The Cerebral Mum

The last 48 hours have been relatively busy and I was going to talk about all the things I’d done, all the things I’ve yet to do and all the benefits of the new site for me and for my readers but I’m too tired to make administrivia sound interesting right now. Even though it is interesting (to me at least). So I’m leaving that for another day and what I’m thinking about is this:

How on earth do we know when things are real?

I’ve spent the last couple of days moving this blog, which required a certain amount of commitment and energy which I purport not to have, and chatting and joking on Skype with people I don’t even know while we worked together to get things set up. I felt normal. I think I even seemed normal. I almost felt likeable. I almost felt human.

And then I got a message from a long-lost friend, the closest friend of my teenage years, and I sent a happy, chatty message back. That felt kind of normal, then very fake.

I was genuinely excited to hear from her and I would genuinely like to see her again but I was also scared of the mess in my head and hyper-aware that if we were to find a time to catch up, I would be stricken with anxiety and feel overwhelmed by the process. I have to ask myself, is a computer a place to hide or is it a safety net while I find my feet again? And I don’t know the answer. I really don’t. Maybe it’s both.

A few people have left comments, and sent messages, appreciative of my candour. Am I candid? I think I am. I try to be. But my mask is still on when the conversations are closer to home, and away from my homepage. Part of me thinks this is good: It is nice to be reminded that there are actually human beings in the world that I can interact with, it’s nice to feel like myself, but then I’m challenged as to why I don’t feel that way when it becomes face-to-face. Worse, I’m challenged as to whether this depression is just a figment of my imagination, something I’ve made up. Maybe there is actually nothing wrong with me. Maybe I am one big faker. Maybe I am not being candid at all.

In the cerebral part of my brain, I can untangle it all, see that none of this is black and white. I can reject the false dichotomy: That’s logical fallacy 101. In spite of that, I just cannot seem to find solid ground to stand on.

Why do I feel that ominous sense of guilt for momentary pleasure? Why do I feel that ominous sense of guilt for being depressed? Why does everything I do or feel make everything else seem like a lie?

The truth is - I know this is the truth! - that we all have many faces. We all play many roles. How honestly we play them is dependent on us, but we play them nonetheless. Why do I not feel at home in any of them? Being sad feels wrong, being happy feels wrong, being alone, being with people, being quiet, being intense… It all feels wrong. I want to feel comfortable in all my faces again. I want them to feel real.

I need to shake everything up. I need to rattle me in a dice box and just see where I fall. I need to somehow create something to work with again, something to hold on to.

In the past, often I would do something sudden: Move house, change jobs, shave off all my hair, anything just to see who I was. At the moment, I can’t even move the furniture. It’s not my furniture. I am living in borrowed space in borrowed time. Time borrowed from living that can never be paid back. But I can do nothing suddenly. I have created too much of a mess. I need to strip away everything, all my labels, all my things, all my burdens, and try on new faces.

I need people.

I think I require a stage. I think the only set-decoration should be me. I don’t think I can do it in this vacuum. I don’t know how to get out of this vacuum. Am I too scared to get out of this vacuum?

The other day, chatting with my Mum on Skype, I called her Mrs. Plod, an affectionate insult that she is not insulted by in the least. I would be highly insulted by it. Is it slow-and-steady that will win this race for me? I am not slow and steady. I am fools-rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread. With nowhere to go and no way to get there.

Tomorrow, I will rearrange my room.

No. I’m not ready to move back into the city yet. That task is still weighing me down. I have, however, spent the last couple of days upgrading my blog to Wordpress 2.3 and moving it to a new home on it’s own domain: cerebralmum.com.

Just when I was beginning to get frustrated with the limitations of using a free host and wondering when I would be able to afford to upgrade, I noticed this little paragraph over at Snoskred’s blog, Life in the Country:

I personally made the change to a self-hosted Wordpress blog a little while ago. I’ve mentioned before that we have a dedicated server which isn’t doing much, and I am willing to offer very cheap Wordpress hosting to fellow bloggers wanting to move away from Blogger. Unlike a lot of the other hosts out there, you can pay by the month and we would set it up for you. Just contact me via the contact form if you’re interested. How cheap? How does $5 a month sound? _{Say Goodbye to Google Today…}

How did $5 dollars a month sound? It sounded like Christmas had come early! And then Meg over at Dipping into the Blogpond mentioned it to me as well.

Over the last couple of days I think I’ve decided that all my Christmases have come at once. Snoskred and her partner have been absolutely phenomenal setting up the install and assisting me with the transfer. If anyone has been considering moving to a real host, I most emphatically recommend them. You can contact Snoskred directly using her contact page if you have any questions.

My domain name, incidentally, was purchased from Net Logistics for $25 and they, too, were prompt and professional. Within a couple of hours I was registered. And that was in the middle of the night!

