More Apples

Like a Willa Cather character there might be, some might surmise, something moody and discontented about my face; not that I can catch it without the aid of a looking-glass, but occasionally I feel its downward pull: the furrowed brow, the frown, the sullen expression, and sense its wan pallor, the pursed lips. Other times, I don't, I think, perceive it at all; the discontent just rests there as if it's now normal for it to do so, so that others, if I'm in company, might observe it, and with it my disappointment in, and with, life.
Disappointments though are natural, just maybe not to the extent I've considered them, every attempt to better oneself and each regret over some action or other, either my own or another's, and as natural to me as my underdeveloped figure which at various points in history has been fashionable, and will be again probably when I'm too old to make it work or my figure, with age, will have done the opposite: grown wide or heavy.
At the beginning my face; now my body, so like I said it's natural that discontents with life's events should follow, which are mostly only uplifting for a time before a sourness or loathsomeness sets in. I'm not the first, I believe, to think, nor to admit, this, though I think there are less of us willing to own up to...to a sort of bitterness. A kind of hostility towards ourself and to everything that comes our way, to all we've agreed to or somehow, even without realising it, put in motion.
I can't say I cope with what I see as 'let-downs' very successfully. Perhaps because my initial ideas or visions are too big or too hopeful, when in reality they're not like that at all. They don't fall into place as easily as they might have done, or did in mind; nor do they fulfil all you imagined they would, in a short space of, or over, time. And dare I say people, who become known to you, can seem that way too. Different to how you thought they would be, or they react in ways you didn't think they would, in ways that don't seem to correspond with their person, that seem at odds with their outer exterior. I tend to find instances like that more surprising than disappointing, but others might take it as the latter and feel aggrieved because their character, on the surface, had suggested otherwise: that they would be in sympathy with (or could persuaded to be) their own line of thinking. That however, to me, intimates flattery and manipulation, as a means, rather than friendship; or that criticism or difference of thought cannot be borne, in any measure.
But then I too am disposed (too disposed) to deal in, and dish out, criticism when disappointments of any kind loom large in my mind. The shine rubbed off the apple; the future far from rosy. Everything rotten and wormy. I realise it's a passing cloud, and yet still give credence, and voice, to those thoughts that really shouldn't trip off the tongue, not to just anyone but to my mum, which is worse for she doesn't deserve any of my vitriol.  
Is that too strong a word? Hmm, needle is more apt. I chide, I scold as if I were the parent and she the child. You hear of parents being bullies but less of grown children bullying their own parents. Though our mother-daughter relations have always had a bit of that – she was Eddie and I was Saffie (from Ab Fab) – where being cruel was meant as a kindness really, like the Nick Lowe song. The tenuous similarities to those characters have watered down even further as both of us have aged and yet if I'm feeling a certain way, anything I can find fault with I will find fault with and that extends to my mother. I don't like it, this trait, but somehow when I'm in its grip I'm powerless to prevent myself from being like it. Inwardly though I'm slapping myself. Perhaps I should wear an elastic band around my wrist? Aversion therapy. Luckily, for me, she finds it (mostly) funny, knowing, by now, the course my dressing-downs take, and that anything I've said has been said for a different reason entirely, one not at at all connected to her. Or to when she smacked me hard across the back of the calves. I was under ten, but even then, as I recall, it was strangely satisfying because I think I drove her to it. Rather perverse of me, don't you think?
But no, this is not revenge. This, in a weird way, is being cruel to myself in the right measure. Because it's quite common, in life, to disappoint and feel disappointed.

Picture credit: Portrait of a Woman Against Cezanne's Still Life with Apples, 1890, Paul Gauguin (Source: WikiArt.org).

All posts published this year were penned during the last.

