Category: books

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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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Choices

For the second day running I have not gone to the beach for sunrise and then wished I had when it was too late. I was awake in plenty of time, then just lay there, and then read for a bit, and I had an idea for a poem, and when I got up I wrote it on the laptop (but don’t feel like I want to share it at the moment). I did it in Open Office, which reminded me that there are many features from Word which are missing from OO, but at least it works and I’ll be able to write in cafes or other places – come such time as I can do that again, which hopefully will return.

I should go out. I mean, I really should go out somewhere, the sun is shining today, I could walk to the beach and maybe get a take-away bacon butty somewhere. Yesterday I didn’t go out at all, or Sunday, only Saturday when I went to the shop. I know it’s not healthy to sit indoors all the time, and the weather is no excuse at the moment, but somehow… In normal times I would go out for breakfast just as motivation to get myself out of the door. In the summer I ate my breakfast in the garden most days, and stayed sitting out there with my crochet, which is better than never leaving the house.

I’ve been reading two books in parallel, one on the Kindle and one in print. After my conversation with the lady in the local bookshop just before lockdown, I felt quite ashamed of myself for continuing to support Amazon by having everything on Kindle, but it is so much more convenient. I’ve now compromised by deciding I will read from the Kindle in bed and proper books when I’m sitting. One of the big advantages of the Kindle is being able to adjust the size of the font. I have so many books that I’ve never read – mostly picked up second-hand – and I worry that my eyesight will go before I’ve read most of them. And of course I spend a lot of time listening to readings and dramas on the radio, so that I can knit or crochet at the same time.

The two books I’m currently reading both have subjects that sound quite dry – one about the history of the Hapsburg Empire (‘Danubia’ by Simon Winder – paperback) and one about DH Lawrence (‘Out of Sheer Rage’ by Geoff Dyer – Kindle) but they’re both written with such wit and humour that they’re great fun  – I think so, anyway. I’ve mentioned the Dyer one before, about how he keeps writing about how he can’t write this book. The bit I was reading this morning was about regret, and how he shares with Lawrence the knowledge that whatever choices he makes, he knows he will regret not doing the opposite. I don’t think I’m that bad.

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Process and Outcome (and losing a poem)

It’s a cliché to say that the quest is more important than the prize, the journey matters more than the destination. This is the meaning of the story of the Crescent Moon Bear, (retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés), with the added subtlety that it is the hardships the protagonist experiences through the journey that give her the skills she needs to keep going and deal with her challenges (which are still there when she returns home).

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012
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Not Writing, but Blogging

Where does this stuff come from? I sit down with a vague idea and the words come out in a completely different direction – like starting from a conversation about the role of fate and chance in an individual life and going off on one about Isaac Asimov and the fates of galaxies (not to mention Planet Earth).

Lately much of my time is being taken up with obsessing over getting this jumper finished – so much so that I haven’t even touched the weather blanket for a week. And a fair amount of that time, of course, is taken up with untangling wool, although yesterday I felt as though there was a better balance, and that I made reasonable progress (admittedly it was a less complicated part of the design). In fact it even feels as though I may be approaching the end – although I still have to do the sleeves, which always take longer than expected. I’ve made a start on one of them (when the body got too stressful) and I’ve decided to incorporate small candy canes into the pattern to relieve the boredom.

I still have moments (or even hours) of panic that she’s not going to like it. But then I think – too late to go back now, I might as well just keep on the way I’m going, knowing that whatever my daughter’s opinion, I’ll be embarrassed by it when it’s done. She asked for it, I tell myself, and she knows well enough it will probably turn out to be a mess.

But I’ve decided to stop worrying about the quality of the things I make (which goes for my writing too, which is why I’m still writing this blog). Also I heard on the radio the other day that only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, but almost 1800 were discovered by her sister after her death. What does it matter?

This takes me back again to ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the idea of the poetic imagination, or Wild Spirit, (or whatever you want to call it) being stolen or given away or strangled at birth. Looking back over my life – which I still haven’t delved into in depth – has shown me how much I’ve repressed, denied, pushed away, belittled that side of myself, while simultaneously longing for it. So I’ve decided just to do what I can without thinking too much about it or expecting anything from it. Lockdown helps, of course – as it did in the spring: I feel a lot less stressed and more content when I don’t have to go out and interact with other people. That’s something else Dickinson is famous for – it’s said she rarely left her bedroom –at least I have a whole house to myself.

Despite longing for the life of a wild bohemian, I never had the nerve or the opportunities. I’ve always been more Emily Dickinson than Bloomsbury – and at least it requires a lot less energy.  

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Foundation and Pandemic

No dreams to report today.

I have to go out today and tomorrow: this morning, to take Miko to the vet’s for a checkup and blood test to monitor how she’s getting on; and tomorrow I’m going for a mammogram at the hospital. I don’t mind too much – we are both getting older and creaky, and it’s good to know someone is looking out for our health. Miko is less than thrilled, as she can’t have breakfast because of the blood test – I wish I’d got an earlier appointment than 10:30, I didn’t think about it till it was too late to change – must remember next time. The vet is checking her quarterly at the moment, though it seems to have gone fast since the last time.

