'life events'

How long should condolence cards be left displayed for? On the 6^th of January the pavements are littered with Christmas trees. So for Christmas, ten days is considered to be a suitable recovery period. Obviously, a death is (usually) more traumatic than the festive season. Although in my AS level Psychology course I distinctly remember both being termed ‘life events’, a clinical and bloodless term for heartache, catastrophe and acute stress. A life event such as Christmas was given a score of 12, whilst ‘death of relative’ was given 63. Moving house was surprisingly high, I seem to remember, about 40. Anyway, the point was that if you have more than 150 points in a given year, you are more likely to suffer a breakdown, or depression, or similar. I was enthralled by this way of quantifying the ghastliness of one’s life. (By the way, ‘Change in Church Activities’ was given 19)

I’m well aware that the opening question is about as stupid (and bloodless sounding) as trying to assign a score to the ‘event’ that is ‘death of relative’, but I’m still intrigued. I noticed a few days ago that my mother had quietly removed the twenty odd cards we had displayed on the shelves in the living room. I noticed their disappearance immediately, because I would look at them every morning, arranging them in my head from the most vile (three pink butterflies, and a purple bow) to my favourite (a Rossetti detail of hands entwined), with special note made of the comedy ones (anything using a euphemism for ‘death’, anything religious, anything so eye-bleedingly hideous as to make one glad that the dead in question is indeed dead, so as not to be subject to this horror). But anyway, now they’ve gone.

When I would see the discarded Christmas trees in the gutter on my way to school – or this year, for the first time, on my way to work – it was always a grim reminder that the holiday, with all its manufactured nauseating cheer, was firmly over. It was the beginning of January, fucking freezing, whipped by wind, grey and flat skies, work to do, the Christmas tree star packed away in the attic, and that is that.

And so the cards have been packed away, I’m never going to ask her where, I don’t look at them anymore over breakfast, and that is not that.

(On a brighter note, I am well within healthy levels of ‘life events’ so far this year. Recent calculation show that I’ve got at least another 40 points before I hit 150, where the depression and breakdown kicks in… Although a Change in Personal Habits (20) combined with Outstanding Personal Achievement (28) could quickly change all that. I’ll work hard at keeping them both at bay.)

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass

Age gaps

No one has ever stared more
tenderly or more fixedly after you…
I kiss you—–across hundreds of
separating years.

Marina Tsvetaeva

I have absolutely nothing (good) to say about today.

Should be nice, but isn't

I got two things in particular by email today which I very much enjoyed. Three sentences from one of my best friends living in Paris, and a photo from a friend who works on the floor above me, a world away in the art department - I see him less than my Parisian friend.

My parents are here this weekend which is the usual 'could-be-nice-but-isnt' nightmare (...) Right, i have been summoned by my aunty to go to her house, which is a real pain beacuse i have to go on the RER train which smells of wee. oh well.

first to the obituaries, second to the stock market

Here you are

It's such a relief to see the woman you love walk out of the door some nights
for it's ten o'clock and you need your eight hours of sleep
and one glass of wine has been more than enough
and, as for lust - well you can live without it most days
and you are glad, too, that the Ukrainian masseuse you see every Wednesday
is not in love with you, and has no plans to be, for it is the pain
in your back you need relief from most, not that ambiguous itch,
and the wild successes of your peers no longer bother you
nor do your unresolved religious cravings or the general injustice
of the world, no, there is very little, in fact, that bothers you these days
when you turn first to the obituaries, second to the stock market,
then, after a long pause, to the book review, you are becoming
a good citizen, you do your morning exercises, count
your accumulated small blessings, thank the Lord
that there's a trolley just outside your door your girlfriend
can take back home to her own bed and here you are
it is morning you are alone every little heartbeat
is yours to cherish the future is on fire with nothing
but its own kindling and whatever is burning in its flames
it isn't you and now you will take a shower and this is it.

Michael Blumenthal

Tied to a swivel chair

A quick email I got at work from my aforementioned friend who can't bear Milan. I don't know why, but I kept on re-reading it all day long.

Thalia do I get a reply today? I need some stimulation. It's sunny and I feel dreamy and hopeless again. The weather is so...destabilising. Obliterating, almost. Talk about unbearble lightness. You look through glass and feel like your soul could just seep out of you. And then the unbearability, which, in this case, is your body being tied to a swivel chair.

As if by Centrifugal Force

Was enjoyably wasting time earlier with my brothers, re-enacting bits of Withnail & Ir. We're a bit obsessed with that film. And of course it is a hysterical comedy, but I love/hate the ending so much - when two out-of-work actors living in squalor suddenly become just one out-of-work actor living in squalor.

I first read this when I was 15, and the passage got under my skin then, as it does now:

You see, it was no longer just me. Harvard was full of nut cases, and we'd all managed to find each other, as if by centrifugal force. People at school were sufficiently eccentric to offer a new playground for my neuroses, to create novel opportunities for acting out. But in the end, after the curtain dropped over these little dramas, they all seemed able to go back to their rooms and back to their lives, they all seemed to know that it was just a game. Only I seemed to be left behind, wanting more, wanting my money back, wanting some satisfaction, wanting to feel something. I was the only person going to a prostitute in seach of true love. But somehow, no matter how often I was disappointed, I was always game for the next round, like a drug addict hoping that a new fix will give him a rush as good as the first one.

Prozac Nation

And so Withnail is left reciting Hamlet to himself in the park. In the unpublished novel's ending - on which the screenplay is based - Withnail says goodbye to 'I', goes home, drinks, and shoots himself. This ending was ditched as it was thought to be 'too dark'.

"I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgon eall custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither."

A Mood Apart

Just back from a brief holiday. Hard to pin things down and capture them in words, and hard to find the motivation to do so this time.

Robert Frost seems appropriate here -

Once down on my knees to growing plants
I prodded the earth with a lazy tool
In time with a medley of sotto chants:
But becoming aware of some boys from school
Who had stopped outside the fence to spy,
I stopped my song and almost heart.
For any eye is an evil eye
That looks in on to a mood apart.

Also, I have lost my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and I have a BURNING desire to re-read the introduction right now. It's odd, a friend was recently saying how he finds that opening chapter horrific, too painful/true to read. I'm slightly obsessed with it. It's the part where he talks about why lightness is unbearable. Not being grounded, not having anchors of responsibility mooring you. It's nearly three, I can't sleep, and I really need to read it again right now. Damn.

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.