Giving Up, Giving In

Oh dear sweet blog, what an utter, utter relief it is to be tappin' away on you again! I have had a seriously bad week (things really kicked up on Sunday morning, but I will only talk about that once I have the strength/anyone asks).

I read this article which got my mental cogs whirring rustily. Maybe I'll even write on it like I used to, who knows??! Lack of sleep, serious emotional stress and general need-to-cry have left me clogged and murky upstairs. What I really need is some sort of anonymous guardian angel figure who will kidnap me, appease the various people who are baying for my blood asking me to do the bare minimum expected of me when I signed on to take a chunk of Governmental money to be educated. I get told that I am a good person, who makes people happy (chiefly by The Libertarian, bless him) but I do feel like a tremendous failure when things pile up on me. The knotted narrative of my life so far, in which all the events connect and nothing can be left out to fully understand the enormity of current problems, makes it that much harder.

After handing in an essay two days late by accident, after having spent all day writing another which WAS due today, I almost fell to pieces. Never had my skin felt thinner in recent memory, as I stood in front of the office of the somewhat perplexed Administrative Director of the School of English and Drama! I could feel heat creeping upon me; I knew how it might look to them, and I was ashamed. 'I'm not your common or garden layabout!' I wanted to shout with some sort of perverse pride. 'No; I'm in this situation because I'm pathetic enough to be deeply affected by the suffering of others! GO ON! PUNISH ME!'

Defeatist, much? I managed to recover 'Fight Mode' once they, very kindly, gave it an on-time stamp after all, but I was afraid. I knew that my memory, taxed with misery and fatigue, would probably fail me. Sure enough, it did - the essay was of course due in two days ago. Everyone else isn't always wrong, my mother used to say to me. It's YOU. I went to see my course organiser, quivering on the brink. She was very considerate and my skin thinned further, dangerously. She had misunderstood things slightly. I clarified. She went to recover my essay, and my skin collapsed altogether. Sat right there in her office, I cried. Oh, how much I wanted to cry my eyes out! How I wanted to slide to the floor, pull my coat over my face and cry pathetically in great, big, bursting sobs! Embarrassingly enough, my eyes are filling with tears in my university library as I type this.

Instead, I hyperventilated my way back to some semblance of composure. I could not embroil this poor woman - who had once asked me if I was alright after the seminar, because I hadn't contributed - in my personal failure to handle emotion. So, head dipped and shoulders shaking, I 'sucked it up'. A vague numbness settled over me and when she returned, I could occasionally flick glances towards her. There was an awful, genuine kindness in her eyes when she (repeatedly) apologised. She could probably tell from my shrivelled eyes that I had problems. Hence my inability to meet her eye. She advised me to speak to my advisor and submit an Extenuating Circumstances form. I comically imagined entering his office to meet with him and descending into a disastrous, weeping wreck.

A fear and pride held me back, just like it does. I want to resolve my feelings somehow. The urge to live, to be something is strong in me - but so too is the urge for destruction. Why? Why do I want to lie across a stranger's table and cry out my whole life? Why do I want to invite them to stamp over my feelings? Deep down, I know they probably won't. They'll just be appalled. They will probably, as many already have, give me credit for coping with the amount of familal bullying that I took.

I am a hypocrite though. I usually like grey areas, I like things to be complicated. Yet when it comes to the whole 'I need to get away from my family, but they have made more vocal expressions of love towards me recently than ever before and I feel horribly guilty. Plus, I'm the only real adult in the house emotionally' - I wish I could pass. I really do.

The source of much of this angst is that, when I returned innocently home last weekend to work on the essay I handed in today, I was served up the information that my elder sister (who was there, as I complained in my last post) is there for good because she has left her husband. He has always been abusive (not physically, thankfully for him). Much to my amazement, it was my parents who had told her to come back. A giant psychological shift has taken place - both my parents and my sister are being forced to reassess the way they see the world. My sister, at the age of 31, is being forced to consider life without a partner and children. I know that sounds dramatic; but that's how it is in her head. Remember that as a card-carrying member of the community we live in (unlike me), she subscribed fully to all the bullshit dictated to us by my parents, and especially my mother.

