Like you and I who manage to be known and unknown

You, Reader - Billy Collins

I wonder how you are going to feel

when you find out

that I wrote this instead of you.

that it was I who got up early

to sit in the kitchen

and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,

the ivy wallpaper,

and the goldfish circling in its bowl

Go ahead and turn aside,

bite your lip and tear out the page,

but, listen -- it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened

to notice the unlit candles

and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning--

a song on the radio,

a car whistling along the road outside--

and I was only thinking

about the shakers of salt and pepper

that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends

after all these years

or if they were still strangers to one another

like you and I

who manage to be known and unknown

to each other at the same time --

me at this table with a bowl of pears,

you leaning in a doorway somewhere

near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.

Treacherous streets of memory

along the brittle treacherous bright streets
of memory comes my heart, singing like
an idiot,whispering like a drunken man
who(at a certain corner,suddenly)meets
the tall policeman of my mind.
awake

being not asleep, elsewhere our dreams began
which now are folded:but the year completes
his life as a forgotten prisoner....

I like her, she's got great legs

People misread Betty Friedan in opposition to Gloria Steinem. Steinem has always taken a harder line on most feminist issues (she's against pornography, for instance). And yet people preferred Steinem to Friedan always, thinking of her as less acerbic and less radical because she had her hair streaked and had beautiful long legs - basically because it was nice to think that a woman who didn't 'have' to be a feminist would choose to be one. People liked Steinem because she was pretty and disliked Friedan because she was so damn froglike, which is just fine by me: given the choice between someone aesthetically pleasing and someone else whose appearance is somewhere short of offensive, I will always take the former.

But we should not get their positions - which were essentially similar - confused on important matters. In the seventies, the president of one university actually said, when asked his position on feminism, 'I don't subscribe to the radical anti-male views of Betty Friedan, but I think I can be comfortable with Gloria Steinem's ideas.' If he'd just said, 'I like Gloria Steinem, she's got great legs,' he would have proved that at least he can see, even though he obviously cannot hear.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch - in praise of Difficult Women

Hideous pep talks about rising through Sainsbury's

How People become writers, even though they Shouldn't

Here's Elizabeth Young again.

-On childhood:
Many people endure the uniformly horrible experience of being a child by reading maniacally. At least they used to. The classic neo-Victorian Unhappy Childhood that I knew (Calvinism, farming-out of infants, remote parents behaving like crazy free-wheeling gods, no showing of emotion, public school, abuse, the whole predictable sob story) seems to be on the wane. Children have (I think but am not sure) a somewhat happier time now. I do hope so. At the very least they have Wave Machines and Bouncy Castles and those wonderful glass rooms full of squashy, coloured balls. So perhaps that is why there are fewer bibliophiles.

-On becoming a writer:
So you move to London if you can - and then you either sign on and write (if they give you a moment between questionnaires, motivational interviews and hideous pep talks about rising through Sainsbury's) or you try for a vaguely arty job. It is ironic really - all these fey, arty people, quivering with tension at the thought of trying to solicit work when you actually need the nervous system of a clam to survive the vagaries of life as a writer. I am trying to suggest a strategy for aspirant authors in response to those who have sent me enquiring letters (usually accompanied by an immense manuscript about sadomasochism in space or growing up gay in Basildon.)

-On education:
My own secondary education was hideously expensive and largely useless. I learned to walk with a book on my head and to open a garden party, although no-one has ever asked me to do either. Odd, that.
It would almost have been more useful the other way round.

from Pandora's Handbag - adventures in the book world

And for lots of other stupid reasons

Daddy wanted a son. For his pride, his name, the honour of the family and, I suppose, for lots of other stupid reasons.

Kiffe Kiffe Demain by Faiza Guene (who was 20, dammit, when her book about a 15 year old Muslim-Moroccan-French girl living on a Parisian housing estate was published to massive acclaim in France.)

Top 40 of terrible things to do

In my Top 40 of terrible things to do in my life is flying with a hangover. The central nervous system is in direct conflict with the speed and noise of the airplane. It's like having a surgeon operating on you while you're still conscious with a scalpel in one of his hands and a textbook in the other, and meanwhile he is repeating over and over again, 'I should have studied harder,' and just then his mother barges into the operating room wearing her gardening clothes and comes over to me and looks at the hole in my stomach and yells at the doctor,'Why did I waste my money sending you to medical school!' and then gesturing in my direction, 'Look at that hole! What are you going to do now? I want to see how you get out of this one!'

An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan

A terrible amber

We were discussing, via email as usual, the time we spent together. How it comes back to haunt us (well, me at least) at unexpected moments, in unexpected ways. Shards of memory - a prosaic conversation on the 345 bus; sudden snapshots - the look on his face by the flowerseller at the station, him frowning into a book whilst sprawled across the bed. Brief moments that rudely elbow their way into my mind at inconvenient times: at work, whilst having breakfast, when smiling at someone else. Moments that, in his words, 'ask to be held up to the light of the present though caught in the amber of another time.'

Here's Jack Gilbert again.
Rain

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.

I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.

Views from my window in my university room last year. I'd sit on my desk and stare at the changing light. Best part of my day.
These pictures are taken from only slightly different angles. You can see the tower and the steeple to the right of it, in the distance, in all the photos.

And the words get it all wrong

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say,
Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong.
We say bread and it means according to which nation.
French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure.
A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Jack Gilbert

Crunchy heart

I got a bittersweet letter today, containing a poem. A friend of mine invented a phrase for bittersweet: crunchy heart. I love it, it's almost onomatopoeic. A Japanese man, with almost perfect English, expressed his regret at leaving Oxford and going back to Tokyo: 'it was such a perfect trip, the leaving is somehow sweet and sour.'

The poem is a short one -

Divorce

Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.
Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
out at bright moonlight on concrete.

Jack Gilbert.

Those two words are so perfect: Stopped, remembering. You can feel time standing still. Sweet and sour.

Undesirability of desire

Waiting for the 242

There must be a better activity at a bus stop
To which the mind can aspire
Than brooding upon the unnatural nature of nature
And the undesirability of desire.

Kit Wright

Woman's whole existence?

I want to read A.S. Byatt's Possession (I'm in that kind of mood) but my local bookshop didn't have it, so I'm reading her lesser known Still Life instead. From the blurb:

Frederica Potter, 'doomed to be intelligent', plunges into Cambridge University life greedy for knowledge, sex and love. In Yorkshire her sister Stephanie has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. A.S. Byatt illuminates the inevitable conflicts between ambition and domesticity, confinement and self-fulfilment, while providing a subtle yet incisive observation of the intellectual and cultural life in England during the 1950s.

Half a century later, is there still an inevitable tension between ambition and domesticity? I don't know, I've already opted out: at 23 I am neither ambitious or domesticated. I suppose you can have both -Nigella Lawson could be said to be ambitious within her domesticity? God give me strength. I like that phrase 'the cosy frustration of the family'. It neatly captures that feeling of stifling oppression within something which is meant to be Good and Godly.

I love how Byatt describes the normal yet horrendously disfunctional family. Stephanie has married a vicar, Daniel. Her father doesn't visit her, 'because he dissaproved of Daniel, the Church of England, Christianity and Stephanie's burial of her talent amongst these things. He disapproved with a liberal atheism that produced emotions more akin to seventeenth-century fanaticism than to agnostic tolerance.'

I love love love that last sentence about seventeenth-century fanaticism. It reminds me of Richard Dawkins' evangelical zeal in The God Delusion etc.

One of the most deeply annoying quotes I have ever come across is mentioned in her book. Byron's 'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart: 'tis woman's whole existence.' Even Simone de Beauvoir says something similar in The Second Sex: 'What he requires in his heart of hearts is that this struggle remains a game for him. While for woman it involves her very destiny. Man's true victory...lies just in this: that woman freely recognizes him as her destiny.'

Why why why why why?

I'm so incredibly annoyed by this that I'm going to have to stop writing and go away and think about something else.

from Pictures of the Gone World

Number 8

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light

'We think differently at night'
she told me once
lying back languidly

And she would quote Cocteau
'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'

Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise

and stretch
her sweet anatomy

let fall a stocking

"I was supposed to be having the time of my life"

I have mixed feeling about The Bell Jar. But parts are incredibly funny.












Esther has just been moved to a new psychiatric hospital.

After Doctor Nolan had gone I found a box of matches on the window-sill. It wasn't an ordinary-size box, but an extremely tiny box. I opened it and exposed a row of little white sticks with pink tips. I couldn't think why Doctor Nolan would have left me such a stupid thing. Carefully I stored the toy matches in the hem of my new wool bathrobe. If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.



And I remember being extremely tickled by this bit, when I read it for the first time aged about 15. I think I was going through a difficult phase where getting out of bed, showered and dressed in the morning would feel completely beyond me.


'Lie down,' the nurse said. 'I'm going to give you another injection.' I rolled over on my stomach and hitched up my skirt. Then I pulled down the trousers of my silk pyjamas. 'My word, what all have you got under there?' 'Pyjamas. So I won't have to bother getting in and out of them all the time.'

Unhelpfully contradictory quotes about Truth

Last summer, after just about scraping through a Russian Literature paper, I sent my brilliant but also unusually patient tutor a thank you card. In a bid to say something a bit more meaningful than just: 'thanks for getting me through the Dostoevsky exam, nice one', I wrote, truthfully, thatwhen I chose my degree discipline, theology, I had naively thought that it would provide answers. Half-way through my degree I realised, to my disgust, that it was just throwing up more questions. By the end of my four year course I felt that I had begun to get a vague inkling of how to formulate what the most important questions were. I thanked him for contributing to this process.

I really liked his reply:
Hopefully, Dostoevsky will be a companion to whom you will return at many points in life and, like many good writers, a true friend. As for God - perhaps in my Kierkegaard lecture I mentioned Lessing's saying that, if God held all truth in his right hand and the endless pursuit of it in his left, then he (lessing) would always choose the left. perhaps that's how it has to be. Good luck, anyway, and keep looking.

But I've never really understood that Lessing quote. I would pick the right hand. Why would one want to be willfully ignorant? The full quote:

If God held all truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand the persistent striving for the truth... and should say 'Choose!' I should humbly bow before his left hand and say, 'Father give me striving. For pure truth is for thee alone.'

Maybe life would be easier if one believed that last sentence, pure truth is for God alone. Emerson writes:
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

But that can seem like a cop-out. A bit too Sunday school facile: 'God works in mysterious ways, dear. Now have you drawn the special intersection of the three circles in gold, using the special pen?'

And Lessing also says:
It is not the truth that a man possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man.

Isn't that earnest effort a bit pointless if one believes that what one is striving for - truth - is ultimately unobtainable?

One of my favourite teen books - The Giver by Lois Lowry - expands on Lessing's idea that God alone has the burden/glory of full truth. In Lowry's questionably utopian futuristic world, only one individual in each generation is given the burden of memories, the pain of knowledge. I'm not doing the book full justice; it is incredible.

Daylight with her hatful of trivial repititions

The title of this Plath poem caught my eye. I've been re-reading it all evening.

Insomniac

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Mere personal charms...

The Times describes Elizabeth Young as 'the high priestess of Post-Modern lit crit.' Now I know nothing about lit crit (I am a theology and philosophy graduate - although on reflection I know next to nothing about these subjects as well) but I love her collection of essays in her book, 'Pandora's Handbag', a collection of literary criticism and journalism. She's subversive and brilliantly witty.

But one of her pieces is achingly sad. 'The agony of losing your looks.' She originally wrote if for The Independent, but then a woman's glossy picked it up, and insisting on running it against a Before and After photo. A medley of extracts:

For about fifteen years I rarely paid a train or bus fare. People just let me off. I never went food shopping. Men gave me expensive drugs all the time. I wasn't trying to ponce off people or to prostitute myself. They just offered... Jean Cocteau said, 'The privileges of beauty are enormous', but it is hard to make the damning admission that one is, or was beautiful, or to speculate on what the inevitable loss of such looks entails.

It would have been stupid to pretend I didn't know that many people were attracted to me. But conscious awareness of my looks made me feel superstitious and desperate. The hysterical emphasis on youth and beauty everywhere was a forcible reminder of their temporary nature. Everything I depended on was slipping away, day by day...

But things are much easier for the pretty girl. When you are indulged like that you acquire a sort of learned helplessness. It makes you very lazy with your life. You drift along like sea kelp.

Every little sign that you are getting older is a dagger to the heart. You really feel it. The first time a man's eyes don't follow you. The first time you like a guy who is completely indifferent - no offers of a lift, a drink, not even a telephone number. The increasing callousness regarding your welfare. The growing anonymity - standing alone at a party.

Two centuries earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote warningly about this:

• Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they cherish, by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing.
• The respect consequently which is paid to wealth and mere personal charms is a true north-east blast that blights the tender blossoms of affection and virtue.
• Love's silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when anything beside a return in kind is sought.

But it's not just women who have this problem. This quote resonates with me particularly: When a man falls in love with a woman half his age, it's not her youth he seeks, but his own.