WHEN PAIN IS GOOD

Two or three weeks ago I overdid the walking exercise and stressed a muscle in the arch of my left foot. For ten whole days I walked around limping and I felt thoroughly sorry for myself!! At day eight I went to the sick bay and the nurse suggested that I bandage it, but all that got me were more sympathetic smiles and head shaking from everyone I passed – the foot got no better!! Two days later my friend decided to take matters (i.e. the foot) into her own hands and gave me a hard massage; I left her house jumping!! I remember walking aimlessly around campus, running unnecessary errands just to test the foot out, and trying not to let doubt into my heart; scarcely could I believe that I could walk without pain - I mean I had limped around for ten whole days and five minutes of massage had put me right as rain. I had heard of people to whom miracles happened – they regained their sight or threw away the crutches, only to be hit by severe doubt and be back with their infirmities in no time… So after that time I really struggled to keep my belief up… The point is life felt so much better – it was like I had gotten a new lease on life..

It’s like earlier today: I had really, really bad cramps from my period starting, and as I lay there on my bed groaning and rushing back and from the bathroom to throw up, I felt as miserable as anything... This pain always reminds me of the pain of child birth, and makes me wonder how much pain women in labour must feel seeing as some of them scream out loud and even jump up and run around the ward like crazy people (not to mention where they find the energy).

This thought occurred to me again recently when I had to have my hair dreaded. I had had it in braids for almost four months and the extensions being quite heavy had been kept up a constant pressure on my scalp as they hang down under their weight. The day I undid the braids, I decided to go straight to the salon and dread the hair. GOOD GOD!!! What a nightmare that was!!!! First of all my hair was a tangled wrangled mangled bush – what can I say?? The hair dresser drowned it in detangler and conditioner and all manner of lotions to help detangle it, but to no avail – he had to comb through the hair inch by inch, and I felt as though my scalp was going to peel right off!! At one point I asked him to hand over the comb so I could do it myself but wah!! Nothing doing.. We were at this for two whole hours and I sat through it with feet, teeth, shoulders, elbows my WHOLE body clenched, until I thought I was going to faint with the pain!!

Finally we got through the detangling and then came the dreading: he started off massaging wax into the wet hair (even that was painful!) and then starting in the back took a small portion of the hair, pulled through it with a fine comb, then set the comb back at the base of the hair and pulled through the portion again while twisting the comb until he’d twisted the to the full length of the hair; at this point he portioned off another small amount of hair and made another dreadlock, and so on. This process also took some time, but as he got to the middle of the head, the wax that he had spread all over the hair had now hardened so it was getting more and more difficult to pull through the hair to twist it. Every now and then though, he sprayed my hair with water, and then continued. Now about two thirds of the way to the front of my head is a very sensitive area – I think it became that way because of a fall I had on the ice when I went ice skating once – when he came to that region, tears just begun rolling down my face – it was soooo painful!! I kept surreptitiously wiping away the tears but man – that is when I begun to really wonder if I would ever bear the pain of childbirth!! Anyway, in time of course he finally twisted the last one, and I could go home at last!! My friend – if I tell you how I felt!!! I walked out of the building – I had to use the back entrance because it way past closing time – I passed some shady guys playing a dice game of some sort, walked through the dirty smelly back street, stepping over flowing sewage and passing more shady (incidentally dreadlocked) street boys, briefly felt afraid but told myself to look confident and not lose a step, but nothing could dampen my high spirits!!

So anyway back to earlier today: after the cramping and vomiting had passed, and I had brushed my teeth and washed my face, I stepped out into the punishingly hot midday sun and felt that all was right with the world. I even decided to reward myself with some junk food at the staff pub, and they were playing some country that had me tapping my foot and dancing in my seat! For once even the gloom and doom being reported in today’s papers had no effect on me – ALL WAS WELL WITH ME!!

THE UNCONSCIOUS

I have been having the weirdest dreams…

Eh, before I go any further, I must say one thing:

BARCELONA BABY!!

This is how I hope to get to Barcelona at the end of March: focus on the end goal, and care less about the means… So I keep saying
BARCELONA (there it is again), and visualising myself in the city, and studying the street map that I picked up at the reception of my hotel, and visualising myself negotiating the narrow (?) streets and figuring out the public transport; I have downloaded a tourist guide and picture myself visiting this café or that restaurant, basically!! I will know for sure tomorrow, so fingers crossed!! In the meantime, say it with me:

BARCELONA!!!

Right, back to our scheduled programming :-) I was saying that I get the strangest dreams these days – well, all dreams are strange obviously but let me say I am more aware of them these days. The other day I dream that I’m sitting in a chair, and ‘walking’ towards a certain room whose door slowly swings open as I approach, and then as I begin to cross the threshold, a force field of some sort pushes me out again – I say ‘force field’ because it was not a wind, nor any physical thing that I could sense – it really felt like I was being repelled or something… anyway, next thing I know I am lying on my bed – and at this point the dream sort of merged with reality because I felt like this was really happening – a strong wind begun to blow around my room and my covers were yanked off me as my body was forced upward at terrific speed, not very high up, somewhere near the ceiling I would guess, and there my body held, stiff and straight. This happened so fast that I hardly had time to be afraid – and then as I started to BE afraid, something told me that it was alright, this was merely a prelude to something that I had been waiting to happen, and so I told myself not to be afraid, and to just go with it.. Don’t remember what happened after that but when I woke up I racked my head to remember why I thought this was nothing to be afraid of, but could not remember… Up to now I cannot figure out what that was all about, but I am still not afraid anyway.

Then two days ago I dreamed that I had to have my tonsils removed – and that they would have to drill through my throat and remove them.. so the doctors stuck an intravenous tube down my throat and begun feeding me with anaesthesia. I could see the fluid coming down the tube into my mouth, and this went on for sometime, on and on and but effect; then I begun to feel like I was drowning in the anaesthesia, so I tried to tell them to stop but my voice came out as an incompressible gurgling.. at this point they pushed a tube the size of a magic marker under my chin and straight into my throat but at that point I woke up – heart pumping.

Then this morning, I woke up from a dream which unfortunately I have largely forgotten but I know it ended with a woman trying to get us out the back way because some people were after us and were banging on her front door (I don’t know whom I was with).. So she gives us a key to fit into a small key hole in the wall (one couldn’t tell there was even a door there) and as I tried to turn the key in the lock it begun to melt in my hand and twist out of shape and finally broke in two so that I couldn’t get the door unlocked. I quickly went back to find the woman and apologise for damaging her key, but I was greeted with abuse as she informed me that she operated a brothel behind that door and now how would she survive etc… Next thing I know I am walking along with one of my mother’s brothers and he is telling me that my grandmother on my father’s side (who died about a year ago) was berating him for not having any children (my uncle is over fifty and has four grown children, but somehow in this dream I also believed he had no children). Apparently my grandmother went on to ask him if he was ‘lame’ – and as he said this we were walking up to a group of people at a barbeque, and one of them turned out to be my grandmother and she was falling about laughing from hearing my uncle talk about being lame; and then I woke up.

Reflecting on these weird dreams, I wondered at the richness of our unconscious – basically during sleep our brains can make free associations and make up all sorts of stories! I have just come from reading a book of short stories by a guy called Maugham Somerset, and his stories are just astounding!! It features some of the most ordinary people but they are faced with some extraordinary circumstances – and it is not even as if these circumstances are fantastic – they are all perfectly possible – but surely they can’t all be inspired by true life – he must have made some of them up – but HOW?? I think I am a good enough story teller, but I don’t know how I will fare in the fiction genre.. A book that I am reading on craft encourages the beginning writer to just be confident that they are an entertaining story teller, and to go with it..

No wonder sometimes to aid my creativity I lie down and day dream for a while – all sorts of crazy stuff goes through my mind then! Perhaps I should begin to mine this source? I am reminded of my Mom’s visions: before she goes on a journey or has to leave the house to run an errand, she has a lie down and she says this usually results in her getting some kind of vision that shows her what lies ahead, and then she can pray as is needed. I don’t know how effective or true this is, but it appeals to me somehow…

So anyway hooray – more afternoon naps for me!! :-)

BURIED EMOTIONS!!!

A friend of mine has the gift of being able to instantly sense the state of emotions in any room that she enters, no matter if these are overt or suppressed. She has often received grief from her friends and family for always trying to delve into the emotions and affairs of others, but she says it is as easy for her to ignore her friends’ emotional and mental states as it is for her to ignore one of them suddenly turning up with an amputated limb. I recently met with her for an afternoon and after we had been talking for a while she suddenly narrows her eyes and asks:

‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

‘Wrong?’ I ask ‘Nothing.. Why do you ask?’

Well, you look kind of unhappy.. unsettled in some way..’

‘Really? That's odd. I don’t know of any particular reason I would be unhappy.. I mean there are a couple of things that I feel below the surface, unresolved things, but I am not aware of being unhappy as such.’

‘I don’t know,’ she says ‘I mean for instance you have been frowning since you sat down, or else giving me strained smiles’

‘Hmm...’ I frown – this time I am aware of it - and think about what she is saying.

I hesitate to argue with her because not two days earlier, another friend of mine had asked me how I felt about some people close to me with whom I currently have a strained relationship. My immediate response was that beyond a general feeling of disconnectedness with them, I only felt a little worried about their well being and maybe mild irritation whenever we had our never ending disagreements. Further questioning by her however revealed that in fact I feel deeply hurt, misunderstood, unsupported and confused - a FAR cry from what I had thought!! This gave me pause at the time, and now it came back to me, so I decided to think more deeply about what might be manifesting so clearly on my face and in my demeanor that my friend had been able to pick it up straight away.

Today morning (two days later), I am sitting in the University library completely absorbed with reading some books on the craft of writing short stories and the biographies of famous short story writers when the thought comes to me (not for the first time either): ‘I do not want to be teaching in my faculty, I REALLY do not!! I want to be getting my business off the ground. I want to be writing fiction. I want to be watching people on the street and making up stories. I want to be creating something new. I do NOT want to be teaching in my faculty!!’

