whatdorothyhaleknew

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

I like hearing about other peoples families. Especially, I like hearing about brothers, and sisters, who seek each other out. Who make efforts to be kind to each other. Book days off work for their birthday.

What must they be like with each other, I think. Do they get on properly. Is that the normal way? Imagine being in a room with your brother or sister, and not being tense. Or frightened. Or sure something will happen soon, that will at best, leave you with a bad taste in your mouth the sort of taste that lingers because you know this distasteful person owns an unbreakable link to you, no matter whatever the inspirational quotes about choosing your own family may say. These monsters are linked to you, like a wart that keeps growing back no matter how many times you pick away at it. At worst, the monster might get angry, like he has done so many times before. Things will be said, maybe gestures toward you that replay and rewind what has been done before.

A cupboard shelf splintering on impact from above, and then from below as I'm pulled back through it

And they pull around him once more. "He has done this to me." Yes well, families do that. "There is a monster that lives in our house, in our family. Look what he's done to me. Look what he's starting to do to the new children."

"Stop being dramatic."

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

I keep seeing really upbeat, life-affirming statements from various people, such as:

"you get to choose your story" *chalk stencil of a butterfly on the pavement.*

Makes me wish I could indulge in that type of wisdom. "You beautiful, fucked up soul, I'm here for you" *black and white grainy pic of a black flower unfurling wonkily.*

Whenever I do though, it just feels like a lie. I'm sarcastic, bitter, and suspicious of pretty much everyone. Trying to suspend my innate personality, to indulge in something that reframes being weird and outcast as something sexy and self-determining, rather than just depressing, makes me feel flimsy.

Gonna stay cynical and embrace hopelessness.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Confectionary

We, as a species, need sugar. Our brain is thus wired, so that when we bite into an apple or pear, it registers the sugar by making it taste good to us. To make sure we get as much as it as possible, our brain makes us enjoy getting it, so we seek it out voluntarily. To quote Dan Dennett, we do not like sugar because it is sweet. It is sweet, because we like it.

Confectionary, chocolate cake, and other processed sweet foods, are what are known as “supernormal stimuli.” These items take what we are programmed to seek out, sugar and sweetness, and replicate them artificially. Chemically created, we get food that always delivers that sweetness we crave. You might get an exceptionally sour orange from a bush that normally produces sweet ones, or an almond that is bitter, or an apple whose consistency is mushy and unpleasant. From the lab, by selecting and concentrating the substances that deliver that evolutionarily demanded hit, we get sweets and chocolate that are far sweeter, and more consistently so, than any fruit you could care to try.

The issue, though, is that much of the time, these processes reduce or remove the benefit of consuming the food. There is next to no vitamin C in strawberry laces. The rush of sugar from chocolate cake is pleasing, but it is excessive - aside from an immediate energy boost, it provides no proteins for repairing cells or building muscles. This food is “junk”, because there is nothing actually good in there. It is speciously delicious, it ticks that ancestral box that tells you to seek out something that will give you energy and health, but in fact just satisfies the most shallow desires and pleasures.

I think the way a lot of us construct and present our personalities are a kind of “human confectionary.” They adopt characteristics that are superficially attractive and desirable, that are usually indicators of good qualities, without actually incorporating those qualities. This might be an apparently friendly and upbeat attitude, or a confident and intelligent persona. Or socially conscious, caring individual. 

We are a social species. We encounter each other often. Being able to recognise characteristics that indicate we can trust someone or benefit from their company is important. It is ultimately a selfish endeavour, but to be honest, everything we ultimately do will always be in service to either our physical benefit or to reinforce our sense of self, to help us convince ourselves we are the people we hope we are. But this play-acting I see people doing, it’s destabilising. I wrote the other day of an acquaintance who seems to have a perpetual objective to convince everyone of his Renaissance man persona, to even the extent that he lies about the literature he has read and languages he knows. And as much as that makes me dislike and distrust him, it also makes me feel bad for him. Does he really do all these things to be regarded as someone who does them? 

The question, and these observations, have led me to two main thoughts (or conclusions.) 

1) I need to be more aware of how much “performance” is imbued in day to day conversation. I am autistic, so my ability to understand the world, and particularly people’s actions within it is impeded enough. But I’m hoping that my scepticism, and my auton ability to examine people’s actions differently than others will help my ability . It does make me feel uneasy though.

2) More complicated, and sadder, this grasping for recognition “as” something, for an identity, is nothing to do with other people. It may be calculated and with a discernible, material profit in mind. But mainly, I think it’s fulfilling a far more intangible need. I think these kinds of performances are more for them to feel secure, because they don’t. They want to understand themselves from the exterior, because they can’t from the interior. So they overact certain qualities about themselves, to have a handle on who this person they have to spend their entire lives with are.

