‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’ Henry James
They weren’t flash backs exactly, at 5.00 am, launch day over and my mind racing over scenes from my book launch. My sense I was foolish in my enthusiasm and lack of coherence.
Here’s one definition of a flash back from Miranda July in her book All Fours:
‘It wasn’t over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements.’
I had tried so hard to make it work. But it was hot and I grew flushed which left me as I often feel these days when my cheeks glow scarlet as if I have made an utter fool of myself. My anxiety is riddled all over my features, a woman in a heightened state and not one of sexual arousal, more one of panic.
So many people I know and love with the occasional ring in invited by Carrie Tiffany who urged them to come to help make the occasion splendid. And people chatted together amicably including a lovely woman whom I knew from elsewhere whom I could not place, but she told me she was happy to be a fly on the wall and watch.
What is it with me that I so want everyone to feel comfortable and ensconced in meaningful conversation? Why this urge to introduce everyone so no one is left out? Why my discomfort with the awkward silences that precede an occasion where people meet one another for the first time and don’t know what to say. Here on this occasion through me.
And my morning pear has gone soggy and taste of pear but with that squishy consistency that I dislike. Lacking in texture.
I have a strange sense of not knowing what to do with myself. Where to put my mind and body. A sense of wanting to cry in the aftermath. And my husband has gone to Bendigo for a Lost Arts exhibition with a friend and I’m to meet other friends in the afternoon for a get together and somehow I feel socialised out but also lonely, as if I want company but also to be alone. I want more sleep.
It all feels too hard as if I have lost all my adrenalin in the effort yesterday and despite sleeping all night I’m still tired.
And last night on a crowded tram on the way home, my husband asked a young man to move the bag on his seat to give him room. The young man was visibly annoyed. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. He did not want to move.
In the next brief kerfuffle, my husband wedged himself onto the seat as the young man cursed him for being old. Old was the one word I heard. ‘Oh you’re old,’ he seemed to say. This is how old people behave.
And a young woman seated nearby gave her seat up to me, while the young man who sat opposite a woman and small child glared.
My husband said words to the effect. ‘Is this the example you offer a child?’
And the woman asked the man whom we assumed was her partner, ‘Do want to move?
All three left their seats empty for me and my friend and the young woman to sat comfortably while the man and his partner and presumably their child made their way to the other end of the tram where they stood for the rest of their journey.
A bad feeling, this person so reluctant to share. And a reflection of the ugly world in which we live where people look after their own and pay no heed to the needs of more vulnerable others.
And I might well go back to be for more sleep tiredness sits behind my eyes, a well of exhaustion. How can I go on?