A Leaf Pressed Dry

Summer hiatus

2006-06-29T15:55:00.000Z

I'm going to have to take a break from this for a while, since I'm not going to be near an internet connexion. In the meantime I'll be working on my own top secret writing projects. I'll be back at the end of September.

Be good.

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation - Roger Scruton

2006-05-19T15:58:00.000Z

In which Arrietty gets epigraphical.

"I said that this edgy baptism - which looks like being a real dunk in water - is about finding my place. Yet the whole business - fitting in, sharing territory, discovering a niche, making, with luck, a contribution, and trying to do it all with a modicum of grace and inventiveness looks uncannily like the challenge our species is facing as it tries to find its own settlement in nature. The difference is that, ecologically and globally, we're bucking the whole emotional aspect of that settlement. So often we're lectured that the great environmental crises of our time are just problems of household management writ large. If we're less greedy, stop breeding, budget our energy use, recycle our waste, make compost, then everything will be fine. What a hope! Who could ever run a house (if we must use that bossy, domestic metaphor) while ignoring the unquantifiable tastes and habits, the needs and motivations of all its occupants? The list of our disastrous failures, from forest obliteration and oceanic pollution to the raising of the extinction rate a thousandfold, bears all the marks of a species which no longer believes itself to be part of the animal world at all. We're becoming unearthly, freed, we like to think, from the physical imperatives of nature by technology, and exiled from its sensuality and immediacy by our self-awareness. Our role on the planet is compromised less by our power than by this arrogance, and the belief that our particular brand of consciousness makes us uniquely privileged as a species, entitled to evaluate and manage the lives of all the others on our own terms."

Nature Cure Richard Mabey

"I'm not exceptionally shy
But I've never had a man
That I could look straight in the eye
And tell my secret plans"

The Perfect Fit The Dresden Dolls

"One of the awful things I find today is that young people come to me and ask if there is any hope. Of course there's hope. At the moment, we are just waiting as we were in the 30s, when everyone knew war was coming but no one knew what to do about it. The moment the war started, we knew that the prospect was pretty awful, but there was a wonderful sense of purpose. There were no consumer goods, and food was strictly rationed. We never considered that time hopeless. When climate change gets bad, then there will be excitement, and that's the payoff. As Crispin Tickell said, what we need is leadership - and disaster."

James Lovelock

I don't think I want kids until I know how the world's going to turn out. In fact, if this entire, probably futile enterprise into figuring out the global story turns out to be nothing more than what happens when my angsty side starts arguing with my clucky side, well, I'll be the first one to start laughing (and the first one to stop).

That really is the main reason. I like kids, and I'd love to settle down if only I could find someone whom I can tolerate at least as much as they can tolerate me (I'm cynical about my romanticism). And I know that if I'm having kids, I want them before I'm thirty.

I wrote something in my head the other morning that I really need to type out, about talking to a boy about the farm he grew up on and which he might wind up inheriting. I wanted to say: Marry me. Take me home. I'll raise your children and make your dinner and do whatever else it takes to be in that farmstead, to be in one place, to know that place. To be away from all these troubling thoughts and challenging people, my dissenting beliefs and uneven past. And they were thoughts that I curtailed quickly, but believe me, they came from somewhere, a place I know well. I can still feel that place: it aches to find a home.

I wouldn't be happy, though, in a life like that. I'm too spiky, too questioning, and though I'm not easily bored I know when I'm not being pushed.

I'm interested in the idea of the end of the world. I read an article today about the remake of The Omen that's coming out soon. Apparently it brings in the theme of fundamentalist terrorism, and the director or screenwriter or whoever was saying that it is beginning to feel like evil is growing in the world, like it's resurgent in events such as 9/11. Well, that's a pretty ignorant reading of modern affairs, for starters, but more to the current point, hell, it's not like this is the first time people have felt like this. Think about being in London in 1666 (plague and fire and the Number of the Beast), or during any of the major wars, anywhere... or when epidemics hit, or during the vast canon of invasions, infernos and destruction that add drama and excitement to our glorious human story.