As I say, I’m an autist. I’m used to feeling like I have a completely different hymn sheet from everyone else. I also grew up as the black sheep/scapegoat in a family that was insulated from typical social and communal life. My isolation is multi-layered, and has been pretty constant throughout my life. While I do wonder how I am perceived by others, it always comes with the same conclusion: “who fucking cares, as long as I can pay my bills.” An addendum has been added in recent years: “who fucking cares, they’re all a bunch of try-hard eejits anyway.”  

These days, as painful as my background has been, as much as conventional or healthy families do seem heaven to me, at least it has given me this perspective. Confectionary is immediately beguiling, it’s designed to be that way. But the emphasis on having a desirable quality, is enough for me to re-examine what is actually there.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Ever meet someone who is just vaunted in everyone's assessments? They stride through life easily and confidently, casting a long and damning shadow on everyone else's attempts to get by?

This guy I know is like that.

We're both PhD students, and I found him intellectually intimidating. He has a reputation in the department for being super smart. I'll give him an academic book on some heavy topic, that it took me a month to get through, and he'll tell me he finished it in a few days. He listens to audiobooks at almost three times the speed, and boasts that he can't listen to anything slower than that. He took an excessive number of subjects in school, he said. He can play multiple instruments, he says. He can draw, and paint, and I have seen this work.

I believed this reputation, of a highly intelligent, uber talented intellectual.

But twice, and perhaps three times, I've caught him in a lie, blagging that he has greater knowledge than he does.

The first, we were talking about Dante Alighieri, and his Inferno. He talked at length about how he had read it. I mentioned The Divine Comedy, which the Inferno appears in, alongside Purgatorio and Paradiso, and he said something along the lines of "oh yea, I've read that too. Both the Divine Comedy and Inferno."

I pointed out the error: Inferno is The Divine Comedy, or part of it. He dropped his usually exuberant tone, which has that certainty and confidence in it I find so daunting. He murmured something "Oh well, I guess that's what I read then," before trailing off and dropping the topic.

I could have believed that he had made a basic mistake, and misremembered the books Dante wrote. But that drop in his tone was instantly recognisable. He'd made a mistake, a very illuminating one, and he knew it. Anyone unfamiliar with Dante would have taken his confidence and pontification as signs that this guy knew what he was talking about.

But he didn't. He really had no clue. He had been made, and he knew it.

The second time, he was marking an essay, and was writing a note about the students use of a subordinate clause. Except he couldn't remember the term, "subordinate." He paused, clearly sensing that it wasn't the term he was needing - I'm sure we've all been there, on the tip of our tongue, cycling through words until we find the right one. He put down "subjunctive", and paused again, knowing it wasn't right.

"It's not a subjunctive, is it?"

It most definitely was not.

I gave him the right term. And then I paused, before asking him.

"Do you know what a subjunctive is?"

He kept sighing, asking himself in that breathless, searching way "oh, what is it?? Oh, er, what is it again?"

He was trying to act like he had known, and forgot. It was transparent to me, now.

(For reference, it's a case where the grammar indicates a state of conditional or unreality about the sentence - think "I recommend he be fired". He's not really fired, you're just recommending it, so you use be and not "is").

The third event, I feel could be fifty fifty. He may genuinely have forgotten a detail. But the former examples have stayed with me. I had mentioned a book I wanted to read: Difficult Women, by Helen Lewis. As ever, he swung in with comments on how he had read it already, and how it had his seal of approval. He had that tone to his voice, the confidence and inflation, that I now suspect is entirely hot-air. I hadn't read the book yet - it hadn't been out for long. But I knew that one section of the book talks about Erin Pizzey in detail, who is quite an unusual case study (not to go into it here, but she set up a load of women's refuges, before becoming a men's rights activist. Shit's cray.)

I asked him about her. What did he think of that particular case?

He didn't recognise her. I fleshed out the picture a bit more. After a beat, he nodded. "Oh yea, yes, I remember, vaguely, haha."

It could be that he forgot that detail from the book. But still, in light of everything else, I've a fair amount of doubt.

This guy is always ready with advice and suggestions. He floats behind me while I'm typing out my thoughts, cheerily offering points and guidance I did not ask for, and find invasive. I feel like I see through him entirely now. His mannerisms, his statements, his opinions, it is a walking lie. He needs people to see him as intelligent and knowledgeable, he can't bear not to be seen like that. And so he has created this insincere, inflated persona. It's not an empowering knowledge, this clairvoyance. It's discomfiting, and uneasy. I don't know what to do with it. Others are taken in, so quickly, and so completely, by it. He is, undoubtedly, successful.

I'm beginning to see more people, with this phony swagger, as they sail through life. I wonder how many of them have read what they say they have, understand what they say they do. Is the world built on this? Does nobody tell the truth as to who they are?

