I am re-thinking and re-reading Helen Garner. All week her books and their image have surrounded me. In photos she does not smile for the camera but looks to one side. The photographer has caught her during a thoughtful moment, perhaps during a conversation, maybe mid sentence and in one photo she holds the tip of her fingers together as if she is disseminating a closely woven thought. Her hair is short, neat and brown. I can only guess that her eyes are brown. I have seen them close up but I cannot remember whether they were blue or brown or shades between, though I imagine them as brown to match her autumn temperament. To me Garner has an autumn temperament, 'the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...the maturing sun.'
I’ve read somewhere her daughter talking about Garner’s amazing legs and I remember my desire several years ago after one of the Mietta’s writing events at Federation Square when I scoured the shops trying to find a pair of purple stockings just like Garner’s.
I want to write to Helen Garner again and tell her how sorry I am. In my last letter to her I think I was trying to show off, trying to show her how clever I was under the guise of trying to get her to take me seriously in relation to my thesis topic. But now I suspect she will only experience my writing as pompous and peacock.
I am ashamed of my desire to impress Garner, my desire to seduce her, to make her my friend, to want her to rely on me for something, anything however small, just as I rely on her. I have to remind myself that I am a reader, one of many, an admiring reader perhaps but like everyone else, especially those who try to write themselves, I am prone to fits of jealousy.
I have never been able to, or even wanted to dismiss Garner's writing. I have wondered about her interpretation of Anu Singh in Joe Cinque’s Consolation and of Joe himself. Garner says she’s one sided in her appreciation of Joe’s parents. She has come to love his mother and that might account for some of it. After all Anu Singh murdered Joe. But Garner in the book seems to see Anu Singh as the representation of evil in Singh's failure to recognise the horror of what she had done. Garner pays lip service to the notion that Anu Singh is mentally unsound but she does not seem to understand the blatant disregard for others that someone like Anu Singh might manifest.
Anu Singh from what I have read in Joe Cinque’s Consolation, and from news reports elsewhere suffers some sort of personality disorder, to use the horrible psychiatric jargon. She’s 'borderline', destructively narcissistic. She can’t see past her own nose, herself as the wounded and traumatised infant who must be immediately given whatever she wants, who must be cosseted and who can become overwhelmingly vengeful when things do not go her way. This to a pathological extreme. She’s not your average young woman caught up in the madness of disappointment in a loved one, in a relationship. She’s probably not even capable of loving someone in the first place.
So what was Joe C doing with her in the first place, I asked myself continuously in reading his consolation? What was he doing smitten by such a woman, drawn to her, living with her, putting up with her? There were rumours as I recall that he was thinking of leaving her and that in part may have inspired her wish to do away with him. Anu Singh could not bear to be abandoned, but all of that was towards the end. They’d been living together for some time.
If there ever exists such a couple where one is the innocent victim and the other a cruel ogre I tend to see it as a function of the two. Of course there are some situations where young women are forced unwillingly into alliances not of their choosing, maybe sometimes even young men so forced, though I cannot think of any off hand. Joe C presumably chose consciously to be with Singh. Why was he so naïve, so blind, so innocent? Or was he, too, like Singh's friend Madhavi Rao, caught up in the siren’s song?
What is this siren’s song? Have I been lured by it in Garner’s writing, but her writing is not a siren’s song. It does not lead the reader onto the rocks of destruction, broken and battered, though maybe that’s how some people find it.
I write about these people as though they are characters in a novel. But these people exist in reality and I am troubled by the ease with which I dissect them here as if they are fictions.
To this extent people are challenged by Garner's writing. It seems either they love it or they hate it. Even her last and third failed husband apparently discredited her writing as not worthy of attention because it was not fiction. Is that why she wrote this latest one, The Spare Room as a novel?
Back to the old chestnut, fact versus fiction and the highest praise reserved for fiction while the readers keep clamouring for the truth. We want to know that this really happened? We want to know about real lives, real events. We don’t want fantasy.
It’s a non-fiction moment HG said to me in 2004, a non-fiction moment, so make the most of it. I’ve been trying to do so ever since, with varying success.
Gsrmer talks in an interview about resonating with Virginia Woolf's feelings when the writer first opened one of Katharine Mansfield’s new books: ‘If she’s good, then I’m not’. This 'infantile' comparison that we can all get into from time to time. The concrete, unprocessed thought that my mother has only so much love to give, as if it's all held inside a bottle, a bottle of sand and every time she pours out a little for one child, there’s only so much left for the others and for me. In time even if she gives me a little, soon there will be none left and there’s no way known she’ll ever be able to re-fill the bottle. The bottle once empty is useless.
Reading her interviews about Garner's experience with male writers and publishers in the 1970s resonates for me, too. No wonder I gave up English literature after two years at Melbourne University. I who had once imagined myself a writer dropped the idea cold and turned instead to being a good social worker in the first instance and later a good therapist because according to the mores of the time women’s writing was all about ‘shelling peas and pain’. The only ones who could write were the great classicists from the 18th and 19th century literary canon, men mostly. Even Jane Austen has come into vogue in more recent years. There is not a single woman recognised as a Shakespeare or a Wordsworth, a TS Eliot or a James Joyce. There are women who receive praise: the Brontes and Jane, Christina Rosetti and little Emily Dickinson. These are the female names I grew up with, but they are all secondary to the great men.
I too once feared showing my writing to a man, a man would find me wanting. Which leads me to my other thought about Garner: her father, her so-called negative relationship with her father, her life long battle to win his esteem. And supposedly she has never really felt she has, any more than many of us women feel we have.
Somewhere Garner quotes someone else’s comment that we are always laying tributes at our parents’ feet.
I feel so vapourish alongside Garner, who spends hours perfecting each sentence, every word. Her sentences she says in one interview used to be short and clunky but now she goes to trouble to fill them out. She collects good adjectives, splendid nouns and images from her daily life, snippets of conversation over heard.
I rely purely on my memory and what rolls into my mind, and it’s so limited.
Friday, October 09, 2009
The significance of being seen
I have started to read Ann Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty about her friendship with Lucy Geary. Geary is the author of the book, Autobiography of a Face. It tells the story of Lucy’s life after she developed cancer of the jaw, Ewings sarcoma, as a nine year old. Thereafter the doctors removed part of her jaw through surgery and chemotherapy and radiation. She spent the rest of her young adult life undergoing reconstructive surgery on her jaw. All attempts failed. The book focuses on the pain of her experience but more than the physical experience and the long isolation and sadness of a childhood in hospital, Geary wrote about the effect of her appearance on others and on herself.
Drusilla Modjeska wrote about the business of being a woman as the one who is looked at in her book The Orchard. I heard her speak about this at a psychology conference several years ago before she had finished writing Stravinsky’s Lunch. At that time she had been writing about the lives of two women artists, Grace Cossington Smith and Stella Bowen. Modjeska had been reflecting on the difficulties for
Australian women artists during the early 1900s. In the process she wrote about the business of seeing and being seen. She had suffered a sudden threatened total loss of vision, a detached retina or some such thing and for a time she sat in darkness. She could not see. She contemplated the possibility of blindness. When you cannot see, do you cease to be aware of the significance of being seen? Do you care less about your attraction to men for instance? Men's attraction to you? Do you focus on other senses instead?
I had a dream as a child, a recurring dream, one of complete whiteness, whiteness that was not like a white wall that covered the whole field of my vision; it was a whiteness that held depth. I was looking into a void, rather like those arctic images I imagine when people suffer snow blindness, when the horizon blends with the land and we cannot discern land from water. A motion sickness they describe that sailors suffer when they have been out to sea for too long. The waves they imagine are rolling hills and they find themselves ready to leap overboard in a desperate bid to find steady land and something solid on which to walk. Their stomachs heave.
This body ache that comes from constant motion must in some ways hark back to days in utero. Though to be carried in utero or in a mother’s arms must surely feel different from the experience of being tossed or rocked on top of ocean waves. The one surely has some cadence and sense to it, the other has the wild rhythm of a beast or a creature with a will of its own, a will that does not have the needs of the individual it carries in mind at all. A mother hopefully is mindful of her child; the sea I imagine is oblivious to its cargo. It will go on regardless, though, humankind is said to be upsetting the balance of the natural order of things such that even the seas might be angry with so many intruders. Our excesses interfere with the climate, the temperature, the balance of all things so called natural and as the concept of Gaia suggests, the sea might be angry and may have been so for many years. But this is to anthropomorphise nature and that will never do.
Drusilla Modjeska wrote about the business of being a woman as the one who is looked at in her book The Orchard. I heard her speak about this at a psychology conference several years ago before she had finished writing Stravinsky’s Lunch. At that time she had been writing about the lives of two women artists, Grace Cossington Smith and Stella Bowen. Modjeska had been reflecting on the difficulties for
Australian women artists during the early 1900s. In the process she wrote about the business of seeing and being seen. She had suffered a sudden threatened total loss of vision, a detached retina or some such thing and for a time she sat in darkness. She could not see. She contemplated the possibility of blindness. When you cannot see, do you cease to be aware of the significance of being seen? Do you care less about your attraction to men for instance? Men's attraction to you? Do you focus on other senses instead?
I had a dream as a child, a recurring dream, one of complete whiteness, whiteness that was not like a white wall that covered the whole field of my vision; it was a whiteness that held depth. I was looking into a void, rather like those arctic images I imagine when people suffer snow blindness, when the horizon blends with the land and we cannot discern land from water. A motion sickness they describe that sailors suffer when they have been out to sea for too long. The waves they imagine are rolling hills and they find themselves ready to leap overboard in a desperate bid to find steady land and something solid on which to walk. Their stomachs heave.
This body ache that comes from constant motion must in some ways hark back to days in utero. Though to be carried in utero or in a mother’s arms must surely feel different from the experience of being tossed or rocked on top of ocean waves. The one surely has some cadence and sense to it, the other has the wild rhythm of a beast or a creature with a will of its own, a will that does not have the needs of the individual it carries in mind at all. A mother hopefully is mindful of her child; the sea I imagine is oblivious to its cargo. It will go on regardless, though, humankind is said to be upsetting the balance of the natural order of things such that even the seas might be angry with so many intruders. Our excesses interfere with the climate, the temperature, the balance of all things so called natural and as the concept of Gaia suggests, the sea might be angry and may have been so for many years. But this is to anthropomorphise nature and that will never do.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
On Doubt and Wonder
Martin Edmond, the wonderful New Zealand writer, has included a piece in his blog on Doubt and Wonder. It's well worth a read as it looks at the history of writing in ways I had not considered, both in terms of non fiction and fiction.
If you have not read his writing yet, here's a wonderful introduction.
If you have not read his writing yet, here's a wonderful introduction.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Tortured conversations
I’ve been reading all these blog references to the use of corporal punishment as a legitimate form of discipline. They remind me of Alice Miller’s work. Once you’ve read Miller you’ll never view corporal punishment in the same way again, however much you ascribe to the notion of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. Is that how the quote goes?
It also puts me in mind of a conversation I overheard recently. I’ve tried to record it as best I can remember. It puts me in mind of Ruth Schmidt Neven’s notion that ADHD can perhaps be relabeled: ‘parental attention deficit disorder’. But of course, any parent was also once a child and most of us tend to repeat what was done to us. Therefore we need heavy doses of compassion for all parents however seemingly inadequate.
At the airport on Saturday as I stood and waited for the arrival doors to open and let out our youngest daughter, returning from a three week school trip to England, I overheard a conversation.
A boy, about ten years old stood, between the barrier and the corridor that leads from each of the three exit doors. He was waiting with his father for his mother to arrive. Presumably this mother was on the same flight as our daughter, Emirates 404 from London via Dubai and Singapore. I knew this because I had overheard the father tell his son that the air hostesses, who walked out of those sliding doors, mostly in twos, were from the Emirates flight, his mother’s flight.
The man said this I think to encourage his son to be patient, but it had the opposite effect. The boy wore glasses and had a sharp freckled face, none too attractive but typical perhaps for a boy of ten who had been waiting for a long time at the airport for his mother to arrive.
I noticed his face after this first odd exchange with his father.
‘I’ve seen people over there who are crying,’ the boy said.
‘They’re probably happy to see someone come home. Like we’ll be happy when we see Mum and Emma.’ There was a pause, and the boy strained to look to the top of the corridor where people were finally able to come together and hug.
‘I don’t care about other people,’ the father went on to say. ‘Forget about other people. We’re here to see Mummy and Emma.’
The boy spun around then and glared at his father momentarily before regaining his position behind the barricade beyond the opening doors. In that movement he looked directly at me. His face was a grimace and I wondered whether I had missed something.
The boy held a small plastic figurine in his hand and he tapped with it against the metal bar.
‘Stop that now,’ his father said.
‘Why can’t I?
‘Because I said so. Now just be quiet and wait till your mother comes.’
‘There are some balloons over there,’ the boy said, straining to look behind him. ‘Can I have one?’
