Category: books

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More About Mirrors

I sat on the edge of the bed facing the mirror this morning, as I do every morning, inside my thoughts. I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, nothing too grim today, just general. I’d had quite a vivid dream, though now I can’t remember what that was about, either.

Yesterday I read to my therapist what I wrote two days ago. She was impressed by the idea of smashing my head into the mirror and breaking both it and myself.

‘That sounds as though the mirror is the life you wish you’d had’ she said, which seems to make sense because of the frustration of the gap between what is there and here. She went on to talk about a theory from someone whose name meant nothing to me, about the image we have of ourselves and how we negotiate our inability to reach it. That sounds banal – of course we all must feel that way – but I expect there’s more to it than that. I pointed out that there’s a physical mirror on the wardrobe by my bed, so inevitably I see my reflection when I get up, but there again, I often use mirrors as a metaphor for my life and relationship with myself.

‘You keep saying the same things’ she went on ‘but every time you say it in a slightly different way, and today it’s smashing the mirror that’s significant.’

Before I went travelling, I was seeing a hypnotherapist (the third time I’d tried that), who in our sessions told me to imagine myself going into a room where there’s a mirror and the image inside it is the woman I want to be, with all the qualities other people see in me that I can’t find in myself. Then I was supposed to enter into the mirror and merge with that person, because ‘she is you’. She made me an audio file, which I used to play every night in bed, till I started screaming back at it: ‘but that’s not really me, can’t you see that?’

There’s a postcard on my desk, propped up in front of the monitor. It turned up a couple of days ago, tucked inside a book. I’ve been staring at it because I couldn’t remember how it got there, or where it came from. It’s a painting by Paul Nash, titled: ‘Landscape From a Dream’, and on the back I’ve written: ‘My book is the story of my journey, the reasons why I went, the places I went to, the things I saw and did, the feelings I had about them’ and addressed it to myself at the old house, which dates it to 2014 after I came back from Prague, when I was failing to write S2S.

I rummaged in the heap on my desk and found the book – called: ‘Show Your Work!’ – it started to make more sense, because I remembered writing the card in the Tate café.

And then I noticed the mirror.

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#amnotwriting

Awake at four thirty, I thought I would listen to a radio play, because that sometimes sends me back to sleep, or at least passes the time. I picked ‘Marian and George’, about how Mary Anne Evans in her mid-30s met the love of her life, ran away with him to Europe, and started writing novels as George Eliot.

And that kicked me in the teeth in two ways, because her lover, George Henry Lewes, was a writer whose work I came across when I was doing my PhD, at roughly the age she was when she met him, a philosopher whose words clicked something open in my brain and showed me a little of the pattern of the universe, and now after thirty years I can’t even remember what it was that he said that was so inspirational.

I sat on the bed and screamed at myself in the mirror, because wasn’t I going to write something wonderful that would inspire people, or at least entertain them, and whatever happened to that? Whose fault was it? And why? It wasn’t the brain or the intelligence or the thirst for knowledge or even the writing ability that was lacking, it was, and is, the guts, the determination, the ideas, the twin abilities to sit down and start and to sit down and finish. Not only can I not start that work of genius that will make readers gasp in awe, I can’t finish a silly little fantasy novel that I’ve been picking over for thirty years. Not only can I not be George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, I can’t even be Barbara Cartland or JK Rowling.

This is what tears me apart and makes me hate myself with such deep loathing that I want to smash my skull into that mirror and shatter them both. And now I’m 66 and what chance is there that I will ever rise above, get beyond that failure? To write something and know it was good but for it never to be recognised by the world would be bad enough, but not even to write anything that I can look at with pride, or to finish anything at all, that is not just disappointing it’s deeply shameful, a betrayal of myself and the dreams I’ve had for sixty years, from the moment I knew what books were, and realised that they were made by people, that there were people who could bring these wonderful objects into the world, and wouldn’t it be exciting to be one of those people?