The dissatisfaction with my job has been a recurring theme over the last four months or so; I was sure I had resolved it in December, but then following some new considerations in January, I reneged on my previous decision but obviously my subconscious is trying to tell me that I have not resolved the issue to its satisfaction. This weekend my friend and I also discussed the importance of following one’s bliss, and maybe when my subconscious receives these kinds of information (and it receives them on a daily!), it factors them into its evaluation of my decisions. On a conscious level I know that the see-sawing over the decision to quit stems mainly from one thing: WHERE and HOW I will I do my PhD. Being employed by a university all through one’s PhD study, or at the very least at the time one completes one’s application brings with it such advantages that it is currently unthinkable for me to quit. If I could only find a way around this, life would be MUCH better!! I have thought and thought and THOUGHT about how to get around this, but I am coming up completely blank!! No wonder I had buried the whole business.

Ah well, my friend’s observation has at least forced me to look at this problem again, and I think I have clarified it further – if I can find a way around the PhD problem, then I will, if not, then I will look for ways to make the best of a bad situation; at the very least I will relive my poor spirit from the burden of unresolved problems.

LEARNING TO WRITE FICTION:

I am reading a book on how to write fiction (and think about it) and I am really enjoying it! The good news is that I have already been doing a lot of the things that a writer in training should do to build fitness, such as writing regularly, keeping journals, going around with a notebook in hand to record thoughts and observations, reflecting on my dreams when I wake up, and reading, reading, reading... The bad news is that looking back at some of my own writing (which has drawn a lot of praise from people who read a lot and with whom I share reading taste), I find that it is riddled with some of the more common mistakes that beginning (or BAD) writers make!! This led me to thinking that either:

1. My writing is not all it is cracked out to be – and that therefore my assessors and I are no good

Or

2. Reading these kinds of books (on how to write well) is going to make me sooo critical of my writing, that I’m never going to be able to produce anything that I think is worth publishing!

If the latter is true, then woe is me!! :-/

Ah well, on the bright side, I have such a passion for writing, that very little can truly discourage me - that is surely a plus. Secondly, it turns out that one of the best ways to train as an aspiring writer is to read, and God knows I love to read; moreover,I have read A LOT! Thirdly, I am a quick learner; and what’s more, a reflective one This means that I can only get better if I apply myself! I am sure writers, no matter how gifted, still need to learn how to express themselves and this does not happen overnight. Fourthly, this self criticism can only drive me to better performance; I cannot imagine a bigger obstacle to learning than thinking one is already good enough!

So anyway, reflecting on what I have been reading, I am particularly intrigued by two processes: characterisation and plot. In the case of characterisation, I have always wondered how writers make up completely fictional yet wonderfully believable characters, and was always sceptical about that disclaimer that they include at the beginning of the book that the characters portrayed were completely fictitious and any resemblance to actual living or dead persons was not intentional. As it turns out, or according to this book anyway, it is perfectly possible for these kinds of characters to actually be 'born' within the writer's subconscious!! Obviously, just like babies, they will bear a resemblance to their parents and other relatives (read the people with whom the writer comes into contact), but just like children, they will have a personality all of their own nevertheless.

I found this so intriguing that all day today I have been trying to imagine the response of different characters to different stimuli: in the book they ask you to imagine the reaction of a passenger in a non-smoking compartment of a train to another person who walks in, sits down and lights up. I immediately pictured a non confrontational and self effacing woman, and compared her possible reaction to that of an irritated, overworked, underpaid civil servant for instance. Immediately the possibilities for creating characters opened up to me! Before that, I had worried that I had not interacted with enough people, did not know enough of human behaviour etc. But now that I think about it, maybe reading all those books on behavioural psychology was preparation for just such a time!! Not to mention all those books on religion, politics, the law, feminism, geography, and heaps and heaps of fiction of all genres (except horrors!!) In future these should help me flesh characters out and organise plot.

Speaking of plot, the book says that writers generally use one of two approaches: either they will plan it all out from the beginning, or they will write whatever comes as it comes to them - the end might even get written first, so that the writer writes backwards.. Either way, the one who starts out by laying it all out is likely to force himself into a box, otherwise he will wander away from the plan by all means. This for me was a source of great release - I tend to try and know the end from the beginning; failing that, I often cannot even begin to write a story!!

All in all, comforting thoughts.

(This is an opportune moment to stop I think, writers are advised not to write beyond the end of the story. As it is, the conflict that I started out with is resolved, and the reader (I hope) feels like they have closure. It is also important that the reader does not suspect the writer of cheating - you know like how in a book or a movie, conflict is resolved by highly unlikely people or circumstances - like aliens coming out of no where to rescue the captives; or someone suddenly rising from the dead a la South American soap opera)

A last note: I hope I am not going to fall into the habit of analysing everything I write to death!! That might a bit boring..