‘No,’ his father said.
‘Where did they get them?’ the boy asked. ‘Why can’t I have one?’
‘They probably brought them with them. Now settle down.’
I was looking straight ahead so I did not see what happened next but the boy’s voice rose to a new pitch.
‘Don’t you hit me,’ he said.
‘Let go of my shirt,’ his father said. The boy held on.
‘Let go of my shirt or I’ll leave.’
‘You can’t do that,’ the boy said. ‘Who’ll look after me?’
‘Let go of me or I’ll leave.’ The father pulled away. The boy wailed.
‘I’m sorry dad. I’m sorry.’
The father left off leaving.
‘You’re not sorry, he said. Now settle down or I will leave.’
‘You can’t go,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll be all alone.’
‘I told you to settle down. Just settle down.’
‘You shouldn’t have hit me,’ the boy said.
‘Let go of my shirt.’
‘Dad, Dad, I’m sorry Dad.’
The father must have moved away because the boy became even more agitated
‘Don’t go, Dad. I’m sorry.’ In the midst of all this wrangling, the boy’s mother arrived.
I leave this conversation now for you to interpret and make sense of.
It also puts me in mind of a conversation I overheard recently. I’ve tried to record it as best I can remember. It puts me in mind of Ruth Schmidt Neven’s notion that ADHD can perhaps be relabeled: ‘parental attention deficit disorder’. But of course, any parent was also once a child and most of us tend to repeat what was done to us. Therefore we need heavy doses of compassion for all parents however seemingly inadequate.
At the airport on Saturday as I stood and waited for the arrival doors to open and let out our youngest daughter, returning from a three week school trip to England, I overheard a conversation.
A boy, about ten years old stood, between the barrier and the corridor that leads from each of the three exit doors. He was waiting with his father for his mother to arrive. Presumably this mother was on the same flight as our daughter, Emirates 404 from London via Dubai and Singapore. I knew this because I had overheard the father tell his son that the air hostesses, who walked out of those sliding doors, mostly in twos, were from the Emirates flight, his mother’s flight.
The man said this I think to encourage his son to be patient, but it had the opposite effect. The boy wore glasses and had a sharp freckled face, none too attractive but typical perhaps for a boy of ten who had been waiting for a long time at the airport for his mother to arrive.
I noticed his face after this first odd exchange with his father.
‘I’ve seen people over there who are crying,’ the boy said.
‘They’re probably happy to see someone come home. Like we’ll be happy when we see Mum and Emma.’ There was a pause, and the boy strained to look to the top of the corridor where people were finally able to come together and hug.
‘I don’t care about other people,’ the father went on to say. ‘Forget about other people. We’re here to see Mummy and Emma.’
The boy spun around then and glared at his father momentarily before regaining his position behind the barricade beyond the opening doors. In that movement he looked directly at me. His face was a grimace and I wondered whether I had missed something.
The boy held a small plastic figurine in his hand and he tapped with it against the metal bar.
‘Stop that now,’ his father said.
‘Why can’t I?
‘Because I said so. Now just be quiet and wait till your mother comes.’
‘There are some balloons over there,’ the boy said, straining to look behind him. ‘Can I have one?’
‘No,’ his father said.
‘Where did they get them?’ the boy asked. ‘Why can’t I have one?’
‘They probably brought them with them. Now settle down.’
I was looking straight ahead so I did not see what happened next but the boy’s voice rose to a new pitch.
‘Don’t you hit me,’ he said.
‘Let go of my shirt,’ his father said. The boy held on.
‘Let go of my shirt or I’ll leave.’
‘You can’t do that,’ the boy said. ‘Who’ll look after me?’
‘Let go of me or I’ll leave.’ The father pulled away. The boy wailed.
‘I’m sorry dad. I’m sorry.’
The father left off leaving.
‘You’re not sorry, he said. Now settle down or I will leave.’
‘You can’t go,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll be all alone.’
‘I told you to settle down. Just settle down.’
‘You shouldn’t have hit me,’ the boy said.
‘Let go of my shirt.’
‘Dad, Dad, I’m sorry Dad.’
The father must have moved away because the boy became even more agitated
‘Don’t go, Dad. I’m sorry.’ In the midst of all this wrangling, the boy’s mother arrived.
I leave this conversation now for you to interpret and make sense of.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Women will be fly-by-nights
What does the brain matter compared to the heart? These words from Mrs Dalloway. I have been watching Marleen Corris’s film of the story with the same name, Virginia Woolf’s glorious story that says so much of a bygone era, written with a woman’s voice.
I have a preoccupation at the moment with women’s voices as opposed to those of men. More so since the conference. The conference of course was inundated with women. Forty women I’d say, to only three men, and one of them a convener.
I prefer a more balanced ratio, men to women, but it rarely happens for me these days. In my own household dominated by women, even with visits from the odd regular boyfriend or partner, my husband is never alone sufficient to overcome the impact of what one of his friends has described as ‘too much oestrogen’.
‘There’s too much oestrogen in your household,’ my husband’s friend tells him and I know exactly what he means. Too much oestrogen, as opposed, I suppose, to too much testosterone.
It is hard for my husband to get a word in, and so he takes to making jokes much of the time or of becoming authoritative. It’s hard for him to find a middle path. What is this about? It is more than a function of his own idiosyncratic upbringing, I suspect. Why the imbalance between the genders? We cannot simply ascribe it to difference.
During the conference there was often talk of feminist perspectives and how much these have altered the degree to which storytelling has changed. How much women’s voices are now more often heard.
Sometimes I confuse the notion of women’s voices with my understanding of the role of middle children in families. This tends to be the role of the conciliator, the one who tries to get both sides together and yet at the same time the one who rebels, the one who is subversive.
I am struggling with this at the moment. In the last several days I have had at least three conversations with different men about the intricacies of my paper, Straddling Two Worlds, the writer and the therapist. The men have all been generous in their responses and in their efforts to help me work through what it is I am trying to say. By and large it is women who have been my detractors, though not all women of course. Still it is striking that within my professional association it is mostly the women who have taken me to task.
This is my favourite time of the week. The time when I have energy to write and often with no agenda.
I read Peter Craven’s review of Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch and felt the same sharp thrill of pleasure at Gerald’s success and jealousy, that no one should ever appreciate my work in such a bold and clear way. Peter Craven is clearly an admirer. But in his text he does not mention a single woman writer. They are all the famed fellows and Craven imagines that GM will join them, the one who will be read in 100 years time, akin to Marcel Proust.
Women will be fly-by-nights. Is there a woman writer today whom people write about as someone for the future, someone whose work we will be reading in years to come? I think of GM’s ‘future creature’, the young researcher whom he imagines as an attractive woman, a student of literature who pores over his archives and is the first to know all his wonderful and as yet untold secrets. GM has fantasies of how his future creature will respond, and how she will be amazed by the secrets she unearths.
I have at times wanted to be that future creature but my time for such research is past, besides I do not want to spend my time researching other people’s work. I want to write my own. Yet in the back of my mind I take great pleasure in being part of GM’s archives.
These days whenever I write my letters to him, I write with a broader audience in mind, the future readers, future creature, future researchers of GM’s writing and work. In this sense I am a parasite living off the great man’s reputation, a tic on his skin, a louse in his hair.
These things are not set in stone. I met a man at the conference Michael, an older man who is doing his PhD on notions of disability relative to his son who died at the age of 22 from muscular dystrophy. This man showed photos and talked of Roland Barthe’s differentiation between what he calls punctum and studium. The latter is visible in ordinary photos that reveal only conventions, where every event is balanced such that it might represent a stable and predictable moment in time as opposed to punctum that carries the sting, the punch, the sudden shock in one or other of its elements. Punctum can emerge not simply from the photo itself but from our knowledge about the photo, which may come after we have first viewed it.
Michael showed two family shots. He is sitting in the background, his then wife in the foreground in a wading pool. She is dressed in bathers and holds her 18 month old son. Their daughter, seemingly a couple of years older than her brother is also in the wading pool. She sits to one side and is smiling. A family photo that reflects Barthe’s interest in all things photographic, including the seemingly benign and predictable. Then Michael showed another photo in which his little boy’s disability is more visible.
Would we think it if we did not know? The little boy is stretched out in the second photo as if caught in an awkward shift of body. There is something in that shift that bespeaks some sort of bodily spasticity, some awkwardness of tone, but all of this punctum, we can surmise only on second sight.
Later during a tea break, Michael talked to me about his observation that women, many women in their fifties and sixties seem to be coming into their own. Their children have grown, their familial responsibilities begin to ease up and they can begin to find new interests, new ways of fulfilling their lives, lives perhaps to some extent that were held off during the years before. Men on the other hand, he observed, hit sixty and they go into a decline, both physical and emotional. They feel that their best years are behind them. Meanwhile the women are beginning to find theirs.
It’s a terrible generalisation, and I can think of many exceptions and yet it resonates with my own observations of many women, and particularly the women at the conference last week. All these women, intelligent, articulate and fired up to explore new ideas and consider their own identities in the light of these new ideas – educated and bright women, who are interested in the story of the story.
Someone asked, where are all the men? Why is it that women take an interest in life writing and many men not. Though at the IABA (International Autobiography and biography Association) conferences there is a much better balance, still many more women than men, and yet there is no shortage of men. Mind you, I notice many of the men are older, near and beyond so-called retirement (as if anyone needs to retire) and many of them are the early pioneers in auto/biographical theory. There are those like Philippe Lejeune who established the now controversial ‘autobiographical pact’ and my hero, despite his slightly ‘protestant’ flavour, Paul John Eakin, who writes so much about autobiography and identity formation.
There’s room for men in theory-making it seems, but less so in the business of personal storytelling. That’s where they turn to novel writing and fiction perhaps as a safer means of telling their stories.
Women perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, might feel safer in the realm of so called creative non-fiction and life writing. That's not to say there are no fantastic women novelists, nor equally fantastic male life writers. I'm talking proportions here.
I have a preoccupation at the moment with women’s voices as opposed to those of men. More so since the conference. The conference of course was inundated with women. Forty women I’d say, to only three men, and one of them a convener.
I prefer a more balanced ratio, men to women, but it rarely happens for me these days. In my own household dominated by women, even with visits from the odd regular boyfriend or partner, my husband is never alone sufficient to overcome the impact of what one of his friends has described as ‘too much oestrogen’.
‘There’s too much oestrogen in your household,’ my husband’s friend tells him and I know exactly what he means. Too much oestrogen, as opposed, I suppose, to too much testosterone.
It is hard for my husband to get a word in, and so he takes to making jokes much of the time or of becoming authoritative. It’s hard for him to find a middle path. What is this about? It is more than a function of his own idiosyncratic upbringing, I suspect. Why the imbalance between the genders? We cannot simply ascribe it to difference.
During the conference there was often talk of feminist perspectives and how much these have altered the degree to which storytelling has changed. How much women’s voices are now more often heard.
Sometimes I confuse the notion of women’s voices with my understanding of the role of middle children in families. This tends to be the role of the conciliator, the one who tries to get both sides together and yet at the same time the one who rebels, the one who is subversive.
I am struggling with this at the moment. In the last several days I have had at least three conversations with different men about the intricacies of my paper, Straddling Two Worlds, the writer and the therapist. The men have all been generous in their responses and in their efforts to help me work through what it is I am trying to say. By and large it is women who have been my detractors, though not all women of course. Still it is striking that within my professional association it is mostly the women who have taken me to task.
This is my favourite time of the week. The time when I have energy to write and often with no agenda.
I read Peter Craven’s review of Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch and felt the same sharp thrill of pleasure at Gerald’s success and jealousy, that no one should ever appreciate my work in such a bold and clear way. Peter Craven is clearly an admirer. But in his text he does not mention a single woman writer. They are all the famed fellows and Craven imagines that GM will join them, the one who will be read in 100 years time, akin to Marcel Proust.
Women will be fly-by-nights. Is there a woman writer today whom people write about as someone for the future, someone whose work we will be reading in years to come? I think of GM’s ‘future creature’, the young researcher whom he imagines as an attractive woman, a student of literature who pores over his archives and is the first to know all his wonderful and as yet untold secrets. GM has fantasies of how his future creature will respond, and how she will be amazed by the secrets she unearths.
I have at times wanted to be that future creature but my time for such research is past, besides I do not want to spend my time researching other people’s work. I want to write my own. Yet in the back of my mind I take great pleasure in being part of GM’s archives.
These days whenever I write my letters to him, I write with a broader audience in mind, the future readers, future creature, future researchers of GM’s writing and work. In this sense I am a parasite living off the great man’s reputation, a tic on his skin, a louse in his hair.
