…perhaps.
I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter these days (for others’ benefit more than my own) but yesterday was A Very Good Twitter Day.
My Scottish-born friend recited Robert Burns’ Address to a Haggis.
Then there was Radiohead demonstrating the purpose of reading books (via @rageabc).
Gush.
(in case you were wondering about the title…)
I made it to fifty-three books. So damn close. I’m too damn lazy to review all of them, so here’s the list. It wasn’t as good a year as 2010 (despite my also failing to reach my goal then too) where I finished fifty-nine books, started fifty-four and reviewed most of them.
Anyway, the list, roughly in order of completion:
November and December were stellar reading months, having finished books 39-51.
This year is going to be a fab reading year. It’s also officially a habit: I’m reading French again. I’m even understanding some of it… *wink*
I’ve lived in Australia for most of my life but the question still gets asked and it still irritates me:
What nationality are you?
I look the person dead in the eye and say “British.”
The next question:
Where are you really from?
My mind answers: Fuck off, that’s none of your business. My mouth answers “Oh, my mum is from X and my dad is from Y and they met in Z and had me and my brother. The interrogator at this point looks confused and their interest starts to wane.
One day, I’ll learn to actually verbally tell such nosy parkers to fuck off. Till then, I’ll derive comfort from poems with stanzas like this:
One time I was At a party. Some guy asked me: What are you, anyway? I downed my beer. Mexican I said. Really he said, Do You play soccer? No I said but I drink Tequila. He smiled At me, That's cool. I smiled back So what are you? What do you think I am he said. An asshole I said. People Hate you when you're right. Especially if you're Mexican.
(an excerpt from Benjamin Alire Saenz’s Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Franz Fanon)
I like words. They help us hide who we really are (if we choose).
There is no way around it: I think next week will be the hardest week of my life ever.
I’ve never ever been so frightened in my life, I’ve never wanted someone to hold my hand and tell me it will be okay more than I have since yesterday evening.
This sort of fear and want of company is new to me.
The not having anyone or the (in some ways) abandonment is fine: it is the waiting that kills. It also, naturally, seems to be the source of anxiety.
Because I’m reading TS Eliot, all I can think of is
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
I must be the only person in Melbourne right now wanting the weekend to finish. What do people do when they’re not-social-anxiety scared (which is the best kind of scared I know and do)?
Hopefully after Monday, I am going to stop being the person that asks her friends to “wish me luck!”. I want to start being the person who wishes them luck.
It isn’t good luck I really need: just good treatment.
I hope to one day read back on this post and “you worried about this so much and it was all for nothing”. That day will truly be an excellent day. It will happen.
Today’s Poets.org poem of the day, ouch.
It’s some cold comfort when someone else can say the things you feel or experience, even if they don’t necessarily feel or experience them themselves, or you can’t get confirmation of aforementioned.
In case you didn’t get the memo, poets sometimes lie in their poems and then sometimes… (found through KJ).
Tumblr, your coding/formatting’s a real bitch.
I’m rereading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with my good friend Ranjit. It’s time I focussed on other loves.
I thought it might be nice to share one of my favourite passages. I’ve read this poem several times over the years (and rarely been none the wiser though now I have a Norton Critical Edition to help out) and this one passage constantly haunts me. I’m not sure why.
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed. I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.
This hyacinth girl, I want to meet her. The NCE says that there are so many variants of the poem and in comparison to my first copy (Faber & Faber edition), it’s really obvious. Eliot himself supervised both the publication of different versions near-concurrently in the US and the UK. It got me thinking: technically, there would be no such thing as a ‘definitive’ version.
My inner lit wanker asks is that actually necessary, even our crappo pomo world etc. etc.? Does having a definitive edition add to the enjoyment of the poem? I personally don’t think so. But then again, chasing down the variants does have a ‘collecting bootlegs’ feel to it and heaps of music nerds do that.
As a practising poet, I agonise over punctuation and line breaks endlessly. If I were a healthier person, I dare say it would be the one thing that’d keep me up at night. Incidentally, I don’t like the capitalisation of ‘Hyacinth garden’ though having read the UK standard version first, it probably ‘feels’ more natural for it to remain uncapitalised.
If you see the hyacinth girl, tell her I’m looking for her.
“You know, it means more when people like C who is normally so upbeat gets down. It’s people like her that you really want to help.”
