by
Helen Garner
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It seems I am a really awful person. Pushy, aggressive, demanding, always wanting everything to be clear, worked out, resolved. Also I have bad table manners: I was the first to put out my chopsticks at Brilliant’s when the food was served. My enthusiasms, my expectation that others will follow me, lead people to do so against their will: apparently I phrase suggestions in a way that brooks no refusal. When I said ‘Let’s go to the nude beach on Sunday’, my manner made him say, ‘All right’ instead of what he really felt which was ‘Maybe’. Growing more pathetic, dismal and contemptible every minute, I tried to explain my feeling that there is a link between my ‘enthusiasms’ and the bluff that’s needed to be a writer. No, no—many writers are quite introverted. I will have to tone myself down. I couldn’t help crying. Silent sobs, with a lot of tears running out. I despised myself for giving way to a spasm of self-pity. I wish I could bawl out loud, get some voice into it and howl.
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Sunset last night was like a swap card I once had of a pirate ship: torn clouds, dramatic perspective, orange, gold and green. And now a dawn sky of delicate purity, and a smell of eucalypts. Maybe a marriage can get up again and walk, after a terrible beating.
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In the bookshop I picked up the new Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, a book whose existence was unknown to me. I knew I could not be represented in it because they would have had to ask my permission. I examined its index. No, I wasn’t there. I felt the world seesaw. I walked to the tram stop wretched. I am full of shit. I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at forty-two I can’t even get into the Oxford book.
aw girlll
A couple passed us on the beach. We guessed they had met through a dating agency. I said the man couldn’t find a woman because he talked all the time and expected her to listen. F said the woman couldn’t find a man because she listened all the time with her head on one side and made attention-murmurs, and was ‘limp’.
yikes
He’ll be like the Russians: he’ll retreat and retreat and retreat until I freeze to death.
noooo
Clear statement: I have very strong urges (irresistible urges) towards some kind of religious or, rather, spiritual experience. This frightens me, not because the spirituality in things is so inscrutable but because I don’t know what it will do to my ordinary life arrangements, my friendships, my attitude towards my work, if I turn around and acknowledge something I privately refer to as ‘the mighty force’. It’s there behind me, and in me, all the time. It’s benevolent, it’s totally good—not morally—I mean that it only wishes me well. But I’m afraid to find out what I’ll become if I stop running away from it. It’s as if I were always swimming against a tide. How do I turn round and face it? How’s it done?
He tells me that the vision of life that’s in my work is not real; it’s much less bad, dark, mischievous, painful etc than real life. It holds out some belief in the essential goodness of people. It is a picture of the way I’d like life to be rather than the way it really is.
‘I’m afraid your pessimism will contaminate me,’ I say.
‘If you believe in good, why are you afraid that bad will contaminate you?’
It’s like arguing with the devil.
In the discussion I ran the line against possessiveness that we thought was so cool in the seventies: ‘Jealousy is a completely useless emotion.’
Psychoanalyst: ‘On the contrary. I think jealousy is at the cutting edge of the psyche.’
Me: (riveted) ‘What do you mean?’
Psychoanalyst: ‘It’s painful, but it shows us in no uncertain terms that we are not rational beings. That our lives are not under our conscious control.’
A poem translated from the Arabic called Homesickness. Words to the effect of ‘Once again you take out your knife and stab me’, and then this: ‘Nobody knows whether I am dancing or staggering.’
‘There is something between me and her.’
‘Since when?’
‘Two weeks.’
I keep walking but put my hands in my pockets.
Nobody knows whether I am staggering or dancing.
oh shit
I told the Jungian how I hated and feared the kind of privilege claimed by beautiful women.
‘And how have you claimed attention, Helen?’
I did not like being asked this question.
‘Sex. Using my brains.’
heh