Breaking Old Thought Patterns

Smeuse: a hole in a hedge made by the repeated passage of small animals. (Sussex dialect)

Dear Reader

I took this photo when I was driving around Tasmania - oh, back earlier this year, around the time of my birthday - and I stopped to photograph this person’s pretty garden with their escaped hens and saw that the escape was the prettiest bit.

One of the best things about middle-age is finally being clever enough to escape the worst of my unhelpful thought patterns. Consequently, I have a lot more peace in my life. It’s not perfect, I don’t catch every negative thought before it takes hold, but gosh I do better than I used to.

This month’s newsletter is about:

getting older and happier (and prettier)

diaries

parents

politics and culture

preoccupations of the middle-aged.

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Happy winter (in Australia), I wish you some pleasant daydreaming this month.

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THINGS THAT GO AWAY & COME BACK AGAIN

Thoughts

Airplanes

Boats

Trains

People Dreams

Animals

Songs

Husbands

Boomerangs

Lightning

The sun, the moon, the stars

Bad weather

The seasons

Soldiers

Good luck

Health

Depression

Joy

Laundry

- Anne Waldman

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Getting Older and Happier

1. Older I

The older you get (the more) your life becomes richer. It’s incredible.

- Vivienne Westwood.

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2. Older II

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

- Sharon Olds.

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3. Marriage As a Long Conversation

When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation.

- Nietzsche.

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4. An Unfortunate Angle

Paulina Porizkov, for the sisters.

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5. Aunties’ Selfies

I watch my mother’s rebirth unfold Instagram story after Instagram story.

When she writes “Enjoy moment” in the caption, I don’t correct her. Does she want to say: “I enjoyed the moment,” or “You must enjoy every moment,” or “This was an enjoyable moment,” or “I must always enjoy my moments”? I suspect it’s all of them.

Ankita Shah in VOGUE India.

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6. How Horribly I Was Talking to Myself

Caitlin Moran wondering why she is not being nicer to herself.

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Diaries

1. Raw

The more digital we have, the more naked skin and rawness we will want -Björk

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2. Maybe We Should Be Re-enacting More

This amazing documentary, which is about a recreation of the battle of Orgreaves by Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller, just totally blew my mind. Maybe we should be Gestalt-therapy-ing our way through a lot more trauma, as a community?

Deller’s conceptual art piece used many of the veterans of the original event in the re-enactment and so it crackles with rage and excitement.

You can see the documentary for free on YouTube. It’s an absolute gem.

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3. Who Had Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy During Her Third Marriage

But Malcolm also revealed a new way of writing. When Garner read The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s book on Sylvia Plath and her biographers, published in 1994, she was struck by Malcolm’s fearlessness and how she used psychoanalytic methods to locate meaning in the way someone cooked a lasagne or decorated their house. Garner, who had psychoanalytic psychotherapy during her third marriage, thought: “OK, well, I’m going to let it rip too.” She began to include observations in her books that she would previously have dismissed as illegitimate, the micro-interactions that revealed more about a person than their words. In an interview with a professor for The First Stone, Garner kept helping herself to biscuits in a jar on the table until he moved the jar out of her reach. She found the moment funny and full of subtle meaning, the way it communicated the power struggle between her and her subject. Under Malcolm’s influence, it became material.

From Sophie Elmhirst’s “The Savage Suburbia of Helen Garner” in The Guardian.

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4. Spatial Biographies

..my artistic and architectural sides plus the “ability” to talk deeply with people whom I just met somehow leads me to drawing maps and gathering oral histories from my community to create a visual work that my audience can consume.

From Malaysian artist, Harold Egn Eswar in Baski.

Isn’t this, Dari Kali ke Durian Tunjung (From Kali to Durian Tunjung) 2021 terrific? This mixture of memoir and mapping.

He calls them spatial biographies. My son and I saw them in an exhibition recently and stood reading them together for an hour or so. Just wonderful.