It was when this sentence was first uttered, I knew that I had lost my now ex-boyfriend.
This post isn’t going to be the blame game. This is going to be about me coming clean.
First of all, yes, I miss both my ex-boyfriend and my ex-girlfriend. They gave me the happiest three months of my life and they put up with my giving them hell (side effects from medication: I got very aggressive. T, I think, if I can believe anything he tells/told me said that yes, it was only once I started taking this particular med, I got all HULK SMASH).
Secondly, I hate that I participated in constant backstabbing whilst in that relationship. All of us did, but I am apologising and taking responsibility for my backstabbing. It was, and it is disgusting. This is a really hard thing to admit.
Thirdly, if I thought I could get them back then yes, I would do any-fucking-thing I could. They are worth it. I need to stop pretending I don’t think that. However, my illness means it will never be possible. I do not want to know if either of them want me back – I am being brave and owning up to my feelings. Yes, they could both be cunts at times (I think, for instance that the ex-boyfriend tried to outdo Zev in his manner of breaking up with me as is generally believed by my ‘professional help’). My ex-girlfriend was very verbally abusive towards me when drunk (apparently, according to one drunken tirade, it was my fault she’d cheated on her boyfriend with my boyfriend. This still stings a fair bit).
But guess what, so was I. One week I hated the ex-girlfriend, the next, thought she could do no wrong. The ex-boyfriend, god knows how, put up with this. He also put up with my failure to get over mistakes he’d made in our relationship prior to going poly. He saw these as barriers to us ‘moving forward’ (weaselword, hope you’re reading Luke). So he left.
None of us were perfect. However…
Yes, I still love them. Yes, I expect to do so for a while.
Now that I have neither, I will focus on the only things I can do (in the business they call these ‘distractions’): health (it’s kind of a full-time job when your health problems are chronic), writing, books and gamba once out of hospital (incidentally, gamba needs to go to its own hospital, pout). I have sought ‘professional help’ and will be entering into a treatment programme in the future that helps people with borderline personality disorder and survivors of trauma (I’m in the latter category).
I am really tired of my life being fucked up by triggers because I’ve been raped. I will do everything possible in my power to get well and FUCKING GET OVER IT.
I failed them both and I think if I continue to be in their lives, I will fail them over and over again. I want to break the cycle so the best way I know to do this is to sever all ties with them.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this isn’t easy. I still keep finding belongings from both of them. I don’t know what to do with them given that I am the one who requested ties to be severed.
Dear Team Neopolitan, thank you for allowing me to dream and for cheating my brain for a little bit that we were going to actually have the ‘happily ever after’. I know I’ve said I regret it, but I don’t regret a fucking thing. To the ex-boyfriend, I thought we did have a future innings in us of long standing but no, I will not demand you back. You deserve a ‘normal’. To the ex-girlfriend, god I want you to visit me in convalescence more than you know. I don’t want to be a negative or blaming fuck anymore so I won’t tell you why you cannot visit.
You’ll both go on to find more amazing people and I pray our paths will never cross because quite frankly, I am really sick of having to chomp benzos to get through life. Yes, it will hurt to see you happy, alone or with other partners. How fucking twisted is that? If you love someone, you should want to see them “happy and healthy”, as the ex-boyfriend said to me.
I am done with (self-)hate, with distorted thinking, with jealousy, with manufacturing relationships where I deliberately give persons no option but to reject me, with the gaping holes in my heart, with alcohol abuse (that hasn’t been a problem for a long time: it generally happens as insomnia creeps back), deliberate starvation. I’m done with being a victim: I’m just a really unlucky person and hopefully I can navigate through the rest of my life and lessen my bad luck.
However, I will take every fucking drug they will throw at me if it’s going to alleviate the pain. My close friend KJ said that I can be destructive. It’s true (mainly self-destructive but it seems the more social I allow myself to be, the more destructive I am towards others. This is not on). I will take responsibility for this and will do my best to steer it away or just practise unconditional love. I will pretend getting my poems published is awesome even though no one I know in real life knows or cares how much it means to me.
