Susan Green

Spring came in with sunshine and warmth. Yesterday in the late afternoon I stood with my husband in the courtyard at the front of our house. A grey shrike thrush flew to a blossoming plum tree, perched on the crown for all to see and sang his little heart out. We watched, thrilled, as his throat and chest vibrated with the effort; according to my bird book, The Australian Bird Guide by Peter Menkhorst et al, this little grey bird has a pure, ringing, rhythmic voice, and a liquid five-note song. All that, and more; his voice is audible joy. After broadcasting to the neighbourhood, he rushed around from bush to shrub, perching to flirt and pose and add a note or two, quite un-shy and seeming actually happy to be in our presence. Eventually we heard an answering bird – just a short, sharp single note, which the book describes as a ‘contact call’ – and our thrush flew away.

We were out there to survey the results of my recent planting spree –  violas, pink and purple and yellow; a germander bush, silvery leaved with pale lavender flowers; two different heucheras (lime green and deep purple), low and sprawling, which I hope will want to become ground covers; a hellebore or winter rose, with palest green flowers; and two plants I’ve never grown before, bought to see how they turn out, a penstemon, dark green strappy leaves and blue flowers; and a saxifrage, which looks like a tiny squashed cabbage and is supposed to erupt with little pink flowers on stems. We shall see.

That’s the great thing about gardening; you wait, and then you see.
We were seeing how unpromising looking bulbs turn into absolute stunners. My little crocus (crocuses? crocii?) are nearly finished but now it’s time for the big guns; tulips. They are trembling on the brink. After going for the deep reds, purples and nearly-blacks in the past, with a not-to-be-repeated diversion into frilly weird pinkness last year, I have gone for orange and ginger this time. Stupidly, I put the tags in the pots but they were made of card and so I have no idea what my beauties are. But it doesn’t matter. I know that some gardeners are systematic about such things, so that they can repeat a success and avoid a failure, but somehow I am trusting that next year when I’m looking at the bulb catalogue, I’ll remember. And maybe, anyway, I will choose another colour.

My last post was inspired by the traffic essay of Rachel Cusk; this one, by reading Derek Jarman’s diaries from 1989-90, Modern Nature. The book is a nice, cheap Vintage reprint with an introductory essay by Olivia Laing, who is my new girl crush. I’m not sure that many young people would know who Jarman was; he died of AIDS-related illness in 1990.  He was a writer and gay activist, an artist, stage designer and perhaps most famously, a film director. As a young art student in the late 1970’s, I went to see his angry, sad, violent Jubilee. I remember not liking it, but then I didn’t ‘get’ punk. I was more David Bowie than the Sex Pistols. What I have never forgotten was his spellbinding version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The final sequence, where a crew of uniformed sailors dance and jazz singer Elisabeth Welch sings ‘Stormy Weather’ is utterly magical.
And he was a gardener. At Prospect Cottage, his retreat on the beach at Dungeness in the shadow of the nuclear power station, the odds were stacked against him. Wind, exposure, salt, shingle and stones and sand for soil  – nevertheless, he persisted.

Modern Nature takes in all of these strands. Sometimes the contrast is jarring. He makes lists of plant names that sound like incantations –  loosestrife, bugloss, buckthorn – and then, back to London, goes cruising on Hampstead Heath. This:
There is the suspicion of rain in the air, but a dry wind blows. The downy seeds of the willow herb float by. The back seed pods of the broom split with a crackling sound.
At the end of the garden the sloes are turning purple, and the blackberries are ripe. My wild pear tree wilts in the drought, and the nettles are dead and rattle in the wind.
And this:
Finding sexual partners was difficult and they were often transitory   – hardly bothered to take their pants down before buttoning up. And the police might raid, send the prettiest ones in as agents provocateurs. They had hard-ons but didn’t come. Just arrested you.
But now, halfway through the book, I’m loving the juxtaposition. Olivia Laing says in her introduction that her adult life was founded in the pages of this book.
It was here I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely).

