The Stack

Outside the snow was beginning to melt. Using the already-stretched sleeve of her cardigan, she smeared a hole in the condensation on the window. It was still snowing. Yes, it was a little damp, perhaps, a little direct. But no one could call it sleet. The sight of the piebald ground – straggly tufts of unkillable grass puncturing the white; infectious mud discolouring it from below – was, for some reason, unbearable. Her mouth opened, but a sigh didn’t quite come out. It was only another moment before she had on her Wellingtons, waterproof trousers, and a sturdy jacket. Her ears were enveloped by a hat slightly too large, her neck wound in scarf. She crammed the thicker of her pairs of gloves into a pocket, and set forth. It would still be snowing on the mountain.

After five steps, she could no longer see the front door. It may have been sleet, but it was still thick, and, if she were honest with herself, it was getting a little dusky. The melting of snow had always frightened her. Ugly glimpses of the dark squelchy earth beneath. She began to jog a little, glancing around to see if she must worry about looking silly. Knowing she was not a running person, she could not quite commit to it. Consequently her motion was a strange loping jog. She realized she could have used thicker socks – wellies were not ideal on a steep incline. Although her ears were muffled by fleece, and beyond the wind applauded, she could hear the annoying swish of her legs in the waterproofs. The blue stripes on her boots began to glow like gas as the daylight dimmed. She climbed further, looking down both to be aware of her footing and to avoid squinting into the sleet. The fingers of her gloves poked from the top of her pocket like a litter of black joeys.

After fifteen minutes, she was rewarded. There was no more mud to be seen, and no wet darts of sleet – just snow fairies, ambling and dancing their way down to her. She had reached a small false peak. It was getting lighter again, as she was above the valley and more of the sky to the west was visible. She turned to look back, her back to the wind, the snowflakes swirling past like a universe rushing away from her. The view was no different – the bluish dusk had given way to dove grey once more. Snow grey. She put on her gloves, realizing this past quarter hour her hands had been freezing. It was a relief not to feel the sting of the weather on her face.

She had not the time to acknowledge this, before black feelings piled on her like ants crawling on ants in her head. Facing the snow again, she walked on, her feelings lost in her struggle with the wind and slope, just as the swish of her trousers now was. But even altitude could not hold back the progression of evening. It surely wasn’t getting dark? Surely the snow was just a little thicker higher up. The sky was still a shade of white.

All was going well. It snowed and it snowed. White spots meandering against the white sky like an infinity of tiny babies all coming to meet her. When she trod down, her whole foot was immersed, only a stripy tube led to her knees. Suddenly… she lost her footing… lurching… scree shifting under snow, away from scrambling feet, but her hands saved her. She tested her unsupported ankle. Then, on, forwards, upwards. She did not notice how much harder it was to see her feet and their placement. She did not notice her laboured breathing.

And then she stopped. She had to. There was nothing ahead. No ground, no laid snow – just: Sky. And its snowflakes. She was confused. She knew her mountain. This was not any of her paths. There was no cliff. Where had she…? She turned to retrace her steps, but after only two: another cliff. Had she not just come from here? She walked to one side, another, and another still. All dead ends. She was calm, she could reasonably expect that in at least one direction there was no cliff, because had she not, just this last minute, walked to this spot?

Never mind. What she wanted to do was shout. Very loudly. That must be why she’d come up here. But what if somebody heard her? What if they mistook her jubilation for trouble – a cry for help? She could hardly explain to Rescue. Of course nobody could hear. Nobody could possibly hear. She coughed. Aaaahh she said, dentally. She tried again, aaaeeeeehh…, she didn’t bother to finish. She wasn’t really the screaming type.

Each snowflake exploded on her face in a numb starburst. She lay down. The area on top of the apparent stack was just large enough to accommodate her length. The sky was undeniably grey. The snow against it grey and less discernable. She banged her gloved fists against the earth, impacting circles of snow, and screamed so loud it felt like her lungs had flown out: What are you afraid of? She did not notice the flakes of snow landing in her eyes, their sting and water. She did not notice that now she could no longer see. What was that expression? If you look into the snow too long you’ll go blind?