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6. Active Nests

Author, Derrick Downey Jr is “looking out for everybody”.

“When something brings you peace, you protect it”.

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Why This Painting Makes You Uneasy

I collect pictures (in my head and on art gallery visits) of sighthounds in art. This is a good analysis of John Everett Millais’ Isabella by Matthew Olivier, which is on my list of #sighthoundsinart.

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Sea

This is my childhood beach. I have mixed feelings about seeing it become a ‘secret beach’ recommendation on Instagram.

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Parents

1. When Somebody You Love Dies, You’re Close to the World of the Dead in a Way. You Go With Them

Heti’s father died in 2018. “I don’t think I could have written about it in that way if I hadn’t gone through something similar,” she said.

In the novel’s strangest scene, Mira’s consciousness joins with her father’s – inside a leaf. It’s a bizarre notion, but one that Heti too finds “simple and humble”.

“It feels like a kind of realism to me,” she said, “when someone you love dies, you do go into a leaf with them. You do become closer to nature, or at least that’s how I felt. I felt much closer to nature suddenly. I felt separated from other humans. I felt like I was in a different realm, like I was very close to my father. When somebody you love dies, you’re close to the world of the dead in a way. You go with them.”

From a review by Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman.

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2. Lying Down

Do you remember how amazing it was when you first mastered the lying-down-breastfeed with your newborn?

Paula Modersohn-Becker does in her 1906 painting.

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3. Birds Flying High

Jennie Harney Fleming with her three year old.

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4. Give Less

Jenny Hwang on not getting resentful with your teenager.

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5. Parenting Teenagers and Young Adults Takes a Good Sense of Humour

Bless.

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Politics and Culture

1. Be Safe to Disagree With. Wipe Down the Sink. Put a Record On. Dry Laundry in the Sun. Hang a Disco Ball. Hold Quiet Hours.

Buy a print from Lord Cowboy on how to have peace in your heart.

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2. Everything Was Fought, As It Is Now, Tooth and Nail

People speak ad nauseam of golden days when governments, and/or the parliament got things done.

From someone who lived and worked through those times: don't get sucked into all the stuff about how social media makes it harder. Believe that none of the tax reforms, the social welfare reforms, the energy reforms, or whatever, were actually easy.

Everything was fought, as it is now, tooth and nail, whether that be by the Hawke/Keating governments or the Howard government.

The arguments only started to fail when politicians got too tired to keep prosecuting them. When the exasperation with "dumb" journalists or voters got too much.

In a famous bit of correspondence originally reported in 2008, the former Hawke and Keating government minister, Gordon Bilney, wrote a letter to a local government bureaucrat once he was on his way out the door.

"One of the great pleasures of private life is that I need no longer be polite to nincompoops, bigots, curmudgeons and twerps who infest local government bodies and committees such as yours," it said.

"In the particular case of your committee, that pleasure is acute."

To those who knew him, it was very Gordon Bilney. But it reflects the exhaustion people in the political process inevitably feel, and which can be the most debilitating limitation on getting things through.

- Laura Tingle’s farewell in the ABC.

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3. Pure Opposition

Spengler envisaged an end-point where, “The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will”. It’s reasonable to surmise that those cheering on the Trumpian backlash from the depths of the “dissident” internet would understand themselves as aligned with the re-assertion of a martial over a managerial spirit. But what if the internet Nazism as an expression of rage does not, in fact, signal the return of martial spirit? What if it’s just another spasm of brutalisation and dissolution, en route to the bottom of the cycle?

If this were so, it would be reasonable to expect any political victory applauded by a dissident caucus not to be followed by much in the way of substantial policy change. And indeed, since Trump’s victory, the so-called “dissident Right” has grown increasingly marginal within the emerging government coalition. The anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo explained why, distinguishing between those effective as critics and gadflies, and those with the temperament for building and cooperation in an institutional environment. “In my opinion”, Rufo said, “we are lacking some of this capacity.” When he made this point on X, one of the first responses promptly illustrated it for him, replying: “I’m kind of like fuck your institutional environment”. It’s a sentiment very much in keeping with “Nigga, heil Hitler”: one of pure opposition.

