Note to Self

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

(From The War of Art by Steven Pressfield)

A Monkey-Mind Afternoon

I have a lot of things running around in my slightly achy head today (in addition, of course, to snot). I’ve been picking through my newsfeeds, discovering articles I’d marked to read six months ago, and remembering why it is that I read stuff online: because reading stuff online is like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

It’s like this: you read someone’s blog, and there are so many links you could possibly click, so you choose one, and then that takes you somewhere else where there are still more links to click, or things to investigate, and you go on choosing until you find you’ve made a journey in your mind. That’s a good feeling; I’ll never give up reading books, and I like to peruse the weekend papers over a pint of cider in my local pub, but the beauty of internet-based reading is that special level of interactivity. I often feel like an explorer, an Egyptologist in a forgotten tomb, wandering down corridors and dusting off artifacts and forming an new picture in my head of how the world is.

So, let’s talk about blogs, and the internet. Because here we are in this funny world where these things are important. They’re important in new and exciting ways, and we’re all learning how to use them, and in the process, sometimes we mess up a bit. We become over-dependent, or rebelliously under-dependent. But there’s a lot of interesting writing happening around this idea.

Are there rules to blogging?

Apparently there are. In a roundabout way, via Academic, Hopeful, I arrived at this post by Penelope Trunk, of Brazen Careerist fame. In the post, she quotes Phil van Allen, a faculty member of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena: “The most interesting blogs,” writes van Allen, echoing Trunk herself, “are focused and have a certain attitude.”

Trunk and van Allen also seem to agree that a blog is essential, “a way to let people know what you are thinking about the field that interests you.” Here’s Trunk at her tough-love best:

Each day you have to wake up and do something. So you have to guess where to aim. We are all just guessing. Make your best guess and keep going in that direction until you find something else. And your blog is an expression of that commitment to yourself to have direction, even as you doubt it.

I guess that if there are rules to blogging, and these are them, it’s safe to say I’ve broken them and maybe I’m breaking them now. Not deliberately, not maliciously, but because I haven’t been paying much attention to where I’m aiming. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s there. No wonder I sit and stare out my study window so often feeling stretched thin.

But two comforting points also come from Trunk:

Blogging is about self-discovery
Blogging is about connections

When I wrote the “about” page for this blog, and I said, quoting the poet Louis MacNeice, that it was “incorrigibly plural,” I think in a lot of ways that I meant exactly what Trunk has said: it’s about self-discovery and about connections. And not necessarily in that order; usually, the self-discovery comes after the connections.

And why do we blog, anyway?

I spend some time–not a lot, but enough to notice it–trying to mentally defend blogging to myself. If something is public, you can’t just do it because you enjoy it, and I know that if all I enjoyed about blogging was the writing bit, I would write in a journal instead and keep it locked away.

But what I enjoy is the fact that in this weird internet world where I can spend an afternoon on the couch exploring other people’s virtual caves, it’s all about drawing links between ideas. We can do that now! All of us! Once it was a thing that only academics did; they wrote dissertations and books and gave complicated lectures. And now blogs have democratized this playful aspect of academia.

We may not all be as qualified or as educated but, in a comfortable online forum, we can play with ideas, and have conversations (overt or implied) about them, and through all of this play, maybe we go a little further down the path of self-discovery and maybe we figure out where to take aim and maybe we eventually figure out what it is we’re meant to be doing; or maybe not, maybe all that happens is that we have some fun and see the world a tiny bit differently, if even for an instant. It hardly matters; whatever happens, it’s powerful stuff.

But?

But maybe the best part of my monkey-mind afternoon is this: having read and thought all this stimulating stuff about the wonders of our age of connectivity, I stumbled upon Alain de Botton’s recent essay on distraction at the School of Life. “The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything,” de Botton writes. “To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.”

And that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it? The tricky bit is learning to absorb all this information, connect all these ideas in our heads–and then to step away, to unplug, to sit and to stew or to go for a good old fashioned brisk walk along the river or clean the kitchen or simply to have a drink and a hearty laugh with some mates. We’ll find the balance eventually.

Random Sunday Thoughts

Sometimes in my dreams I return to my elementary school, which in dream-form is large and strangely austere. It’s full of pillars and courtyards like a crumbling Roman house.

I’m ill again; and all day I slip in and out of sleep, and dream of locales, old haunts, childhood memories. As if illness causes a sort of temporary regression.

***

It used to be that people wrote books that tried to encompass everything. Histories of the world, of mankind, of the universe, of Europe or the African continent; encyclopedias, overviews of civilisations, tomes that chronicled every human accomplishment since the invention of fire. Now people write books of such amazing specificity: books on the banana, the pineapple, the sewer rats of Manhattan, biographies of little-known scientists and histories of obscure cultural practices.

Is this because we think we have a grasp of the big picture now, or because we’ve given up on it entirely? Sometimes I think it would be nice if we still had people who could tell us with such confidence that “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” If only so that we could shout no, it isn’t!, if we so chose.

***

Birthday Crayons

I’m older today.

I remember the year I turned four. I woke up early and climbed out of my bed and toddled to my desk (yes, even then I had a desk and yes, even then I used it religiously) and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and a crayon and took a deep breath and waited for a piece of knowledge–something I’d been missing–to come to me.

I put the crayon on the paper and I drew, and as I drew I realized that something was still missing, and so I toddled off to my parents bedroom and said, “I’m four. Shouldn’t I be able to draw a heart now?”

So they explained, as best they could, that knowledge is acquired; we do not wake up each year on our birthdays with our heads suddenly full of new things. The learning process is continuous, and age, funnily enough, has absolutely nothing to do with it. (Last night I met a man who had just turned forty-three; but in the last decade I’ve been a hundred, and I’ve been sixteen, he said.)

