Being Intimate

I’ve just got back from Salzburg, where I was presenting at a conference on Persons, Intimacy and Love. It was good, and worthwhile, but utterly exhausting. Two full days of listening, with a hearing impairment, to lectures and to people talking over lunch and wine and coffee, completely did me in. I stayed at the hotel where the conference was being held. It didn’t have much to recommend it except for its pillows, which were the biggest and fluffiest I have ever seen; sleeping on them was like burying my head in a nest of clouds. The town itself didn’t have much to recommend it – it was touristy, and generally unattractive. T told me to piss on anything to do with Mozart, but had I followed his instructions they would have resulted in a bladder complaint. Instead I bought him some Mozart tat, just to be perverse.

And as I rounded the corner in one of the cobbled streets, I came across a shop which had rows and rows of painted eggs in its windows. It reminded me (again) of a fairy tale we’d read when we were kids, and even though I’ve racked my brains for a week I can’t remember which story it was. All I can remember are these beautiful painted eggs, and thinking how much I wanted one of them. You couldn’t get eggs like that in Australia.

At the back of the touristy streets was a big church, and below the church were some fruit markets, and a stall selling lavender. The smell was so rich that I was tempted to buy some, but I resisted. I don’t need lavender.

However, on the 2nd and 3rd days it SNOWED. Not grotty London snow, but big fat snowflakes that settled on the ground; it was just like being in a snowdome. After that the town was much prettier, and as the taxi driver took me to the airport, the mountains appeared in the distance, covered in snow and sunlight; it was gorgeous. On some other hills that rose above the town was a forest without any leaves, very grim and forboding like something out of the Grimms Fairy Tales, and I realised how only those kinds of stories could have been written in Europe. Near the hotel were the Mirabell Gardens, in which the song ‘Do Re Me’ from the Sound of Music was sung.

At this point I must make a most dreadful confession: in 1999 I went on the Sound of Music tour. It was kind of under duress, but mostly due to my own timidity, because I didn’t want to be left behind while my travelling companions went off, so I went and saw a lake with a lot of rubbish in it, a gazebo, the inside of a bus, the tour guide cracking jokes (which E told me were awful) and the selfsame gardens, which were lovelier then as it was summer while we were travelling.

I was glad when it was all over though (both the Sound of Music tour and the conference), and came back to (slightly) warmer climes. People said they enjoyed my paper on Molloy, but I didn’t get much feedback. There weren’t that many literature people there and I think they didn’t feel qualified to comment on it. Well, I didn’t feel I could comment on theirs; half of the papers went over my head. I was grumbling to someone about how academics rarely wrote in an accessible way and she replied that often it was because they couldn’t write in any other way; she certainly couldn’t, and I thought, Oops, I’ve put my foot in that one.

'Must be a chick thing.'

Thus spake the numbskull in ‘Alien Resurrection’ after Ripley had blown to bits the tanks full of attempts at recreating her self from a bit of DNA left on a piece of ice in the last film (I know that was a bad sentence, but I can’t be bothered to fix it). Or rather, the idiot who wrote that stupid line and ruined the whole scene.

I love Aliens. Once I was so infatuated with Ripley (during my anorexic adolescence when I found her leanness so very appealing) that I thought that, if I had a daughter, I would call her Sigourney. Then a friend asked, ‘So what would you do for her nickname? Call her Siggy?’ and I admitted that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. But on that note, I like the themes of motherhood, pregnancy and hosts that ripple through the stories, especially in the last film, where the boundaries between alien and human began to break down, and you can't tell what a mother isanymore, because the doctoring of DNA has become motherhood. Which is why that line shat me, because it pointed so obviously to what was there, that it assumed the viewers were dumb.

But what I like most of all about the movies is that Ripley is such a ball-breaker. She’s as tough as nails, smart and has satisfyingly sarcastic one-liners. I said to A- that, sadly, I didn’t think they made movies with strong female characters like that anymore and A- replied, ‘I don’t think they have ever!’ (She also said, in a discussion we had with H about whether it was the blood or the Alien’s saliva that was acidic, and H said it was the blood, and A- said, ‘I hope she doesn’t menstruate,’ and I said, ‘I bet they didn’t even think of that.’)

Yet I found it unnerving that it was still a resurrection, because although I was glad Ripley had come back to life, it was still upsetting that she wasn’t completely the same. It was like in the Dune novels, by Brian Herbert, when Duncan Idaho was replicated each time, but always changed some way. I loved that character, and I was disappointed that he never lived as he originally had.

Anyway I like these ideas about perpetuating love and life, and I dimly recall Sue Woolfe saying, in an interview, that someone like Ada Lovelace had invented the computer so she could find some way of extending the life of a person she loved, who was dying. It’s for the same reason that I’m interested in memory, and in the question of how you can bring back someone who you’ve irrevocably lost through the process of remembering them. And I’m wondering if I’ll ever be good enough to write something science fictiony, and have it work as well as well as Aliens.

But maybe it was a chick thing, on Friday, to burst into tears after spending an hour and a half getting to the British Library (there was an incident of some sort, so the police had cordoned off half the street so I had to walk to St Pancras from halfway down City Road, in very high red heels), only to discover that I’d left my card behind and couldn’t get into the reading room. I was already overwrought because it had taken so long to leave that house that I felt like I was living out my recurring nightmare of never getting anywhere because of having so much stuff to pack. So I went to the membership desk and asked if there was anyway of getting a temporary membership card and the man said yes, there was, if I paid £5 and provided proof of address and identity. Since I can’t even afford to pick up my dry cleaning, let alone pay £5, and since I’m not in the habit of carrying around my latest gas bill, there was no way out of it, and in despair I rushed into the ladies’ and started howling. Naturally it would have been more efficacious to cry in front of the man at the reception desk but unfortunately I hate crying in front of other people. There was nothing for it but to get on the bus and go back home. I did, however, see a man in a suit playing a guitar in a parking lot and, tossed onto the top of a bus shelter, a potato that had been spraypainted blue and jabbed full of red toothpicks.