Mary Harrington’s “The Decline of Ye West” in UnHerd.

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4. Its Cult of Toughness

America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

- Anaïs Nin, 1940.

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5. Phone-Based Psychosis

At the root of this opacity might be whatever strange thing is currently happening with time. I mostly keep track of it on my phone, a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now. More than a decade of complaining about this situation has done nothing to change my compulsion to induce dissociation anew each day. And, though there was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more concrete than whatever I was looking at on my phone, this year has marked a turning point. Now the cognitive tendrils of a phone-based psychosis frequently seem more descriptive of contemporary reality—“Houthi PC small group,” etc.—than the daffodils I see springing up in the park. The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly.

Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker with “My Brain Finally Broke”.

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6. The particular types of human connection that are now extinct

This is a very loving ode to the spontaneity and serendipity of living in the 1990s by Kelly Oxford.

You’ll never experience leaving your house feeling like everything was a random adventure because you had no lifeline back to safety. You couldn’t Google the restaurant menu beforehand, couldn’t check if your friends were already there, couldn’t verify that the party was still happening. You just showed up and dealt with whatever you found. Maybe the restaurant was closed. Maybe the party was lame. Maybe you’d meet the love of your life in line at the grocery store. The uncertainty was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure, like being the protagonist in your own life instead of a spectator scrolling through everyone else’s.

You’ll never know the luxury of spending three hours in a café drinking ten free coffee refills while smoking inside, having conversations that meandered through every topic because time moved differently when no one could reach you.

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Pas Besoin de Couteau, J’ai Mes Canines

Soldat Tue Soldat by Alpha Wann.

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Preoccupations of the Middle-Aged

1. Forever and Ever

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time”. - Maya Angelou.

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2. Pretty Amazing Things

Mortality cake.

Grayson Perry Broach. I bought this one as a little present for myself.

Motherhood memoir: Mother Archive by Erika Morillo.

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3. Without Running Away

The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth they can accept about themselves without running away.

- Leland Val Van De Wall

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A not admitting of the wound (1188)

- Emily Dickinson

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside-

a closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun
Until the tender Carpenter
Perpetual nail it down -

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4. Their Purpose is to Restore Order in the Playground That is Your Life

In Defense of Temporary Obsessions by Ankita Shah.

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5. A Place of Perfect Solitude

Abe Obedina’s garden shed is the best space I have seen in ages.

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6. Books I Have Read Lately That I Enjoyed

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Between You and Me by Joanne Horton

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

Calypso by David Sedaris

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7. Films I Have Enjoyed Lately

Force Majeure (2014) (Now one of my favourite films, ever. There is so much I loved about this Swedish dark comedy about the inside of a marriage.

And lately, I have been enjoying a lot of spooky films:

Stranger by the Lake (2013) (If you are going to watch this when your teenager is home, know that it includes graphic sex scenes. Teenagers hate coming across graphic sex scenes with their parents. Or so I have heard. It’s French and quite Hitchcockian).

Memories of Murder (2003) (Korean - Bong Joon Ho film, to be precise, and about a serial killer and a farming village).

Night Watch (1973) (English mystery thriller with Elizabeth Taylor).

Sinners (2025) (I love vampire films set in the Deep South).

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) (Turkish police drama and possibly the best landscape shots I have ever seen).

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8. On My Middle-Age Related Insomnia

My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt. - - - Gustave Flaubert.

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Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1854.

I am really, really trying to remember this each night.

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9. Needy

I, in my corner, with my monstrous needs.

- Susan Sontag.

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Finally

“You can be happy and fucked up and still triumph” - John Waters.

This is exactly how I feel at this time of my middle-aged life.