musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

I wear my rue with a difference


I have so many questions about things nowadays; maybe I always have, but perhaps the questions were held down, drowned beneath the sea that encircled my working life. In the days when I worked in a big city hospital, my life was hectic, so maybe my mind was hectic then as well. Retrospect is difficult through what seems a fog of war, though; almost like trying to remember the experience in a hall of mirrors, or escape from a complex maze enshrouded by dense, high bushes.

Maybe I am the problem, however; maybe with Age comes not wisdom, but confusion. Doubt. Denial. So many new things seeming to tear the paper off the gifts I have spent a lifetime wrapping; so many beliefs I held, and kept losing along the way…

It’s difficult to know what ‘normal’ means, don’t you think? We’ve stretched and bent it into so many shapes nowadays, I’m no longer sure I’d even recognize it if I bumped into it. And it’s not that I want to be normal -I’m pretty sure I don’t- it’s more that I don’t want to be so abnormal that I risk ‘curative’ – ‘calming’- medications, or worse, involuntary committal to some form of locked institution. No, I think I’d like to be considered a rose with a different name; or a rose growing quietly by itself in a mountain meadow somewhere -admired from afar, but like Brigadoon, only approachable after a long interregnum, and even then, by invitation only…

There are probably a lot of people out there who feel the same; only a few of them venture out of the shadows, though; and even fewer ever dare to admit it -especially if their self-diagnosed difference hasn’t rewarded them with enough talents or skills to make it worthwhile risking being misunderstood. Or worse I suppose, claiming that they are indeed different with no evidence to back it up, no ability to claim membership in an unfamiliar pasture; no right to wander where they don’t belong…

I’m not talking about me you understand -I’m too old to wander unsupervised: even well-travelled trails sometimes branch in unexpected directions if you haven’t walked them for a while. No, it’s more the people whose work I have come to love who make me wonder. But maybe the Muse picks people like them out of crowds heading the same direction, but treats them to surprises, unexpected inspiration along the way.

Years ago, when I was first exposed to enigmatic writing on a dare, I tried to read a few pages of Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce. I was stumped within a page or two, but after fighting my way through what seemed like a stream-of-consciousness filled with strange words, neologisms and the sense I was merely wandering through a stranger’s unlit room in the dead of night, I gave up my attempt. The rest of Joyce’s writings are probably more readable, and no doubt clever, but I gave up on him after that naïve and unexpected plunge into water that made no attempt to welcome me.

But, as I have come to understand it, Joyce was probably experimenting with what it might be like to transcribe instalments of subconscious thoughts -dreams perhaps- as remembered on awakening in the night.

Other authors, though, seem to have had better success in my opinion. Instead of fluent thought progression and building on sound grammatical principles, some have constructed their sentences as if they had to hurry to get them on paper before another equally important thought arose. Although at first I found it disconcerting, as I continued to read I began to enjoy the style; the rush to get the thoughts on paper (or screen) meshed with my own way of reading: skimming some paragraphs whose details I found uninteresting and then immersing myself in others as I progressed.

I particularly enjoyed the style in the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx. Just randomly opening a page: ‘Quoyle woke in the empty room. Grey light. A sound of hammering. His heart. He lay in his sleeping bag in the middle of the floor. The candle on its side. Could smell the wax, smell the pages of the book that lay open beside him, the dust in the floor cracks. Neutral light illuminated the window. The hammering again and a beating shadow in the highest panes. A bird…’

Or, consider a more complex example of a description of these hurried thoughts taken from Virginia Woolf’s Selected Short Stories: ‘Miss Thingummy drinks tea at her desk, and plate-glass preserves fur coats –
Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled – and truth?’ [i]

Far from criticizing this style, once I got used to the quick, short descriptions, seemingly transcribed randomly as the thoughts occurred to her, I began to enjoy them. They are how I imagine thoughts are assembled in our brains before they become words. In fact I doubt that thoughts are always transcribable, and usually flit away before solidifying; Woolf has done a good job of transmogrifying them before they disappear, I think.

But does this form of writing say anything about the writer? Does it categorize them as ‘different’ or merely brilliant? Clever, or stochastic? Difficult to read, or simply fitting more precisely into the way that some of us read?

Perhaps if any of us were to be analysed, some quirks would surface; some diagnoses might be attempted to more easily contrast us with the prevailing Zeitgeist -but why? For a reader, would a diagnosis change the enjoyment we feel when we read their works? For a writer, would it discourage them if we slapped a label on them; would ‘othering’ them stop them from writing?

Of course not… well, I can only hope not…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/why-i-wonder-if-virginia-woolf-was-autistic?

, , , , , ,

gozzter

, , , , , ,

Leave a comment