Not So Happily Ever After

I expect most people are aware that there’s been a royal wedding taking place today. There were fairy tale carriages and splendid guards on horseback and kings and queens and cheering crowds and the palely gorgeous Westminster Abbey, an ‘intimate’ venue for 2,000 guests. If we still have our monarchy in the UK, it’s probably because we have all these excellent props and it would be a shame to see them go to waste. Plus, all our broadcasters get to use the word ‘pageantry’ a lot, and it’s a very good word. My favourite moment in the whole thing was a camera shot of the world’s religious representatives, all sitting side by side against a wall. In my imagination I couldn’t help but see a banner unfurl above them, on which was written ‘Special Edition. Collector’s Set’.  Weddings make me uneasy – they are such a performance of optimistic fantasies; all that pomp and splendour around promises that can never be perfectly kept in complex, difficult reality. On the one hand, we need that level of hope to get us through life, but on the other, no one tells you quite how much tolerance and flexibility you need to get though marriage. The Bishop of London gave a really rather good address, in which he said marriage was an important step in becoming the selves god wanted us to be, and that it was a chance for us to overcome our basic human selfishness. I thought that was a very astute way of putting it; a successful marriage really does need each partner to find proper, loving altruism towards the other, and the difficulty of that spiritual task should not be underestimated.

It may seem a tad out of keeping with the spirit of the day to be reviewing a collection of short stories by the American writer, Michelle Latiolais, entitled Widow. But it is a) a truly excellent collection of short stories, the best I have read in a long time and b) it is excellent precisely because it has so much to say of interest about long-term partnerships. Out of 17 stories, five concern what must, I think, have been a real-life experience of the author of being unexpectedly widowed after 18 years of a happy marriage. We are not told until the final pages how the husband died (the circumstances are shocking), instead we are right up close to the absurd process that is the continuation of life within full-blown grief. Although that sounds ghastly and miserable – and it is clearly no fun at all – these are not depressing stories. There is an emotional vitality to them, a clarity of insight, a sense for the ridiculous and the poignant that make them simply truthful and engaging.

They are surrounded by what looks at first glance to be stories covering a wide variety of situations and concerns. The story about a woman’s trip to a male lap-dancing club that I liked so much is here; there’s a story about the wife of an academic, saying goodbye to his students who’ve been round for a social evening and realising her husband might be having an affair with one of them; the story of a young woman being chatted up by her writing class teacher in a way that she really doesn’t appreciate; the story of a wife deeply in love with her husband who is persuaded by him (in the interests of his academic research) to go to Africa and eat the same diet as chimpanzees for a month; the story of a woman doing the ironing and reflecting on the differences between cotton and linen and synthetic fibres, how the former protect the skin and the latter – especially in the case of fires – endanger it. They seem at first glance disparate. And yet as I read, so I began to feel there was an underlying interest in our profound sensitivities. We are sensitive in so many ways, more than we ever give credit for – sensitive to what we have against our skin, sensitive to people who do not think the way we do, sensitive to the diet we grow accustomed to, sensitive to tiny clues and gestures in the body language of other people. Our being in the world takes place in a myriad of interactions between skins, minds, fantasies, and more often than not, those interactions rub us up the wrong way and make us uncomfortable.

So this is where the long-term partnership fits in because here, when it works, we find ourselves cradled and soothed. Even the partnerships that don’t work have the blessing of familiarity about them, enough harmony and coordination to give us a sense of comfort and safety. When we lose a partner, we lose the body that fits against ours, the mind that choreographs with our own, the routines and the habits that smooth the rough edges off of life, the place where we can be at peace and at rest. Our partners are our literal human shields, and the effect when they are removed is akin to brutal exposure to the elements once again. The narrator’s grief in her widowhood is portrayed in a series of stories that show her sense of vulnerability and isolation, and the insufficient attempts she makes to bolster herself in the world. But these are not melancholy stories, as I said; they are courageous and honest. The cover, which I think is particularly beautiful, is taken from a fifteenth century tarot card depicting the Queen of Swords, representative of widowhood, separation and mourning, but also the woman who is wise through suffering. These are indeed wise, beautiful and evocative stories that reveal the intricacy of our inner lives with delicacy and restraint.

Thoughts On Change

It’s been very quiet in my corner of blogland lately and I’m trying not to let this have an impact on my blogging. I remember that the same thing happened last year, and the year before that, and that blogging has notable seasonal variations. Once the weather picks up lots of people have an outdoors life to attend to. Plus, a lot of my particular blogging friends are busy with life events; three have recently had babies (which I recall makes it hard even to get food in the fridge, let alone find time to blog), several others are busy with demanding courses or writing books or similar projects, and many more just don’t blog as regularly these days as they used to. That’s the problem with an elderly blog like this one, which had its fifth birthday at the start of the month. It’s my natural state of mind to stick with the people I know through thick and thin rather than exploring the blogworld to find new friends (although it’s a pleasure to make a new friend when it happens). And I admit I am a dreadful blog housekeeper, and often forget to add new links to my blogroll and then can’t remember who I wanted to visit. I really ought to embrace more outward movement, though, as I hate the feeling of talking to myself.

