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Happy writing to you all!
Stream of consciousness Saturday: Finding the light
The whole week has been about uncovering, finding the light. Once again Winter has been weighing heavy. How many times have I felt this time of year accompanies dark passages of life. Hope is fleeting because I am once again managing me and my depressive reaction to less sun and my son in his struggles. It’s scary to see him Retreat into the room and want to make a nest. I know that feeling so well.
I was once told by a doctor that the way to handle Winter was to get out at the morning each day. I walked around a lake so much that it came associated so much with my dark thoughts, I could not go there even in Summer for such frivolities as a picnic. I took my family there a few years back determined to trudge out my demons. I have to do this, go back over old ground. Face down what had overcome me. I have walked round an old school, the place I played as a child and along a beach. My final accounting. That’s from Maisie Dobbs books, which are just enough cosy, just enough psychologically interesting that I enjoy them.
Have not much I can do about long walks right now, stuck at home. I drew two tarot cards from my Literary Witches deck the other day – the noose and Charlotte Gilman Perkins. The yellow wallpaper of my life I the school refusal and same walls I see all the time. Looking for bright spots and I can’t find them well. So instead I stand in the backyard looking at the light in the sky hoping that the week ahead will be brighter. A week off from school for half term and hopefully chance to take those walks even if it is just to the playground.
Twenty years of seasonal depression, you think I’d be used to it by now.
This response is to the stream of consciousness prompt from Quaint Revival and inspired by this post on Keep it Alive.
Your prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “heavy/light/dark.” Use “light” and/or its opposites. Bonus points if you use all three. Enjoy!
REVIEW: Vladimir by Julia May Jones
A feisty and funny collegiate novel about feminism- what’s not to love?
The collegiate novel is often one of my favourite settings. The reason it works so well, is that the university is where debate is part of what you’re involved in and what you’re taught, so it is the perfect place for a polemic novel. Within the structure is the staid white tower academia, up against the zeitgeist thought and the youthful hope of students. By seeing the world through the lens of the students or teachers, we also see a microcosm of debate in the wider world.
Vladimir by Julia May Jones is offering a prism on the debate around feminism and the me-too movement. But also, goes so much further. Fantastically funny and frankly disturbing in later parts, we hear most of the story in the voice of neither antagonist nor victim but rather through the wife of the disgraced professor.
I kept comparing Vladimir to reading The Human Stain by Philip Roth and Disgrace by JM Coetzee. These novels academics overstep the mark and their life falls down around them. We have shifted by now, to actually knowing what the wife of that alleged perpetrator feels. Similar to The Human Stain, we start off on slippery ground. Did this person perpetrate an offence, are the moral implications of the offence too troubling to ignore? In The Human Stain, the professor, probably unknowingly, used a racial slur. In Vladimir, the professor has been having affairs with students for years, assumed consenting adults and the wife has been supportive it seems of the open marriage. Their culpability until a particular moment in history has not seemed a problem.
At this time, we have a very different answer to this question whether we ignore these behaviours. The Me Too movement categorically put a line in the sand that Time is Up – the ripples of this movement have been seen far reaching across a number of industries. We hear these ideas from the students in the novels. As the novel continues, we become more and more discomforted by the details of the sexual encounters that the husband had in the past. But set against this discomfort and the opinions of the younger generation, we are predominantly hearing from his wife, herself a scholar but who has been also fighting within patriarchal system. Up until this point, her husband has been a beloved head of department. The flips and tricks of her perspective is in the fact we do not know where we support her, but part of me certainly felt like she was asking for her position to be understood really until the end of the novel, we are very attached to her perspective.
Contrasted with her husband’s seemingly predatory behaviour is her growing and increasingly obsessive fantasies about Vladimar. She has led us through her own feelings about the encounters, and we I suppose feel sorry for her. The 58-year-old narrator has us living through the generations of feminist debate.
Having studied feminism at university, I could identify the waves of feminism that our narrator lives through. At times, I found myself agreeing with her, then wanting to question this immediately. She is a product mainly of second wave feminism that drives her. I think the real pleasure of this novel is the absurdity. The details of her fantasy life, the slow subsuming of her life into the dreams of being with Vladimir, which turns in a absurdist dream of a scene in a cabin in the woods (I won’t spoiler this) but I was at once horrified at the characters actions and laughing at the mechanics of the affair.
I think this is the best novel I read this year because it is at once mundane and ordinary people’ lives whilst broaching this harder discussion about how power and relationships should play out. I think of it as a worthy candidate to stand alongside The Human Stain and Disgrace as the collegiate novel that makes you think.
