Solent Green – blog

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Cycle of Emotions

Are human emotions just illusions that conceal the deep heart of everything? Or are they the deep heart of ourselves?

I think: if I didn’t fight it every moment of every day, I would cry every moment of every day.

This morning I did something I’ve been thinking about for a while, restarting my morning routine of 10 minutes yoga followed by 10 minutes meditation. And the above two paragraphs are the thoughts that came into my head at the end of that time. Which some might say is an indication that yoga and meditation in the morning are not a good idea for me.

Yoga, meditation and writing 500 words first thing in the morning are very old habits, tried many times, discarded many times. In the quiet street outside my window I spot the occasional vehicle, the occasional jogger. Sunlight illuminates the top storeys of the red brick houses opposite; the bottom storeys shadowed by the terrace that includes the house where I sit at my computer.

The bucket has brought up some odd thoughts from the ‘writing well’ this morning, not at all what I was expecting to write about when I sat down, or planned yesterday evening when I thought about writing this morning. Maybe I’m getting back into the swing of this.

I don’t want this blog to turn into a whine-fest. That’s what I was thinking yesterday, when I walked by the sea. I can’t let it degenerate into a mire of self-pity, it’s too public for that. And I freely acknowledge that on most scales that mean anything in this everyday world, I have far less cause for self-pity than many people – most, even. Maybe I could even offer it out as something that might help others, a way of showing them: this isolation isn’t so bad, this lack of structure and excess of choice over how to fill the time, can be survived, can be dealt with and got through – look at me, welcome to my life. All those good, strong, positive people out there who are putting their efforts into making this situation better for others – that may sound sarcastic, but it’s not intended as such, I admire people like that, I really do, but I’m not brave enough to count myself among them. And if I tried, I’d only f*ck up whatever I tried to do – that’s my lame, selfish, mealy-mouthed excuse.

Self pity or self compassion? How do you tell the difference between the two? The former evolves rapidly into its close correlatives, self-disgust and shame. Ah yes, shame, the driving force of my vicious emotional circle – I am ashamed of myself for not being a better person, and that makes me angry and frustrated with myself, and that makes me unhappy which makes me sorry for myself which makes me more ashamed which makes…

Is this cycle of emotions an illusion that distances me from the deep heart of everything? Or is it the deep heart of myself?

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Shopping in Interesting Times

Okay, it’s now day three of writing something every day and…  I need to think of something cheerful to say, because we all need that right at this moment, right? Well, it’s lovely and sunny, I’m looking out the window behind my monitor and thinking: ‘I should go to the beach, walking to the beach will make me feel better’ but then I’m also thinking: ‘there’s loads I can do here that will also make me feel better’. There’s always great drama on Radio 4 and 4 extra on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so get everything else done and out of the way now, and then spend some time on my chair in the bay this afternoon, crocheting or weaving with all that lovely afternoon sunshine coming in the window behind me, and Miko purring on the chair arm, or on the windowsill watching the world go by.  

I was going to say something about shopping. I live within five minutes walk of ‘local’ Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Co-op, health food shop, greengrocers, pharmacy and pet shop, and as they’re all so close I tend to just pick up what I need as and when, rather than doing a regular main shop – anyway, as I walk, I can’t carry too much at once, and sometimes it pushes me into going out on a day when I wouldn’t otherwise bother. At the beginning of the week nothing was noticeably different about any of them, though odd things started to go missing – eggs, for example, and potatoes (I bought sweet potatoes instead). Yesterday I went into the Sainsbury’s Local for the first time since Monday, and was shocked at how much things had changed in those few days. Where have all the fruit and veg gone? It’s not as though those are things that can be easily stored – unless you cut them up and freeze them, of course. I managed to get a bunch of under-ripe bananas, but there were no oranges.

Makes me think about how fragile our supply chains are if things can get this bad so quickly. Also, it has to be said, not a great sign for what’s likely to happen a few months down the line when current trading arrangements come to an end, and who the hell knows what’s going to happen then, when we’re still trying to manage the aftermath of… well, the aftermath. Talk about a double whammy.