I could take a blogging break but I don’t want to, partly because my reading has been so interesting (to me) recently, and partly because I am finally feeling much better than I have done in years. A few weeks back I was writing about a period of intense anxiety I was experiencing. My doctor gave me some anti-anxiety medication that I was very unwilling to take, having a prejudice against pills because they deal only with symptoms rather than cause and often bring a lot of side effects. Well, I will have to reconsider that prejudice now, as finally taking a low dose of the medicine has been a revelation to me. I can’t get over how different life feels without the background of constant anxiety that threatens to shoot off into the stratosphere at any moment. One thing I notice particularly is how easy it is to be curious about certain problems and issues now. It strikes me as one of life’s great paradoxes that anxiety collects around the issues that we most need to explore, preventing us from getting anywhere near them.

I’ve long been intrigued as to why we persist in behaviours that do us no good, and thought patterns that reinforce damaging or unskilful beliefs. It’s clear to me now that anxiety wards us off change and experimentation; but why should that be? I guess a possible explanation is that change always looks bad to the lizard brain, where the oldest and fiercest beliefs accumulate; a primitive part of us thinks that anything is better that altering behaviours and responses that we have actually outgrown. And equally, as I know to my own cost, transition periods are just dreadful. You can read all the self-help advice you like about using them to test out new things and try on alternative attitudes like you were having a lovely rummage through the Harrods sale, but in reality, all one really feels is destabilized, adrift and bewildered.

I think it’s hard for us to accept quite how much we dislike change, because we need to hold onto it as an abstract ideal. Plus it’s hard to realise how much we have invested emotionally, and often morally, in our settled patterns. So, for instance, let’s take something completely innocuous, like the way I read, which I notice has been changing despite my attempts to continue in the old routines. When I began blogging I was deeply involved in teaching literature to university students. I was set up to transform what I read into a series of lessons – about how literature creates its effects, about the development of literary history, about the interaction of readerly expectations with a story and about the creative interchange between life and its written equivalent. It was what I did, and I liked doing it. But it fell into a broader mental attitude that I held, which told me I had to find value and meaning in everything I did, and then make something out of that to give to other people. It wasn’t a choice so much as a moral compulsion. I felt I wasn’t earning my oxygen quota if I wasn’t producing something that other people could gain benefit from.

Dislodging this old attitude has been like loosing baby teeth. First it wobbled in its setting, and wobbled for a long, long time. Then it became loose and awkward and uncomfortable. Then it was held on by one last, painful nerve ending that neither I nor anyone else could really bear to look at. And then suddenly it was gone and I never noticed the end.

It’s been six years since I was teaching literature and I have no mental image of how it’s done. Although there was a moment, last term, when I did see a student for a literature supervision and I had the strangest sensation of recall that was bodily rather than mental; I shifted a gear somewhere inside and moved seamlessly into teaching mode. But I can only do that with a student in front of me. Now my reading is selfish and creative. I had this glorious afternoon last weekend when I was dipping into lots of different books. I read a fascinating short story by Maupassant, about a woman who was furious with her husband; he had managed his intense jealousy of her beauty by forcing her into a series of pregnancies, and so to gain her revenge she told him that one child was not his, but refused to tell him which. This story turned out to be a frame for a strange discussion between two characters in which one suggested that beauty and art were a kind of loophole in the universe, an unintended benefit in a world set up by god for animals. Then I read another short story from a brilliant collection by Michelle Latiolais, in which a woman was taken to a lap dancing club by her partner and was aware of what a different atmosphere there was when the men danced for the women; a tender, indulgent sort of atmosphere that made her think of the bonds of maternity. This story was also a frame for the report of a crime committed by an American woman who had drowned all five of her children in the bath. And then I went on to read about the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H, Lawrence, and how the jury had to decide whether it would incite corrupt or depraved behaviour.

Oh I loved all this, all the sparky links between the stories and the sense of a theme developed and fragmented into all kinds of variations. I can’t tell you what it all meant, though, I can’t transform it into blogging fodder. And I feel bad about this, guilty in fact, and uncertain how best to talk about books. I still feel the book review + teaching point is my basic blogging unit, even though those posts get the least interest (due in part to what seems like a recent sensitivity about spoilers, I think). Perhaps it’s just as well if things are quiet around here until I get a better sense of what form a blog post most usefully takes because I do love conversation about books and what they do, and that’s really what I want my blogging to provide for me.