Ignoring boundaries. Exactly. It’s what he does here. I guess that’s the beauty of the diary form. You can recount your daily life, you can reminisce and gossip. You can talk to yourself about sex and death (in those far-off days, being diagnosed as HIV-positive usually was a death sentence) and art and memory. And you can name the plants that you nurture and grow  –  wild fig, sempervivum, dead-nettle, night-scented stock – as you submit yourself to the eternal rhythm of the seasons.

www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jul/21/derek-jarman-prospect-cottage-dungeness-kent-garden-museum-london

I pause, waiting for the kettle to boil, standing at the kitchen window and looking out into the gathering dusk. This part of the house is set up high on stumps so that it’s almost at second storey height; I can overlook our unruly garden right to the back of our neighbour’s house. Homing birds zoom between the shrubs and trees across my line of sight but my eye is drawn to a brilliant rectangle of light within a dark frame. It’s Joe’s* kitchen window; I can see from mine into his.

And now as I pour boiling water into my cup, I see him. He’s there, maybe fifty metres away, all lit up but unaware, and he’s bobbing up and down and then twisting sideways in what could be an odd kind of dance or exercise routine but probably isn’t. I stare, fascinated. What is he doing? I have to know, I have to make sense of these movements of his – in spite of my uneasy feeling that I am about to enter voyeuristic Rear Window territory. Though I don’t know for sure, with my lifetime knowledge of kitchen floorplans I think I can safely assume the window is in front of the kitchen sink. So it’s got to be something sink-related. Or undersink-related. I keep watching. Then I see the flash of metal and he stops the weird dance and turns away. My brain works furiously and then it all falls into place. He’s been looking for an oven tray. He’s been sorting through a low cupboard, taking out non-tray items, putting them on the bench and then going back in again until he finds the right one. A kind of relief floods through me. Puzzle solved.

And I think about artificial intelligence, about robot brains. I know they can look at CCTV footage of every person who passes every camera in a city and put a name to each face. But could they interpret the data – the time of day, the weird movements, the flash of metal – and make up the story, as I did?  Creativity does not depend on rules or algorithms – it’s a leap into the dark, informed by personal, lived, felt experience. A computer can’t know what it’s like to grow increasingly more frustrated as you clash and bang through piles of irrelevant bakeware in an inconveniently low cupboard, but I do.

My neighbour Joe, leisurely now, puts something onto the tray and places it in the oven. He goes to the fridge but his back is to me, so I can’t see whether he’s reaching for a lettuce or the butter or a jar of pickled onions. Ah, yes, here he is, pouring liquid into a stemmed glass. A glass of wine is a good guess. Red or white? I’m not close enough to tell.

“And that’s enough now, Susan,” I say out loud. I’m starting to feel bad even though my neighbour has no idea he’s been spied upon. Everyone deserves to drink their pre-dinner wine in peace, I decide, drawing the blinds and reaching for my lukewarm tea.

But now, I start to wonder…what’s Joe having for dinner?

*Not his real name!

https://mindmatters.ai/2020/08/six-limitations-of-artificial-intelligence-as-we-know-it/

First day of Spring!

I’m either reading less fiction, or more non-fiction – I’m not sure. I haven’t been able to get my teeth into any novels lately, and at tomorrow’s Book Group Zoom meeting I am going to have to confess, yet again, that I have not read the book.

But I have been reading. Lately, essays and memoirs: Feel Free by Zadie Smith, More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing and now Coventry by Rachel Cusk.

This was my introduction to Cusk’s writing, although I’d been aware of her fiction for a few years and her Outline trilogy has been strongly recommended to me (as in, “Susan, you’d love Rachel Cusk!”). I’m not so sure that ‘love’ is the right word; I don’t feel an incipient girl crush of the kind I have for Rebecca Solnit or, more recently, Olivia Laing.  Coventry reveals a detached and occasionally rather spiky sensibility and indeed the first essay I read, Driving as Metaphor, seemed deliberately off-putting.

