On the Precious and the Perplexing.

The dream I had last night was a vague, misty affair. I was helping somebody do a job with a pile of white plastic pipes which had a bore of about two inches. But I was hesitant because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them, why I was there at all, and I couldn’t properly see the man I was supposed to be helping.

When I woke up I was beset by the fear that if the present drought in the UK continues, the rivers and reservoirs might soon run dry. I imagined the consequences and they became ever more awful until we were all dirty, decrepit, and finally dead so it didn’t matter any more.

And then I remembered that all through my life – even as a young boy – I’ve wondered why we don’t commit resources to the development of desalinisation technology and the provision of infrastructure to distribute purified sea water to where it’s needed. It always struck me that this would be a far more sensible use of resources than going to the moon, keeping huge militaries, killing children in Iranian schools, and producing shiny things to bolster the egos of the dim witted. The confidence we have that the planet will always continue to behave in a manner commensurate with human interest sometimes seems a little risky. And it seems a little odd that while we can develop software capable of doing nearly everything that people used to do, we still can’t develop the means to take salt out of water efficiently.

And then I used a few dozen gallons of precious water to have a shower. I always feel weak and a little ill after a shower, and I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with guilt. They say the INFJ mind works differently than the normal mind. Well, I’ve spent a lifetime being driven into the wilderness, mostly alone, by it, so they’re probably right.

But here’s a little end note: When I was walking up the lane earlier I was passed by a big, articulated box truck. The whole of its back doors was covered by an image of white plastic pipes, seen end on as they were in the dream. And up came that old question about coincidence again.

Getting to Know Me.

There’s an American woman on YouTube who does reaction videos on old British children’s TV shows. Her gravelly voice sounds a bit New York to me, but I’m no expert on American accents (except Deep South, of course; we all know the drawl), but the point is this:

She’s done at least two now on The Magic Roundabout, and it just occurred to me that when I’m in high functioning mode I’m the perfect cocktail of one part Dylan, one part Ermintrude, and one part Dougal. Anyone familiar with the British version of the show (the original was French with the same characters but different stories) will know what I mean. And the main point in saying this is that I think I need a Florence.

(When I’m in low functioning mode I’m pure, unadulterated Eeyore – which I thought was an oxymoron before I learned the true definition of the word. I blame a cousin of mine from whom I first heard it.)

Must stop making Me posts.

Phloxes and Fallacies.

The garden was scented this evening. It’s the first time the garden’s been scented this year, so I tracked down the source. It was the phlox flowers, two clumps of which stand next to the big dogwood shrub. And it was rather pleasant.

‘Excuse me.’

Oh, God, I’m about to be interrupted by one of my lesser known personality variants.

What?

‘You shouldn’t say that.’

Shouldn’t say what?

‘That you like the smell of a scented garden.’

Why not?

‘It’s girly.’

Why is it girly? Why am I allowed to express a liking for the smell of new-mown hay, salt sea air, women’s perfume, and pubs, but not a scented garden?

‘Where was the scent coming from?’

Some flowers.

‘And what colour were they?’

Pink.

‘Well there you are, then. Girly.’

Bugger off.

Now do you see what I have to put up with when my depression is in high functioning mode?

The Peril of Panpsychism.

I was just reading an old post about the night my Spanish guitar went west (or ‘went south’ to the colonials.) I remember the feeling of sorrow I felt at the prospect of casting it into the tip on its way to lie broken and unwanted in some smelly old landfill site somewhere. And on recalling the fact, something crystallised in my mind – something I already realised but hadn’t thought much about before. What I was feeling was guilt, not loss.

I give some credence to the doctrine of panpsychism, you see (consciousness is present in every cell of material – the basis, as I understand it, of the old Sufi saying {originally ancient Indian, apparently}: that God sleeps in the stone, stirs in the plant, dreams in the animal, and wakes in man.)

So that was the real basis of my regret: not so much the sorrow of losing something precious to me, but the worry that I might be hurting its feelings. I feel the same way about most things I discard. It’s one of my oddities.

On Topping Up the Bird Table For the Morning.

Imagine a late afternoon or early evening when the sky is a dull, unremitting grey, interrupted only by the various shades of greyness here and there. The land and all who move upon it take on a torpid and reluctant air, and a mild sense of misery afflicts those sensitive enough to feel the oppression.

And then a break appears in the western sky and a low-hung sun reminds us that he wasn’t gone after all, but merely hiding. The world suddenly explodes in golden brightness, and we mere earthbound creatures are startled by the rapid elevation in our mood.

Don’t you just love that moment?

It didn’t happen this evening. I wished, but the sky stayed grey, a cold wind rose, and light rain began to fall. Shame.

W Again.

2 o'clock on a Sunday morning.

The World is quiet. The Whiskey is mellow. Listenin’ to the Wailin’ Jennys singin’ This is Where.