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

I have this fantasy, where as the leader of the country on a state visit to America, I go to the Indigenous communities and leaders when I first step off the plane, to acknowledge *them* as the legitimate leaders of America, before I see the United States president.

How cool would it be if foreign leaders would just insist on seeing the Indigineous people first, speaking to and having their photo ops with them, to say "yea, these are the people whose land we are in. This is who we need to see first to acknowledge our interest to do business with you. These are who we respect first and foremost as equal leaders."

I know it will never happen, because the US pres is the one with the nuclear codes. But still. I like to imagine it.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Something I wrote when my mother was dying.

My mother is dying, and not in the Buddhist, Sylvia Plath “we’re all dying, all the time” way. Her body has been compromised, the messages her cells send each other got confused, and now there is rapidly developing cancer in her lung, and most horrifically, in her brain. Just typing that disgusts me enough to taste stomach acid rising, the most brutally unfair place to become ill, a desecration on the shrine to her life, her person. I’ve been staying  at home a lot, obviously, and unsurprisingly, my university work has been put on the back burner while I cope emotionally and practically. Mum has been her usual stoic self, we don’t talk about it. She just wants to sleep, drink her tea, keep on smoking (as laughably distasteful that seems), listen to her radio. She doesn’t want to disrupt any of our lives. But despite her stiff upper lip, her cancer is catching up with her. First, she couldn’t make it up the stairs, so she had to stay downstairs. But she still was ok. Then she had her infection, knocking her out completely over Christmas. Back then we still didn’t know she had cancer, she had kept it from us. She seemed to recover a bit, she came home, she was back to normal. It wasn’t until later that she began to decline. Now, she is frailer than I could ever have imagined her to be. She moves with a tricycle/walker that we got from the NHS, which she could use by herself at first. I stay at home as much as I can. I stay up late, listening for her needing my help. When she could move easily by herself, getting out and into bed with no problem, zooming around with her walker, going up and down the steps no bother, it wasn’t such a big deal. I went to sleep without any worry. Then she got thinner, slower, she needed more help with getting up the little step to get into the kitchen. I started staying up late, listening in my bedroom for the telltale sound of the kitchen light flickering on, coming down and making excuses, assuring my mother that I was up anyway, and that I just wanted a tea, like her. About 3 or 4 times a night I would sit with her until she went back to bed, trying to make conversation. I still haven’t talked about her cancer, or her terminal diagnosis, with her. It feels too cruel to do it, to someone I love, who is dying, who never wanted to have the difficult conversations. I dread when people ask me how she is. She’s getting worse, more confused as the tumours annex more of her brain and more of her, she’s thinner, getting lighter for her final journey. The last week or two, she has had trouble getting in and out of bed. Now there is no pretense, she knows I am up for her in the night, because she calls me to come down. She knows I stay awake. Yesterday, I had the horrible thought that all of us were just waiting to be bereaved, trapped in between two points, the names of which I am too frightened to fully acknowledge with words. Mum was adamant that I stay in university, and so I have also been thinking of all that tedious business, in the back of my mind. Now there are some deadlines coming up, and I have threadbare theories to work with, subjects that I struggle to care about. Today, I came back to my flat near the university, and headed to the university library with my laptop, intending to bulldoze my ideas and theories until I produced something. I stared into space when I tried to read, I desperately switched to Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter when I tried to write. Without realising it, my fingers seek distractions from when I try to let my brain out of its safe space. About 20 minutes ago, I was finally pushing my thoughts forcefully onto the Word document, rough, shoddy work, but at least it gave me a mound of clay from which I could sculpt my argument. I had stopped, just for a second, to think, or to not think, just for a second. I had Spotify on my earphones, on shuffle, my playlist including over 9000 songs. In that dead space, my brain briefly off-lining itself while I gain momentum to write again, Amanda Palmer came on, freezing me with her words. “Love of mine, soon you will die, And I won’t be far behind, I’ll follow you into the dark.” I sat through the entire song, not sure if I should just have skipped it, as I felt that icy boulder I have in my gut thaw, a real, bitter taste to my throat. Embarrassed to say that I cried there. I swallowed that mysterious lump that comes from crying. I think the Chinese guy to the side of me saw that I was crying, but I’m thankful he didn’t say anything. After I got myself together again, after I grew used to the wound that the song had created, or exposed, I felt….the same? Worse? Better? My life at the moment is like a kaleidoscope of brown and grey, even when it turns and changes, it’s just more of the same aching dullness. This whole thing with my mum at first made me scared about where would she go when she died. I was raised a Catholic, then I was an atheist in my teens, and now I confess that I am agnostic. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. I don’t think the picture painted in the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qua'ran, or any other holy book is the perfect, accurate story, I don’t think it is the exact blueprint for how the cosmos works. Ultimately, these religions were created, I think, to act as an adhesive for communities, creating immutable laws for everyone, and explaining unknown things. Of course, the belief in the afterlife is part of that last thing. Even knowing this, in my cold, rational brain, I can’t quite believe that a person ends completely. Part of this lack of belief in disbelief is something I can’t explain without sounding mildly insane. I have always had this sense, that the pair of eyes I look out of is a complete fluke. That I could have just as easily be looking out another pair of eyes, and using a different pair of hands, being called a different name. I have never liked labels placed on my identity, or people assuming I like this or that because I am female, or because I am straight, or English. Because I am well aware that there is a part of me, deep in my mind, which is neither female or male. It has no sex, no nationality, no race, no preference. I would stay awake for a long time as a child, thinking about this other me, that was looking out of my eyes, knowing they were only mine by chance, and knowing that these eyes are only mine for a limited time. As a child, when I went to sleep, this is all I would think about. As I got older, as I absorbed the culture I grew up around, I did not have so much time to reflect on this opinionless, sexless, ageless edifice in my mind, thinking instead about how I could fit in with the others, whether I’d get a job, if I would fall in love. But that thing still lives, it has always been there, it sits, unchanging in its appreciation in the randomness of this body and this life, a dark, hard, immortal rock in ever-changing currents, the mountain my house is built into and on. I don’t know what to call it, not entirely sure if I can call it part of me, and if that it is the “real me”, and the personality I have developed is just a growth. I don’t want to use the word “soul,” as it is too value-laden, but it suits this rock within me in some ways - it is unchanging, it watches, it is nothing but itself. If I lose both my legs, this rock of me will not be chipped, it will not be scratched, it will remain as unmoved as it always has been. I could lose my eyes, and it will only increase in its heaviness, in its presence. If the part of me that is me is my brain, what happens when it rots? Does it rots away around this rock of me? Does the rock of me stay?

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Something I wrote when my mother was dying.

My mother is dying, and not in the Buddhist, Sylvia Plath "we're all dying, all the time" way. Her body has been compromised, the messages her cells send each other got confused, and now there is rapidly developing cancer in her lung, and most horrifically, in her brain. Just typing that disgusts me enough to taste stomach acid rising, the most brutally unfair place to become ill, a desecration on the shrine to her life, her person. I've been staying  at home a lot, obviously, and unsurprisingly, my university work has been put on the back burner while I cope emotionally and practically. Mum has been her usual stoic self, we don't talk about it. She just wants to sleep, drink her tea, keep on smoking (as laughably distasteful that seems), listen to her radio. She doesn't want to disrupt any of our lives. But despite her stiff upper lip, her cancer is catching up with her. First, she couldn't make it up the stairs, so she had to stay downstairs. But she still was ok. Then she had her infection, knocking her out completely over Christmas. Back then we still didn't know she had cancer, she had kept it from us. She seemed to recover a bit, she came home, she was back to normal. It wasn't until later that she began to decline. Now, she is frailer than I could ever have imagined her to be. She moves with a tricycle/walker that we got from the NHS, which she could use by herself at first. I stay at home as much as I can. I stay up late, listening for her needing my help. When she could move easily by herself, getting out and into bed with no problem, zooming around with her walker, going up and down the steps no bother, it wasn't such a big deal. I went to sleep without any worry. Then she got thinner, slower, she needed more help with getting up the little step to get into the kitchen. I started staying up late, listening in my bedroom for the telltale sound of the kitchen light flickering on, coming down and making excuses, assuring my mother that I was up anyway, and that I just wanted a tea, like her. About 3 or 4 times a night I would sit with her until she went back to bed, trying to make conversation. I still haven't talked about her cancer, or her terminal diagnosis, with her. It feels too cruel to do it, to someone I love, who is dying, who never wanted to have the difficult conversations. I dread when people ask me how she is. She's getting worse, more confused as the tumours annex more of her brain and more of her, she's thinner, getting lighter for her final journey. The last week or two, she has had trouble getting in and out of bed. Now there is no pretense, she knows I am up for her in the night, because she calls me to come down. She knows I stay awake. Yesterday, I had the horrible thought that all of us were just waiting to be bereaved, trapped in between two points, the names of which I am too frightened to fully acknowledge with words. Mum was adamant that I stay in university, and so I have also been thinking of all that tedious business, in the back of my mind. Now there are some deadlines coming up, and I have threadbare theories to work with, subjects that I struggle to care about. Today, I came back to my flat near the university, and headed to the university library with my laptop, intending to bulldoze my ideas and theories until I produced something. I stared into space when I tried to read, I desperately switched to Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter when I tried to write. Without realising it, my fingers seek distractions from when I try to let my brain out of its safe space. About 20 minutes ago, I was finally pushing my thoughts forcefully onto the Word document, rough, shoddy work, but at least it gave me a mound of clay from which I could sculpt my argument. I had stopped, just for a second, to think, or to not think, just for a second. I had Spotify on my earphones, on shuffle, my playlist including over 9000 songs. In that dead space, my brain briefly off-lining itself while I gain momentum to write again, Amanda Palmer came on, freezing me with her words. "Love of mine, soon you will die, And I won't be far behind, I'll follow you into the dark." I sat through the entire song, not sure if I should just have skipped it, as I felt that icy boulder I have in my gut thaw, a real, bitter taste to my