Early 2005

Letter from America - Part 3: Publish and be Damned

My hair has metamorphosed into some kind of ravening beast atop my head (altitude? Soft water? Galtonesque sub-optimal genetics?) I examine it with mild fascination each morning, but largely leave it to its own primal devices. Perhaps it is on-message – this is, after all, my wild and free adventure. As I roam, so does my hair.

And the adventure into which I roamed this week was transcendental meditation. I bartered a day’s work for charity in exchange for tuition. I’m destitute, so genuinely could not have paid a cent towards it, but also harbour healthy suspicions when asked for large sums of money by such organizations. Whilst I’m wary of being suckered into any kind of weird belief system, I am here, one could argue, to expand my horizons and to change my life for the better – so I will not yet sniff at a constructive way to reduce stress and anxiety.

I cherry-pick the practical technique and retain a rounded scepticism about secret words, rituals, and all the stuff that smacks of insidious religion: hubble-bubble cauldrons that bypass the conscious mind, prize us open and defenceless, and reduce us to credulous sponges. (Much like advertising, in fact.) Religion is religion is religion, whatever your flavour: and they all prey on the vulnerable.

Dr. PJ (yup!) doesn’t actually have a beard and sandals, but I do strongly suspect him of lentil-eating (J’accuse!). I am charmed by his constant and surreal use of broccoli in his analogies to describe meditative techniques. And even a jaded old bastard like me can’t find a less-than-glowing adjective for the man: he’s a one-man charity crusade. Arguably he’s a zealot, but in the nicest possible way (besides, there’s something pretty unthreatening about a meditation zealot). I do believe the world is a much better place for his existence: he has my appreciation as well as my genuine admiration.

I become keenly aware of my abrasive cynicism when surrounded by such sincerity (a Brit in America – say no more). As to the question that any sentient Brit would ask: does all this earnestness preclude a sense of humour? I will continue to report back from the spiritual coal-face…

My charity work will be for the local adaptive ski programme that takes out disabled kids and adults to ski – I’ve seen them on the mountain a lot. I must admit, I tend to give them a wide berth – am not sure if that’s politically incorrect or just pragmatism. I’m really excited about it, but as yet I’m not sure they’re so thrilled to have me. (I know, hard to believe…)

My meditation training meant I missed my usual Monday night date with the Summit County Choral Society – cheerful murderers of the classics, from Faure to Mozart. As Alison was there with the car, I got the bus home.
“Is this the Boreas Pass bus” – I knew it was but, you know, belt and braces...
“Where you go?”
“Wildflower...?”
“I stop there just for you” In fact, I was fairly certain this bus always stopped there.
“I stop Wildflower just for you. You sit here”.
John, it transpired, was an Uzbekistani dental surgeon. (I am actually inclined to believe this after some gentle quizzing on implant techniques – conveniently I have an ex who is a dental surgeon.) His wife (ex) had won some sort of immigration lottery and lo, he now had the privilege of being a Colorado bus driver. I was relieved when the bus pulled off and he stopped pinning me to the spot with his over-familiar gaze. Despite blushing and not knowing quite where to look, I did manage to convince him that Scotland Yard was not in Scotland, and Braveheart was not entirely historically accurate. He was crestfallen. “Was he not a real person? Did he not fight and die for his country?”

“And Scotland – it is still under England, yes?” Ummmm.

