Inchoate Ramblings

In Carol Shield’s last, and in my opinion sharpest and most affecting work, we are presented amongst other things with all the pain and beauty of family life. Painted on a much smaller canvas than her Pulitzer Prize winning “The Stone Diaries”, “Unless” cuts deeply at a key moment of a family’s life.  A mother, Reta, is preoccupied with not only the travails of being a female writer engaged in translating French poetry into English, but also with a daughter called Norah who, for reasons that are not revealed until the very denouement, has chosen to sit silently on a street corner in Toronto holding an increasingly dirty cardboard sign upon which she has scrawled the word “Goodness”.

Without unpacking many of the braided reasons that Norah has chosen to spend her life in this way, and in that process revealing far too much of the story to generate any interest in you wanting to read it, the reason that has always interested me most was that this act was Norah’s final acceptance that the world was so big, so painful, so beautiful and so exhausting that the most honest way to interrelate with it, to deal with those vagaries that tug wearisomely at the soul, was not to confront them with expectation, regret, fear or even happiness, but to totally renege on having any emotional engagement with them at all. To sit on a corner of a busy city intersection and just accept stoically and placidly that the world will always hurt  and always sing.

This paradox, the act of acceptance being the act of confident resignation, has long intrigued me. I read the book when it first came out in 2002 and I suspect then that I was too young to fully appreciate the message. It seemed a pretty tale to be sure, but some part of me was deeply sceptical of Norah and her what then seemed to be clearly indulgent behaviour. To me at that time the world seemed boundlessly engaging and through the sheer act of will and intellect I could bend it to my every want and desire. I could travel anywhere and do anything and stay wherever I happened to alight. Eight years later I am constantly reminded that the world in which we live, and by that I mean the social and geographic fabric that constitutes our daily reality and generates for us meaning, belonging and those ephemeral tangentia such as happiness, exist at the whim and capricious bequest of fates of such a greater scale than I as to be wholly malignant in their ignorance of me. As Dickens said in a differing context, they move like the great ponderous heads of melancholic elephants. They are born of mankind but no longer aware of the upheavals that they can create.

The true wisdom and beauty of what Shields is telling us, is telling me, is that maturity comes in the acceptance of those far distant but overwhelmingly consequential actions of others. Our pleasures and pains are so contingent on the world that is sustained by things we have no control over that to find contentment we must look beyond the immediate tapestry of our lives in the hopes of finding, and reconciling with, the underlying total lack of our significance to others purpose. A reconciliation generated not through mutual accommodation of us with them, but with our total acceptance of them and their ability to erupt into our carefully husbanded world.

This is why, to me, the book is entitled Unless. What a remarkable way to in two syllables express such a complex notion. I will be happy “unless” the actions of others dictates otherwise. I will be sad “unless” something intercedes to arrest that. In these coming months of seemingly unlimited uncertainty, where everything I have come to value, the tapestry I have weaved over the last 5 years that is the beauty of my life to date, is held in contingent jeopardy by the unfeeling and splendidly isolated structures and processes of others, I will try to bear in mind the notion of Unless.

Noun – dystopia - state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror

Closing line, 1984, George Orwell. “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

The most pernicious effect of prolonged exposure to that which is chronically and sustainedly distasteful is not the infliction of pain and suffering, it is the very alteration of the self, bringing it into accordance with the perverted “realities” of the situation at hand. The final victory of Big Brother is not the grievous torture inflicted upon Winston Smith in Room 101, it his recognition of the value of that torture. It is the very remodelling of Winston’s soul in imitation of his surroundings where the true nightmare of Orwell’s totalitarian state is most fully revealed.

It was then an interesting alignment that I remembered Orwell’s warnings last week. My best friend and I had lunch last week. Watching people pass the packed Sushi place there were so many faces we “recognised” from the past. People we had taught? Dated? Fucked? Who can say. As we walked away puzzled and unable to place these echoes of the past, I said, in one of those throwaway lines fraught with meaning, that sometimes if feels like the only people we no longer recognise are ourselves, and what we have become.

