Hellawes' Perspective

The reason why fragments of thoughts are spooky

Dear Reader

This is Anne Carson in praise of fragments:

In Sappho’s poem, her addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the way—and this is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, so spooky.

I really like it. I’ve linked to the source of that quote quite a bit in this newsletter because the interview in The Paris Review is so good.

As you know, I’m a lover of fragments in this newsletter… fragments from my journal, fragments from things I’ve read and seen and listened to, fragments of time…

It’s November. This month’s newsletter is named after Hellawes, because I am interested in the distribution of power, and our relationships with power. It is a political season, after all. And, this is a woman who was dangerous. She represented a reversal of gender roles, too. Hellawes is a woman who threatens a man, Sir Lancelot no less, with rape and death.

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Notes From My Journal

It’s like that joke, does the process know we’re trusting in it, she says to me.

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A young woman talking with us about the tragic backstory behind Aileen Wuornos: I’m for women’s rights… and women’s wrongs.

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Me, at a party, looking for my teenage son: Is Cormac out there?

Male friend: Yes. He’s out there somewhere. You know how he just drifts off.

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My son, describing his sister: She said everything and nothing at the same time.

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I saw a blue-faced honeyeater drinking from my pond and felt joy.

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Male friend to me: You’re a babushka doll of over-analyzing.

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I opened my front gate and saw a small snake on my step. It was moving so quickly it resembled something sizzling on a hot pan.

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My son told me he had a very pleasant dream. I was out walking with a sheep dog. You know the sort, you can have them off leash and not even pay attention to them?

Our dogs can be a little stressful, can’t they, I said, laughing.

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That there is something other than a boys’ club. That there are secret conversations that happen sometimes in work environments, when there are no men about. It was an unexpected turn in our conversation. We learned we had both loved breastfeeding. And, this strong woman, who works in an often-dangerous and very male-dominated field, was reminiscing about the moment she discovered she could breastfeed her newborn. She bent forward, cradling an invisible baby and said in a tone not unlike a blues singer, Baby Girl, Mama’s got what you need.

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My husband picks up the fat black cat sitting between us in bed and plops it onto the floor.

He says, cat, you’re getting in the road of boobs.

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Our Three Dogs

Our dogs are all named after artists.

Rothko

(Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, Mark Rothko)

Unemployed - “was probably our best soldier¹”, but like most Italian Greyhounds, has ended up with most of his teeth removed over time, and so is now a toothless watchdog.

Prone to anxiety - scared of storms, scared of teenagers cooking, scared of social gatherings. Very scared of teenagers cooking for social gatherings.

Well-mannered, like an older gentleman, and always asks permission before coming into the bedroom or jumping onto your lap.

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Whistler

(James McNeill Whistler)

Underemployed - occupation is dog personality tester, and like a therapist, is also able to approach almost any dog and help them emotionally regulate off his calm.

Prone to jealousy - having started life as a wallflower and then blossomed into world’s best behaved, off-leash Italian Greyhound, he now has a desperate desire to be the one to receive the most affection if any affection is going around in the local area.

Small enough to look like an actual Italian Greyhound.

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Caravaggio

(Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio)

Employed - Turkey Chaser, removing bush turkeys from our hens’ coop and very, very proud of how useful he is.

Prone to rule-breaking and athletic feats and combinations of the two.

Handsome, charismatic bad boy who secretly loves boundaries.

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Hyperdimensionality Or Modern-Day Epicycles?

Pravica suggests that we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams. In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology,” he says.

- From an article by Stav Dimitropoulos in Popular Mechanics.

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“The details in the public stairway are original to the building..”

A midcentury house in the North of Italy.

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On Loving Politics

“It’s a hard time to be in politics,” Mr. Carville said, reflecting on his work. “Everyone who is part of it feels beleaguered. The surest line you can use to get applause is, ‘I hate politics.’”

“Actually,” he said. “I don’t.”

But also…

Mr. Carville said he turned off the Biden-Trump debate after the first few minutes, ate two pot gummies and started listening to some Hank Williams.

- Adam Nagourney in The New York Times.
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What Makes an Economist Cry?

This is a cracker of a little clip. It’s from an interview with an economist being led by politician, John Parr who is trying to make community change politics compelling again.

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In Thinking About Political Change

If you grow up in secure attachment, you learn life is about connection. If you do not grow up in a secure attached environment, you learn life is about survival.

- Dr Rangan Chatterjee

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Wisdom for Family Life Through Difficult Times (eg. Parenting Young Adults, Being Partnered or Dealing with Tough Parents)

You have a decision to make. There’s two rational choices and one irrational one. The rational choices. Number one - what you’re doing causes me so much pain, so much stress, I can’t be with it. I love you very much, but this is too hard on me, and I am not willing to expend my energies trying to self-care for all the stress that’s being caused from you by your behaviour. So, I can’t be with you. That’s a perfectly rational choice.