Ah well, I was going to try and be cheery and upbeat.

I’ve started (for the third time) reading ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantell. It is a big beast of a book, hard to notice at first when you read something on Kindle. I’m glad I don’t have to hold the whole thing in my hand to read it. I’m getting into it now, just read the passage about how Cromwell’s wife died suddenly from a ‘summer plague’ and the household went into isolation afterwards. Almost 500 years later, are we really any better at dealing with crises?

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500 Words

Sun shining today. Will I venture out for a walk? Or to do some gardening? Hmmm. The eternal conflict between what I ‘should’ be doing (what would ultimately be better and more positive for my wellbeing in a general sense) and what I ‘feel like’ doing (back to the su doku again). Living alone gives me enormous freedom to ignore many of the ‘shoulds’ without suffering under anybody’s judgement except my own – until such time comes as I’m forced to interact with the outside world, or even (god forbid) allow anybody from outside into my home.

What am I saying here? What am I trying to say? I decided that writing 500 words a day would be a Good Thing for me. So I am trying. Because I know I can do it. This is what I always say (I’ve said it many times, in many ways, to many people), I know I can do it, because I’ve done it in the past, but nothing good has ever come out of it – well, wait, is that strictly true? If I look back fifteen years, I could argue that it has changed my life fundamentally in startling ways – but never in the way I once hoped for, ie turning me into a professional novelist.

So much of the advice I’ve received down the years has stressed the need to write, write, write regularly, write often and write at great length. Write spontaneously, do a brain dump, draw up all the rubbish from your writing well and that’s how you make yourself ready to write the Good Stuff. But, congenitally lazy as I am, all I ever want to do is keep writing the easy stuff. I don’t have the self belief, tenacity, staying power – let’s face it, guts – to face the difficult stuff, the hard work. And however much of this easy, spontaneous stuff – this drivel – I write, it’s not going to miraculously open the way into the source of ideas that I need.

I don’t think like a novelist – or a short story writer, come to that. Sometimes I think like a poet. Mostly I think like a confused woman approaching the end of life with the sense that I’ve never worked out what I should be doing, never made use of whatever talents I might have had to make a difference to myself or others or the wider world, amid the consciousness that I am now running out of time and options, and without the energy, enthusiasm or motivation to follow any of those options even if they were pointed out to me.

That isn’t quite 500 words. Do I keep going for the last fifty or so? It’s just an arbitrary challenge I’ve set myself. I can say I’ve done it, but like the 50k words I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2018, it’s worthless because there is nothing there – well, nothing I haven’t said or thought or written a million times before. That’s the story of my life.

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Killer su doku

‘Tomorrow’ I thought to myself yesterday ‘tomorrow, I’ll start blogging again, and stick at it for as long as it takes’. But I found myself over breakfast getting deeply engrossed in a killer su doku (number 53 in the monthly book, which means it is designated as ‘Tricky’, and further into the fiendishness than I usually get).

No danger of running out of killer su doku. A book of 100 is delivered every month, I currently have four on the shelf unopened, and eight which have only been completed as far as the mid-50s, saved because if I keep honing my skills, maybe one day I’ll be able to progress as far as the 60s (Extreme) or even 80s (Deadly). No, I won’t run out of puzzles, though possibly I will eventually run short of pencils and erasers.

Don’t assume this is a joke; I can seriously spend days on end doing one killer su doku after the other. I realised this during my previous period of self-isolation, three years ago. At that time, of course, the rest of the world just carried on as normal, as I sat here in my kitchen (or, when the summer came, in my garden), drinking coffee and scribbling numbers into small printed squares (with a good deal of logical deduction and mental arithmetic going on in the background).

