Category: self-analysis

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The Way of the World

First, here is an update on some issues you may have been wondering about:

Coffee Pot: Gave it a thorough clean, paying particular attention to the threads where the two halves connect, and it seems to be okay.

Hedge trimmer: Used the fuse from the room heater, and it now works, so on Sunday I cut the edge next to the gate.

‘Walnut’ poem: Went through all the files in both my ‘blog’ folders, but still haven’t located it – though did find another (pretty rubbish) poem. I’d completely forgotten Now wondering if I should go through old notebooks in case I hand-wrote it, but that seems very unlikely given that I have this memory of someone commenting on it on Facebook.

Dodecagram: Now converted into an octagon with somewhat wobbly sides – I gave up at that point yesterday, but thought of something else to try when I woke up, so now eager to get back to it.

Other than that: how am I feeling? Well – trying not to let my anger at the current political situation overwhelm all good things, let me put it that way.

Except… Around twenty five years ago I was working with a man who was very charming, not physically attractive, but he told a good tale, very persuasive, good listener, GSOH – yes, I’ll admit that I was a little in love with him. But as we grew closer, I discovered one fundamental flaw in his character – he could say something with the utmost sincerity, conviction and plausibility, then a few days later say the exact opposite with equal sincerity etc etc. If I picked him up on it, he would laugh it off, smooth talk his way out, make me question my own memory of what he’d said previously, or just dismiss it as unimportant.  Now, I’ve said before that honesty is in some ways my downfall, I can’t tell a lie to save my life. In fact I once said to him that I wished I could bullshit the way he did – it was something I genuinely admired, the way he could always find an answer for everything , always steer the conversation to his own advantage. But somewhat to my surprise he was deeply offended.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that he always said whatever came into his head at the time he said it, whatever suited his advantage at that particular moment, and he honestly didn’t realise that he was contradicting himself, or that to do so was in any way morally wrong.

You can see where this is heading. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It angers, frightens and depresses me that these days that sort of plausible deceit is just the way of the world, prevalent among our leaders, large sections of the popular media, almost a prerequisite for gaining any kind of power. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, they can’t get away with it any more, it does, and they do.

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Squaring the Dodecagram

Time is strange these days. It feels like ages since I started the project I’m going to write about, but I checked out the photos on my camera, and the ones of the first attempts were dated the 9th, 10th and 12th of May, which is only a fortnight ago.

I bought this beautiful varicoloured cotton knitting yarn online, and got obsessed with it, buying up different colour combinations with no clear idea what to do with them. I crocheted two shawls, then decided I would make myself a beach cover-up/summer top. The idea I had was that the front would have a starburst pattern in the middle, which I would gradually extend outwards, then at some point I would square it off and do rows along the top and bottom to the right length. It all seemed fairly straightforward, but I thought it would be fun.

I started from the middle with an ‘icicle’ design from a book of crochet stitches, a hexagon which grew into a six pointed star. Then, still working in the round, added stitches into the space between the points, and turned those into additional points, while still extending the original six points, so I ended up with a 12 pointed star (dodecagram).

That’s when it started to get interesting.

My plan was to keep extending the star until it was wide enough from point to point to go across my body and then ‘square it off’, filling in the spaces between the points. Except… For a start, once the points got to a certain size, I couldn’t get them to lie flat. Also, if I wanted to keep working in a circle, the points would keep growing while I was also trying to fill in the gaps. I could complete the star to the desired size and then fill in all the spaces individually, but that would disrupt the sequence of colours and besides, that wasn’t what I was trying to do. So I pulled it down by a few lines. Then tried something else. Then realised I needed to go back further, so undid what I’d just redone, plus some more. And so on. Every day I give up, put it away, get up the next morning, pull down what I’ve done, and try something else.

Then I started thinking more about the geometry. If I just filled in the spaces between the points, I would end up with a 12-sided polygon – a dodecagon. After a couple of days puzzling over this, I realised I should think of it in groups of three points. If I identified four main points and laid them out like the points of the compass, the next step should be to merge the pairs of points between them. If I could flatten them out, I would have a diamond shape in the centre and then four triangles round the corners.

Don’t know if this counts as ‘creativity’ sparked by the lockdown. It’s pretty pointless. But I’m enjoying myself.