Over the next few days I practiced my hearts until I could form a passably symmetrical one in an instant; so in a way, turning four was the catalyst, only not in the way that I’d thought. And now, here we are again, in February, and I’m reminded of crayons and childhood by the book my parents send me. They say I’m Harold, drawing my own path with my own purple crayon, and I think they’re probably right, and I think I probably have been ever since I drew my first faulty heart on my fourth birthday, or even since before then. Since forever.

And it’s good to remember this because this morning, I woke up, and the Man brought me a mimosa, and as I sat there sipping it, preparing to struggle against the wind on my way to work, I caught myself thinking: do I know how to be an adult now? Hoping that the morning would magically imbue me with a belated understanding of adulthood (I think I’ve hoped this every year since I turned 18).

And of course, it didn’t, it can’t, I will never wake up and know how to be an adult, not today, not next year, not when I’m 43 or 100. So I guess I’ll just pick up my crayon and keep drawing.

A Few Brief Notes on the Politics of Being Local

There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

Winter Cold

We’ve both got a cold and an attitude and an overdeveloped sense of winter angst. As we walk towards the castle I tell him that it’s sad, we don’t spend very much time in Oxford anymore, we’re always skirting around it, it’s almost like we’re afraid of it though really I know it’s only because everything we need–the pub, the office, our friends and family–are also on the outskirts. Every day I cycle to work and I manage, going from one far end of the city to the other, to avoid the centre altogether.

He says it’s only because of the weather, which is miserable and makes us like hermits.

I say that there was a time when if a shop closed down and a new one opened up in its stead I would know instantly; now it might be months before I noticed. I wonder to myself how many things have changed without me knowing. There are roadworks on the High street that make it almost impassable; I’ve avoided it for months, and now, for the first time in a long time, I take a moment to observe the mannequins in shop windows, the half-hearted early springtime displays, the canary yellow macs and peep-toed heels.

He doesn’t seem perturbed by it but I can’t stop thinking about how long it’s been since I sat on the steps of the Clarendon building watching Japanese tourists pose for photos and flush-faced American undergrads in groups, hiding under their new hoodies, watching women in heels and students in vintage brogues or else boots and tight skirts, toddlers tripping over the uneven stones. Our love was born here, doing these things, but that summer feels a very long time ago. Who was I then, with the time to waste on trivialities?

And who am I now, to think it might be a waste?

When we reach the castle we have dinner at a place I’ve never been before; it’s huge and dark and full of dolled-up girls with painted lips and high heels and a twentysomething-single-career-girl-attitude. I’m glad I’m not them but at least they don’t have a cold, I think. It’s a very American place, cavernous, full of booths and happy-hour menus and even the toilets downstairs trick me into thinking for an instant that I’m in New York or Los Angeles. I feel momentarily both homesick and repulsed.

It’s just winter, he tells me. We’ll walk around the city in spring, we tell each other, we’ll drink at all our old haunts and watch as many people as we like when it’s warm enough.

So until then I’ll spend time in my study, by the radiator, watching cats in the far end of the garden. There goes another one now, a new black-and-white thing, picking through the tangle of dead brush. And here I am in Oxford, missing Oxford. Humans are funny creatures, much funnier in a way than these aimless cats.

In Late Winter

In late winter I like to turn the heating on and then open the window and lie in bed pretending it’s summertime again.

Now That We’re Back

Now that we’re back there is the snowfall of dead skin. Every time I look in the mirror, I see myself fading; I’ll be ghost-white soon, just like before. The healthy glow has gone and left only a few wavering lines where a swimsuit once was.

We have uneasy memories, heavy, fragrant dreams, photographs. My bank account is empty. My card looks weary and I have debt again. I count pennies in the supermarket. I go to bed hot and wake up cold.

Of course the funny thing is, I’m home, and I feel home. I am comfortable, and happy. We make plans to rearrange furniture. We’re going to buy a new duvet. We sweep the stairs. We build fires in the lounge. We’re nesting, together. Waiting for springtime.

But the dreams. The dreams. And the way we are when we’re away.

The City Is So Cold

And so we arrive at that time of year when winter seems interminable. Your bones have been cold for so long that even a hot bath fails to thaw them. The English are invariably sullen over late-winter weather, and I’ve heard several times that we’re in it for the long haul this year, that we don’t stand a chance of an early Spring, as if we’re children, we’ve been badly behaved, the thermometers want to punish us.

I stand outside, in our back garden. It’s too bleak for words, the sticky black paste of mud and dead leaves, the naked shivering trees, the poignant abandoned laundry line, the table and chairs which have spent these long months buckling under snow and rain. I realize I haven’t stood in the garden for weeks. From my study window I have a view of it; I watch cats trying to catch birds, I see the neighbours’ sad detritus gathering mud, but I haven’t actually stood here, surveyed it at ground level, for too long. I miss standing in our garden, I realize.

Every once in awhile there is still the lingering dream of African light, of trade winds, spice, valleys like bowls; but mostly the mundane has crept back in. I like how local I feel, here, how we go to the pub on the end of our road for bloody marys and sandwiches, how well we know the roads, how predictable the fall of night is each evening, how every night is getting a tiny bit shorter. I like the idea that I will, over the next few months, slowly reacquaint myself with our garden. We will grow potatoes again, maybe. One day we will wake up and it will be warm enough to start to prune and dig, and the colour will start to come back into our cheeks, which have already turned pale again.

Weekend, February, Oxford

Morning. We spend hours in bed, experimenting with different configurations of limbs; legs on top of legs, arms extended and then retracted. The warm skin and the half-sleep is the best part of any Saturday.