Well, I’m not completely self-isolated yet, though I am arguably in a high-risk category (over 65 with an underlying condition, ie asthma, though that very rarely bothers me these days). I don’t feel ‘at-risk’, though maybe that is naïve of me. I’m not worried about getting sick, and I’m not particularly scared of dying (I went through all that in 2017). What bothers me more is the memory of how I felt after that time of intense medicalisation (well, it felt intense to me, though nowhere near as bad or as long-lasting as many people have to deal with). That sense of: well, I’m still here, for an indeterminate period, so, woo hoo, shouldn’t I be waking up every morning glad to be alive? (Erm, actually, that never happened). Waiting for all that energy, enthusiasm and motivation to come back (though if I’m honest, I haven’t been too hot on any of those for years), when I felt more like: ‘Naah, I know the kitchen needs cleaning/stairs need hoovering/fence needs painting/grass needs mowing, but I can’t be arsed with all that, I’ll just sit here with my coffee and su doku/crochet/weaving’ (the latter two being arguably more constructive, but not all that when you see the piles of blankets and scraps of weaving in my cupboards and drawers).

So here I am at my laptop, spewing out the verbal equivalent of a su doku or an unwearable sparkly shawl, and maybe I’ll just carry on and on and be back here again tomorrow with more of the same – you lucky people! (Who used to say that? Ahh yes, Tommy Trinder. Thanks, Wikipedia.

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Blobby Canvases

I went to a writers’ group yesterday, one I used to attend every week but have more or less given up on over the last couple of years. I picked up a card and letter to myself which I wrote last year at this time defining my goals for the year. I haven’t opened it yet because I  know I won’t have done any of the things I said then – to be honest, I probably realised when I said them that they weren’t going to happen. Next week it will be time to do it all over again, and what will I say?

Why write every day when nothing ever leads anywhere? That is the dilemma I keep wrestling with. Maybe I should define where I want it to ‘lead’, because often that’s taken to mean fame, fortune, book sales, when really I just want it to lead to something I can be proud of producing, to fill the crack in my soul and help me feel good about myself. I used to think that writing every day would lead me to better things, but instead it all feels futile – though, if I’m honest, no more futile than the other things I spend my time on. I guess it hurts more because writing has always felt important to me, a precious thing – I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, but I guess I’ve always hoped to do something real and worthwhile with it, but instead it seems that however hard I try and however much I do it, I end up just throwing it out there without ever constructing something whole and finished. It’s like an artist who puts a few blobs of paint on the canvas, then the next day starts another canvas with different blobs of paint, and so on ad infinitum without ever creating a complete image.

You can call me ‘talented’, but it’s just a micro-talent, for stringing words together in a pleasing way. The macro-talent of constructing plots and creating characters always eludes me, I’m forever trying to grasp it but can never quite get there – or maybe it’s just that I give up too soon, that is likely knowing how readily I give up on other aspects of life – still, the fact remains that without the ideas, plots and characters, there’s nowhere I can take those words, and so the stack of blobby canvases grows.

Perhaps that’s why I’m more drawn to poetry than fiction – a poem can be just a few stanzas – even a few lines, or a few words. It doesn’t require the same degree of structure and commitment as even a short story. That said, I rarely set out to write a poem – they just come to me, and if they don’t, I can’t force them – but once I start it usually doesn’t take too long to draw them to a satisfactory conclusion – or at least some sort of provisional ending (though even that doesn’t always work).

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The Examined Life

Socrates is often quoted as saying: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, but what if you’ve examined your life to the nth degree and realised that it’s STILL not worth living?

Actually, although this reflection has come to me quite independently through my own experience of life, it’s not exactly original. Just this morning I was delighted to find this version from the great Kurt Vonnegut:

‘Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?’

(Notice that he attributes it to Plato, and it variously seems to be attributed to both of them by different people, but given that what we know of Socrates mostly came down to us through Plato, I guess that’s not too surprising).

A similar version which I like is from Ruby Wax, who said: ‘Self knowledge isn’t always happy news’. Well, you could argue that that’s slightly different because it’s about knowledge of the ‘self’ rather than the ‘life’. But I guess self-knowledge is what one hopes to gain through examining life, so in that sense they’re directly comparable. And it’s that sense of an examined life implying an examined self that interests me. Is it the events of life which construct the self, or is it the nature of the self which determines choices and actions and hence the way life works out? A bit of both, probably.