What have we got now? Forget terrorism, that doesn't scare me. Oil's running out, nuclear armament, and, oh yes, climate chaos a-coming. We've got the Holy Neocon Empire with their sky-gods and belligerence. The reason things are different this time around are that the climate change that's coming (and I do believe it's coming) is going to be more horrific than anything since the last Ice Age. We've only stopped being hunter-gatherers since the ice melted. Humanity dealt with climate changes before, but this time is very different. This time we live in a ridiculously complicated culture, entirely dependent on food and energy that we don't produce. You wouldn't have to remove very many links to bring the whole edifice down. And this time, we live in an economically global society. The end of oil is not just going to affect life in Europe or America, but people in every part of every fucking continent. And while we're at it, we've only got one atmosphere.

Now, this is entirely depressing. And scary. And maybe the best thing to do would be to put up, shut up and have another drink, because I do know that there's fuck all I can do about any of it. I can't do that. I've got my kids, such as they may be, to think of. I've got my friends' kids, my cousins' kids. And I have hope.

James Lovelock may be a little... almost gleeful... about what he sees coming (and he's predicted some things that make even me want to disbelieve him). But what I've copied above oddly echoes a conversation I had with my best friend last year: that we can get together, we can survive this, and we don't know what's coming or when but by god we will pull together and we will face it. The Spirit of the Blitz, and all that. I just don't know if I want to look after a child while that's happening.

What scares me even more? The way that other people will react. I read an interview with Jeremy Leggett, who wrote Half Gone, which I ain't read yet, but in it he talks about the BNP, a British far-right party, and how some members of it turned up to a public lecture about the end of oil, and said nothing, but listened carefully and then left. The far right always does well in bad times. And if you look at New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, you do wonder about how good people are at helping strangers when danger's in the air.

Even to me, a lot of this seems like I'm just scaring myself; that I'm creating imaginary nightmares. But I respect science (unlike some major leaders I could mention) and I even understand a reasonable amount. And there is strong, strong reason to believe that bad times are coming.

Still, I have hope. I know there's a future. I know it's coming. I know there are many things in it. And I'm still reading books and watching films and thinking rather than, say, learning SAS survival skills and how to grow my own food.

Put it this way, though: I'm not starting a pension any time soon.

***

A week later

I managed to say some of the above a few days ago to the first person I've met here with whom I can have a genuine, intense, candid conversation. "You can't live your life like that" he said. And he's right. I know he's right. Thing is: for the first time in years I have plans, I have a future. I'm going home for the summer but in September I'll be back in this decent little city, a place I don't love but which contains people whom I do. This wouldn't be a bad place to settle down. It's thrilling, that idea. I still have places to go: Spain, Iran, China, Sub-Saharan Africa, back to Australia - but the idea of a base - a house, a shitty little house that I can fill with books and prints and people and come back to - well. It sings to me.

And a future. A career, even. Kids. I've never let myself plan anything ahead, but now I want to. Not too much, of course - I'm not one for hammering my time ahead into a framework held together with rivets where the mileposts are: graduating, buying a house, having children - but a little bit. A realisation that I have so much time ahead of me, and a tentative idea that there are things I could do with it, and threads that I could run through it and let thicken and entwine. That maybe my life doesn't have to be irresistibly batted from one thing to the next, and that I could find a path, and follow it, rather than constantly crashing through the undergrowth, chasing something and running away. I type in metaphors when faced with the idea of planning a life: it seems better than writing a list of Things To Do Before I'm Dead.

Still, I am making plans. For the first time in years, I'm going home and I know when I'm leaving again and where I'll be going and what I'll be doing. I have purpose. If I can start off with this: with the easy aims set by my degree requirements - then maybe I can work up to big plans. Maybe I can figure out what to do not with my life, but at least with my twenties. Maybe I can stop being scared by what I think I know is coming, and just accept it. Fighting it in my head won't help anything. There is time.

Waking up with blood on my face, or, Anhedonia comes soon after angst, or, A Mission Statement

2006-05-01T12:14:00.000Z

Being here has turned into a process of disconnecting myself: of losing contact with friends and pissing off the ones I do see. It's so selfish. I'm just not able for anything else right now.

But it's been a rough week. I called my parents to tell them some good news - first thing my mother said was "What do you need?" as if there was no other possible reason for my calling them. I told her the good news anyway. She wasn't particularly impressed.

I got an essay back, with a ridiculously high mark. I didn't smile when I saw the mark. My tutor said: "You can really write" and I didn't smile at that either. Nobody will sympathise with me about how I feel about my grades, because this semester I have been getting nothing but first class honours and frankly that's nothing to complain about, but the fact that I no longer feel any pleasure whatsoever in doing well is symptomatic of whatever the hell is going on in my head right now.

