The Loneliness of the Long Distance Shit Muncher

http://uk.match.yahoo.net/edito/index.php?mtcmk=080405&name=5/118/2745-10-ways-to-win-at-relationships.html

This morning was spent in a haze of procrastination under the guise of “research”, and during my “research” I came across the above article. This kind of thing always catches my attention but probably not for the reasons the writer intends. I regard them as an invitation to partake in the increasingly popular sport of shit munching. The article really reads, 

"Dear Plebs, please come munch our shit. It is nutritious and will aid your neuroses in ways that don't seem much at the time, we're just frivolous fun after all, but will nevertheless try to get under your skin and make you question yourselves, just like all the other ridiculous shit that you get bombarded with every day but means jack all. Thank you for your time. Now please fuck off and feel bad about yourselves." 

It's a genre of article that is designed to fuck our shit up. Mcshizzles like Cosmopolitan do it all the time. "Better sex", "Why doesn't he want you?" "How to make him want you!” "Even better sex!" - a thinly veiled didactic pissantry that in reality serves only to confuse and undermine.

I think I can consider consider myself as being in a successful (certainly so far) long term relationship (getting on for 20 years *choke splutter*) but that qualifies me for nothing. Good for us and all that - I genuinely believe that committing to anything, not just in respect to love and companionship, should be celebrated (and that includes committing yourself to cutting your losses; those decisions are almost invariably hard as fuck) - but mine is not a template for anyone else's relationship. 

In a world of increasing homogeneity *shudder* this kind of article comes thick and fast. While we're told that the family unit has changed/is changing and that it's okay to be on our own or whatever, we're also slammed with these proclamations about the holy grail of long term security and love. As though anyone really has a clue. People can lecture you all they like about how they "make it work", but I'd be willing to bet good money they're making that shit up. Truth is, in our case, the only thing I really know is that we stick together. We don't give up when it's hard, we don't walk away and wander around in that greener grass over there. Not because we stand before a jury of our peers and declare ourselves to be committed to working things through, noble soliloquy from the male lead and all, but because the thought of not being together sucks ass. Simples, as they say.

So much energy is wasted in making judgements about other people's relationships, whether that's from a negative “it’ll never work” or a positive “what’s their secret” perspective. Futile rubbish. You can’t really explain why one person falls for another – common interests and lust are all very well, but that mysterious kick-in-the-gut spark is usually what seals the deal. You can't share secrets about "how to make it work" because the variables are never the same. Even if all men were uncommunicative ballbags and women uptight harridans, the variations on these stereotypes would still be in their millions, making any rule, or set thereof, redundant.

Yes, be nice to each other - if you care deeply about one another, why would you not be? Yes, talk to each other - again, caring deeply = worth the effort. But all that other horseshit in the article? Pinch of salt. It probably doesn't apply to you. It doesn't to us. Secrets? I can't lie to Mr Y to save my life, I'm brutally honest and open, and it works. Sit down and make a fucking road map for the future? What for? We usually can't plan much past next week ... but, then again, if that's what floats your boat, why should you not? Get your cartography on!

The thing is, none of us know much about any of this carnival of fools. We have little to no idea why some relationships work and why others don't. We're all flying by the seat of our clichéd pants and articles like these are fillers, not pointers. Don't waste your time worrying about what you're supposed to do, and get on with the loving and the living. Or working, or helping, or painting, or skiiing, or whatever the fuck you like. You’re the only one who can feel what’s right for you at the time. It's your life, whether you live with someone (or someones) else or alone. Your choice. Your rules … actually, fuck rules. Rules suck.

Mr Hardy

The RSC are putting on an evening of the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Here's the link to the event:
http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/updates/thomas-hardy-poems-said-and-sung.aspx

Sadly, I'm going to miss it, but it has reminded me to reread his poetry because I haven't done so in ages. Hardy's poems are what really made me fall in love with English Literature. I studied them for GCSE and although I had been a rabid reader since I was but a scrap of a thing, I'd never connected with the subject at school. Not really. We read Far From The Madding Crowd, but Hardy's prose left me cold - I've tried since, I really have, but still with the meh. His poems, on the other hand, turned out to be a revelation.

On the surface, they might seem homely, but often they are twisted and wonderful. Many of them make me want to dig him up and slap him upside the head, but the impotent angst is just too addictive. His first wife, Emma, died suddenly and although they were estranged her loss hit him hard. He began churning out acres of mournful poetry about her, every line aching with his futile remorse. Remorse, you say? Yes, indeed. But how is that so? I don't recall him living out the rest of his life in heartbroken solitude. No indeed. This spurt of industry was in full effect when he married his second, much younger, wife, Florence (who had been his secretary) It seems to me that he spent most of his marriage to her bemoaning the loss of Emma. Quel ballbag. But my, they're good poesie.