I love alliteration almost as much as I love good music. Just sayin’.

The Shirley Jackson Mystery.

I’ve had internet problems again today. Twenty minutes of attempted solutions failed to remedy the matter and I thought I was gong to have to engage with the agonising prospect of trying to contact BT again. Fortunately, I restarted the computer as a last resort and the internet came back. Is that encouraging or worrying? I don’t know. In any event, now I can make the post I’ve been wanting to make since yesterday, so here it is:

I want to say a brief word about Shirley Jackson who has become one of my favourite writers. Everything I’ve read about her has been united in seeing her literature as belonging to the mystery/horror genre, and her work routinely described as ‘gothic.’ I’ve even seen her absurdly, in my view, described as 'following in the tradition of Poe', and I don’t for the life of me understand why.

I’ve read five of Jackson’s six novels and greatly enjoyed them. (I didn’t read the first of them because the synopsis suggested it was all about suburban politics, and suburban politics are not my style.) I’ve also read a fairly comprehensive anthology of her short stories. One of her novels, The Haunting of Hill House, is, to my perception, the only one which fits the category universally applied to her. It is unquestionably gothic and fairly well loaded with mystery and horror. But the rest?

There are slight hints of all these appellations in other works, but they are infrequent and often combined with a dry sense of humour, itself a rare component in the horror genre. What I see and relate to in Shirley Jackson are various forms of neurodivergence in female MCs, and especially the sparkles and misapprehensions which ensue when the neurodivergent heroine comes into contact with the world of neuro-normals. It’s all psychological observation related back to the reader in great detail and quite brilliantly. Her plots are pegs on which to hang this observation and there is very little in them which might be described as mysterious, horrific or gothic.

So what on earth is going on here? Is my own neurodivergent tendency shining a light on just one aspect of interest and leaving the rest in darkness? Are all the critics, editors, and bookworms right and am I the one in the wrong? Is that it? I wish I knew. Meanwhile, I’m well into my second reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and getting more from it than I did the first time. Good enough, I suppose.

Being Here.

I stood in the garden this afternoon and looked around at the heavy summer growth. I looked at the trees by the lane, at the fields of high-grown maize across the hedge, and at the high hills beyond the river valley. I looked at the sky, now turned grey after weeks of sunny weather. Two birds flew across it heading north.

I felt a strong sense of being here; nowhere else. It struck me that if I’d made one different decision somewhere back in the sands of my history, I might not be here. I might be somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all.

The thought has occurred to me before, and I suppose the same thought has occurred to just about everybody at some time. And yet it’s an oddly profound thought, and what was different about today’s example was the intense clarity and strength behind it.

I think I might be turning into one of Shirley Jackson’s neurodivergent heroines.

Missed Opportunities.

I saw a woman I know in Sainsbury’s on Wednesday. It's some years since I last saw her. ‘Oh, hello,’ I said, ‘I didn’t recognise you at first.’ ‘I suppose that’s because I look so much older, is it?’ she replied ruefully. ‘My response was rapid and almost unequivocal: ‘I hadn’t intended to say so, but now you come to mention it…’

The first three sentences are true. The rest amounts to a succession of lies, the fact of which constitutes yet another of life’s multitudinous missed opportunities. 

Meanwhile, Ashbourne was awash with young women in shorts and dogs with wagging tails. What is a chap supposed to do in such circumstances? Which is he supposed to admire first? The dogs won, of course, because you can stroke a dog’s back, pat its head, and tickle its ears without fear of being driven away by men in uniforms and treated badly. Young women are in a different category.

Killing Time.

While I was sans internet I decided to put my enforced idleness to good use by dusting, vacuuming, and generally tidying my living room. It hadn’t been touched, or even used for that matter, for two months or so and I was feeling almost committed to my place in the human environment for once. It took two hours to complete the job, and when I’d finished I was taken aback by the fact that it looked very little different.

In all ways, that is, apart from the lack of spider silk. It had been everywhere – between this and that, underneath every horizontal surface, beside my armchair, behind the big unit thing containing mostly wooden bowls, books, and various expressions of my interest in the worlds beyond the veil, strewn across the ceiling and down the walls… The room was full of the stuff. Being a sensitive soul I made every effort to do no harm to the spiders scuttling hither and thither, but their handiwork had to go.

I realised, of course, that the spiders would not have taken kindly to being so outrageously inconvenienced, and a dream began to form in my mind. I saw an army of Cellar spiders – for such they all were – approaching me with revenge in their eyes and determination in their spindly gait. I knew that their objective would not be to drive me to the burning mill with pitchforks as the local villagers might, but to suck my vital fluids until I breathed my last. The fact that I have no straws of either paper or plastic in the house was no consolation since spiders have their own methods. The sound of gurgles, slurping, and the death rattle filled my mind, and the dank odour of something unrecognised hung in the air.