I sleep eleven hours a night and wake up with bloody lips, pillows, hair. Biting my wounds in my sleep. Awesome.

I'm reading Voltaire. Candide to start off with, though there's other stories in the volume I've borrowed. "If this is the best of all possible worlds, then what must the others be like?"
I've been known to have huge arguments with my friends over the phrase "meant to be". If people want to apply it to themselves on a personal level - that something was meant to be, wasn't meant to be - it irritates me but I don't generally pick up on it, because I choose my fights.
What really rubs me up the wrong way is when it is applied to the whole goddamn world. That this is the way the world is meant to be. My flatmate said that in a drunken conversation a couple of weeks ago - we were talking about the future, and the environment, and global inequality, and other things that are unlikely to be solved by three students sitting around getting trollied - and it really annoyed me, although I know my flatmate well enough that I was not in the least bit surprised. This is not the way the world is meant to be. The world could truly be a better place, and it could truly be a worse place. So much of history has swung on tiny pivots, tiny interactions - and on men (and occasionally women) of such ignorance and hatred, and of such grace - in short, on the decisions of very fallible people, working blind, not knowing what the consequences of their actions would be. No, this is not the way the world is meant to be. There is nothing pushing our "progress" - we take it ourselves, one step at a time, and with little knowledge of the destination we are heading to. And similarly there is nothing to catch us if we should trip and fall, except for ourselves. But when I think of what it is I love about humans, of what there is beyond our greed and negligence and stupidity: ingenuity and wisdom and, yes, love - when I think of that, my lack of belief in a god that will intervene to save us becomes un-frightening, and instead is just liberating.
When I wrote above that the belief that things are or aren't meant to be on a personal level annoys me but that I don't generally argue about it - well, it annoys me because it implies that people are happy to surrender personal responsibility. But to accuse someone of surrendering personal responsibility is not necessarily something I want to do, because, ho-ho, I like having friends. Still, to me, responsibility is freedom: it is saying to the world that I can stand on my own two feet (although I realise that to anyone looking through this blog, the evidence may come down strongly against this idea). And this idea is so fundamental to me that really, I cannot help but see the refusal to take responsibility as a sign of immaturity.
This comes full circle because I reckon the western world's refusal to take responsibility for the way we are fucking up the planet is on one level a demonstration of collective immaturity. It's not just that, it's other things too, and I'm going to write about them here at some point, but that's one of them.

A realisation: writing this, getting my ideas down in pixels, makes me the happiest I've been in a week. And no matter how much I feel like I'm going off the rails right now (Mean of the Emotional Quagmire Quotidian Quotient This Week: 56.3, up 24.9) the ability to express some idea of mine is what makes me feel alive again. How odd. This thinking, if you can call it that - stewing on an idea and trying to get it down right - is so far away from my concept of being alive that it's really not funny - actually, that gap is something else worth thinking about.

I never wanted this to turn into an angsty journal, but maybe angst is part of who I am right now. I mean in the way the dictionary on my computer defines the word: a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general. There's a bit of that in me. The task I am setting myself is to focus it, and that's part of what writing this journal is, I think, beginning to do. And I know my thoughts are an odd mixture of big questions, and emotional insecurities, and some knowledge, and ignorance that at times seems insurmountable. But that's who I am. I cannot begin to approach these big questions that I want to think about (basically: where is the world going?) without sorting out some things in my head first, not least my doubts about even asking that kind of question. I wasn't entirely sure, when I began this a few months ago, what I wanted to do with it, but now I think I know. This is going to be a place for me to play with arguments and also to get out in the open some of my worries about the fact that I'm even doing this, and to write about some of the things I've read and, well, generally sort my head out. Whether or not anyone else actually wants to read that remains to be seen.

Reveal six weird facts/things/habits about yourself and then tag six people.

2006-04-21T16:50:00.000Z

Well, I'm not going to tag anyone, because I don't have enough people to tag and because I really don't like memes. Still, Nick has set me a challenge. So I'll answer it, although I'm not sure it's anywhere near what was originally intended.

These are nominally things I don't like about myself, or things that worry me - a list of "six weird facts/things/habits" about myself wouldn't get anyone very far (although hey! Maybe I'll do one tomorrow). I guess what the list really turned out to be was a few trivial things and a few serious things about myself. Sounds fascinating, eh?

