In the southern spring of 2003, not long before I started these pages, I went on holiday to Melbourne to visit my brother who had been living there for a couple of years at that time. (An annual or eighteen-monthly visit was a ritual of mine for those first few years of his domicility in that city.) As was my habit during trips away, I thought a lot about what I needed to do to reorganise my life and make it work better for me. I lived at that time under an assumption of the possibility of mastery, that if I changed x and rejigged y, something like tranquility and contentment would arise. I had spent six unhappy months applying for academic jobs abroad after spending much of the northern spring on holiday in the UK and was ready to quit that particular trajectory; I didn’t have the stamina for the three hundred or more applications it was widely alleged humanities PhDs should be prepared to make to get a university job anywhere. (I had a non-academic university job at home; I just didn’t like it very much at that time.)
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The wall to the left of the flat, narrow bed was largely clad in boxes labelled kits, that strangely jaunty name for what I assumed were needles, perhaps syringes and whatever sterile, sealed storage their preservation and transport demanded.
The needle whose future work had preoccupied our thinking for the previous four weeks was out of its own kit now, its action calmly described by the consultant who sat near the foot of the bed. Neither the señor nor I saw it, my eyes closing as I saw the señor drop his head toward the floor, knees and feet splayed and hands clasped in the sad stock pose of the waiting man.
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Instead of a dearth of relevance, suddenly there’s a ghastly surplus of it. Like a boor at a party, the quake insists on pushing in and monopolising every conversation. (Source)
Reticence came up with the dust or down with the snow, placing me at quiet odds to this rising heap of narrative to whose granular contents I cannot, in general, bear to incline my eye. It is important to gather stories as data, it is important for everyone, everywhere, to have their say, but, to be frank, I do not suffer well all the talking and I am waiting for the sifting to start and the making to follow. No doubt this will take as long as the rebuild itself.
I wonder if perhaps it’s because I’ve participated in times past in both a talking cure and group therapy for my own historical mental illnesses, that the wider feeling of a community and beyond its boundaries a nation more generally turning over the traces, circulating the images, talking, talking, talking about its feelings, is something that for cultural purposes I so resist. I’m not meaning here the coronial findings, the stories of crisis, of deficits of provision, of help wanting or help that never came, that to my mind deserve a loud reciting in public forums and plazas of all kinds, but the meta-narrative, the story about the story, the What Does All This Mean for Us that’s an inevitable consequence of the literate, numerate, articulate life lived in late modernity, in person and online.
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We watch a lot of Sesame Street in this house, for the usual complex miscellany of reasons. It is one of the shows I remember fondly from my own early years; it blends the imaginary with the every day; it wears lightly the ways of thinking and living that inform its mise-en-scène, and these in turn are things that sit easily with me. There are other reasons of expediency, not least that, at fifty-five minutes, its episodes are long enough to engage my daughter for significant amounts of time, but also allow her to go away and come back without losing the thread of the action. Television is one of the tools with which I support the simultaneous care of my daughter and getting my work done, a contingency in which I have no special pride, but of which I am, at the same time, not especially ashamed.
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My daughter turned one this week. What I have quipped many times remains largely true: that my experience of the past year has split, depending on who is counting, in one of two ways. The first is between the first eight weeks – after which harvestbaby no longer needed my inexpert help to burp – and the remainder, and the second is between the first eleven or twelve weeks, after which came the September earthquake, and the rest. Either way, the greater part of the time has gone quickly.
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Posterous
Tolerably Habitable
29 December, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,dogs,we are family
In the southern spring of 2003, not long before I started these pages, I went on holiday to Melbourne to visit my brother who had been living there for a couple of years at that time. (An annual or eighteen-monthly visit was a ritual of mine for those first few years of his domicility in that city.) As was my habit during trips away, I thought a lot about what I needed to do to reorganise my life and make it work better for me. I lived at that time under an assumption of the possibility of mastery, that if I changed x and rejigged y, something like tranquility and contentment would arise. I had spent six unhappy months applying for academic jobs abroad after spending much of the northern spring on holiday in the UK and was ready to quit that particular trajectory; I didn’t have the stamina for the three hundred or more applications it was widely alleged humanities PhDs should be prepared to make to get a university job anywhere. (I had a non-academic university job at home; I just didn’t like it very much at that time.)
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