Instead of waiting for the bus to wheeze around its circuitous loop, I hopped off early and opted to walk 10 mins in the arctic conditions. Which is not to say the wisdoms with which John favoured me did not impact.
“In Uzbekistan, people are not poor – not like Africa – but not rich like here. Are the dentists in England rich? (Yes.) But people – they are happy – not like here. I work for government – economy does not affect me – people always have sore teeth. I help them. I make them feel better. It made me happy. People come here – they discard their culture. There is no culture here.”
Clearly John had his criticisms of the American way of life, and whilst I could not agree with all he said perhaps we were in accord on certain points: Money does not bring happiness; consumerism feeds, but does not fill, an inner emptiness; and hardline libertarian economics will not cure the world’s ills.

As for culture – how can so many peoples of such vastly disparate identities and backgrounds be convinced they have something in common – something that is ‘Americaness’ – unless they are forced into somesuch mould. Some of their identity crushed out, like a scrap car, reduced to a nice bland stackable cube of Americana.

I am put in mind of one of the cultural habits that still leaves me confused. Everywhere I go, “How are you today?” is the greeting. It is expected that one will not answer the question, but merely give back the required response “good” or some contentless equivalent. Whilst on the one hand I love people’s cheerfulness and politeness here, I also find it difficult to cope with this constant wall of insincerity. It’s like a courtly dance – an intricate etiquette I have not quite mastered. Of course I do not have such trouble in just the U.S. (I have little or no small talk at the best of times – my failing!); it’s just more pronounced here and hence more flagrantly insincere. But it is, after all, just exaggerated politeness – a social ritual of which all cultures have their version, to make life more pleasant for us all. Ah what a lost and distrustful Annabee I am.

We all conceal our feral animalism beneath artfully tailored cloth, within beautifully structured walls – and behind a gloss of socialisation: in other words, a wall of insincerity.

I adore the people I have met – I love their warmth and kindness, their can-do attitude, and sheer optimism. But the flip side of that optimism can be a certain blinkered lack of self-doubt. This is surely a key to success, but a tariff I am unable to cough-up. Once you realize that you are being pragmatic in casting aside your self-doubt – it is not about the truth-status of those doubts, it is about realising the lack of them is a tool to success - it feels like a world of contrivance. Your belief-system is merely an empty functionally-effective life-strategy. (Rather like religion, in fact – the constant looming presence of which both depresses and disappoints me.)

I realize my way is not the way to a happy life, and perhaps there is no nobility in sacrificing a bliss to cling madly to truth – no, not even a truth, but the idea that truth is important. I reflect upon what a strange little girl I was, even as tiny ‘un, sitting apart from the world, contemplating such existential agonies before I had the vocabulary to frame them. How little we change in substance – I am still but a lonely separate little girl seeking and clinging to invisible truths of my own, wishing to share my little island with someone who will willingly cling there too. (Can you imagine the personal ad…?)

My current conclusion is that there is a fakeness about uniting so many disparate peoples and cultures and attitudes under one banner. A fabulously winning strategy, but with what collateral damage? The building up of America itself as a religion. The brainwashing that to admit doubts about capitalism is sacriligous. That to be un-patriotic is the most heinous and socially unacceptable crime. Like God, the concept of America and its values are protected above criticism by this sly contrivance – if one questions or rejects, one forfeits the right to be a member of society at all. It means that the risk of having such doubts is too great, and should you succumb to them your dangerous voice will be rendered impotent lest it affect others.

Dissent and questioning, and a right to verify truth for oneself, rather than to place one’s faith in authority unquestioningly: is that worth sacrificing to be happy - with God, with bland politeness? To be the world’s greatest superpower? Probably. Yet I will huddle nobly on my little island with my brittle moral superiority and my ignoble truths. Lonely.

Wasn’t America build upon a foundation of free-thinking? Humanity may go around (all the way across the Atlantic, even.) But in the end it comes around.

