Thursday, June 09, 2005
Steamed
Finally got to try out the Pagan's sauna. Such an odd thing to have in your garden, a sort of Scandinavian torture chamber. Satan's Portakabin. But feeling your flesh start to slide off your bones while birds sing outside, a profusion of greenery framed in the square glass at eye level, offsetting the small vicious rectangle of red by the floor - it could get addictive. I forget what a fan I am of nice fresh sweat, because I hardly ever generate any of my own. I mean, it's great to be mostly fragrant and perspiration-free but it's highly satisfying to feel your pores start going for broke. Slightly transgressive, like you're pushing something past where it should be.
I should stop calling her the Pagan, it sounds vaguely derogatory when it isn't meant to. She's only the Pagan because I told some Jehovah's Witnesses not to bother knocking on her door either because "she's a pagan". I was astonished at my own temerity. I suppose I was emboldened by my brusque confession of atheism. I did feel imposed upon - there were three of them, two loitering at the bottom of the garden while the other came to wheedle at me. How dare they? I mean, what gives anyone the right to go to the home of anyone else to try to influence their beliefs? It infuriates me. I knew the Pagan would really go to town on them, and say exactly that kind of thing, and keep them there until they were the ones making excuses to leave. So in part I didn't want them to waste their time, but I didn't know what I was going to say or in what tone until I said it. It sounded very insolent. Tee hee.
They went anyway, of course, and I peeked. There's nothing funnier than watching a conversation you can't hear but know the basic gist of. Anyway, she's not really a Pagan, although I'd be fascinated if she was. She's a homeopath and Reiki practitioner. And she is strong but she is over-burdened, not just with her pack of children and animals but with her thoughts as to how the world is affecting them. I'm a fairly big believer in the psychologically absorbent qualities of children who are too young to be able to form memories - anything you take in before the age of three cannot be made sense of by your developed mind later, so people have to be extremely fucking careful - but she has taken this so much to heart, she seems crippled with worry about her little boy. She feels that the dog runs away so much because the dog is unhappy and neglected, and that the boy won't sleep because of some stuff that's going on with her. There's something in it, but I had to tell her to give herself a break, because you can't control everything, and she is doing heroically.
She went to roast herself and within four minutes Tiny was screaming down the monitor. I went up and found him lost in giant bed. I don't know what to do with children at all - I have some fractured sense of what they are about when they get to five or six but before that they are alien. I was such a solitary and intense child I probably never figured out what other children were like, and I suppose I missed my little sister's development because she was born when I was 13, and then I was being an intense and solitary teenager. I get on brilliantly with F, P's seven-year-old, she's one of those prodigious minature adults; Tiny though is nearly two, and never smiles, and I cannot gauge where he is in terms of cognitive skills. Can't connect with him on any level. He is a long way away. He made lots of noise, I talked softly to him and got nowhere until I asked if he would like to go downstairs and watch some telly. Very clearly - "yeah". Shunting of baby body with purpose.
P came back in to find me buried under a heap of vibrating cat, sullen baby and oblivious dog. She fretted afresh about what a bad neighbour she had been to not see me more often, and said sweetly and in the usual flood of syllables that it makes a positive difference, seeing people makes a positive change in the world. . .I can never recall exactly what she says later on because it's always such a rush of organic herbal overheard-in-the-Green-Fields-at-Glasto stream-of-consciousness, but it's unfailingly touching.
Tiny was asked to say 'night night Sarah'. "Night night Sarah" he said into her shoulder. "Awww," I said.
I don't think I could bear to have children. They affect me too much. They are on some other level of existence that you can't get to at all, and you just have to guess and make large gestures and hope. That's if you give a shit. If you don't, you carry on as normal and occasionally grunt something like "gerroff" and then you act surprised when your kid grows up to hate you and themselves and to be aggressive and hateful to the rest of the world. It seems you have to be prepared to ruin your own life to an extent so that they are spared. If you jealously hang onto yourself as your first priority, the crap is still there and someone has to carry it and it will end up being them. And it will really show.