If you aren’t considering moving to paid hosting with your own domain name, here are a couple of things to think about:

• Should I get my own Domain for My Blog?
• Am I A Good Blogger?
• The Pros and Cons of Moving a Blog
• Australian Blogs - Hosting and Search Review

Incidently, for all you Australian bloggers out there, especially the ones terrible at networking llike me, I highly recommend adding Life in the Country and and Dipping into the Blogpond (both linked to above) to your subscriptions if you want to know what is going on in the blogosphere, with a little perspective from our neck of the woods.

Anyway, I’ll be writing more about the move soon but this post is really just to let you subscribers know about the changes because I am about to switch my feeds over to the new site now. If you do not receive my next post, which I will be writing tonight, you may need to visit the new homepage and resubscribe. Hopefully though, the transition will be seamless and you won’t need to do a thing.

All the old posts, and all your wonderful comments, are available there now. So come and visit me at The Cerebral Mum’s new home…

cerebralmum.com

Oh, look… You’re already here!

Okay, what follows is brain detritus with foul language, and no stylistic merit to justify it. Don’t read if you’ll be offended. Don’t read if you hold me in any esteem. But it is what it is. And I won’t apologise for it. Or justify it. Because whatever it is, it’s better off here on this blog than in my head. If I deleted, this blog would become a lie and I’m sick of feeling ashamed for whatever I am.

Sad facts. I hate not being happy. I hate feeling lonely and friendless and boring and nothing. Even if it isn’t true. I hate feeling it. I think that’s pathetic. It is pathetic. Not for anyone else who feels like this. I have sympathy for them.

No sympathy for me, please. No, no sympathy for me. I have none. I want none. I just don’t want to feel like this. It makes me angry. It makes me angry being pathetic. I’m smart, I’m not half bad to look at. I’ve got an education. I’m capable. It makes me angry being weak. Because weakness is repugnant. Weakness is the fear of rejection, the loss of respect. It’s people feeling sorry for you. That’s not the same as sympathy. It’s people moving away from lepers. I don’t have to experience that right now to know it’s true. That’s the way it is.

Reality without it’s face-on only does two things; it fascinates from a safe distance or makes people run like hell. Because people are big, fat, hairy-assed pieces of chicken shit. They’re liars and right now I wish I could say that I was just externalising my own state of mind, and I am, and I’m pissed at myself more than anything, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a little bit of truth in there.

I love people, I do. I love them for all their flaws and faults. I do that because there is nothing else that can be done. But boy, are we all a fucked up bunch of pansy-assed hypocrites. You know what word I like? Honour. And loyalty. I like that word too. I’m sick to death of seeing so many people around me using and being used. I’m sick to death of how fucking small everybody is and I’m sick to death of everything I’ve done in my life so as not to offend them. Because, you know what - that makes me a big, fat, hairy-assed piece of chicken shit.

So what if I’m not liked. So what if I attract people like flies before they dash off to the next pile of shit. So what if I could never understand my visibility and tried to be what a million other people needed. So what if I was present, really present. What the fuck made me think that it was my responsibility to fix whatever anybody else’s fucked up reactions were? How did I absorb everybody else’s fucked up projections until I ended up here, with nothing left of my own.

I’m angry and crying and angry and crying. Because I should have known better. And I should have been aware of what I was doing to myself, and now there is nothing left of me to like. And I don’t even care how fucked up the rest of the world is and I don’t even care about the who-done-me-wrongs. I just care that I’ve let something outside of me mould my existence, grind my existence to fucking nothing.

When I used to be someone people would come to, rely on for help, for perspective, for philosophy, for unadulterated fucking acceptance and love. What fucking use to the world am I now? Really… What use?

That’s not hubris. Everyone is connected, everyone is useful. Everyone conscious is useful. When did I lose my fucking consciousness. When did I lose my fucking conscience.

So, after loosening up my written tongue, that’s what I had to say. I would have said more but there was a knock at my door and B’s twins were there offering me licorice and wanting me to go and meet their Nan. So I’ve been sitting in the garage next door with a wonderful lady and Big Sis and The Odd Couple, and surprisingly, talking about real things. Talked about the people in everyone’s lives; rape victims, manic-depressives, alcoholics. And B’s autistic brother, and what it was like raising an autistic child 30 years ago. How she wanted to commit suicide every day, how she wished every day the bus bringing him home just wouldn’t arrive. How much respect I have that she is comfortable saying those things, just matter-of-factly, never diminishing the love she has for him, the pride she has in him. She can talk about the excitement of the first time he looked through the window instead of at the glass at age seven, but she tells no lies about what it was like. She doesn’t conform to everyone else’s opinion, to society’s story of the self-sacrificing mother. Which she was, of course, and deserves respect for, but there is no getting around the fact that we don’t experience life in the way our patterned narratives make it seem.