Why am I doing this? When I woke up it seemed like a good idea. But I don’t know. Been wondering for a long time about whether it’s worth trying to write again. In my heart of hearts I know it’s all pretty futile. What else would I rather be doing? Right now? Listening to the radio and crocheting or weaving? Playing freecell or Killer su doku? Walking on the seafront? Eating breakfast? All pretty futile, apart from breakfast. Washing up, hoovering, sorting out washing? Clearly, I don’t want to do any of those, and am an expert at procrastination when it comes to all of them, in fact I carry it to such an extreme that I prefer not to have friends so that no one comes into my house and sees what a shit-hole it is. (Actually there are other reasons why I don’t have friends, but that is quite a significant one.)

So, examining self/examining life. Begs the question of to what extent there is a single ‘self’ to examine. Clearly, the ‘self’ that I know (and hate) is quite different from the person that other people perceive me to be, which is frustrating at times, but on the other hand, is probably the only reason anyone has anything to do with me at all – if they knew the me I know, why would they bother? If I could get away from myself I would – in fact, I have tried in different ways at many different times, but it never works. One of the repeated motifs that has appeared though my examination of my last 60 years of life, the impulse to run away and keep running, which is continually thwarted when I realise that nothing inside has changed, and being in a different place is only superficially preferable to what went before. Now I have reached a place where I really feel I have nowhere else to go – that’s wisdom, I guess. No point in wishing for anything better, looking to the future and hoping for a change. When I moved here I was reminded of the Eagles’ song The Last Resort: ‘There is no more new frontier/We have got to build it here’. I came to the end of the country, with nothing beyond but sea (and the Isle of Wight, of course, let’s not forget that). My last dream, my last throw of the dice, and here I am.

Yesterday I saw my shrink and read her this poem, which I wrote in 2017:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

Afterwards, she said: ‘that last line is quite hopeful. You played your own game.’

Really? I suppose I felt I had to put something positive at the end, but I’m not saying that’s how it was. I didn’t choose to be that way (except maybe in some very deep self-hating, self-punishing way), I’m sure that as a child and teenager I would rather have been accepted by others, liked even. It was just an adaptation to the reality of not being the sort of girl anyone wanted to be with. I did say to her ‘it’s a kind of sour grapes’ and the more I thought about it, the more that seems to be true – ‘Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going down the garden to eat worms’. When you have no one to play with you have to make up your own games or do nothing at all (of course, what I did a lot of the time was the classic lonely-child thing of retreating into books). As I said to myself when I was alone in Paris in February 2012: ‘I’m still the woman nobody wants’, and that is just as true now as it was then and as it was 50 or 60 years ago.

Ah well. The examined life. Maybe I could start a new blog with that as the title. And what am I going to do  with this? Where should I put it? Somewhere where there’s a possibility of it being read? Or where there’s a theoretical possibility, but I know no one will bother?

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Peeling the Onion

Am I going to write another whiney piece about why I don’t write any more – don’t even want to write – to add to all the others I’ve written over the last year – or two – or however long it’s been? The endless, pointless quest to be understood and accepted – when, let’s face it, what does it matter, why should I expect anyone to understand or accept me, or even want to do so (except maybe my children – or my shrink, but then, that’s her job).

Why should it matter to me whether anyone understands me? I’m trying to understand myself, or explain myself, or accept myself, but why bother? Isn’t it all just inverted narcissism?

I get into conversations where I’m trying to explain but somehow what comes back from the other parties is not at all what I mean, yet I’m too slow witted to be able to argue back, and then I get frustrated at my own incompetence and inability to communicate and so angry with myself that I just have to let it all go. It doesn’t matter if nobody understands me, or they get a false idea or don’t listen to what I’m saying. I don’t need anybody else’s good opinion, but maybe I do need my own – and yet I know that really is a hopeless quest. After a lifetime of self-hate, how can there be any version of my future in which I could possibly find any pride and satisfaction in the things I’ve done? That is what I have to accept, that I’m incapable of having those feelings and there’s no future in trying to find them. So why waste my energy and time trying?

