eventually, insomnia, my love.

In my golden memories of late-childhood I recall sleeping. I slept the deep bone-sleep of the child who spent days perfecting handstands between eating rounds of white-bread sandwiches washed down with milo.  I slept listening to 3XY radio and  I slept with the dropped book squished somewhere against my hot little body. 

Then in the mornings, once I’d been good and earned my reading-rights by getting up for breakfast, washing myself and doing a house-work job like dusting with an old singlet of Dad’s, I’d be allowed to go back to my room, to sleep-read, which is possibly the most delicious sensation I know—pages are read, face drops onto arm or pillow, wake, read more, drop off dreaming the next part of the story…

I don’t sleep like that now, not with that heavy sense of ease and rightfulness.  These days I doubt sleep, and perhaps knowing this sleep in turn is skittish with me, thin like the meanness of dieting, jumpy like a new love, uncertain and fleet of foot.

And yet, and yet… my body gets tired but I love what night-wakefulness can do If I let it.  There is no fight sometimes against 3am, no fight and no hope-for-sleep and no anything so sometimes I simply mediate a huge blue flower across the dark expanse of my forehead.  Sometimes I get up from the kicked sheets and beaten pillow, and these times are sublime.

There is the night being washed.   Who is doing this washing, how does it happen always this way?  The utter clarity in the chill air, my toes scrunching on the warmer greyed-wood of the deck, and the possums have stilled in my presence.  Night-flower-scent, delicate, moreso than under the sun of daytime.  Jasmine and honeysuckle and the gorgeous sexiness of orange roses.

Or 5am, my mind yearning towards coffee and the sharpening into day, perhaps I do some words or read.  I go again to the back veranda to sail in a brief dream-burst upon tiny wooden boats silhouetted on a sky that is striated pink-- a mobile that takes me briefly into fantasies of the spice isles, where I lurch against rigging as my grin splits my face in two and my lips catch salt-spume.

Eventually, in insomnia, I wonder why I would sleep when there are waking dreams?

come shrug with me

Parents used to have more social time with friends in the sixties, seventies and eighties than parents do now.

As kids we ate a yellow TV dinner whilst they entertained with tinned things on ritz crackers, BenEan wine (or if you were classy, Mateusse), Neil Diamond on the record player and a blue haze of Stuveysent smoke.  They laughed and ignored us, we survived it. Mothers and Fathers, hear my Call to Arms.  Come and hang out. I will not cook from Nigella nor entertain your kids.  I will wear lipstick and I may make lewd innuendo in front of your darlings.  Ring the doorbell.  You might get a ritz cracker with a tinned oyster while our kids hunt for snails in the garden. When there is whining or dobbing we’ll ignore them, and They Will Survive.

Ok, so in truth MY mum and Dad did a bit of the above, though the meal would have been a cooked one for us kids…but yellow, like maybe fish fingers.

But I recall them entertaining. Be it a drop in from neighbour Margaret that lasted for three hours and a packet of mint slices, or the more posh dinners, or the family arvo teas or BBQs, the house often had people in it.  Any kids present were left to their own devices. We got up to some mischief, got bored, whined, dobbed, but weren’te given the huge amount of air-time that prevents ‘grown-ups’ from having a bloody life.

I have decided to become a big supporter of Childhood Boredom, something I’m learning to instil finally (hopefully not late) in my son who as an only child has ruled the bloody roost for too long!

The best gift my Mum gave me as a kid was boredom.  She’s an interesting person.  But she didn’t load me up with pre-set interesting play.  I didn’t go to Kindergarten, I dagged around behind her doing bits of housework.  I got bored. I found things to do. I was eager when schooling started.  Later I learned to make things, draw, colour, hook rugs, tapestry, annoy my brother, have a fight, survive it etc.

So yeah, forget waiting for an invite for some posh nosh.  Forget me setting up a fun learning activity for the kids.  Come over. We’ll talk in the kitchen and let them work it out. I won’t ignore them if they damage themselves, but unless they’re bleeding, murdering or setting fires I’m going to take a deep breath (and a deeper slug from the wine-glass) and then I’m going to shrug. 

Don’t you think it’s time we all learned to shrug again?  Ahh, the shrug, that lovely loose physical manifestation of ‘care factor?’ and ‘I dunno!’…

On re-reading the journals of Anais Nin

Recently I was scanning my bookshelves and found an old 1964 edition of the ‘1931-1934 Journal of Anais Nin’.

The last time I attempted to read some of her journals was about 17 years ago. I had graduated with a literature major, knew I wanted to stay at university longer and do an honors thesis in literature, and was tossing up between attempting something on Nin or something on the poetry of Coleridge.

Neither won. Broke and sick of the struggle, I gave up the attempts to stay in academia and went out to get a job. I continued reading the Anais Nin journals, and continued my personal war with her.

At 23 my moral certitude was high and I railed against her even as I begrudgingly admired her. I was too young to know I could admire her but not want to be her. So I seethed at the lies of omission in her journals, how she fails to cite her husband Hugo as the patron of her lifestyle, the source of the income she passes on to an increasing friendship circle of hungry writers and artists.

Now I’m finding it a joy to read this journal. Maybe my moral certitudes have been softened by my observance of life. People’s marriages are complex and interior worlds, everyone is fallible, and an individual struggling to be heard as an artist to me now has a ‘moral’ right to grow their creative flow as much as to protect another person.

The journal I’m reading covers one of the most fecund times in literary history, a period between the great wars and more specifically a period in France where the communication of psychology, the relative ease of writers banding together to print their works, and political tensions combined to create strong opinions and heady thoughts.  This was café society at its purest, and amongst her friends Anais counted Antonin Artuad, Henry Miller and Otto Rank.

It is the conversations between Henry and Anais that I am now finding so rich and fulfilling to re-hear. Reading these  is awakening the critic and the feminist and the writer within who have been dormant for a while out of necessity.  Their conversation is a distillation of ideologies emerging at the time about how men write, and how women write. Henry is the almost caricatured male: active, vulgar, sexual, pugilistic, drawn to the ugly, writing the male orgasm in all its linear trajectory.  Anais is the archetypal female, writing her unconscious, immersed in sensual observation, artifice, and writing narrative that expands like ripples on a pond. Their arguments and friendship reflect at times the misogynist talking to the feminist, at other times the duality of a whole and healthy psyche, the male and female at one.

During the time she wrote this journal she begins her first novel that will be published (‘A spy in the House of Love'). Henry is writing his famous novel ‘Tropic of Capricorn’.

Both of these novels are their attempts to write June Miller, Henry’s wife, out of their systems, to write until she is understood and in some way therefore diminished. That both love her and are sexually fascinated and repulsed by her underpins their own explosive sexual and literary affair over these years.

During this journal Anais also undergoes analysis, first with a Dr Allendy, then with Otto Rank, a student of Sigmund Freud. Her aptitude for psychology as an analysand leads her into a study of it under Dr Rank, and her work from this time draws heavily on Jungian  symbolism and is nourished by early psychoanalytic theory.  I believe it leaves a legacy that female writers have followed down the twentieth century and beyond.

Reading the journals again, and feeling this time such pleasure in her strengthening personal self, her burgeoning intellect, her crystallization as a writer of something very fine, I am happy to feel compassion for a woman of her times, a woman writing herself into an existence out of the ordinary, out of what was given her by men in a still-tightly bound society.

In reading the journals again I have been able to reflect on my own shifts since those first attempts years ago. It is good to realize you have changed; it’s so incremental a process that it can be easily left unseen.