These things are not set in stone. I met a man at the conference Michael, an older man who is doing his PhD on notions of disability relative to his son who died at the age of 22 from muscular dystrophy. This man showed photos and talked of Roland Barthe’s differentiation between what he calls punctum and studium. The latter is visible in ordinary photos that reveal only conventions, where every event is balanced such that it might represent a stable and predictable moment in time as opposed to punctum that carries the sting, the punch, the sudden shock in one or other of its elements. Punctum can emerge not simply from the photo itself but from our knowledge about the photo, which may come after we have first viewed it.
Michael showed two family shots. He is sitting in the background, his then wife in the foreground in a wading pool. She is dressed in bathers and holds her 18 month old son. Their daughter, seemingly a couple of years older than her brother is also in the wading pool. She sits to one side and is smiling. A family photo that reflects Barthe’s interest in all things photographic, including the seemingly benign and predictable. Then Michael showed another photo in which his little boy’s disability is more visible.
Would we think it if we did not know? The little boy is stretched out in the second photo as if caught in an awkward shift of body. There is something in that shift that bespeaks some sort of bodily spasticity, some awkwardness of tone, but all of this punctum, we can surmise only on second sight.
Later during a tea break, Michael talked to me about his observation that women, many women in their fifties and sixties seem to be coming into their own. Their children have grown, their familial responsibilities begin to ease up and they can begin to find new interests, new ways of fulfilling their lives, lives perhaps to some extent that were held off during the years before. Men on the other hand, he observed, hit sixty and they go into a decline, both physical and emotional. They feel that their best years are behind them. Meanwhile the women are beginning to find theirs.
It’s a terrible generalisation, and I can think of many exceptions and yet it resonates with my own observations of many women, and particularly the women at the conference last week. All these women, intelligent, articulate and fired up to explore new ideas and consider their own identities in the light of these new ideas – educated and bright women, who are interested in the story of the story.
Someone asked, where are all the men? Why is it that women take an interest in life writing and many men not. Though at the IABA (International Autobiography and biography Association) conferences there is a much better balance, still many more women than men, and yet there is no shortage of men. Mind you, I notice many of the men are older, near and beyond so-called retirement (as if anyone needs to retire) and many of them are the early pioneers in auto/biographical theory. There are those like Philippe Lejeune who established the now controversial ‘autobiographical pact’ and my hero, despite his slightly ‘protestant’ flavour, Paul John Eakin, who writes so much about autobiography and identity formation.
There’s room for men in theory-making it seems, but less so in the business of personal storytelling. That’s where they turn to novel writing and fiction perhaps as a safer means of telling their stories.
Women perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, might feel safer in the realm of so called creative non-fiction and life writing. That's not to say there are no fantastic women novelists, nor equally fantastic male life writers. I'm talking proportions here.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Anxiety Dreams
I put these two dreams on the Annandale Dream Gazette. To me they represent something of my anxiety about presenting at a conference, but more than this they relate to my struggles against being silenced.
Dream 1:
27 September 2009
This morning I dreamed I went to visit the house of some friends. It was an unusual house in that there was a long low movable wall around its perimeter. At several points in the wall there were gaps to take the place of doors. You could move this wall with a simple push and get the openings to fit to the door of each room in the house. It was like opening the lid of a pepper dispenser. You push the lid around and different size holes become available depending on whether you want a light sprinkling of pepper or a great handful.
My friend’s daughter was in her room. I call him my friend but he’s more my husband’s friend. I have an ambivalent relationship with my husband’s friend, but somehow my feelings about him did not feature in the dream nor my feelings about his daughter, who is a strange person I find in real life, though in the dream she seemed normal.
She had gone to a great deal of trouble to tidy her room and yet I noticed the drawers were bulging and stuff peeped out through the cracks of the wardrobes as if she had simply stuffed things inside willy-nilly. There was a false sense of order here.
My youngest daughter who in the dream was still a toddler joined us. A carefree, cheerful toddler. Then a little ball of fur on legs walked across the room. It looked innocent enough and I asked my friend’s daughter what it was.
‘Stay away from them,’ she said. ‘They’re trouble.’ The ball of fur suddenly let out a spray of the foulest stench imaginable into the room and we all reeled back.
‘That’s what they do,’ my friend’s daughter said. ‘And if they manage to get some of that stink on you, it sticks for ages.’
I swooped up my daughter and tried to escape the monstrous ball of fur, which I felt sure was getting ready to spray us again.
The doors slid around the room and my friend, my husband’s friend arrived, all bluster and swagger. He remonstrated with his daughter for keeping the walls fixed in one place. He had had trouble getting in.
I was aware as if in a flash that there were other dangers lurking here in this oddly designed house and I must be careful.
Dream 2:
30 September 2009.
On the morning of my presentation at a life writing conference called The Story of the Story I had a dream that felt so real it still seems as though it actually happened. I dreamed that when it came time for me to present my paper in the Noel Stockdale room within the library at Flinders University I went ahead of the others to set up and to tweak my paper for the last time.
In my dream an old friend, who is now dead, LB was the conference convenor. LB once lectured me in psychology. He was born around the same time as my father.
People had already arrived in time for the third day of the conference to begin. They sat in rows faces turned towards the front in readiness. LB asked me to start. Some people were still rustling papers and chatting to one another, so I had to repeat my first sentence. Then I started fumbling my words. I lost my place on the page and could not find it for what seemed like ages. People shifted in their seats and began to talk among one another. I could not regain their attention. I tried from the beginning and spoke loudly but my words would not flow.
I had rehearsed and rehearsed. I had tried hard. Now here it was: my turn to present, my turn at last, last speaker of the conference, and I could not get the audience to listen.
I tried to catch LB’s eye, to plead with him to get the audience to settle, but he would not look at me. The people in the audience then seemed to lose patience altogether and before I knew it they had decided to break for morning tea.
I had lost my opportunity to present. It had passed without my saying a word of what I needed to say. I was devastated and stood at the podium in tears. There was a small group of people nearby, the ones with whom I had shared a car en route to the conference. They ignored me, too. I was furious, but flooded with tears.
In my dream LB had become a medical doctor not just a PhD. I wailed to a woman nearby about how unfair he had been in not insisting to the audience that I be allowed to have my turn. I had tried so hard to prepare and now no one wanted to hear from me.
I woke sobbing and nothing felt as if it would ever be any good again.
Dream 1:
27 September 2009
This morning I dreamed I went to visit the house of some friends. It was an unusual house in that there was a long low movable wall around its perimeter. At several points in the wall there were gaps to take the place of doors. You could move this wall with a simple push and get the openings to fit to the door of each room in the house. It was like opening the lid of a pepper dispenser. You push the lid around and different size holes become available depending on whether you want a light sprinkling of pepper or a great handful.
My friend’s daughter was in her room. I call him my friend but he’s more my husband’s friend. I have an ambivalent relationship with my husband’s friend, but somehow my feelings about him did not feature in the dream nor my feelings about his daughter, who is a strange person I find in real life, though in the dream she seemed normal.
She had gone to a great deal of trouble to tidy her room and yet I noticed the drawers were bulging and stuff peeped out through the cracks of the wardrobes as if she had simply stuffed things inside willy-nilly. There was a false sense of order here.
My youngest daughter who in the dream was still a toddler joined us. A carefree, cheerful toddler. Then a little ball of fur on legs walked across the room. It looked innocent enough and I asked my friend’s daughter what it was.
‘Stay away from them,’ she said. ‘They’re trouble.’ The ball of fur suddenly let out a spray of the foulest stench imaginable into the room and we all reeled back.
‘That’s what they do,’ my friend’s daughter said. ‘And if they manage to get some of that stink on you, it sticks for ages.’
I swooped up my daughter and tried to escape the monstrous ball of fur, which I felt sure was getting ready to spray us again.
The doors slid around the room and my friend, my husband’s friend arrived, all bluster and swagger. He remonstrated with his daughter for keeping the walls fixed in one place. He had had trouble getting in.
I was aware as if in a flash that there were other dangers lurking here in this oddly designed house and I must be careful.
Dream 2:
30 September 2009.
On the morning of my presentation at a life writing conference called The Story of the Story I had a dream that felt so real it still seems as though it actually happened. I dreamed that when it came time for me to present my paper in the Noel Stockdale room within the library at Flinders University I went ahead of the others to set up and to tweak my paper for the last time.
In my dream an old friend, who is now dead, LB was the conference convenor. LB once lectured me in psychology. He was born around the same time as my father.
People had already arrived in time for the third day of the conference to begin. They sat in rows faces turned towards the front in readiness. LB asked me to start. Some people were still rustling papers and chatting to one another, so I had to repeat my first sentence. Then I started fumbling my words. I lost my place on the page and could not find it for what seemed like ages. People shifted in their seats and began to talk among one another. I could not regain their attention. I tried from the beginning and spoke loudly but my words would not flow.
I had rehearsed and rehearsed. I had tried hard. Now here it was: my turn to present, my turn at last, last speaker of the conference, and I could not get the audience to listen.
I tried to catch LB’s eye, to plead with him to get the audience to settle, but he would not look at me. The people in the audience then seemed to lose patience altogether and before I knew it they had decided to break for morning tea.
I had lost my opportunity to present. It had passed without my saying a word of what I needed to say. I was devastated and stood at the podium in tears. There was a small group of people nearby, the ones with whom I had shared a car en route to the conference. They ignored me, too. I was furious, but flooded with tears.
In my dream LB had become a medical doctor not just a PhD. I wailed to a woman nearby about how unfair he had been in not insisting to the audience that I be allowed to have my turn. I had tried so hard to prepare and now no one wanted to hear from me.
I woke sobbing and nothing felt as if it would ever be any good again.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Optimal anxiety
Yesterday the day seemed swallowed up by football, even as my family does not participate much. I was sad that the underdog team lost. It was a close game, in the wet and cold rain. Only ten degrees and the ball had been slippery. People here in Melbourne get worked up about their football. I’m glad I do not participate. If I did I know I’d be like all those others – frantic for my team to win.
This loyalty to a team is seductive stuff. Wanting our team to win, desperately above all else, identifying with the heroes, the strong ones, the achievers is heady stuff. I find it hard watching my own children when they are in competitions, most often of the public speaking variety. Occasionally I watch my daughters play basketball and the adrenalin pumps through my veins at such a rate, I would rather not be there.
I find life anxiety inducing enough. Why do we create more of it voluntarily? To me watching competitive sport induces too much of it. Playing sport I imagine is different. At least there is something you can do with your anxiety. As one of my daughters who acts tells me, although she feels the butterflies in her stomach before the event, once she is on stage she goes into a sort of trance and loses herself in the experience. All her energy goes into her role.
Perhaps I am writing about this topic here now because in three days time I will present my paper ‘Straddling Two Worlds: the writer and the psychoanalytic psychotherapist’ and I am nervous. Appropriately nervous I would say.
I learned in psychology many moons ago about the importance of an optimal level of anxiety. It energises you. An excessive amount of anxiety can destroy you - stage fright and the like, and no anxiety whatsoever will most likely render your presentation flat and boring.
I am also a tad nervous about flying, but I am getting more used to that. There was a time when I hardly ever caught a plane, but these days I seem to travel through the sky at least two or three times a year and at least one of these trips tends to be as far as Europe. I am becoming a seasoned traveler, and less like my beloved Australian writer and correspondent, Gerald Murnane, who never travels in planes and refuses to move far beyond his home in Macleod.
He travels in his mind, he says, and in his writing. I like to do this too, but real travel in real time also has its merits, if only to shake us out of the daily grind and a sort of sedentary complacency. Besides things seem to take longer when we move out of our routine.
I shall report on my shake up on my return.
This loyalty to a team is seductive stuff. Wanting our team to win, desperately above all else, identifying with the heroes, the strong ones, the achievers is heady stuff. I find it hard watching my own children when they are in competitions, most often of the public speaking variety. Occasionally I watch my daughters play basketball and the adrenalin pumps through my veins at such a rate, I would rather not be there.
I find life anxiety inducing enough. Why do we create more of it voluntarily? To me watching competitive sport induces too much of it. Playing sport I imagine is different. At least there is something you can do with your anxiety. As one of my daughters who acts tells me, although she feels the butterflies in her stomach before the event, once she is on stage she goes into a sort of trance and loses herself in the experience. All her energy goes into her role.
Perhaps I am writing about this topic here now because in three days time I will present my paper ‘Straddling Two Worlds: the writer and the psychoanalytic psychotherapist’ and I am nervous. Appropriately nervous I would say.
I learned in psychology many moons ago about the importance of an optimal level of anxiety. It energises you. An excessive amount of anxiety can destroy you - stage fright and the like, and no anxiety whatsoever will most likely render your presentation flat and boring.
I am also a tad nervous about flying, but I am getting more used to that. There was a time when I hardly ever caught a plane, but these days I seem to travel through the sky at least two or three times a year and at least one of these trips tends to be as far as Europe. I am becoming a seasoned traveler, and less like my beloved Australian writer and correspondent, Gerald Murnane, who never travels in planes and refuses to move far beyond his home in Macleod.
