Art and Meditation

One of the perks of my loft bed is that I can have a whole stash of books tucked down the side and they don't fall off. 'The Yellow House' by Martin Gayford has been renewed several times as other things have interrupted the reading. (I think I read a review of another of his books and the library happened to have this one.) It tells the story of a brief period in 1888 when Paul Gauguin lived with Vincent Van Gogh in a house in Arles. It was just such an interesting book because it gives you the two artists as real people, their lives together and the impact they had on each other's work. It is a detailed timeline of the works they produced during this brief intense period. Vincent had this idea of creating a place where artists could come and work together and share ideas and influences. He had set a lot of store by his invitation to Gauguin and admired him greatly, though it turned out Vincent himself was not an easy person to live with. There is much discussion of the art they created but it also charts the development of the crisis in Vincent's mental health, an issue that had haunted his life and would lead finally to him taking his own life. The books brings to life the real person behind the myth that is Vincent.

'Meditations for Mortals' by Oliver Burkeman has been just a lovely and helpful as 'Four Thousand Weeks' was in 2022. It's all about considering what's important in life and not sweating about being a 'better person'. I loved this notion, 'cosmic debt': 

"Of course, there's the mundane sense in which we 'need' to do all sorts of things: in order to pay the rent, you must generate an income; if you do that by working at a job, you'd better meet your employer's requirements, or you can expect to run into trouble. If you have kids, it's generally a good idea to provide them with food and clothing. But we overlay this everyday sense of obligation with the existential duty described above: the feeling that we need to get things done not only to achieve certain ends, or to meet our basic responsibilities to others, but because it's a cosmic debt we've somehow incurred in exchange for being alive. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written, 'we produce against the feeling of lack'. Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society." (p.21)

Designed to be read over four weeks, not as a blueprint for 'action' but as a guide to considering different kinds of problems and getting comfortable with imperfection, insecurity, and inevitable oblivion, and I was left with much to ponder. 

I very much liked this analysis of Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' poem (which I understand he grew to hate since it was so much requested at readings), taking a closer and slightly alternative reading of it, and it kind of sums up much of the book's message:

"Frost's poem undermines the conventional reading on almost every line. No sooner has the speaker told us about the road less travelled than he admits that, in fact, previous travellers had left the two paths worn 'really about the same'. And on closer examination, he never asserts that his choice of path 'made all the difference' in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one? What the speaker of the poem may be saying is that 'ages and ages hence' when he's an old man, he expects that's what he'll claim. Because he'll want to rationalise the choices he made - like everyone else does.

The true insight of Frost's poem, on this interpretation, isn't that you should opt for an unconventional life. It's that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you're inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can't ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you'll never know in hindsight, either - because not matter how great or how appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you'll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse. Even so, to move forward, you still have to choose, and keep on choosing." (p.49-50)

Stay safe. Be kind. Eat the damn marshmallow.

How to be a limousine driver

'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb has popped in and out of my life for quite a while. I listened to the audiobook last year some time, but then borrowed it again and listened to it three times while I was sorting letters at work. Then I had to borrow a hard copy so I could write some quotes for you.

It's hard to put your finger on quite what this book is about, because it is about so many things. It is in parts the story of his life, and the things that happened to him to make him realise that he was seeing everything backwards. He describes how people's attitude to rare and highly unlikely events, Black Swans, is twisted in a way to make us think they should have been predictable. Throughout he uses vignettes from the real world, and invented ones, to highlight such Black Swan events and how the human race responds.

I wrote down a few things as I was listening that made sense to me: the link between busyness and being able to claim responsibility for success; managers in a business busy doing their managing stuff, the business does well, they get to claim it was all their doing, but when disaster strikes they claim it was events out side their control. What the book argues a lot is that what humans do mostly bears little relation to the outcome. He talks about how people are notoriously bad at predicting things, and so probably shouldn't bother. Opinions are like possessions and we don't like to let go of them; when we have a precious belief and someone or some event shows it to be mistaken we are very loath to change it.
We narrate backwards to give an illusion of understanding; this is another way of being wise after the fact. He discusses 9/11 at some length, and the notion that authorities should have been able to predict and thus prevent it. People point to all the clues, and with hindsight, show how it was not only predictable but patently obvious. Then when authorities put in place precautions to prevent exactly the same thing happening again, he points out that if some politician had suggested these precautions prior to 9/11 he would have been argued with or even laughed at.

"Being a Fool in the Right Places
The lesson for the small is: be human! Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs. Do not be ashamed of that. Do not try to always withhold judgement - opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting - yes, after this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places.
What you should avoid is unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions - those and only those. Avoid the big subjects that may hurt your future: be fooled in small matters, not in the large. Do not listen to economic forecasters or to predictors in social science (they are mere entertainers), but do make your own forecast for the picnic. By all means, demand certainty for the next picnic; but avoid government social-security forecasts for the year 2040.
Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
Be Prepared
The reader might feel queasy reading about these general failures to see the future and wonder what to do. But if you shed the idea of full predictability, there are plenty of things to do provided you remain conscious of their limits. Knowing that you cannot predict does not mean that you cannot benefit from unpredictability.
The bottom line: be prepared! Narrow-minded prediction has an analgesic or therapeutic effect. Be aware of the numbing effect of magic numbers. Be prepared for relevant eventualities. " (p.203)

I have dithered and dithered over writing this review, and then in searching about him last week I came across this old review in the Guardian for 'Antifragile', but had much more fun reading the comments at the bottom, many of them attacking Black Swan. It can make you feel a bit stupid sometimes to enjoy a book, and then have other people point out how not-clever it really is. But then I thought to myself that what I liked about the book is all the things that people were criticising it for. I loved his anecdotes and the stuff that he made up to make a point, I found the style engaging and allowed myself to be carried along by his arguments. Yes, it was a bit rambling and repetitive in places, but you know what ... so is Harry Potter and you rarely read a critical review of her writing. I even liked the fact that he is a bit full of himself and hyped up on his own cleverness. And so what if his ideas are not that original, it's being able to get the ideas across in an interesting and accessible way that can often be the thing that matters. I trawled through trying to find another quote but he is so constantly circling round and referring back to other points in his argument that it is impossible to find any single paragraph that tells you anything succinct. Review quotes on the back use words like idiosyncratic, opinionated, provocative and bouncy ... make of it what you will.