I am oft prompted to remark that I have not enjoyed the last 18 months or so of my life. The list of reasons as to why this may be is shall we say extensive, and even a cursory glance over the ever so depressing, and deeply self indulgent,  ”recent” posts on this blog will reveal many of these. A PhD that has become a protracted soliloquy to folly. A Department that runs on nepotism and random acts of cruelty, and is imbued with a fatalistic love of the leader that would not go amiss in a 1945 German bunker. A financial situation that has deteriorated beyond mere “bad” through the comparatively happy uplands of “unsustainable” to complete epic madness. If I could print money I would be in hyper-inflationary Weimar excess. A family situation that has seen death and hysteria.

My current life is painted against surrealist madness. I spend my days in a place that is so totalising in its conceit and self adulation. A place so dissonant of the evidence heaped against it and so unfeeling in the agony it causes through wilful decision and sub conscious reflex. I am ensconced in sadness. It scares me not because I think being sad is “wrong” or “incorrect” but that I am no longer able to control it, or predict it. I spin off into wells of self loathing, and then just as randomly pop to the surface all smiles and jollity. I do not attribute this solely to others, I know well enough the “black dogs” that walk with me of my own creation. I am well aware of my own failings.

I want to scream and shout, were it that the gods of Hades listened, about just what I have become and what I have lost and our joint culpability in this process. That being ignored and shunned and criticised for the failings of others is part of the reason I now sit in silence. Prolonged exposure to all of this has rendered me unintelligible to myself, and wholly incompatible with who I thought I was “then” and who I wanted with such long quenched ferocity to be by “now”. I was not always so sad, so deprived of stability and so quick to judge. I did not always turn my faculty for scorn so quickly on others. I did not always feel in monochrome.

I take strength, if that is the right word, in the fact I do not love Big Brother. That I have been brought to this place is not the same as being a willing citizen of it. I want to tell those who do not care that the very fact I still come into this place, still do my job and then some, is every day a victory over their empty careless protestations. That I cannot be ground down, even when evidence of my erosion clouds my eyes and judgement. That I am determined to walk out of this place, when the last time comes, having achieved that which I came here for. This is my victory, so much less, and so much more, than what I felt I could have become all those years ago. It is this mythic full stop, this act of punctuation after a ill formed and interminable sentence, that keeps me going.

I don’t know what to write

I want to explain what I have tried to explain before, what I have become and the spaces within me where I used to feel. Now I just echo with past absence

I used to be, if not a happy person, than a person that could make others happy. I could smile and joke and just be normal. Sometimes I would be sad, I would be like this, but those were moments of punctuations in longer sentences of normality.

Now I have nothing but this. I have a contiguous space where I used to be. I don’t have sentences and verses, stanzas and paragraphs. I live my life in parentheses, filled only with semi colons and muted exclamation marks.  Nathan asks what is wrong, and the thing is, I don’t think anything is wrong. I am not cross, and nothing is the matter. I am just this. The closest word I have to describe it is sad, but this is to sad as Uluru is to sand.

I am sad because all I dreamt this should have been, my PhD and my “academic” “department”, has turned into an endless nightmare. No one read my work, no one cared to do their job. I tried so hard, I tried with all I had, and I end up here, now, a pariah to other people’s vanity. I turn up every day, and sometimes I even smile. I could cope with being angry, what worries me is that I am nothing anymore.

I am sad because someone I loved, well love, hurt me so very deeply. In a way that I thought I could deal with, and instead has just tunnelled into me and corrodes me as endless rains do to concrete.

I am sad because all I have every day is a travesty of the life I wanted. I could handle not getting it, but now I rotate around the emerging belief that I may not even deserve it.

I sat at a friends leaving dinner tonight. I should not have gone. I know well enough what this is like. I had no words. I had chronic embarrassment, but I had no words. I could not eat, even though I was hungry. I drank a glass of water. Small victories. The people on the next table were staring at me. I am sure I would have stared as well.

I want Nathan to come home and fall asleep in my arms. I want to feel his confidence in me in the darkness write poems in the air pregnant with happiness.

One day I hope this will be a memory. I just need to hang in there and, when it becomes possible, get out of here.  But, for now, for the record, I am no longer coping. I am merely dealing.

I am sad because, despite it all, I know exactly what to write.