Try any of his work - in a step away from his marital shitdickery, Convergence of the Twain, about the sinking of the Titanic (or, more to the point, about how Nature was just waiting to fuck that shit up) is one of my all time favourite poems:

 I

      In a solitude of the sea
     Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.


II
     Steel chambers, late the pyres
     Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.


III
     Over the mirrors meant
     To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.


IV
     Jewels in joy designed
     To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.


V
     Dim moon-eyed fishes near
     Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .


VI
     Well: while was fashioning
     This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything


VII
     Prepared a sinister mate
     For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.


VIII
     And as the smart ship grew
     In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.


IX
     Alien they seemed to be:
     No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.


X
     Or sign that they were bent
     By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,


XI
     Till the Spinner of the Years
     Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.


Of course, there's a lot more to Hardy than my pithy but sadly superficial scratch at his surface might suggest. So, I urge you to read his poetry. I really do.

Reading - not the town

As it's just about the anniversary of my reading my first proper book (Jane Eyre, I was not quite 5 and a half and just a smidge precocious) I thought I'd do a little blog about reading.

I love Reading. Have I ever told you that? It's my number one hobby - no wait, it's more than a hobby. It's so much a part of me and who I am, that it's more like a part of my DNA than a thing I do. I have to do it, like breathing, to stay alive. It was and is my first love. I'll be reading until my eyes stop working or I die. In the case of the former, then I'll learn me some braille and get that shit on! In the case of the latter, I won't be around to mind much. I'll be too busy being stardust. I'll have a go at reading pretty much anything. Noir, SF/F, Romance, Horror, Biographies, Religion, Philosophy, Art, whatever. It's all reading to me and I need it in my brainpan. I want it all. That said, I have finally learned to put something down when it's just not doing it for me. You know, the times when you look at a book that's been sitting there for a week and you feel like your fingers will snap off from its sheer weighty not-for-youness if you so much as try to pick it up? Some books are just like that for me, but I used to make myself finish them regardless. Now, however, I'm not so sure there's enough time left for me to even get through all the books that excite the shit out of me, so why would I bang my head on that brick wall of book just because I "should finish it" - yikes, I can hear my mum's voice saying it to me! She's the Evil Queen when it comes to books; that woman cannot let a book go unfinished. She's a word sucking machine (and that's just one more reason why I love her) I'll give a book a fair go, but I'm not finishing it if it looks like it'll finish me first.

As with any great love, however, there are problems. Books make me panic. I have a lot of books. I mean A LOT - I confess that I tend to judge my friends on their attitudes to reading - tell me you don't read and I'd really rather you left me in peace. Sometimes I look at them, the books not the philistines, and I get palpitations. What if I can't get through them all? What I've read in my 33 year reading history is still only the tip of the iceberg anyway, so what if I can't finish the ton I have here in my apartment and can never even get onto the next step of "everything else"? The panic flutters in my tummy like exam morning anxiety and I know I'm going to fail. I can't read everything. No way ... but then that little voice, the one that so often gets me into trouble, pipes up. "No," it says, all sweetness, " but you can try". And so it goes.

Then there are other times, when I look around my rooms (there are books in every one, except the bathroom after a most unfortunate incident) and think, "this is it. This is how life is supposed to be. For me. Look at them all. I'm going to read that one, the cheeky minx, and you can smile at me all you like over there, you big black spined gorgeous, because you know I'm not going to miss out on you either."

I dream about books, I smell them, flick through their pages, touch them with my fingertips and sigh.

This is why I spend the majority of time on my own.

Skiiing - an aside

At the ripe old age of 38 and after living in Switzerland for nearly 6 years, I went skiiing for the first time yesterday. I only fell over twice, a result, but I have to confess that at times in the first hour or so, I would happily have poked the ski poles where the sun does not always make itself known and stomped off in a huff. But I had forgotten how stubborn I can be when it comes to these things and kept on going. I wasn't ready to ski on the slopes in the afternoon (Yates gave me the stern face before telling everyone no, I should say) so I spent an hour soaking in the sun in the freezing cold on top of a mountain in the middle of the Alps. It was a beautiful thing. I was so tired when I got home that I only managed to make it through twenty minutes of Sherlock before dribbling a sufficient amount to wake me up and send me off up the little wooden hill. 