But if I could wind back time for sixty years – or thirty – how would things turn out differently? How could they? Because I would still be me – all the chaotic, lazy, self-doubting aspects of my personality would be there in me, just as they are now, waiting to trip me up. A lifetime of trying to correct them has been as much of a failure as my intellectual and literary pursuits. How could it not?

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Remembering Cannes

No romantic poetic thoughts about the French Riviera last night. When I was in Cannes in 2012, I remember it struck me as tacky, over-privileged, overcrowded, superficial, artificial. I spent a lot of time there in McDonald’s, home-from-home of the American teenager, using the free wifi to work out my onward plans and arrangements. Maybe I should have gone to Nice, as a friend recommended, for the flower market and the Matisse (or is it Cezanne?) museum, but for some reason I thought Cannes would be more ‘classy’ – when it was just more expensive.

But I must have done something other than sit in McD’s getting stressed over Google, surely? There was the flea market, I remember that. I walked up a hill to a chapel with a view, a posing pigeon, a sexy photographer, a statue of an oddly grinning Madonna and child, and a museum which was closed for lunch, so I ate chocolate and drank water in the garden instead. How do I remember all this? Because I wrote it down at the time for my blog, then used it (or at least re-read it) when I was editing ‘Single to Sirkeci’. I even have a photo of the statue somewhere, which is why I remember her odd expression. Also one of the posing seagull – it wasn’t a pigeon, see, my memory’s not that good – although my alliteration is admirable. I ate crepes on the promenade, had a fabulous Provenҫal seafood dinner on my last night there (onward travel arrangements and accommodation having been confirmed) and swam in the sea. It was the vernal equinox – or thereabouts.

By the summer solstice, I hadn’t quite made it to Norway, as planned, but was in Berlin, in freezing cold and driving rain, sheltering in the national art museums, poring over an exhibition of Goya’s engravings of horror and war. And eight years ago today, where was I then? From the ‘memories’ of Lübeck and Flensburg that popped up on Facebook a few days ago, I guess I would have reached Copenhagen by now. Yes, I am lucky to have those memories, lucky that I wrote them down, and I should probably finish off that book with the later ones.

What was I thinking about when I woke up? Trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about, whatever that was. Then the usual probably. Or remembering Cannes, which would explain why I wrote about it just now.

Life is a story that we tell ourselves, over and over, and maybe it changes with each retelling, because how would you know? I seem to remember writing, somewhere on my travels, about how life distracts from writing and writing distracts from life, how they feed on one another and interfere with one another in an incestuous, abusive relationship – or maybe that’s not how I put it, maybe that’s what I thought just now.

One thing I know for sure, we can never know the ending of our life-story until it’s too late.

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Old Songs

Can’t find my reading glasses. I had them in bed, because I was reading for a while, I remember that. Now I can’t find them anywhere around the bed, or in the kitchen, or the spare room where I did my exercise. Not even in my dressing gown pocket, because I didn’t wear my dressing gown this morning. I can write okay with my varifocals as long as I don’t have to look at the screen – I just stare down at the keyboard.

I’ve thought once or twice recently about writing – proper writing, not this daily drivel. If nothing else, I suppose, I should finish off ‘The Long Way Back’. The first part – the return journey from Istanbul – is written and edited, and it feels as though I’ve cheated those kind people who have gone to the trouble of reading ‘Single to Sirkeci’ to leave it all dangling. My idea was to pad that out with an account of trying to piece my life together afterwards, hopefully coming to a positive conclusion and some lessons learnt. And so far I’ve edited enough material together to get me to May 2013, when I left for Prague. At one point I even thought I might turn it into three books, with a Prague instalment as well. But so many years have passed now – another three even since I published S2S – and so little changes, I’ve ‘learned’ so few life lessons from those experiences, my heart sinks at the thought. When I tried reading the blog posts from the Prague times, and realised how depressing that all was, it wasn’t something I wanted to revisit.

What about the famous thirty-years-in-progress fantasy novel? Or rather, fifteen years, from 1990 to 2005, because I haven’t touched it since then. It ground to a halt in October 2005, when I started a creative writing course and, coincidentally, started blogging, though I’ve never been able to fathom which (or possibly both) of those circumstances was responsible for the stasis.

