Ye Olde Buckinghamshire

So, having aired the major grievances in my existence (c: yesterday, I think I can go without another diary-like blog post for a long time. Today I oscillated between Gawker and other websites, though I wrote Greek exercises and (with inward groaning) renewed my acquaintance with the aorist tense, played the piano and violin, and sang, too. Gawker was unusually rewarding, what with the mice whose presence the New York City Health Department discovered in the Metropolitan Opera, the perfectly aligned sunset that is to make the streets of Manhattan glow red this evening, and the opera based on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth which is to be performed at La Scala (and the rich selection of Gilbert-and-Sullivan riffs which the blog's commenters wrote on hearing this news).

As for the writing, nothing did materialize yesterday, but I added half of a long paragraph to "The Fountain and the Labyrinth" today. The heroine has arrived in Beaconsfield, so I describe the crossroads where London, Aylesbury, Wycombe and Windsor End meet, as it may have looked in the 17th century, and am about to launch into a depiction of the inn (I chose Royal Saracen's Head). My research yesterday was deeply absorbing, because I found a treasure-trove of old photos and postcards and pictures of Buckinghamshire's towns. There are beautiful scenes like the Pepperpots at a bridge over the River Wye, with a grey flint chapel (/shoemaker's cottage) hidden in the trees nearby; the Church Loft, built in 1534, with the passage leading through into the slightly triste but peacefully quiet Church Lane; and the intricately carven wooden lodge (reminiscent of Hänsel and Gretel), with the ornate brick gate-posts and wrought-iron fence beside it, as well as the stately but compact, lavishly pillared mansion of Hall Barn.

A week or two ago I saw a photo of the Château Chambord, which Francis the First built in the Loire Valley and which was finished in 1547 (the year he died), and the thought struck me that landscapes and edifices can be as beautiful and elaborate and perfect in real life as they are in a painter's imagination. This idea was confirmed when I was looking over the English photos. (But the festooning on the Hall Barn Lodge seems overdone, as if the artist's chisel were bewitched to move compulsively and incessantly like the red shoes in the fairy tale; still, I think that the faces of the cherubs, which don't really fit the bodies, often have an amusing medieval sinisterness, and I enjoy the peaceful curling leafy sprays that end in dragons' or gargoyles' heads). I like the names of the towns, too, like Wycombe and Fingest and Stokenchurch.

For some reason I very much like the St. Bartholomew Church at Fingest, too. It has a great square Norman tower at one end with a double-tented (twin-gabled?) roof on top, slits down the sides, and one modestly large window embedded in its western face. Then there is a nave with a little buttress sprouting out of the middle to the left and right, and at the end there is a chancel, added to the nave in the 13th century, which also sprouts a buttress at each corner. There is an entry porch of dark wood at the nave, a tiny sprinkling of gravestones in the mild green lawn surrounding, and two sombre yews standing guard outside the chancel. While the nineteenth-century brick Methodist chapels that proliferate in the neighbouring towns are at times not without their charm, and there are other venerable churches of which I am also fond, this church was most authentically earthy and plain and impressive.

Anyway, Stowe isn't along the route, but I've been gazing at its National Trust website, which is at times, unconsciously funny. Here are scenes from the Western Garden, where the edifices are meant to represent "illicit and unrequited love":

The Statue of Queen Caroline
A tribute to the consort of George II, her statue was soon moved to the end of the Eleven Acre Lake after her husband fell out of favour with Lord Cobham

The Hermitage
It is said to represent the last refuge of the misogynist, surrounded by evergreens to underline the gloom

Artificial Ruins
Built as a ruin, they have twice had to be rebuilt, once in the late 19th century and again in 1974

The Menagerie
Its earliest function was as a much-admired museum for stuffed animals, including an eight foot crocodile and a thirty two foot boa constrictor. This is now part of Stowe School

A Nile of Ink; Or, a Very Long Diary Entry

It is about 1:40 a.m. and a blank WordPerfect document is open, the cursor blinking and blinking, and the white field glaring and glaring out of the screen, but no writerly inspiration is materializing. I've dipped into my beloved internet sites, have tried to search for classical music videos on YouTube only to be informed that an error had occurred and that "a team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with the situation" (it would be funnier if I weren't sure that this error message has been in use for years), and have twirled and twirled in the rolly-chair. All in vain.

Today T.'s and my high school transcripts arrived in the mail, so there is no obstacle left in the way of submitting our university records to the attention of professors, being advised to enter a certain semester, and then filling out our application forms, e-mailing and sending them off (or, as we did last year, hand-delivering them). Until two days ago I had no intention of reapplying to university, deciding instead to boldly stake out my own mountainous path to an author's career, teaching myself better than ever before and working and working until I come up with good stories and poems and articles. But I've changed my mind so far as to wish to give university a chance again.

