I want to begin by thanking Eloise for starting me off on this thought yesterday when I read her blog entry, I just don’t know what to do with myself, and the attached comments. I continued to crunch away at the subject whilst having my weekly creative time with the hoover, and got that lovely warm feeling when things started to click into place.
The subject is really that of self-belief. This is a subject that has often blipped my radar and is mostly responsible for the title of this blog, along with my love of ancient history. Why do I often feel misunderstood (which sounds rather self-involved for a woman in her forties) and why do people so often think I am arrogant or pretentious? Why do I care? Hmm; the last question is probably the easiest to answer – I hate being misunderstood because I’m a communicator and it makes me feel like a failure.
I think I found the answer to this a little while ago when I worked out that most people judge according to their own standards and behaviour – thinking I’m arrogant, pretentious, or anything else negative, says more about them than it does about me. But when does self-belief become arrogance, or does it?
One of my clearest memories from childhood was the horror of having to use the telephone to call someone I didn’t know. I was incredibly shy, although anybody who has known me during my adult life would have a very hard time believing it. I used to work out exactly what I needed to achieve with the call, how I would do it and what all the possible permutations of the exchange would be (what if the person is rude, or I get a wrong number) – it was very important to have counter measures and contingencies fully planned out ahead, I couldn’t rely on my ability to react naturally. Writing that seems so odd – I honestly don’t recognise myself – my ability to think on my feet has served me enormously well.
So, if I was such an unsure child, where did my high level of self-belief come from? To add to the big negative of being naturally shy, I also have a mother who never tired of telling me I couldn’t do things. I don’t mean she wouldn’t allow me, I mean she would tell me that I would fail – she never gave me a reason why, she just gave it as an intractable fact. She wasn’t being evil or nasty – she truly believed it herself, because of her own life experiences. I simply never listened to her. I knew she was wrong, that I could do anything if I set my mind to it. And now I’m wondering if it was perhaps one single event that sparked that in me. Did I make such a good job of one of those horrible phone calls, or tell a really convincing lie (the one I remember best from childhood was that my dad was Elvis), or make up a story or a poem (the only ones I wrote as a child were funny and end-rhymed) that everyone I read it to loved? I honestly don’t recall – I just know that fairly early on in life, I knew I could do anything if I tried. Now that’s not arrogance – that’s self-belief.
Dictionary.com defines arrogance as: “overbearing pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors” and that is something I have no memory of ever doing.
The Red Hot Chili Pepper’s new album is out – my copy is en route from Amazon – so what a great excuse to revisit their other albums.
I was horribly disappointed with By The Way– there are probably only three tracks on there that I really liked, and I think the disappointment was doubled by having enjoyed Californicationso much before it. Apparently, Flea has made the comment somewhere that if you don’t like Stadium Arcadium, you don’t like the RHCPs – I take that as a very positive indication for content!
I’ve also been reading Anthony Kiedis’ autobiography, Scar Tissueand quite enjoying it – following a shaky start. At first, I thought he was making a lot of the stuff up (like having Cher as a baby sitter) but, he’s probably not – some people’s lives really are that insane.
So having got the albums off the CD shelves, I couldn’t resist burning a compilation CD with my favourite RHCP tracks, interspersed with the likes of Nirvana and Queens of the Stone Age. Driving to work yesterday, the wing mirrors were jumping – brilliant.
Having completed the first proper draft of the third (though not chronologically speaking) in my series of serial killer poems, I am facing the questions I usually face – does it stand alone, does it need to? As usual, I don’t feel that I am any closer to answers that satisfy me.
I’ve looked at other series and sequences and it seems to me that whilst it is perfectly possible to make single poems in a thematic sequence stand alone quite satisfactorily, it isn’t entirely possible to do that with a character based sequence – without the other poems in the series, the reader will never see the full character / story. But, what I really can’t work out is what each of the poems needs, to enable it to stand alone.
To me, each of the three poems so far stand entirely alone and, apart from tinkering (which could still be substantial), they all feel complete as far as content is concerned. My problem is that, to some of their readers so far, at least two of them don’t feel like complete pictures in themselves – they rely on the others in the series.
Even if I do decide that one or two of them don’t stand alone, does it really matter? I’ve read some discussions about series and sequences and about what is ‘correct’ but, isn’t it more important for me to ask myself what is important to me and to these poems?
Still thinkin’. By the way, the picture is of a Remington ‘Bullet Knife’ that appeared in the latest poem. This one is an R293 jack knife, known as a ‘Hunter / Trader / Trapper’. Don’t you just love authentic detail?