The village where I live is on the coast road, and there is much talk among the residents about how to control the speed at which people drive through it. The slowness that frustrates and impedes us when we are trying to drive on the roads outside our villages becomes immaterial from our perspective as homeowners; from this angle, it appears that  people around here drive not too slowly but too fast. This might seems merely a good example of the corrosion of truth by point of view. Equally, a person travelling by bicycle feels an antipathy towards cars, and yet once inside a car can immediately become irritated by cyclists, and as a pedestrian could dislike them both, sometimes all in the course of a single day.

I persisted through the traffic flow, and finally I ‘got it’, although the ‘it’ I got is maybe not what Cusk intended. I thought, This is what it’s like to pay attention and report back with as much clarity as you can; this is taking a small slice of existence, examining it minutely and then seeing where it leads. This is what thinking is like. Which is hopefully on to broader and unexpected perspectives.

After I read a couple of articles and interviews online, I realised that the other aspect of her writing is honesty; she’s not concerned about seeming likeable or relateable. Her commitment to honesty in an earlier memoir, Aftermath, where she wrote about her marriage breakdown, apparently caused such media and personal hostility that the experience left her, for a time, broken. In an interview in The Guardian, she said, “Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.” www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/24/rachel-cusk-interview-aftermath-outline

The essays in Coventry are divided between memoir and literary/artistic/ cultural criticism and for my money the first category is the most compelling. By the time I’d read Cusk on traffic, civility, home-making, teenagers and fractured relationships with spouses and parents I did not want her for my new best friend, but I certainly wanted to read more and more of her cool, intelligent and unsparing commentary.

We went for a walk yesterday afternoon. It was sunny and lovely and the bush is springing to life after all the winter rains we’ve had. Much of my childhood was spent living near the beach; I spent hours searching for shells and crabs and odd treasures washed up on the tide. If I may boast, I’m very good at spotting little things and my theory is that those days on the shore trained me to look down. (Alternatively, it’s just short sightedness!)

Yesterday’s wild treasures in the bush were Early Nancy and Nodding Greenhoods. In a tiny, quiet, un-flashy way – aren’t they spectacular? And on the domestic front, these gorgeous crocus. For years I’ve planted pots of tulips and grape hyacinth to cheer us up in the early spring; this year I branched out with Snow Crocus and Crocus ‘Pickwick’. They’re just tiny little things but when you bob down and look, they’re spectacular too.

The world seems full of pain and distress right now. Mainly, it’s the pandemic, rolling on and on like a juggernaut, crushing lives and hopes and dreams. And I don’t mean the Bali holiday, the anniversary cruise, the gap-year spent backpacking. I mean school, interrupted. Careers, smashed. Whole industries and sectors of our communities – small businesses of all kinds, cafes, professional and community sports, theatre, live music, arts, universities, and more – on hold or wiped out. The rise in family violence, in depression and anxiety. We are doing better at protecting vulnerable people in aged care, but my friend who works at a local facility says that without volunteers and visitors, many residents are under-stimulated and lonely.

Add to that the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The steady stream of reports on government incompetence (vaccine rollout) and downright corruption (sports rorts, car parks). State sanctioned (and funded) bigotry in religious schools. The rise of neo-Nazis in our own backyard. Anti-vaxxers. The heartbreaking situation in Afghanistan, and our shameful abandonment of vulnerable civilians who worked with our troops. In response to all these and more, our Prime Minister shows himself to be gutless, clueless and – basically – pointless.

So much to be sad and angry about. The case for despair is strong. During the first long lockdown in 2020, I was OK. When I read about the mental health harms that so many were experiencing, I felt somewhat insulated. I’m a raging introvert in any case, so the enforced calm was quite acceptable. I wasn’t sick or broke or homeless, nor was anyone close or dear to me, so my knowledge was second-hand, from the news. Digital news, mainly; I’ve never had the TV news habit.

But now, like so many others, I’m fatigued. I had been thinking there would be an ‘after time’ when this ended, when we would all go back to normal. But I see that we won’t be able to do that. Our lives have been changed and I often wonder what my parents would think. It happened to them; their generation went through a world war.