From now on, I will seek to cultivate healthy relationships and I know I will fail. I will stop blaming my mother’s psychological abuse and neglect for my failure with people. It is no accident I think that I do not have any close friends in Melbourne. It wasn’t them, it was me. So let me try to fix this. Hopefully, I will succeed at cultivating healthy relationships: this means sticking to ‘safe’ topics. That’s what you ‘normals’ do, right? No, I’m not mocking, I’m genuinely asking.
My friend Suz, now in Las Vegas told me that her favourite book was What Katy Did. In it, Katy gets very unwell and initially gives up on life. She doesn’t care how her clothes look, what disarray or dust was in her room.
My father (having helped drop off the ex-boyfriend’s things on the weekend) said something that broke my heart and now I understand the ex-boyfriend’s comment (even though please note my unhappiness is not actually something I have a lot of control over. Honest): my father never admits to feeling depressed or awful. He said it was so hard for him to see me so visibly upset, then see Mum upset over me. I realised we were all inadvertently making each other sadder and more detached. What Katy Did touches on this too. Both of us have this quiet Anglo-Indian agreement that we pretend we’re okay when we’re not really.
And my dad is the only reason I haven’t committed suicide. Trufax. I’m going to continue not to fail him. Today, I’ve started trying to live again. When he next sees me, I hope that by looking a little better, it will ease his heart which generally suffers in silence.
These are the confessions of the loneliest would-be unicorn in Melbourne.
P.S. Dear rape, stop bothering me. I went many years without you fucking me up.
P. P. S. yeah, if either of you get mail from me, it will have my UK address on it. For your good, not mine. It’s about time I did something selfless for you both.
IT’S OVER.
What an exhausting, exhilarating week. On a chronic illness front, I’m really proud I made it through. Sadly, I couldn’t stick around for planned oysters and martinis celebrations as planned because I just needed to go home and die.
The first session was all of us listening to each others’ settings of Luke Paulding’s ‘Ganymede’s’ Song’ and ‘The Lost Aria’. There were some fantastic treatments of ‘Ganymede’s Song’ (the original of which you can listen to here). Personally, I still maintain that this was more difficult to set because we were given a musical score of the piece. Also, because contemporary classical music is (for me at least as a flautist) really difficult to perform perhaps unless you start early or do it lots (I didn’t when I was at the Con).
I was the one fool who admitted that yes, indeed, I did have the burning desire to have my piece reperformed because I wanted to record it. You may recall that I chose to write words to David Young’s ‘The Lost Aria’. Thanks to Soundcloud instantly uploading, you can listen to it. Again, Deborah Kayser performs (thanks Deborah for letting me record!).
The Lost Aria by David Young. Performed by Deborah Kayser by mspixieears
Weirdly enough, though I gave more directions on how I wanted my words performed this second time, I actually felt that Deborah performed it best the first time though she did tell us she was working under serious conditions of sleep deprivation. One major criticism one workshop participant had about my words is, to sum up, I broke a major cardinal rule: mimesis versus diegesis. Alas, I did too much telling and not enough showing.
In Monday’s post, I went to great pains to explain my poetic inspiration. However, for libretto, during the course of the week, we learnt that this can become completely irrelevant. The audience will not care that you’re referring to, say, in this case, Monteverdi’s setting that one surviving aria from his opera L’Arianna in a sacred and secular madrigal. Neither will the composer. I tried to be clever and it failed dismally. This was pretty evident in my words being performed for a second time, cringingly so.
When I get around to writing the libretto I plan to work on over the next year or two, I will be doing my damn best to make sure I do not make these mistakes again.
So after two or so hours of listening to each others’ words to predetermined music, it came time to head to North Melbourne for lunch. They had Spanish beer! It was amazing enough that I was actually able to go to Mr Price’s Food Store when it was open, but it was the last place in the world I expected to use Untappd! We were treated to delicious sandwiches, cake and alcoholic beverages of several persuasions while we paired up with a fellow librettist-to-be to ‘speed date’ the composers who also attended the lunch.
I maintain that I was at a disadvantage because I got paired up with someone who’s actually done some libretto work, a Kiwi fellow named Paul Horan. I was going to be relying upon the fact that I had some musical background and recent publishing history as my ‘wowsing’ elevator pitch. Let me tell you, Paul’s recited CV sounded pretty bloody impressive compared to my humble one. However, all the composers present were extremely gracious (and perhaps just as nervous as some of us?). I won’t even try to do a summation on every conversation I had with each composer, but here is the list of those who were present:
