SubscribeJanuary 9th, 2011
moments of silence
Yesterday I spent outside. I stayed away from human contact as much as was possible given I live in a very big and very busy city. I walked a lot, went to the beach and walked some more. I sat in my car when I got cold and watched the birds, the sky, the water moving with a slow, deep pulse.
I also read—a wonderful, funny, provocative book by Lyn Cowan which I will tell you about later. I wrote down some impressions, some dream images. But mostly I just walked, sat and watched.
Come supper time I went to my favourite vegan restaurant and had dinner. One of the reasons it is a favoured restaurant is the site itself. It is on the second floor of a two story building overlooking a very nice stretch of tree-lined street. There are big picture windows on two sides and the table I usually choose is right up against one of those windows overlooking the street. I got to the place at civil twilight, bought some tea and sat for about 40 minutes before I ate, drinking tea and watching the light seep out of the sky and fill up the thousands of little white light bulbs that decorate all the shops and bistros along the street. Then I ate dinner when my two companions arrived.
I need those multitudinous moments of silence. It is not just a desire but a need. I cannot be me without them.
December 28th, 2010
more Hillman
When left to my own devices, I seem to follow a trail laid out by books themselves. Without reading lists generated in classrooms or book club participation, I don’t think about what to read next. There’s no need. I seem to live in a universe where I am mostly blind to what exists, or perhaps deaf to the languages of frog and tree, of body and branch. There is something nudging me, though.
Call in my unconscious if you like. In a dream I had a year ago, nearly exactly, I landed in the sea with Alfonden (my non-verbal dream partner) amidst an enormous circle of sea life. Whales I think, but all I could see from the air as I descended were giant ovoid shapes, and once in the water, I could feel their mass below me but could see nothing but water and sky. Even the land was too far to make out. My eyes, you see, cannot discern what is there. I just know that it exists all around me. “Choosing” reading material is bit like that for me. I feel a sense of “there-ness” in a text, open it, begin reading and if it persists—that gut bump and slither—then I continue the process of attending to the words. So I never know what I am going to read next; I don’t know where the whales will herd me.
What, you say, has this to do with Hillman? I found a copy of Salt and the Alchemical Soul and was so taken by the title that I ordered it from the library. After finishing Dream Animals (by Hillman) I checked my library account and found that Salt was ready for pick up. So I went to fetch it. There is an essay in Salt by Hillman, as well as one by Ernest Jones and a third by Jung. The whole book is a delight because it provides such good material for comparison of psycho-therapeutic “genres,” that it clarifies the bones (so to speak) of each approach. This seems to have been the purpose of the volume, and the introduction, which summarizes each approach, allows a broad overview of each of the three narrative worlds.
Reading the included essay by Hillman is instructive of his overall approach to the mind. It is a particularizing way of seeing the world. That is, each meaning can only really be said to exist in the interaction of its component elements in the environments which give rise to them. So there is no possibility of a steadfast symbolic meaning to any one image. Or there is, I suppose, but such a fixed approach is like pinning a butterfly to a board. All the flex and undulation of life must be absent for the “meaning” to coalesce. Hillman’s approach is a bit like Heidegger in a way: everything is bound to its time and place – or every “thing” is its time and place. I find this a powerful narrative and particularly persuasive. It’s a hard one though. One must become accustomed to paradox, multiplicity, the common intransigence of material nature with respect to human desire and uncertainty.
Reading Salt has broadened my reading of Dream Animals. There was a line in that book that caught me when I first read it, that now seems to have more body. He said, “animals as images.” Ooooooh, I thought—and the phrase ran right up into W.J.T. Mitchell and lodged there under his heart. I mean what does that mean? And then of course, Hillman’s approach slaps you and says, don’t do that! Reducing it to a concept, to a sentence or phrase, eats the heart right out of it. Animals as images. Imagine.
Then there is a phrase in “Salt: a chapter in alchemical psychology” (the name of Hillman’s essay in Salt)—salt matters. Oh my is that ever wonderful, because what he means is not just that salt is important, but that salt creates matter – it matters mind – matters as a verb. The larger idea that salt is the body’s sensation (the sting of salt water in a wound, for example), a physically based metaphor that allows us to discern types of feeling, and therefore the trail to be followed to this particular moment of self-awareness, this is a wonderful story. It is one that provides us (our conscious selves) with the eyes needed to discern the particulars of each shape under the surface of the sea. But it takes time and a willingness to follow the trail laid out by others, by the body—laid out by the history of stings and tears that experience makes. It is not a trail we (our conscious selves) can blaze. It requires a willingness to be led, but also to think along the way. It is not an abandonment of conscious life, but an inclusion of the unconscious as an equal partner. It is the recognition that we are not one, still and fixed, but many in constant motion, frolicking, leaping, hiding in the world at large.
So that’s today. Tomorrow?
December 26th, 2010
the calm of a coherent world
Boxing Day was a busy day and I got very little reading time but what I did spend I spent on Miss Buncle Married. I learnt about the Miss Buncle stories over at litlove’s place and read the first of the two after she did a review there. I was so very delighted with the first that I immediately ordered the second.
I wonder sometimes what it is about books like Miss Buncle that I so enjoy, because it is a high pleasure for me. When I look at the kinds of fiction authors I go to for a steady, warm pleasure, they are remarkably different yet they all have a way of seeing the world that is essentially kind. Even the bad guys, should they be actually bad, are dealt with kindly.
I think that was what my mother was seeking when she moved our family back to England for those years. She was an Austen fan and had the same craving for that gentle, civil world. So we moved. My father worked, I went to boarding school in Surrey and my mother converted a home and built a wonderful garden from what had been an outdoor model railway and budgerigar breeding site. It was quite a transformation and while she had that to do things went tolerably well.
The thing about the Miss Buncle-type world is that it depends so much on community agreement on the principles of life. And that agreement is formed very early in life, or has to be worked, and worked, and worked to achieve consciously. I think perhaps this sense of worldly coherence is what I love so much about these books. It is not an experience I can depend upon, not especially since I have relations in very, very different worlds—worlds whose basic assumptions are wildly different, which, of course, generates very different standards of behaviour and expectations.
It’s a nice world to visit, the Miss Buncle’s. I have to sustain the belief in such a coherent possibility, but it isn’t very hard since it would be so nice if it were so. I know that people have this golden age notion that says it used to be so, but coming from the extreme lower classes myself, I’m sorry, I know better. In Miss Buncle’s world everyone has a modicum of their needs met. Even the serving girls get to flout off from houses where they don’t get to go to the pictures. No one sees them starve once they leave the margins of the pages. It’s a delight really, but what it tells me is that to get to the place where love warms and our wants are possible, the needs based on human agreement must first be met.
Of course that’s easier if you can force your narrative of the world as the norm, but much more difficult if you are a minority in any kind of way. Hence, those who foster the idea of a golden age tend to be those whose narrative rode in the social saddle. They very understandably want to return to that place, because there, just like in a book, one can ignore those who are beyond the margins and concentrate on oneself as the central character. It makes for a delightful few hours spent reading abed, but it wouldn’t do at all to assume that the limits of the page mirror the limits of the world. Doing so makes for a revolutionary state of mind in those clinging to the page edges and a kind of fierce stoicism in those not even within reaching distance. And of course that practice—that refusal to admit the narrative quality of social life, of norms, values, morals and laws, and readmit the marginals onto the page—is what makes any coherency we achieve break down and society fracture.
Nevertheless, what makes Miss Buncle such a pleasure to read is that coherence, and that gentle civility which can be depended upon as long as you remain within the page’s influence. I’m going to try some of the author’s other books to see if she achieves a similar feeling of calm—I do very much enjoy that state, even if it is temporary and not what social life is actually like for me. I think it probably does me a world of good to settle into that felicitous, if imaginary, world once in a while. I view it as a kind of literary meditation, or a bookish person’s relaxation yoga. Because of that induced serenity, Miss Buncle helps smooth out some of the more incoherent bits of the world. Like honey and lemon on a sore throat, I suppose. It might not fix anything but it sure does feel good, and that, I suppose is valiant achievement enough.