He travels in his mind, he says, and in his writing. I like to do this too, but real travel in real time also has its merits, if only to shake us out of the daily grind and a sort of sedentary complacency. Besides things seem to take longer when we move out of our routine.
I shall report on my shake up on my return.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Story of the Story
Tomorrow, I leave for Adelaide for the Story of the Story Conference to be held at Flinders University. The conference theme centres around the ethics of life writing.
I have been reading Margaretta Jolly’s book, The Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, in preparation. Jolly is taking a master class at the end of the conference where we will discuss issues relevant to the ethics of life writing.
I have a great deal of trouble with the issue of ethics and life writing. I see from my reading that if we life writers are to take our work seriously then we must be more than careful about what we publish. We must be vigilant.
From what she writes, Margaretta Jolly went to great pains to get permission from all the people whose letters she had sought to publish even as the letters were found in many instances in university archives and the like. Many were in effect already in the public domain.
This has to do with the issue of freedom of speech versus the individual’s right to privacy. Because we are relational creatures whenever we write our own story inevitably we involve aspects that touch on the lives of others.
The ethics of life writing, as I understand it, involves an attempt to build a bridge across the divide between one’s right to speak in writing of one’s experience as honestly as possibly while at the same time recognising the rights of others, whose presence is included in the writer’s story, the other’s right to privacy.
Even as I write about this here, I fell vexed. It is hard for me to write now without feeling hot under the collar. Is there some emphasis on political correctness that I must tackle?
I get mixed messages. One of my supervisors suggests I write it all. I should be like Janet Malcolm, who writes in detail about what people do and say. Though to be sure, Malcolm’s had her share of trouble. She uses transcripts of interviews and the like. I’m not talking about interviews and transcripts by and large. I’m talking about having the freedom to write thoughtfully about my experience from my own perspective without feeling the need to ask people who might feature in my writing whether I have their permission to publish it or not.
Several years ago I wrote an essay about my analytic experience. The essay was published in the ‘Shrinks’ edition of Meanjin. I was happy with my essay. I felt it offered a good enough version of my good enough experience in my analysis. I stress it was a good experience.
My analyst thought differently about my essay, however. She believed that I had violated her privacy. Even though I was writing about my experience in analysis, her presence in the essay is central. So I disguised her to some extent. I changed certain identifying features and I gave her a pseudonym.
I suspect she has not forgiven me for it. At the time she was angry and I decided that I should avoid any further contact with her, but later I met her at a conference and she seemed to have calmed down.
Since then I find she has published writing about me, in a much disguised form, to the point that I have become a man, with no other identifying features. I would probably be one of the few people to read her essay who is able to identify myself. Though my husband also recognised the sections in the essay that describe me.
I’m not troubled by this myself. I do not mind that my analyst has written in some detail about the way I once thought during the course of my analysis: namely, 'that I turned against the church with venom when I went to university…and found a belief in psychoanalysis as saviour’.
I have written about this myself, the degree to which I imagined that by giving up Catholicism for Psychoanalysis I had entered a better world and that my world was then a better world than that of those misguided people who still preferred religion.
I do not think the same way now and perhaps for this reason I consider the person whom my analyst describes as someone of the past, not me now and therefore not someone I need be ashamed of.
Nevertheless there is a view in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking that if an analyst/therapist were to write about a patient, how ever well described, then they should first seek that person's permission.
In Freud’s day people did not bother to get permission, but we’ve moved further along the track now and recognise the difficulties inherent in the appropriation of someone else’s story for our own purposes. Think of Thomas Couser’s work. He writes about ‘vulnerable subjects’, those who cannot speak for themselves, including our own children, the disabled, and the disenfranchised about whom others might write.
Appropriating someone else’s story for our own ends may well be unethical and yet in some ways it’s what we often do when we write. And it’s what I find so troubling. Where’s the dividing line?
More recently I have encountered a drama within my professional association. I’m toey about writing any details here. See how paranoid I have become. I, who value openness, have become wary of ‘self-disclosure', because of what others might make of it. So now I must be careful. Nevertheless, this issue of self-disclosure will be the basis of my talk at the conference in Adelaide.
I don’t know about you, but I’m of the view that when things are written down they take on a certain ‘unreal’ quality. They become something else. I try to write as honestly about my experience as I can, except when I am writing fiction, and I don’t do much of that these days. I do not enjoy the fictional process as much as I enjoy the process of letting ideas and words form in my mind and then tumble out onto the page. Inevitably, for me at least, these words tend to be autobiographical. And yet at the same time, once these words are down on the page they become somewhat artificial simply through the process of construction, and I would not want ever to be held to them as gospel truth, not that I believe there is any such thing.
It’s weird, words on the page have a substance and solidity that spoken words lack and yet the words on a page also have the fluidity that each individual reader brings to them.
I remember the writer, Elizabeth Jolley, once talked about her experience of having her fiction read. She described how one day a woman in her audience asked Jolley about the lesbian references in Mr Peabody’s Inheritance. I think this was the book. Elizabeth Jolley asked whether they talking about the same book?
‘No,’ the woman replied. ‘There’s a scene in the book where you describe rumpled sheets on a bed. Clearly this refers to a sexual encounter between two women.’
This had not been Jolly’s intention. Never mind. Who cares these days about authorial intention. One reader read a new image behind Jolley’s words and this indeed is what happened for her, the reader, regardless of what Jolley thought she had written.
After writers have written their readers come in with their own experiences and interpretive devices. It is as if the readers then re-write the text on the page in their minds to their own satisfaction and a new construction, several new constructions emerge. I call it subjectivity.
We all do it. Everyone knows this and yet there is still pressure as a non-fiction writer somehow to provide a clear cut and factual account of events. Now, if we are to take on board the extremes of ethics in life writing, we need to get permission from many others to put our words out.
How much does this requirement then strangle the writing? I ask you.
I have been reading Margaretta Jolly’s book, The Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, in preparation. Jolly is taking a master class at the end of the conference where we will discuss issues relevant to the ethics of life writing.
I have a great deal of trouble with the issue of ethics and life writing. I see from my reading that if we life writers are to take our work seriously then we must be more than careful about what we publish. We must be vigilant.
From what she writes, Margaretta Jolly went to great pains to get permission from all the people whose letters she had sought to publish even as the letters were found in many instances in university archives and the like. Many were in effect already in the public domain.
This has to do with the issue of freedom of speech versus the individual’s right to privacy. Because we are relational creatures whenever we write our own story inevitably we involve aspects that touch on the lives of others.
The ethics of life writing, as I understand it, involves an attempt to build a bridge across the divide between one’s right to speak in writing of one’s experience as honestly as possibly while at the same time recognising the rights of others, whose presence is included in the writer’s story, the other’s right to privacy.
Even as I write about this here, I fell vexed. It is hard for me to write now without feeling hot under the collar. Is there some emphasis on political correctness that I must tackle?
I get mixed messages. One of my supervisors suggests I write it all. I should be like Janet Malcolm, who writes in detail about what people do and say. Though to be sure, Malcolm’s had her share of trouble. She uses transcripts of interviews and the like. I’m not talking about interviews and transcripts by and large. I’m talking about having the freedom to write thoughtfully about my experience from my own perspective without feeling the need to ask people who might feature in my writing whether I have their permission to publish it or not.
Several years ago I wrote an essay about my analytic experience. The essay was published in the ‘Shrinks’ edition of Meanjin. I was happy with my essay. I felt it offered a good enough version of my good enough experience in my analysis. I stress it was a good experience.
My analyst thought differently about my essay, however. She believed that I had violated her privacy. Even though I was writing about my experience in analysis, her presence in the essay is central. So I disguised her to some extent. I changed certain identifying features and I gave her a pseudonym.
I suspect she has not forgiven me for it. At the time she was angry and I decided that I should avoid any further contact with her, but later I met her at a conference and she seemed to have calmed down.
Since then I find she has published writing about me, in a much disguised form, to the point that I have become a man, with no other identifying features. I would probably be one of the few people to read her essay who is able to identify myself. Though my husband also recognised the sections in the essay that describe me.
I’m not troubled by this myself. I do not mind that my analyst has written in some detail about the way I once thought during the course of my analysis: namely, 'that I turned against the church with venom when I went to university…and found a belief in psychoanalysis as saviour’.
I have written about this myself, the degree to which I imagined that by giving up Catholicism for Psychoanalysis I had entered a better world and that my world was then a better world than that of those misguided people who still preferred religion.
I do not think the same way now and perhaps for this reason I consider the person whom my analyst describes as someone of the past, not me now and therefore not someone I need be ashamed of.
Nevertheless there is a view in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking that if an analyst/therapist were to write about a patient, how ever well described, then they should first seek that person's permission.
In Freud’s day people did not bother to get permission, but we’ve moved further along the track now and recognise the difficulties inherent in the appropriation of someone else’s story for our own purposes. Think of Thomas Couser’s work. He writes about ‘vulnerable subjects’, those who cannot speak for themselves, including our own children, the disabled, and the disenfranchised about whom others might write.
Appropriating someone else’s story for our own ends may well be unethical and yet in some ways it’s what we often do when we write. And it’s what I find so troubling. Where’s the dividing line?
More recently I have encountered a drama within my professional association. I’m toey about writing any details here. See how paranoid I have become. I, who value openness, have become wary of ‘self-disclosure', because of what others might make of it. So now I must be careful. Nevertheless, this issue of self-disclosure will be the basis of my talk at the conference in Adelaide.
I don’t know about you, but I’m of the view that when things are written down they take on a certain ‘unreal’ quality. They become something else. I try to write as honestly about my experience as I can, except when I am writing fiction, and I don’t do much of that these days. I do not enjoy the fictional process as much as I enjoy the process of letting ideas and words form in my mind and then tumble out onto the page. Inevitably, for me at least, these words tend to be autobiographical. And yet at the same time, once these words are down on the page they become somewhat artificial simply through the process of construction, and I would not want ever to be held to them as gospel truth, not that I believe there is any such thing.
It’s weird, words on the page have a substance and solidity that spoken words lack and yet the words on a page also have the fluidity that each individual reader brings to them.
I remember the writer, Elizabeth Jolley, once talked about her experience of having her fiction read. She described how one day a woman in her audience asked Jolley about the lesbian references in Mr Peabody’s Inheritance. I think this was the book. Elizabeth Jolley asked whether they talking about the same book?
‘No,’ the woman replied. ‘There’s a scene in the book where you describe rumpled sheets on a bed. Clearly this refers to a sexual encounter between two women.’
This had not been Jolly’s intention. Never mind. Who cares these days about authorial intention. One reader read a new image behind Jolley’s words and this indeed is what happened for her, the reader, regardless of what Jolley thought she had written.
After writers have written their readers come in with their own experiences and interpretive devices. It is as if the readers then re-write the text on the page in their minds to their own satisfaction and a new construction, several new constructions emerge. I call it subjectivity.
We all do it. Everyone knows this and yet there is still pressure as a non-fiction writer somehow to provide a clear cut and factual account of events. Now, if we are to take on board the extremes of ethics in life writing, we need to get permission from many others to put our words out.
How much does this requirement then strangle the writing? I ask you.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Self and other: the difference between the inside and the outside
This is how I remember it.
Twenty-five year eleven girls at Vaucluse Convent for ladies. Mrs Raj is our new and exotic biology teacher who speaks with an accent and wears brightly coloured saris over a cropped bodice. I can still see the line of her coffee coloured flesh between the waist of her sari and the edge of her top and I wondered two things: Why isn’t she cold and what do the nuns think? This is in the late sixties. Women do not expose their midriffs except in advertisements for bathers or those Metre Maids on the Gold Coast. The nuns are already railing against the amount of leg showing under our school dresses when we hitch them up desperate to wear a mini dress, a la Jean Shrimpton.
We are sitting on our high stools in the new science block, which was built on government funds where the old tennis courts once stood. Our arms are adjacent to the bench tops in pale pinewood. The copper taps each shaped like a swan’s neck fall into sinks along the line of bench.
‘Each of you girls take a glass.’ Mrs Raj has put out a series of clear glasses and set them on the bench top, one per girl. ‘Now I want you to spit into your glass.’
What! A murmur from the classroom that bounces off the walls. What is she saying?
‘Spit into your glass, girls, as much saliva as you can get.’
We look at her face. She is serious. We spit away. Giggles, grunts and the splashing whistle of twenty-five girls spitting into glasses.
‘Now set the glass in front of you and wait.’
The puddle in the bottom of my glass of bubbly saliva is thick and sticky. My stomach roils as if I have exposed something that should not be seen; as if I should rinse the glass under the tap for fear that others will see it too. I cannot look over at the other girls’ glasses. It is as if we have been asked to take our clothes off and we are standing naked, eyes ahead, hoping that no one will notice our vulnerability, that no one will cross our gaze.
‘Now,’ says Mrs Raj. ‘I want you all to drink it back up’
‘Yuk,’ the class calls in one voice.
‘Do as I say girls. It will not hurt you.’
