated with me. Humph. The definition about dependence links back to an earlier post, where I quoted an extract from the Pursuit of Happiness. Sara asks 'Why should I entrust my happiness in someone else? (ie: a husband) Aren't they just as fallible as I am?' But the thing is, being dependent is actually quite comfortable. It's the opposite of freedom, which is mostly feared, I think.

And what are you?

The Philosopher

And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?

Yet women's ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell,—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?

Edna St Vincent Millay

Complete archive of her poetry available here.

a helpmeet

My mother made a lovely Christmas eve dinner for the whole family tonight. (damn, really wanted to try and get through this whole season without making use of the C world here) As she dished up, she explained the portions distributions. I was to have one tortilla wrap, my brothers were to have two. There was a spicy tomato sauce to go with it, but she had made a special non-spicy one for me. (I have never expressed a dislike of spicy tomato sauce. If anything, it is my brothers who are a bit wussy about spice. Their noses start to run when anything is quite strong... It's an Oriental thing!) I couldn't, even at a family dinner, let this go without a tease, and so I made a silly comment about only the Y chromosomes being allowed the special sauce.

All this triggered an interesting conversation with my older brother (late twenties) about feminism. He mentioned that my feminist rhetoric was at variance with my love life, with the type of man I seek out. This is undeniably true. I suggested that maybe it was precisely this acknowledged tendency of mine that made me cling to feminist theory, as at least an abstract reprimand of my behaviour, something telling me that this was wrong. My brother added that when he was younger, as a liberal fair-minded male, he was something of a feminist. But he became very bitter when all the women who advocated feminism where themselves attracted to misogynistic men.

Been reading some more of Wollstonecraft. Beauty, our obsession with it, the way it clogs up the minds of virtually all of us, is a particular interest of mine. I liked this quote: Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison. Photographer Clare Parks captures this beautifully in this photo which is seen here as the jacket cover of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.

There is no new thing under the sun

Yesterday I bought a beautiful book called 'A Treasury of Proverbs'. I found it in the children's 'world religion' section. Each double page spread has a precept from Proverbs, Ecclesisastes (my personal favourite book of the Hebrew Bible), Song of Solomon, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus. What makes it special is that each proverb is illustrated by (mostly) Renaissance paintings from the Uffizi, the National Gallery etc.

My absolutely favourite quote from the whole of the Bible is: There is no new thing under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) In the book this quote is laid out on top of a detail from The School of Athens.


Don't know why exactly I love this quote so much. It speaks to me! Like the title of this blog, I find it uplifting rather than depressing. Or perhaps comforting would be a better word. There is something comforting in the idea that the trials we face today have been dealt with - and sometimes overcome triumphantly - by generations before us. That nothing is completely new, unforseen, unprecedented. I have heard this put much more succinctly.

The physical world around us constantly changes, but human nature does not. We must struggle in our brief existence to find some transcendent meaning during reoccurring heartbreak and disappointment and so find solace in the knowledge that our ancestors have all gone through this before. You may find all that all too intrusive, living with the past as present. I find it exhilarating. I believe there is an old answer for every new problem, that wise whispers of the past are with us to assure us that if we just listen and remember, we are not alone; we have been here before.
(Victor Hanson, in his essay 'This I Believe'. For full transcript, go here.)

Tip number 4 of 'To 10 tips for Bloggers' is: Include lots of lists. These are quick and easy to read. In the past 6 months, I've been meeting quite a few older and wiser women at work and socially. They have often given to general advice about life, told me what they would want their daughters to know, what they wish they had known at my age. Here's a quick list:

• I wish I hadn't worried so much about my figure, or chastised myself about eating a cream bun. I was so gorgeous and lovely back then! It's sad that I can only appreciate it now.
• Before marrying someone, think about them not only as a partner to you, as a husband, but as a father. Is this the kind of father you'd want for your kids? Be practical. Together would you be able to build the kind of life you want to lead? Don't just think: oh, the sex is so great, our chemistry is electrifying, the rest will fall in place.
• Sex is only 10% of a relationship. Yes, it is the first 10%.
  
