between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Everybody's afraid of something.

#

This week, I'm more afraid than usual. Leading, yesterday, I had the bone-deep conviction I was going to fall and break bones, if not my neck. I could feel it, every time I reached for a clip. My stomach and my shoulders were too tight, my arms too loose, my hands not steady or certain enough, my foot placement more tentative than usual.

I'll improve, with practice. I'm even thinking I might be prepared to try leading on of the gentler 6As in a week or two. Eventually, I'll get over the conviction that my incompetence will doom me, because already I'm growing more competent, and growing into sureness of my competence. Physically, I feel more sure and powerful than I've ever been. Physically.

#

I don't know if you heard about our drastic April budget, or the fact that the Irish economy is projected to contract by eight percent more in the next twelve months. I don't know if you've heard that the unemployment rate is already at ten percent of adult able population.

I am not sanguine about my prospects of self-sufficiency in the near-to-medium future. It's a good time to be a student parasite on the body politic; a bad time to be looking for work, or funding.

It's not a good time to do poorly.

#

I'm reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and thinking about history, and perspective, and language, and bad things happening to unobjectionable people. I have an assignment to write for my class on Jewish Diasporas, about the treatment of aspects of Jewish Diaspora identity by the author, and I am thinking about the extent of my ignorance, and about being the child of an incredibly parochial society, and about the moral standing of academics to examine and pronounce upon the lived experience of people yet living or not very long dead.

And about whether this is more or less problematic than that of the academics who examine and pronounce upon the lived experience of people dead for hundreds of years.

We are always looking through a funhouse mirror, at ourselves, and at the Other. Even when we deny that there is an Other, when we claim we think of people, not objects, or statistics, or dusty theoretical models.

Literature is especially slippery that way. It gets under your skin, and itches.

#

I don't know if you've ever been asked to sit down with part of the New Testament, give your own exegesis, and also sketch out how it's been interpreted by others over the centuries. I find it opaque, and baffling, and frustrating. The letter of Paul to the Romans, chapter 11, is my present nemesis, and all I can think, reading it, is that Paul wanted very desperately to believe.

He's an angry, shouty, arrogant, occasionally patronising little saint. His justifications for what he believes are elaborate, contradictory, and occasionally confused, and he makes reference to the previous Jewish writings with very little concern for context. And yet, I would like him so much better if so many people today did not take him so seriously as an Apostle of the One True Revealed Religion, if they did not refuse to see him in his context, and the context of his times.

For Paul is very much a product of Second Temple Judaism. Far more than he's a 'Christian' as we understand the term, he's a Judaean, a product of a particular class and time in the history of Yahwistic monotheism, and the apocalyptic 'apocrypha' associated with it in the first century CE. Reinterpreting the previous writings out of context was a perfectly valid act for him, and the expectation that the world was in or entering its final period perfectly understandable. Paul did not think it would be long before "the full number of the Gentiles is gathered" and "all Israel will be saved". 1 Thessalonians gives the impression he expects it within his lifetime.

It annoys me, then, when the scholarly commentaries I have to read are uniformly Christian in their presuppositions, no matter how hard they try to maintain their objectivity and academic thoroughness. But I suppose it is only to be expected: the history of early Christianity, and Biblical scholarship, undoubtedly attracts Christians.

I wonder where all the godless atheists, like me, who do biblical studies end up?

#

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I don't really remember much of Dune - I think I may have read it when I was twelve, but I tend to ascribe a lot of books whose individual when I can't recall to that year* - but the litany against fear sticks out in my memory: the test scene made an impression.

I come back to my fear, again and again, as - you might say - a dog returneth to his vomit. It's very familiar to me by now, if never comfortable.

Fear is real. Fear is key. Fear is a friend. Fear is what drives success. Fear is a devil. Fear is a lie.

I'm afraid of uncertainty. I'm afraid of discomfort. I'm afraid this comfortable tissue-tower of compromise and security that makes up my life will one day shatter. I'm afraid it's my fault. I'm afraid I'm unlucky. I'm afraid I'm just lucky enough.

I'm afraid it's all quite baffling to me, to be honest.

Uncertainty never goes away: it's a basic principle of the universe**. But I think I am growing, or stumbling - it may be the more apropos word - up. Insofar as up is a term that admits of definition.

I'm already growing into better understandings of my competence, I think, and the ways in which my competence may be persuaded to grow.***

I'll improve, with practice.

Practice. Now there's a helpful, hopeful thought.

---

*Glorious 1998! Alas for the Spice Girls, and Boyzone, otherwise you might be year of sublime perfection in the golden fields of my memory.

**"Certain physical quantities, like position and momentum, cannot both have precise values at the same time. The narrower the probability distribution for one, the wider it is for the other." I approve of Wikipedia. It's useful.

***I'm also trying to grow into a better person, but, you know, that's one of those hard things.

I don't have to wonder why this time of year always makes me sad. I know.

It's no big thing. But I can't help remembering people I used to know, places I used to love. Things I used to look forward to, like Christmas, I dread for so many small, petty reasons I couldn't count them all. People I used to care for, who I've... misplaced, one way or another, due to time or distance or simple carelessness.

Lately I've been dreaming of a house in the country. Actually dreaming, not daydreaming: a small grey farmhouse in the old style with worn rooms comfortably arranged and a wooden stair, four-pointed stars carved into the risers of the steps, and a kitchen where a cat sleeps on a jumble of shoes in a corner by an Aga cooker. Outside there is a shed half-full of straw, a small paved yard, and beyond, fields green and damp and full of dying gorse under a grey sky sweeping down to the sea. And I know if I went down a narrow hall and opened the door to the living room, it would be full of friends. And I wake up full of regret.

It's happened more than twice now. The house in the dream is nowhere I've ever been. Or rather, it's bits and pieces of a number of places I've been, all mixed together, under a dream of west-of-Ireland scenery and sky. It's the house I wish I could belong to, in the middle of countryside that for all its foreigness to me (I really am more comfortable in towns) still smells like coming home.

I hate that dream only a little less than I hate the fact that I have had it. It seems a little implausible, not to mention impolite, for your own brain to be giving you tastes of things you can never have. Hell, I thought the recurring symbolic dream thingy was a literary invention. It's freaking ridiculous to find out it actually isn't.

And it's really not helping my winter mood of sorrow and old socks and fruitless regrets. Fruitful regrets would be a different thing, but I don't seem to quite do fruitful regrets.

It's the tail end of the (solar) year. Maybe some other year I'll get a sunlamp, mum won't be scheduled for too many shifts over the holidays, and the shops will play choral music instead of hive-inducing cheery jingles. That's the year I'll have a pony, too, and an antidote for some of this tired cynicism. Right?

Here's to the year to come. May it be more just, fairer, and more kind.

So. I got Words! on the train today. Now they are typed up, and things have to be difficult (v. nearly tyoped as diffucilt, and no, we will not transcribe that phonetically).

Damndamndamn! ::throws novel on floor and jumps up and down on it::

Okay, I feel better now. I'm just feeling a wee bit antsy because Inspiration!(tm) dropped a complete, unadulterated, stand-alone sequel idea on my head today.

::hates unfinished-ness::

And jmeadows gifted me with an idea for a short story. (All right, maybe it's unfair of me to blame her, but still.)

Whine Moan Whinge Grump Groan Growl.

::kicks self-pity in the unmentionables::

Okay, now that's taken care of, back to work.

---------------

PS: I've just realised that my current background music is so completely appropriate.