Other

I read Toni Morrison – her essays, her speeches, her meditations – and my mind roams over the people I have known who were Other to me. This Otherness as it's now classed is a relatively new language. I didn't see these neighbours, these friends, these colleagues as Other at the time I knew them; now I would, because this Otherness has permeated language. I cannot now not see it (or past it); I cannot now not censor myself in any exchanges there might be or reflect on my part in them afterwards. Our racial discourses have damaged my natural inclination to want to know and to befriend people, all different types of individuals. It has, within me, created barriers. I cannot now engage on any deep level because there is always a risk of being misunderstood; I cannot express myself as I would to someone who I know to be “safe”, that is, we are already known to each other, we have history. There is only the page, yet even here I do not say explicitly what I want to say, for the page is now Other too.

See Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison. 

From journal, August 2022.

Picture credit: Other Voices, 1995, Jamie Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

Master / Slave

Master. Slave. Is it harder to live life as a free man, a free woman than as a slave? An ancient idea, but is there still some kernel of truth in it? Truth perhaps that we daren't voice, daren't consider? We are “free and equal by law.” Are we? And even if we are or feel we are lawfully as compared, say, to slavery times or more snobbish eras, is being free – and knowing ourselves to be free and at liberty – not just a feeling, one which can be suppressed or explored as the mood takes or as our own circumstances change or demand? Does being a free man or woman, in the modern age, mean having the ability to impose – to impress upon ourselves – the conditions of our own freedom?

I am, in effect, Freedom's master and as its master I can usher in as well as abandon old laws. Freedom chained; Freedom controlled.

A thought which occurred when reading Deceit, Desire & the Novel by René Girard, written July 2022.

Picture credit: Chained Prisoner, 1806-1812, Francisco Goya, (source: WikiArt).

Ye Gods

Down into the belly of the ship. Ye gods! Where must the burial chamber be? Dig, dig, dig. A pyramid, tiny and gold (a piece of jewellery?) with very intricate clorisonné work. Ye gods. Grave goods. Gold and more gold, everything gold.

A sceptre! Ye gods. The grave – or memorial – of a king.

See The Dig by John Preston.

From journal, written July 2022. 

Picture credit: View of the excavation of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England. c.1930's, British Museum.

I Am A Story

NEVILLE: Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story.

All of the Waveses are: a story in themselves. Distinguishable from each other; and yet I sometimes forget whom is speaking. They are all waves of the same sea, flowing and curving. I am Jinny; I am Susan; I am Rhoda. I am in my school uniform, the rich green, the dark blue; I see the various mirrors I have looked into: where in the room they were placed, what they showed, what they cut off; I am absorbed in a day-dream as scenes of life flash past car windows.

JINNY: There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe.

Time flows forwards, backwards; memories rise, fall.

BERNARD: There is a wandering thread lightly joining one thing to another.

I am Jinny; I am Susan; I am Rhoda.

I am now Bernard: too complex; I float, unattached. Now Neville, with some fatal hesitancy in my make-up. Now Louis; even Percival. I am all.

See The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

Picture credit: Receding Waves, 1883, Claude Monet (source: WikiArt)

Written June 2022.