Recent Reading

I picked up Michael Rosen's book 'Carrying the Elephant' on a recent charity shop trawl. If you don't follow his blog I would suggest you do, he writes thoughtfully about a wide range of subjects from literature and education to current affairs.  This book is a kind of autobiography in poem form, little snippets that make up a picture of his life. Some of them are mundane, some very moving, they seem to be exploring, I felt, the way it truly is the apparently insignificant things that make us who we are. 

"It was a Formica table that my mother leaned on 
when she said she never did understand why 
Stalin got rid of his generals. He won himself 
the breathing space to get ready and wasted it,
because of course Hitler would eventually go
East, we all knew that, she said. The people in
Leningrad were living off rats. You've never
seen starvation like it. Millions, millions dead.
You don't hear about it, but we knew. And you
waited for news. You always waited for the 
news. And they go on about Alamein and Monty
but it was Stalingrad that turned it round, you
know. When we heard about that, it was the
first real good thing we had heard in years. If
we had lost Stalingrad ... it doesn't bear
thinking about. We wouldn't be here now.
One hand makes an arc across the table wiping
breadcrumbs into the hand waiting at the 
table's edge.
Mind you, there were people here who wanted
Hitler to win. They'd've done a deal. We all
knew that." (p.5)

Lucy Grealy's 'In the Mind's Eye: an autobiography of a face' has been on the shelf for ages. Another one that I spotted and bought because I had fallen for her while listening to Anne Patchett's 'Truth and Beauty', the story of their intense friendship. It is a very personal memoir of loss. Although the book focusses entirely on her cancer, its treatment and her subsequent struggle with reconstructive surgery the title seems wrong, it is not so much about her face but about the loss of her sense of herself. I found myself quite angry with her mother, who seemed to expect her to hide her suffering, to put on a brave face, telling her not to cry when she was hurting. I felt that this must have contributed to the way she withdraws inside her head, becoming very self contained, lacking anyone she can trust and talk to. She spends all those years of her treatment suffering in silence, without much outside contact, you can't imagine how hard this must have been on such a young child. While it come across as self-pitying sometimes you cannot judge her for that because spending so much time on negative introspection she develops a sharp self-awareness and insight into life. This is not a 'brave little girl battling cancer' story, it is about how we become the people we are, not the people we might have been. 

I only noted this quote. It is after she spends time in the hospital with a young man who had been paralysed by a stupid diving accident:
"Two days later I was transferred onto the regular ward, and as I was wheeled away I promised Michael I would come back and visit hime, but I never did. As soon as I was back on the ward, filled with nose jobs and jowl tucks, i grew fearful of my distorted face again, and put Michael and his predicament out of my mind. I was walking to the bathroom by myself now, and each time I opened the door the first thing I saw was my own face reflected back at me. Was that really me? I knew it had to be, but how could it possibly relate to the person I thought I was, or wanted to be? I considered the whole operation a failure, and when the doctors came round and told me how well it was healing, how good it looked, my heart sank. We were speaking two different languages, and if this looked good, then what I thought looked good must be an impossible dream. I felt stupid for having had any expectations or hopes at all.
When I got home, I thought of Michael again and again. Did he ever re-imagine himself standing on top of that roof, trying to remember what it was like not to know his fate for just one split second longer? If he didn't, I did it for him. I'd close my eyes in order to feel the height, see the bright blue of the pool winking below me, bend my legs and feel the pull in my calves as I jumped up and then down, falling from one world of unknowing into the next one of perpetual regret." (p.126-7)

Just paddle

Another book that I spontaneously requested from the library and then wondered why. I don't know why I keep reading these death memoirs, maybe the idea that people who experience death close up and viscerally somehow have something to say about life. This book is funny because her chatty writing, not because anything she did or experienced was funny. In fact it is all mundane; her life is just so very ordinary. Much of the book is Nora venting her grief at the world, and why shouldn't she, some bad shit happened to her, but mainly I found myself not liking her particularly. The book often comes across like one of those bland lifestyle blogs which seemed out of synch with the subject that she was writing about.