I watched a PBS documentary the other night about Lincoln, which served as a timely reminder to me that he was but a politician. He had no great humanitarian conviction that the races were equal. He just thought that slavery narrowed the opportunities for working white men, and that it was inherently corrupting to those white men (who were, lets be clear, his actual concern) to own slaves. The thing that interests me about this is the disparity between the public myth and the reality. What is the difference between truths that become common knowledge, and those that refuse to circulate? There is a real unwillingness to re-evaluate the popular narrative that is Lincoln. I felt a completely different sort of pathos watching old reel of Marian Anderson singing under the great square be-throned Lincoln – clinging to the hero that never was a hero.

Surely there are no heroes – they are just people conjoined with time and place and circumstance and we make of them what we will in our folklore. Like history – they are constructs. We adapt the telling of our past to the version that suits us. We project what we need in a hero onto whatever hapless inadequate is in the right place at the right time. Lincoln, Jesus, George Clooney…

Entirely by coincidence, a fellow volunteer was telling me about ‘President’s Day’. It’s now ‘President’s Week’ (Heck, lets celebrate all of ‘em), but there used to be two days – one for Washington and one for Lincoln. According to the version of my (New Jersey-hailing) friend, the South didn’t recognise Lincoln’s day because they were still mad about the abolition of slavery. I can’t believe this version is true for a moment, even as a non-American with very little knowledge of American history. But I’m both flummoxed and fascinated by this mish-mash of event and perspective, and completely unable to tease one from the other. It is not always so?

Ah well – Lincoln is still the beardy dude in the big square chair that he always was to me! (Actually – they showed him pre-beard in the documentary and his features did look like chiselled rock even before they immortalized him…)

I have come in for criticism in more than one quarter for the personal nature of some of the content I write. I am beset with concern that people read my little travelogue (both outer and inner) as a self-indulgent personal catharsis – indecorous, crass, boundary-less, adolescent dirty-linen-airing. It’s difficult to hear an external voicing of one’s own self-doubts (self-belief being precarious at the best of times), and for a moment I lost faith and swore to take down every piece of poetry and never publish again. Perhaps I should not write, lest people think me innapropriate for being so intimate. Should I censor, and sacrifice the honesty that allows me to be creative? Perhaps I should produce a jolly but sterile account of my adventures – all frothy wit and anecdotes. Lift music. I find myself engaged in this constant battle between the lingering desire to be socially acceptable, and a growing need to just exist as who and what I am (whatever that is…). There’s a real tension between trying to live my real life, alongside the more public life that is necessary if I am to continue to work and publish. The conflict between the rather brutal creative and the pink-and-fluffy self is exhausting. That I’m so reticent about sharing my work at all is precisely because of worries about how I will be perceived: thus I am a coward who sells the creative down the river to accommodate the needs of a shy girl who needs people to think well of her. The artist provokes comment or offense: but the girl suffers the fall-out. I am striving to build an inner resilience that will allow me to further the creative without, in turn, sacrificing that fragile girl.

Far be it from me to elevate myself with inappropriate comparisons, but I do wonder if all people who work in a medium that involves revealing something of the inner have to weather accusations from their ‘real life’ that they’re inappropriate. Do Tracy Emin’s friends express disapproval of her exhibiting pictures of her cunt?

I’ll leave you with that edifying thought. This blog was brought to you today by the letters A and B, and by a number of fractured modernist identites, and post-structuralist epistemological doubts.

Do tune in again. I promise to make the jokes thicker on the ground…

Foties link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179608&id=533893668&l=e970d7c1a8

Letter From America - Part 2

(Physically America, mentally still mid-Atlantic-ish)

Although I am settling in to the new culture and lifestyle, I find my thoughts still direct themselves towards certain parties left behind. Perhaps a transitional period.

Acclimatizations include constant mild nosebleeds resulting from the altitude. This creates copious amounts of peculiarly orange snot. Makes a change from black London smog-snot. There was the one exception of alarming day-glo yellow after my visit to the pool – they must have different ideas about pool-chemical recipes over here.

The day has a different rhythm here – going to bed much after 8.30 pm seems quite unnatural. I must admit that almost unawares, I find myself inhabiting a sickeningly wholesome lifestlye. I crave almost no coffee at all (those of you familiar with my usual habits may find this hard to swallow, but I assure you it is the case). Tea is more refreshing, although goes almost immediately cold, as water boils at 80 degrees at this altitude. There no room for microwave-tea snobbery here. Apparently the rules for baking are all different, and an altitude cookbook must be acquired if one is to have any hope of success.

As we drive between the two vast walls of snow that flank the roads, Alison tells me that this is the worst year in living memory for snow. It is a very bad season (clearly the Annabee-holiday-weather jinx continues to thrive). As I trudge through knee-high drifts in a car park, I try to imagine where all the rest of the snow (in a ‘proper’ season) is crammed in. Meanwhile everyone at home is plastering facebook walls with news of the preternatural amounts of the white stuff back in the UK. (But, of course.) In cafes and bars, in locker rooms, and on chairlifts, I overhear folksy murmerings: it's an El Nino year – the snow will fall in February; the Ullr-fest parade will bring the snow; we will have a storm tonight – did you see the moon on it’s back last evening? I looked at the moon – clearly framed in the cloudless sky – and saw only a lascivious grin.

I’ve done some skiing. Well – I’ve made my way to the bottom of a mountain on a pair of skis. A subtle distinction that would be not-so-subtle if you had the visaid. I find the lift queue quite a surreal experience, principally because of the music broadcast to the queuing masses – I’ve not done that many runs but, as far as I can ascertain, it’s on a permanent Aerosmith loop, with the odd interjection of Toto’s Africa.

It is apparently unprecedentedly warm for January. Nevertheless, I wimpily clad myself in unfeasable numbers of layers, the base of which comprises several depths of M & S thermals. When fully encased, I am so rotundly padded that I could hurl myself ski-less down a slope and merely zorb to the bottom. As I waddle along, local boarders (I am sure I saw him on the plane!) skoot past me in t-shirts.

Runs are colour-coded so you can pick one of a level appropriate to your skiing ability. I find one also gets a strong intuition from the name – I intend to avoid such runs as ‘High Anxiety’, ‘Shock’, and ‘Psychopath’. I did brave ‘Little Hairy’, perhaps aided by a US-to-Scottish translation issue (I thought it was called ‘Little Harry’). Some supposedly on-piste runs appear to me indistinguishable from cliffs (apparently primed for hurling oneself from). Perhaps I have not yet quite inhabitied the skier mentality. Today I was very smug to have achieved a blue/black, albeit unwittingly (I took a wrong turn). Ironically, the run was called 'Volunteer'.

I did two days of ski school last week – helpless adults follow brazen zig-zagging instructors like strings of ducklings. A technique is imparted, and then you try to implement it on a run. For example, after being told to concentrate my weight on the balls of my feet, I whispered from my racing crouch all the way down “balls, balls, balls...”. Not sure what the casual observer made of that.

The work is very varied, and there are many procedures for me to memorize and feel confident implementing at a moment’s notice. You really have to be ready for whatever you encounter, and that could be pretty much anything (including fatalities). My uniform and radio bestows authority upon me - a terrifying and burdonsome illusion I must maintain. In truth, I am currently more lost than the guests! This bluff (along with disguising my current woeful skiing ability) is proving to be quite stressful to uphold!

Highlights of my first day included skiing down a little boy who was out of his depth: moronic parents avoid paying for ski school then tip their unfortunate ill-taught progeny down blue runs unawares. I side-slipped next to him, carrying his skis for 500 yards, assuring him what a champ he was, until he was content to hurtle his merry little way to the bottom once more. I was also given what is termed ‘body snatching’ duty. This involves standing at the top of the Quicksilver chairlift, which serves only beginner runs. Every 10 seconds a new chair deposits six clueless bodies in a guddle of limbs and skis – this needs to be disentangled, individuals extracted, rendered upright and ski-clad, and removed from the vicinity before the pile is augmented by the ever-advancing subsequent chair. The hardest element of this task is that the process must be completed without sniggering, on pain on firing. Tricky.