The night before last caused this change, because it was truly awful. I searched for jobs online again, but had worse success than usual, convincing me that there are no jobs that I want and none for which I am remotely qualified. Then I succumbed to the impression that I was never going to get anywhere and that I am only a burden to myself and the world in general. So I struggled with that feeling for at least half an hour, and then it revived from time to time the following day. Now I am airing the experience here, but I won't talk about it to any single person directly, because my problems seem abstract and slight, my complaints whiny, and also because, if I said to what extent I feel troubled, I would only cause needless anxiety.

What increases the trouble is that I've sensed that everyone I know outside of my immediate family disapproves of the way my life is going and blames me for my status quo. To a great extent I've recaptured my happy optimism – yesterday being an unfortunate and hopefully anomalous relapse – but it doesn't help to feel that I can't rely on sympathy, understanding, or the willingness to suspend judgment in any one (except my parents and siblings). It doesn't mean that these qualities are lacking, but that their presence and extent are, as I said, unreliable. Of course neither I nor the way I'm running my life are perfect, but for this very reason I have burdens enough of my own, so I don't need people adding to them and undermining my faith in myself so that I am less fit to bear them.

This eagerness to judge also makes me distrust people more. I find people as fascinating as ever in an impersonal sense, but as acquaintances I fear them because I worry so much about their opinion of me. Even if I weren't so exaggeratedly insecure and self-centred, true sympathy with other people is an extremely rare good, and I want to have that before I become friends with anyone. It seems to me that many relationships are unpleasant precisely because this sympathy does not exist but people still feel the need to be close to each other, even though that proximity only leads to unhappy friction.

In the meantime, as I've been told often, I could do with much improvement in speech, clothing, posture, and size, to become more acceptable in Society. I agree that my speech could and should be clearer, but I can and do improve it by simply being more careful, and I'm not willing to go to a speech pathologist again to perfect it. It may be a defect, but I've made honest efforts to cure it, and they didn't wholly succeed, and I accept it. As for clothing and size, I think this is no one else's business. I want to dress in a way that suits me, and I don't always do it, and sometimes my taste and sense of the fitting go on a holiday, but I don't pretend to be a work of art and so purely aesthetical criticisms are as superfluous as they are superficial. I don't want to have to hang out a sign that says "I am not a bum, but someone who is in the Respectable Upper Class." Being poor is not shameful in itself, and surely people can make the effort to examine the faces of people as an index of character and intellect, and not lazily rely on sartorial snap-judgments. As for size, I've "slenderized" again lately, but I "slenderized" because I like being lighter and curvy in a more finely-moulded sense, and not because I dislike myself or am afraid of being ugly. The posture thing does bother me too, though to a lesser degree, so I stand straighter whenever I remember and take remarks on it in stride except when I feel tired and humourless.

* * *

As for the New Yorker, it has remained silent; only half of the maximum waiting period of 3 months has elapsed, but I've almost reached the stage of taking out a calendar and marking red crosses on each day that passes. I see my poems as ships that I've sent out to sea, full of wares that I consider beautiful and worthwhile, and if they meet the approval of someone at the other end, I'm happy, and if the ships are sent back I'll go back to building and stocking new ships and try again. Unluckily the tranquillity that I think proper to cultivate under these circumstances deserts me rather often. I have written at least one poem in the meantime, and worked on a handful of stories, and this morning I spent hours researching Buckinghamshire towns along the London-Oxford road for my "Fountain in the Labyrinth" tale, but my writing still feels as if it were suspended until I know the fate of my poems.

By the way, the reason why I sent the verses to the New Yorker is only out of ambition insofar as I want my writing to be of a very high quality, and enjoyable to read, and I (perhaps naïvely) consider that periodical's editors to be good judges of whether I've achieved this aim or not. Fame is only enticing if it means that my peers approve of me, or that I am widely respected; the ambient fuss, like book tours and interviews and photos, etc., sounds bothersome (and, as Doris Lessing recently lamented, can gravely impede one's writing). I think I can afford this idealism; I live in material comfort and am not forced to encounter reality much.
Besides, my principal ambition is to act faithfully according to my conscience, which I think is an admirable aim also because it requires great exertion (and at the same time, as long my conscience winks at it, I plan to continue to channel my human delinquency into being as indolent and day-dreamy and careless and easily amused as I like).

P.S.: I suppose this is a textbook case of "oversharing!" Oh, well. (c: