Landslide
Even children get older... (Content warning for brief mentions of suicide, deaths of family members).
I’m turning twenty-three tomorrow. I find myself wondering, not for the first time, what I would have done if I had lived twenty, thirty, fifty years earlier. It comes with the territory, I suppose, of being a history student -- (or maybe a student at all, if you consider this specific quality to be “wondering”, and not just wondering about the past, but about anything at all. It is also maybe rude of me to class that as a “student” trait rather than something just human which it, of course, is.), -- this inability to do anything without thinking “Well, what if I had to do this without X, Y or Z? What if I was living in year X, Y or Z?”. By nature, this is of course a thought that can only be traced backwards if it is not traced outwards -- i.e. a hundred years ago in the place where I sit and type this would be a different place to even anywhere else in the world a hundred years ago. What I’m saying is that the thought experiment gets a little worryingly teleological if you think about it for too long. The idea that everything in history led up to this moment of me typing in the library at a desk I sat specifically at so I could read articles about everything (an over exaggeration) in history is not only heaping spoons of causation onto events that had none but it is also horrendously and embarrassingly self-absorbed.
The last time I was writing on this website I was twenty-one and in my final year of my undergraduate degree. This is to say I had no idea what I would be doing for the next year (or, indeed, the rest of my life). I can now at least let you in on the secrets that the year would hold: it was professionally a whole lot of nothing (Job title: administrator; Tasks: picking up the phone and writing emails; Pay: mortifyingly little) but socially a whole lot of joy. Also climatically (meteorologically?) a whole lot of freezing -- I moved back to my university city in the winter and had to live for a few weeks in a variety of Airbnbs which both drained my savings and were catastrophically ill-equipped (in my opinion) to handle any temperature less than ten degrees C.
Anyway, the year came and went and now I am at a different (new) university city, studying a different (new) degree. It is still absolutely freezing cold, and most nights when I read in my bedroom I will have a moment when I look up startled, having just seen the cloud of my breath appear in the air.
I am now studying again, which means my mind is being used in a way I really had to exercise the first few weeks of September, like swimming laps in a pool I had not touched since the previous year’s summer months, starting first with widths and then graduating towards lengths, and, considering the promise of my dissertation looming over the horizon, training towards covering myself in fish oil and swimming towards France. The course is tough and heavy, but good. I am learning lots and most of the things I am learning I find interesting, and most of the people I am talking to everyday I find interesting, and we are all doing a masters degree which means we are all a little embarrassingly earnest, and we are all big readers, which is something I enjoy. When I think back to myself as a teenager, awkward and closeted and awfully quiet, I feel comforted. That person would meet kindred spirits at sixth form, and then more at undergrad, and now I knew that at least this chapter of my life, they would also.
What worries me most about myself (and this is definitely a lie, because I have much more concrete and pressing worries, but those fortunately do not concern you) is that I haven’t written very much in the past year at all.
In my own writing, I will admit I have a somewhat of an obsession with time. How we move it, how it moves through, over, us. The question about when a meeting is pushed back -- do you consider it to be earlier or later, has it moved towards you or have you moved towards it -- has always fascinated me. It’s only grown and expanded as I’ve studied the past, yet when I read for pleasure, it is speculative fiction, not historical, to which I am most drawn.
It is one of these books, I admit, that has even led me to writing this now. I am (for reasons unknown even to myself) currently reading Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, which is a series of words I thought for a long time I would never string together. The qualms I have with Yanagihara are, like many people’s, due to A Little Life, a book that is admittedly incredibly written but one I would never recommend to anyone. I can also, by looking on my goodreads, see that I read it between 29/12/2019 and 06/01/2020, and I know that it plunged into a sort of semi-depression that I didn’t quite get round to kicking until early March of that year -- and I don’t have to explain the significance of that to anyone.
When To Paradise first came out, I remember reading the blurb and wondering why on earth anyone would ever read it -- my grudge had still not abated, and I was frankly sceptical of anyone who wanted to put gay men through so much pain with so little reprieve. But that was almost two years ago, and a small part of me remained curious, and now I find myself at the tale end of it after only beginning it last Saturday.
It is a hard book to describe, and I won’t go entirely into it now. The part, however, that has led me to writing this, is the last section of the book, which is made up of letters to a man named Peter. It is these letters that have thoroughly turned the book for me -- there is a certain resignation in them that creates a sadness unlike the abject horror of A Little Life. But there is a truthfulness in them too. The letters describe so many parts of the writer’s life, they follow love and hardship and lulls in a relationship and fatherhood and honestly, too many things to name. What I realised, when reading these, is this is what my own writing is missing. I need to imagine (in my opinion, at least) that I am not writing for some sea of unnamable people, but that I am writing for just one person. It is easier to write when you just imagine there are two involved -- the singular writer and the singular reader.