Dilly-dallying, Shilly-shallying

Mind racing, in turmoil; heart, fluttering a little. The symptoms, some might say, of love or admiration, and not pangs of, Oh God, don't do this to me. Which again you might plead of love, to have mercy on you, if the object of your affections belongs to another or doesn't have eyes for you; but in this instance it's something entirely other, nothing whatsoever to do with those thorny issues and is more head than heart related.
And yet equally as obstacle-ridden, of the kind you supposed to run up to and jump over, except you run and stop. Stock-still as if someone's shouted “Freeze!”, without the Hands Up or Put Your Hands Where I Can See Them because it's not an arrest, citizen's or police, and nor is a crime in the process of being committed.
Perhaps listening to and acting on your inner voice is a sort of crime though? A crime of thought, though I don't think George Orwell meant this type, where it prevents you, and only you, from following through on something. Nothing you set your heart on, though possibly it would be easier if you had, because then, somehow, the heart overrules everything, but when it doesn't, well, there's hell to pay.
The mind will think on and on and on...until the matter's settled. Never giving it a rest even if you, as a last resort, resort to begging. And makes it its mission in turn to upset other organs: heart, stomach, liver. The more you try to prevent the mind from focusing on the dilemma the more it will, which attracts the very thing you're trying to avoid. The whole enterprise to not do so (and jinx a positive outcome) a waste of time, and which then occurs after it has made you a bag of jangled nerves and an emotional wreck to further prolong the agony.
I wonder do only sensitive and analytical personalities think along these lines? And do some people's brains talk to them too much? As if there's been an interruption of electricity, where immoderate sparks upset the functions of organs and intercepts important messages; or distorts any internal symbiotic communication until a decision, that can't be retracted without a lot of humiliation, has been made.
Of course, there's stubbornness too, which tends to throw a further spanner in the works if it's the rigid type. Is there any other form? Yes, like everything there's a scale to be slid up or down, almost (and yet nothing like) like a highly polished and particularly attractive bannister. Mind you have a cushion at the end though because there's only ever one direction in which you can go with that. Down, down down...but then if you have recurring moments of that sort you'll be familiar with it; though it has to be said when you land, if you land instead of clinging and pulling yourself back up, there's more of a bruising bump, where you may not be able to sit down comfortably for days. But be thankful, if you can, it wasn't your head. Hmm, if however you have been in a sticky frame of mind, you might, of course, have preferred that it was. Well, as mentioned before, we never get what we wish for. And nobody, really, truthfully, wants to be a Humpty Dumpty character: put together again and wrapped up in bandages, or even cotton wool to prevent such mishaps in future.
But could physical ills obliterate the ills of the mind? Provide respite when the mind's overwrought, and been in that state for a while? Well, who can say with any authority, as that as they say is also 'all in the mind', your individual brain and perception of events, which may not be altogether true. Nobody's version of reality (or of their-self) ever is. There's nothing we, humans, can do about that, except be sensitive to such fluctuations: in perception, in mood, in analysis. That's our trouble, in work, in life, we try to pin ourselves down to one thing or many things, one or many labels, when all is fluid around us and constantly on the move or changing, and when nothing needs, or wants, to be defined.
For God's sake, just BE! Tough that, when it can be misinterpreted as flakiness or perpetual ungratefulness, and is neither. Instead, it's a state that doesn't assume anything, that allows choice regardless of how something went, that accepts what is reasonable to one may not be reasonable to another, and where any stubbornness displayed is in fact a deep dislike of, an inner recoil from, anything that appears would only serve a conflictual nature.

Picture credit: Feminine Folly, 1819-1824, Francisco Goya (Source: WikiArt.org).

All posts published this year were penned during the last.

Maelstrom

You get everything you think you want but in the instant it's given want to chuck it into the nearest river, except it's not something you can throw due to its size or because it can't be held, physically, it being a verbal offer; or because, well, it's a person or it would be very ungenerous of you to do so, and besides, you don't live close to water.

You could fill the bath, you suppose, but that won't cause the thing, if it can be seen and held, that you should be grateful for to sink from sight or float away from you, away from view. Not even metaphorically i.e. down the plughole. Perhaps a bathe would help though..? But when did washing (yourself) ever solve anything?
Mermaid, mermaid, on the wall, combing your seaweed-red hair, which part should I listen to – head or heart?
Steamy room, misty mirror and no advice spoken but a stare that says: you know.
But you don't, that's the problem.
Other people flip a coin, assigning a decision to heads or tails, and noting their reaction: relief or disappointment, to the side that falls face-up. You petition a mermaid on the wall as if you're inside a Brothers Grimm fairy tale and get precisely nowhere, just more confused as the hours and days pass.
If you have that luxury, some things won't wait. And when they won't they get decided for you which can be a worst fate because then you either have to break something off or make the best of it at a moment when you don't want to or fail to see the bigger picture: the seed that will eventually germinate if you give it a go.
Such a process that. Taking on a thing when you have doubts. That won't be banished, even after you've taken it on. Your mind just, if not more, as uneasy as it was before, and yet you've done it now. Oh, the new routine. Oh, the compromises. Oh, the playing nice and walking on shells, egg and those at the seaside. Accompanied by the feeling that you're bluffing and will, in a very short time, be found out.
Whereas on paper (before it came), it looked ideal. Lots of ticks, very few crosses. Until reality hit, when the thing you didn't think would come, came. Tick, tick, hmm cross, cross, cross, cross. Because there are conditions. And you'd imagined you feel differently.
You should feel differently. Yes, there are changes to the original idea that formed in your head, but it's virtually everything you asked (the Universe) for. Isn't it? and you have to admit if written down it still looks good on paper.
So what's the problem? Is it the tweaks which have presented themselves weren't yours? Is it more than you wanted to undertake, and you're not sure you want to or you can? Yes and yes . Or do you just need to give yourself time, to resign yourself to it or hopefully to see it in a whole new light, as something miraculous and the answer to your prayers?
Are you not, at present, just struck dumb? You don't know what to think or how to feel, so that like a fish caught and flung in the boat you keep flip-flopping, eyes dilated with the surprise of it all and your head a little giddy as if you've been twirled around a floor over a hundred times by a devilishly handsome partner.
For this, whatever it is, is an answer, of a sort just not what you thought when you thought it out, before it happened, when it was unreal and you hadn't imagined for one instant it would really occur. Not in your wildest dreams could it possibly. Though not all happenings are as delirious-making; some, though unexpected in the way they've come about, are merely annoyances, a fly in the ointment which you wish after a spell would take themselves off and bestow themselves on someone else who would perhaps welcome them on a more permanent basis, and with a sunnier disposition.                     
It is said fortune smiles on the brave. What luck! you're supposed to say, even if you're far from brave. The things you make happen, however, are not the same as things happening to you because the reality when they arrive causes you to want instead a sheltered life.

