I am an inveterate life-narrator, not only on these pages but also in my own head and with my friends and family, frequently (and no doubt tediously) turning my experiences into stories about my experiences: this is what we did. This is what we do. This is why that thing that happened that one time turned out to be significant or (more commonly), this is the pattern that emerged over time.
It started young and lost me friends in those early days, when we persisted in the belief that our lives were our own to direct and that spontaneity, epiphany and the practised resisting of interpretation would keep us in a state of grace and freedom. These days it gives both me and the señor something like an adult handle on what might at times otherwise threaten to overwhelm: being married (to each other), being parents. In our next-to-darkest hours, we can take comfort in the meta-narrative that auto-processes, incessantly, just beyond the tears.
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I am full of the worst kinds of impulses creatively at present, from sulking with maudlin froideur in front of a blank screen to comparing myself unfavourably with those whose work suggests they are fitter and more productive, if not happier. It is time to mix myself a bowl of hot metaphors, get back on the internet horse and refuse to let my earthquake malaise separate me from my aphoristic lyric glands. Even fragments that don’t yield up their tenor are better than nothing at all.
Thank you to Giovanni for keeping the vehicle open.
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This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
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Inspired by my friend (and new-media artiste) Robyn Gallagher’s tweet, I have discontinued the Twitter archiving function on these, my narrative pages, and transferred it instead here, to a back-end blog with a separate feed to which you may wish to subscribe.
I am more obsessed than ever with archiving my Twitter-presence, seeing it as a short-form narrative whose relationships to these longer essays is both real and polyphonic, but the archive adds clutter here. I hope you will continue to read and comment in back, however, where I have imported and archived the existing Twitter-aggregates and will continue to tinker with the space.
I am abashed, as three weeks go by and the front page begins to look like a mere Twitter archive. The more time passes without making an entry, the more difficult making an entry becomes. It’s all commensurate, of course, with the impact of my return to work and the new-and-perpetual balancing act of that with home and babycare. The experience is akin to running atop a beachball: fine, so long as I don’t stop.
This brevity is the extent of my ability to commit thoughts to print at the moment, but I offer it up in the hope it might open up in future some more of that long-form goodness by which I made my small name. Abstract thought passes across the horizon of my mind and is observed, but the energy at day’s end to write up my musings, or even just to take lasting note of them, is low. The professional honeymoon whereby special consideration was given the woman with the baby has also I think ended, and this too I must accept.
I am preoccupied by things close at hand: feeding routines, housework, money, meetings. A heavy cold impairs me and I worry about the baby getting it, not least because she has had no such thing these past five months. I look at her face sometimes and think how it has ruined aesthetics for me, and about this how unperturbed I feel, save that it makes an account of art viewed and digested this season so much harder. Most things, indeed, are in a state of beautiful ruin at the moment: timetables and timelines, literary commitments, bank accounts, circadian rhythms, household repairs, my concentration. I will cope better if I stop struggling against it, even as that is a difficult habit of which to let go. Best, perhaps, to do it singing. Ha ha ha; bless your soul. Did I really think I was in control?
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Gambling Cards/I Have a Feeling
30 December, 2011
in commentatrix,meta-diarist,we are family
I am an inveterate life-narrator, not only on these pages but also in my own head and with my friends and family, frequently (and no doubt tediously) turning my experiences into stories about my experiences: this is what we did. This is what we do. This is why that thing that happened that one time turned out to be significant or (more commonly), this is the pattern that emerged over time.
It started young and lost me friends in those early days, when we persisted in the belief that our lives were our own to direct and that spontaneity, epiphany and the practised resisting of interpretation would keep us in a state of grace and freedom. These days it gives both me and the señor something like an adult handle on what might at times otherwise threaten to overwhelm: being married (to each other), being parents. In our next-to-darkest hours, we can take comfort in the meta-narrative that auto-processes, incessantly, just beyond the tears.
[click to continue…]
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