But if this daily writing doesn’t help, then what’s it for? A question without an answer.

Old songs. My pre-bedtime wind-down habit of listening to Amazon Music through the telly has led me back into the past so that now I’m returning to songs of thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Vinyl albums in tattered cardboard sleeves stand in no particular order on my IKEA cube units, a shoebox with the marker-penned legend: ‘Cassettes Study’ by my side on the floor. The USB turntable and cassette player – both presents at different times from my ex-husband, the latter, from the final, fateful Christmas – spent many years stashed away in boxes, but earlier this week I ordered a new stylus cartridge for the turntable, and finally connected the cassette player up to my PC. The sound quality is pretty uneven, especially after thirty years of listening to CDs, but the songs and lyrics are the same.

So today I’m uploading Jon and Vangelis: ‘Somehow I’ll find my way home.’

One day.

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Parallels

Staring at the screen trying to think of something ‘nice’ to say. Growing sense of discomfort all week, not just because of the heat – which even I have to admit tipped over into ‘hot’ yesterday – might even be in the red today (thirty plus), if the forecasts are correct.  

Looking back, I often put forward my travelling times in 2012 and 2013 (counting my sojourn in Prague as a continuation) as a happy time of my life, but it wasn’t always idyllic. Partly that was because of the irritations and frustrations of planning and organisation: finding accommodation; co-ordinating with friends and family I was hoping to visit; deciding routes; booking tickets; etc etc. There was also a degree of guilt over the pointlessness, self-indulgence and irresponsibility of what I was doing (although the blog posts I wrote at the time did lead – eventually – to the completion of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, and there’s still potential in there for another book – or two). The third source of stress was the knowledge that the life I was living would have to end at some time and I would be forced to return to the life I’d run away from – or some hazily understood and recognised version of it.

Perhaps you can see where this train of thought is going. There are clearly parallels between the feelings I had then, and the ones I’m having now. Daily life has its irritations and frustrations – though not quite as dramatic as working out where I’m going to be sleeping tomorrow night, and where travelling to after that. I’m certainly feeling guilt over the way I spend my days, the worthlessness of my life and the activities (or inactivity) I engage in, although that seems more forgivable now I’m officially ‘retired’, ie I’m no longer obliged to look for paid work in order to pay the bills (I do feel guilt over that in itself, but I’ve learned to come to terms with it). The third point, of course, is uneasiness about what happens next, moving back into a life of having to engage with the external world more directly after this period of quiet, solitude and reflection, of pleasing myself.

I look inside myself to see if I’m any better prepared than I was when I came back in 2012, or from Prague in early 2014. Every morning I check myself and think: nope, I’m still me, no sign of any miraculous transformation yet. I poke around in the past and I think I’m gaining a better understanding of who I am and the factors that made me, but still can’t find any way of unravelling the threads and exorcising the demons.

I didn’t want to write anything this morning. One of those mornings when it didn’t seem possible to find anything ‘nice’ to say. However, as I approach my quota, I’m not too dissatisfied with what I have written.

Over three months of this ‘lockdown diary’, I must have written about 45,000 words. Maybe there’s something in there worth saving.

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Business is Business

Just had a one-sided conversation in the shower (not that unusual) about the winding up of one project for a long-standing client (her proof copies have just arrived) and another job she asked me to think about to create a website related to her book. I told her I’d give it some thought, which I haven’t really over the three weeks we’ve been waiting for the proofs, but now I have to, I think I’ll suggest setting something up on WordPress.

My hosting is still paid for until September 2021, but every time it comes up for renewal I have this inner debate over whether it’s worth continuing. I don’t host sites for anybody else any more, and my own has been pretty much in limbo for years. I had a go at tarting it up a couple of years ago, when I added an online shop (through which not one single copy of any of my books has been sold), and created this blog. The cost of hosting keeps going up, and although I can still afford it, I do get this sense of good-money-after-bad. I don’t need to make a living any more (not that I was ever much good at that anyway) and although I used to enjoy the challenge, I never thought that what I produced was much good (which to be fair is true of anything I do).