When I look back at the essay I wrote here just a little under two years ago, what I note is my flinchingness. I turn away from so many things I know I wanted to say -- it may not be obvious to the reader, but I can see what I did write, and therefore know the boundaries and what was skirting them. Even then, when I was actively writing much more poetry, I was a shy writer. I know I wrote about grief in that essay, but what I didn’t say is that the death in my parents’ circle made me think less about the death of my grandfather, but more about the fact that when I was younger I discovered that I had not only a great-great uncle that died from suicide, but also a great-uncle -- both on the same side of the family. I didn’t write about how I wondered for a time if my family was somehow cursed to have a suicide every generation -- likely because this definitely seems the kind of thing you should not write about; nobody wants to hear this. But is this not more interesting? Is there not more poetry in this?
The truth is that I find it difficult to imagine that anyone could read my poetry and still take me seriously as a historian. The underlying concern here, naturally, is that I find it difficult to imagine that anyone could read my poetry and still take me seriously as a person. In the past couple of years I have become so inescapably self-conscious a writer that not only have I stopped submitting poems to magazines -- I have almost stopped writing them entirely. The ones I do write I often hate, but the ones I like are always entirely too autobiographical. I find myself naming my friends, naming streets, extracting parts of real conversations I have, setting the poem among landmarks that would make finding exactly where I live an almost laughably easy game of geoguessr -- like the ones where you turn in a circle only to find you’re at the base of Christ the Redeemer or looking into the mouth of the Eurotunnel.
But still, I love history, and I love poetry. I think there needs to be some kind of way for me to reconcile these parts of each other. It is true that the first poem I ever had published was about Joan of Arc, though this was in a magazine that went dark a few years ago, as many online literary journals often do. But I took great pride in that poem, and I was only eighteen when I wrote it, and it has one of the best endings I think I have ever written.
In honesty I think I struggle with the idea of being observed in most areas of my life (which means maybe it’s time for me to start reading some articles about social media and surveillance, or time to stop using BeReal, even though I do genuinely enjoy the app). I’m taking a Latin class right now for university, and I find myself often wondering what a Roman would think if they were looking over my shoulder as I revise (though -- note that I took my exam yesterday and it was by all measures fine, and so the studying will certainly lull accordingly). What would this Roman think of me if they saw that I had just written “heavy head” over and over, in different cases. The heavy head. The heavy heads. To the heavy head. Of the heavy heads. (caput grave. capita gravia. capite gravi. capitum gravium). caput grave meum est; dormiam. I don’t even know if that’s correct Latin -- or if it is, if it even makes sense contextually.
When I study the past, when I study people in the past -- when I read about them or where they lived or what they ate and how they ate it, what they did for work and how they did it and how long for, the rules of their lives, the norms, the boundaries and how they transgressed across them -- I don’t see this colourless world that you would be led to expect. People were happy in the past. People had rich lives, with triumphs and losses, peaks and troughs like any others. Sure, maybe they didn’t have the technology we do. Maybe there was famine or illness or war or political upheaval, but there is famine and illness and war and political upheaval now. There is a tendency, I think, when discussing moments of the past, to laugh about their assumptions, the small worldviews, funny things that might have happened. Stupid deaths, ridiculous things someone might have been recorded saying in a trial, or observations sent to a friend in a letter that may have never been intended for the messenger to read -- let alone a class five hundred years since the day it was written. But it is important to engage with these histories beyond the archive -- important to know that they were real people, that they were once babies, children, adults -- though even these seemingly simple marcations of age may be anachronistic to impose on some individuals. It is likely that most people never expected to have this kind of scrutiny, and it is a fact that none of them are around to know it is being used against them. To assume that everyone who lived before some prescribed date was miserable is not only untrue -- it’s cruel.
And anyway, this concern about how I am seen both professionally and poetically could all be for nought. I don’t know if the academy is for me. I sometimes get quite quietly nauseous when I think of me in the future holed up in some dusty university steadily killing myself over studying something that nobody really cares for when the world is moving on without me. I hate the idea that academia is hidden away behind paywalls that you can only access through being a member of an institution (and thus having already paid or be in the process of currently paying extortionate fees for your education) or someone of considerable wealth and perhaps a small island and so able to access pay per view articles easily. I am aware that there are countries where higher education is free; I am unfortunately not a resident of one of these countries.
In short, I think it is time for me to take a very deep breath. I am turning twenty-three tomorrow. I don’t know what the year will hold, and I have no idea where I will be when I turn twenty-four. All I know is that I want to be writing more, and I think I have it in me to at least try.
ALL MY LOVE!
SJ.