Here she is talking about her youthful need to be liked:

"During the years - yes, years - that we lived together, tattoos were really hitting the mainstream. I know that's a dorky thing to say, but this was right when Amy Winehouse was getting big, and full-sleeve tattoos went from being a sign that you're comfortable on the outskirts of society to being the kind of thing that fat suburban dads in cargo pants proudly sported. So one day, when Ricky made an appointment for a new tattoo, I went with her. 'Really?' she said, and I sensed in her a very, very faint interest in me as a person. 'Yeah,' I lied, 'I've been thinking about it forever so I think its' time.'
Ricky doted on me for a whole week after I mangled my torso. She bought me ice packs and spread Aquaphor across my back to speed the healing process. And then, just as quickly, she was done with me. I think because I once had my boyfriend over at the apartment where I paid rent, and he went pee in the bathroom at some point and she didn't like that.
Ricky and I moved out of the apartment and we never spoke again. But I have a permanent memento of our time together. It's not quite as bad as getting a tattoo that says 'no regrats' but the sentiment is the same." (p.210-11)

But somehow she manages to get across how such an experience transforms not just her life but herself:

"It was the middle of a normal Monday when Aaron had a seizure that turned out to be a brain tumour that turned out to be cancer that turned out to kill him. I'd woken up a normal twenty-seven-year-old woman who still had a hangover from Saturday night, and somewhere along the way, my life had been tilted on its side without my permission. I was not pleased. I had a very important PowerPoint to finish! I worked in advertising! I needed people to click on Internet ads and buy things! I made my mother drive me to the hospital, and I could feel my heart beating through my chest the entire three-mile ride from downtown to south Minneapolis. My mother had things to do at work, so she pulled up to the emergency room, leaned over me to open the door and all but pushed me out of the car.
'Go in there and be a woman,' she said, and even though I had no idea what she meant, I did it." (p.205)

So probably, for some audiences, a more relatable history than 'A Year of Magical Thinking' (Joan Didion) or 'A Widow's Story' (Joyce Carol Oates), but I think they are both much better books.

Blackbirds in the garden

One of the trees in the garden lost all its leaves and looked faintly ridiculous with all the apples still attached. As winter set in they finally dropped and the blackbirds have been feasting on the fallen apples; the females seem to be chasing off the males, who sit in the surrounding trees waiting their turn. It's just nice to look out through the kitchen window and see them there, frequently oblivious to the neighbourhood cats who crouch down by the shed watching.

I bought John Berger's 'Bento's Sketchbook' several years ago. I hoped it might inspire me to go back to drawing. It is a strange little book, physically very satisfying with a textured hard cover and thick pages, an excuse to just meander through his own thoughts, about art and philosophy and life, and fill pages with random sketches. The idea for the book sprang from the information that Spinoza carried a sketchbook with him, but after his death none was found amongst all his letters and manuscripts. The book is scattered also with quotes from Spinoza (about whom I know nothing), but I found them rather vague and unfathomable.

"Each spring when the irises begin to flower, I find myself drawing them - as if obeying an order. There's no other flower so commanding. And this may have something to do with the way they open their petals, already printed. Irises one like books. At the same time, they are the smallest, tectonic quintessence of architecture. I think of Mosque Suleiman in Istanbul. Irises are like prophesies: simultaneously astounding and calm." (p.106)

I like this, and I don't have the faintest idea what 'tectonic quintessence' means.

"When I'm drawing - and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning - I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digesting or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated , but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning." (p.149)

He fills the book with stories about art that he has valued and places and people who have had quiet impacts on him, close friends and casual acquaintances. I liked it because it is so casually intimate, just like you are listening to him talk. And the simplicity of the drawings that he includes is encouraging, things that are just around and he happened to draw them. 

One quote from Spinoza I did get to grips with (even though it is a long convoluted sentence), from Ethics, Part IV, Definitions VI (and isn't 'we are won't a wonderfully archaic expression). 

Just something to ponder:

"But it is appropriate here to note that we can only distinctly imagine distance of time, like that of space, up to a certain limit, that is, just as those things which are beyond two hundred feet from us, or, whose distance from the place where we are exceeds that which we can distinctly imagine, we are wont to imagine equally distant from us and if they were in the same plane, so also those objects whose time of existing we imagine to be distant from the present by a longer interval than that which we are accustomed to imagine, we imagine all to be equally distant from the present, and refer to them all as it were to one moment of time."

Motorcycle Diaries

I was one of those predictable students who had a Che poster on their bedroom wall; to a naive teenager there was something romantic about the idea of pursuing and then dying for something you believed in. Ernesto Guevara must be one of the most iconic revolutionaries, almost more so than Lenin, and his early death has allowed him to remain a romantic figure rather than his image being tarnished by a lifetime as a politician. 'The Motorcycle Diaries' recounts a journey taken when he was a 23 year old medical student with his friend Alberto Granado. 

I was left a little bemused by what the fuss is over this book. To begin with so little of the journey they take is on the motorbike that I felt the title was somewhat misleading; the bike disintegrates and has to be abandoned only a short time into the trip and they continue as hitchhikers, blagging lifts and accommodation and food along the way, using their kudos as medical students to good effect. And to be honest there is very little politics: it is often reviewed as a journey that formed him politically and led directly to his revolutionary ambitions and yet although he observes much in the way of deprivation and inequality in the communities they pass through his reaction is not always sympathetic and they were occasionally somewhat contemptuous of the illiterate indigenous people. They are travelling to see and experience the continent, as tourists, not to learn about the lives of the people. There is much more discussion of their own hunger than that of the poor people they encounter, and their talk is frequently directed towards acquiring some alcohol and recovering from the after-effects. The book is written very much as you might imagine a young man's diary; it is mostly a catalogue of where they went, how they got there, who they met, what they ate and so on, with elaborate descriptions of some of their most desperate hardships and dangerous scrapes. I think what I liked about the book is that it humanises the icon; Che becomes a real person, a real young man with the interests and concerns of a young man, and there are some very thoughtful and perceptive descriptions of the places they visit, showing Che as having a true appreciation of the history of the continent. But I do feel like I got to know him somehow and it reminded me of Boris Pasternak's letters and how it was their very ordinariness that allowed you to see the real person. Some of the writing is mundane but occasionally he waxes lyrical, so I'll give you one of those:

"EL OMBLIGO
the navel!
The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch the bottom. But there are two or three Cuzcos, or it's better to say, two or three ways the city can be summoned. When Mama Ocllo dropped her golden wedge into the soil and it sank effortlessly, the first Incas knew this was the place selected by Viracocha to be the permanent home for his chosen ones, who had left behind their nomadic lives to come as conquistadores to their promised land. With nostrils flaring zealously for new horizons, they watched as their formidable empire grew, always looking beyond the feeble barrier of the surrounding mountains. And the converted nomads set to expanding Tahuantinsuyo, fortifying as they did so the centre of their conquered territory - the navel of the world - Cuzco. And here grew, as a necessary defense for the empire, the imposing Sacsahuamán, dominating the city from its heights and protecting the palaces and temples from the wrath of the enemies of the empire. The vision of this Cuzco emerges mournfully from the fortress destroyed by the stupidity of illiterate Spanish conquistadores, from the violated ruins of the temples, from the sacked palaces, from the faces of a brutalised race. This is the Cuzco inviting you to become a warrior and to defend, club in hand, the freedom and the life of the Inca.
High above the city another Cuzco can be seen, displacing the destroyed fortress: a Cuzco with coloured-tile roofs, its gentle uniformity interrupted by the cuppola of a baroque church; and as the city falls away it shows us only its narrow streets and its native inhabitants dressed in typical costume, all local colors. this Cuzco invites you to be a hesitant tourist, to pass over things superficially and to relax into the beauty beneath the leaden winter sky.
And there is yet another Cuzco, a vibrant city whose monuments bear witness to the formidable courage of the warriors who conquered the region in the name of Spain, the Cuzco to be found in museums and libraries, in the church facades and in the clear, sharp features of the white chiefs who even today feel pride in the conquest. This is the Cuzco asking you to pull on your armor and, mounted on the ample back of a powerful horse, cleave a path through the defenceless flesh of a naked Indian flock whose human wall collapses and disappears beneath the four hooves of the galloping beast.
Each one of these Cuzcos can be admired separately, and to each one we dedicated a part of our stay." (p.103-4)

Wikicommons

When Breath Becomes Air (not an A to Z post)

'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi was yet another recommendation from Brainpickings; sometimes I think I should stop following it because I can't keep up with all the interesting stuff, but it does extend my reading into non-fiction that I didn't use to read much of.

This book is the life and death of a neurosurgeon who seems to have spent his life contemplating the nature of death and what it means to be alive, so while it is his own story it is also a recounting of some things he has learned along the way. He blends the story of his own illness with the story of his academic pursuits and interests that eventually led him to leave literature and study medicine. It is very much about becoming a doctor, and how he learned to treat his patients as people rather than illnesses. As he writes you can but wish for every medical person you might encounter to be so dedicated to caring and single minded in their pursuit of excellence. As a brain surgeon he seems intensely aware of how his work has the ability to not only save, but to irrevocably change, his patients lives. 

"While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and the family, the brain surgery is usually the most dramatic event they have ever faced, and, as such, has the impact of any major life event. At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability - or your mother's - to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain haemorrhage? Your right hand's function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurological problem forces the patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?" (p.71)

His cancer forces him into the position of patient and so his own existence thus becomes an extension of his search to understand what makes us human and what makes life meaningful; in having to readjust his view of what he could achieve in his life he is forced to evaluate what is really valuable to him:

"One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. It felt less like an epiphany - a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters - and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.
...
The lung cancer diagnosis was confirmed. My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed. Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we were, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seemed recognisable. Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity." (p.120-1)

Paul finds his own answer to the meaningful life question; the answer is not *the* answer, it is just his answer. He is not trying to tell anyone what they should do, just that they should find it for themselves, which is what makes this book so thought provoking. The urgency of terminal illness must focus the mind, where the rest of us flounder around with all the time in the world to consider the endless possibilities of life. Happy floundering. 

H is for Hawk

I read about 'H is for Hawk' by Helen Macdonald when it first came out and put it on the list. Then I noticed my dad was reading it, but had to wait to borrow it until mum had read it too. It is about so many things, but the events of the story were prompted by the sudden and unexpected death of Helen's father. The focussed attention that is required to train a Goshawk seems very much to be a means of avoiding contact with the world and in a way, as she admits to herself, escaping from the emotional turmoil of being human. 

This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision by a novice but a long term ambition by someone who had been fascinated by and knowledgeable about birds of prey from childhood. It is in no way an instructional manual for hawk training, though there is plenty of technical information about falconry in general and hawks specifically. The book is in some ways a homage to the sport of falconry, though one who trains and hunts with a hawk is called an austringer not a falconer: she talks a lot about the long history of falconry, and the books written about it, but alongside her own story she chooses to tell the tortured tale of T.H. White, who wrote a book called 'The Goshawk' that had sparked her original childhood fascination with hawks. 

I think I liked the book because her love of the English countryside really comes through in the way she writes about it, but she does not have some kind of old-world naive sentimental view of it, she seems to relish the impact that humans and the environment have had on each other. 

"Here I was standing in Evelyn's Travelling Sands. Most of the dunes are hidden by pines - the forest was planted here in the 1920s to give us timber for future wars - and the highwaymen long gone. But it still feels dangerous, half-buried, damaged. I love it because of all the places I know in England, it feels to me the wildest. It's not an untouched wilderness like a mountaintop, but a ramshackle wilderness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness. It's rich with the sense of an alternative countryside history; not just the grand, leisured dreams of landed estates, but a history of industry, forestry, disaster, commerce and work. I couldn't think of a more perfect place to find goshawks. They fit this strange Breckland landscape to perfection, because their history is just as human." (p.7)

She quotes this lovely vivid piece from White's writings, that captures a real understanding of wildness and how it rubs up against, but is also part of, human nature. Here he is commenting on another book he was reading, and an incident of a lost hawk:

"The sentence was: 'She reverted to a feral state.' A longing came to mind, then, that I should be able to do this also. The word 'feral' had a kind of magical potency which allied itself with two other words, 'ferocious' and 'free'. 'Fairy', 'Fey', 'aerial' and other discreditable alliances ranged themselves behind the great chord of 'ferox'. To revert to a feral state! I took a farm-labourers cottage at five shillings a week, and wrote to Germany for a goshawk.
Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wants to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he'd pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk." (p.45)

It is also something of a love story, for how could you not fall in love with such an awesome creature. Here, their first meeting:

"the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of the world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. The hawk's wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porcupine. Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers." (p.53)

Helen talks about her relationship with her father, both the way he influenced her and also the things she did not know about him until later. He was a photographer and she gives this description of a photograph she recalls, it is so detailed it left me with a curiosity to see the image, though I can't seem to find much about him anywhere:

"Henri Cartier-Bresson called the taking of a good photograph a decisive moment. 'Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera,' he said. 'the Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone for ever.' I thought of one of those moments as I sat there waiting for the hawk to eat from my hand. It was a black-and-white photograph my father had taken many years ago of an elderly street-cleaner with a white goatee beard, wrinkled socks and down-at-heel shoes. Crumpled work trousers, work gloves, a wooden beret. The camera is low, on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. the man is bending down, his besom of birch twigs propped against his side. He has taken off one of his gloves, and between the thumb and first finger of his bare hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught mid-hop at exactly the moment it takes the crumb from his fingers. And the expression on the man's face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel." (p.72)

The book is full of descriptions of their training and hunting together. She talks a lot about taking flight with the hawk, or of allowing herself to become wild with her, as she works through the intense period of grief where she allows the rest of her life to fall by the wayside. But I found again and again that what she comes back to are detailed descriptions and reactions to the natural environment. It was this atmosphere that she created that, again, enamoured the book to me:

"I hold my arm high, wait for her to look about, and cast her off my fist into the gusty wind. She glides down to the far hedge and swings up into a small has, shaking her tail. I follow her down and we start hawking proper, looking for rabbits in a tangle of broken, open woodland. This line of trees is not designed for human thoroughfare. There are elder bushes, green twigs and branches starred with lichen. There are fallen oaks, clumps of vicious brambles, screens of hazel, and ivy clambering and covering stumps and extending a hand up to the trees above to scramble into the light, so the whole place is umbra's and decorated with shiny scales of ivy leaves. The air tastes of humus and decay. Each footfall breaks twigs and has that slightly uncertain, oddly hollow quality of walking on thick woodland soil." (p.258-9)

You feel quite confident in reading that this will be a tale of redemption and healing, what would be the point otherwise, and she manages to draw the lesson quite beautifully; having had several, quite visceral, descriptions of hawk injury, she sums up their relationship thus:

"I put White's book on the shelves, make myself a cup of tea. I'm in a contemplative mood. I've bought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. Now it feels different: we share our lives happily in all their separation. I look down at my hands. There are scars on them now. Thin white lines. One is from her talons when she'd been fractious from hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I'd pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I'd thought I'd lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she's helped mend, not make." (p.275)

I have always loved birds of prey, but I don't think you would have to to find this book interesting, because, like so many biographical tales, it is just another slant on the nature of being human. I loved it too because Mabel is not a character in the book, she remains a bird, a wild thing, linked but loosely to her human partner, one who, at a moment's notice could return to feral state without a backwards glance.

Lives Like Loaded Guns

'Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson  and her family's feud' by Lyndall Gordon has been a most unexpectedly excellent read. I have some Emily Dickinson poetry but have not given it much close attention so I was drawn to read this more based on curiosity about a person who led a somewhat strange and elusive existence. Maybe this is not the book for getting to know Emily, for that I think you would probably be better off with a book of her letters; it is a book about her life, yes, and the times she lived in, but so much more it is about the legacy of that very elusiveness.

The first half of the book follows Emily's life and death in Amherst, New England. Neither she nor her sister Lavinia ever married, and her brother Austin, after his marriage, build and lived in a house next door. She benefitted from a good education and went on briefly to one of the first women's colleges in the US. They lived a very quiet life, rarely venturing far from their home town. I liked the idea that she showed early signs of her unconventional nature, resisting social pressure while she was at school to a public confession of faith that accompanied a religious 'revival' of the time:

"Emily rejects not religion, but coercion. Signalling from behind her public failure is an intelligence collected enough to combat bullies who want to take over her mind and hardwire into it a formulaic 'tale - the 'tale' of all fundamentalist faiths that close down the right to freedom of judgement. This negates the intellectual development for which she had come to college and, at the same time, negates notions of self-reliance she had come upon in the essays of Emerson. She talked appreciatively of visits from her fellow students, but sensed that these attentions were not friendship as she understood it. Thought she did have the moral support of her father and brother, they were not on the scene and undoubtedly the strength to face this out alone came from herself: 'I generally carry my resolutions to effect', she had reminded her brother in a lighter mood. It's an accurate self-estimate of a young woman of extraordinary integrity and firmness." (p.46-7)

The social standing of the family contributed to a circle of people who went on to influence Emily, exposing her to writing and ideas. She formed many friendships over her lifetime and sustained them through correspondence, though from the description in the book I got the impression that she was a very intense young woman and would often alienate others by the ferocity of her friendship. She craved intellectual companions, people to discuss literature and writing, and it was still considered an unusual thing for a woman to be educated and opinionated. The book talks much about the social attitudes of the time towards women, and the generally small-town conservative attitudes that predominated.

