‘The world is a skin around sorrow.’ Emily Dickinson
Days pass and you’re locked inside your body, you cannot escape much as you might want to try, especially from a body that falters more than it flies.
Have you had dreams, when you find yourself airborne? When you can simply, by wishing, lift off the ground and find yourself gliding along air currents?
Such dreams of bliss and I enjoy them occasionally for no reason I can fathom other than as a lightening of my state of heaviness, which crashes in from time to time.
This morning in those idle moments of lying in bed before the day demands I move, I mused on the history of my visits to hairdresser’s, unable to remember any such visits until I was in my twenties.
I’m in the grip of an internal editor who keeps tripping me up. I’ve made him a ‘he’ because he prizes objective reasoning above all else. It gets in the way.
Alison Williams on the Brevity blog writes about the need for brevity. If you write something like ‘She picked up her phone and texted her boyfriend’, it’s better to reduce these words to, ‘She texted her boyfriend’.
Convert excess into one simple verb.
Something of these reductionisms bug me.
I start to do it in my head, even as I’m thinking back to the days when someone else cut my hair. Not my father with his pudding bowl and scissors at the kitchen table. I want to create an image. But then there’s the image of my youngest child at three, shortly before we were off on a camping trip one Easter, when she took the scissors to her fringe. The result, a zigzag of impossibility until it grew out.
Why was I so horrified?
None of her older sisters had gone to this extreme. They only lopped off Barbie’s locks and it was enough to convince them Barbie’s hair never grows back. But the satisfaction of wielding scissors as a child never evaded them.
It’s one of those mornings when I’m bogged down with the detritus of my life, its endless bric-a-brac of concerns. I can’t focus on anything. Times like these when the cruel voice trots in with its usual platitudes.
Who gives a shit about your visits to the hairdresser? Who gives a monkey’s? A rat’s arse? a fig?
The derisions are endless. And all of them simply highlight the extent to which my internal editor keeps score of some hypothetical audience, who is even bothering to read this? He’s judging me all the way.
As Virginia woold writes ‘On being ill’. ‘All day, all night, the body intervenes. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy- it cannot separate off from the body.’
And the conscious mind, the mind that flits there on the surface of your skull is part of that body, tripping you up at every turn as every muscle and sinew joins in to declare your writing, and by extension you, are of no value.
At times like these, I go back to my reams of quotes gathered with pleasure whenever some other writer whose wisdom and modes of expression appeal to me. I’m thrown back to my childhood and adolescence when I was convinced I could never say anything as well as the authors of the books I read. Or my teachers.
I preferred to quote other people’s words and not use my own.
I’m past this now except in moments like now when my cluttered head becomes a clot of ideas and memories refusing to take shape.
‘I rode a red bus, in a clot of blood,’ writes Janet Frame after she learns of Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963.
Now there’s some poetry for you. Tiny words that decant a myriad of feelings I can never hope to capture except as aspiration.
Then Jeanette Winterson reminds me: ‘Words create worlds’.
But how to reach those worlds, creating images in the mind of readers, any reader who d8es not scuttle their minds ahead of closing the book.
Yesterday I received an email telling me the book I published in 2017, The Art of Disappearing is to be terminated.
What a dreadful word. As if you can do this to a book. It’s not the book itself, but the publisher’s agreement to distribute the book and sell it in the event someone wants to buy it.
From now, the book is in my charge, and I must care for it if I’m to hope it has a long life than less than a decade.
This I understand is part of the hideous world of publishing for those of us who are also- rans. For those who lack the dignity of a name that sells books.
It’s a business after all. We must use language, not so much to enter the slush pile of unpublished manuscripts, so as not to join trashed pile of books which fail to get traction.
Still it’s not this that bugs me this morning. I can find a way around his, but it’s the state of my body which intermittently sends shots of adrenalin through my brain as though I have been given a shock and am left briefly in the aftermath of an adrenalin bath.
A visit to the doctor later today bothers me for the hypochondriacal fears I tend to develop in the recesses of my mind.
What if it’s my heart, or brain, mostly my heart?
I have long decided my heart will fail me in the end, which happens to all of us in death.
My mother died of heart failure in her mid-nineties. I’m a long way off this grand old age, but something about the idea of heart failure dogs me.
At least in my mind where thoughts about a slowing down of energy can be challenging.
If I have the inclination and energy later in the day I will report back here on my interaction with the doctor. Just so I have a sense that you and my beloved page on which I write can find a way of controlling the story such I feel better than I do now when my mind is assailed by dark fears.
The world is indeed a skin around sorrow.
In the evening, post visit, blood tests will reveal all, it seems and I’m not dead yet.