My mother, in a manner which really shouldn't surprise me, obviously feels both relief and guilt in great measure. I don't think she's quite emotionally developed enough to realise that, but as somebody who has borne the brunt of her tactlessness my whole life, I can see it. She keeps talking about how glad she is my sister is back, bringing up family skeletons and saying in an accusatory way 'I don't know how you stayed with him!'

GREAT, Mother. Just great. She's already feeling guilty of betraying him, as the abusee often feels upon escaping their abuser, and trying to make sense of why he married her in the first place when he obviously didn't love her. Make it worse, why don't you? Truly, we can do no right. We actually pointed this out to my mum ('If she had come back sooner, you would have accused her of not working at it') but my mum seemed rather oblivious. I don't hate my mum like I came close to in the past - I despair of her. She had the sheer presence of mind to bring up my sister's ex-fiance the other day (who broke off the engagement unexpectedly and without contact, and then tried to hide from her afterwards, fucking asshole) and say of her soon-to-be ex: 'It must have been something you did that really irritated him.'

Fucking hell! Though I know it really doesn't sound like it, she meant well in her completely cack-handed way. As my sister sobbed into her fleece, I turned and refashioned my mum's bald statement into what it was probably intended to be. 'You see? You see?' my mum leapt in eagerly, as she often does when I comment on the sorry affair. She flags up the evident sense in what I'm saying, I think with some relief, because Mater REALLY doesn't know how to do emotion.

So yes - at a time when I was already under hideous levels of pressure (two essays, Master's applications, a French presentation which should have been done LAST YEAR, behind on general French work and barely keeping up with my reading), this landed slap on me like a big, fat, fucking turd. This kind of shit makes me angry enough as it is, but the fact of it happening to my sister, my mum bringing up similar family history and meeting an old friend who had put her daughter's in-laws behind bars after a long fight increased my sense of despondent rage. At the very least, I wanted to be at home to look after my sister for the short period of time she has off, but nuuuuuu, I have to keep going and do fucking shit. Well, I am only human. I fail. I failed today. By a miracle (i.e. making it probably quite obvious that I would not refrain, if pushed, from crying in the English office), I was saved - but this is bullshit, yo.

I shouldn't have to be in this position. Maybe I sound like an ingrate for saying that, but that's how I feel, I'm afraid. I have no bitterness about all the time I lost looking after my sister (why the fuck should I?) but it just seems so very fucking unfair that this kind of bollocks happens to me. Furthermore, when I grovel before my advisor and the evaluatory board that may or may not condemn me for my failure of memory, I must reduce this all to one paragraph. How shittily pathetic is it going to sound, do you think? 'Sorry, I think I'm developing a stomach ulcer because my sister's getting divorced.' I know it's not right - but good God, part of me almost feels like I deserve it. Maybe I do. Maybe I should have been professional to the end, as my mother no doubt would have been.

Ah well, fucking bullshit essays handed in, still not had a shower and the French presentation looms over me like an executioner. Time I went back to the flat, had dinner and leapt out of the window forced myself to read until I fall asleep with exhaustion and then stay up later than necessary for no good reason because I can't relax and the fridge is too loud.

Well, I'm a regular bundle of joy - but so run the joys of blogging. It's like offloading on people without actually doing so. No need to make small talk, no need to force myself to be suitably smiley. I am free of social convention's oppression and I can wallow in my mounting unhappiness. Not a joke, not a hint of a smile. Sometimes even krazy jelly beans lose all their colour.

Headscarves and Turbans

Quite some time ago, I said that I would reveal what I thought about girls who wear headscarves (at my university). I'm not going to focus just on the laydeez though - the menz will also be getting a bit of a rollicking.

It must be said that I am not targeting all girls in headscarves either. Just a lot of them.

It has struck me recently that there is so much fundamental dishonesty in the world. That sounds really naive, but I don't mean it in some 'child-opening-eyes-to-harsh-reality' way. I mean it in the sense that it is stunning how much of human existence can essentially be boiled down to power struggles - people trying to claim authority over each other. Yet a lot of the time the subject of the power struggles is often misunderstood or misrepresented, and hence those arguing over it are, if you will, arguing over something that does not actually exist. They are trying to generate authenticity out of inauthenticity, and in the process basing themselves and what they stand for - their identities - around a lie.