December 23rd, 2010
feeling odd today
I had another whopper of a dream last night. Not scary or disturbing exactly but intense and apparently transformative in some way. The reason I think this is how I feel. I’ve given birth three times and each time, near the end of the process when the contractions were completely overwhelming, there was always a brief space when the last one had quieted and before the next swell began. In that space I unfolded into the universe.
Now I know that sounds really odd and very unlikely but it is the case I’m afraid. Or at least, my body was sure that what was happening and my mind, being overwhelmed by the process of living those moments just went along with the body. It’s your show, my mind would stutter before it just shut up and curled in a ball under the somatic rug.
Anyway, I am past childbearing now but apparently my body still knows how to unfold. It’s exactly how I feel right now, like there are infinite strings in the universe and this small knot of them is just the part of me that I call Mary. The rest of them, well they are you and all the rest of what is—and I can feel them just in the same way I can feel my stomach turn over when I am nervous, or feel the heat radiate from my solar plexus when I breathe deeply and evenly for more than a few minutes.
The feeling is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but just there. There is, though, a small (very small) knot of the threads that wonders if this is a prelude to a “contraction.” I suppose that very small knot is my mind hiding under the rug. And, no, I don’t drink and I don’t drug. It’s just my form of an odd cerebral set up.
Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s in part because I am reading Chas Clifton’s her hidden children and it seems to be related to the process and to the dream last night. I am not sure how yet, but as I keep reading maybe it will become clear. If it’s not too boring I’ll tell you about it here.
December 2nd, 2010
aggression in women and the pouting princess
I’m an aggressive person. And female. That seems to be a problem. I keep getting counselled to “let it go.”
Certain things make me really mad and to be truthful I suspect that at least some of the things that make me mad are the result of my pedophile “uncle” (hereafter known as “P”).
Yuck, I know. (Please relax. I am not going to tell you about that set of experiences, rather I would like to briefly meditate on the outcome today, all these decades later.)
I acknowledge that some of my aggression is the result of trauma and emotional damage. However, I suspect I would have been aggressive whether or not P turned up to the family property that summer. My father was a terrier with an attitude. He was, frankly, terrifying in his rages and drunken affection and I have inherited some of that disposition, although not the alcoholism. (I associate the feeling of being out of control with the hurt of others and therefore do not partake to the point where I feel that instability which precedes drunkenness.) What I suspect is that P narrowed the focus of the natural aggression. I react poorly, for example, to threats to my physical or emotional safety or to the safety of children or others under the power of a “well wishing” majority.
One time, as an example, a boyfriend thought that pushing me into a corner was the answer to my anger at a bit of his behaviour. Before I knew quite what was happening I had a pair of scissors in my hand and the points were headed for his throat. He had very long (and fast) legs. Last I saw of him he was booting it down the road outside the apartment.
I have fought very hard to control the actual outcome of my anger. I did not kill the bugger above, for example. And as soon as the threat was gone, so was the anger. I will not tolerate what I consider to be abusive behaviour. Even things as simply juvenile as snides, snarls, slammed doors and tossed heads in the work place I consider worthy of disparagement, nay, outright scorn. I recognize it makes me an uncomfortable, and vaguely threatening person to be around and there is no cure for that I’m afraid. I just stay away as much as is possible from people who are afraid or threatened by my presence. I don’t really care if a 30-something year old acts like a 10 year old except when I have to both witness it and suffer its effects. If you want to be a princess do it away from me. That’s all I require. I don’t think it too much really. And if you do decide to sport your tiara and flip your hair at me, I will attack.
A lot of people see that as a problem though. I keep being told that I can be assertive without being aggressive, for example. Actually, I’m not sure that this is really possible, not without changing an important component of what makes me me. It’s who I am, welded, now, to the bones of what I would have been.
I am a badger. Leave me alone and I am kind of fun to watch. But I have enviable claws and a disposition to dig.
I do like being me for the most part. While I have had several rather nasty things happen to me in my life, I feel more than compensated by my “gifts.” I hear the sky singing, for example, and when the brain shifts sideways I can also experience yellow as a “ting” sound and other such cross-modalities. I can think; I can reason. I can flow in and out of the experience called “art.” I have wonderful children and friends. I live in a country that will take care of me should I need it. And perhaps most importantly, I have a strong sense of ethics.