One of the issues that has always bothered me over design work is that by and large my clients were people like me, individuals with small businesses, scrabbling in the marketplace to try and sell their services. I had the suspicion that they thought having a bespoke website would raise their profile and bring new clients flooding in, whereas I knew from personal experience that that was pretty unrealistic. So I was torn between wanting to do a professional job, put in the time, make things as good as I possibly could, and the feeling that I was acting under false pretences, that if I charged a professional rate for my time, they would never make back the money they were paying me. So I would only ask for what I thought they could afford to lose, but still put the work in as long as they wanted me to, and told myself I was still learning, and some day I would feel confident enough to charge a realistic rate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t – and conversely, sometimes I still priced it too high and lost work that way.

What goes for web design also goes for print – who really cares about the aesthetics of a book, now that self-publishing is so easy? And who wants to pay someone like me to take the time over the details, when there’s so little potential financial payback? Just because I want to weep when I see another badly designed, amateurish self-published book doesn’t mean anybody else gives a crap.  

Oops there I go, completely blowing my business credibility.

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On My Desk

Difficult to write with a cat where the keyboard should be. Fortunately it’s a wireless keyboard.

Does mean I’m sitting very awkwardly. If I sit with my knees under the desk and keyboard on it to one side, I have to twist my lower back to reach it. Not good. If I move my chair so I’m directly in front of the spare bit of desk, my knees are hitting the desk drawers and I have to stretch forward which also puts a strain on my back, and I have to reach over the keyboard when I need to use the mouse, which is awkward. I’ve tried with the keyboard on my knees, but that’s also awkward and I can’t look at the screen at the same time.

In trying to take a photo of this situation, I noticed the mess on my desk. What on earth is the end roller of my old Dyson vacuum cleaner doing here? Box of tissues (fair enough); empty cassette box (who knows what happened to the cassette?); CD box containing – a CD which – yes! – does match the title on the outside of the box (Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’); copy of ‘Tea With Douglas’ which I was using for reference in my last book design job; two empty (used) jiffy bags in different sizes; copy of ‘The Culture of Contentment’ by John Kenneth Galbraith, which I was also using for reference (for the same job, on the order of the front matter for a non-fiction book); a dozen recordable CDs, some with backup data from years ago, some blank, all on a spike; a note book; a Black and Decker Dustbuster on its charging stand (which is here because I’m supposed to use it for picking up dry cat litter off the bathroom floor, and this is the nearest place I can plug it in which isn’t on the floor where it’s liable to get tripped over); a ceramic pot with a large capital ‘B’ on the side and ‘RUSH’ inside the bottom bulge of the B, which is intended to hold toothbrushes, but I bought it because if you think about it could be a pun on my name, and I intended to use it for pens but it contains only a green CD writer pen whose felt tip is fuzzy, dried up and unusuable, an orange gel pen (probably also dried up) and a pencil with a hand carved and decorated end like a cute penguin; stack of four 5 cm diameter semi-clear pastel coloured round plastic boxes containing small stationery items (on closer inspection, two hold buttons, one pins and one miscellaneous including staples, picture hooks, screws, drawing pins, freezer bag ties, a green magnet from a notice board and a small metal plate with East Asian characters which appears to have come off the back of something); three coasters and a coffee cup.

And a cat. Except that she has now woken up, jumped down and walked off in a huff.

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A Poem That I Meant to Write

‘The net that links us

Is not the web that binds us’

Linda Rushby (unfinished)

I thought that was going to be the start of a poem, but after an hour of rattling around, nothing else has appeared. So now I’m sitting at the keyboard, and – I don’t think this has struck me before – although I usually write as I go directly on the computer (which is why my posts ramble quite as much as they do), it doesn’t work that way with  poems. Mostly they come into my head fully formed, and then I have to write them down before I forget them – like a line from a Paul Simon song of 50-odd years ago :

‘I was twenty one years when I wrote this song.

