Marginal improvements

I feel guilty about the last few posts. I don't wish to gainsay anything in them, but perhaps some thoughts should not have been thunk? (If I were a better person, I would not have thunk them...goes the refrain.) Still, I do feel better for having gotten them out - as if I've released the negative thoughts together with the words - and I do feel more able to be my slightly better self slightly more of the time.

It takes a village

But what I'm doing is rejecting the village, I guess is one way of thinking about it, and possibly/probably the way everyone else thinks about it, her grandparents and father and aunts. If you need help - and you say you need help - then avail yourself of the help that is offered - and stop caviling about how it's not the right kind of help, not the particular help you want. (It would also not be right to refuse the help, even if you could afford to. That would be ungrateful, and cruel to the child, and I'm sure other terrible things as well.) It's not - I think? - that I think her grandparents should only consult my wishes, but that they act as if they were only consulting my wishes but without actually consulting them, and denying that they have wishes of their own. So it's a tangled web of obligation and gratitude and passive-aggressiveness and sheer greediness for the child that we're all caught in - the last of which I do understand, but is somehow not an acceptable thing to say of oneself (except in deprecation) or of others (especially of others).

PS: I don't think of it as rejecting the village, in concept or actuality or sentimentality. But I do sometimes, often, feel - enmeshed - in family.

All mixed up:

1. Possessiveness - this is my baby - which is hardly new or surprising, for me/to me.

2. A desire for privacy, the strength of which I never quite realised until I was pregnant. A sense that whatever else this is - grandparent-grandchild relationships, a new dynamic for the extended family, a new dynamic for my little family, mother-child relationships - it is still my life. I don't think this is the same as (1), and while (1) has diminished with time, this one hasn't - it's sometimes driven underground by a combination of despair and despondency and tiredness. I think it might be the harder feeling to understand, if one doesn't have it oneself.

3. Flickering gratitude, and resentment of being expected to be grateful, and resentment at being in a position (not put in a position, not by anyone but myself - that has always been clear to me) of needing help and being expected to need help and being expected to be grateful for the help that is given.

4. A fierce love for the baby - a little less fierce now, more tamped-down, though no less strong, than a few days after she was born - or perhaps the ferocity is just less surprising to me now. I see these words a lot, in writings by or about new mothers - a 'fierce love' - the same adjective always - it's hard to get away from cliches, especially when they're apt. Related to (1) but not, I think, the same thing. My baby. This puts all other loves in the shade (be honest: some were true loves, and some were social/moral/familial obligations).

5. A need/desire to be mothered, but in a very particular way, and resentment at being mothered in any other way. Which feeds into

6. Surprise at, and surprise at how much I dislike, many aspects of grandparent behaviour. This comes from (1) to (5), I think, and more besides, especially when I think back to my own childhood. (Not that it wasn't happy, by any account. But not, I think, as so thoroughly enjoyed by my parents? For the usual reasons - I don't remember my early childhood or my siblings' early childhood that well, there are stresses and worries associated with parenting, my parents were much less mellow and there was a great deal more shouting (but only shouting) at points in my life.) Some of it is - the tension between thinking that I'm too old to need parenting, and wanting my child's caregivers to behave as caregivers, responsible and sober and long-term-thinking, rather than besotted grandparents, and, well, (5). You don't stop needing your parents, it turns out, but it's possible - I want to acknowledge the possibility - that they might stop wanting to parent you. In a non-melodramatic way; haven't you left the home, after all? I wanted them to be - oh, friends and (my idea of) parents and my child's co-caregivers, and they wanted to be - grandparents, I guess. And to be helpful; see (3).

You'd think I'd've learned it by now #500

I find myself doing it again and again: thinking that if I just express myself clearly, if I articulate my needs and wants* clearly and precisely, if I show why I'm thinking what I'm thinking - then the other person will respond to me in the desired way. Not - I tried to explain - necessarily by fulfilling the need, or even by thinking it a reasonable or understandable or morally okay (technical term here) thing to need - but by engaging me in like manner.

This is clearly not a thing that's going to happen. (I find the same tendency in some of our politicians - if we just explained things carefully and clearly to people, they will see why our policies are what they are, why they are what they had to be. It doesn't work that well in politics, either.) My question is, is it okay for me to do this? To demand engagement? Is that a need that I'm demanding be fulfilled - a meta-need? an underlying need? - and is that demand, well, wrong - not reasonable or sympathisable-with or morally okay, but too narcissistic and self-centred and self-ish? Maybe yes? The 'maybe' isn't purely rhetorical - for a long time I believed that it was reasonable (etc) to articulate one's needs and to expect to be taken seriously - for the other person to fulfill the need or explain why it couldn't or shouldn't be fulfilled or to articulate his or her own needs or something. To respond in the same register. (Though maybe this is a smokescreen for myself: I did expect that the so-reasonably-set out needs would be fulfilled. In the way that I wanted them fulfilled. As in: I would like you to show your love in these particular ways. And how would you know them if I didn't tell you what they were? But I want to acknowledge the possibility that my reasonable needs were not, in fact, reasonable.) That while my interlocutor might well say no, there would be a conversation about that no. But is the demand for the conversation reasonable? May I demand it? I guess this is a trick question - it all depends who you're demanding it of - it might be an okay thing to demand, or a kind of aggression, or a true need, or a deeply narcissistic thing to do, or a very adolescent thing to do (all I want is for you to understand meeee) - or all of the above (trick answer).

* For my purposes pretty much the same thing. I'll just say 'need', since every want feels like a need to the want-er.

Update: the answer is clearly no, it's not okay, don't do it. Accept what you're given with a glad heart. It's too late for that kind of openness and vulnerability, if ever it were possible. If you were a better person, you wouldn't even ask this question. But since I'm not, and I can't pretend to be on a consistent basis, which is probably just confusing and upsetting for everyone - and we're not going to talk it out, are we? - what should I do? Beyond the usual unsatisfactory mix of politeness and embarrassment and kindness: pretend it didn't happen, be kind when you can, nurse your resentments in private if you have to. Accept such means as will give you your ends, your stated ends, even if those ends were conceived of, and repeatedly affirmed, in moments of high-mindedness which you find increasingly difficult to sustain.

Because writing needs readers

I don't mean all writing; this isn't a statement on writing, or writers, or anything like that; I mean just mine. Me. I need readers - even just the illusion of readers, which the blog maintains, compared to say writing an email to myself.

Some thoughts:

1. I have never procrastinated so much in my life as in the last five years. Also known as grad school.

2. I've been reading Jenny Diski's books. Not all procrastination (see (1)) is mindless, but it is procrastination.

3. Looking after the baby - the toddler! - now is high-level procrastination. Or perhaps this dissertation is high-level escapism; most escapists (escapees? no) have to make do with less high-falutin means of procrastination. Either way - I'm doing both in half-assed fashion.

4. I'm much less patient with other people (my parents, my husband) when displeased with myself. This is not a new observation to me, just one borne in again and again and again upon me.

5. Maybe the thing to do is to suck it up and accept that my parents show love in the way that they can, for me and for the kid. You can't dictate people's responses. You can tell them your needs, though - or can you? Perhaps that's too close to dictation? At any rate, I don't appear to be able to suck it up. And I do appear to have different needs.

6. I don't want to outsource my child.* I think I have legitimate grievances, although that's not to say that my reaction to my parents has been generous, or that they don't have legitimate grievances against me. I'm finding out that I'm more my mother's daughter than ever I realised - than ever she realised? Her reaction is mine - to say yes, yes I understand, but really only seeing the rejection and the instruction. Learning the words but not the vulnerability and openness that would give meaning to the words. A defensive technique. Which is perfectly, yes, understandable, but also frustrating.
*That's not a generous way of looking at the matter. But for me, it would really be outsourcing.

7. I should subscribe to the Straits Times. To some local news source. I'm one of those people who gets their news from FB, and it's not like I have a diversified FB feed, or even that I check it very much.

8. None of this is about the dissertation. Which I've lost interest in. And lost faith in myself. Both of these precede the child, but having her around (see (3)) isn't really helping.

9. The usual thing to say is: do better, pull your socks up, get your act together, pull yourself together, work harder, just do it. And if you can't? If all this panicking and procrastinating and muddling around in circles is all there is to it?

10. I have to go.

liu si

This is all I know about June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square:
(1) A lot of students died when the tanks were sent into the square. (Actually I don't know this - strictly, all I know is that there were deaths.)
(2) There's a book by a American (or British?) sociologist, who happened to be in China at the time working on something else, and went down to Tiananmen to interview students. We don't want your democracy, they told him; we want Rousseau's democracy. I think about that from time to time. What did they mean?
(3) I wasn't in Oxford the weekend Wang Dan came to speak.

But it seems important anyway not to forget the day - to acknowledge that it happened. Tiananmen wasn't my first impression of China, but it was my first political impression? of China - and one of my first political memories, I think - in the sense of a memory of politics happening somewhere in the world. Five months later, the Berlin Wall came down. I was TFing for a class on democracy last semester, and it occurred to me that all of the students in the class - who were all sophomores - had been born after 1989. They have no sense - however vague and inchoate - of a world in which Communism was still a force to be reckoned with.

