(no subject)

Last night I dreamed I put on my old school uniform and went to school. Protective colouring: but in the dream I was me-as-I-am-now, not me-as-I-was-then.

I can still taste hot humiliation and the madness of wanting/not wanting to go back.

Meditations upon the screwed-up brain

The problem with screwed-up brain chemistry is the temptation to use it as an excuse.

Or rather, the constant uncertainty over what's a reasonable accommodation to make, and what's letting my screwed-up brain chemistry serve as justification for the worse angels of my nature. It doesn't help that it varies by the day. For the last few days, for example, I've had social anxiety and social fatigue so deep as to be almost crippling. This isn't fun when I have a presentation to give today, and an evening lecture to attend tomorrow: the tightness in my throat and nauseous gut and across my shoulderblades is the precursor of full-blown jittering shakes.

I haven't had the shakes for a while. Not since I was travelling in Greece. There I could breathe through them, in the knowledge that however I fucked up, I had to deal with it. And because I had to, because my options were deal or be stranded by the roadside, I could. Here, the quality of necessity is different: I could scurry back to my comfort zone. It would be the wrong choice, but the option's there. That makes carrying through all the harder.

There've been other presentations where I didn't feel like this. Other days where I rose from my sickbed to travel to another city, even, and felt reasonably confident, even slightly enthusiastic. Where it didn't feel like one more damn thing breaking me open and letting all the soft parts out. Breathe through it. Tomorrow, if the sickening sensation is still here, I can ditch the evening lecture and go get therapeutically beaten up instead.

There's only so much I can handle. I hear it's called being human. The worst part, the most self-destroying thing, is never being able to count on the amount of cope available for any given task. There are walls inside my head, some days, and some days they choke me.

I'm not saying this because I want pity, or advice, or anything else. I'm saying this because I need to remember: like my bad ankle, with its weak tendons and ligaments that sometimes takes rough ground in its stride and others gives me bright flashes of pain on the flat, my screwed-up brain chemistry is an unpredictable weakness to work around. To strengthen by exercise, yes, but also to remember the blurred line between pushing the limits of tolerance and expecting no consequences when I cross the line.

This is my life. There's no percentage in resenting it for what it is.

Books 2012: I'm not afraid of the dark when the sun goes down and the dreams grow deep

Books 2012: 14

nonfiction

14. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. WW Norton, 1995. First published 1979.

Rich remains interesting to me, as much for what she isn't (conscious, much, of feminism outside of the United States, viscerally aware of the working-class experience) as for what she is (feminist, a woman writing to women, a women steeped in the English canon where it comes to formative literary experiences, intellectually aware of her own privilege and conflict vis-à-vis the systems in which she finds herself, for better or worse a poet). Against the experience of reading Joanna Russ's nonfiction, Rich's wit is less scathing, her critique less acutely visionary. You have the feeling she'd be a milder person to debate.

Russ's nonfiction speaks to me on more levels. We still don't share a native tongue, but the world we see has more overlap, I think, than the world Rich sees and directs her writing at. Where Russ appears to me to address (abruptly, with caustic impatience at the foibles of fools) anyone who cares to listen, Rich is an essentially American thinker, an American poet, an American woman. There's nothing wrong with being limited - or choosing to limit oneself - by the geography of one's intellect, of course. I'm just reminded frequently, reading Rich, that I am other to her. Geographically, experientially, physically, intellectually, politically. And while I find her work interesting...

Huh. I have just realised. It makes me defensive about my perspective. About my experience as an Irishwoman, an experience of the world not seen from within the nation with the world's biggest muscle. An experience characterised by being outside the standard Anglophone frames of reference.

Aristophanes, Frogs, 242-269

Βάτραχοι

μᾶλλον μὲν οὖν
φθεγξόμεσθ᾽, εἰ δή ποτ᾽ εὐηλίοις
ἐν ἁμέραισιν
ἡλάμεσθα διὰ κυπείρου
καὶ φλέω, χαίροντες ᾠδῆς
πολυκολύμβοισι μέλεσιν, [245]
ἢ Διὸς φεύγοντες ὄμβρον
ἔνυδρον ἐν βυθῷ χορείαν
αἰόλαν ἐφθεγξάμεσθα
πομφολυγοπαφλάσμασιν.

Διόνυσος

βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ.
τουτὶ παρ᾽ ὑμῶν λαμβάνω.

Βάτραχοι

δεινά τἄρα πεισόμεσθα.

Διόνυσος

δεινότερα δ᾽ ἔγωγ᾽, ἐλαύνων
εἰ διαρραγήσομαι. [255]

Βάτραχοι

βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ.

Διόνυσος

οἰμώζετ᾽: οὐ γάρ μοι μέλει.

Βάτραχοι

ἀλλὰ μὴν κεκραξόμεσθά γ᾽
ὁπόσον ἡ φάρυξ ἂν ἡμῶν
χανδάνῃ δι᾽ ἡμέρας. [260]

Διόνυσος

βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ.
τούτῳ γὰρ οὐ νικήσετε.

Βάτραχοι

οὐδὲ μὴν ἡμᾶς σὺ πάντως.

Διόνυσος

οὐδὲ μὴν ὑμεῖς γ᾽ ἐμὲ
οὐδέποτε: κεκράξομαι γὰρ
κἂν δέῃ δι᾽ ἡμέρας [265]
βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ,
ἕως ἂν ὑμῶν ἐπικρατήσω τῷ κοάξ,
βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ.


Frogs:
Indeed, and so
we'll speak out, as indeed when in sunny
days we sprang through the cypresses
and through the reeds with oft-diving limbs,
or after Zeus had left the
watery thunder-storm, in the depths [in the midst] of our
wriggling dances we sang out,
with a bubbling noise.

Dionysos:
Brekekekex koax koax!
This I get from you.

Frogs:
We suffer terrible things indeed.

Dionysos:
And I suffer really much more terrible things, rowing,
since I'll be broken in two.

Frogs:
Brekekekex koax koax!

Dionysos:
Go howl! I don't care.

Frogs:
But we will have croaked
as much as our throats
might hold all day.

Dionysos:
Brekekekex koax koax.
You won't overcome me with this.

Frogs:
We'll overcome you in all ways.

Dionysos:
You won't overcome me
ever: for I'll have croaked
as much as necessary all day
Brekekekex koax koax
until I prevail over you with koax
Brekekekex koax koax.