But – reasons to be cheerful.

#1 Babies.

Babies unselfconsciously elicit adoration when they go out in public; they just do. It worries me that we are all masked and they can’t see the smiles any more. Yesterday in line at the chemist, a masked elderly lady and a 16-month-old had a mutually satisfying game of peek-a-boo while his mother looked on. I could only see the baby smiling but that was enough.

#2 Libraries.

I am reading up a storm, and taking home armfuls of books and magazines. For free! How splendid.

#3 Writing.

Last week, I decided to get back on the horse after a few falls – fails – and write a short story. I find I can still do it. Amazement, astonishment, gratitude! It’s a wonderful thing, to sit down at the computer, start work… and then think about a cup of tea, and look at the time, and realise that my goodness, two hours have passed and I didn’t even know it.

#4. Spring Gardens.

I quote from Monty Don’s The Ivington Diaries, because he says it better than I could.

Sometimes you just want to say, Look – here we are again. Yes, I know it is exactly where we were last year, and yes, I know that these particular flowers or plants did pretty much the same kind of thing then and every preceding year before that, but if that is not a miracle then I genuinely don’t know what is. One of the joys of gardening is the process of doing the same thing year after  year and even day after day. Instead of being boring, this constant and subtle repetition is actually the most fascinating part of it.

#5. My husband.

Just because.

The Ouse is a small English river, only 84 kilometres long (and for comparison, the Thames is 346 kilometres and here in Australia, the Murray is 2,508 kilometres long). To those who are interested in literary lives, it is most famous as the river into which Virginia Woolf waded, with stones in the pocket of her coat, and drowned. One midsummer day in 2009,  in the aftermath of losing  her job and her relationship with the man she loved, Olivia Laing set out to walk the length of the Ouse.

I wanted to clear out, in all senses of the phrase, and I felt somewhere deep inside me that the river was where I needed to be. I began to buy maps compulsively, though I’ve always been map-shy. Some I pinned on my wall; one, a geological chart of the underlying ground, was so beautiful I kept it by my bed. What I had in mind was a survey or sounding, a way of catching and logging what a little patch of England looked like one midsummer week at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That’s what I told people, anyway. The truth was less easy to explain. I wanted somehow to get beneath the surface of the daily world, as a sleeper shrugs off the ordinary air and crests towards dreams.

So, here is another woman walking, along a meandering path beside the Ouse, from its rising-place in a muddy paddock to its exit at the coast. There is nothing spectacular in this journey, no sublime landscapes or scary wild creatures or blizzards or floods.  She doesn’t sleep rough – she spends her nights sleeping at inns along the way, or in the houses of friends – and nothing is more gruelling, really, than the occasional hot day. But that’s not the point; Laing hasn’t set out to challenge herself to feats of physical endurance; she is walking and thinking and feeling and looking and  –  I imagine  – writing, if only in her head.

And the writing is the thing. Poetic, attentive, hypnotic in its accumulation of detail.

It was just after sunset and everything had stilled, the sky shot faintly with rose. The reflections in the lake seemed sunk very deep. The water pleated as carp sank and climbed, occasionally breaking the water as shivers. Beneath them, the clouds made their way east. At the far side of the lake the trees were reflected in sooty green and when the fish jumped there the ripples ran in white concentric circles. On the near side, where there was only pale sky on the skin of the water, the ripples flashed dark, a trick of the light I’d never seen before.

Her sensitivity to landscape, to the details of birds and plants and animals that inhabit the landscape, make this a slow and meditative summer journey, with the writing and the structure of the book as meandering as its subject. Subjects, plural. For Laing weaves in all sorts of topics; biography, literature, mythology, science, history.  Neolithic settlers, Saxon villages, Norman castles, Tudor sewage works; farmers and fossil-hunters and medieval soldiery. Other writers apart from Woolf make an appearance on her journey. There’s Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, and Iris Murdoch.