Apart from the one day when I had to go into work to deal with everyone’s annual pay review, this week has been really good. I badly needed a rest and some time to myself as work has had me fairly frazzled for the past 18 months (and only the last 4 months have been busy in a good way). I have been feeling guilty that I haven’t used my time off work to get other stuff done (like proper housework rather than the weekly scoot round with the vacuum) but, for once, I’ve managed to ignore it and relax properly, just doing what I feel like doing.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time at the latter end of the week at PFFA critiquing, and have really enjoyed it – I had got badly out of practice. Strangely, I haven’t had a real urge to write myself – I usually have lots of ideas when I’m properly relaxed. However, I’m not concerned – I’m beginning to understand that moods to write, read and critique come and go, and it’s more fruitful to go with them than to fight them. How very Zen of me.
Well, rather than making my usual pretend Ragù Bolognese for lasagne today, I decided to try and make a proper one. Of course, I didn’t venture into classic Italian cookery books (I only wish I could be that authentic) but checked up with good old, reliable Delia and found her recipe.
Even if I say so myself, my pretend Ragù Bolognese is usually quite tasty – I tend to use peppers as well as lots of garlic and onions, along with bacon, a good concentrated beef stock, passata, tomato puree, red wine and fresh herbs – but I just use steak mince – no mixture of pork and beef and chicken livers, and certainly no nutmeg. However, having made Delia’s today, I will never make it any other way – it is amazingly gorgeous and actually didn’t take that long to make – about 45 minutes all told.
Obviously, I couldn’t bear to follow the recipe exactly, but I only made minimal adjustments – swapped the tinned tomatoes for a large jar of passata, used far less olive oil than Delia gives, only a squeeze of tomato puree and added a tub of sun-dried tomatoes that I chopped up finely.
I’ve just used half of it to make a lasagne and put the other half in a tub for the freezer. If only I could stop eating it out of the tub with a spoon…
I really can’t decide what I want to write about today. I finished work for a little holiday on Wednesday and I haven’t done a stroke since – lovely. The only issue with that is that the lack of work-based mental acrobatics means that I’ve gone into overdrive-any-subject-under-the-sun-based mental acrobatics, and now I can’t pick just one thing to concentrate on.
I do have an idea for a new poem lounging around in my head somewhere – something to do with a character who collects pebbles in the pockets of a gabardine coat but, at the moment, I’m not sure if it’s a he or a she, why they’re collecting the pebbles, or if the pebbles should be polished or not. I’m also heavily into revisiting the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ work as their new album is about to come out, and I’m trying to read Pushkin’s Onegin at the same time as Anthony Kiedis’ autobiography, the course books from A103 that Barbara sent me to see if I thought I might like to tutor it, and Juvenal’s satires.
Where to settle? Easy answer – don’t. That’s the option I’ve gone for so far. I reckon that when I’m ready to settle on something, I will.
Meanwhile, I’m thoroughly enjoying reading my selected NaPoWriMo threads on PFFA and trying to resist the temptation to branch out to others that I very much want to read, but really can’t afford to give the proper time to. They’ll still be there in May.
For now, I’ll continue butterflying around and enjoying my mini-break over Easter. Oh yeah, and I accepted my honours degree today – have plumped for BA (Hons) Humanities with Classical Studies at a 2:1 classification. Job done – lovely.
I’m currently working my way through an anthology of ghost poems Chance of a Ghost, to write a review for Gerald England and, whilst it is taking much longer than I’d like due to a continued shortage of reading time, it’s already paid off with a new discovery – Marjorie Stelmach.
So far, I haven’t found out much about her, except that she's Canadian, has one published collection and various poems published in various journals. I'm continuing to dig. Meanwhile, here’s her poem from the anthology (I think the second strophe is outstanding):
DOORWAYS
IN OTHER PEOPLE’S DREAMS
I appear in doorways. I always know something they should know. I call them in to hear the tidings, or out to watch the world do whatever it’s doing. Sometimes I’ve come to warn them – No. Don’t look: the shuttle’s crashed; the beautiful child’s stillborn; wait, the stairway’s gone. Then I vanish or my words wake them. Either way, my part is over.
It’s a gift of sorts, a calling: I appear and disappear my body like a wink or a moon, thin into rooms and out, as if my cells could take the shapes of ornamental spaces in a lacework of worlds.
Meanwhile, in my own dreams I move slow motion. Dreamfields unfold like lifetimes before me; buffeted by landscapes, I can’t seem to fly. I watch my doorways fill with clear gaps where no one stands, and never will again. I listen. No word comes.
After years of being told at breakfast or in letters of my appearances, I’ve begun to feel an awkwardness in living. Our comings and goings, the expansions and contradictions of the air between us, these cumbersome tissues we call our lives, how could these be real?
And dreams? Words spoken in dreams stay Or they don’t. Screams doppler off into breakfasts, words of comfort sink into the sweetened milk. If, in broad day we suddenly turn and look over our shoulders at doorways, it’s nothing. We know we’re alone; but sometimes we think we may not be.
