It’s Furious Balancing

When…everyone was competing for airtime, I felt invisible and became over-stimulated and anxious.  My anxiety was not about the pressure to socialize; there were more than enough bodies to take care of that.  I became anxious because I couldn’t think, and, without my own mind, I felt like I was disintegrating….In my solitude, I could regain contact with myself and become solid again. Laurie Helgoe, PhD.

That is the most apt, most accurate description of the life of an introvert in an extroverted world that I have ever read.  Truly.  When I read it, I felt as if I had the breath knocked out of me, almost like I had been punched in the stomach.  Someone understands.  Someone gets it.

I haven’t been showing up here too frequently because I haven’t been able to recover very well from my work.  For whatever unknown reason, my work load has doubled in the past two weeks.  It is utterly insane.  It’s not my boss dumping stuff on me; he is as gobsmacked as I am.  By the end of the day, I’m ready to curl up in the fetal position and eat ice cream for dinner.  I find that I’m needing more and more time to regroup so I can go back to the office the next day.

I’m around.  I am basically okay.  I’m just not feeling very chatty lately.  I’ve been knitting and reading and watching documentaries.

I’ve been rebuilding myself daily.

I was surfing the Innernets this morning, reading the news and minding my own business, when an article in Slate started an avalanche in my Wee Little Brain.  I don’t think I’m capable of crafting an honest-to-God blog post out of this yet, but I thought I could amuse someone out there with my notes on my train of thought.  My utterly derailed Train of Thought.

I did go back over this inchoate list of notes to make it look somewhat formatted, and I added in my links.  It’s not all off the cuff.  Hopefully, there is a gram of sense in it.  Somewhere.  All I know is that I need to go back to my World War II/German history books and do a lot of re-reading.

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana

William L. Shirer made these words the epigraph for his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959).

Note that I should finish Rise and Fall, former bedtime reading, having only made it up to the Anschluss.  I would read two pages before falling asleep, worry of breaking nose from hardcover book.

Don’t Ignore the Tea Party’s Toxic Take on History, Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum.

Tea Party movement = Ignorance of History.  Ignorance of meaning of the words socialism, Nazism, Communism, etc.

Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler, which is not a Hitler apologia apologist (determine noun, an historical apologist writes what?  Apologies, certainly, but there must be a better word, based on root apolog-.) My reading of that and of personal narratives of German citizens during the Hitler years has been met with unspoken condescension — usually from people unable to cope with anything that actually requires them to think about what they read.

These books are not a glorification or a rationalization of Hitler or of Nazi Germany, but stem from a need to understand; and I read them due to my own German descent and my interest in the complicated nature of human evil and in the lack of black/white dichotomies.

My fascination with shades of gray in the human psyche, how easy it is to push someone from sanity/rationality over the edge.  Incremental and unnoticed for the most part.  Similar to ease of losing humanity under extreme duress [lack of food, example of Primo Levi (?) -- or was it Elie Weisel (?) --in Auschwitz listening to father's death rattle in hopes of getting his stuff.  Boots?  Blanket?]; or not [1950's or 1960's psychological research study at U.S. college of prisoners vs. wardens - find link The Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971].

If it is that simple — simple as in “not complicated,” not “easy” — to become inhuman to others, how simple is it to manipulate the narrative to merely plant the seeds of a social movement that takes us backwards towards intolerance, racism, xenophobia, and worse.  A spiral into madness.

Weimar Republic, social history.  Analogous to today?  Tea Party, by their inability to understand history, is becoming a tool to lead us into a repeat of that not-understood history.

Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets. — Edna Ferber

I’ve always wondered about the whole bit with the groundhog seeing his shadow, or not.  I mean, if he DOES see his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter?  And if the weather is overcast and there is no shadow to be seen, it’s an early spring?  This never made sense to me; it seemed backwards.

