Category: Cassandra

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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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Happy Solstice

The northern hemisphere summer solstice, as you probably know, is usually on the 21st June, but fluctuates because the convention that Earth’s orbit around the sun takes 365 times as long as each rotation is an approximation – the real figure is closer to 365.24, but with the addition of an extra day every four years, it’s a pretty good approximation to keep things consistent within the average human lifetime – though it does go adrift over the centuries, hence the introduction in the Gregorian calendar of another fix to remove a day from three centuries in four – an improvement adopted by the English less than three centuries ago, years after the rest of Europe, and then only with much grumbling, propagation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and rioting in the streets. Plus ҫa change.

There I go again. Nobody likes a smart-arse. But the point is… when I’m doing the Cassandra smart-arse thing, it’s not that I’m trying to show off – well, maybe it is, but only because in the normal run of things, I feel there is so little I can show off about. In the normal run of life I am so chaotic, clumsy, awkward, forgetful, messy, slow, disorganised… dyspraxic. That’s who I am, it’s who I’ve been all my life, and (though I’m not a big fan of putting labels on people) it’s a relief to have a word for it.

When I started seeing my therapist, I told her all this and she began by trying to find a more positive word than ‘chaotic’ (though the one she came up with: ‘ditsy’ – didn’t strike me as an improvement). Like most people I’ve tried to speak to about this, she was making the assumption that it was just a story I was told as a child, and that I’ve been repeating to myself ever since, it’s not who I really am.

One day, after I’d been seeing her for a couple of months, she suddenly said: ‘What you’re saying reminds me of another client I used to see – I think you might be dyspraxic.’ So I looked it up and read the characteristics associated with dyspraxia – and saw myself laid out, even down to strange apparently random things like: not being able to read my own handwriting; lacking confidence in my appearance because I can’t do hair, make-up and have no dress-sense; took years to learn how to ride a bike…

I find it difficult to explain this to people. It sounds like excuses, doesn’t it? I think that’s probably been the problem all my life – I am so conscious of my shortcomings because surely, with a little more effort, I could find ways round them? So I try and fail and get frustrated and hate myself.

Maybe I should come back to this another day. Because what I started to write about was the Cassandra thing, because sometimes it feels as though a head full of useless knowledge is about the only thing that I’m good for.  

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Non-attachment

What will I write about today? Therapy day. What will I talk about? I have two blog posts to read out, at least.

Is anything shifting inside my mind? If it is, it’s probably due to the lockdown, which has given me peace and space to be by myself. But it can’t last forever. How will I cope when I have to start engaging with the world again? Well, I have some control over that. When I first moved here I felt I needed to get out and make contact with other people. Now that seems less important. When I was a child I was told that shyness and introspection are things to be conquered, but these days I can see my self-containment as a gift. Am I getting any better at managing my response to and interactions with other people when they do happen? I suspect not, but I’m more comfortable about avoiding them, and less concerned about ‘missing out’. I can look back on memories of happy times with friends without feeling an urgent desire to repeat them – which is a good thing, I see that now. I can have my own happy times,

Trying to explain how I feel about that at this moment, I’m grasping for the right words. Contentment, maybe? No, too mealy-mouthed. Maturity, a feeling that I am on a mountain top, where I can look back and see my life and the things I’ve done, experiences I’ve had and people I have known laid out below me – no that sounds arrogant, which isn’t at all what I mean. Enormous peace that I can be who I am. Gratitude to all those people who have loved me and whom I have loved, forgiveness of those who’ve hurt me and of myself for hurting others, and knowledge that I no longer have to seek after love, but can be whole and by myself. Non-attachment, not detachment.

Well, what a wonderful epiphany for a Thursday morning – one which won’t last, I realise that. But it is there, and might return. I want to sit with this, be bathed in it, but also to keep writing, to complete this task, this daily commitment to myself, if for no other reason than that I can then get dressed and have my breakfast.