I like her. I like people who are not phased by messy reality. I guess what I wrote before going next door was how angry it makes me that people are phased by messy reality. And I guess that isn’t a new theme here, even before I said the word depression. So now I feel like, fuck it all, I am who I am, whatever. But tomorrow I will wake up and I will be left alone in my messy brain, and the mess of my reality will have, again, no place in this world. I need to carve a space out for it, even if it is only in words. More importantly, I need to carve out a place for it in myself.

Because,the world is full of people experiencing big things, big traumas, big struggles, big joys. Things which always go unsaid, things repressed and reduced, always hidden beneath the Sunday-best face we’re are supposed to present to the world. Welcome to reality, where people suffering suffer all the more because it makes everyone uncomfortable, everyone exhausted.

That’s just not good enough for me.

Life is fucking huge. Make room for it.

The assignments I haven’t done from 30 poems in 30 days are just sitting there, clogging up my dashboard. I can’t write anything good. It feels like thinking. And I can’t think. So I’m just going to do them. Randomly. Whatever assignment I open, I’m cutting and pasting it in, then… Bang: A poem! In 30 seconds. I don’t even care how bad they are, or good. I just want my brain to start feeling fluid again. Instead of crushed.

So..

Bang! The 10th assignment: The good, the bad and the meter…

“Write a three or more stanza poem that uses a metered style for the first two stanzas and a non-metered format for the remaining stanzas.”

My head is just imploding,
I don’t know what I’m saying,
I’m sick of all this thinking,
There are no words left in me.

Numb and poetry is lost,
Blind and all my meaning gone,
Nights too short and days too long,
There are no words left in me.

I hate this.

I hate my stuck mind,
I hate my lost time,
and yesterday
and nothing.

There are no words left in me.

Bang! The 17th assignment: The constraint as a tool.

“Wikipedia’s Random Button is a great and magical thing. Today it lead me to an article about Cheshire Mammoth Cheese. The story of Cheshire Mammoth Cheese has everything you need for poetic inspiration. It has historical significance. It has political significance. It has small town appeal. It has people working together toward a common goaland it contains a pop culture reference. Most importantly, it has cheese. Find a way to incorporate this article into a poem.”

I’m not reading about the stupid cheese.
Seriously? Seriously?
(That’s a pop culture reference. )

I’ve heard the story before.
Cheese and politics
and highways for wolves
on The West Wing.
(That’s the pop culture reference.)

But politics isn’t like that,
It wasn’t like that then either.
Now, we talk faster.
We film it, dreaming they
Talk faster. And better.
Politics is pop culture.

Buffy likes cheese.
(That’s a pop culture reference.)

Bang! The 13th assignment: What is your writing process?

“Today is a two-part assignment. The first part is to think about your method of writing poetry… The second part is to shake up your process. If you have a lot of structure, try loosening up. If you write very loosely, try adding some structure to the process. Find a new place to write or use a different tool. The change doesn’t have to be major, but if you post your poem, please tell us what you changed.”

I normally don’t write poems
in 30 seconds bang.
I normally don’t write poetry at all.
I’m not a poet.

None of that’s true,
or it wasn’t once,
once-upon-a-time.

Then, I just wrote
and words were dark
and rich
and deep,
saturated with music
and sensation.

Redolent.

Now, nothing.

Bang! The 15th assignment: Imagism.

“Write a poem that follows the three rules of the imagists.

1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.”

Too rigid, imagism.
Too conscientiously flowing. Abrupt. Flowing.
The thing is not a thing.
It expands, contracts, unfolds. It has no substance.
I am not T.S Eliot,
The thing is words, stripped words, naked, undulating.
Shock me with it. Hurts like hills and dreams and loves,
like blood.
Flowing.
Gone.

Bang! The 14th assignment: Repetition

“Write a poem that uses at least two different forms of repetition. Try to embrace at least one form of repetition that you don’t ordinarily use. “

Repeat.
Repeat.
That’s all I do.

Fucking echoing, empty
chamber of my mind.

Repeat.
Repeat.

Dead nouns. Dead signs.
No metaphor,
no semaphore,
Just dot dot dot,
dash dash dash,
dot dot dot.

Repeat.

Bang! The sixth assignment: Developing your voice…

“Take at least five minutes to meditate in a quite room free of outside influences before you write today’s poem. Try to clear your head of stray thoughts. Once you feel like you are clear and calm, write your poem. Let the topic be about whatever comes to mind after your meditation. If you have never meditated before, simply sit in a chair with your eyes closed and try to relax.”

Yeah, right. That’s going to happen. I couldn’t do it then. And I sure as hell can’t now.