On the Annabee-welfare front, Alison nags me just the right tactical amount about eating, so the nourishment stakes thus far: Annabee, 1; self-destructiveness, 0. Top marks in Annabee-husbandry. I am hoping to hit an equilibrium soon whereby I can separate my real life – or what should be my real life – from the stuffing I interpose to obfuscate and stall clarity and progress. I must be careful not to, in turn, sabotage this process by becoming absorbed in my skiing ability (or lack thereof) or job performance (it is, after all, a voluntary position). My goal must be to achieve and retain a concrete perception of what I am, and my current relative position, no matter the circumstances (studio drudgery, musical invisibility, skiing ineptitude...). Annabee GPS – a known and fixed point.

To be continued. Possibly. No promises.

Letter From America - Part 1

(Actually, more of a letter from Heathrow and mid-Atlantic)


Heathrow was some kind of Kafkaesque airport nightmare - despite staff thrusting palliative sandwiches at wan travellers, who had the appearance of having lost years in desolate stationary queues. Queues that appeared and disappeared amorphously before one's eyes, and for which no end (or, terrifyingly, beginning) could be found. Indeed, I myself fell under the spell and elected to join one. As nobody appeared to know which queue they were in, nor could the end of any specific queue be found, I grasped gratefully at the one end that appeared brig-o-doon-like in front of me. I was seduced by the admittedly random logic that any queue was better than the ice-cold state of belonging to none at all. Frankly, I am reluctant to recall anything further of this chapter of my journey.

Was pleased to get my seat of least-terror (aisle, over-wing). But no sooner had I blessed the absence of proximate screaming children, than I realized I was marooned amidst a host of rubbery American adolescents who insisted on conversing dude-to-dude over my head. Ah well.

300 ‘dudes’ later (just over 4.5 hours) (could this be measured in dudes-per-hour?) we had moved not an inch. We were in another queue, this time comprising planes. The weight of several hundred people occupying this queue-space appeared to be an insignificant factor. (Wondered if this observation could be usefully applied to models of federalism. Brain starting to depart from planet, even if plane not.) Our wings required de-icing. Apparently this would take 40 minutes and smell bad. 40 minutes after the arrival of the (rather cute, as it transpired) spray-bot, that is. Which didn’t happen for, as I mentioned, a significant period of time. Apparently, dude, they have millions of de-icing rigs at the airport in Alaska – it’s, like, skoosh, like a carwash, man, and that’s it. And thus a 9 hour flight became a 13 ½ hour one.

******

Already, merely from the vantage of mid-Atlantic, I was able to cock a rueful brow as I reflected on my real life (the one 38,000 below, and some way South East). Still wantonly not engaging with any of the things I would like to in life. It’s not as if I make a good-faith try, yet fail gallantly – this scenario would be a triumph next to my perpetual tortuous inertia. Does the solution to inaction lie all the way across the Atlantic, I wonder...

This last year has been, without a doubt the best year of my life. Albeit a turbulent one. I was plunged head-over-heels-over-head-over-heels into love, only to be denied thrice (well, technically, I proposed 4 times, but who’s counting?). The U.S. is my crowing cock - no further denial-invitations shall be forthcoming. He is the only other person I’ve encountered who truly understands the nature of anxiety: how it dissembles one’s life brick-by-brick, extinguishing all under its suffocating blanket. Yet it is responsible for forging the most beautiful , and unseverable, of connections between us.

The trials of love aside, this was also the year I embarked on my most ambitious project to date. I was so crap at being what others' expected. I hope I turn out to be rather more successful at being me. So: slowly I sand-off the socially-acceptable topcoat. Perhaps this will be the year we’ll get a peek at the grain.

And so it begins with my little US adventure.

To be continued...
(possibly. Should I find the impetus...)