throat. Embarrassed to say that I cried there. I swallowed that mysterious lump that comes from crying. I think the Chinese guy to the side of me saw that I was crying, but I'm thankful he didn't say anything. After I got myself together again, after I grew used to the wound that the song had created, or exposed, I felt....the same? Worse? Better? My life at the moment is like a kaleidoscope of brown and grey, even when it turns and changes, it's just more of the same aching dullness. This whole thing with my mum at first made me scared about where would she go when she died. I was raised a Catholic, then I was an atheist in my teens, and now I confess that I am agnostic. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. I don't think the picture painted in the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qua'ran, or any other holy book is the perfect, accurate story, I don't think it is the exact blueprint for how the cosmos works. Ultimately, these religions were created, I think, to act as an adhesive for communities, creating immutable laws for everyone, and explaining unknown things. Of course, the belief in the afterlife is part of that last thing. Even knowing this, in my cold, rational brain, I can't quite believe that a person ends completely. Part of this lack of belief in disbelief is something I can't explain without sounding mildly insane. I have always had this sense, that the pair of eyes I look out of is a complete fluke. That I could have just as easily be looking out another pair of eyes, and using a different pair of hands, being called a different name. I have never liked labels placed on my identity, or people assuming I like this or that because I am female, or because I am straight, or English. Because I am well aware that there is a part of me, deep in my mind, which is neither female or male. It has no sex, no nationality, no race, no preference. I would stay awake for a long time as a child, thinking about this other me, that was looking out of my eyes, knowing they were only mine by chance, and knowing that these eyes are only mine for a limited time. As a child, when I went to sleep, this is all I would think about. As I got older, as I absorbed the culture I grew up around, I did not have so much time to reflect on this opinionless, sexless, ageless edifice in my mind, thinking instead about how I could fit in with the others, whether I'd get a job, if I would fall in love. But that thing still lives, it has always been there, it sits, unchanging in its appreciation in the randomness of this body and this life, a dark, hard, immortal rock in ever-changing currents, the mountain my house is built into and on. I don't know what to call it, not entirely sure if I can call it part of me, and if that it is the "real me", and the personality I have developed is just a growth. I don't want to use the word "soul," as it is too value-laden, but it suits this rock within me in some ways - it is unchanging, it watches, it is nothing but itself. If I lose both my legs, this rock of me will not be chipped, it will not be scratched, it will remain as unmoved as it always has been. I could lose my eyes, and it will only increase in its heaviness, in its presence. If the part of me that is me is my brain, what happens when it rots? Does it rots away around this rock of me? Does the rock of me stay?

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

The brain, it exists, attached to the rest of the body through strings of nerves. It is directly connected to our eyes, and vision is our most important sense. If there is a me, I would think it's my brain, and my eyes. How I know the world. Today was strange, it started and it carried on but I stayed where I was. The day cycled around me, but I stayed a dry rock in a river. And if I do not voice words to the others, I feel guilty. I should be like them, chatty and normal, their lives in a steady and straight ascent. But my brain stayed at the back of my skull, not just shy but disconnected from my eyes and ears. Not pre-occupied, just not playing. I close my eyes and nothing is different. And the day ran like a black and white film on a never-ending projector. It will run and run and run, and participation is expected, but difficult. How are we meant to break through the veil that separates the film from us? Not quite human, really.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