P does remind me ever so slightly of my older half-sister, to whom I haven't spoken in years. I was definitely the lucky one of the two of us. I don't even want to work out how old she is now because she might as well still be 14. She's intelligent enough and a talented artist but she is entirely mangled. I'm getting the usual sinking feeling around the racks of Father's Day cards, and all the ingenious new marketing angles like CD compilations of Oasis and Black Sabbath. Bleurgh. Happy, obviously, that these are just residual niggles, but they will probably always stick. I start to get misanthropic. I resent the fact that some people really will pick the most syrupy gloopy sentiments they can for their dear ole pa. I resent that for some people it is that simple. I resent that they take for granted even the knowledge and the experience, even if it doesn't amount to a lot of actual affection or positive feeling. I just don't have anything much to go on. It's mostly stuff I had to generate myself to fill in the gaps, stuff that was just squeezed out of me that I had to then fashion into the facsimile of a parent, and then figure out the details, and then get rid of.
Nature is not much on vacuums, and so lots of nice healthy stuff sprouted when that one was finally cancelled out. These indifferent spaces are the things you hope to avoid - big empty arenas of shrugging absence, important scary things crowding around outside them but with no way in. Everyone involved acting like it's normal. That was the worst of it - the pretence that this is how life is conducted, and that if you feel a bit uncomfortable and like something isn't right then it's your problem, babe. Years of that persistent denial, whole herds of elephants stomping through living room, and I think you at least earn a scowl at Hallmark.
People don't always recognise that there's a big landfill of emotional rot between the two supposed poles, just horrible swathes of nothingness; like they don't anticipate the worst thing about grief is the boredom, the tedium of having only the same finite batch of memories to rehash to yourself, the fact that you wake up every day and they're still not there and you are just so fucking bored by that fact. That's where the worst of life is -not in the sickly lurching of events (all movement is a blessing) but in the hanging around of non-events, the horrors of inertia.
The great thing is though that I'll never have to do all that again, not that particular slog, and because the vacuum is no longer there I'm not going to start leaping out of my seat with instinctive reactions. The sensors were certainly warped for a while, but not now. Any current expanses of echoing space can't be mistaken for that epic gap, nor for anything like indifference. I'm too determined that life ought to be at some constant high temperature, with those waves of sensation which are half-pleasant and half-frightening, but you can't be in a permanent state of glowy-faced. . .sogginess. No sir.
Hot chocolate, I think. For being such a good girl.
I should stop calling her the Pagan, it sounds vaguely derogatory when it isn't meant to. She's only the Pagan because I told some Jehovah's Witnesses not to bother knocking on her door either because "she's a pagan". I was astonished at my own temerity. I suppose I was emboldened by my brusque confession of atheism. I did feel imposed upon - there were three of them, two loitering at the bottom of the garden while the other came to wheedle at me. How dare they? I mean, what gives anyone the right to go to the home of anyone else to try to influence their beliefs? It infuriates me. I knew the Pagan would really go to town on them, and say exactly that kind of thing, and keep them there until they were the ones making excuses to leave. So in part I didn't want them to waste their time, but I didn't know what I was going to say or in what tone until I said it. It sounded very insolent. Tee hee.
They went anyway, of course, and I peeked. There's nothing funnier than watching a conversation you can't hear but know the basic gist of. Anyway, she's not really a Pagan, although I'd be fascinated if she was. She's a homeopath and Reiki practitioner. And she is strong but she is over-burdened, not just with her pack of children and animals but with her thoughts as to how the world is affecting them. I'm a fairly big believer in the psychologically absorbent qualities of children who are too young to be able to form memories - anything you take in before the age of three cannot be made sense of by your developed mind later, so people have to be extremely fucking careful - but she has taken this so much to heart, she seems crippled with worry about her little boy. She feels that the dog runs away so much because the dog is unhappy and neglected, and that the boy won't sleep because of some stuff that's going on with her. There's something in it, but I had to tell her to give herself a break, because you can't control everything, and she is doing heroically.
