Insomnia and Illness

I have forgotten how to go to sleep. It started the Sunday before last, and every night since then I’ve been kept awake by conversations with myself, new threads for my thesis, tirades against our flatmate’s boyfriend who, at 25, still can’t even aim into the toilet bowl correctly, and ideas for the endings of stories. I do exercises to banish any thoughts from my head (muscular relaxation, pushing thoughts out with a broom) but they spring back like bouncy young vines and keep growing and curling in my mind. I need weedkiller.

So, with not enough sleep, I have naturally become ill, and a few days this week were decadently (any time I have when I’m not writing or studying feels decadent) passed wrapped in my pink mohair rug on my bed, reading Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Sometimes I felt as aimless as Frederic himself, wandering the streets of revolutionary Paris and thinking about his amour and generally not doing anything with himself, and other times I wanted to give him a good kick up the arse and tell him to get a job.

One of the things that makes Flaubert such an excellent writer is his attention to detail. Here is a paragraph describing Frederic in love:

‘They nearly always stayed out of doors at the top of the stairs, with the tops of trees yellowed by the autumn rising in uneven curves up to the pale horizon in front of them; or else they went to the far end of the avenue, to a summer-house whose only furniture was a sofa covered in grey linen. The mirror was stained with black spots; the walls gave off a musty smell; and they stayed there talking about themselves, about others, about anything and everything, in an ecstasy of delight. Sometimes the sunbeams, coming through the Venetian blind, would stretch what looked like the strings of a lyre from ceiling to floor, and specks of dust would whirl about in these luminous bars. She amused herself by breaking them with her hand; Frederic would gently seize it and gaze at the tracery of her veins, the grain of her skin, the shape of her fingers. For him, each of her fingers was something more than a thing, almost a person.’ (Penguin, 1964, p. 271).

It’s the grounding of love through the details of the particular – the spots on the mirror, the mustiness of the walls, the yellowing trees, the strips of sunlight – that makes this such an evocative piece. Also, I have a fondness for the way light falls through shutters and windows. I like Emily Dickinson’s ‘There’s a certain slant of light’ – her entire poem on a shape of sunlight in a room - and (for I am sometimes a popular culture whore), the line from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love: ‘Shuttered rooms/with sunlight breaking through.’ It reminds me of summer afternoons in the long holidays on the farm, bored out of my mind, lying under the fan on the prickly carpet and contemplating the light.

On Saturday H and I went to the National Gallery to look at Alison Watt’s exhibition Phantom which was, essentially, huge paintings of swathes of white fabric. The paintings were very poorly displayed and we didn’t think much of it at all until we watched the accompanying video. Despite an incredibly odd start, in which it looked like the painter was being stalked by her interviewer, it developed into an interesting depiction of her work and the ideas behind it. One concept was that the hole made by a fold in the fabric is about the possibility of all that is unseen. I like this idea – which is called ‘negativity’ – and I use it in my thesis, in the sense that those things which we can’t see or hear are not necessarily a loss, but rather something that is productive. The shapes in Watt’s folds were also undeniably feminine, reminding me of vulvas, and I was surprised that no mention was made of this. Perhaps she hadn’t intended it that way and it was, as usual, just my indecent mind. In the video the painting were arranged in her studio so as to take up all available space and it appeared as though she was working among a sea of sheets, but in the gallery they were hung solitarily upon the walls, and it felt very empty.

Plateauing

I’m feeling strangely flat, and I shouldn’t be because it’s warm enough to wear skirts and stilettos, I know what to write this week (kind of) and last weekend was utterly gorgeous. I think I need a holiday, but I won’t get a break until the beginning of next month, when the parental unit come over from Oz.

Last weekend was spent in M’s endlessly entertaining company in the wilds of England, exploring old houses, beautiful parks, gardens and ruins. Sunday saw us walking through the greenest paddock I have ever seen. Up to the skyline, everything was green, and above it were milky blue clouds. We had lunch by a pub near an old water mill with ruins in the distance, and I was in ecstasies. I never knew England could be so beautiful, and fear I may even be starting to like the place.

On the way back through the paddock, we stopped by a gate that led to an old church (although M maintains that a 19th Century church is hardly old) and waited for three young Goths to step through first. The first looked relatively normal, despite a halo of dry, brown frizzy hair, the second was black and the third had buck teeth. Even though I couldn’t hear him, I knew M was laughing behind me, and I was struggling not to laugh myself, but some adolescents do try so hard to be individuals, and we really shouldn’t mock their efforts.

Due to my perpetual state of impoverishment, H very kindly took me to see Equus on Thursday, along with the Magirrister of whom, like H- (March 10 entry), I profess to be very fond. When I met them, wearing my red silk Monsoon skirt and a black top, H asked, ‘Did you spend all day getting ready?’ I protested, somewhat annoyed because I had actually done some work, that it had only taken me 45 minutes. I’d read the play before I left, as from past experience if I don’t hear what’s going on I get very, very angry and frustrated. As it transpired I couldn’t hear much anyway. The loop system worked, but the microphones were at the front of the stage and the actors were standing quite a way back. So I did hear some things very clearly: someone coughing their guts up and a mobile phone going off.