• Growing old is unspeakably ghastly. Value your youth.
• Your heart isn't a cake. Your love isn't divided into slices. Unfortunately, we are able to be in love with more than one person. Falling in love with another doesn't necessarily mean you love your first love less. (controversial. Not sure I am mature enough to come to terms with this yet. That Disney heart speaking again...)

Ooh, I think I like lists. I might go back to my previous blogs and add lists.

Powerful women: Mary W and St Catherine

I had dinner at a friend's house a while ago. Fred and I met in a literature class we took at university. I get on incredibly well with his mother. We were gossiping in the kitchen (ouch - female cliche. Mary Wollstonecraft, forgive me) and she told me this hilarious story of when Fred was 2. He was in the bath with his mum, his dad was shaving. Fred shouts out in alarm, 'Daddy! Mummy doesn't have a willy! We have to go to Harrods to buy her one!'

Have been reading Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, finally. Another university friend who lived on the same corridor as me used to leave books, including this one, in the loo. I never managed to get very far, so am finally settling down to it. One passage, in particular, resonates:

Weakness may excite tenderness ... but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind ... that deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!

This severely reminds me how pathetic it is of me to long for lordly caresses rather than genuine friendship. And do some men really find weakness appealing? Some of her reflections on male and female relationships are really disturbing. She writes that gentleness, which she equates with insipid softness, is a particular characteristic of women, developed with the aim of ensnaring men. Without it, woman would then lose many of her peculiar graces... For Pope has said, in the name of the whole male sex:
Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create,
As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.
I went round the Uffizi and the Accademia recently, and was very taken with St Catherine. In
pictures she is often painted with the Wheel (instrument of torture) somewhere around her robes, and is often arguing with pagan philosophers. According to various legends, Catherine of Alexandria declared to her father that she would only marry someone who surpassed her in beauty, wisdom, reputation and wealth. (I love her already) After refusing the advances of Emperor Maxentius, he threw her in prison. When she began converting all those around her to Christianity, she was condemned to death on the wheel. However, the wheel broke at the crucial moment.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Michelangelo_Caravaggio_060.jpg/456px-Michelangelo_Caravaggio_060.jpg

A little list of favourite children's books:

• Charlie and Lola
• all Eva Ibbotson books, especially her less well-known monster and witches books (Monster Mission, Dial-a-Ghost, The Haunting of Hiram)
• One Ted Falls Out of Bed (Julia Donaldson)
• Jellybean (Tessa Duder)
• Journey into War (Margaret Donaldson)
• Anastasia (Lois Lowry)
• Tom's Midnight Garden (Phillipa Pearce)
• Midnight is a Place (Joan Aitken)
• Gemma and Sisters (Noel Streatfeild)
• The Steps up the Chimney (William Corlett)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (Mildred Taylor)
  

Personal responsibility, personal freedom. No, thanks?

Black, black mood tonight. I should really pay more attention to the maxim: A pessimist is never disappointed. Although I like to shroud myself in a protective layer of acerbic cynicism, I think I have a 'Disney' heart, deep down. Feel horribly disappointed in a couple of people today. But then I was stupid to expect so much. Why entrust your happiness in the hands of someone else?

In one of my favourite books, Douglas Kennedy's The Pursuit of Happiness, Sara and Jack - who are on the cusp of falling in love - are talking about what they believe in. Sara says she believes in responsibility:

It all comes down to the responsibility you have to yourself... When I look around me, and listen to my contemporaries talking, all I hear is stuff about how other people will work out life's problems for you. How getting married by the time you're 23 is a good thing, because suddenly you're relieved of the burden of freedom. Whereas I'm rather scared of entrusting my entire future to another person. Aren't they as fallible as I am? The moment you entrust your happiness to another person, you endanger the very possibility of happiness. Because you remove personal responsibility from the equation. You say to the other person, 'make me feel whole, complete, wanted.' But the fact is: only you can make yourself feel whole or complete.

I like that phrase: relieved of the burden of freedom. I think freedom can feel like a burden. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Why? Aren't those chains man-made? Germaine Greer: The fear of freedom is strong within us. I'm scared of my freedom, certainly.

