Archives for October, 2007

Shame. It’s been a recurrent theme in my writing these last few weeks, underpinning my discomfort with/disgust at the things I’ve been writing, even when I didn’t use the word explicitly. I think it’s because of that, because of this fog that I’m struggling with, that the tone of the last few posts here has degenerated into one I’ve largely avoided these last few years. The last time I wrote like this was during my first year of university. It’s one of the reasons that I now attach my full name to my online writings – it forces me to acknowledge the fact that the silences my oblique metaphors and half-expressed angers leave open can easily be filled with the wrong kinds of reader assumptions, especially given the pigeon-holed identity politics into which I and my writing can be thoughtlessly slotted.

So, to be clear, the shame I’ve become obsessed with is a purely academic and political one. The anger that grows out of this shame is one directed only at me. I’ve learned not to blog about the more private and externally-directed angers that often consume me. No, not “learned” – decided.

But it worries me that I cannot write about this new anxiety without resorting to the language of my adolescence, because it implies that the intervening years and the intervening struggles have meant less than I thought they did and that they had less of an effect on me than I’d hoped they had.
That I’m going to have to start all over again. That the holes in my self-consciousness I thought I’d filled up years ago with the necessary life experiences are gaping voids again.

From an email exchange, now almost two months old:

that was the first kind of love i believed in: that heady exultation that comes from swallowing other people’s words; that borders on anger, too, because it stems from such beautiful rage.*

re: love via anger, isn’t that just an explanation of adolescence? the best part of it, anyway.

i was going to say something like that, but didn’t, because a) i don’t want to believe that that love won’t come again; because b) i know that anger will and it won’t help me to think i am being juvenile when i feel as though i am being incredibly, deathly serious.
but you are right, and i hope you’re not.

you don’t hope i’m wrong.
i’m under the impression that the ability to love evolves just as the rest of our lives do. and one day it won’t come as a uncontrollable surge that can turn on you in a second – something flippant and unreliable and as ugly as it is beautiful – but something strong and reliable, so perfectly simple, and you learn to use that weight as a foundation to grow rather than a trophy you lift over your head.

* In that conversation, A & I conflated different types of anger, but the kind of anger I’d initially been talking about was a political anger, the anger you feel for things that do not directly impact you. But at the base level, all anger for me, even those kinds I am grateful for, spring from the same, ugly source.
In a way, thinking about this now, it seems to me that this new sense of shame, arising from a new source, is perhaps an opportunity for me to move away from that ugliness and to forge new and cleaner angers. I just need to give it a chance to mature.

It grows colder outside. Autumn moans a little through the leaves. Dislocated branches flare fire-red in the middle of trees still holding, tight-veined, onto green. The sharpness in the air condenses into rain, bringing darkness to afternoons.
Coats hang in my room, dusty, stained, tucked into a corner behind my door. Light gets trapped here, enmeshed in the residues of last year. I avoid them, let them hang there in their thick silences. I wrap scarves around my neck, button my blazer over my chest, stretch mittens over my fingers. This is enough that I can trust my teeth to stay still, refrain from spontaneous chattering, which they’re sometimes giving to doing.

Just enough, too, that I feel the sting of the cold.

It grows warmer inside.
Thick heat inside, melting my inside.
Language collapsed for me one way a few weeks ago. I remember vaguely that there were broken pieces and I could feel the edges of them. I remember trying to trace the outlines, but the mechanism that used to make that possible was also broken. So putting words together became a strange process, because of things shutting down in various parts of my mind. I had to choreograph through the various strikes of consciousness, to manoeuvre between the unprepared for blanknesses.
But it’s difficult to remember.

Now it’s just melting. There’s a fog swirling in my head, woolly, wet. It pulsates, a hideously living thing that feeds off things I don’t feed it. It appropriates for itself mindspace I never offered it, oozing over the hedgerows and the walls I’d carefully maintained, reducing my mental landscape to a quagmire of undifferentiated doubts. The questions, now slimy with shame, that are melted together should not be – now I cannot answer them, can barely ask them; they meld into each other like this: ugly.

Shame, mostly. Unlike any shame anyone’s ever introduced me to before. A shame that does not spontaneously combust, that does not generate its own heat, but gets sucked into the morass of doubt, into and under. Out of which grows disgust – because, god, it’s inescapable, entangled in everything: every single space, every single letter.

And I’d like for it to go away.
Because the more I try to exorcise it, slow and cringing, the more ammunition I give it.

I woke up Saturday morning and in what sounded to my sleep-stuffed ears like a perfectly clear voice, resonant with determination, I said, “I’m going to read.” A fraction of a lifetime snapped by and, my eyes not even fully open yet, I continued, “And do other things.”

I was entirely serious, however ridiculous I must have sounded, absolutely convinced I was going to split the daylight (if not the day) into straightforward blocks of time during which I would accomplish devilishly impossible quantities of things. I was about to not only find time, I was going to make it. I was going to read my fill of the world and of people and I was going to also do things, fulfil my obligations to the world and to people. There was no contradiction of thought and action here, nor any conflict of physics.

The morning previous to that, I’d woken up screaming my brother’s name, the wrong brother’s name, as the youngest one walked away from me on the wrong side of the concrete pavement in my nightdream.
It was my mother’s voice in my bedroom and the grey light on my eyelids that woke me that morning.

Saturday, it was a determination to grapple with the world, in its stories and its being, that woke me.

Saturday was yesterday. Continue reading this entry »

On the one hand, if I slept, my body would be able to rest a bit, recuperate: I wouldn’t be having these sudden moments of dizziness or find myself shivering through abrupt, inexplicable fevers. The pressure in and the tightness around my head would let up and maybe I’d stop squinting in the autumn light. I’d sit straighter.

All these things I’d blamed on the weather would probably sort themselves out if I just slept a little more and a little more regularly.

But on the other hand: things to read, do, make. Things I actually want to read, do, make.
An increasing hesitation to write things: emails; papers; complete sentences. But it’s not as though this drift towards a counterfeit hush has opened up space to be still in. It’s just a different, calmer frenzy that fills the space I never saw the floor of: an ordered stockpiling of everyone and everything else.

One day last week I was reading The God of Small Things on the bus. I looked up and I saw something and various things in my mind clicked into place. The problem is, I cannot remember what I saw. Only that I saw something and the word mol became mahal; mon, mahan.

For a few days, that book lodged itself just below and to the right of my heart, an almost physical sensation as I lived that stark, familiar green.
Continue reading this entry »

I am afraid I’m not politically engaged enough – and I don’t mean ‘afraid’ in the insincerely apologetic sense, but in the sense of a concern that actually does trouble me.
Hopefully, I’m not going to have to explain why it’s important that people do make the effort to involve themselves in the politics that limit their lives. Or if I do have to explain – and I’m thinking I do, for my own sake – now is not the time. I’m too tired.

Oftentimes, my ‘political engagement’ limits itself to swearing at the newspaper, slipping snide remarks into casual emails, and making fun of Daniel Pipes in English classes.
Sometimes I go to conferences, where we sit in orderly rows and hear people whose first names are always Right Honourable talk. And then we smile politely at each other, tuck in our knees, and munch on croissants, washed down with (occasionally even free-trade) coffee.
Sometimes I sit in dusty rooms with other students and we hash out the things that are wrong with the systems of which we are a part, shock ourselves with the sordid details of university industries.
Sometimes I watch plays people my age put on where they mock the things I do, the letters I write, the lectures I attend. Sometimes I fall in love with the lyricism of their pragmatic angers.
Sometimes I read books.

Last week I went to a rally. Continue reading this entry »