Loud swallows and grunts as each girl tries to take back inside the saliva she had so eagerly parted with a few minutes ago. It is cold on my tongue, worse to swallow than medication but I get it down.
‘Now, girls, the reason I have asked you to do this is to show you the difference between the inside and the outside.’ Mrs Raj is serious. Her voice does not falter, even underneath the singsong lilt of her Indian accent. ‘When the saliva is in your mouth, as it is every minute of every day, you don’t notice it. Your saliva is you. Spit it out and it becomes not you. Drink it back and it’s like something completely foreign to you, when only minutes ago it was you.’
Mrs Raj beams a smile that shows all her large straight teeth, white against the gleam of her skin. The red smudge of paint on her forehead matches the redness of her lips and the faint blush in her cheeks.
Twenty-five year eleven girls at Vaucluse Convent for ladies. Mrs Raj is our new and exotic biology teacher who speaks with an accent and wears brightly coloured saris over a cropped bodice. I can still see the line of her coffee coloured flesh between the waist of her sari and the edge of her top and I wondered two things: Why isn’t she cold and what do the nuns think? This is in the late sixties. Women do not expose their midriffs except in advertisements for bathers or those Metre Maids on the Gold Coast. The nuns are already railing against the amount of leg showing under our school dresses when we hitch them up desperate to wear a mini dress, a la Jean Shrimpton.
We are sitting on our high stools in the new science block, which was built on government funds where the old tennis courts once stood. Our arms are adjacent to the bench tops in pale pinewood. The copper taps each shaped like a swan’s neck fall into sinks along the line of bench.
‘Each of you girls take a glass.’ Mrs Raj has put out a series of clear glasses and set them on the bench top, one per girl. ‘Now I want you to spit into your glass.’
What! A murmur from the classroom that bounces off the walls. What is she saying?
‘Spit into your glass, girls, as much saliva as you can get.’
We look at her face. She is serious. We spit away. Giggles, grunts and the splashing whistle of twenty-five girls spitting into glasses.
‘Now set the glass in front of you and wait.’
The puddle in the bottom of my glass of bubbly saliva is thick and sticky. My stomach roils as if I have exposed something that should not be seen; as if I should rinse the glass under the tap for fear that others will see it too. I cannot look over at the other girls’ glasses. It is as if we have been asked to take our clothes off and we are standing naked, eyes ahead, hoping that no one will notice our vulnerability, that no one will cross our gaze.
‘Now,’ says Mrs Raj. ‘I want you all to drink it back up’
‘Yuk,’ the class calls in one voice.
‘Do as I say girls. It will not hurt you.’
Loud swallows and grunts as each girl tries to take back inside the saliva she had so eagerly parted with a few minutes ago. It is cold on my tongue, worse to swallow than medication but I get it down.
‘Now, girls, the reason I have asked you to do this is to show you the difference between the inside and the outside.’ Mrs Raj is serious. Her voice does not falter, even underneath the singsong lilt of her Indian accent. ‘When the saliva is in your mouth, as it is every minute of every day, you don’t notice it. Your saliva is you. Spit it out and it becomes not you. Drink it back and it’s like something completely foreign to you, when only minutes ago it was you.’
Mrs Raj beams a smile that shows all her large straight teeth, white against the gleam of her skin. The red smudge of paint on her forehead matches the redness of her lips and the faint blush in her cheeks.
Monday, September 21, 2009
The Little Book Room
Halfway up the Burke Road hill in Camberwell, just before the railway station, there was once a bookshop known as The Little Book Room. It was unusual for its careful selection of books, as if the owners had hand picked each book with great and loving care. It had the feel of a personal library, like roaming through someone’s store of books in an overcrowded house. The books lined the steps and at times came in what seemed like no particular order at all.
It was in this shop that I first came across Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy. The cover drew me in, the sepia toned photo of a mother and her baby, the words transcribed from the text, Modjeska’s words, so familiar to me now, a mother urging her baby to look into the mirror. 'There, see there. See, it’s you.' That moment of recognition, of mother and baby, that moment of connection.
I bought the book and read it over the next weeks. The story, the writing gave me hope, the greatest hope of all that someday I too might be able to write like this.
Modjeska became my point of reference for my own attempts at writing. When my writing teacher in the novel writing class I had joined in 1997 once criticized my narrator as drowning the energy from my story I listened only with one ear, one eye. I wanted too much to be like Modjeska and she could get away with it. Why ever could I not join her , imitate her style?
Now I recognise the need to find my own voice, even as it echoes back in my ears, tinny and self serving, with none of the gentle cadences and rhythms of Modjeska’s words. But I must trust myself, otherwise I will plunge back into that empty space of my childhood where I seemed able only to try to imitate the greats.
It was in this shop that I first came across Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy. The cover drew me in, the sepia toned photo of a mother and her baby, the words transcribed from the text, Modjeska’s words, so familiar to me now, a mother urging her baby to look into the mirror. 'There, see there. See, it’s you.' That moment of recognition, of mother and baby, that moment of connection.
I bought the book and read it over the next weeks. The story, the writing gave me hope, the greatest hope of all that someday I too might be able to write like this.
Modjeska became my point of reference for my own attempts at writing. When my writing teacher in the novel writing class I had joined in 1997 once criticized my narrator as drowning the energy from my story I listened only with one ear, one eye. I wanted too much to be like Modjeska and she could get away with it. Why ever could I not join her , imitate her style?
Now I recognise the need to find my own voice, even as it echoes back in my ears, tinny and self serving, with none of the gentle cadences and rhythms of Modjeska’s words. But I must trust myself, otherwise I will plunge back into that empty space of my childhood where I seemed able only to try to imitate the greats.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Breakdowns
Everything is breaking down in our household. It seems to happen every ten years or so. All the white goods, not all perhaps but a number of them, decide to die simultaneously and we are left with the expensive and time consuming task of either getting them repaired if at all possible, or replacing them. Having said they have died, it’s not possible to resurrect a dishwasher that has an element which has turned into a raised crescent moon shape making it impossible for the bottom foot that spins through the dishwasher to function. The fridge door has sunk so low it now exposes part of the fridge’s insides. I know both these machines are now energy inefficient so not only do we have to contend with the hassle of the broken down machine we also have to feel bad for wasting energy.
Yesterday morning my shower went cold because the pilot light on the hot water service had gone off. That was easily rectified, even I could fix that, but finally the switch on the central heating unit refused to click, so the unit no longer operates.
It could be worse. It’s not so cold these days. We can manage without central heating. A couple of months ago it would have felt a disaster but spring is here now. The blossoms are erupting and t-shirts have taken the place of coats.
Let's hope there are no more breakdowns for a while at least.
Yesterday morning my shower went cold because the pilot light on the hot water service had gone off. That was easily rectified, even I could fix that, but finally the switch on the central heating unit refused to click, so the unit no longer operates.
It could be worse. It’s not so cold these days. We can manage without central heating. A couple of months ago it would have felt a disaster but spring is here now. The blossoms are erupting and t-shirts have taken the place of coats.
Let's hope there are no more breakdowns for a while at least.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Obligation versus love in Samson and Delilah
On Thursday afternoon at the La Trobe staff/postgrad seminar a couple of postgrads presented papers on the film ‘Samson and Delilah’. Hannah offered an overview of the film, and talked about its disturbing and yet beautifully haunting quality. David asked the question why some people believe the central character, Samson, should need to speak. He does not. Apparently, David told me later, he had read numerous comments on line from people who had seen the film and resented the fact that the two central characters barely speak at all throughout the film.
'How can this be?' They ask. David backed his talk with an audiotape in which he had remixed bits of music from the film interspersed with the name, Samson, stuttered in the background. Samson's only sound comes when he voices his name with a stutter. He has been glue-sniffing for such a long time it has damaged his brain.
The third speaker, Alison who teaches at LaTrobe talked about the difference between obligation and love and how these two notions have become confused within western culture. Not so, she suggested within the aboriginal community as depicted in the film.
There is a scene where the young Delilah discovers her grandmother dead one morning. From the onset we can see that Delilah has been devoted to her grandmother. She takes her to the clinic, she cooks for her. They dot paint in the dust on the ground together.
It is hard to do justice to this film, to the images, the sense of barren hopelessness and boredom as depicted in the lives of Delilah and more particularly Samson who continues to sniff glue for comfort.
After Delilah finds her grandmother dead, the women from the town, a small group of them, round middle-aged aboriginal women, set upon her with sticks and their fists. They beat her savagely.
‘You did not look after your gran,’ they say. ‘You did not take her to the clinic.’ You did not feed her, care for all the things that we, the viewers, know the granddaughter has done.
It comes as a shock. I had expected the women of the town to embrace the young girl in her grief. I had expected them to take her in their arms, to welcome her into their homes, but not so. They beat Delilah back and blue and leave her listless on the mattress in the dirt that is her bed.
In the seminar we puzzled over the meaning of this event. One person suggested she had thought that maybe the women beat Delilah because they felt guilty for all the things they had not done themselves to support the grandmother – a projection of their guilt onto Delilah.
When I saw the film I had no idea about why this happened. Was it a cultural ritual that I knew nothing about? The film offers non-aboriginal people a close up view of life in a small aboriginal community and although it is fictional it resonates with a sense of being a truthful account of how things are. Alison wondered whether the women beat Delilah in an attempt to inflict bodily wounds that in time would heal, as an aid in the process of mourning, part of their obligation to the young abandoned girl.
Some one out there would know more about what this scene might mean. There were visitors in our audience from Batchelor Institute in Alice Springs. I asked if they had thoughts about the film, but Alison suggested they might not like to be put on the spot. They did not speak, which I suppose harks back to David’s question, ‘why does Samson need to speak?’
I still feel uneasy about my sense of discomfort that we, a small group of postgrads and staff from the English department at LaTrobe should sit around musing over the meaning of this particular aboriginal film, laying on it all our intellectual assumptions about what the story might be telling us, while in our midst sat three or four silent people from such a community, who chose to remain silent.
Chose I say, but I wonder, did we silence them? They were students of creative writing come to LaTrobe to learn. I suspect in their small groups they may well have learned especially under Alison’s care.
I am finding it hard to put into words Alison’s point about the clash between love and obligation. She reckons that we have lost sight of our obligations in our western style community/world because we tend to respond to crises with affect, affect as in emotion. We are taught from earliest days that we must empathise with the other. When something goes wrong for the other we become overwhelmed with our feelings, our tendency to identify and then we fail to act. We fail to act because we do not automatically, unconsciously know what our obligations are. We are burnt out.
In aboriginal communities Alison argues most people have a strong sense of obligation. She offered an example from her own life, eavesdropping on an aboriginal woman whom she had met who was dealing with a series of crises from those near to her. This woman did not, it seems, become overwhelmed. She did not judge those who had stuffed up such that they were now in crisis. I cannot remember the details, but the crises could well evoke moral condemnation in our community.
This woman knew instinctively what to do. Alison talked about how we in western societies are burned out by our struggles in responding to crisis with affect.
You get off the train at Flinders Street and you are surrounded by it, by people for instance begging for money. What do you do? She, Alison, when she visits the city gives away one twenty dollar note to the lucky one, whoever that might be and leaves it at that. She cannot do enough. She recognises the bottomless pit. Others, she said, might give a dollar muttering to themselves that they know the person begging will go off and most likely use it for drugs or drink. Others will distance themselves and rationalise that there is no point in giving anything when the person begging will most likely abuse it. We are burned out and overwhelmed by too many calls on or empathy.
I am afraid I have not articulated this well. I am still puzzling about it. I have not done justice to Alison’s argument, but it intrigues me because it introduces an element I had not considered before, the element of obligation as distinct from empathy and love.
I have long fed on the notion that empathy is all. Empathy is king. But now I wonder. I think Alison is suggesting that were we to have a clear knowledge and understanding of our obligations to one another then in a moment of crisis we might know how to act, almost on automatic pilot, a bit like driving a car through a dangerous situation, knowing exactly what to do without even thinking about it.
When her own beloved grandmother died, Alison said, she felt nothing. But she and her mother knew instinctively what to do as they sat there in the dead of the night in the small township of Maldon with her just deceased grand mother. They sang Anglican hymns.
I know that when my father died, I too felt a sort of nothingness. For me the action came with the funeral but even then I distanced myself from the event. The others, my older siblings took over and dealt with the crisis. Someone must and perhaps that is as it should be. The oldest ones generally move first, the others must follow or make their own way, whichever feels right.
Samson and Delilah as Alison suggests is a love story perhaps, but not a romance and one that deals with people who meet their obligations, while others fail.
'How can this be?' They ask. David backed his talk with an audiotape in which he had remixed bits of music from the film interspersed with the name, Samson, stuttered in the background. Samson's only sound comes when he voices his name with a stutter. He has been glue-sniffing for such a long time it has damaged his brain.
The third speaker, Alison who teaches at LaTrobe talked about the difference between obligation and love and how these two notions have become confused within western culture. Not so, she suggested within the aboriginal community as depicted in the film.