A little list of favourite teen books:

• But Can the Phoenix Sing? (Christa Laird)
• Kiss the Dust (Elizabeth Laird)
• Stranger with my Face (Lois Duncan)
• The Giver (Lois Lowry)
• I am the Cheese (Robert Cormier)
• Alex (Tessa Duder)
• Feeling Sorry for Celia (Jaclyn Moriarty)
• Tomorrow When the War Began (John Marsden)
• People Might Hear You (Robin Klein)
• The Root Cellar (Janet Lunn)
• Tug of War (Joan Lingard)
• Malika (Valerie Valere)
• Looking for JJ (Anne Cassidy)

Happy Hellidays

Last day in the office tomorrow. Some of the more senior people with children have taken tomorrow off, to deal with kids, last minute presents, car journeys to the in-laws. Christmas with small kids sounds exhausting. It reminds me of a passage in one of my favourite books, I don't know how she does it, by Allison Pearson. In an email exchange, one high-powered city lawyer writes to her best friend, a hedge fund manager, that there must be a better word for holidays - one that does not convey the meaning of a)peace b)rest c)holiday. Helliday?, she suggests.


I LOVE emails. I even love getting work emails. I love the 'ping' noise as it 'flops' into my inbox, and the little envelope sign in the left hand corner at the bottom of my screen. I love sticking my out of office on, when I have to go to the studio, and coming back to a 'bulging' inbox. But the best emails, of course, are the ones from friends. I have several friends at work, who sit FEET away from me, and we ping and ping back and forth all day. An email exchange today that I particuarly enjoyed. I suggested to my friend, who was - like me - so bored he was contemplating sticking his head through his computer screen, that we run away to sea together. OK, he replied, I'll hotwire a car, you make the sandwiches. I grumbled about the gendered ditribution of labour, but then quickly remembered that I don't even know how to drive a car, let alone hotwire one. It'll be so romantic, he said. All the blue rinses, chipped lino-floors of the fish shops, filthy sea and bruised skies. There's something so beautiful about that last bit - bruised skies... Then we got back to our work, obediently.


Was flicking through Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in my bath tonight. Didn't get very far, I unterstand little. But I stagnated on the beginning of one poem, it starts so simply

Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,

Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l'onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l'immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.
...

Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
— Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!

(Elevation)

Translation:


Above the valleys and the lakes: beyond
The woods, seas, clouds and mountain-ranges: far
Above the sun, the aethers silver-swanned
With nebulae, and the remotest star,

My spirit! with agility you move
Like a strong swimmer with the seas to fight,
Through the blue vastness furrowing your groove
With an ineffable and male delight.

...

Whose thoughts, like larks, rise on the freshening breeze
Who fans the morning with his tameless wings,
Skims over life, and understands with ease
The speech of flowers and other voiceless things.

— tr. Roy Campbell

For the full poem and various translations, click here.

A little list of poets I like at the moment:

• Edna St Vincent Millay
• Carol Ann Duffy
• William Meredith
• Billy Collins
• Dorothy Parker
  

Disappointment: my guardian angel

Fell sound asleep for hours after I got back from work, waking up only now, which is why this post looks a day late. Am still determined to try and write every day though. I'm not sure why though, because I don't think I get any visitors.

A friend sent me a quote which I have been re-reading all day. About the joy of disappointment. I actually agree with the following, but it does go against a lot of what we're taught - striving and attaining and attaining and SUCCESS...

'I am not averse to disappointment. It has its own special pleasures. Disappointment is the hidden agenda within fantasy, a nugget for the aficionado who might trick up the bland negativity of the word by sliding alphabetically towards disjunction and disparity. If you could have what you dream about, if I could have Antarctica all white and solitary and boundless, there would finally be no excuse. Imagine, you are exactly where you want to be — and now what? Yes white, yes solitary, yes boundless, but will it, in its icy, empty, immense reality, do? In my head, it does fine, why seek out the final disappointment which the earlier, smaller disappointment only seeks to prevent? The point of desire is desire itself, the essential pleasure in expectation is expectation. The idea that gratification is a completion of the wish is fallacious. It is only our dim literal-mindedness that makes us believe that we should try to achieve what we wish for. Disappointment stands between the two
like a guardian angel. The fissure between what I want and what I can have is my friend, my best friend in all likelihood, and I know it. Disappointment is a safety net, to be relished in a secret knowing way by the disappointed.'

—Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica

I cracked today, and replied to my love who, in actual fact, is no longer Mine in any way. He replied, a lovely email, but I couldn't help noticing that where he usually starts all emails to me with 'My beauty,' this time he simply wrote 'Beauty,'. So much is lost in the omitting of that one tiny word! Mutual possession, mutual belonging, is that what love is? Put that way, it sounds quite oppressive. But the words from Song of Solomon are so beautiful:
'I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine....'


A little list of things I have developed a fondness for:

• sticking cloves in oranges, and mulling wine. (more than the drinking of it)
• amazon used books
• public libraries (a long-standing love)
• the contents of the Uffizi, especially when replicated on the xmas cards my mother receives (and therefore easy to pinch and stick up in my room, in manner of adolescent, which I am no longer.Need to remind self of this fact on regular basis)
  
• long baths (which has led to the destruction of many books, and a couple of manuscripts for work - the less said about this, the better)
• gingham checked pyjama bottoms
• quotes. Especially acerbic and witty ones. (Oscar Wilde is the master at these)
• love poetry with unhappy endings. (Duffy's 'No Cuba' is a favourite. Haven't quite reached 'My last Duchess' levels yet.)
  

Snoozing in the loos

Got an email from a colleague sitting a few feet away, warning me that she was thinking of making an extended trip to the loo, to have a good sleep. Reminds me of a friend in an extraordinarily high-powered job who is so intimidated by his superiors that he hides in the executive bathroom at lunch time to read Sherlock Holmes.

Was flicking through the beginning of good old Bridget Jones' Diary, and I hit on something which made me laugh on and off all afternoon, something I couldn't remember from my previous readings. Bridget is at that awful New Years Day party at Una's, and Mr Darcy turns round to reveal that his jumper, innocuous enough from the back, actually has ghastly diamond pattern - the kind ageing sporting enthusiasts tend to favour. Bridget recalls the wise words from her gay friend Tom: attention to detail when on the lookout for potential dates can save one vast amount of time and money. Immediately rule out people with: white socks and black shoes, home knitted jumpers, the odd swastika... (not exact - I don't have the book to hand...)

I also love the bit when Bridget's mother rings her in August, asking her what she would like for Christmas. 'One of those super-dooper suitcases on wheels that air-hosteses have. Now. Would you like red on navy or navy on red?'

I don't know why exactly, but so much of life's inanity and tedium is encapsulated in that sentence: 'red on navy or navy on red?'

Have decided that I love Bridget. I know that she is not great feminist example - so much fretting about men and weight, sense of self entirely dependent on outside affirmation etc etc - but she is funny and nice and doesn't take herself too seriously. She reminds me of a quote that I love: 'If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be an awful warning.'

My love will be shade where you are

Bad news today. A far away love has finally decided that he is going to stay far away, re-commit to the life and love he has built for himself there. To ease the process, he wants to stop all communication. I've become so used to our daily emails. My morning email to him, wishing him good night, became a ritual comparable to pouring one's love their Earl Grey at breakfast time. I sent him this Carol Ann Duffy poem a few weeks ago:

World

On the other side of the world,
you pass the moon to me,
like a loving cup,
or a quaich.
I roll you the sun.

I go to bed,
as you're getting up
on the other side of the world.
You have scattered the stars
towards me here, like seeds

in the earth.
All through the night,
I have sent you
bunches, bouquets, of cloud
to the other side of the world;

so my love will be shade
where you are,
and yours,
as I turn in my sleep,
the bud of a star.

Sikhism Bingo

I mean the title of this blog to be uplifting rather than depressing. Yes, life's a bitch and then you die, so you might as well not take yourself too seriously and laugh about it all.

Things that cracked me up this week:

-an old university friend is currently doing some work experience at a comprehensive in London. Mel is a Theology graduate, so she is assisting in the RE lessons. With her Year 8 class she played a lesson called 'Sikhism Bingo'. The hoped for learning outcome: an awareness and understanding of the fundamental beliefs and values of Sikhism. Righto.

-My office has a free staff canteen - and when you eat it you understand that they couldn't possibly charge anyone for it. My boss told us she was going to brave the canteen, and her assistant replied that she should bring her handbag with her. (ie: to go out and buy something if it was all too vomitatious). My boss looked a little puzzled, and said, 'Why? To throw up in?