Meanwhile, I am going mental (just in case it wasn't obvious from the abovementioned incident) because I haven’t been writing. I think the instability also has something with the fact that my baby (so to speak) of seven years has left me and now I need something else to fill the space. Stories keep welling up in me, bursting to be written down, and I just can’t seem to find the time.

At least now I’m writing in notebooks again, which I haven’t done for years, and I’m using the chocolate brown one that C sent me after we’d had a fight. I’m writing down my dreams, because A- said she’d had a dream that she, H and I had moved to a house by the beach, and I said I never had happy dreams, so I’m logging my dreams for a month to see what they’re like. So far I’ve had my only other recurring nightmare – about marrying a man I don’t love, and having a less-than-perfect wedding – and a dream about being frustrated with H because he was having a dinner party and it wasn’t organised, as usual.

And I have, at last, found an author who inspires me – Marguerite Duras. I’ve just finished ‘The War’ and for a day I was slightly stunned by the potency of her words. I read ‘The Lover’ last year, but I found the film far better than the book. Naturally, this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Tony Leung was stark naked in it, but all the same I think I’ll go back to that book and try it again. And I might watch the film again too.

What to Wear?

I’m slowly beginning to realise that there is such a thing as having too many clothes. Last Friday was V’s party and after wrestling with my velvet Fanchulla dress for ages (moving buttons, sewing and unpicking illegal seams, swearing a great deal) I finally had to concede that it was obviously made for someone with a much longer torso than mine and would never do grace to my curves in the way that I wanted. And so, feeling bereft (for it would have gone splendidly with my red boots), I pulled everything else out of my cupboard and tried to find something else. Several hours later I decided on my bottle green top, asymmetrical black skirt and the boots, and then I reflected how appalling it was that, even though I my mind was slow with exhaustion and I’d been cooking hors d’ouevres in between, one could waste so much time trying to work out what to wear.

I know that I have too much stuff because the only recurring dream I have is of being late for something because it takes me hours and hours to pack everything, or hours and hours to find something before I can go somewhere. I think I have only ever once successfully got to where I wanted to be before I woke up. But this won’t stop me from buying more clothes; there are just too many pretty things in this world that must be possessed.

And speaking of not reaching one’s destination, it seems that every time I try to get to the Orangery in Hyde Park, I am late. Last time it was daylight saving: as was my wont, I wound my watch back instead of forward and left H to read the paper for two hours until my arrival; however that was the last time I ever get it wrong, because a friend has since taught me the very useful maxim ‘Spring forward, fall back’. This time I left my bus pass at home, and being an impoverished student (in theory, at least) I can’t afford to travel without my Oyster card. I was already cutting it fine, having taken too long to get out of bed, which then left less time for the crucial activities of applying one’s makeup and doing one’s hair to one’s satisfaction. Then of course, the Tube was fucked, and it stopped, as it often does, in the middle of a dark tunnel. This is why I tend not to take the Tube. When it stops in dark tunnels, my heartbeat vaults and I start hyperventilating with claustrophobia. I marvelled, this time, that the woman next to me could read so calmly, and take out a packet of rice cakes and munch on them.

On recounting this to H and R over coffee and cake (‘This one is low-calorie,’ said the waiter as he placed a berry tart in front of us.’ After he’d gone, I took a bite and said, ‘Low calorie my arse.’ But I appreciated his efforts to make me eat it, which I did, as calories tend not to bother me), H said that if I ever do have a panic attack, I should go all-out, and scream, ‘I’m going to DIE!’ and that would set off everyone else in the Tube who was on tenterhooks. A bit like the kid who vomits on a bus, and sets all the other kids off barfing.

And just like the last time I was late to the Orangery, there were gale-force winds to contend with and the ground was soft with rain so my stilettos insisted on aerating the soil and the wind blew my hair into my face so that it got stuck to my lip gloss, and I was in a right strop by the time I got there, esp as H and R had not arrived after I walked so fast to make up (however slightly) for my lateness. But in the five minutes it took them to arrive, I calmed down, found a bench, combed my hair and tried not to squint against the light, as one needs to get as much light in winter as possible, to regulate one’s circadian rhythms.

The next day as we walked along the canal, we told B about the swans clustered around the man feeding the birds by the pond, and how they came up to his waist, and B in turn told us of some trashy newspaper like the Sun that had the headline ‘Asylum Seekers Eat Swans’ and I thought how interesting that was (regardless of whether it was true, which I doubt it was) – it would be like someone coming to Australia and eating all the koalas. The asylum seekers were eating the swans that were protected by the queen – they were eating the heart of the empire, so to speak. Though I doubt the Sun shone that particular light on it, except subliminally.

At work, a wall overlooking over the quadrangle is covered with leaves that are slowly turning red. But they’ve started turning on the outer edges of the wall, for what reason I can’t understand. So the centre is greenish, but the rest of it is red. In summer, when all the leaves are fresh, the breeze makes them ripple like a green ocean.

Mum said that yesterday it snowed at home – in mid-November! And also in Ballarat and other parts of Victoria. The weather is seriously fucked. I’m not complaining that it’s warm here – I loathe the British winters – but it’s disturbing when you see blossoms coming out on the trees at the Barbican in Autumn. What will they do now when Spring comes, and they’ve already flowered?