Long story short — I was reading the Wiki article on Imbolc, since it’s Imbolc as well as Groundhog’s Day, and I found the following something:

Imbolc is also named as the day the where the Cailleach, the hag of Gaelic tradition,  gathers her firewood for the rest of the winter.  Legend has it that if she intends to make the winter last a good while longer, she will make sure the weather on Imbolc is bright and sunny, so she can gather plenty of firewood.  Therefore, it is seen as a good omen if Imbolc is a day of foul weather, as it means the Cailleach is asleep and winter is almost over.

I love it when I find pieces-parts of the universe that neatly snap together.

Today is also the Feast of Brigid, a goddess associated with poetry, healing, and smithcraft.  In the blogging world, today is a day for poetry.  My contribution this year doesn’t seem to fit in as a poem — more like a prose-poem.  I offer it anyway, since the beauty of the prose shines through.

Dreamtigers

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger — not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant.  I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers.  (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.)  My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams.  In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure.  As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream.  At those moments, I often think:  This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh, incompetence!  My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for.  The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

- Jose Luis Borges

Enjoy your day, whichever you celebrate.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles.

It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

When I find myself under stress, when I’m overwhelmed, there are several things that always help me feel better.  One of the tried and true methods involves sundry combinations of chocolate, sugar, and caffeine.  Another is immersive computer gaming, fantasy RPG being my preferred genre.  The last, oldest, and perhaps the most important for my mental health is reading.

That should be re-reading, actually.  I go back to my favorite books; they’re comforting and familiar.  It is, perhaps, my choice of books that may appear… unusual.

I’ve been going back to savor the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.  Curling up with Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath or The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has helped maintain my equilibrium for the past week or so.

It’s the delicious, dense, antiquarian prose that draws me in.  I love the sound and shape of words for their own sake, and Lovecraft’s words are what lead to my idea for this post.

When I read, I use a large Post-It note as a bookmark.  I use this to keep track of interesting words I encounter in whatever I’m reading at the time.  Words I want to look up since I’m not quite certain of the meaning.  Words that are complex and multifaceted.  Words that make me pause and think  “Oh, this looks really, really cool.  How delightful.”  These words eventually appear in one of my lists at Wordnik.com

I’ve filled up two Post-It notes and part of the back of an envelope with Lovecraft words.  They’ve been lurking on my nightstand.  When I saw them this morning, I thought — for the first time in a long while — that I had something worth sharing.

Without further ado, in no particular order, and in nowise comprehensive:

miasmal, cenotaph, niter, necrophagous, aegipans, lambent, interdicted, acidulous, eidolon, teratologically, squamous, vigintillion, ductile, ichor, palimpsest, quintile, foetor, cartouche, labyrinthine, cumbrous, illimitable, bas reliefs, terrene, pallid, spheroid, aggultinations, dadoes, cryptical, similitude, austral, Cyclopean, anent, bizarrerie, portent, preternatural, immensurable, trans-montane, ineluctable, nefandous, congeries

If only I had been able to start writing!  But, however I set about it (all too similarly, alas to the resolve to give up alcohol, to go to bed early, to keep fit), whether it was in a spurt of activity, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing and reserving it as a reward, taking advantage of an hour of feeling well, making use of the inaction forced on me by a day’s illness, the inevitable result of my efforts was a blank page, untouched by writing, as predestined as the forced card that you inevitably wind up drawing in certain tricks, however thoroughly you have first shuffled the pack.

Marcel Proust – The Guermantes Way

And that’s what I have to say about New Year’s Resolutions.

Actually, I need to re-read Proust.  Yes, you read that correctly — RE-read.  I had my first trip through  À la recherche du temps perdu in 1994-1995.  I’ve picked it up, on and off and on again, for years.  I’m thinking it’s time again.

One of my favorite poems, holiday season or not.