There is a scene where the young Delilah discovers her grandmother dead one morning. From the onset we can see that Delilah has been devoted to her grandmother. She takes her to the clinic, she cooks for her. They dot paint in the dust on the ground together.
It is hard to do justice to this film, to the images, the sense of barren hopelessness and boredom as depicted in the lives of Delilah and more particularly Samson who continues to sniff glue for comfort.
After Delilah finds her grandmother dead, the women from the town, a small group of them, round middle-aged aboriginal women, set upon her with sticks and their fists. They beat her savagely.
‘You did not look after your gran,’ they say. ‘You did not take her to the clinic.’ You did not feed her, care for all the things that we, the viewers, know the granddaughter has done.
It comes as a shock. I had expected the women of the town to embrace the young girl in her grief. I had expected them to take her in their arms, to welcome her into their homes, but not so. They beat Delilah back and blue and leave her listless on the mattress in the dirt that is her bed.
In the seminar we puzzled over the meaning of this event. One person suggested she had thought that maybe the women beat Delilah because they felt guilty for all the things they had not done themselves to support the grandmother – a projection of their guilt onto Delilah.
When I saw the film I had no idea about why this happened. Was it a cultural ritual that I knew nothing about? The film offers non-aboriginal people a close up view of life in a small aboriginal community and although it is fictional it resonates with a sense of being a truthful account of how things are. Alison wondered whether the women beat Delilah in an attempt to inflict bodily wounds that in time would heal, as an aid in the process of mourning, part of their obligation to the young abandoned girl.
Some one out there would know more about what this scene might mean. There were visitors in our audience from Batchelor Institute in Alice Springs. I asked if they had thoughts about the film, but Alison suggested they might not like to be put on the spot. They did not speak, which I suppose harks back to David’s question, ‘why does Samson need to speak?’
I still feel uneasy about my sense of discomfort that we, a small group of postgrads and staff from the English department at LaTrobe should sit around musing over the meaning of this particular aboriginal film, laying on it all our intellectual assumptions about what the story might be telling us, while in our midst sat three or four silent people from such a community, who chose to remain silent.
Chose I say, but I wonder, did we silence them? They were students of creative writing come to LaTrobe to learn. I suspect in their small groups they may well have learned especially under Alison’s care.
I am finding it hard to put into words Alison’s point about the clash between love and obligation. She reckons that we have lost sight of our obligations in our western style community/world because we tend to respond to crises with affect, affect as in emotion. We are taught from earliest days that we must empathise with the other. When something goes wrong for the other we become overwhelmed with our feelings, our tendency to identify and then we fail to act. We fail to act because we do not automatically, unconsciously know what our obligations are. We are burnt out.
In aboriginal communities Alison argues most people have a strong sense of obligation. She offered an example from her own life, eavesdropping on an aboriginal woman whom she had met who was dealing with a series of crises from those near to her. This woman did not, it seems, become overwhelmed. She did not judge those who had stuffed up such that they were now in crisis. I cannot remember the details, but the crises could well evoke moral condemnation in our community.
This woman knew instinctively what to do. Alison talked about how we in western societies are burned out by our struggles in responding to crisis with affect.
You get off the train at Flinders Street and you are surrounded by it, by people for instance begging for money. What do you do? She, Alison, when she visits the city gives away one twenty dollar note to the lucky one, whoever that might be and leaves it at that. She cannot do enough. She recognises the bottomless pit. Others, she said, might give a dollar muttering to themselves that they know the person begging will go off and most likely use it for drugs or drink. Others will distance themselves and rationalise that there is no point in giving anything when the person begging will most likely abuse it. We are burned out and overwhelmed by too many calls on or empathy.
I am afraid I have not articulated this well. I am still puzzling about it. I have not done justice to Alison’s argument, but it intrigues me because it introduces an element I had not considered before, the element of obligation as distinct from empathy and love.
I have long fed on the notion that empathy is all. Empathy is king. But now I wonder. I think Alison is suggesting that were we to have a clear knowledge and understanding of our obligations to one another then in a moment of crisis we might know how to act, almost on automatic pilot, a bit like driving a car through a dangerous situation, knowing exactly what to do without even thinking about it.
When her own beloved grandmother died, Alison said, she felt nothing. But she and her mother knew instinctively what to do as they sat there in the dead of the night in the small township of Maldon with her just deceased grand mother. They sang Anglican hymns.
I know that when my father died, I too felt a sort of nothingness. For me the action came with the funeral but even then I distanced myself from the event. The others, my older siblings took over and dealt with the crisis. Someone must and perhaps that is as it should be. The oldest ones generally move first, the others must follow or make their own way, whichever feels right.
Samson and Delilah as Alison suggests is a love story perhaps, but not a romance and one that deals with people who meet their obligations, while others fail.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Perfume
In the bathroom this morning I noticed the almost empty bottle of Givenchy III perfume that my husband gave me years ago for one of my birthdays. I have stopped using it because the dregs in the bottom of the bottle have gone stale. They smell now more like alcohol and have none of the freshness that first came from the bottle.
I might ask for a new bottle of this perfume for my birthday. I do not remember ever buying myself an expensive bottle of perfume. It does not seem to me the thing to do. I buy bottles and sprays with cheap scents regularly, especially Tweed, which my daughters insist marks me as an old woman, but somehow I stick with this perfume because I have always loved the smell. It is familiar and somehow for me it has become my smell. I am like a baby, the scent of her mother is the scent she longs for.
Once I considered perfume as a gift a wasted present. I did not want my husband to buy perfume for me, any more than I wanted flowers or chocolates. To me these were non-presents, the things you buy when you have no idea what to get.
I did not want these presents because they signified a lack of care. I wanted things that were more specifically geared to my image of me, whatever that may have been.
My tastes have changed over the years. Now I love a bunch of flowers, not so much chocolates because I rarely eat them, but they’re good to share with others who do. Here I am now thinking of asking my husband to get me perfume. But it is a specific perfume and one I’m sure that whenever I use it I will be filled with a sense of bygone days of memories of dressing up to go out to special occasions.
I wear Givenchy on such occasions – weddings, dinners and funerals. Givenchy for me is a ritualistic perfume. And I am a creature of habit. Over the years many people have bought me a bottle of sometimes expensive perfume. I might use it once or twice, but the smell jars. I have a series of bottles, almost full, lined up along the marble ledge of the wash basin against the mirror in our en suite bathroom. Golden and glowing, they hold no allure for me. I want only the perfume that’s familiar to my senses, the perfume that now smells to me of me, whether it’s Givenchy or Tweed or just my ordinary unadorned skin. I don’t want to clutter my senses with foreign perfume smells.
I might ask for a new bottle of this perfume for my birthday. I do not remember ever buying myself an expensive bottle of perfume. It does not seem to me the thing to do. I buy bottles and sprays with cheap scents regularly, especially Tweed, which my daughters insist marks me as an old woman, but somehow I stick with this perfume because I have always loved the smell. It is familiar and somehow for me it has become my smell. I am like a baby, the scent of her mother is the scent she longs for.
Once I considered perfume as a gift a wasted present. I did not want my husband to buy perfume for me, any more than I wanted flowers or chocolates. To me these were non-presents, the things you buy when you have no idea what to get.
I did not want these presents because they signified a lack of care. I wanted things that were more specifically geared to my image of me, whatever that may have been.
My tastes have changed over the years. Now I love a bunch of flowers, not so much chocolates because I rarely eat them, but they’re good to share with others who do. Here I am now thinking of asking my husband to get me perfume. But it is a specific perfume and one I’m sure that whenever I use it I will be filled with a sense of bygone days of memories of dressing up to go out to special occasions.
I wear Givenchy on such occasions – weddings, dinners and funerals. Givenchy for me is a ritualistic perfume. And I am a creature of habit. Over the years many people have bought me a bottle of sometimes expensive perfume. I might use it once or twice, but the smell jars. I have a series of bottles, almost full, lined up along the marble ledge of the wash basin against the mirror in our en suite bathroom. Golden and glowing, they hold no allure for me. I want only the perfume that’s familiar to my senses, the perfume that now smells to me of me, whether it’s Givenchy or Tweed or just my ordinary unadorned skin. I don’t want to clutter my senses with foreign perfume smells.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
My Mother/Myself
My daughter has landed in Manchester. In her text she tells us it’s sunny. It’s strange to me that once I know she has reached her destination I feel as though I can stop holding my breath. Even when my daughters take a brief trip to the country I feel this need to know they’ve reached their destination intact, otherwise I fret.
I have been trying this morning to write a speech for my mother’s ninetieth birthday next month. I have long told people that I wanted to give a speech at my mother’s funeral, because I still resent the fact that I was not able to do so for my father when he died. When my father died 27 years ago now, my oldest brother wrote the eulogy and asked our now estranged brother in law to read it out at the funeral.
It was a double whammy this gesture. I think my brother may have been trying to re-involve said brother in law into the family at a time when my sister’s marriage was on the brink. My brother-in-law had found someone else. That my brother did not read the eulogy himself created a distance for me and the words my now ex brother-in-law read in the church about my oldest brother’s version of our father rang untrue.
I was much younger then, I’d just given birth to our first daughter who was ten days old. My mind could not have been sharp, but I remember feeling cheated at my father’s funeral because my oldest brother had focused on all the positive aspects of our father that he remembered and they bore little resemblance to the man my father became when dealing with the rest of our family.
I am sixth born, hence my blog name. It has always mattered to me, this family chronology. I agree with Frank Sullivan, who writes on birth order: family chronology is a powerful influence for most of us in how we lead our lives.
As a child I resented that I was not first or last born or at least bang smack in the middle of the nine children. The brother, the one above me who was the first of my parents' children to be born in Australia always seemed better placed than me. He at least could identify himself as the first Australian born child and in the middle. The four oldest were born in Holland; they had that special privilege. The last four born in Australia seemed like an after thought.
Of course my perspective on this keeps changing.
At my father’s funeral I resolved to have more of a say about my mother’s life at her funeral. But this speech on which I'm working now, is not for my mother’s funeral. It is to celebrate her life, while she lives. She will tune in and although her hearing is not the best these days I must write this speech with my mind on her.
How can I write about my mother from a purely positive perspective without my speech sounding cloy and false? There are of course good aspects to my mother. She has always been an optimist and this has helped her through a most difficult life, at least when we were young, but it has also led her to a level of denial that leaves those others of us looking on with a sense of being left out in the cold.
I want to write about my mother as honestly as I can. I want to be able to include some of her ‘warts’, but I do not want to hurt her feelings. Every time I go to write about her strengths I have my brothers, mostly my brothers, though not all of my brothers, in my ear telling me otherwise. She’s manipulative, they will say. She neglected her children. She’s a bitch.
Are these really my brothers' thoughts, some of my brothers' thoughts, or are these my thoughts? I have to own up to my own doubts.
My mother/myself. I share my mother’s name. A Dutch custom. The oldest daughter is named after the mother’s mother, the second daughter named after the mother. The same applies to sons. Elisabeth Margaretha Maria. My mother bore the title, Mrs, and I the Miss, but otherwise our names, until I married and changed my name and then later still when my mother remarried and changed her name again, were exactly the same.
My mother likes to tell me that of all her children, I am the most like her. As a child I enjoyed the comparison, as an adult I do not. There are aspects to my mother’s personality that bother me and I do not like to identify with them, besides my mother was a first-born, I am a middle born, we have to be different.
My mother left school at fifteen to help her mother care for her five brothers and her little sister, I went to university, the first girl in my family to do so. We have had a different life and yet I identify with her optimism and to some extent a certain level of idealism and naiveté, even though I know it’s there. Still I do not desist from it.
My mother, I fear, does not see that her optimism borders on denial, and can tend to exclude the experience of others, besides she has her strong religious beliefs that help her through everything and I have no such comforts.
I have been trying this morning to write a speech for my mother’s ninetieth birthday next month. I have long told people that I wanted to give a speech at my mother’s funeral, because I still resent the fact that I was not able to do so for my father when he died. When my father died 27 years ago now, my oldest brother wrote the eulogy and asked our now estranged brother in law to read it out at the funeral.
It was a double whammy this gesture. I think my brother may have been trying to re-involve said brother in law into the family at a time when my sister’s marriage was on the brink. My brother-in-law had found someone else. That my brother did not read the eulogy himself created a distance for me and the words my now ex brother-in-law read in the church about my oldest brother’s version of our father rang untrue.
I was much younger then, I’d just given birth to our first daughter who was ten days old. My mind could not have been sharp, but I remember feeling cheated at my father’s funeral because my oldest brother had focused on all the positive aspects of our father that he remembered and they bore little resemblance to the man my father became when dealing with the rest of our family.
I am sixth born, hence my blog name. It has always mattered to me, this family chronology. I agree with Frank Sullivan, who writes on birth order: family chronology is a powerful influence for most of us in how we lead our lives.