I relate to song lyrics, although at least I have the good grace to be embarrassed by it these days.

I wish I could be more spontaneous and funny in writing. In person, I can be. But when it comes to putting things on paper, it doesn't work. My sisters are good at it – whenever I get anything from them I laugh out loud – and I can see it comes easy to them. Still, I've known at least one person who was hilarious in emails and utterly useless and impossible in actual conversation, so I prefer being this way.

I procrastinate so much. That procrastination can be roughly categorised into two groups: avoiding stuff I truly don't want to do and avoiding stuff that's boring, with the majority falling into the latter camp. The stuff I truly don't want to do is interesting, but not in good ways, and a lot of it is related to No. 5 below.

I have a secret crush on Sam Vimes from Discworld. THERE WE GO I'VE SAID IT OKAY?

There are things that have happened in my life which I cannot think about because if I do, I come close to non-functionality. Again. So I don't think about them. They're not the kind of thing that time heals: more the kind of thing that takes time to learn to ignore efficiently. This is cowardly but I don't know what else to do. I have a pretty strong feeling that everyone with a certain amount of living behind them has these kinds of knots in their heads.

I wonder sometimes if my attempts to fit in anywhere: my ability to change my accent, my appearance, and to selectively mention my opinions, are based on a fundamental insecurity about myself. I choose how to display my personality to those around me: as the one person reading this who knows me face-to-face can attest, if I can do anything well, it's dissimulation. I know everyone does this to an extent but I take it to extremes – so even though I have a firm personality in my own head, and I know who I am, hardly anyone around me does. And most of the people or groups of people I know have very different ideas of who I am. This is okay until you try to put them all together in one room. There are people who know me almost only for the fact that I can write a decent essay, and others who would never guess it. There are people who know me as sociable, and people who know me as unsociable. There are people who know me as argumentative and garrulous, and people who think that I am nervy and shy. There are people who expect me to go on to a PhD and encourage me to do so, and people who think I would do best just coming home and getting a proper job, and a majority of people who leave it to me, thank god. If it is that: if it is an insecurity – it's not based on discomfort with my idea of myself, but the worry that I won't live up to my own expectations; that in the cold light of day, I won't be as strong or as important or whatever as I secretly want to be. It's procrastination of the first type: putting off saying to the world who I am, even though I figured out a lot of it a long time ago. My real dreams and hopes are a long way both from PhDs and from home, and even from writing, but I've never been brave enough to tell anyone what they are.

Seven things better than grey days in winter

2006-03-27T16:52:00.000Z

The memory of elderflower champagne.
Staying up late and watching films: just because I can.
Roughnesses: bark, rock. Everything I touch these days is so smooth, or at least graded, and it's like sensory deprivation after a while.
Lamp-light reflected from copper spill-trays onto the faces of girls standing at the bar.
The smell of dried yeast as it's sprinkled on warm sugared milk.
A wind at my back.
The clocks going forward. Yesssss.

An over-abundance of writing about books

2006-03-20T16:33:00.000Z

I finished Possession by A. S. Byatt, so I'm now onto Rabbit, Run, which I don't like half as much so far. Possession was good - very good. I hadn't wanted to like it because I read The Virgin in the Garden a couple of years ago and by the end I was just really pissed off with it, and by extension with A. S. Byatt. I didn't like the feeling of being talked down to, or I didn't back then. And it did feel like being talked down to - so much erudition and so little humour (the latter is what saves Umberto Eco for me). Occasionally I would catch an obscure-ish reference, which would only highlight the fact that I was missing so many. Anyway, the story mostly sucked. But all is forgiven. She can write frighteningly well, and in Possession she does - straight narrative and pastiches of 19th C poetry and diaries and correspondence... I need to re-read at some point to try and take it all in properly. My two favourite bits were towards the end. The first one is where she breaks into her narrative with a page-and-a-half-long riff on reading, and perhaps comes close to the kind of thing that annoyed me so much in The Virgin in the Garden - but she's earned it this time and the words are just exquisite. And the second is when Roland is standing out in the garden with the cats. Good books are like decent meals that leave you properly satisfied - the difference being that they can be consumed and re-consumed at leisure. Yum.