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A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

While my absence from blogging primarily is due to a heavy work load at the office, knitting under a deadline, and not a few problems with my home computer, I am, for the most part, Doing Quite Well — at least as far as my depression is concerned.  I enjoy the dark, cold winter nights.   I crawl into my den with my books, cats, yarn, and computer games, and I am Very Content Indeed — happily and cozily cocooned.

There’s a passage in Moby Dick, when Ishmael and Queequeg are under the covers at the boarding house, prior to their sailing on The Pequod, which describes this comforting warmth and well-being perfectly:

We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was chilly out of doors; indeed out of bedclothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room.  The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast….[I]f like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of you nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm….[T]he height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.  Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

No Seasonal Affective Disorder here, thankyouverymuch, at least not the “normal” kind.

We have a Christmas tree up for the first time in two years.  Two Christmases ago, I lost Gregor and I had new kittens to care for.  Last Christmas, a combination of Teh Husband’s work and mine (and a few bouts with head colds) kept us from doing much.  This year I finally have the energy for a little celebration and relaxation.

I am officially off work until Monday, December 29th.  I know it might not seem like much to some of you, but to me, I have four consecutive days of freedom and pleasure.  No traveling.  No relatives.  No must-attend parties.  No Christmas shopping.  No craziness.  I have four days to call my own and I have no intention of doing anything I don’t feel like doing.  I think the most stressful activity will be doing the grocery shopping tomorrow to get the missing odds and ends for our Christmas Day Feast.

Le Menu (so far)

Foolproof Rib Roast. Teh Husband and I are going out in the morning to pick up a 6-pound standing rib roast at Knight’s Market.

Steamed Asparagus with Real Hollandaise Sauce. This involves whisking egg yolks and lemon juice over a double boiler as you incrementally add melted butter, whisking, whisking, whisking all the way.  There is no comparison between Real Hollandaise and That Blender Crap.

Delmonico Potato Casserole. If you’re nice to me, I’ll type out the recipe.  The recipes I found online for Delmonico Potatoes left a lot to be desired.  One even called for — I kid you not — cubed processed cheese food. I’m certain there is a time and a place for cubed processed cheese food, but my Christmas Day Feast is not it.

An As-Yet-to-Be-Determined Dessert. Maybe.  Teh Husband picked up the Williams-Sonoma Peppermint Bark for me today, and I’m satisfied to call that our dessert.  This is assuming I don’t eat it all in the next 36 hours.

More later, cats and kittens.

I’ve been chewing on two ideas for blog posts.

One post would be a righteously indignant screed concerning the utter stupidity of the public and the media in their interpretations of the latest recommendations on mammograms for women between the ages of 40 and 49.  Honestly, people; get a grip.

I threw that idea out because I really don’t have the energy for righteous indignation right now.

The other idea for a post was how I find myself thinking more and more about my own mortality.

I have to point out — here and now — that this has nothing to do with my chronic depression or chronic pain, nor is it anything suicidal.  I’m not getting all emo-gothy-weird — I don’t have the wardrobe for it.  I’ve just been thinking thinking, and I feel myself Running Out of Time.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker

There is so much I want to see and do and experience; it’s really not so much of a memento mori thing as it is a sic transit gloria mundi thing.

In any event, that’s where my head is — for what its’ worth — and I’ve just reminded myself that I really need to get around to reading the annotated The Waste Land that’s been sitting on my to-be-read bookshelf for the past twelve months.

Damn.

I better get up on that.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.”

Knitting women… chuckled when they heard that FBI agents, ever on the lookout for agents of unfriendly powers with subversive pamphlets, apprehended a woman passenger on an incoming liner whose papers included such scribbled notations as “K2, p4, k6,” and demanded a translation of the code to which the vast State Department Library had no key.

No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting
Chapter 14 — The Forties: Knitting in War and Peace
Anne L. Macdonald

I’ve been on a Victorian literature kick lately.  It started with Drood, which led me to Wilkie Collins‘ The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which took me to Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, which somehow took me into the village of Cranford.