A book like this is probably not for every reader, but then what book is? It doesn’t fit neatly into a category (memoir? biography? nature?); it’s not a self-help book exhorting us to get out into nature, nor is it inspirational (challenges overcome!) or spill-your guts confessional. I’m not really sure what it is. Beautiful, I suppose.

It’s a thing, a genre. It’s my new obsession. Women, walking. Women thinking while walking. Women walking while looking backward and forwards, moving between their pasts and their futures and meditating on nature. Human nature seems to come into stark contrast with the other kind, whether wild and tamed, whether animal, mineral or vegetable. Something about walking, putting one foot in front of the other no matter the weather or the terrain or the state of your feet, seems to work some kind of magic, seems to restore bodies, hearts and minds – if not to health and happiness, at least to some kind of workable balance.

The first of the genre to pop into my consciousness was the American writer Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild. It was published 2012 and describes her gruelling 1770 kilometre trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. I often found myself wincing as I read. Not just from her descriptions of the skin peeling from her blistered feet, but from the lacerating unsparing inventory of her life she took along the way. Her journey of self discovery was often brutal.

Now, more books have popped up. This year, I’ve read Sarah Wilson’s This One Wild and Precious Life, Katherine May’s The Electricity of Every Living Thing, To the River by my new literary girl crush, Olivia Laing and Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path,

Raynor Winn and her husband Moth have lost their farm due to a legal dispute; it’s their own incompetence and inexperience with the law that’s tipped them into homelessness. I mean, really; they have no home, and the government benefits provide very little money. Added to this, Moth has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. So they decide, seemingly on a whim, to walk the South West Coast Path, over a thousand kilometres from Somerset to Dorset. Though Winn competently describes the beautiful landscape of cliffs and beaches and sea in Devon and Cornwall, where her writing comes alive for me is in the difficulties of the walk.  The bad weather, the nights spent illegally in car parks or in farmer’s paddocks, waking to the sound of farting cows; the al fresco toileting, the feeling of  unwashed hair and body and clothes. She and Moth struggle with hunger and exhaustion, with sore feet and encroaching illness, but she’s matter of fact. They get on with it.

We left Bude with enough twenty-pence packs of noodles to last a week and a lot of water. Walking out of the genteel holiday spot, past the retired ladies tennis club, past the strangely folded rocks and the tower on the headland. The path felt remote now. Without money, we had moved into a world apart. It was nearly dark when we found a corner in a field of thistles, ate noodles and slept.

They make miserable mistakes with money and Winn writes movingly of her feeling of exclusion by virtue of their poverty and homelessness. She is a thoughtful writer but it’s not a lyrical or literary book, rather a gritty tale of love and endurance and redemption. Because in the course of the walk, Moth goes into a kind of remission, their 32-year marriage grows even stronger… and Winn finds her voice as a writer.

I’m a writer, but like most writers, I need a day job. And I have a new one.

My old job was as a bookseller. Two days a week, 9 to 5.30. I  spent my days answering phones, taking orders, helping customers and organising returns. Bookstores aren’t generally high pressure work environments, but they can be busy – and I easily tracked 10,000 steps a day around the shop. When it was quieter, I dusted and shelved and read the back cover blurbs. It was part of the job to keep up with the latest publishing news; I knew all about the hot new releases, the up-and-coming authors, the latest fads and fashions in the various genres; I picked over the piles of reading copies provided by our reps and discussed them eagerly with my colleagues and our customers. As well, I sold books at book launches and events and for three years, wearing my bookseller’s hat, I presented ‘Green’s Guide to Good Books’ at the school’s day for the Bendigo Writer’s Festival.

On the days when I wasn’t at the shop, I wrote. Eight books – two unpublished –  in twenty four years, which seems like a reasonable strike rate when you factor in home making and  child rearing and caring for aged parents and life. For 24 years I enjoyed being ‘Susan from the Bookroom’. A dream job for a writer.
Perhaps.

