Nocturnal on the Days of ’92

Thank you to yesterday’s kind commenters; it was a treat to open up the window this morning and see your thoughts and reassurances. If Des is right and my readers are indeed patient and eager then I am a lucky h-bird and you fellas and fellesses (as Billy T. James used to say) are a chivalrous lot. (As an aside, one of the things I like best about the fellesses in Malory, chivalry’s most disaffected exponent, is that, when they clap eyes on a knight they like the look of, they make it plain what his obligations are. It’s unfortunate that it was Sir Lancelot that the Maid of Astolat claimed for her husband-or-paramour. The flower of all knights was only slightly less overrated than his silly son.)

Some of my reticence to write about trouble goes back to the bad old days of ’92, when I was in an altered state thanks to tri-cyclic antidepressants and a mental health professional who might best be described as old-school: at that time, I simply could not stop talking, and it was all bad. Moody goth teens making vague references to the general meaninglessness of life is one thing but when the school’s brightest-eyed Jesus freak suddenly dropped the ball and started talking about fifty ways to leave the planet, it fairly cleared the room. Later I found it was the drugs talking as much as the depression, but by then a long enough shadow had been cast to mean that twelve years down the track, I stay in a permanent state of hesitation concerning narrating the blues. The blues look fairly black when they get dark enough.

Fortunately, this has not been one of those times (nor shall I see their like again, I suspect, even if that’s something I know rather than believe) and I have relocated my equilibrium. Sleep helps (a sure sign that I’m not facing something worse, since when worse comes along no amount of sleep is enough) and so, strangely enough, do contractual obligations, ie, having classes to teach. I think I find putting out feelers for writing work a fairly terrifying prospect, since it’s rather like trying to sell some of the armour I usually just wear, and the fact I had to ask a contact the favour of passing on an address made me feel somewhat overexposed. It’s the writer’s equivalent of the first hot day of late spring in my first year at Concrete University (as a student, not an employee) when I decided to wear shorts with a blouse that felt notional rather than actual. (I was a modest late-teen; cap sleeves and a sweetheart neckline were its worst sins.) I walked around for a few hours convinced everyone was looking at me (which is a bad, not a good thing, understand), then rushed home and put on the baggiest pair of jeans I owned, and probably one of those giant double-knitted cardigans I used to wear, although I can’t remember.

Yesterday brought snow to much of the country, though it seems to have bypassed the Port Hills nearby me. I infer a causal relationship between my thinking it might be nice to take Millie down to visit the doggie whanau in Twizel and this recent change in the weather, since each time I consider heading south and inland, that part of the island normally gets about twenty centimetres of snow overnight. Debra and Neil will be digging walkways for the dogs, no doubt, and the hens will have compacted themselves into the size of small feathered rubic cubes in order to conserve laying power. I was curious at one of my students’ claim this morning that Chinese customs include staying home during the winter when it’s cold. While I suspect this may be either fictitious or lost in translation, I wouldn’t have minded adopting that custom this morning–although it’s by no means really cold. Murray at CoffeeWaffle gives the weather lowdown from the Nelson point of view; although there are no pics for this particular entry, you should browse some of his other photos too. They’re great.

I wanted to augment the Chapman quote from yesterday with something from Donne’s “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucie’s Day”, which is one of my favourite winter poems. (Dead of winter/dead girlfriend? It’s a winning combination!) However, I was at work and the internet proved less than fruitful, but now, at home, I can give a little salt for any wounds you might presently be suffering:

Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flask
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with mee, who am their Epitaph.

Mmmmmmmm, I like it, even if the best it can draw from me at the moment is a very un-literary “mmm”. Having said that, it really is a northern poem: the only southern winter I’ve experienced with that grieving, freezing, heavy feel was the winter of power shortages and the Big Snow, which, not coincidentally, was in 1992, when my mood was akin to the speaker’s above. I doubt it would have made much difference to those hard times if I’d known this poem then, since major depression takes you to a place where not much can reach you (except, curiously enough, Queen’s Greatest Hits I & II, my obsessive playing of which may also have contributed to the quiet exits of a few school chums), likely because the lost object is not the lover of Donne’s verse but one’s own feeling, functioning self.

If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.

It’s disingenous, I guess, to analogise this too far, since lovers once dead stay dead, but selves sometimes get remade, once the roundabout of drugs and doses has stopped and the giftbasket of therapy has been emptied. What remains are moments of bleak deja vu, in which ordinary, everyday bad moods caused by ordinary, everyday worries are passed over by a shadow of how it once was.

A student in class this morning–we were discussing what culture is composed of–came up with the word “curio”, one of the mistranslations or misexpressions that arises when students rely on electronic translators to carry their thoughts into English. Still, it’s not a bad thought, that culture is made up, among other things, of strange little objects, conversation pieces, emotional antiques and other kinds of kitsch of the psyche. In that spirit, I thought you might be interested in this, the destination of what seems to be my current blogsnob ad. I would not wish for a vision such as the one that diarist claims to have had: I don’t have the grace or good taste to handle it. As evidence, I offer the anecdote that when, three-and-a-half years ago my car was hit by another on a roundabout and I spun off the road, the thought that passed through me as my life lolloped before my eyes was, “Is this the end of Milhouse?”. Since the odds that I will die with a Simpsons quote on my lips seem fairly high, I’d really rather not have time to decide what it will be.

A bientot.