The play was interesting to read but quite boring to watch. Daniel Radcliffe was good but I didn’t think Richard Griffiths had enough presence. The actors playing the horses were fantastic however, not least because they were dead sexy, but also because they’d studied all the movements of horses and they looked positively real. I really liked the theme of communicating with animals in some kind of unearthly, mystical way, just as I liked the fusion between human and animal love in Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime, and it gave me the hint of an idea for fixing a short story which has been stubbornly refusing to work for the last 10 years.

Obviously one of the drawcards for lots of people was Daniel Radcliffe getting his kit off, and H pointed out that there was a great deal of grappling for the opera glasses between the gay couple in the row before us. But it didn’t seem that necessary for him to get starkers, unless the writer was trying to drive home some point about the primal fusion between man and horse. I have to confess I was more taken with the muscles on Radcliffe’s back than his willy.

The Magirrister had bought a new pack of cards which he liked because they looked old, but they were so new and shiny that spreading them felt like rippling water. Halfway through dinner after the play (at a bright yellow Chinese restaurant in Chinatown), he told me to cut the pack, and that the person with the highest card could chose the last round of hors d’oeuvres. I teased him that he must have already figured out who was going to get the highest card, then cut the pack and came up with an Ace of Spades. The Magirrister looked utterly flummoxed for a few seconds, then conceded that there was no point in going on with his trick and had to put his cards away.

My Life at Work

It’s the end of my working week. Tomorrow I start my second job (thesis) so on Wednesday nights I revel in the luxury of doing nothing. Since I lead a tremendously wild and extravagant life, to pass the time I usually read (Huxley’s Brave New World at the moment; I don’t like it much), flaff around on the internet or tidy up my room which looks like a bomb after three days of - on account of my sheer tiredness - dropping clothes on the floor instead of hanging them up.

Ordinarily I have Wednesday afternoons off too but this afternoon was spent on a course entitled ‘Coping at the Counter’, which I attended in the hope of learning how to keep myself together in conversations with patronising male academics at the library. During such exchanges (which usually arise because I can’t hear said academics properly, on account of their mumbling), my first impulse is to grab the stapler and knock them over the head with it and staple their bovine faces to the desk. However, Mother’s continual exhortations over the course of my childhood to always remain polite hold sway, and if I swear and make a scene it is in the sanctuary of my boss’ office.

It isn’t always academics to fluster me, although it is usually a man. I can only recall one woman being revolting to me, and that was mostly my fault because I wasn’t assertive enough to tell her that I was deaf and that was why I hadn’t spelt her name properly. However, to give an idea of the kind of person I sometimes deal with, I offer the following exchange:

Man in his late twenties comes to the desk. Doesn’t smile. ‘I’d like to know how many books I can take out,’ he says.
‘Sure, I just need to check your status.’ I take his card.
Computer shows that he’s doing a PhD.
‘Which university are you at?’
He mumbles something and I hear two words, ‘royal’ and ‘art.’
‘Royal College of the Arts?’ I ask, to check.
‘Art,’ he emphasises as though I were stupid. ‘Royal College of Art, not Arts.’
I blink and don’t look at him, but my lips are thinning. I check the membership manual and tell him how many books he can take out. I am very pissed off.
He gives me his books and after I’ve stamped them I slap them back on the desk, slightly louder than usual, and he looks at my face to check my expression. He must realise that he’s offended me because he attempts a thankyou as I give the books back, but I scarcely acknowledge it. I like people with manners; people without manners don’t deserve my attention.

Now, I know a big part of my problem is my ego. I’m a smart girl and I loathe people treating me as though I were dumb. Also I often forget that I’m deaf, so the problems which are caused by my deafness I tend to take personally instead of dismissing them. To counter some of these problems, I wear a very unattractive badge which says ‘I’m hard of hearing, please speak clearly.’ On account of this, I sometimes have (again, mostly old men) speaking to me as if I were not only deaf, but also slightly retarded. In other words, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Usually when this happens I have to suppress an insane urge to giggle, again until I reach my supervisor’s office. The last time this occurred, the deputy supervisor suggested that I wear another badge on the other side of my chest saying, ‘I’m deaf, not stupid.’ Then (because it was winter and I was in the habit of wearing tight skivvies) he added, ‘And then you can have another badge down here,’ (he patted his pecs), ‘which says, “Stop staring at my tits!”’ I burst out laughing.

But mostly my job is very nice, not least because of the people I work with (and indeed, yesterday at lunch I was in a state of beatitude because B was in the staff room; he has such a charming sensibility and delicious smile that it was like being cast in the glow of an angel), and I only remember the ugly incidents because they’re the ones that upset me.