"To marry would be to lose this freedom to follow her natural rhythm, no husband would have tolerated her timetable as her father did, and soon there would have been babies to fill the hours. The poet Julia Ward Howe found herself silenced by her husband Samuel Grindley Howe after she published Passion Flowers in 1854. 'The Heart's Astronomy' reveals the wife's affinity for a 'comet dire and strange' as she paces round and round the house, while children smile from its windows. The book made a sensation but Mr Howe was so displeased to hear of 'wild, erratic natures' tethered to domesticity ('Between extremes distraught and rent') that he delivered an ultimatum: if his wife continued to publish in this vein he would end the marriage and take the children. His threats bought Mrs Howe to heel." (p.82)

Their mother sank into illness and became bedridden and Emily and Lavinia between them care for her and maintained the house; they were affluent but not so wealthy as to not do their own domestic chores. The book puts forward the theory however that the main cause of Emily's seclusion was that she suffered from epilepsy, something that, at the time, would have carried a stigma and would not have been admitted in polite society. She has bouts of illness over the years and, though she maintained a vigorous correspondence, gradually became more selective about who she would socialise with at the house. Her withdrawal from society grew however until for the final fifteen years of her life she was completely reclusive.
At the same time she was writing. During her lifetime only a tiny number of poems were published, and these often were 'tampered' with by editors to make them more appropriate and acceptable as writing by a woman. Her closest friendship was with her sister-in-law Susan and they both visited and corresponded on an almost daily basis and Emily shared hundreds of poems with her. I think it is what is fascinating about her writing is that she did it for herself, and for a small private audience, not because she had something she wanted to say to the world.

"For Dickinson, the vital open-handedness of improvisation outweighed the permanence of print. Here was a positive reason to develop an alternative to publication: the well-established practice of circulating manuscripts. This was customary, of course, before Gutenberg invented printing ... Private circulation of manuscripts would seem to be superseded; still, the practice did not end. ... In the early nineteenth century, Byron, as an aristocrat, scorned publication and affected to toss off poems with careless ease, though he did stoop to publish - upon persuasion - and in1812 famously woke up famous. ... It was part of the modernist ethos to speak only to discerning readers, while in the Soviet bloc dissident literature was disseminated privately because publication was dangerous.
So, for aristocratic, political, or experimental reasons, texts continued to exist in private hands, often associated with contempt for the compliant herd. This elitism puts the unpublished texts above the masses; it reverses the educative mission of print, to be found in mid-nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens, whom Dickinson read and quoted. All the same, despite pleading for the poor, Dickens did not jar the well-to-do; he upheld the social divisions." (p.142)

The predominant part of the book however covers the arrival in Emily's life of Mabel Loomis Todd. She arrived as a young academic wife and found herself drawn to the Dickinsons, becoming friends with both Lavinia and Susan, and becoming fascinated with Emily's writing, but never actually meeting Emily herself. Her influence on what followed however came in the fact that she and Austin Dickinson fell in love and began an affair that was to tear the family in two. While Lavinia acted as 'facilitator' of the affair over many years, Emily steadfastly refused to have contact with Mabel. All the while Mabel tried, and failed, to tear Austin away from his family. The children sided with Susan and this laid the groundwork for the feud that would cross the generations.
In private Emily began the process of editing and collecting her poems into hand sew books, but the extent of her writing was not even discovered until after her death. 

For years it was Mabel's work as transcriber and editor of the papers left after her death that was the dominant influence on the interpretation of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. However this work was tainted by Mabel's efforts to deny the place of Susan in Emily's life; her own desire to have Susan removed from Austin's life seemed to cloud her judgement, when it seemed that mostly she was very scrupulous to maintain the integrity of Emily's writing:

"A strange scene takes place in the middle of 1891, when the biographical project has barely begun. Mabel, with Austin's collusion, begins to tamper  with the overwhelming evidence of Emily's bond with Susan. A booklet containing 'One sister have I in the house/And one a hedge away' is taken apart so as to remove the poem. Emily's sewing holes are cut to disguise the poem's place in the booklet, but though the page is thus mutliated, and torn in two places, it's not destroyed for the sake of another poem on the verso. Using black ink the mutilator scores out all the lines and, most heavily, the climax 'Sue - forevermore!'
The text survives only because Susan retained the copy sent across the grass in the late 1850s. There are similar mutilations of many letters, especially Emily's early letters to Austin, written when he was in love with Sue, and letters to Sue filled with Emily's parallel, more entrancing ardour. All mutilations are designed to obliterate the poet's attachment to 'Sister'." (p.267)

"At the same time, Todd did bring out the explosive character of the 'startling little poetic bombs', as though earthquakes, bolts, the revolver pointed at an unwanted self, and a life that stood a loaded gun had no connection with the ghostly writer. This blend of truth and evasion was to characterise future legend. Todd did encounter words like blades but, as mouthpiece for the family, never mentioned this, any more than Jane Austen's family saw fit to mention her sarcasm. Nineteenth-century families project an image of an authoress as retiring lady who gif shades into an uneventful life. Nothing could be said of sickness, love, adultery or the rising fire of the feud." (p.275)