I'm eating pizza right now. Isn't it weird that you now know that? I'm surrounded by a mess, which is surrounded by a wall, which is in a house in a town, city or even country separate from yours, and just from that first sentence you know that a) I exist or have existed at some point, b) I have access to a computer, c) I'm literate,  d) I have a pizza that I am eating, and e) I have enough time to eat pizza, and misuse my education and time on meaningless little posts like this. Just by encoding a few words into writing in a little electronic box, a collection of electronic magnetic waves magically changes them into a section of ones and zeroes, takes them over to your computer, and changes them back into words before your very eyes. So much information. From the language that I am using, it is enough to identify me from what must be more than 99% of human life. Even at a), I'm in the minority of all the humans that have ever lived. To be known from afar to have lived. It was important you know. For the dead to be remembered. Still is I suppose, but not so centrally. I'm talking core religious belief. The Egyptian monarchs dedicated mindblowing resources to ensure people would remember their dead kings, diverting rock and sweat and lives to construct towering monuments, commemorating the life and death of the pharoah and his lot. So much is difficult to grasp for us, but think about being an Egyptian man or woman, confronted with this building, far bigger than your limited imagination would have ever allowed. An immense building built for your dead leader, 20 times bigger than your own current dwelling, which not only holds you, but your spouse, 4 children, your parents and sometimes your livestock. We see big constructions all the time, walking down the street, crawling inside them like crabs feeding on a whale carcass. Very rarely do we ever stand back and look at them. See how truly magnificent they are. Appreciate the planning, the sawing, the chiselling, the broken bones, the burnt skin, the strained muscles and neurons it cost to erect them. I stand on the pavement and gawk upwards. Try it sometime. It feels like the bottom of your heart just opened, and the world peers in. So think about the poor Egyptian felt as he stared at the dead kings pyramid, or mortuary temple, or barque shrine. Nothing that size ever really existed that was man made til then, for him anyway. If he was lucky he may have glimpsed the treasures of the sort that may have been inside, at some point in his life. Sacred things from places you don't know exist. Colours on a gemstone on a necklace are even more brilliant when all you're used to is sky and sand and rock. And the shine! Nothing ever looks that clear here. My word, reflections like on the water but not, brighter and cleaner and clearer and more entrancing and frightening, like God flashing a grin at you!! And a slow understanding, entering your mind drip by drip, that you are tiny; a speck on a speck of sand that you think is the whole jostling, moving, unwieldly world. The brief insight that it is a speck and the whole world is elsewhere, pressing down and surrounding you like earth upon a buried person, the excrutiating horror and excitement about the size and number and sheer enormity of life outside. The realisation only lasts the briefest of seconds, before the mind instinctively pushes it away to the back of the brain. Dwelling on that sort of thing can drive a person doolally. Best just get on with things as best you can. Can you appreciate why they worshipped their leaders? Can you understand why they believed the king when he told them he was god and was to be obeyed? I didn't get it at first, but I think I do now.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

I left you at the airport at 5 to 8. Your gate closed at 15 past 8, and your flight departed at 15 to 9. It was on time, even though I prayed it would be late so we’d get more minutes together.

I left not crying, because I never do, but with a heaviness in my chest and a wateriness around my eyeballs. I regret everything, then nothing, then everything again. I flash angry-happy-desperate. 

I travelled back to Saint Denis. It’s quite close to Charles de Gaulle, and I often hear the planes flying over the Seine. At 10 to 9, while walking on the bridge near my apartment, I see the flashing lights in the sky that signal a plane flying overhead. My profile is elevated to the heavens as I watch it, listen to it, suffering my lungs. I breathe your name. “I don’t know if that’s you. I love you.” I stare up a little too long and become disorientated as I try to walk across the bridge while gazing upwards. It must look comical.

Your plane or not, I am struck by the paradox of having nothing but a well of sky between us. Gravity’s apple stops me swimming up. I stand at the bottom of this well and I watch it take you away. I whisper my love in bubbles that I hope the wind takes to you. All of this is impossible. Just wishing it with gasps.

And I think of what I told you. If the billions of anonymous people in this world were featureless sand, I would set them in an ashtray. Films, the television, and teachers tried to tell me every human in the world was special and different and mattered, but I get on and off the Metro everyday, and I see different, undistinguished faces of the crowd, bored, staring, dull eyes, inane gabber.

To me, they are grains of sand. The world is an ashtray, and we are all grains of sand swept up there, not sure and not feeling. I set the ashtray aside. I don’t hate them but I don’t care about them. Upturn it if you like, I do not care.

Except you. You I hold, I keep. You I find in the sand, and are more than a grain. 

My fellow vulture.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Words – long and short, stilted and fluent. Building blocks, communication, vocalisat-

fuckers everyone of them

Mouth teeth lips, alveolial trills, stomach talki-

Eat me you traitors, mouth lips teeth, eat me, chew your words chew your filthy food, eat and ignore, smoke inhale and abandon, cut off from the raw, the

Tongue of an amputee my tongue is an amputee my tongue a stump my tongue the stump my tongue is an amputee

But then

words the sapling stump, a poking yellow tendril is there and it grows and there is sunlight and rain and it grows again and

the words! 

the words grow too, bubbling, branching away, blooming, blossoming, from one to another, until a canopy of hope and eloquence is there, floating and

in my mind

it is penetrative, sweet, cutting sheer like crystal.

And then it’s

empty

a dream I think, because again my stump bangs against

raw

my inside teeth, pathetic, short, chompy, thick, useless.

dead?

It won’t grow just by thinking, I think and I think and force it.