She went to roast herself and within four minutes Tiny was screaming down the monitor. I went up and found him lost in giant bed. I don't know what to do with children at all - I have some fractured sense of what they are about when they get to five or six but before that they are alien. I was such a solitary and intense child I probably never figured out what other children were like, and I suppose I missed my little sister's development because she was born when I was 13, and then I was being an intense and solitary teenager. I get on brilliantly with F, P's seven-year-old, she's one of those prodigious minature adults; Tiny though is nearly two, and never smiles, and I cannot gauge where he is in terms of cognitive skills. Can't connect with him on any level. He is a long way away. He made lots of noise, I talked softly to him and got nowhere until I asked if he would like to go downstairs and watch some telly. Very clearly - "yeah". Shunting of baby body with purpose.
P came back in to find me buried under a heap of vibrating cat, sullen baby and oblivious dog. She fretted afresh about what a bad neighbour she had been to not see me more often, and said sweetly and in the usual flood of syllables that it makes a positive difference, seeing people makes a positive change in the world. . .I can never recall exactly what she says later on because it's always such a rush of organic herbal overheard-in-the-Green-Fields-at-Glasto stream-of-consciousness, but it's unfailingly touching.
Tiny was asked to say 'night night Sarah'. "Night night Sarah" he said into her shoulder. "Awww," I said.
I don't think I could bear to have children. They affect me too much. They are on some other level of existence that you can't get to at all, and you just have to guess and make large gestures and hope. That's if you give a shit. If you don't, you carry on as normal and occasionally grunt something like "gerroff" and then you act surprised when your kid grows up to hate you and themselves and to be aggressive and hateful to the rest of the world. It seems you have to be prepared to ruin your own life to an extent so that they are spared. If you jealously hang onto yourself as your first priority, the crap is still there and someone has to carry it and it will end up being them. And it will really show.
P does remind me ever so slightly of my older half-sister, to whom I haven't spoken in years. I was definitely the lucky one of the two of us. I don't even want to work out how old she is now because she might as well still be 14. She's intelligent enough and a talented artist but she is entirely mangled. I'm getting the usual sinking feeling around the racks of Father's Day cards, and all the ingenious new marketing angles like CD compilations of Oasis and Black Sabbath. Bleurgh. Happy, obviously, that these are just residual niggles, but they will probably always stick. I start to get misanthropic. I resent the fact that some people really will pick the most syrupy gloopy sentiments they can for their dear ole pa. I resent that for some people it is that simple. I resent that they take for granted even the knowledge and the experience, even if it doesn't amount to a lot of actual affection or positive feeling. I just don't have anything much to go on. It's mostly stuff I had to generate myself to fill in the gaps, stuff that was just squeezed out of me that I had to then fashion into the facsimile of a parent, and then figure out the details, and then get rid of.
Nature is not much on vacuums, and so lots of nice healthy stuff sprouted when that one was finally cancelled out. These indifferent spaces are the things you hope to avoid - big empty arenas of shrugging absence, important scary things crowding around outside them but with no way in. Everyone involved acting like it's normal. That was the worst of it - the pretence that this is how life is conducted, and that if you feel a bit uncomfortable and like something isn't right then it's your problem, babe. Years of that persistent denial, whole herds of elephants stomping through living room, and I think you at least earn a scowl at Hallmark.
People don't always recognise that there's a big landfill of emotional rot between the two supposed poles, just horrible swathes of nothingness; like they don't anticipate the worst thing about grief is the boredom, the tedium of having only the same finite batch of memories to rehash to yourself, the fact that you wake up every day and they're still not there and you are just so fucking bored by that fact. That's where the worst of life is -not in the sickly lurching of events (all movement is a blessing) but in the hanging around of non-events, the horrors of inertia.
The great thing is though that I'll never have to do all that again, not that particular slog, and because the vacuum is no longer there I'm not going to start leaping out of my seat with instinctive reactions. The sensors were certainly warped for a while, but not now. Any current expanses of echoing space can't be mistaken for that epic gap, nor for anything like indifference. I'm too determined that life ought to be at some constant high temperature, with those waves of sensation which are half-pleasant and half-frightening, but you can't be in a permanent state of glowy-faced. . .sogginess. No sir.
Hot chocolate, I think. For being such a good girl.