A few decent things I've come across this week:

Firstly, Neil Gaiman says Stardust is going to be made into a film, and someone on aintitcool who's seen the script is very excited about it. And so am I.

Also via Neil Gaiman is something I found just a few minutes ago: a new comic for me to read. Sweet. It's called Saukkosotilaat/Otter Soldiers and although I've only read a little bit of it and so can't comment much on the writing/plot, it's satisfyingly weird and funny so far, and the drawing is bloody brilliant. (One day I'll write a post about why I love comics... for the moment it will suffice to say that I do.) Also it's made by a Finn and Anyone Who Speaks Finnish Is Cooler Than You.

Finally, here is a long extract from Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised As A Man, by Norah Vincent, which I am seriously looking forward to reading. I might even buy it new. Any blokes reading this: go read that, and come back and tell me what you think. I'm interested to know.

I have, of course, been much more cheerful this week. I'm worn out though: I know it. I need to go home for a bit.
I've been working - both at the books and behind the bar. The weather is permeatingly grey and uninteresting, and it's getting everyone down. Aside from that, there's not a whole lot going on. I'm looking forward to the holidays, and I'm working on an essay and thinking thoughts.

Oh yes. Things are going well with a beautiful girl I met quite a while ago (things took ages to get off the ground). I'm not at all sure how it will end up, but it's just lovely now.
And kissing her's like tipping sherbet into my bloodstream. That's something I haven't felt in a very long time.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats

2006-03-12T22:21:00.000Z

It feels like there's nothing left now but exhaustion.

I have solutions and methods for times like this. I make sure I eat properly, and I sleep sensibly. I get outside for some fresh air, and I speak to people about ordinary things (not what's actually on my mind: that would be too horribly embarassing once I return to normal). I try to get on with things, and in a few days, or a week or two, I cheer up again and it's as if it had never happened.

In winter I can never remember what it's like to have the sun on my skin. And in summer I can't imagine the bitter January wind.

I read this article today. Looking back over it now, I can't quite remember what it was I saw in it. There was something, anyway. Something that I can't see there now.

Something about burying things, about hiding things and how they sneak out again when your back is turned. Nothing new, nothing original. But it's a lesson I haven't learned (despite all the classes I've had in it) and thus every reminder is needed.

And I'm writing in circles. Bollocks. What I want to say is that I know how to cope. But I don't know how to fix the things I have to cope with. Sometimes they fix themselves, or sometimes time fixes them. But that leaves behind the nasty ones. And THERE IS NO INSTRUCTION MANUAL. That's okay, because you've gotta learn these things yourself, but Christ - I wish there was someone here I could talk it all out with. I don't know anybody here who's been through the kind of things I've been through and come out the other side; I don't know anybody here who thinks the way I do. I could try and tell my story to someone, but it's... maybe it would be overburdening to them. Not because my story is so special or unique or anything much at all compared to others, but because it's so... idiosyncratic?

It could be argued (one can guess from that phrase that I have been writing too many tentatively critical essays recently) that I'm just being overcareful: that there are people here who would easily accept my story and my bullshit and know something about how I need to fix things. And I think in the past I have underestimated people's capacity for understanding. But it's a risk, it's always a risk, telling stories, especially if they're true. I'm defensive even with people I trust and know well, with only one exception. And here there is a surfeit of middle-class blondes and snowboarders of above-average intelligence who talk about nothing. Along with a lot of people I like. Yet I'm scared to get down to the gritty talk with them: scared of rejection, I think (and when I get down to it, there's nothing but that? really?).

Oh, to sit down over a beer and talk about life: about things we have done, things we are doing, things we will do. And to speak about the first without regrets, the second with some uncertainty and humour, and the third with nothing but ill-advised optimism.

That's what I'm missing, I think. It's a bit difficult to add to a checklist alongside "eat some food" and "get some sleep".

Rats.

First words

2006-03-05T19:29:00.000Z

Yesterday was my last day at my old job. I finished, walked across the road, and spent my entire day's wages in the chemist, buying things I needed, but not as much as, say, food and water.

Still. I feel a lot better. And cleaner and softer.

Woke up this morning with the kind of hangover that only red wine followed by rum-and-cokes can give me, recovering from a dream. A dream that gave me an idea for a story that, a few hours later, I realised was really only the backstory for something else. I don't know if it's any good. I'll sleep on it.