Or you can say, I love you very much and I understand that what you’re doing, whatever it is, comes out of your pain and this is the only way, so far, you’ve found to deal with your pain. So, I’m not going to judge you, I’m not going to control you, I’m not going to try and change you. I just hope you come to your senses at some point. But, I’ll be with you, and I’ll be supporting you emotionally, and so on. That’s another rational choice. What is completely irrational and dysfunctional is to stay with somebody and try and change them. To control them, to convince them, to bribe them, to beg them, to coerce them to change. That’s what’s crazy-making. Don’t ever do that. It’s one of the other.

- Dr Gabor Mate

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Obviously, the Purpose of Growing Flowers is For Our Cocktails

Bloody Mary.

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Garden Inspiration

The answer to almost all your gardening problems is to grow a native garden, instead. Look at these gorgeous ‘before and after’s in an Australian suburban yard. I am currently building native gardens in our backyard, and I can’t tell you how happy it makes me. When I go to visit it after a hectic fortnight, I find it thriving, instead of failing. But, of course, I think, because you’re meant to be here.

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Drawing Vs Writing

It’s play by comparison. Drawing is quite, quite naked. Horrifyingly naked. But I’ve always felt that if I could have forced myself to draw every day I’d be a better person. That it would pull me into an honesty and diligence about honesty that I otherwise slack off from. I also get very happy when I’m drawing—even when I was working on Michael’s book, which was a completely melancholy subject. I felt so happy, just fulfilled.

INTERVIEWER

And you never feel that when you’re writing?

CARSON

No, rarely. Maybe for a second, or a moment here or there, but not in any sustained way. It doesn’t gather up my being the way making an object does.

INTERVIEWER

So why write at all?

CARSON

I write to find out what I think about something.

- From an interview with Anne Carson on ‘The Art of Poetry’ by Will Aitken in The Paris Review.

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Books I Want to Read

Clinical Storytelling, Art and the Problems of Being - Jade McGleughlin

Theory & Practice (a novel) - Michelle de Kretser

Nobody Ever Told Me Anything - Rachael Finley

The Third Realm - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Our Evenings - Alan Hollinghurst

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Suffering

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

- Ernest Hemingway

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Living

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing².

- Agatha Christie

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Even When There is No Peace Outside My Window, There is Peace Inside

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Pure Sex and Mischief

Edelman’s film deepened those impressions, while at the same time removing Prince’s many veils. This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling. The film is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. But then, always, there is relief: the miracle of Prince’s music — a release for me and a release, above all, for Prince.

- From Sasha Weiss’ “The Prince We Never Knew: A revealing new documentary could redefine our understanding of the pop icon. But you will probably never get to see it” in The New York Times Magazine.

Capturing the Surface of Emotional Fact

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts—to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote “The Glass Essay,” I also wanted to do something that I would call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did.

I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if you read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with the people in the story. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.

….because this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their own act of understanding. But I still don’t think I finished the thinking.

- Anne Carson in the same interview above.

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Sometimes the Only Way to Work Out Why a Trap Has Been Set… Is To Walk Into It

We’re really enjoying watching Slow Horses together in the evenings. It’s got some magical older stars like Gary Oldman, and plenty of dark, rainy London scenes along with a bit of black comedy. A friend of mine said that in some ways this spy show is really a show about middle management in big bureaucracies. I like that. And by Season 2, with the Russian spies and English country houses, it even began to remind me of 1960 The Avengers. You might like it, too?

Season 2 Slow Horses.

The Avengers, 1965.

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For the Middle-Aged Woman

It’s a look and a vibe. I am not having a go at us about ageing, I honestly love this. Note the bare feet, too.

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Little Death

Day of the Dead by Spencer Tunick³.

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Recommend

You know I love life-drawing? Do you want to try some, too, and support a good cause?

The Lebanon and Palestine Solidarity Zoom Life Drawing Fundraiser is on 16 November, and you can buy tickets here.

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Finally

Have I told you before how goddamn happy Isabella Rossellini is, being as eccentric and tender as she possibly can while getting older? What a path to follow.

I choose to love     this time     for once
with all my intelligence

- Adrienne Rich, from Splittings, The Dream of a Common Language

I'm trying, Adrienne, I'm trying. 

1. As my daughter said, piteously.

2. This is not intended to be any judgement on those with depression. I liked how freely Christie talked about these feelings.

3. My daughter recently participated/posed in his latest piece. I can’t wait to see the print.