As a child I resented that I was not first or last born or at least bang smack in the middle of the nine children. The brother, the one above me who was the first of my parents' children to be born in Australia always seemed better placed than me. He at least could identify himself as the first Australian born child and in the middle. The four oldest were born in Holland; they had that special privilege. The last four born in Australia seemed like an after thought.
Of course my perspective on this keeps changing.
At my father’s funeral I resolved to have more of a say about my mother’s life at her funeral. But this speech on which I'm working now, is not for my mother’s funeral. It is to celebrate her life, while she lives. She will tune in and although her hearing is not the best these days I must write this speech with my mind on her.
How can I write about my mother from a purely positive perspective without my speech sounding cloy and false? There are of course good aspects to my mother. She has always been an optimist and this has helped her through a most difficult life, at least when we were young, but it has also led her to a level of denial that leaves those others of us looking on with a sense of being left out in the cold.
I want to write about my mother as honestly as I can. I want to be able to include some of her ‘warts’, but I do not want to hurt her feelings. Every time I go to write about her strengths I have my brothers, mostly my brothers, though not all of my brothers, in my ear telling me otherwise. She’s manipulative, they will say. She neglected her children. She’s a bitch.
Are these really my brothers' thoughts, some of my brothers' thoughts, or are these my thoughts? I have to own up to my own doubts.
My mother/myself. I share my mother’s name. A Dutch custom. The oldest daughter is named after the mother’s mother, the second daughter named after the mother. The same applies to sons. Elisabeth Margaretha Maria. My mother bore the title, Mrs, and I the Miss, but otherwise our names, until I married and changed my name and then later still when my mother remarried and changed her name again, were exactly the same.
My mother likes to tell me that of all her children, I am the most like her. As a child I enjoyed the comparison, as an adult I do not. There are aspects to my mother’s personality that bother me and I do not like to identify with them, besides my mother was a first-born, I am a middle born, we have to be different.
My mother left school at fifteen to help her mother care for her five brothers and her little sister, I went to university, the first girl in my family to do so. We have had a different life and yet I identify with her optimism and to some extent a certain level of idealism and naiveté, even though I know it’s there. Still I do not desist from it.
My mother, I fear, does not see that her optimism borders on denial, and can tend to exclude the experience of others, besides she has her strong religious beliefs that help her through everything and I have no such comforts.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Navigationally challenged
I will feel better once I know that my youngest daughter has arrived in London. She is traveling there for three weeks on a school music/sports tour. I do not enjoy the knowledge that one of my children is flying. I might as well be in the plane too for all the apprehension I feel. Even though I know that statistically we are safer in an airplane than we are in a motor car, I still fret.
I keep a special look out on the news for word of crashed planes. It is one of my pet horrors and more so these days because these days it is not unusual for one or another of my nears and dears to be mid flight.
On top of this I have noticed this strange heaviness in my torso of late, somewhere around where I imagine my ovaries sit, though it could be my intestines. Do they sit on either side? Jim might say, too much information here and I am reminded of the strange unspoken rules of blogging, whatever they are, but I take the plunge and mention it regardless.
I am no good about the location of body parts. I am as geographically challenged traveling around the internals of my body in my mind as I am traveling in my imagination through the countries of the world.
I have heard that women are less navigationally able than men, but with me it is worse. I cannot distinguish north from south, east from west. I can tell my right from my left by noting the presence of a writing lump on my right hand. But even now as I sit at my desk in my familiar writing room I have to think long and hard about where north, south, east etc are situated in relation to me.
I think the south is ahead of me because I know that I must travel down Tooronga Road to get to the seaside suburbs and Cheltenham where I once lived. Tooronga Road is to one side of the house in which I live and running therefore in a southerly direction. If south is in front then north is behind. Now I know the sun rises in the east in Australia and therefore looking out my window to where the sun first appeared this morning I must be looking eastwards. And west is its opposite. So now I have located my self in a north, east, west and southerly direction, I feel better.
If you were to ask me where England lies, and where my daughter is traveling relative to home I must think again. But I know we speak of Northern Europe and the North Pole. All these are ahead up above as I see it in my mind’s eye, so England is most likely to the north of us. Probably not directly north, though .
Having vaguely located myself and my traveling daughter I must begin to write more serious things elsewhere. Maybe I should also visit a doctor to establish that I do not have some dreadful disease that needs immediate treatment. This a comment from my hypochondriacal self.
I keep a special look out on the news for word of crashed planes. It is one of my pet horrors and more so these days because these days it is not unusual for one or another of my nears and dears to be mid flight.
On top of this I have noticed this strange heaviness in my torso of late, somewhere around where I imagine my ovaries sit, though it could be my intestines. Do they sit on either side? Jim might say, too much information here and I am reminded of the strange unspoken rules of blogging, whatever they are, but I take the plunge and mention it regardless.
I am no good about the location of body parts. I am as geographically challenged traveling around the internals of my body in my mind as I am traveling in my imagination through the countries of the world.
I have heard that women are less navigationally able than men, but with me it is worse. I cannot distinguish north from south, east from west. I can tell my right from my left by noting the presence of a writing lump on my right hand. But even now as I sit at my desk in my familiar writing room I have to think long and hard about where north, south, east etc are situated in relation to me.
I think the south is ahead of me because I know that I must travel down Tooronga Road to get to the seaside suburbs and Cheltenham where I once lived. Tooronga Road is to one side of the house in which I live and running therefore in a southerly direction. If south is in front then north is behind. Now I know the sun rises in the east in Australia and therefore looking out my window to where the sun first appeared this morning I must be looking eastwards. And west is its opposite. So now I have located my self in a north, east, west and southerly direction, I feel better.
If you were to ask me where England lies, and where my daughter is traveling relative to home I must think again. But I know we speak of Northern Europe and the North Pole. All these are ahead up above as I see it in my mind’s eye, so England is most likely to the north of us. Probably not directly north, though .
Having vaguely located myself and my traveling daughter I must begin to write more serious things elsewhere. Maybe I should also visit a doctor to establish that I do not have some dreadful disease that needs immediate treatment. This a comment from my hypochondriacal self.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Self indulgent writing or whistleblowing?
I had a simple thank you email from Katherine Wilson, a woman whom I have never met.
She wrote an article for Meanjin on the hoax she began, ‘Holding up the Mirror: Windshuttle, Me, and the Provocateur on Trial’. In this essay Wilson writes about the way she posed as a scientist, Sharon Gould, and wrote an essay which according to the journalist, Margaret Simons is ‘studded with false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes’.
Keith Windshuttle fell into the trap and accepted the essay for publication in Quadrant without checking it, the fake footnotes etc. Simons blew the lid off the hoax after publication and then all hell broke loose, for a while at least, given the notion that Windshuttle had once accused a couple of historians of doing the same thing, not checking their facts, or worse making them up.
This it seems had been Wilson’s aim, at least in part: to test Windshuttle out. There’s a reference to Wilson’s article on Larvatus Prodeo, and there follows a stream of largely negative comments about Wilson’s writing such that I felt compelled to comment, too. I could not let it go.
Some accused Wilson of writing badly. Self-indulgent writing, they said, writing that lacked a coherent argument. To me the accusation of self indulgent writing is a red rag to a bull. It reminds me of the argument my mother used when we were children when she was unhappy with is. The argument that this is pure 'selfishness'. Selfishness and self indulgence, what a way to try to undermine a person. That's not to say it doesn't happen sometimes, but it's not the case here. I doubt that Wilson would have garnered the attention she's received, she would not have been published in Meanjin were her writing as awful as some of her detractors suggest.
I disagreed in a comment on Lavartus Prodeo, then a couple of other commentators started to turn on me, for having a go at them, the mostly men, for not having read the essay, etc. How could I have read Wilson’s work it seemed and not share their views? One woman complained too, and she's a mother, she wrote, though at least she acknowledged that she does not like this style of writing., Each to their own taste. but to say something is bad because you don't like it or disagree with it, is simplistic in the extreme
Read Wilson’s article for yourselves in Meanjn, Vol 2, 2009, Winter or see references to her 'Diary of a Hoax' online, .
Wilson's writing is good, it’s passionate, and it’s thoughtful. She is clearly one smart cookie. It seems her detractors hate her examination of her own motives in writing the hoax article/essay in the first place. That she was about to give birth at the time the hoax came out, the original hoax came out that is, seems to have added fuel to the debate.
This is my blog. I can generate my thoughts. There may be some out there who disagree with me about Wilson’s work and I would be happy to hear from them, but there needs to be be more substance to it than the sort of criticisms that arise on Lavartus Prodeo.
I made the mistake of putting my full name to my comment, at least so one of my daughters told me. 'Never put your full name on a blog,' she said. Why? I ask. 'Why, because people you don’t want might get access to them.' I suppose this sort of self censorship applies everywhere.
As Jim remarks in an earlier comment on my blog. He presents certain aspects of himself in his blog, his writing self, with occasional glimpses into his private life, and the rest he keeps to himself.
We all do. We all censor ourselves, if we did not our words would come tumbling out like the unprocessed stuff of madness, of so called primitive process. Still I can’t help thinking that it is more honest for a woman like Wilson to try to grapple with a written explanation of what she was trying to do in creating the hoax she did, than it is for her detractors to complain of self-indulgent writing.
This issue is dear to my heart. To Helen Garner ‘writing is always a seething area of longing and anxiety, and fear and mistakes and daring and of consciousness lagging behind action'. I couldn’t agree more. I also think there is the issue of consequences. Writing can be a dangerous business. I fear that people read with blinkers on. I’m sure I do too. People surprise me then on what they take up and on what they leave out.
I have had a similar difficulty recently, where it’s alleged I said more than I should in public, not here in my blog, but in a professional gathering of colleagues.
See how cryptic I am. Censorship does this too you. It hands the reins over to the monkey on your back. I’m always swatting the monkey off my back, trying to push him out of sight (note my monkey is a he, but there are times when he’s more likely to be a she, especially when it comes to some of my colleagues.)
I think it was Ann Lamott, who referred to this monkey as being like your parents, your internal parents looking over your shoulder, approving of or more likely disapproving of what you write.
The monkey on my shoulder is big and hairy at the moment. So I seek solace in blogs, my blog, even as I recognise I run the risk of traipsing on sensitive ground.
As Wilson writes in relation to the exposure of her hoax, ‘It’s a wonderful thing to have a public voice, but it’s a shitty thing being the object of media predation’. And as she writes further ‘It’s a dirty business taking the piss. It’s dirtier still to report it’.
This is when all the moralizing starts, when the world gets split into victims and perpetrators. We all do it most of the time, we try to split the world into good guys and bad. We find it hard to see all the grey in between.
Wilson sees grey, when she writes with some compassion about Windshuttle the man, ‘in his emails…so perfectly nice, and in my own vulnerability, on a human level, I had mixed feelings playing Sharon Gould’ as opposed to her feelings about Windshuttle, the idealogue. There is a difference.
She wrote an article for Meanjin on the hoax she began, ‘Holding up the Mirror: Windshuttle, Me, and the Provocateur on Trial’. In this essay Wilson writes about the way she posed as a scientist, Sharon Gould, and wrote an essay which according to the journalist, Margaret Simons is ‘studded with false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes’.
Keith Windshuttle fell into the trap and accepted the essay for publication in Quadrant without checking it, the fake footnotes etc. Simons blew the lid off the hoax after publication and then all hell broke loose, for a while at least, given the notion that Windshuttle had once accused a couple of historians of doing the same thing, not checking their facts, or worse making them up.
This it seems had been Wilson’s aim, at least in part: to test Windshuttle out. There’s a reference to Wilson’s article on Larvatus Prodeo, and there follows a stream of largely negative comments about Wilson’s writing such that I felt compelled to comment, too. I could not let it go.
Some accused Wilson of writing badly. Self-indulgent writing, they said, writing that lacked a coherent argument. To me the accusation of self indulgent writing is a red rag to a bull. It reminds me of the argument my mother used when we were children when she was unhappy with is. The argument that this is pure 'selfishness'. Selfishness and self indulgence, what a way to try to undermine a person. That's not to say it doesn't happen sometimes, but it's not the case here. I doubt that Wilson would have garnered the attention she's received, she would not have been published in Meanjin were her writing as awful as some of her detractors suggest.
I disagreed in a comment on Lavartus Prodeo, then a couple of other commentators started to turn on me, for having a go at them, the mostly men, for not having read the essay, etc. How could I have read Wilson’s work it seemed and not share their views? One woman complained too, and she's a mother, she wrote, though at least she acknowledged that she does not like this style of writing., Each to their own taste. but to say something is bad because you don't like it or disagree with it, is simplistic in the extreme
Read Wilson’s article for yourselves in Meanjn, Vol 2, 2009, Winter or see references to her 'Diary of a Hoax' online, .
Wilson's writing is good, it’s passionate, and it’s thoughtful. She is clearly one smart cookie. It seems her detractors hate her examination of her own motives in writing the hoax article/essay in the first place. That she was about to give birth at the time the hoax came out, the original hoax came out that is, seems to have added fuel to the debate.
This is my blog. I can generate my thoughts. There may be some out there who disagree with me about Wilson’s work and I would be happy to hear from them, but there needs to be be more substance to it than the sort of criticisms that arise on Lavartus Prodeo.
I made the mistake of putting my full name to my comment, at least so one of my daughters told me. 'Never put your full name on a blog,' she said. Why? I ask. 'Why, because people you don’t want might get access to them.' I suppose this sort of self censorship applies everywhere.
As Jim remarks in an earlier comment on my blog. He presents certain aspects of himself in his blog, his writing self, with occasional glimpses into his private life, and the rest he keeps to himself.
We all do. We all censor ourselves, if we did not our words would come tumbling out like the unprocessed stuff of madness, of so called primitive process. Still I can’t help thinking that it is more honest for a woman like Wilson to try to grapple with a written explanation of what she was trying to do in creating the hoax she did, than it is for her detractors to complain of self-indulgent writing.
This issue is dear to my heart. To Helen Garner ‘writing is always a seething area of longing and anxiety, and fear and mistakes and daring and of consciousness lagging behind action'. I couldn’t agree more. I also think there is the issue of consequences. Writing can be a dangerous business. I fear that people read with blinkers on. I’m sure I do too. People surprise me then on what they take up and on what they leave out.
I have had a similar difficulty recently, where it’s alleged I said more than I should in public, not here in my blog, but in a professional gathering of colleagues.
See how cryptic I am. Censorship does this too you. It hands the reins over to the monkey on your back. I’m always swatting the monkey off my back, trying to push him out of sight (note my monkey is a he, but there are times when he’s more likely to be a she, especially when it comes to some of my colleagues.)
I think it was Ann Lamott, who referred to this monkey as being like your parents, your internal parents looking over your shoulder, approving of or more likely disapproving of what you write.
The monkey on my shoulder is big and hairy at the moment. So I seek solace in blogs, my blog, even as I recognise I run the risk of traipsing on sensitive ground.
As Wilson writes in relation to the exposure of her hoax, ‘It’s a wonderful thing to have a public voice, but it’s a shitty thing being the object of media predation’. And as she writes further ‘It’s a dirty business taking the piss. It’s dirtier still to report it’.
This is when all the moralizing starts, when the world gets split into victims and perpetrators. We all do it most of the time, we try to split the world into good guys and bad. We find it hard to see all the grey in between.
Wilson sees grey, when she writes with some compassion about Windshuttle the man, ‘in his emails…so perfectly nice, and in my own vulnerability, on a human level, I had mixed feelings playing Sharon Gould’ as opposed to her feelings about Windshuttle, the idealogue. There is a difference.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Surgery
If only all the worries of my life could be solved as simply as this one.
I have just managed to remove the splinter that had lodged itself inside my little finger for over a week now – a tiny sliver of glass.
This morning I poked a hole into the lump under my skin with a pin and pushed as far down as I could bear, then smeared the puncture with tea tree oil. I bandaged the lot and ignored it for the rest of the day until now.
I should be a surgeon. And you should all be proud.
I have just managed to remove the splinter that had lodged itself inside my little finger for over a week now – a tiny sliver of glass.
This morning I poked a hole into the lump under my skin with a pin and pushed as far down as I could bear, then smeared the puncture with tea tree oil. I bandaged the lot and ignored it for the rest of the day until now.
I should be a surgeon. And you should all be proud.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Foreign objects
I am distracted by an infected finger. Something has managed to lodge itself underneath the top layers of skin on the little finger of my right hand. It is not so much painful, as it bothers me.
There is a lump that I have attacked twice now with a needle hoping to dislodge the splinter or whatever it is that rests there. My husband has offered to do the job for me. Once I would have welcomed that but not now. Now I prefer to minister to myself but I am squeamish. I do not go in hard enough. I cannot reach the foreign objects and I develop dreadful fantasies of bits of this thing splitting off and floating along my blood stream till it reaches my heart where it will cause a clot and kill me. Such hypochondriasis.
It’s not just a function of age. Though my fears get worse as I age. I’ve always been like this. I went once to visit a doctor in Carnegie because I discovered a slight bump in the middle of my big toe, a bump or lump, whatever it was, I decided for a day or so that at last I had the dreaded cancer. I was only twenty-two but I would be dead within months.
‘It’s a ganglion,’ the doctor said. And proceeded to tell me that the only way to treat it, if indeed treatment were necessary, was to drop a bible on top to squash it. Most likely it would go away of its own accord, he said. And it did.
There is a lump that I have attacked twice now with a needle hoping to dislodge the splinter or whatever it is that rests there. My husband has offered to do the job for me. Once I would have welcomed that but not now. Now I prefer to minister to myself but I am squeamish. I do not go in hard enough. I cannot reach the foreign objects and I develop dreadful fantasies of bits of this thing splitting off and floating along my blood stream till it reaches my heart where it will cause a clot and kill me. Such hypochondriasis.
It’s not just a function of age. Though my fears get worse as I age. I’ve always been like this. I went once to visit a doctor in Carnegie because I discovered a slight bump in the middle of my big toe, a bump or lump, whatever it was, I decided for a day or so that at last I had the dreaded cancer. I was only twenty-two but I would be dead within months.
‘It’s a ganglion,’ the doctor said. And proceeded to tell me that the only way to treat it, if indeed treatment were necessary, was to drop a bible on top to squash it. Most likely it would go away of its own accord, he said. And it did.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The loneliness of the diary
I have been watching a documentary on Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. The man amazes me. He seems so ordinary and yet the words that come from his mind and tapping fingers are extraordinary. He can take something as simple as peeling potatoes with his mother as a boy and turn it into a prayer. A prayer, I mean in the highest sense of beauty.
Heaney has a feel for words, the poet’s sensibility I suppose. I wish I had it too. I see it elsewhere, in poets elsewhere, but I have never been able to tackle words with such delicacy and respect myself.
I am a racer when I write. The words roll out of me. I do not stop to attend to them, to look for the finest alternative word, because I fear if I do so I will lose my momentum. I am a writer who uses momentum to create a scene. Momentum gives me rhythm and when I lose it I tend to stumble and stutter. But I wish, oh how I wish, I could string words together, string images together like Seamus Heaney.
I must avoid beating up on myself at this point. It is so easy to do. The writer’s lament: why do I not write like so and so, or such and such? Why do I not perform as well as he or she? Why are my words awkward and clumsy on the page?
I use my blog to practise my writing, to play around with ideas and to communicate with others. Is this the way others operate? Do other bloggers write on blogs primarily to communicate, or to practise their writing, or to show off, or to struggle with ideas, or to assert their certainties or share their doubts? These questions are probably ridiculous. As with so many things there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are bloggers.
It beats the loneliness of the diary. When I was a young girl, around fifteen years of age, I wound up in a Catholic boarding school for the best part of a year. It was not an easy time. My sister boarded with me but she seemed, at least to me, she seemed to handle the experience better. She was a neat and orderly child. She could keep her clothes in good repair. I was a slob, with teeth rotting in my mouth that I sought to hide from the nuns and from my mother because I feared both the shame and pain of attending to them.
In boarding school everything ran in order. The boarders, most of them country girls from places like Numurkah, Wonthaggi and Maffra, wore picture perfect uniforms, each item clearly printed with their names in the top collar or on waist tags. Even their socks and underpants were labeled. I hid my underwear and socks in shame. I ran a furtive washing operation on my own, unbeknown to the nuns in the laundry, because I could not bear to let them see my tatty underwear.
It’s a familiar enough story but I use it here as a metaphor for other secrets and for this underlying sense of my writing - that it is messy and a disgrace.
Perhaps I should confine it to the loneliness of my diary.
Heaney has a feel for words, the poet’s sensibility I suppose. I wish I had it too. I see it elsewhere, in poets elsewhere, but I have never been able to tackle words with such delicacy and respect myself.
I am a racer when I write. The words roll out of me. I do not stop to attend to them, to look for the finest alternative word, because I fear if I do so I will lose my momentum. I am a writer who uses momentum to create a scene. Momentum gives me rhythm and when I lose it I tend to stumble and stutter. But I wish, oh how I wish, I could string words together, string images together like Seamus Heaney.
I must avoid beating up on myself at this point. It is so easy to do. The writer’s lament: why do I not write like so and so, or such and such? Why do I not perform as well as he or she? Why are my words awkward and clumsy on the page?
I use my blog to practise my writing, to play around with ideas and to communicate with others. Is this the way others operate? Do other bloggers write on blogs primarily to communicate, or to practise their writing, or to show off, or to struggle with ideas, or to assert their certainties or share their doubts? These questions are probably ridiculous. As with so many things there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are bloggers.
It beats the loneliness of the diary. When I was a young girl, around fifteen years of age, I wound up in a Catholic boarding school for the best part of a year. It was not an easy time. My sister boarded with me but she seemed, at least to me, she seemed to handle the experience better. She was a neat and orderly child. She could keep her clothes in good repair. I was a slob, with teeth rotting in my mouth that I sought to hide from the nuns and from my mother because I feared both the shame and pain of attending to them.
In boarding school everything ran in order. The boarders, most of them country girls from places like Numurkah, Wonthaggi and Maffra, wore picture perfect uniforms, each item clearly printed with their names in the top collar or on waist tags. Even their socks and underpants were labeled. I hid my underwear and socks in shame. I ran a furtive washing operation on my own, unbeknown to the nuns in the laundry, because I could not bear to let them see my tatty underwear.
It’s a familiar enough story but I use it here as a metaphor for other secrets and for this underlying sense of my writing - that it is messy and a disgrace.
Perhaps I should confine it to the loneliness of my diary.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
autobiographers (and bloggers) lead perilous lives
I am disappointed in myself for not booking into many events at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Yet I fear at the moment I am suffering from stimulus overload. Too much information.
In recent months I find I have become something of a blogaholic. This bothers me. It’s all too easy. Some chance remark on someone’s blog, some brief reference to someone’s thoughts on some other blogger’s ideas, leads me to click the mouse and enter a new blog, one I never knew existed and then depending on the nature of that blog I find I am keen to include said blog onto my ‘follow’ list.
I now have seventeen people whose blogs I follow. I understand I am not alone in this. But at the rate I am going, with an increase of two new blogs every week or so for the last month I will soon be like the old woman in the shoe - she had so many children she knew not what to do. Not that bloggers are children, but I find myself busily identifying with so many of them if I can.
For me it is a brave new world.
I am wary of the ease with which words online can be seen to be far more hostile (or sometimes loving) than they would sound were they spoken. I also resist those (to me) awful conventions, which I see my daughters using regularly on face book, the lol, the hahahah, the letters that signify sounds that presumably are intended to soften the blow of any comments made on line.
My husband, the lawyer, tells me often enough that it is important to be wary of what I write in official capacities, for instance in the notes I might make about my work with others. It’s better he tells me to write less than more. The more you write the more likely it is to be misconstrued, or distorted by those who wish to put a different spin on it than you had intended.
We live in litigious times.
All of this gives me cause to sigh, a tremor of paranoia, but I persevere regardless, because I love to write.
I try to write as honestly as I can and if it gets me into trouble (as it certainly has done recently) then so be it. As the wonderful literary critic, Paul John Eakin writes
‘Autobiographers lead perilous lives.’
In recent months I find I have become something of a blogaholic. This bothers me. It’s all too easy. Some chance remark on someone’s blog, some brief reference to someone’s thoughts on some other blogger’s ideas, leads me to click the mouse and enter a new blog, one I never knew existed and then depending on the nature of that blog I find I am keen to include said blog onto my ‘follow’ list.
I now have seventeen people whose blogs I follow. I understand I am not alone in this. But at the rate I am going, with an increase of two new blogs every week or so for the last month I will soon be like the old woman in the shoe - she had so many children she knew not what to do. Not that bloggers are children, but I find myself busily identifying with so many of them if I can.
For me it is a brave new world.
I am wary of the ease with which words online can be seen to be far more hostile (or sometimes loving) than they would sound were they spoken. I also resist those (to me) awful conventions, which I see my daughters using regularly on face book, the lol, the hahahah, the letters that signify sounds that presumably are intended to soften the blow of any comments made on line.
My husband, the lawyer, tells me often enough that it is important to be wary of what I write in official capacities, for instance in the notes I might make about my work with others. It’s better he tells me to write less than more. The more you write the more likely it is to be misconstrued, or distorted by those who wish to put a different spin on it than you had intended.
We live in litigious times.
All of this gives me cause to sigh, a tremor of paranoia, but I persevere regardless, because I love to write.
I try to write as honestly as I can and if it gets me into trouble (as it certainly has done recently) then so be it. As the wonderful literary critic, Paul John Eakin writes
‘Autobiographers lead perilous lives.’
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