How to Have the Best Winter
A Review: Wintering, the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Wintering by Katherine May has been a really inspirational read over the last few months. The author is living through pain and like me, her autistic child burntout at school. Apart from the parallels with my own life, I found that sense of comfort to be aligned with someone’s thinking. The impact of chronic illness or health problems that she faces does have this benefit too, you have to look around and start to re-evaluate life. It has been a tough season for our family. Like her though, I have also absorbed this idea that Winter, these fallow times can form part of life and can be revelatory if we let them.
So, according to her advice how do we get ourselves ready for Winter?
To make it through the next months when the light comes late and then early and we have fewer chances to see the sun, we have to dig deep into our resources. I have been doing this for a while. Using wellness practices as part of my every day to better manage my health – using pacing, attempting to meditate (here is my guide for fidgety meditators), I have needed to find that slower way of life to slowly recover my energy.
Some ways that I have done this are things that the slow-living movement have been embracing for a while.
In Wintering there are several things she does to help us evaluate the pace of life – I love her ideas of picking and preserving food. My attempts so far in foraging are limited to elderflower tea – some of these you would need to start in the Autumn, but learning about plants that are there in even the most urban neighbouhood and cooking them, going to markets and finding new recipes as well as celebrating traditions are all part of this getting ready for this time of year.
She also talks about ice baths and wild swimming, written at the beginning of 2020, before this became the great craze that exploded in the pandemic, she captured a moment, a feeling of exhilaration that has made it the sport of the decade so far, “The Outdoor Swimming Society (OSS) had 300 members when it was started in 2006; now it has 175,000 across its channels and a million visitors annually to its website.” with people reporting joy as well as the risks as this Guardian article recounts. I have plans to make it out to a nearby reservoir for cold water swimming, sadly I do not live as close as she does to the sea as I loved my swim in the Summer. Instead I have to put up with cold showers which I have used for a while to stimulate my energy. It seems that some bodies crave these extremes of temperature. Like her, I can go from cold to warm though sadly I have to do it at a local gym rather than in the fjords. It’s something that will nourish me even on a cold day.
Another large part of Wintering is engaging with rituals, She shares some fascinating history from pagan practice at Stonehenge, to the Swedish Church welcoming Svenska with her lit candles on her crown. There are so many practices that we can see that celebrating light in the darkness has been a long held ritual of humans in our part of Europe.I think these elements are ones that we can build into our lives and I will be trying to “live by” these practices to help me through the Winter months more mindfully and come out the other side not just managing my condition but thriving with it.
Ultimately, this book is one I would recommend to give solace. Pass it on to any friend who is having a difficult time. It is a guide in many ways to how we find our way through our own Winters. As she shares, it is a normal part of life to find ourselves in dark times and this book itself is a way to let in the light. I highlighted so many passages that were helpful. If you find yourself in dread of the Winter months to come, and are also experiencing illness, I hope you find this and it’s message which is definitely one of hope.
REVIEW: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
A tough but funny read about families, illness and questioning our own history
am unsuprised that Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason has been a big hit. It is full of compelling characters - her narrator, Martha is unreliable and as unpredicatable as her own fluctuating medical condition. She is moving us through the story of the breakdown of her marriage and family relationships. Like Martha’s own mind we are flitting through passages of time, lurching back and forth to hear the history, each person drawn through the lens of how they have treated Martha. In it’s disorientation and ambiguity, we are being lead through Mason’s masterful skill in telling this story.
The thing is Martha has “X” an unknown mental illness and so we find out she is not just unreliable but she if often lying to herself or possibly unable to reflect on what has happened at her worst times. Where she has had arguments, we learn later the extent to which things went wrong. Like any mystery, we are along for the ride to uncover the truth but because of the nature of the condition, we learn the narrator is unable in many ways to tell a full story.
The element of mystery around “X”, a condition which appears to include episodic depression, and outbursts of anger, loss of time is important to the story. Meg Mason has stated that she wanted this ambiguity because it is not a book about the illness itself but the experience of having mental illness. It cleverly leave us in this same slippery space of misdiagnosis and misinformation.
Central to her plot, is the idea that mental health shades all relationships, that misconceptions by those around the person is part of the experience of having that illness. The help that Martha gets eventually has been at the expense of so many relationships and the stability in her life.
There were times reading the novel, I found myself less sympathetic to the characters. It does not seem to matter what goes wrong in their life, this is a story of a wealthy family who always seem to end up with enough money and a place to land. According to Crisis 33% of people who end up homeless have had contact with Mental Health Services and so it does not seem like a part of the wider story of mental health in this country. Ultimately, the professional who helps Martha is an expensive private doctor.
In a sense, we have to look past the slightly fantastical reality she has lived in, where mental health services have been adequate and funded. Mental health issues can of course help all stratum of life and the purpose of the novel is to really hone in on the personal experience and the domino effect it has on family around it.
Overall, I found this a really powerful novel. It is a helpful book in highlighting the issues of misdiagnosis and how difficult it is to move through a system that only wants to see you when you are in crisis. I look forward to reading more from the author.
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