I’ve just expanded the sentence about being on a mountain top, and it’s brought back to me a quotation I first read almost fifty years ago, when I was a student and I have to admit I got it from the cover of a Strawbs album, but I think it was originally from Lao Tzu (a name which would have meant nothing to me then). I will have to look it up…

For once Google let me down, but I did manage to find the album on my shelf and scan it in – and lo and behold, it’s from the Buddha. Doesn’t quite say what I wanted though.

I expect Lao Tzu would have said it better.    

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More Thinking About Thinking

I rounded off my post yesterday by saying flippantly: I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook. But for once I’m really glad I did just that, because it’s opened up a whole area that I can write about.

People (specifically at the moment my therapist, but in the past my brother) have asked me why I’m so open on my blog, why I share so much of myself on social media, why I don’t just write a diary and keep it private. I’ve thought about that myself, because of course it can be risky, the sorts of risks I’m not prepared to take in face-to-face conversation (maybe not equipped to, because I can never think fast enough to be able to speak my responses). Yes, sometimes I get irritated, often frustrated that meanings which seem clear when they leave my brain don’t enter someone else’s in the same way, and depressed when there’s no response at all. But occasionally there’s a spark of something that maybe leads somewhere else, to something interesting. Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without some risk.

We always assume that other people think the same way we do because we can’t imagine any other way. I only started thinking about the visual/verbal thing when I shared an early draft of Single to Sirkeci with a couple of artist friends. One commented: ‘You don’t paint pictures in the reader’s head’. I was upset because I thought, well, I’ve only got what I wrote at the time, if I didn’t describe the places I saw when I saw them how am I supposed to do anything about that now? I got round the problem by looking at my photos and describing what I saw in them, but it opened up a whole conversation about visual memory, and how can you describe something you saw two years ago? I can’t even tell you what colour the door of the house opposite is painted, even though I see it every day (it’s black with two glass panels and a silver coloured knocker, if you’re interested – I just checked through the window).

Returning to the Facebook discussion, something that amazed me was people talking about imagining scents and tastes. How is that even possible? I’ve thought about describing scents and I can’t find any words – other than very basic ones like ‘sweet’ and ‘pungent’ – which don’t compare them to other scents – how would you describe the scent of a rose to anyone who had never smelt one? (‘Sweet and flowery’? How does it differ from lilac?) Or coffee, fresh bread, smoke, shit… you might describe a scent as being ‘like’ any of those things, but you can’t really create them in the mind of someone who’s never smelt them. As I sit here I can sort of conjure up the scent of, say, coffee, but only with an effort.

Mmm, coffee – maybe something is reminding me that it must be time for breakfast.

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Left, right, Verbalise, Visualise

Things in my head today, I don’t know if I want to share them or not – not because they’re angry or shameful thoughts that potential readers might be offended or shocked by, just because they’re so incoherent, not sure if I can knock them into any sort of shape.

In the last few days I have seen one post on Facebook asking if people ‘hear voices in their heads’ when they think, and another two where you look at images and depending on what you see tells you if you’re predominantly ‘right brain’ or ‘left brain’ To deal with the right/left tests and get that out of the way, the first one told me I was ‘left’ brained and the second that I was ‘right’ – which says more about the kind of tests that get posted on FB than anything important to do with my brain.

The discussion on thinking styles was more interesting, but in the end I stepped away, even though this is something I have given a lot of thought to in recent years, because I could feel myself getting frustrated and irritated. One friend made a very good point about it illustrating how little we are able to understand what goes on in other people’s heads. It’s a few years now since the conversation I had when I told a friend that I don’t ‘see’ things in my head (unless I make a deliberate effort to do so), but that my mind is full of words, a constant narrative. I’d always assumed that that was what ‘thinking’; meant, that it’s about the words and concepts in your head, but he spoke to me as though it was a kind of disability, an affliction that marked me out from the rest of the world.

In the FB exchange there were some contributors who, like me that day, were just shocked at the idea that anyone could think any other way than with words. Others started talking about having multiple voices, ‘hearing’ accents, even linking it to schizophrenia, although to me it’s not about ‘hearing’, it’s not a voice, it’s just more like a voice-over or continuous narrative.

Someone else was sceptical because, she said, the internal narrative couldn’t be ‘continuous’, it’s always possible to stop thinking. I thought about my years of meditation – I won’t say I’ve never had any moments of a completely empty mind – but it takes effort and practice and even then it’s incredibly difficult and frustrating. The same person said she wondered if verbalisers (I hate inventing labels, but don’t know how best to express it) can feel any pleasure in reading fiction if they can’t picture the characters – I wanted to scream, because fiction is all about the story, and what are the building blocks of stories if not words? It made me think perhaps this is why I prefer radio to the telly, and reading to Youtube.

I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook.   

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Mirror, Mirror

I was going to start writing this morning by saying: ‘Suddenly, nothing makes sense.’ But I realised that’s not true, there’s nothing ‘sudden’ about it. Individually, nationally, as a culture, as a species, we’ve been heading for disaster for – how long? God knows – ever, I suppose. Just when it feels as though things can’t get any worse… no, I’m not going to end that sentence.

Most mornings I coax myself out of bed by thinking of some joy-giving activity I can do in the day to come. Yesterday I didn’t find much joy in anything. So how about today?

There’s a mirror on my wardrobe door, facing the window, in front of which is a dressing table, with another mirror, and between the two is my bed. I lay in bed this morning, with my back to the window, looking at an image of the edge of the dressing table mirror and the curtain behind, and trying to work out which side of the mirror and curtain it was. I finally convinced myself that it was the same edge and bit of curtain that appeared a little to the right in the dressing table mirror, but somehow this seemed all wrong. Shouldn’t it be the other side? Of course it shouldn’t, because it was a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, so it ended up the same as the original reflection of the curtain, but it still disturbed me.

I’ve written before about life feeling like a hall of mirrors, or a labyrinth. It’s a bit of a cliche, but this morning for a moment I felt how disorienting that experience can be.

It made me think of crossing the road in a country where they drive on the other side – although reason tells you that the traffic on the side nearest will be coming from the opposite direction to where you’d expect it from, sometimes your brain just can’t handle it, and you have to think really hard about which way you normally look so you can look to the other one. When we first moved back from the US, I was very nervous about driving in Milton Keynes, because on the wide dual carriageways I panicked that I would turn into the wrong lane. It may, of course, just be me – possibly related to dyspraxia, though I don’t usually have problems with telling right from left.

And here I am struggling to write with a cat in front of the computer and a mouse which isn’t working and a brain full of mush. I’m used to working without a mouse on the laptop, but on the PC I’m really struggling – again, it’s something I can usually do without thinking about it. Having to sit with the keyboard on my lap or to one side because the cat’s in the way doesn’t help.

I have to wrap a present, write a card and take a parcel to the Post Office this morning. Those are my tasks.  

Happy Monday.

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Spitting into the Wind

Yesterday there was something in my head that I wanted to say, but I ended up saying something completely different, and thought I would save it for today. Then this morning I couldn’t remember what it was and started thinking on different lines. Then I got an inkling of that thing from yesterday, but not sure now if I want to say either of them.

In fact, I’ve just made the classic mistake of looking something up before continuing, and having wandered into and down the rabbit hole of Google and Wikipedia, I am even more confused. But I have discovered that although for years and years I have believed that Newton’s three laws were the same as the three laws of thermodynamics – they’re not. Bugger. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially if you only know the names and not what they actually mean.

However, on the subject of universal laws…

All living things must die, and everything must change (that’s where the three laws come in, but unfortunately not Newton, so I can’t use the quote: ‘God said let Newton be! And all was light’ which is by Alexander Pope, and the reason I was poking around the rabbit hole in the first place, because I couldn’t remember who said it).  