Then came  that first Victorian lockdown in late March 2020. A covid epiphany. I knew I had to have a change. I needed to do something different and here was my chance. I enrolled in the Cert III in Aged Care at our local TAFE…and I still don’t really know why. Perhaps it didn’t really matter what I did, as long as I did something new. Perhaps I wanted to do something meaningful in my last few years in the paid workforce. Or maybe it was because I had cared for my parents and saw how essential it was that older people should be supported to stay in their own homes. Then there was the example of my old bookshop colleague and friend the wonderful Liz – now lost to ovarian cancer  – who retired from the shop only to reinvent herself in aged care.  I completed my coursework – via the dreaded Zoom meeting – and found it harder than I’d imagined. Now, I didn’t think it would be a doddle, but the three days a week class time really did translate into full time study. There was a hold up with the 3 week practical placement, and in the end the whole lot took a frustrating nine months instead of four due to Victoria’s ongoing lockdowns and ensuing restrictions on students going into facilities.

And now – starting five weeks ago –  I am a direct care worker for the local council. I sometimes work from 8am until 5 pm. It is exhausting – but new jobs always are. At times it’s gruelling (physically, emotionally) and at other times joyous and fun and rewarding.
For three days a week instead of swanning about among books, I am to be found driving around town and out into the surrounding country, providing personal care and home care to aged clients in their own homes. Translated, that means assisting people to shower and dress. Sometimes I apply compression stockings, a tortuous process of persuading a very, very tight and very, very unwilling elasticated tube to go onto my client’s foot and lower leg. Oh, and I clean their houses, too – vac, mop, do the bathrooms and toilets. There’s a lot of cleaning. And a lot of chatting. I have discovered that chatting is my super-power.

But what about the writing? Do I have the time, the energy, the willpower, the desire?
There’s a novel for adults on the back burner. I finished a rough and shitty first draft before I began my TAFE course, did some revision in the gap before placement, and now – as of my last day off, when I completed my daily target of 1000 words – I am back to the book again. Winter is prime writing time, after all. There’s no fire in the belly any more, but perhaps I don’t need it. After 13 books published, and a few more orphan manuscripts that sit unloved in the filing cabinet, I should know what I’m doing.

We shall see.

Elinor Cleghorn, an English scholar, researcher and writer, has written a must-read book about how Western medicine has failed women…but it’s almost unreadable. For me, anyway. Not because it’s badly written – not at all – but because the subject is just so damned upsetting and infuriating!

It starts badly in ancient Greece.  The male body was the standard and thus women’s bodies (and it follows that women themselves) were defective. Especially when the poor things were defined and dominated by their wombs, which bizarrely the ancients believed could wander all over the body wreaking havoc on a woman’s health.
It got worse over the centuries, with normal women’s bodies seen as dangerous to themselves and to men. If you weren’t properly submissive and docile you were likely to be punished. Witches were burned, ‘hysterics’ confined to madhouses,  menstruation and menopause defined as illnesses and an excuse for denying women education and political rights, the control of their own destinies, property and bodies. The sections detailing surgery to remove the ovaries or clitorises for troublesome women and girls were so shocking that I had to skip over the details.
The 20th century saw many advances in science and medicine, but for women, not such a great improvement. The myth of the ‘wandering womb’ faded away, but ‘hormones’ as a catch-all diagnosis meant women’s pain and suffering was still too often not listened to or properly investigated. Even into the 21st century, a male-centred medicine lets women down in so many ways. The average time for a woman to get a diagnosis of endometriosis is seven years and women with chronic pain are still prescribed anti-depressants instead of pain relief. It’s unfair, infuriating and deeply frustrating to be patronised, fobbed off and disbelieved. I know, I’ve been there, and so has Cleghorn. After many awful years of struggling to have her symptoms recognised, she was finally diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder.
The book is full of stories not just of suffering females, but of the many brave and revolutionary women who have fought and succeeded in challenging Western medicine to change.

Cleghorn writes, “Medicine must hear unwell women when they speak – not as females, weighed down by the myths of the man-made world, but as human beings. Medicine must listen to and believe our testimonies about our own bodies, and ultimately turn its energies, time and money towards finally solving our medical mysteries. The answers reside in our bodies, and in the histories our bodies have been writing.”