It’s a slender volume that  “recounts the events and activities in the lives of a group of spinsters and widows who struggle in genteel poverty to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness.”  It’s much more entertaining than that sounds.

I had not heard of Elizabeth Gaskell until now, and I have to say I admire her writing style a great deal.  Here’s a bit I particularly enjoyed:

[E]very lady took the subject uppermost in her mind and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss….I asked Miss Pole what was the very last thing they had ever heard about [Peter], and then she named the absurd report to which I have alluded, about his having been elected Great Lama of Thibet; and this was a signal for each lady to go off on her separate idea.

Mrs. Forrester’s start was made on the veiled prophet in Lalla Rookh – whether I thought he was meant for the Great Lama, though Peter was not so ugly, indeed rather handsome, if he had not been freckled…. [I]n a moment, the delusive lady was off upon Rowlands’ Kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in general, and holding forth so fluently that I turned to listen to Miss Pole, who (through the llamas, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian bonds, and the share market, and her poor opinion of joint-stock banks in general….

In vain I put in “When was it – in what year was it that you heard that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama?” They only joined issue to dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not; in which dispute they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs. Forrester…acknowledged that she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologized for it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt.

I was never aware that llamas were carnivorous (and I had to look up graminivorous).  Perhaps the Monty Python troupe was correct.

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.  ~Buddhist saying

I’m applying this thought to my knitting today.  I’m at the very beginning of two rather lengthy projects and need the Positive Self Talk.

Project One is the new incarnation of Socks for The Husband.  The first attempt was too loose after the calf, so I frogged it.  I hadn’t gotten very far along when I (wisely) thought I should have him try it on.  Since I’ve only knit socks for myself, I kept looking at the few inches of ribbing I’d done,  thinking — This looks awfully big.  Is it really big or do I only imagine it’s too big because he’s got Giganto Feetz? When in doubt, try the thing on.  Ripping back part of a sock is much preferable than ripping out an entire sock.

This new sock-knitting attempt is from a recently published pattern — Oliver — that I discovered when catching up on Franklin’s blog.  There’s some unique shaping going on in the gusset and arch that is supposed to help the socks “fit like a glove.”  I can get behind that. I think it’s worth $7.00 if I get a pair of socks that actually fit him.

I’m currently in the “work in k2p2 ribbing until leg measures eight inches or desired length” bit.  This is my mindless take-to-work knitting, or the designated project to work on while surfing the Innernets/watching a DVD/sitting in a waiting room.

Project Two is Hanami. This is going to be a Magnum Opus.  I’m 13 rows into what’s an approximately 500-row pattern.  This is fussy lace knitting with lots and lots of charts.  If I can work a few rows each day, I’ll know I’ll get an FO out of it eventually — a drop-dead gorgeous, awe-inspiring, phenomenal FO at that.  I’m glad I gave myself a self-imposed time limit of a year to complete it.

Yep. Put one foot in front of the other. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

I am distressed that this day has been designated “Patriot’s Day.”  I feel that today has very little to do with patriots.  Today is the anniversary of when the definition of patriotism changed.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalry charged
The Indians fell
The cavalry charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

To be a patriot in the early years after 9-11 meant that you didn’t ask questions.  It meant that you didn’t search for the facts — let alone the truth — of what happened.  It meant that you never thought about why it happened.  It was far too complicated to look at the history of U.S. interference in the Middle East when you could be satisfied with  “They did it because they hate freedom.”

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side.

To be a New Patriot meant you thought the Geneva Conventions were optional.  To be a New Patriot meant you condoned the use of torture.

But now we got weapons
Of  chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.

To be a New Patriot meant you believed that the erosion of civil liberties was acceptable.  To be a New Patriot meant you felt the slaughter of persons who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11 was a point of pride.

In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

It disgusts me beyond measure that the 2,974 people who died on this day are “honored” with such an empty, hollow word.  We need to call today by a different name.