What was a love affair went on to become a fight for the rights to Emily's legacy. Mabel put in years of work on Emily's often illegible handwritten poems and was promised some reward by Lavinia. Although early editions of the poetry sold well there was still not really a great deal of money to be made from poetry. Legal fights began, over copyright, but also over a tract of land supposedly given to Mabel by Austin, adjacent to the house that he had built for her and her husband. Mabel and Susan thus ended up holding part of the collection of papers that Emily left, and even then there remained hundreds of poems that were stored unread and unpublished for years. The intrigue and insults goes on for decades, as Mabel makes a living lecturing about Emily, but is unable to establish legal rights over the writing itself. As we move in to the 20th century Susan and Mabel's daughters, Mattie and Millicent, take over the feud, continue to publish further poems, and fight over what should happen to the papers. 
One last quote that I loved but was a little bemused by, I was left wondering why paper was in such short supply; they were not poor or deprived, I assume it was not so expensive, so why did she do so much writing on scraps?

"... but in many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes - a favourite source of paper - on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers), the editor had been daunted for a long time and it was only in the last three years that she had brought herself to decipher these." (p.364-5)

I had often wondered, on hearing the story of Emily's seclusion, what does someone have to write about if you never go out into the world and experience things. What you find from her story is that even if she was physically contained, emotionally and intellectually she was curious and adventurous.
It felt tragic that all these people who claimed to love and admire Emily Dickinson used her as a battle ground for so long, but it was, I confess, the battle that made this such an engaging book. I was totally sucked in to the family drama. Mabel is much the strongest personality in the story; Emily, as her reputation dictates, remains somewhat elusive and was so wrapped up in her poetry that it seems that she was not interested in what might happen to it. Although I did not like Mabel it was undoubtably her efforts that did ensure a lasting legacy for Emily, but it was Susan who really recognised and nurtured the poet in her and who's friendship was the foundation of her life. 

One Sister have I in this house
And one, a hedge away.
There's only one recorded.
But both belong to me.

One came the road that I came -
And wore my last year's gown -
The other, as a bird her nest
Builded our hearts among.

She did not sing as we did -
It was a different tune -
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June.

Today is far from Childhood -
But up and down the hills
I held her hand the tighter -
Which shortened all the miles -

And still her hum
The years among,
Deceives the Butterfly;
Still in her Eye
The Violets lie
Mouldered this many May.

I spilt the dew -
But took the morn -
I chose this single star
From out the wide night's numbers -
Sue - forevermore!

Many Reasons to Stay Alive

s

'Reasons to Stay Alive' by Matt Haig. When people you love go through things that you cannot understand, it is helpful to find that there are other people out there struggling to not only make sense of their own experiences, but also to allow you a glimpse of the inner workings of their troubled minds. I reviewed Matt Haig's book 'The Humans' a while ago and as such his name was familiar and also this one has this nice upbeat title; we all occasionally need to read some reasons to be alive. It relates his abrupt descent into a very deep black hole and his slow and torturous journey back out; it does so with a perspective and humour only possible at quite some years distance. Everyone's path will be different, but it gives you hope to know that there are paths. 

"Warning signs are very hard with depression.
It's especially hard for people with no direct experience of depression to know them when they see them. Partly this is because some people are confused about what depression is. We use 'depressed' as a synonym for 'sad', which is fine, as we used 'starving' as a synonym for 'hungry', though the difference between depression and sadness is the difference between genuine starvation and feeling a bit peckish." (p.90)

I am a doer. I wanted to learn what I can do, but mostly it reinforced what I have already, tentatively, come to understand, that it is not something I can fix. Mostly you have to 'not do' things. But this description of his girlfriend was very helpful:
"She was someone I could talk to, someone I could say anything to. Being with her was basically being with an outer version of myself.
The force and fury she'd once only displayed in arguments she now used to steer me better. She accompanied me on trips to the doctors. She encouraged me to ring the right helplines. She got us to move into our own place. She encouraged me to read, to write. She earned us money. She gave us time. She handled all the organisational side of my life, the stuff you need to do to tick over.
She filled on the blanks that worry and darkness had left in its wake. She was my mind-double. My life-sitter. My literal other half when half of me had gone. She covered for me, waiting patiently like a war wife, during my absence from myself." (p.125)

It is a book of lists: Things depression says to you, Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression, Things you think during your first panic attack, Famous people with depression, Things that make me worse, Things that (sometimes) make me better. 
I don't think that such books are a solution to anything, but neither that they present a 'fake' happy ending (since they are invariably written by people who have 'recovered'), but they offer possibilities and encouragement to keep struggling, and even the tiniest moment of understanding between fellow human beings might be all it takes.
"Smallness
I went back to visit my parents in Newark about a month ago. They don't live in the same house, but the street they are on is parallel to the street where we used to live. It is a five minute walk.
The corner shop is still there. I walked there on my own and bought a newspaper and could happily wait for the shopkeeper to give me my change. The houses I passed were the same orange brick houses. Nothing much had changed. Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept you smallness in the world." (p.247)

Not so Fun Home

I reviewed Alison Bechdel's book 'Are You My Mother?' nearly two years ago and finally got around to requesting 'Fun Home', which recounts her childhood and her equally contorted relationship with her father.  She grows up in a funeral home, accustomed to the presence of death and the absence of parental interest. Maybe it just shows quite how resilient children are, and their life is just their life, they do not have expectations and so do not have any sense of being neglected or let down.