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Screws and Fuse Blues

After my post yesterday I went hunting for the poem I mentioned, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think I know the title: ‘Walnut’; I know the last line: ‘I was younger then, and I looked good in pink.’ I can remember the experience which inspired it – both at the time I wrote it (finding a matchbox with ‘Walnut’ on the side) and the memory of that restaurant in West Hampstead which it triggered. I know it was in this house, so has to have been within the last three years (most likely 2018), and I know I blogged it (or at least put it on FB) because I remember a comment from one of my FB friends.

I’ve scoured through my poetry folders, through this blog and the previous one for that time period, even my two Facebook pages, but with no luck. All my blog posts are saved in Word in either of two folders, one on Onedrive and one on my desktop, the former imaginatively titled: ‘Blog’, the second: ‘blog’, saved with a filename of the date when they were written. I didn’t look at how many files were in those folders, by that point I was losing the will to live.

The day went on. I decided to fix the hedge trimmer (I cut through the cable when I tried using it last month). When I went to the shop on Wednesday I noticed the hedge is growing over the gate so that soon the postman won’t be able to get in (or I out – I could become like sleeping beauty, there’s a thought). So I got out all the tools and found the bit that I’d cut off (it was still over one of the kitchen chairs), unscrewed the connector that my ex attached the first time I cut through it, cursed the fact that I couldn’t find the better screwdrivers and myself for not being able to get a screwdriver into the slot correctly and hold it tight enough to actually turn it so I always ruin screw heads and drivers alike; chanted to myself: ‘don’t lose the screws’ but of course did, lost every little thing that could be lost and had to look for them all three times, but that’s my life in a nutshell, just a normal part of dyspraxia.

Then when I had it all back together I plugged it in and – nothing. Of course, it must have blown the fuse when it happened. Did I have any spare fuses? No, but I remembered two old appliances (coffee maker and microwave) were still in the bottom cupboard – but both their fuses had already been cannibalised. Went round the house looking for other things with fuses that I don’t want. Found my old hairdryer and tried that, but it still didn’t work, that probably blew when it broke as well.

In bed this morning I remembered I’ve got an electric heater I shouldn’t need any time soon. I’ll try that today.

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The Women That I Was

When I do my morning practice, thoughts often turn up in my head, potential poems, phrases from somewhere else, or bits of songs. This morning I decided to put all my incense cones into one box and mix them up, and while looking for a box I found a tiny box of matches which I remember once set me off into reminiscence and caused me to write a poem, some time last year, I think. Memory squared. I’m going to look out that poem later.

I had the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ in my head when I woke up (a song for our times if ever there was one) and as I started on my yoga stretches, and was thinking about that and the poem inspired by the matchbox, the phrase ‘the woman that I was’ popped into my head. I knew that it, or a phrase very like it, was from a song; the word wasn’t ‘woman’, but it was sung by a woman, and it wasn’t Joni Mitchell, but if I could work out what that two-syllable word was, I’d know. Then it came to me in a flash that it was ‘Gypsy’ by Stevie Nicks. I’ll have to fish that out later as well. And ‘Dust in the Wind’ – which is by Kansas, but I always forget that, or I think it’s Toto, and when it popped up on Amazon Music the other evening I had a laugh because I saw the connection between the two and why I mix them up.

The poem was about the woman that I was, though it wasn’t so long ago, about ten years. And the woman I was in it was who I was for a very short time and I’m not her any more – all we are is dust in the wind. I liked her, I liked being her. She was a bit wild, Bohemian, a dreamer, and she called herself Melinda – she came and went – like Ruby Tuesday – and she had a Bohemian adventure in 2013, but it didn’t work out the way she was dreaming of – nothing ever did – and perhaps that was her last gasp. So who am I now? Cat-by-Herself is my current persona, she emerged from the shadows – ooh, how long ago? Somewhere on a train, between the Camargue and the Balkans, perhaps, or Sofia and Istanbul, or on the shore of the Black Sea. She was the fourth corner (according to CG Jung, all threes need a fourth for completeness) – and she was the resolution of what someone flatteringly called ‘the Lovely Triad’.

I thought I’d left them all behind – Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra – but they all pop up from time to time. Melinda is the poet, after all; and Cassandra, the gloomy prophetess, the brain-the-size-of-a-planet whom no one listens to, but who still gets excited over the flash of intellectual connection; and sad Belinda sitting in chaos with her permanently aching heart. I still need to find a way to reconcile them.