All living things must die. Everything must change. A flame only burns until it runs out of fuel (that’s what set me thinking about the three laws). And – spoiler alert – anyone who is listening to the current Quandary Phase of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 extra should look away now – the Great God’s message to his creation is: ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’.

Any universal truth is fundamentally banal. (Who said that? Me. I don’t claim it to be original, but if I’ve stolen it I don’t know where from.)

It may be argued that true happiness means accepting the impermanence of all things and deciding that life is still worth living. On the other hand, maybe the route to true happiness is to stop thinking about all that bollox, be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Perhaps this is a fundamental difference between two types of people (the Cassandras and the Melindas) – or maybe (more likely, I’d say), there is a spectrum between the two, and we all find our own place.

Which has brought me back to the thing I was thinking about yesterday – or the bit I can remember – that for me, euphoria (Melinda) can’t be separated from existential despair (Cassandra). It’s over thirty years since I first sought professional help to ‘fix’ my psycho-emotional shortcomings, and the paradox is that any attempts to convince me that I’m ‘fine as I am’ miss the point that if I really was ‘fine’, I wouldn’t need to be convinced, I’d already know it. And if I’m not, any amount of wishing away that sense of ‘unfineness’ without accepting it as fundamental part of myself, is spitting into the wind.

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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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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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Routines and Decisions

Structure and chaos. Rules and freedom. Dyspraxia and social inadequacy – nature and nurture. Cats and husbands. This and that. Writing and not-writing.

I’ve been awake for two hours already, but I observe my routines. Time is open-ended – until 1pm, when the afternoon’s radio marathon begins (though I can delay that by setting the TiVo to Radio 4 Extra so that it can be paused and rewound if I miss anything). Little happens in the mornings beyond the routine of: feed cat; half hour yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; coffee; blogging; breakfast (which can end up being at 11, or even later). Except for shopping days, of course, but that was yesterday. There are other day-related things, apart from shopping (which isn’t strictly day-related, but has fallen into that pattern because it takes me exactly a week to use up two litres of milk), like putting the bins out (Tuesday), Zoom tai chi (Wednesday), Skype therapy (Thursday), but they all happen in the afternoon or early evening.

This is very different from pre-lockdown routine, when on most days I needed to be up and ready to go out by a certain time. Which may mean – if those activities eventually resume in a similar format to before – that post-lockdown life (which, may I say, I’m not anticipating any time soon), will be different again.

None of which is what I was thinking about in those two hours before I sat down at the keyboard.

By the way, the Joni Mitchell song I quoted from the other day wasn’t ‘The Blonde in the Bleachers’, as I said, but the one that begins:

‘Two waitresses both wearing black diamond earrings
talking about zombies and Singapore sleeves.
No trouble in their faces, not one angry voice,
none of the crazy you get from too much choice,
the thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce…’

Joni Mitchell

But surprisingly, even though I can now hear it clearly in my head, I can’t get as far as the refrain to remember what it’s actually called (nor do I have a clue what ‘Singapore sleeves’ are) – and I still haven’t got round to looking it up.

Choice as tyranny, that’s what I was going to write about. The comfort of routines versus the horror of being forced to make a decision. That’s why I cling to them in the mornings; though I don’t always wake – or get up – at the same time, the sequence of activities is quite consistent. Otherwise I lie in bed and do nothing – which is not, repeat NOT healthy for my emotional wellbeing.

I still have to make decisions, of course, and I find the two most terrifying are: what to wear, and what to have for dinner; terrifying because they are relentless. And every decision (however trivial) entails judgement: options must be evaluated, probabilities and utilities assigned; projected outcomes considered (especially unanticipated ones) in order to identify and attain an optimal solution.

It’s exhausting. Better to sit in the sun and drink coffee.