 Clearly she needs something from him, perhaps even just his acknowledgement, but the 'What' in the middle of this picture expresses the frustration that seems to be his only response to her presence.

 And he needs something from her, periodically trying to make her into the 'proper' little girl that she so vehemently resists being. Even the connection she makes with him later through their shared love of literature becomes stifling. 

 You wonder if the presence of extensive childhood diaries gives her the opportunity to re-analyse this period of her life, to try and pick apart what she experienced and reinterpret it in light of what she comes to know later. The book is in some ways just a collection of anecdotes but each one draws you into her life and allows to you watch the torturous struggle to make sense of her identity. The emotional isolation and obsessive behaviour that marks her childhood is quite heartrending and, again, I did not find it in any way funny. I think I related far too much to the child she was, wanting to wrap her up and take care of her. And, again, while I do sometimes wonder at how little memory I seem to have of my own, it did not make me wish for a more interesting childhood.

Heartburn

I was not convinced by the previous Nora Ephron book I read but I picked this one out to give her a second chance. 'Heartburn' tells the story of her second divorce and is similarly something you could skim through in an afternoon and just feel as if you have just had a long chat with a good friend. Although there is a bit of backwards and forwards telling you the story of her relationship with Mark (assuming the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike) it mainly follows her through the process of discovering her husband is having an affair while she is pregnant and her reaction and that of her friends and family. It is kind of nice because it is a story about how you fall in love and why you keep loving someone in spite of how they treat you, how love is as much about wanting to sustain the feeling as it is about the actual feeling because without it you have to mourn all the things you lose with it. In the story the character is a food writer, so some of her recipes are scattered through the book. I like the idea that things you eat can become connected to a time or a place or a person. So the story is basically the anatomy of a relationship, with all the gory bits laid out on display, and it's not a pretty sight.

I read the book over the few days staying at Claire's and finished the final pages on the train. I did not have a pen handy so (sacrilegious!) I folded the corners of a few pages over where things had amused or struck a chord with me. This one particularly:

"I considered staying in bed all day. I considered getting out of bed and into the bathtub and staying there all day. I wondered if even considering these two alternatives constituted a breakdown. (Probably not, I decided.) I contemplated suicide. Every so often I contemplated suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all. There was a time when I worried about this, when I thought galloping neurosis was wildly romantic, when I longed to be the sort of girl who knew the names of wildflowers and fed baby birds with eyedroppers and rescued bugs from swimming pools and wanted from time to time to end it all. Now, in my golden years, I have come to accept the fact that there is not a neurasthenic drop of blood in my body, and I have become very impatient with it in others. Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I'll show you a real asshole." (p.46)

This, on falling in love and out again:

"And what is all this about picking, anyway? Who's picking? When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with a particular fluency in French, a subscriber to The New Republic, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn't bald, who wasn't fat, who wasn't covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and a small ass and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for a low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters. At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn't. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral." (p.83)

And this one really captures what divorce is all about:

"That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three." (p.144)

I was talking to Claire about just this during our visit; how as the person who leaves a marriage you get to bear all the responsibility and all the guilt and the other person gets of scot-free. I have been left, over the years, feeling that I should have stuck with my gut instinct that had always told me that marriage was a load of crock and avoided it like the plague. And so now I do.

how should a person be?

'How should a person be?' by Sheila Heti
I got this from the library after a glowing review online somewhere, I even waited in a queue for it. I started reading and my first thought was, 'what is this crap and how did it get published'. Then I thought maybe she was just telling some random anecdote to illustrate a point and would go on to something more significant. It was very stream-of-consciousness style and had something of 'On The Road' about it, but I don't mean that in a good way; it meandered randomly through events, telling yet more anecdotes and musing on some half baked philosophy about what is important in life. 

It is the story (vaguely) of her friendship with Margaux, and I suppose at least she does come finally to realise how important this person is to her, how important friendship is, but it is so utterly self-indulgent and inward looking that I hardly cared. She is both the victim and the perpetrator in some not very healthy relationships. She is so aimless that this takes over the story and you never know where it is going, if anywhere. It is also the story of her attempts to write a play, and the conversations in the book are laid out as if it is a script. I quite liked that and you could almost visualise it being performed, but it didn't make the characters any more interesting. It was a bit like reading a rather trite and tedious blog. Occasionally she had an interesting way of describing something, mostly when she stopped trying to be pretentious. This is nicely understated:

"We could see no trees and we could see no mountains from where we lived. When we looked out the window we saw cars, we saw people, we saw traffic lights and buildings just like ours. Sometimes the past came to greet us, and there were two policemen sitting atop their horses, walking down the side street I was living on, and I woke up to the sound of the horses in the road. I raised myself in bed and looked out the window. When a car came by, the policemen pulled on the horses' reins and the horses stopped, and the policemen and the horses waited patiently for the car to go by, one horse shaking its tail in the road." (p.141)

But much of it was more like this, on finding the tape recorder, and it just feels like she is trying too hard to:

"It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.
...
As the beginnings of a shower mottled the street, I whispered low into the tape recorder's belly. I recorded my voice and played it back. I spoke to it tenderly and heard my tenderness returned." (p.56-7)

I started off actively disliking this book, so maybe it's an achievement that I read the whole thing, but I was only lifted to the level of not-really-caring-much. Lots of 'names' on the back seemed to admire it ("beguiling" "idiosyncratic") so maybe I missed something, or maybe it's the middle aged fuddy-duddy in me that finds young people's existential angst so tedious ... get over yourself. Whatever. 
(If you like stories of female friendship Ann Patchett's 'Truth and Beauty' is much much better.)