This isn't a political post, really; just - marking time.

on going the bloody hard way

I was looking for something Rush Rhees on Wittgenstein and doing it the bloody hard way, and found James Conant's essay

Rush Rhees tells us: 'Wittgenstein used to say to me, "Go the bloody hard way".' And, Rhees adds: 'I remember this more often, perhaps, than any other single remark of his.'
...
Rhees connects what Wittgenstein means by going the bloody hard way with the manner in which Wittgenstein himself sought to practise philosophy:

Unless one understands this, then I do not think one can understand Wittgenstein's conviction that philosophy is important....Philosophy, as he practised it, was 'the bloody hard way'....And it was not only a way of thinking and working, but a way of living as well. And the 'hardness' was really a criterion of the sort of life that was worthwhile. Perhaps I should add 'for him.'

besties

The only differences, 'concerning temporal Matters', that [John Home] had with Hume, were his indifference to port and his insistence on spelling his name with an 'o'. 

- Editor's footnote in Hume's History of Natural Religion. John Home was a cousin and close friend of Hume.

what it is

"But this is neither dogmatism nor scepticism, but stupidity; a state of mind very different from your sifting, inquisitive disposition, my ingenious friend." 

- Cleanthes to Philo, in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 

living on words

C. K. Ogden sums up the ending of the ill-fated romance of Bentham and Polly Dunkley:

Meanwhile...the young lady, alarmed, no doubt, by the prospect of an income derived solely from an annual volume on legal theory, had beaten a retreat. 

- From his introduction to the Theory of Legislation (1931)

An irresistible invitation

Bentham invites John Lind and his wife to visit him:

There is a two-legged creature I have heard you speak of as belonging to you. Were it to come here, could you answer for it's being quiet? If you could, I should like of all things to see it. You must consider and it must consider it could not see a creature of its own sex here all the while above the degree of my Landlord's wife who was Sir George's laundry maid; so that what it has to consider is whether it would prefer its Master's arid company and mine and nobody else's for four days to such as it might have were it to stay at home. Toilette furniture and all its other rattle traps it must bring of course: moreover it must engage to go up stairs and sit in its own room or let us sit in mine if ever we should find it in the way, when you and I in our profound wisdoms are sitting in council over the affairs of state. 

Why indeed

Opening of a letter from Jeremy Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 17 July 1776:

Why has thou not sent me some Tea?

Joan Didion on experience

From a Paris Review interview:

I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal, don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how they work, which is always trouble. As Henry James told us.

And to you too

Bentham to his younger brother Sam, on the occasion of his (Bentham's) 28th birthday:

"God's-daddikins! it is my birthday -- say something pretty to me on the occasion."

Mustard be special?

On the radio:

"...but what do you give to someone special, but not that special? Trader Joe's whole grain dijon mustard. It's the perfect way to say to someone, I really like you, but let's not rush into anything."

Grumblings Pt 2

The young Bentham to a friend (not Mulford):

This Mulford is always sluggish about performing his duty,  untrustworthy, very forgetful of his debts, an enemy to gods and men. Wherefore I pray that his cucumbers may suddenly wither that no plant may prosper for him that Rover may become even more untrustworthy than his master and may end miserably, that his wretched hovel may fall to pieces about his ears, all this and if there be anything yet more terrible than this, I lay upon him as a solemn curse.

Early grumblings

In a letter from a young Jeremy Bentham to his father, while at Oxford:

P.S. Grievances. No shirts to my back. No good shoes to my Feet. My new Tablecloths full of holes. 

His next letter to his father, a week or so later, has this for a postscript:

I forgot to mention that among my 10 Shirts, 1 is my brother's, another quite a rag, and 1 or 2 not much better.

There are also a number of letters asking for sugar and tea, which, he says, costs twice as much in Oxford.

Winter Spring

A script of trees before the hill
Spells cold, with laden serifs; all the walls
Are battlemented still;
But winter spring is winnowing the air
Of chill, and crawls
Wet-sparkling on the gutters;
Everywhere
Walls wince, and there's the steal of waters.

Now all this proud royaume
Is Veniced. Through the drift's mined dome
One sees the rowdy rusted grass,
And we're amazed as windows stricken bright.
This too-soon spring will pass
Perhaps tonight,
And doubtless it is dangerous to love
This somersault of seasons;
But I am weary of
The winter way of loving things for reasons.

- Richard Wilbur

(Via Minz. But did we ever love things for reasons?)

Pt 2

This is the best expression of different perspectives I've heard:

Imagine if you were an oyster. The public would see you as an infrangible nut, a kind of sea-raid shelter, but you would feel yourself all mother-of-pearly inwardness and vulnerability.

From an incredible Paris Review interview with Seamus Heaney, the kind of interview that makes you not just want to read the author's works (that's not so unusual), but to read other poems, all poems; to pay attention to poems, to hear the joy and the exhilaration and the seriousness and the sense of big voltage under the words.

In memoriam Seamus Heaney

The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.

What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept,

and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we'll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.
I see the glittering sound

framed in your windows,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.