I have three weeks to write 10,000 words (my self-imposed goal for the month). It is awful to think that I have another 9 months of this, and that the pain has only just begun, and that it can’t be relieved because I have no money with which to go shopping. However over the long weekend I did nothing, so now I must work.

'Must be a chick thing.'

Thus spake the numbskull in ‘Alien Resurrection’ after Ripley had blown to bits the tanks full of attempts at recreating her self from a bit of DNA left on a piece of ice in the last film (I know that was a bad sentence, but I can’t be bothered to fix it). Or rather, the idiot who wrote that stupid line and ruined the whole scene.

I love Aliens. Once I was so infatuated with Ripley (during my anorexic adolescence when I found her leanness so very appealing) that I thought that, if I had a daughter, I would call her Sigourney. Then a friend asked, ‘So what would you do for her nickname? Call her Siggy?’ and I admitted that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. But on that note, I like the themes of motherhood, pregnancy and hosts that ripple through the stories, especially in the last film, where the boundaries between alien and human began to break down, and you can't tell what a mother isanymore, because the doctoring of DNA has become motherhood. Which is why that line shat me, because it pointed so obviously to what was there, that it assumed the viewers were dumb.

But what I like most of all about the movies is that Ripley is such a ball-breaker. She’s as tough as nails, smart and has satisfyingly sarcastic one-liners. I said to A- that, sadly, I didn’t think they made movies with strong female characters like that anymore and A- replied, ‘I don’t think they have ever!’ (She also said, in a discussion we had with H about whether it was the blood or the Alien’s saliva that was acidic, and H said it was the blood, and A- said, ‘I hope she doesn’t menstruate,’ and I said, ‘I bet they didn’t even think of that.’)

Yet I found it unnerving that it was still a resurrection, because although I was glad Ripley had come back to life, it was still upsetting that she wasn’t completely the same. It was like in the Dune novels, by Brian Herbert, when Duncan Idaho was replicated each time, but always changed some way. I loved that character, and I was disappointed that he never lived as he originally had.

Anyway I like these ideas about perpetuating love and life, and I dimly recall Sue Woolfe saying, in an interview, that someone like Ada Lovelace had invented the computer so she could find some way of extending the life of a person she loved, who was dying. It’s for the same reason that I’m interested in memory, and in the question of how you can bring back someone who you’ve irrevocably lost through the process of remembering them. And I’m wondering if I’ll ever be good enough to write something science fictiony, and have it work as well as well as Aliens.

But maybe it was a chick thing, on Friday, to burst into tears after spending an hour and a half getting to the British Library (there was an incident of some sort, so the police had cordoned off half the street so I had to walk to St Pancras from halfway down City Road, in very high red heels), only to discover that I’d left my card behind and couldn’t get into the reading room. I was already overwrought because it had taken so long to leave that house that I felt like I was living out my recurring nightmare of never getting anywhere because of having so much stuff to pack. So I went to the membership desk and asked if there was anyway of getting a temporary membership card and the man said yes, there was, if I paid £5 and provided proof of address and identity. Since I can’t even afford to pick up my dry cleaning, let alone pay £5, and since I’m not in the habit of carrying around my latest gas bill, there was no way out of it, and in despair I rushed into the ladies’ and started howling. Naturally it would have been more efficacious to cry in front of the man at the reception desk but unfortunately I hate crying in front of other people. There was nothing for it but to get on the bus and go back home. I did, however, see a man in a suit playing a guitar in a parking lot and, tossed onto the top of a bus shelter, a potato that had been spraypainted blue and jabbed full of red toothpicks.

Meanwhile, I am going mental (just in case it wasn't obvious from the abovementioned incident) because I haven’t been writing. I think the instability also has something with the fact that my baby (so to speak) of seven years has left me and now I need something else to fill the space. Stories keep welling up in me, bursting to be written down, and I just can’t seem to find the time.

At least now I’m writing in notebooks again, which I haven’t done for years, and I’m using the chocolate brown one that C sent me after we’d had a fight. I’m writing down my dreams, because A- said she’d had a dream that she, H and I had moved to a house by the beach, and I said I never had happy dreams, so I’m logging my dreams for a month to see what they’re like. So far I’ve had my only other recurring nightmare – about marrying a man I don’t love, and having a less-than-perfect wedding – and a dream about being frustrated with H because he was having a dinner party and it wasn’t organised, as usual.

And I have, at last, found an author who inspires me – Marguerite Duras. I’ve just finished ‘The War’ and for a day I was slightly stunned by the potency of her words. I read ‘The Lover’ last year, but I found the film far better than the book. Naturally, this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Tony Leung was stark naked in it, but all the same I think I’ll go back to that book and try it again. And I might watch the film again too.