I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long…’

Paul Simon, ‘The Leaves That Are Green’

You said it, Paul. And the first time I heard it I was even younger – sixteen, I believe – though the song had already been around for a few years. I think it was the first time I grasped – or at least caught a glimpse of – an adult understanding of the passing of time. That and Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ from about the same: ‘I’m twenty four and there’s so much more’. (To me at that time, even twenty seemed impossibly mature).

How did I get here from there? Oh yes, ‘The Leaves That are Green’:

‘Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl.

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown.’

That one: ‘Like a poem I meant to write.’ Exactly. If you don’t grab them while they’re there, they get away from you – Poems, I mean, not girls (or boys). I wrote once about ‘catching the words in flight’. It may be in ‘Single to Sirkeci’ or it may just have been a blog post. It might be the one I wrote in Tulcea, on the Danube Delta – which would have gone into ‘The Long Way Back’ – if I’d ever got round to finishing it. Or maybe it was just a random, throw away blog post that at most a handful of people might have read.

Do poems matter more than people? That’s a bit contentious – though once out they’re out there, they can live forever – I’m not claiming this for mine, I hasten to add, but I was thinking of the likes of Wordsworth (whose birthday is next Tuesday – I have a reason for knowing that which some of you might work out), Ovid (who was exiled to and died on the Black Sea Coast at Constanta, from where I went to Tulcea) or even poor Sylvia Plath (enough said).  Even mine will still hang around for a while after I’ve gone, out on the internet and in unsold copies of ‘Beachcombing’. Some have already lasted far longer than the relationships that provoked them – but that’s another matter.

Of course – a haiku!

‘When we are ourselves.’

Linda Rushby
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Gremlins

Here I am again. Today I feel overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all. I suppose a week isn’t that long. I said last Friday that I would keep doing it ‘for as long as it takes. As long as what takes? I guess if I don’t identify a ‘goal’, how will I know if I’ve achieved it? And a week is nothing. In the grand scheme of things.

There are things I have to do today – nothing that awful, just stuff beyond sitting in the sunshine, listening to the radio or crafting. Or writing blogs. So the gremlin on my shoulder says: ‘why bother? Who’s keeping tabs on you? Nobody but you. Tell that bitch to go and…’

‘Okay, okay’ I say. ‘I get the point. No need to share that sort of language on my blog.’

I’d forgotten about the gremlin. I was flicking through ‘Single to Sirkeci’ the other day – can’t remember why, it was something to do with checking the layout related to another book I’m designing for a third party. And the gremlin caught my eye. I seem to remember it came in quite early on but I dropped it and don’t refer to it much later in the book. Shame, because it’s quite a good idea. Every time I want to write about what I really feel, my deep, dark, nasty feelings, I should just say: ‘the gremlin says…’ or turn it into a bit of dialogue.

But reading back what I’ve just written, I realise the gremlin has two aspects. The one I mentioned above is the one that says: ‘f*ck it, f*ck them all’ (but without the asterisks). The cynical, vicious, nihilistic one. Then there’s its alter ego, the judgemental one: ‘just get on with it, set those goals, do those chores, you worthless piece of crap. Enough with the whining self-pity, you know why nobody loves you? It’s because you don’t deserve it, you have to earn love, you don’t do that by moaning about how miserable you are.’ Ooooh, I think I prefer the first one.

‘Celebrate your achievements’ says some non-gremlin – or maybe just a more subtle, and hence more powerful, gremlin. ‘You’ve blogged every day for a week, and you’ve nearly done it again, so you have 4000 words – at that rate, you’ll have a novel by the end of May!’ Or maybe not.

‘You’re “pantsing” again’ says Gremlin 2. ‘It’s a week since you did that online meeting, and you downloaded the handouts and have you filled in the table yet? Of course not, you’re an incurable “pantser”, and that’s why everything you write is – well – pants! You go through the motions, you go to the workshops, and still you don’t get your finger out and do anything worthwhile. Do you seriously think that writing this bullshit every day is achieving anything? You’re just deluding yourself…’

‘… except you’re not really, are you?’ pipes up Gremlin 1. ‘You know perfectly well you might as well give up.’