Picture credit: Whirlpools, 1957, M C Escher.

All posts published this year were penned during the last.

As Sure As Fate

I hate the weekends. So much. I hate the crowds. People, people everywhere, supposedly out with a purpose and yet seeming disoriented in the moving masses. All as confused as each other, not knowing why they're there (on the High Street, in the shopping centre) or how they came to be there. The journey a blur, just like the faces, young and aged, they now find themselves surrounded by. Purpose (and heads) lost between point A and point B.
Some, I imagine, are out to be out. A bit like me I suppose, though I always make for the centre with some item in mind, the problem is I lose whatever that was on the way or get there and realise it's too much trouble, on a day when shelves are being ransacked of all their goods as if war's been declared and where personal space will most certainly be violated with little or no apology.
You can barely move (safely) for the sea of people sometimes. Perhaps, no, I know I exaggerate, and yet still I enter these places and instantly feel my breath is being squeezed from me, from both sides of my person like an accordion, as if I were the voice box in the middle. Stretched and squeezed, stretched and squeezed. Hoo-ray and up she rises, hoo-ray and up she rises, hoo-ray and up she rises, early in the morning. Not early enough, judging by the number of people who were already here when I arrived.
Ahh, a new shop has opened. That must be it. Ooh free samples. No, give it sidelong glance and re-position your feet so they keep going forward. Forward when everyone else is leisurely coming your way. Carrying full bags, pushing prams or trying to hold the hands or arms of screaming children. Oh God, stick to the edges. Crawl if you have to. And keep your handbag zipped and close to your body. Watch out, up ahead, for other suddenly stopping bodies. Dodge, walk, dodge, dodge, walk. Free space, free space, walking...oops, toddler, just miss and resist the urge to ruffle hair, pat, or goofy grin at. Mum, Dad's seen the whole thing and done nothing. What is the etiquette these days? I don't think it's quite the done thing to say to the small person: well hello there... Best not. You're not Roald Dahl, nor as tall as the BFG and far too old to be Matilda.
I'm not even halfway to where I want to be. Will I get there? Ever? Push on, push on, you must, otherwise it will have been a useless adventure. Adventure, this? I need to get out more and not less if that's the case. But oh, how I long for my four walls already. Water, water. A few miserable crumbs that mice have left.
This feels like a quest I should never have gone on.
Quick, the tide is turning. Duck in that pocket of air, skirt the lifts, arghhh people! and grab that basket. The fun has only just begun. So clichéd but nonetheless true. Empty. Empty. Empty. Where's the food? What! no avocados, no carrots, no red peppers. Stop and stare, and hope another idea will come. Nope, all gone. One item I can be sure of – will be there and that I undoubtedly need - is milk, because I buy the non-dairy kind, so to that aisle I go, typically at the back of the store and where someone has parked their trolley and disappeared. Blast it! Stretch up and over, got it – one Rice Dream and Quinoa plunked in the basket (so upper crusty which I'll have you know I'm not) - and then to the basket (and cash) queue which seems to be frequented by customers with more, way more, than one item or one basketful. Arghhh! again. I feel pathetic with my single item and say as much to the girl when it's my turn to be served: I don't why I've got a basket, and (luckily) get a laugh in response.
Transaction done and out the automatic door, onto the centre's polished floors where I'll have to either carve a way through in reverse or take an early exit to the outdoor market. What's worse? With a Bag for Life dangling from a hand?
The decision I made that fateful Saturday is not worth recounting. None of it was satisfactory, none of that shopper's high, that others talk of but which continues to elude me. When in the week I might have a dance with an old gent or exchange pleasantries with a fellow, though more deserving (and usually retired), idler.

Picture credit: Lisbeth with Accordion, 1909, Carl Larsson

All posts published this year were penned during the last.