This last – my sense of what is OK and what is not OK in the commerce between people – I thank P for that. The horror that was his life, his actions, his pain and inability to control it, left me (and others) irrevocably changed. I can never be what I would have been, but I don’t think of justice as pertaining to the outcome for the transgressor but justice is rather the eventual outcome for the transgressed. And I think justice has been achieved: my life is a good one all told.
I am aggressive and not simply assertive, it’s true, but I suspect that my justice achieved is really due to my agression, so it is not something I would forgo for others’ comfort’s sake. I can’t help but think of the time and current places where the chucking of full grown women under the chin, the silly diminutive names and bottom pinchings that highlight genderized power disparities and the people who counsel the few outraged women to accept what men are like for the sake of peaceful co-existence. Rage has its problems, of course, but it is also the social change engine.
For me one key to living with rage is the control of my behaviour. Yes, I make most people uncomfortable but I never actively set out to hurt except in self defense. Rage is a form of power and it must be controlled. P taught me that. Still, I don’t think social ease is something that should be overtly fostered, rather the self awareness that must underpin any real acceptance of others should be the focus of our joint efforts. (I mean, the vocalizations of the deaf make many hearing people visibly uncomfortable. Whose problem is that?) Hair flippers that gain self awareness stop being hair flippers. Since I see the source of hair flipping and its generalized form, princess pouting as emotional immaturity and as such an emblem of emotional damage in a woman that should have achieved a higher level of maturity, I think that addressing that damage is the way to achieve justice. So I leave it alone until flipped and then inquire if the person realizes that she isn’t really a princess. “You do realize that daddy wasn’t really a king, don’t you?”
Don’t you think that should be warning enough? Certainly it’s better than smacking her upside the head.
The other key to living with rage is a profound respect for the nature of what is. Slipping into the easy but empirically incorrect comforts of belief is dangerous to self, but more importantly, dangerous to others. The princess pout limits the pouter but it actively hurts the eye and ear of the one witnessing the shocking loss of decorum. To be more serious, I do find that my ability to feel joy, to fall into awe, is directly relational to my ability to accept how I actually am, where from I, in fact, came and where to, in fact, I will go. Princess pouters cause me pain and while I can moderate my response to that pain, I cannot stop the pain itself. Nor should I have to really. It’s not that I expect the princesses of the world to stop being affected assholes, just that I expect them to do what I do and control their natural propensities. In other words, pout all you like, just don’t do it near me. I mean, really, all of us need to shit but most of us learn to do it in a way and place set apart for such unsocial needs. Princess pouting is just a sort of emotional defecation. Do it in private please.
I suppose you can see why I am not universally liked. Oh the joy of living with others.
November 21st, 2010
sumitting poetry for publication
I have a package of poetry currently under consideration by a literary magazine (it didn’t come back in the SASE the week after I sent it with a big ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME scrawled across the cover letter, so that’s a good sign) and am preparing another one to send out Monday. It is oh so very scary to send stuff out. I literally have to close my eyes and hold my breath when I drop the envelope into the mail box -
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh, my insides go
and then publishers can take months to get back to you so you have to wonder all that time. Torture.
November 13th, 2010
nothing coheres
Living is normally like a narrative. Moments of time cohere, seem as if they are antecedent and subsequent to this one moment now. But for the last two days things refuse to join up.
Today at Trout Lake the ducks – preening that soft spot under wing. Yesterday at civil twilight, no ducks to be seen, but their quiet croaks drift past the frenzied joy of playing dogs.
There is a change in park personnel at twilight. The dog owners give way to after-work runners and those coming to find a place to drink then sleep. Dogs and day-chittering sparrows give way to skunks, raccoons and coyotes. At the same time flights of crows float forward below low hanging clouds, homeward to roost, nestled together.
It’s really hard to write poetry when the mind skitters. Even to read more than a paragraph or two seems impossible.
I slept on and off until 3 this afternoon, and still I’m tired.