Yesterday I started talking about fate. My yoga teacher once said that Destiny is what is supposed to happen and Fate is what happens due to our actions, which sounds as though it makes sense, but doesn’t really when you start to think about it. Is Destiny what’s going to happen, or isn’t it? If it can be changed, by individual actions or collective, then in what sense was it ‘predestined’? I’ve been described by people as a ‘gloom and doomer’, particularly with regard to climate change, but I’ve never claimed that it was inevitable, just that trends in the scientific understanding and a knowledge of human behaviour have made it increasingly so over the three (nearly four) decades I’ve been observing it.

When I was an undergraduate, almost half a century ago, I read the ‘Foundation’ trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which an interplanetary federation developed computer systems powerful enough to model all physical, social and economic trends and predict the future of the galaxy. In the story, the ability to plan for and control the threads of destiny was disrupted, initially by a mutant human who developed psychic abilities and took over supreme power, and although he eventually got his comeuppance (I forget how), events were never returned to their original trajectories. Since then, a lifetime of experience and observation has convinced me that it doesn’t take a mutant dictator to throw Destiny into confusion, just the usual work-in-progress of individuals and groups interacting and living and doing what people do without understanding, or caring about, the outcomes of their collective actions – all conspiracies collapse under the weight of sheer unadulterated human cock-up.

For years, scientists have been warning that we were overdue for a global pandemic – it could have been ebola, it could have been SARS, or bird flu, or swine flu – it wasn’t any of those, but the stories popped up every couple of years in the news, and were forgotten by most members of the public, (apart from geeky doomer-types still harbouring the soul of an over-excitable 18 year old statistics student). Medical and population trends continued to predict it was bound to happen – sooner or later.

Welcome to sooner – and funnily enough, no-one was prepared for it.

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Fail Better

Dropping the bucket down in to the well and seeing what comes up, as I do most days, a bit of this, some of that, maybe the odd scrap of inspiration, quite a lot of repetition. My online avatar, theoretically accessible to thousands, in practice viewed by very few – is it, as online personas supposedly are, pure fabrication, or is it truer to who I am than the perceptions of those who think they know me in Real Life? I show and tell so much on here that I would struggle to explain face to face, but realised many years ago that this is a safe space where few venture to look.

In trying to look at myself and my life with attention but without judgement, in trying to discover and welcome my Wild Thing, I look back over all the times I have run away, and the people, situations and commitments I have run away from. According to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, there is not one single descent into the underworld, the wild forests of the psyche, one lesson to be uncovered, learnt and brought to light, but layers beneath layers.

From all my runnings away, I have never returned voluntarily. Although once or twice it might seem that I chose to turn back (thinking specifically of returning from the USA to the house my husband and I had left four years earlier), the situation I returned to was always different from the one I left (or at least, I was different – in that case, I was now a mother with two small children, and no longer a professional career woman) and in each case it was only a matter of time before I ran away again (except arguably the most recent, but of course it could still happen – only time will tell).

What am I trying to say? That reading Pinkola Estés’ book is leading me to reflect on all those times I have leapt into the unknown, the choices I made (which were largely my own, though some also involved my husband), and see them as… well, maybe answering the call of the Wild Woman?

Last week, I read a piece where she suggested drawing up a time-line of life-events and at the time I dismissed the idea, but then I wrote about my first running-away – in fact the first two – going away to university and then accepting the first (actually, the only) man who asked me to marry him.

I have a tendency to look back on my life as a string of failures: failed marriages, failed (or abandoned) careers, dreams that were fulfilled but then turned to dust and ashes. But perhaps there were lessons learnt, things gained which weren’t recognised because they weren’t what I thought I was looking for? Most of those runnings-away were thrilling, at least in the early days, even though I eventually came to the conclusion that wherever I went, I could never ‘run away from myself’.

Fail again. Fail better.

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Dreams and Explorations

I mentioned a few days ago that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Yesterday I tried to remember as soon as I woke up, and retained a few things, which I didn’t write down and now they’ve gone, but today I did the same and am going to write what I can remember.

The main theme was that I was visiting an old, strange house, near the sea – not here, but somewhere with cliffs and a rough grey sea, a dangerous sea. The house appeared to belong to my ex husband (although part of it was rented out to some other people), slightly ironic because I was always the one who wanted to live near the sea, and he was never interested. Rough seas and old, strange houses have cropped up in my dreams from way, way back, though I can’t remember them ever occurring together before. Exploring an old house signifies exploring your own psyche, and I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I don’t know about rough seas, but I wasn’t on the sea or threatened by it, just watching it from the beach, and also from the house.

One specific incident in the dream that I remember was that I got stuck in an automatic door leaving a supermarket, and couldn’t move to go either in or out. I could see my ex, who was loading shopping into the back of a car in the car park, and I kept calling his name to get him to come and help me, but he couldn’t hear me because he was busy with the shopping. I don’t think you have to dig too deeply to find a message in that. Another man came up behind me from inside the shop and I suppose he freed me. Also, later I was in the house and washing up at the sink, when a strange man came up behind me, put his arms round me and kissed the back of my neck (or was it the side of my face?)