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Dull

I lay in bed this morning listening to a distant susurrus – was it wind, rain or just in my head? I got up, sat on the edge of the bed to dress, and in the mirrored wardrobe door facing me I saw the clothes I’d chosen for my exercise/meditation session (purple yoga pants, red long-sleeved tee shirt) and thought they looked wintry compared to yesterday’s sunshine – not that it matters when I won’t be going anywhere. The weather app told me 2 minutes to a break in the rain. Five minutes later I checked to see if it had changed, and it said rain was expected in 83 minutes. Following from a previous post, it really is that precise. Now it just says: ‘Current: Cloudy, 16C’ and ‘Looking ahead: Pleasant Sunday’. Well, that’s something to look forward to.

I opened the door to let Miko out onto grey sky and trees shaking in the wind, but it wasn’t raining, and the ground didn’t look as though it had been. By the time I got back downstairs from my half hour session, she was curled up in her bed, so I closed it again.

Not so many people in the street today. A couple just passed, walking a dog – the man in lurid shorts, dull tee shirt and face mask, the woman in jeans and a yellow coat. Come to think of it, they’re the only ones I’ve seen so far. A few pigeons and gulls flying sideways. Every so often the sound of the wind rises above the murmuring of the computer.

I wrote yesterday but didn’t share – only with my therapist, and she agreed it probably wasn’t one to post generally (though I’m sure she has an unrealistic idea of how many people are likely to read this stuff). Maybe I won’t share this one either, maybe I’ll stop posting altogether or post on a secret blog and not share it to Facebook , or share it to a page that no one knows about, which is how this one used to be when I started it.

I have the tail end of some paid work to do, and I think that’s been responsible for my bad mood over the last couple of days. I’ve been putting it off, or rather, it’s been put off for me because of delays in the arrival of the proof copy, which finally turned up on Wednesday, so yesterday was pretty tied up. I think I should stop committing myself to doing things for other people, though this is a long-standing project –almost six years on and off, and it will be so good to get it out of my life at last.  

Just realised that that strange noise I’ve been hearing for the last few minutes is the venetian blind in my spare bedroom (where I do my exercise) banging against the wall. I always open the window when I finish to clear the smell of incense.

Time to get to work.

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The Hermit (Part 3)

I’ve been to Tesco. It was going to be Sainsbury’s, but when I got there there was a barricade across the door. I looked though the window but couldn’t see anyone inside – this was just after 8 and they normally open at 7. So I crossed the road to Tesco (again). When I came back, Sainsbury’s was open. Bit late by then.

Walking home, I started fretting about what it will be like when things start opening up again – whenever that may be. Yesterday evening I joined in with a Zoom meditation session from the group I used to go to on Sunday evenings. On Sundays now they have a Crowdcast with guest speakers, and are getting 200-300 people from all over the world connecting (or whatever the word is). The difference between that and Zoom is that the ‘viewers’ are not visible but can contribute through an online chat area, so I like that because it’s nicely anonymous. I do join in properly with the meditation, but during the talks I quite often sit crocheting, as I would if I was watching telly. On Zoom, it’s possible not to share your video and audio, but it’s a bit awkward when there are only half a dozen people involved, and not only that, but mainly people I recognise from the regular group (and who would presumably recognise me).

Anyway, the guy leading it mentioned in the chat afterwards that he has been quite enjoying the lock down, but felt guilty admitting it – the lady who led the session last week said something similar – and then we were all putting our hands up and agreeing, and saying what a relief to hear someone else saying it.

Now, there could be a whole complex of reasons behind this. To put a negative spin on it, maybe people who join meditation groups – more specifically, online meditation groups – are all geeky, introverted loners who want to hide from the world and keep away from people in general. On the other hand, maybe they are thoughtful, contemplative individuals, interested in learning to detach themselves from the materialistic pleasures to which we are all addicted to a greater or lesser extent, on a path to self realisation and acceptance of the world as it is.

In the fifteen years I’ve been actively pursuing this path, I’ve met both sorts of people – some who are in conventional terms ‘damaged’ in some way and some who are intellectually fascinated by the life of the mind and disillusioned by the modern world, and many (like myself) who are a combination of the two. I mentioned to a friend the other day that it’s noticeable how many people I’ve met in meditation groups are educated to PhD level – all disciplines, but I think it reflects a certain kind of thoughtfulness and curiosity. On the other hand, there are also a fair number of recovering addicts.