I don’t know what happened, I only had it for the minute but I want the trees again.But my tongue

brain

shrivels in my throat and it was a dream a dream it was all just a dream, and my tongue is an amputee.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

A Tanzanian T-55 races along the main road from Kampala to Jinja, part of the Tanzanian forces trying to capture Jinja from the Ugandan army, as one crew member plays an accordion. Uganda–Tanzania War, April 20, 1979.[960x792] Credit to: u/RoadRunner71

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

So, a few weeks before the lockdown, I was at a gathering for a friend's birthday. It was a relaxed affair, the usual thing of people standing around, drinking, talking. While talking to two guys I knew amicably, though I can't remember precisely how, the topic got onto the British Empire. For clarity, the two guys I was talking to are of Indian descent, and I am of Irish descent, although we are all actually born, raised and still living in Britain.

The conversation was gentle and not too serious, and fairly well-balanced - one of the guys was actually defending it, as his relatives had been soldiers in the British Army, and served during the World Wars. However, we were still pretty critical of it, and to cap off a general feeling from our discussion, and wishing to move on from the topic, I said something purposefully blunt and vulgar, along the lines of: "all in all, the British really have fucked us all over."

The guy who did not have relatives in the army paused, looked at me, and with a slight smirk murmured: "yes, but I think we have it....worse."

My response was to straightaway tell him "let's not do that, this isn't some kind of pissing contest," and he backed off whatever string of thought he was having then and there. My reaction was tamped down enough to maintain the easy-going atmosphere. I did not express the depth of my disgust with his comment, but having seen a similar "erm, I think we have it worse" comment made under a news article, I want to get out here what I would have liked to say to him had I not been worried about ruining the atmosphere of a generally nice party.

Do you know what my family went through, Ireland, during the Troubles? Because I don't. My mother refused to talk about it. She would switch the radio or the television off when it came up on a news bulletin. She would refuse to answer questions about it. She maintained a very particular distance from us, her English children, and from me in particular, her most curious and persistently enquiring child. That distance was not solely cos of Ireland, and partly because of the bizarre and unhealthy relationship she had with our dad, the seedy details of which she kept submerged right up until her death. But that's another topic entirely. No, a lot of what was dragging that woman down, she carried with her when she crossed the Irish Sea. And what it was that haunted her, I have no precise idea.

I know it was bad. Her reactions, sometimes when I prodded too much, as a clueless, empathyless child, told me as much. She cried once, begging me to stop asking about her life before she came to Britain. I got some details out of her, a few droplets of blood out of that stone. The Black and Tans had killed a whole family in a house near where she went to school, she once told me. I was so clueless as to the history of Ireland, I didn't know who the Black and Tans were, that they were the British military police in Ireland who had disbanded years before her birth. She let slip once that her father had to put in severe effort to stop her brothers from joining the IRA, my living uncles who still regarded the British with a burning, black hatred, and communicated a constant rumbling support for Sinn Fein, even after some of them emigrated to the Midlands. I can infer, from a comment made by someone at one of my uncle's funeral, that we did in fact have relatives who were active members, but I was never allowed to even learn their names. Mum herself held a fierce defensiveness of the IRA. One time, after the Omagh bombing in 1998, all the newspapers and television pundits were going on about the heartlessness, the savagery of the attack. I, a precocious-enough tween to read the paper headlines, and dense enough to miss the everpresent atmosphere in our home, parrotted some of the most condemnatory, flat analyses, ripping into the IRA as a violent, hateful group. My mother grabbed my arm, squeezed it until it hurt, her mouth thin, her eyes searing. I remember her trembling. She didn't shout, but her voice sounded strained. "Don't you dare say those things about the IRA. They were the only thing protecting Ireland for the longest time." Later on, when she realised how much she had frightened me, she tried to comfort me. It didn't work. I had no idea what had made her so angry.

A few years after, as a voracious reader of the Horrible Histories books, I read the one on Ireland. I started to learn, on the page, the history of Ireland, how the British had invaded, how many rebellions there were, and how many people were killing the other people. In the early days of Wikipedia, as well as obsessively learning about my favourite heavy metal bands, I poured through the pages on Irish history. I learnt about Michael Collins, the Falls Curfew, Bloody Sunday. It's a fucking mess. I still struggle to keep up with it. And I still don't know, precisely, what haunted my mother. I guess, just all of it? Living in a country during its most violent, frightening days? Being from that community where everyone knows someone who had joined the IRA, or who had been shot, or shot someone else? I could ask my surviving Irish relatives, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, but honestly, how can I bring up something that disturbing, painful, and bloody. I have inherited my mother's attitude in part. I feel a brief flurry of fear and panic when the topic comes up.

Your attitude is disgusting. It is repulsive, mean, shallow and self-serving. It is contingent with an attitude that uses traumatic past as little more than political leverage, and fails to appreciate the real, lived damage.

