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March 2009
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It’s March – it’s almost spring. That means life. That means love, because they are bound together.
My garden is packed with snowdrops, so late this year after all the snow. We had so much snow it was up to the tops of my boots. OK, so if you live in Canada or Scandinavia, it may not be much, but it was much for us.
I have daffodils too, and crocus and hellebores, and all the beautiful things that open the soil and wake the sun.
My fire still blazes in the evenings, and I light the candles on the mantelpiece and close the curtains against the dark, but I know that the light is very near now.
I want to thank the many many people who wrote to me after the death of my father. It was surprising and welcome, the comfort of strangers, and I needed the things you said – all of you – to help me find a place to mourn, and to accept. And it seems that the piece about Dad was able to help some of you too. We help each other, I guess. And that is right. And that is relationship.
I was arguing with someone just now, a rather pessimistic person, though a very creative one, and she was talking about some impossibility of ours as ‘the situation’. It struck me that there is no such thing as ‘the situation’, only the people who make the ‘situation’, and that if we could shift the thing from a bogus objectivity back to an authentic subjectivity, ‘the situation’ would look very different.
By which I mean that we have more control than we think – or control might not be the right word, (the person I was talking to is very controlling). In fact, it may be that we ‘control’ the ‘situation’ by giving it a bogus objectivity, when in reality the people in it have every chance to change it.
But it is easier to accept a ‘situation’, however negative and destructive, than it is to change it.
Why? Change means responsibility. And that means my responsibility – who am I in this?
Of course, where there is a ‘situation’ that involves many people, the only response might be to get out, because of sheer weight of numbers. But in families, and particularly in one-to-ones, every person who is part of the ‘situation’ can alter it.
I am thinking of the bit in The PowerBook where the narrator says, ‘I can change the story. I am the story.’ I like that line, which works on a personal level, but when the story includes other voices, what do we do?
I think we change our own story – that is our own attitude, and then see if anything shifts. What I am getting at it is that the key is to recognise the thing as fluid and not fixed. The moment we are caught in the Medusa stare and turned to stone, we can’t do anything. The powerlessness of the ‘situation’ is overwhelming.
We come out of relationship – which is a permanent negotiation – and into the stone place/stone face – where everything feels fixed.
Then we despair.
Much of my despair over the last two years has been in this struggle with a stony place/stony face. I will not ‘win’ my position, in that I will not win back the relationship I have lost, but I have discovered that I can win back myself from the Medusa-stare.
By this I mean that I have come completely towards the understanding of relationship – to a partner, to friends, to work, to life itself, as a negotiation, as a dialogue, as something that always shifts because it must. If it stalls, I have to look past the ‘situation’, however dire, and back to the people who made it. Then there is a chance.
Creatively, this is always the case. Imposing control on an emerging work is always a disaster. Sticking to a plan, having a plot, leads to creative writing school style stuff, which never hits the deep places in others, because it never came from the deep place within the self.
Whenever I substitute the ‘situation’ for the responsibility that lies between individuals, I am avoiding the problem. When I avoid the problem, I make a creative solution impossible.
I don’t know what your problem is – you reading this – but I am certain that there is a creative solution. It’s the YES, not, NO. Hidden, present. Only possible if the problem – and the suffering that goes with it – is not avoided.
I am reading the new long poem by Alice Oswald : A SLEEPWALKER ON THE SEVERN. (Faber UK)
She is the most significant younger poet working now. I don’t think there is anyone more interesting. Her feeling, her form, her imagery, her intensity, her language, her love-affair with Nature, mark her out. When I first read her – maybe 10years ago, when I picked up her first book by chance (THE THING IN THE GAP STONE STILE), the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
And now – with this new poem – the same thing.
Check out POEM OF THE MONTH for a snippet.
You know, it makes a difference to our deeper lives, what we read, what we listen to, what we watch. Anything won’t do. The real stuff is what we need, and evermore so in an outside world gone threadbare.
Did you lose money in the banker farce? I did, but it’s OK.
Just never believe again, ok, if you ever did, that money knows what it’s talking about. Not a clue. The real things know what they are talking about. Stick with them.
What’s real? The Planet, animals, art, human beings, not trashed or commodified.
I suppose I keep coming back to Love.
Yes.
And a PS. Those of you who check my journalism will see that I wrote my last column for Times Books at the end of January. The books section is no more, alas, and I had thought to take a break and then do something else, but the huge number of letters and mails that arrived at the Times has meant that I am coming back to write regular pieces, but throughout the paper, not only for books.
This is a good outcome, and for those of you who want the BOOKS section back should write and say so, because people-power really does make a difference.
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