Let us invoke a 'trendy' example here: Islam and the arguments between Sunnis and Shias, or between Wahabbis and pretty much every other type of Muslim (:-D). It's not just Islam though that has this problem - pretty much every religion based around a text of some sort has this problem to some extent.

If you haven't already, look at my blog header. It is a quote from that wonderfully disturbed man, Franz Kafka. I am not, and did not, choose that in order to come across as intellectual (ffs, I read the book for a university course... I'm not the sort of person who reads 'classics' for fun unless they're relatively humorous. Yes, yes, I know. Sacrilege!). I chose it because it struck me as so very true. Thanks to ol' man Nietzsche and others of his ilk, I've come to rethink what that means. Now, when I think something is 'true,' what I really mean, I suppose is that for me, it is very applicable.

'The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.' I would gladly renounce all hope of ever being a real writer if I could produce such a phrase. Staggeringly obvious, but like the most accurate observations, it needs to be pointed out to us. I can't help thinking that if only more people kept this in mind, the world could well become a more sensible place. I'm not a fucking 'punk rocker with flowers in my hair' nor am I wishing for 'world peace' like a beauty pageant contestant, I just wish for a little more pensiveness, please.

Once something has been printed/published - that is IT. It takes on a life of its own. To borrow a Freudian term, it becomes 'uncanny.' I was thinking about it and I surmised at first that perhaps at the heart of our power struggles lies the desire to 'be or beat' the author. Maybe the power struggles are nothing but an expression of collective frustration at the fact that the author has 'got one' over us and an unconscious acknowledgement that we would like to be in their position. I mean, look at the way educational progress works. We do not learn and learn - the aim of accumulating knowledge is to reach the position of knowledge-provider ourselves in most instances. Think of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and how much it applies to all of humanity; all our learning is but an attempt to take a swipe at God.

However, the printed text will survive after its author's death. It will outlive them, and even in their own lifetime, it will defy them. All their manicured intent will not be able to forge a 'pure' work that has only one understanding to it. Some critics and reviewers will see what they were aiming to do in their work; others will draw entirely new strains of meaning from it. It is their legacy; much as other people have children.

People like to think that their children, sharing their genetic matter as they do, will turn out to be, if not carbon copies, at least startling likenesses of the originals. Not so! as anyone with half a brain knows. Works of art are no less wayward. They must be as receptive to the egos of others as they are to the ego of their creator; otherwise they will not survive over time.

Therein lies an irony: you work and work and create yourself a monument, yet after all your efforts it defies you. It refuses to behave as told, to conform exactly. It is 'uncanny,' because as soon as it leaves your mind and becomes apparent, it takes on an authority of its own and perhaps even robs you of your authorial authority. You can't tell it what to do. Nobody can tell it what to do - and then the problems start because it tells others what to do.

People are base, lowly creatures fashioned out of clay who fail to do justice to that glorious organ in their heads that rules them. If ever there was a 'God,' it ought to be the human brain. Look at what the human brain can do! However, if we can't even respect the capacities of our own brains, then we haven't got much chance of remembering that texts are living things. They don't belong to the author any more than they belong to the reader; they live in the middle ground between intent and interpretation and we would do well to remember this and get the hell over ourselves.

So. Intro over.

What with this insecurity that surrounds texts, religious and otherwise, people need SOMETHING to cling to. Enter ritual and symbolism. What yuman beans really like, is habit and routine. I think it is hardwired into our biology, but I'm not certain. Even those who seek variety need this to some extent in order to be less aware of the passage of time and our mortality.

I don't really approve of the laziness that induces us to cling to things out of sentimentality in such a way, but I understand why people do and I understand how terrifying it can be to suddenly let slip a whole set of beliefs, no matter how half-baked, and have to start again with a blank canvas on the world. I'd venture to say here that while liberation is generally good, it definitely ain't easy yo.

All this is why, when I see girls at my uni wafting about in their hijabs, I feel... ambiguous. Depending on what they look like, my thoughts tend to run thus: either 'Oh' or 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame.' Quite often the former runs into the latter. If the girl in question looks like a fully-paid up devout Muslim: baggily covered, has a hint of a moustache (sorry ladies, but if you do, you do) and is bare-faced (and quite often looks dead-eyed, although I'm sure I do too), I think to myself that I don't really know how much of a believer she is. Maybe she wants to do her eyebrows and wear lipgloss, but maybe she can't. Maybe she really DOES believe that she is the Satan-sin of Temptation personified and/or see the gaze of others as a threat - if so, that's a damn shame.

However, when I see what my friend Ala (and others) have described as 'muhajababes' (oh go on, read Ala's post, it's short, concisely-written and well-explained!), I just think: 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame' because it is a stupid shame. They are a visual lie to me. Here are girls who want to be regular girls, wearing make-up and tight clothes and accessorising fit to outshine even the scantiest-clad girl - and suddenly a hijab obscures their hair and neck. The pointlessness of it is what always astounds me. Human sexuality cannot be regulated. People always try and do so; in some respects (i.e. paedophilia, incest, etc.) this is laudable. In many ways, it's also quite a hopeless exercise, like trying to rid the world of all its rats. Purge in one place, and there will be an upsurge elsewhere.

When I see these girls, or boys with turbans which hide their cut hair - or they have carefully shaved and groomed beards - I find it stupid and dishonest. Some of them will perhaps want to continue as they are, no doubt. However, I want to shake a lot of these people and ask them to think and sleep on it a bit. What kind of ludicrousness is that? Evidently they are doing it so that their parents and relatives can look upon them and see the symbol, see the visual affirmation of faith.

(I once saw a woman on the Tube who had short hair - neck-length, tons of make-up on and I don't know whether her eyebrows were partially drawn on or what, but I noticed she had a very fucking big tattoo of a khanda on her forearm. I have no idea whether she was wearing a kara or not, but I don't remember seeing one...)

Yet, like texts, the person may well be trapped in the middle - caught between the symbol and those that demand it. They may think the symbol is a concession to their parents/relatives; in fact, the parents/relatives tend to see it as a promise and a testimony. It tells them that you have faith and locks you in to their system of belief, and if you don't, it's a lie - once again - that everything is hinging on. Take a stand! Don't let yourself be suffocated by something that you thought you were in control of!

Then again, some people are so unable to handle the abstract as the abstract that they will literalise everything. They are people with no imagination and no inquisitivity, and they will not accept the view of sexuality I have just mentioned. They will cry vermin and keep stamping until there is blood. Their failure to accept the fact of sexuality's omnipresence will result in them turning, like so many desperately unimaginative bastards, to murdering their children in that most well-known of rituals, the 'honour' killing. The term 'control killing' as has been proposed, is much better. See, 'control killing' makes me think of Rentokil, which makes me think of vermin, which leads me back to my metaphor. Such bastards - being as they are, probably consumed with personal guilt and shame for whatever reasons - will seize upon the separate existence and snuff out its life in a pathetic and futile attempt to protect their lie.

Lo, we have returned to the power struggles of which I spoke at the beginning, and so it is that books are burned and women are killed for the sake of people's authority. Shame on you. Grow the fuck up. If you were truly people of religion and honour, you would accept that all things belong to God, and that ultimately it is only God's decision to exercise judgement. Monica Ali - an author who faced the threat of book-burning in this day and age - helped in the production of this post, pointing out as she did via Brick Lane that it really is not just fear, but also laziness, that drives people to stay with a certain ideology. I mean, ferChrissakes, the main character is not afraid to have an affair, even though she hasn't guts enough to stop praying despite not really seeming to believe in religion! A special mention must also go to Marcel Proust, upon whom I had to write a 2, 500 word essay, which I did 2, 000 words of in one day. Thank you.Thank you very fucking much.

The moral of the rant may be that art of all kinds and children are much more alike than you ever wanted to realise, and that you don't own nuttin'. Don't let this capitalist, property-appropriating world fool you, y'hear? ;-D As if the recent recession and allegations of fraud didn't make that clear enough already. As an absolute genius of a man once said: 'Money ain't got no owners; only spenders.'

To finish in an Omar-ian vein: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR, YO!