Thinking again about the stuck-in-the-door incident, I don’t actually remember the second man freeing me, just talking to me. So it could be that I managed to free myself – which would be a better reflection of what happened in my life.

Yesterday in my therapy session I read what I wrote on Wednesday about my childhood – though she’s heard the story before, of course. I’m still reading my way through ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’. She recommended it – two years ago, when I didn’t read it – because of the part about transitioning into the third stage of life, as the Crone or Wise Woman. But it’s leading me to re-evaluate the whole course of my life – which is why I wrote about my childhood expectations of what life as a woman would be like. Often I read things in it which bring me up short – about being lost, wandering, not knowing what you’re looking for – and finding a new self.

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Tangled

Every morning (mostly) I sit down with a blank screen and the faint hope that by the end of 500 words I will have said something worthwhile. Admittedly, five hundred words isn’t much, though some days it’s a struggle to fill it. Sometimes something occurs to me just at the end, which is why the title (always written afterwards) often refers to the final paragraph. Maybe I should carry on beyond 500 words? I tried that two years ago, and I don’t recall it being any more productive. I have a file (Word table) containing extracts taken from these posts that I think might be worth expanding, and the dates when they were posted, but I never look at it. Maybe that’s a project for one day, but I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of repetition and few surprises.

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘should’, which is anathema to my therapist, and most other therapists, coaches and others of that ilk I’ve come across. A couple of weeks ago she asked me whose standard I’m trying to emulate – but when I ask: ‘what should I do?’ I’m asking for help, not to be set a goal. There are many things which, if I did them regularly would I’m sure help make my life less chaotic and more satisfying, but, in the phrase she used last week, I ‘can’t be arsed’. But if she, or anybody else, tried to tell me to do them, I would feel patronised and insulted and do anything to avoid it.  

Half way through, and I gave in and looked at what I wrote yesterday. Ah yes, the quest of the Crescent Moon Bear, and what did you learn from the journey? I enjoy reading her analysis of the stories but don’t find her suggestions of how to apply the lessons to your own life very helpful in a practical sense. This is also true of every self-help book I’ve ever read. I remember my PhD supervisor commenting that I have to think things through from first principles – I didn’t know then what he meant, but I think it’s because I can’t understand an argument unless my head can get inside it and see where it’s coming from, but once I can do that, it seems obvious and I don’t know why everybody else can’t see it as well. It’s like the time I spent last night (about two hours) extracting one single thread from the tangle of the border threads for my blanket. I thought I had them all separated only last week, but somehow just by taking it out of the bag each day, attaching a new square and putting it back again, I now have a hopeless mess. I honestly can’t understand how it happens – presumably it’s dyspraxia-related but I don’t see how.

My thoughts and words don’t want to play the game today either. But putting things down and coming back to them later, trite though it sounds, does work sometimes.

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Chasing Rainbows? (to be continued – perhaps)

I keep hinting that there are ‘deeper’ things I want to write about, but that I don’t have time because the trivial everyday things take up my word count, and then I’m done and can leave whatever it is for another day. Except this morning I’m staring at the blank screen and empty Sunday-morning street and not sure how to set foot on this morning’s path, or where it’s going to take me, if anywhere at all.

Thursday’s therapy session was a bit like that. I hadn’t got any major rants to read out, or insights from the week, or anything at all that I could think of to say – not that it had been a perfectly blissful week, but in that moment I wasn’t tapping into anything in particular, so it descended almost into (very expensive) chit-chat. Sometimes it’s like that, but it never means the darkness has gone away for good, and I don’t suppose there’ll ever come a time when it will. There’s still the ongoing issue over housework, with the therapist (who of course has never stepped inside my house) obviously assuming that I’m exaggerating, and falling into the same pattern of people who don’t want to hear the truth as I see it. At one point, as I was trying to explain, she said: ‘that doesn’t sound like dyspraxia so much as you can’t be arsed to do it’ to which my reaction was: yes of course that’s what I’m saying, I can’t be arsed, I’m lazy and don’t take responsibility, how can you possibly not know that when I’ve told you a million times? I didn’t put it in quite those words, but my heart did sink a little to think she really wasn’t getting me at all. When we Skype I sit on the sofa and all she sees is a blank wall behind me, I was going to try doing it in the study last week but remembered at the last minute that there’s no webcam on the PC so that’s no good, maybe I’ll bring the laptop up here next time.

Well, so I did find something to write about which isn’t about causality, creativity, liminality, fate and destiny. Or Women Who Run With the Wolves. This week I read her analysis of the story about the Crescent Moon Bear, which is a version of the Grail story, that the point of the quest is not about the ostensible object, but the lessons you learn from undergoing the quest itself. This is hardly an original thought, but it is an interesting one to reflect upon. When I came back from my original travels, I felt I hadn’t learnt anything at all, that nothing had changed, that I couldn’t run away from myself; and the only lesson when I came back from Prague was there no way on earth I could ever be a teacher. Or maybe the lesson is: you can keep chasing rainbows, but make sure you’re enjoying the chase?