Tag: Jeanette Winterson

The hyperreal and ordinary days

‘No TV people are the scum of the earth.’

A comment made in a series called Trying, where a couple are competing with other parents to adopt a child in Camden London. The other family in this story enjoy a large and beautiful house, with multiple bedrooms and a tree house at back.

But they do not own a television set, a sign of something off, according to those who compete. 

To me there’s nothing off in not owning a TV, though the idea puts me in mind of the many years ago when my youngest daughter, now in her early thirties, was only three. Her eldest sister away in Germany on exchange and her other sisters were addicted to Home and Away.

One evening with dinner on the table when the elder of the two insisted she could not stop watching the movie at that moment because one of the central characters was about to have a baby, something shifted inside me.

Enough was enough.

In a grand gesture, I pulled out the plug and lugged the beast across the back garden and plonked it down on a bench in the workshop where it stayed for the next decade or so.

My children were mortified and distressed. We still talk about it. My third child bemoaned the fact she had nothing to talk to her friends about when they were going on about the latest episode of Home and Away. 

My eldest daughter imagined on her return from Germany that she’d be able to talk me out of it but to no avail. I was obdurate. Typically, Thoughout our children’s childhoods my husband was the firm disciplinarian, but in this instance I held firm.

My children soon found a solution after they each took possession of a computer and could watch movies on their screens as my husband and I still do.

We still do not possess a television. I see no need.

In retrospect it seems harsh but during the years after I installed the television unplugged in the workshop, my children read more books than they might otherwise. 

Maybe my decision as a twelve-year-old to give up television watching after I decided I could spend my time watching the box or I could begin to apply myself at school paid off.

Till then I loved nothing more than getting home from school to Simba the White Lion, or Robin Hood in his greenwood finest, or Leave it to Beaver.

There was any number of American sitcoms to enjoy even as we tended to stop television watching the moment my father walked through our door.

It’s different these days, it seems with the ever-available presence of the online world. And as Kate Manne writes, ‘We live in a state of hyper-reality that perceives the simulacrum or the copy of the real thing to be more real than reality.’ 

To this end, I can watch endless reams of Kelly Boesch art installations on the screen. The hyperreal people and creatures cavorting the screen in endless impossible ways. They burst into cascades of colour, or overflow with water. The nature scenes of flowers more hyper real than hyperreal. 

I love the effect of watching for those moments as I study the screen, but it has a dissatisfying feel once it ends. I can rarely find a story in any of these pieces, even though often she accompanies her visual portrayals with the lyrics of songs, hers and other peoples’. The songs sometimes hold snippets of story. But I cannot hold onto any of it. just a lingering after taste of pleasure rather like saccharin in your tea, or the artificial taste of low joule soft drinks. 

But then I think of Jeanette Winterson’s advice on one of her Substack’s on writing, ‘Do not confuse product with process.’ These two are not the same and in this world where we have become obsessed with the finished product and urge to produce, we forget the pleasures of the process. 

It’s one of the reasons I write endlessly, not for the product, the finished piece but for the pleasure of the process, of finding ideas words and images rolling from my mind through my fingers and onto the keyboard and thinking.

Like Siri Hustvedt, I can see that memory and imagination are twins. I dig into my memories and before I know it, I’m embellishing the memory with all its holes and gaps in understanding where my imagination leads me. And my imagination also piggy backs on memory. It must be somewhere inside my mind, unconscious and all for it to emerge on the page. 

The dogs are with us this weekend, they too blend with my dreams and imagination. I try to understand their movements, to provide them with predictability and care. And to help them override the impulse to bark whenever someone new enters our house. They are determined to warn people off or in the case of beloved family members they bark out of pleasure at the reunion.

But their barking is so loud it sets your teeth on edge, and it takes time before it subsides, for the rest like now they’re quiet. The small one at my feet trying to slip their body between the folds of blanket I’m using to cover my knees in this cold house. 

The other, a black labradoodle is under their own blanket on the chair behind me. Both quiet for the moment. But there will come a time soon when one or other of the dogs will move closer and address me with wagging tail and insistent snout rubbing into my leg, It’s time now for action. Enough of the indolence. We want you to take us for a walk or at least throw those endless balls in the back garden so we might play fetch. 

What is it with dogs and balls? The game of fetch. Dogs bred or trained from the get-go to undertake their role in life as one of retrieve-that object-and bring it to your owner. The …oodle of labradoodle whose breed for centuries were water dogs trained to fetch from  the water birds felled by their owner’s gun, and the little Jack Rusell terrier cross, bred as a rabbiter or mouser, snout into holes. You see it even now the way she pokes her nose into things.

Beloved dogs who give us such joy, more than the television or the hyperreal online world ever could. 

Not dead yet.

‘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.