How long is a second,
how long a breath?
How many moments spent,
With glass grating
my screaming head?

How long is five minutes?
Is it tense or dead?
My only thought:
Too much. I’m going
to bed.

So, I got some things done today. Not a lot, but some. And I said this would be my reward but somehow I’ve forgotten how to write without conscious thought, and I just don’t want to struggle with words right now. Instead, I’m looking at snippets of my other writing, old writing, better writing. I’m not even gone to try to understand what they mean, or why I chose them. I’m just going to be with them.

There’s this, the beginning of a short story never written, with a note that the title phrase comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, The Revolt of Islam and to research Fanny Godwin.

The Eloquent Sleep

…She dreams of opium beds and laudanum. She dreams of her hands hanging heavily from wrists limp and numb, of her arms sunk deeply into cushions which bear the weight of her bones like frothing waves. She dreams of reeds and dense, green rivers and a punt drifting. She dreams of the blurring warmth of moisture-laden air, of the liquefaction of her hair pooling, of her eyes washed to lavender.

She dreams of her mind submerged and magnified.

She waters the potted plants around her front step as dusk falls. She moves subtly, with her breath held and all her focus contained within the needle’s eye of her mourning larynx. A twig may snap and she may start at the sound and then quiver. A car may pass along her street and she may shrink back into the shadows and swallow painfully.

Her footfalls are silent.

She dreams of evanescence, of existing as the shadow of herself, of existing only as the ethereal void of her empty belly. She dreams of her skin gossamer, of her veins delicately spiderwebbed, of her coffin glass. She dreams of lying passive in the space between breath.

She wishes that she could hear the frogs croaking. Nothing so fecund can be heard above the grating of the cicadas in the sequoia tree at Number 5.

She dreams of the shocking fluorescence of pale skin under water.

There is no still point.

2002

And there’s this, a poem I wrote during my Professional Writing & Editing course…

Amphibian

Do you recognise night when I sleep
or just rapid-eye under the sun
when I sleep   when I sleep?

In spite of me and it all you will grow.
You tell lies like a lady in muslin, like alfred,
play cucumber tennis, spread marmalade thin,
and sing high.
You don’t realise how quickly the shadows can fall
upon life; you don’t see passing clouds, closing days.
But you’ll grow.

So I hurt like a lake when you sleep
I pond without water   eat toads
when you sleep   when you sleep.

1993

I wanted to put an excerpt from my novel here, but the passage I wanted hasn’t been re-typed since the last great computer disaster. So one more poem, and then goodnight…

Prenuptial

When the time comes, I will quietly press God’s jaw
And bite at the tendons of his stiffening neck.
I am disoriented.
When the time comes, I will face East.

Bedlam is the home of women with tangled hair
And I have no hair.
This is my home.
Men wear white when they visit me;
They are bridal.
I pick flowers from the fields to earn my keep.
No. That was in another place.
I’ll tell you a story.

When I was a girl, the grass grew.
Oh, I know the grass grows still
- I am not crazy -
But then it grew in the fields I grew in
And I raced to grow faster than it,
Taller than it.
But I fell and it defeated me.

A snake entered the pit of my womb
And planted there a seed
Which grew round and downward.
My woman’s body was not built for movement
So I lay still.
This is the meaning of the story.
The teaching.

When the snake enters,
When his fangs are poised,
Do not interrupt. Lie still.
Talk to the grass for whom you raced and fell.
You belong to the grass.
This is an old, old teaching.

My bridal men stand poised with syringes
While I murmur to you.
I have another story.
When I was a girl I wore a crown.
Now I have no hair and God is coming.

199?

[*edited to change “Lay still” to “Lie still” as per Rosemary’s comment. Aside from the question of grammar, it sounds better. We all know sound trumps grammar. Still, I’m appalled that I missed it.]

So, I’ve had a cup of coffee and read my morning feeds and now, just for today, I’m making the rule that I will not come back to the computer at all until Cas is in bed for the evening. It’s sunny out. Today is external work day. I will get some things done. I don’t know how much, but I’ll try to differentiate between the physical exhaustion and the mental exhaustion. That is so much harder than it seems. It is amazing the impact of your psyche on your physiology. I will push through, I will take breaks. But I want one small thing done every hour. And then I shall come back here for my reward.

That is my plan for today. Not for the next week, not for the next month, just for today. Anything else is too much for me to imagine.

I really don’t. Or not this, anyway. I’ve had enough of myself. I’m living in a vacuum. Nothing challenges me. Nothing inspires me.

Hmm. Since writing the above, I have wasted two hours pfaffing around on Facebook, which I don’t even like. Procrastination. On that uplifting note, I’m going to bed. Numbness and sleep. Lipstick tomorrow.

xx