I’m not disappointed in my writing because I ever expected it to bring me money or fame (never been that naïve). ‘Write for yourself’ people say, but why should I do that if it doesn’t make me happy? All the words I’ve written have never resulted in me creating, completing, anything to be proud of. Maybe the odd poem (though I’m not writing them any more either) but no book that says what I want to say, or even comes close to a coherent, completed, narrative. Just the endless blog full of this same drivel, day after day, started because I thought that was the way to become a ‘writer’, and continued in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And in my heart I’ve learned to understand myself well enough to know that nothing I create will ever fill the great chasm inside me where love should be.

Where did that word spring from, the ‘L’ word? It just came as I was writing, as words do. I’m writing about writing, not about that. Is that my holy grail? It’s all part of the same thing, this great hole – I nearly wrote that as ‘whole’, very Freudian. Which reminds me of Peer Gynt – when you keep peeling the onion, in the end you have nothing. Just tears.

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Does it matter?

Lately I’ve been having conversations – constantly ongoing inside my head, but occasionally with other people too – about whether to carry on trying to write when I can’t see any prospect of completing anything worth publishing; whether I should write ‘for myself’; and crucially, whether writing ‘makes me happy’ (whatever that means).

All I can say is that when it goes right it’s the greatest joy imaginable, but those times are so rare, is it really worth churning out sentence after sentence knowing that most of them are of no interest to anyone, not even me?  I know the argument that if you don’t go through all the grunt work, you’ll never have a chance of finding the treasure, but on any given Monday morning, the pleasures of walking by the sea, listening to the radio, reading, crocheting, killer su doku-ing in a friendly café and untangling yarn (which I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks) are so much more immediate, accessible and reliable, why bother spending time and nervous energy on anything so risky and massively unproductive as writing?

I’ve been vaguely wondering about how many words I’ve written in my lifetime – starting with the years 2008 and 2009 where I wrote (and blogged) a minimum of 500 words every day – so for those two years I churned out over 365,000 words – I’m not sure how long I continued with that discipline of blogging, but I think it was consistent for at least another couple of years, and then there were the years 2000-2007 where I wrote a journal every day even if I wasn’t blogging, so when you add in the 200,000 words of the first draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, that will easily get us past the million word mark from 2000 to 2012 (ignoring anything I’ve written before or since then, including the 50,000 words of last year’s NaNoWriMo marathon).

Speaking of which, the one thing that demonstrated is that it’s perfectly possible to keep on churning out those words without ever generating a spark of anything which can be turned into the germ of a novel or short story or anything of interest. Does that matter? This is the question I started with, after all. Writing like this is the easiest thing in the world, but does it bring me joy or contentment for its own sake? When it comes to crochet or knitting or lino-printing or weaving or any other craft, I guess I’m happy to just keep doing it and shoving the results into cupboards and drawers and forgetting about them. I guess that my writing is the same. At some point I’ll be gone and all these files on my computer will be deleted too and no one will know or care what I wrote or thought or felt. And if I don’t write the words out, what then? They get reabsorbed into my head and maybe the underlying thoughts will come out another time in another form or maybe not. And really, what does it matter? Why should anyone care?

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Chasing Happiness

Saturday, 05 January 2019   2:30 AM

Already this year I am feeling besieged by the happiness gurus. For example, yesterday I read this:

‘If it doesn’t make you happy, something needs to change.’

Why? What? What needs to change? How can you predict what is going to ‘make you happy’?  And how are you supposed to change it? What to? How can you ever predict the consequences of what you do (long term, in their entirety)?

Why does everything have to ‘make you happy’ anyway? How does that work? Never do anything that stretches you, or scares you, or that might take you somewhere you weren’t expecting? What sort of life is that? Life is full of risk – you either jump into it or you don’t. And if you don’t want to right now – well, that can be okay too, but not necessarily forever.

Happiness is a chimera – in both senses. It is both an impossible quarry and a composite, an impossible composite of disparate elements that really shouldn’t (oh dear, we don’t say ‘should’ and ‘shoudn’t’ do we?) be together – that don’t make sense together. And what about the word ‘disparate’? I’ve been picked on in the past for using it, but fuck that, I’m writing this and it’s absolutely the word I want to use right there – if you don’t like it, go and get a fucking dictionary. Pretentious, moi??? I’m not using it to impress or intimidate you but because it says what I want to say better than any other word I can think of.

And in the end, that’s the point, isn’t it? Who’s writing this anyway? Maybe what makes me ‘happy’ is using the exact words I want to use, and I know what I’m saying and how I want to say it, so why the fuck not?

Probably I should take some of the ‘fucks’ out of this – probably I will, whether I ‘should’ or not. Everyone plays around with words in their own way. Why shouldn’t I?

That word ‘quarry’, for example – it also has two meanings – both the thing being pursued (the chimera of happiness, in this case) and a source, a place from which things are extracted. What am I extracting here? (Apart from the Michael – or the urine). Meaning, of course. I’m digging in the quarry of the English language to pull out meaning, and that is my raison d’être’ (maybe bits of other languages too). It’s what I do, and though I say it as shouldn’t (oh, there go the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ again!), may I say I do it brilliantly. I do it in the only way I can, and as only I can, and it would be very gratifying if someone (anyone) would read this and say: ‘that’s amazing, that’s fabulous, I just love the way you play with words’. But even though I know that’s a pretty hopeless quest (and a hopeless quarry) I will continue to do it even if I’m the only one who reads it, because it is the process of doing so that MAKES ME HAPPY! and…

What was the question again?


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Procrastination

How do I change? How can I ever either become the person I wish to be, or come to terms with being who I am?

That immediately begs the question: who is the person I wish to be? What is she like, and how will I know when I have become her? The problem with asking that question is that it encourages the creation of an impossible standard. If you ask me who I wish to be, I might say: beautiful, successful; confident, 25 years old etc and then we’re getting into realms of fantasy straight away. What I really want is to be not-me. Once I would have said: what I want from life is to feel loved – not just to be loved, but to feel loved by someone whom I also love – that kind of mutual relationship which creates a ‘couple’. But is that right? Once I would have said that what I wanted was the opportunity for a series of relationships.

Oh, I don’t know. I went down and had breakfast in between and now I’ve lost the thread.

Back to the question: what is wrong with being me? Maybe that wasn’t exactly the question, but it’s a question.

No answer to that. I went off and did something else then just came back to Word to look at C’s Dad’s book and there it is.

Am I going to write any more of this today?

Stink of cat pee in this room. Someone to clean carpet? It’s the hall carpet. What to do. Just get rid of it? Or find someone who can clean it. Or put it up in loft. Go into loft and check leak. Where is the water coming from?

No, I don’t want to do any of those things.

What is wrong with being me? Procrastination. Well, that’s something I can do something about, right?

If I can’t become someone else, what is the point?

Chaos. Procrastination is part of that. Dyspraxia? I have finally sent email to dyspraxia people, after two months – hooray! Must mean that there’s something I want to do even less, ie C’s work, although she is keen to pay me for it, am I keen to do?

What is so awful about me? I give up. No, I don’t mean I give up on the question, I mean that is one of the things that’s wrong with me. I give up on everything. I have no self-discipline. I am lazy. I run away. These seem like things that it ought to be easier to do something about than the chaos. Given the (possibility of) dyspraxia.

Why do I hate myself so much? Why not? Why wouldn’t I hate myself, given that I know all my faults and I can’t escape from them? I am stuck here with them. I have to do this work and I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything that I have to use my brain for. I am afraid of failure.