The neighbour cat comes running when I come home. He stops at the door and peers in at my three female cats and then asks for kibble. My cats just ignore him now. At first they hissed and made a terrible fuss. I’ve carried him in a few times and he seems interested and not at all afraid, but then asks for his kibble on the stone outside the door.
It’s not unpleasant this mindlessness, except, perhaps, for a modicum of fear. Am I losing my mind? Absurd of course.
What does it mean that nothing is inherently meaningful?
November 9th, 2010
sound and calm
I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “quiet” for me. It’s not the absence of sound certainly. For example, yesterday I was anxious, out of sorts, almost panicky in my need for this elusive “silence.” I thought at first just to stay home where it is, in fact, pretty quiet but the thought of that drove the panic into a little flurry. So I got dressed, grabbed my stuff and got in the car.
Driving out on the highway has a calming effect on me most of the time. City traffic cuts down on the sensation but once there is some speed, some space and an open window spilling life smells into my personal space, I almost always feel tension lifting. And of course, driving with one’s window open is not quiet at all.
It’s not even the absence of human sounds because I often come to this cafe where there are always people talking, music playing, the sounds of cars moving on the road: the chitter of civilization. But the sounds make sense. They have a kind of harmony once one is accustomed.
But yesterday even that seemed impossible so I found myself heading along the highway to a small marine park I know just over the U.S. border. I got there, through a patch of hail, to find a blue sky, sun filled afternoon with just a touch of cold breeze. I travel with blankets and a pillow at all times so I just set up a temporary camp in this driftwood enclosure. I took my shoes and socks off, curled up under the sleeping bag and turned my face to the sun.
As I breathed I could feel the calm spreading. Where the tension had left on the drive here, instead there was a spreading warmth, a kind of resilient looseness that I haven’t felt much of in these last years. That calm has something to do with the sound world. The waves were a small shush, the bird calls and pronouncements were pointed, like arpeggios in an otherwise stately piece. The wind had the quiet power of a viola, and the dogs and their people were like well placed percussion. I didn’t hear anything with specific meaning, that is, nothing was intelligible but somehow everything had meaning. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Periodically I would sit up, read a bit, write when phrases would pass through my head on their way from and to where ever. Then I would lay down again. Sometimes I turned so the sun warmed the back of my head, sometimes I would keep my eyes open so that I could watch the bald eagle sit at the end of the pier watching the ocean. Most of the time I had my eyes closed and just drifted on the harmony that I was perceiving as sound.
I spent several hours that way.
I think, just based on my own experience, that there are certain sound ‘scapes that are conducive to promoting this “calm.” Certain kinds of nature work best for me, although the coffee house works to release tension most days. I suspect that these ‘scapes are somehow simlilar to the pattern of organization that is present in me when that calm is working. Like a kind of mimesis, the pattern of the calm is an echo of the pattern of sound of that day at the marine park and so one can foster the other.
That make sense? I’m talking out of my hat here.
November 7th, 2010
at odds
It’s strange feeling at odds with the day. I’m cold, so much so that I can feel the tension and slight shake that comes with a lowered body temperature, and yet, it’s sunny, warm, I have a thick sweater, am inside next to a window and sitting here in a pool of sun.
I know it’s chemical but still, I feel as if somehow I have slipped sideways out of phase with what is.
This will fix itself. Suddenly, without warning, I will be hot and my body will re-establish itself in the here and now. But while it lasts, despite what I know to be true, I feel as if I am not really quite here. This feeling impresses upon me the power of our chemical nature to conscribe what is real. What this means, of course, is that when I am feeling a part of things, this is also chemically induced.
Don’t you find that odd to think about?
September 30th, 2010
The quaking aspens are turning
Today is not a good day: despite the blue sky and sun; despite the golden aspen leaves and willow spears just beginning to fly.
I’ve spent most of the day out under the sky. The moving air and distant horizon compensates for the internal trembling. For moments, in the sun, especially if a breeze lifts, I can feel a moment of stillness. Then, from that place, I can feel the waning half moon on my skin and hear it as an echo, a fluttering against my skin. As fast as I can sense it, it’s away again; I try but I can’t quite reach.
Is it just time / to heal this – catching up to me?