Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Pinching all the pollen
It must be good for the creativity, abstinence. It must. Conservation of energy. Look at me, I'm doing drawings in lieu of leg-jiggling. It just ain't right.
This descending weight of, I don't know, anticipation. I was looking at my study wall and thinking I should take down the cards and clippings that are now irritating me, and then I could see myself going on from that to take pictures down, and do all those little things you must do when you move house that make you want to curl up into a ball. Taking down things from walls is the thing I leave until last - it's practical, I suppose, but also I have to do it on the morning of a move because waking up to bare walls is some sort of death. I am very sensitive to these things, this process of peeling yourself off the surfaces of a house. And this house - as everyone who has visited me here knows in some tedious detail, I've been visiting this house since I was very little. When there was a cupboard under the stairs and Nick had hung a grotesque inflated spiky pufferfish in there. It had a beak, and was perfectly spherical. The place was scruffy and atmospheric and full of books and I thought it was the essence of bohemia before I knew what bohemia was.
It is creepy having an urge to take down pictures. It indicates separation starting. It's uncomfortable, feels like betrayal; but then if you waited until you knew you were ready to do everything, you would never do anything. Ever ever. Readiness might be like justice or happiness or perfection or something - it's not achievable, it's just a concept that you have as some sort of horizon to focus on.
Houses soak things up. They are porous. This one made me think, when I moved into it on my own at the end of the summer before last, of that bit in The Bell Jar where Esther has riotous food poisoning, and wakes up to find the walls of her hotel room hovering around her as if considerately withholding their weight. (I was also reminded of that particular set text recently when thinking of how I'd like to live in the country and the city both at once, please. 'The perfect set-up of a true neurotic', Buddy claims this desire indicates. Tee hee.) Yes. It is a considerate house of expansive spirit. My grief at leaving it is only going to be compounded by the knowledge that it's going to be sold within months. But much as you think it will be great to keep your boltholes in terms of places and people and states of mind, it's probably better to let them get filled in. Nostalgia is nostalgia for, like, a reason.
I am some kind of hormone snowstorm. This surfeit of sentimentality sloshing about. Getting all over this blog, as well. Ugh. Got sent a Blue Cross catalogue and on one page there's a ladybird-roosting box, a sparrow-nesting box (they're declining, no one really knows why, and they like to nest in little communities so don't go for your usual one-room bird boxes) and a bumblebee box. Bumblebees are also declining, in part due to fuckwits not being able to tell them from wasps and boshing them out of existence with rolled up right-wing dailies. Or being able to tell them from wasps well enough but killing them anyway out of fucking lumbering illogical post-9/11 kneejerk self-righteous idiotic fear. And thus presenting yet another sparkling example of how everything good and pure and endearingly fuzzy and aerodynamically-enigmatic is getting sucked into a black hole of duhhhhh.
I would like very much to soothe my own mind and provide a cosy haven for beleaguered bees, but it seems it's too late for this year as the queen needs to nest in early spring. So this garden, with its bracken and Grinchian tree and old ceramic sinks used as planters and dandelions and um, dogshit will never see one, at least not while I'm here.
But I will have a garden elsewhere, and I don't know what it'll be like, and that is exciting. So shut up, blubbering fool.
I shall get a decent camera before I leave here, so I can take all of it with me.
Bees. Ahhhh.
This descending weight of, I don't know, anticipation. I was looking at my study wall and thinking I should take down the cards and clippings that are now irritating me, and then I could see myself going on from that to take pictures down, and do all those little things you must do when you move house that make you want to curl up into a ball. Taking down things from walls is the thing I leave until last - it's practical, I suppose, but also I have to do it on the morning of a move because waking up to bare walls is some sort of death. I am very sensitive to these things, this process of peeling yourself off the surfaces of a house. And this house - as everyone who has visited me here knows in some tedious detail, I've been visiting this house since I was very little. When there was a cupboard under the stairs and Nick had hung a grotesque inflated spiky pufferfish in there. It had a beak, and was perfectly spherical. The place was scruffy and atmospheric and full of books and I thought it was the essence of bohemia before I knew what bohemia was.
It is creepy having an urge to take down pictures. It indicates separation starting. It's uncomfortable, feels like betrayal; but then if you waited until you knew you were ready to do everything, you would never do anything. Ever ever. Readiness might be like justice or happiness or perfection or something - it's not achievable, it's just a concept that you have as some sort of horizon to focus on.
Houses soak things up. They are porous. This one made me think, when I moved into it on my own at the end of the summer before last, of that bit in The Bell Jar where Esther has riotous food poisoning, and wakes up to find the walls of her hotel room hovering around her as if considerately withholding their weight. (I was also reminded of that particular set text recently when thinking of how I'd like to live in the country and the city both at once, please. 'The perfect set-up of a true neurotic', Buddy claims this desire indicates. Tee hee.) Yes. It is a considerate house of expansive spirit. My grief at leaving it is only going to be compounded by the knowledge that it's going to be sold within months. But much as you think it will be great to keep your boltholes in terms of places and people and states of mind, it's probably better to let them get filled in. Nostalgia is nostalgia for, like, a reason.
I am some kind of hormone snowstorm. This surfeit of sentimentality sloshing about. Getting all over this blog, as well. Ugh. Got sent a Blue Cross catalogue and on one page there's a ladybird-roosting box, a sparrow-nesting box (they're declining, no one really knows why, and they like to nest in little communities so don't go for your usual one-room bird boxes) and a bumblebee box. Bumblebees are also declining, in part due to fuckwits not being able to tell them from wasps and boshing them out of existence with rolled up right-wing dailies. Or being able to tell them from wasps well enough but killing them anyway out of fucking lumbering illogical post-9/11 kneejerk self-righteous idiotic fear. And thus presenting yet another sparkling example of how everything good and pure and endearingly fuzzy and aerodynamically-enigmatic is getting sucked into a black hole of duhhhhh.
I would like very much to soothe my own mind and provide a cosy haven for beleaguered bees, but it seems it's too late for this year as the queen needs to nest in early spring. So this garden, with its bracken and Grinchian tree and old ceramic sinks used as planters and dandelions and um, dogshit will never see one, at least not while I'm here.
But I will have a garden elsewhere, and I don't know what it'll be like, and that is exciting. So shut up, blubbering fool.
I shall get a decent camera before I leave here, so I can take all of it with me.
Bees. Ahhhh.