I woke up this morning to find that my chest had clearly been stamped on by a giant. It soon became apparent that I was never going to be able to sit myself up again because my arms appeared to have been subject to the same gigantic mistreatment. The same story sung itself from almost every inch of my screaming flesh, except the bottom of my feet which are peachy. All in all, it was brilliant! One of the best feelings I've woken up to for years. It's easing off now, stretching exercises seemed demented but boy were they worth it.  The serotonin stimulated by my day of sweating, swearing, skiiing and sunbathing has left me slightly high and very determined. I'm going to run later, in training now donchaknooo, and I'm going skiing again at the end of the week. In the meantime, I'm reading some skiiing advice and watching videos, because I'm going to become a proficient skier, baby. Oh yes indeed. BOOM!

Love is Not All

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

                                                            - Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is my favourite poem. It addresses something that is very important to me; it sets forth an idea of Real Love™ It's not the ridiculous hearts and flowers of impossible expectation, but the kind of love that lasts, grows, strengthens. The kind of love that you don't know you want, or know that you should expect, until you have it. It's flawed, sometimes angry, sometimes confusing, sometimes it is the most tender feeling you will ever know, and it is able to grow because of the very flaws that would make many turn their backs on it.

Love is a funny thing. We all want it (or mostly all) and yet it seems so elusive and delicate that our clammy hands can never quite get hold of it - not without breaking it anyway. To many, it's a dream, a hope, and it often ends in disaster and heartbreak.

Here's my theory. Something smooth and perfect has the tendency to be brittle. Something flawed is often hardier. Love works when you understand that the person you love is not perfect and never will be - and that you yourself are a thing of imperfection should not be ignored. Love is the deal you make, the point where you decide "you know what? I don't care if you X, Y, or Z, I still want to be with you, even though that X,Y or bloody Z keeps coming around like a scheduled train. I can live with it. I have to live with it, otherwise it would mean being without you and that just doesn't sit well with me. Sometimes I do want to cave your skull in with my shoe, but those times pass and when they're gone I remember all the reasons why your skull is beautiful just the way it is. When those jolly old chips are down, I might fight to save myself, I might tread on you to get to the surface or sell you out to make sure I'm okay. It could happen, I'm not perfect. Neither are you. But I do not think I would."

Shame

It's been a week since I saw it, and I have to say that I'm very glad I did go to see Shame. Cracking acting. Really cracking, from both Fassbender, who's getting all the attention, but also from Carey Mulligan. They both actually "acted" and for the first time in a while I was watching people on the screen, not actors pretending. I hate when you watch a film and you're distracted by who's in it, rather than being taken along with the story or situation. There was none of that pretty tying up of loose ends; McQueen doesn't even try, and that's part of what impressed me - that and that there was no attempt for a bad ending either. Hollywood these days seems to try to establish credibility by replacing a trite happy ending with a "dark" ending ... which ends up being every bit as trite most of the time. In some ways it has a cathartic end, but, on the other hand, one does wonder if this isn't simply how the obviously damaged brother and sister carry on, that they're stuck on this merry-go-round.

It did keep going round in my head, however, that this might have been a much different film if Fassbender's character had been female. It might not have worked with a female protagonist as its reception would certainly have been much different. There likely would have been more than a few "Cor blimey's, she gets her tits out, cracks one off in the toilet every five minutes and goes around nobbing all the time, fnar", and the amount of cellulite on her thighs would have been red circled in every publication with crayons.

Shame is an observation. I can't say that I liked it, but it did stay with me. Made me think. Gads, I might actually have loved it, but I'm still not sure I liked it. Which is a result. A good film doesn't have to be liked. It just has to be watched.

Anne McCaffrey

My heart is heavy. The sad news of Anne McCaffrey's passing was one of those moments you wish never to come. While I can't profess to have read all her work, my mum has and is an enormous fan. So much so that we went along to one of her book signing many moons ago - the kind of thing that is not my mum at all. I've never seen my mum be a fan girl, except for that one time. Mrs McCaffrey was a gracious lady and seemed to take a shine to Mum. She sought us out after the signing and they chatted for ages. It was one of those lovely moments that you don't forget. Mum was so chuffed.


Dragonquest was my favourite Pern book (I had a real thing for F'nor and Brekke) but I think the Crystal Singer books were my favourites. Anne McCaffrey wrote cracking female characters that defied traditional stereotypes. They always felt like real women in extraordinary circumstances rather than weak-wristed bosom-heaving heroines or strident harpies. They could be either or both, or something else entirely. She, amongst others, worked to take Sf/f into new territory in this respect. She was an enormous influence on me as a teenager and was one of the writers that made me want to explore the fantastic and the alien. She was one of those writers that made me believe I could write the things that excited me too, that being a girl did not have to exclude me from the male-dominated world of Sf/f.


 "... we build the worlds we wouldn't mind living in. They contain scary things, problems, but also a sense of rightness that makes them alive and makes us want to live there." 


Anne McCaffrey wrote worlds that stretched my imagination and that could make my heart pound. She left us a rich legacy and the world is a better place for her having been in it.