I'm not going to compare my family's trauma with anyone's, because to reduce it to some kind of metric, to turn it into a pissing contest at some party, with some eejit who has no idea what that pain is like, is not treating that trauma, or anyone else's, with what it needs: respect. I'm willling to accept, in the woke lingo of contemporary social justice movements, that my skin colour carries a certain "privilege," that I don't have to worry about certain things that non-White people have to deal with. I understand the well-meaning desire to square some circles with that approach. But honestly, carrying that blanket, unthinking assumption, and applying with a fucking mallet to every situation, every individual, is disastrous, and can only be done by someone who has no idea of that kind of pain.

This is not a fucking game. Do not chart me on your scale of "who has it worst." And grow fucking up.

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Des millions peuvent s’y tenir. Errants et immobiles. Sans jamais se voir ni s’entendre. Sans jamais se toucher. C’est tout ce qu’on sait. Profondeur de la fosse.

Se voir, Pour finir encore et autres foirades, Minuit, 1976- Beckett (via rainfilleddays)

[whatdorothyhaleknew]

Why is this?

Something that never fails to leave me despairing about this stupid freaking plain of reality of ours:

Wrong People Are Way More Confident And Assert Their Broken, Incorrect Viewpoint Louder Than Anyone Else.

The other day, I was driving. I needed to make a U-turn. On the road where I was driving, there was a 4 way junction with a set of lights and cars coming from the opposite direction on the other side of the road. My sat-nav instructed me to take the turn. I started to turn, paused for the cars coming from the opposite direction, and continued once it was clear.  

However, on the far lane, another car shot down towards me. I continued my turn slowly, as the road was wide and there was plenty of space. However, the woman inside the car was flashing her lights and gesticulating with her hands with a distracting intensity. I, wondering what the hell her problem was, stopped the turn, thinking that maybe she was concerned that I was going to hit her (highly unlikely given the aforementioned width of the road, but whatever to make her calm the hell down.) But no, even as she went past me, she took the trouble to mouth something, and kept on frantically waving with her hands. Whatever had horrified her so, she felt the need to raise her hand out of the window, palm up to the sky in exasperation.

As she had passed, I completed my turn and pulled up at the next lights, with mental hand-wavy woman next to me. Again, she made eye-contact with me. 

There is a common facial expression people who are performing disbelief and outrage frequently like to do, and it entails slightly dropping your jaw, widening your eyes and shaking your head. I cannot say how sincerely the emotions this expression intends to convey are felt by the people who use it, and of course we must allow for the fact that some are truly struggling to comprehend what they are seeing when they do it. However,due to experience, due to so many people doing this one precise expression to react to really very reasonable and forgettable mistakes, I regard it with intense suspicion. 

Guess what this bitch’s face was doing when we met again at the road. 

It took a minute for me to register what her lips were mouthing at me. Mainly I was squinting at her, again to try to figure out why this complete stranger was so frenetic and passionate about another random driver. It was actually when I set off again that it finally clicked. That was why she was pointing back at the junction. That is why her fingers did that little twizzle, representing a U-turn.

“You can’t do a U turn there!” 

Ohhh.

Oh shit. 

Was she right? If she was, I was likely to be in deep shit, as the junction is a big busy one on a main street. There are likely cameras there, and if I have fucked up, I would be due a fine or maybe even points on my licence.

Her drama in letting me know my alleged crime began to gnaw at me; was that horror she evinced in proportion with how bad an idea it was to turn there? As I drove down the road, I almost went through a red light, I was so distracted at the prospect of having made a faux pas that warranted wide-eyed, gesticulated outrage from a complete stranger. 

Now, if she had been correct, I think she may have had a point to be so extra about it all. Some roads don’t allow left turns or U-turns etc. for good reason. Because it’s dangerous. Because of the number of lanes of traffic and where it is directed. I get the importance of road safety, believe me.

But I made a point of keeping my eyes peeled as I drove back along that road, to see if I *had* made a mistake. 

And there was nothing. 

No “no U-turn” signs. Not any. I looked and looked every time I drove down the road for days after. I had a conversation with a taxi driver about it when I was next in one. There was absolutely no reason to think that junction prohibited u-turns. But I know the next time I will need to make a turn there, I will remember mad gesticulating woman, and her utterly erroneous, wrong confidence in what she was doing.

This person almost caused me to drive through a red light because she was so certain she was right. She took up free rent in my mind, had me questioning my own knowledge, my ability and decision-making. And she was utterly utterly wrong. On every count.

Moral of the story: 

do not wave at random people in cars, specially when they are doing a manoeuvre. You’ll distract them, stress them out, and possibly cause an accident.

Also, people are insanely certain of their thoughts. Waving, shouting at strangers certain. And it makes living difficult.

Ties into a long-standing suspicion of mine: the more stated someone’s viewpoint is, the more righteously it is delivered, is more of a reason to inspect it with enhanced scrutiny. Cos the people who believe they are the most right, are quite often really quite terribly wrong.