This feels like the start of an interesting chain of thought, to which I’ll return.

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Tai chi in the Garden

I’m not going to the shop today. This is a chain of events triggered because I made lasagne on Friday, which meant I used a pint of milk, which meant I ran out of milk early, so I started one of the cartons of long-life milk which I bought to make yoghurt, but also for emergencies; so I’ve still got plenty of milk so I don’t need to go to the shop today.

I opened the door to let Miko out into the garden. The sun was up, of course, but not shining through the clouds. I stepped out onto the steps that go down to what I laughingly call the ‘patio’, although it’s not paved, but gravelled, and if you poke through the gravel you’ll find compacted builder’s rubble – not that that deters the weeds.

There was no wind, and a blackbird was singing into the empty, quiet air – that beautiful, haunting sound, as though the space between the earth and clouds is hollow, and the music is an echo without a source.

On an impulse I kicked off my slippers and walked down the second lot of steps to the grassed area (I hesitate to call it a ‘lawn’, though I did mow it a few days ago, for the first time in weeks). I took a few slow, deep breaths then began my tai chi practice. Tai chi, as you may know, consists of a sequence of movements which is known as a form (or ‘the form’ for each specific tradition, though there are multiple traditions). As a beginner, you learn a small number of moves one at a time and gradually learn new ones as you perfect the earlier ones – so it is a challenge to the memory and concentration as much as the body. I started learning it towards the end of 2015, went for a year then took a break for most of 2017 after I started chemo. In 2018 I went to a beginners’ class with the same teacher, slowly worked my way up to the point I’d reached before, then added on more moves. It’s not unusual for the same class to have students at different levels, and I liked the class, it was convenient and suited me, and the teacher was happy for me to continue with them.

Since the start of lockdown, we’ve been doing Zoom classes on a Wednesday evening, usually only about six of us, at all stages. I’ve discovered that when the classes stopped, I’d reached a point just before a whole sequence of movements in the form is repeated, but I don’t know the connecting move before that happens. I’ve tried to pick it up from Zoom, but I know I’m fudging it. I should probably try and find it on Youtube.

I started writing about the garden, but ended up with tai chi. Both deserve a bit more attention, but this writing randomly is so much easier and more enjoyable than staring at the screen.  

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Somebody Else’s Problem

Today I think I will write about what I was planning to write about yesterday, before I was hijacked by a poem. But first I’d like to observe that the sun is shining, the gulls are flying past the window, the pigeons are woo-wooing, Miko is at her neighbourhood watch post and not bothering the keyboard, and for once it feels as though the day is off to a good start.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis began when I started a PhD at the age of 38, and has continued ever since. I remembered that when I was sharing all those memories from Facebook at the start of May, and realised that, though I may still feel in crisis some days, it’s definitely no longer a mid-life one. So I started to ponder on when exactly that transition happened.

My first thought was – well – it must have been when I moved to Southsea in 2015 – that was a major break in my life, and marked the end of that period of rootlessness which had been ongoing since I split with my husband in 2009. But then I thought that my first months here were still part of that churning, the excitement of a new life, new place, new people, all that. Plus of course, the curse of the Madwoman in the Attic – the stuff that had been left behind in the old house, the emotional and physical baggage which had remained unresolved – was still hanging over me. That wasn’t sorted out till I moved into this house in autumn 2016 –that was the next significant point. But then what happened? Yep, 2017 – cancer year.

So now I think that when I look back over my life and mark it off into chunks, chapters of my autobiography, if you like (though this is the closest I’ll ever get to writing one), the present stage started at the beginning of 2018, when I began to pick up the threads of a life no longer dominated by concerns over my health. Comparing notes with my brother (who was treated for prostate cancer in that same year) and my therapist (who I started seeing in early 2018), I discovered that it’s a known condition for people who’ve survived cancer to experience depression after the treatment is over. For me, intellectualising it two years on, it’s about ‘what now?’ – the realisation that there was more future than I’d subconsciously been anticipating, and that finding things to do with it could be a challenge.

And – this has just popped into my head, and I have 70 words to express it in – being treated for cancer, travelling round Europe, being in lockdown – all have this in common: every day is just about itself. The future can be put to one side; maybe it will happen, maybe it will be somebody else’s problem. ‘None of the crazy you get from too much choice…’, no stress, no sweat.

Well, that’s something to talk about on Thursday.

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Memories

Yesterday afternoon I wrote a poem, I thought I would post it today, but now I feel perhaps it’s better to leave it where it is and go back and look at it some other time.

The beginnings of another one came to me in the shower, now I don’t know what to do about it.

What happens to sadness if you push it away?
Does it fester in the dark, like words never written?
Does it burrow its way into your soul
and feast on what it finds there?

From the surface, you brush away the dust,
shake out your feathers
and get on with life.

You won’t let it hurt you,
you’ll face the new day,
and the next, and the next.
Slide into the mask
and smile for the camera.

Then thirty years later
you look at that smile,
and remember, remember,
the pain that those moments
were trying to cover.

Linda Rushby 17 May 2020

Well, there you go. I finished it (I think). That’ll do, anyway.

Yesterday I came across a photo from 1987 and posted it on Facebook. I remember that time as being amongst the most miserable of my life. We were living in Dallas, I had given up my career to be an ex-pat wife, and found myself sitting in the wreckage of the fantasy that at last I would have time to do some ‘serious’ writing. I had left behind my family and friends; I was getting hardly any sleep, struggling to cope with this terrifying new role of ‘mother’ for which I felt utterly unprepared and unsuited; wracked with guilt and shame for having those feelings; convinced that my son would grow up to hate me because he cried constantly, while I was incapable of meeting his needs; totally dependent on and in awe of my husband who, as well as doing a full time job, was able to understand, soothe, and care for the baby with endless patience and all the parental instincts which I so badly lacked.

And needless to say, I was far too ashamed to seek outside help, even if I had a clue where to look for it. The few ‘friends’ I was able to make were other young mothers, all much more well-adjusted than me, all making it seem so easy, so how could I own up to any of them what a monster I felt inside?

With all those memories, I looked at the two smiling faces, my own and that of the perfect little child, standing with hands holding onto the coffee table while I sat on the sofa supporting him under his armpits.

Oddly, when I look back over my life, it seems that ‘motherhood’ is the one thing I somehow got right, the one project of my life whose outcomes – two wonderful, loving, caring people – I can look at with pride (or maybe that’s down to their father’s contribution, rather than mine).

I don’t know why I wrote this. It’s not what I expected.

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Hedgehog Song

I’ve got into the habit of ending the evening by listening to Amazon music. I try to avoid watching telly after 10 o’clock, though I’m not always very good at sticking to that. I don’t really understand how these streaming services work, obviously they go on the basis of what you’ve chosen before but the random playlists can be extremely random. It’s moved on from giving me lots of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens and Fleetwood Mack to deciding I like early 70s folk-rock, which is quite intelligent of it really, though I haven’t heard a lot of those artists for a very long time. In particular it’s picked up on the Incredible String Band, which I didn’t know much about and I find their songs pretty mixed.

Last night it flashed up ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ (by ISB) which made me laugh, because it reminded me of Nanny Ogg’s Hedgehog Song from the Discworld books. But as soon as the music started, I knew it instantly, though I don’t think I ever knew what band it was associated with. It was just one of those songs that everybody sang in the folk clubs of fifty years ago:

‘Well, you know all the words, and you’ve sung all the notes,
but you never quite learned the song’ she sang.
‘I can tell by the sadness in your eyes
that you never quite learned the song.’

Incredible String Band

Naturally, I sang along, as I’d probably done dozens of times in my youth in smoky clubs and pubs – it had a jaunty tune, quirky rhythm, and apparently silly but actually quite thoughtful lyrics. I thought about my eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old self not giving a thought to the woman who would be singing it half a century later and ruefully reflecting how accurate it was.

Sometimes with these songs from those days I think about the fact that the people who wrote them, if I could see them now at the age they were then, would seem ridiculously young, but at the time they were so much older and more mature than me, role models I admired and hoped to emulate. But here I am with all these years, experience and supposed wisdom, still haunted by adolescent confusion and doubt. I knew all the words, and I sang all the notes, but I never quite learned the song. You can tell by the sadness in my eyes, I never quite learned the song.

No, that wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to turn out to be that sort of sad old lady.

An old friend commented on yesterday’s post that maybe heartache is harder to recover from than heartbreak. I think she’s right, because a broken heart is an acute trauma, that you have to deal with and move on from, but heartache is something that lingers, a chronic condition that fluctuates but never completely goes away. Maybe that’s why my therapist used that word. Interesting.