"Oh no, it is I who am inane"
Transcribing this interview, I am going nuts hearing my own voice: what the hell? There are few feelings in the world awful enough to rival the sound of your own voice recorded on tape. I'm reassured that all recordings lose the lower tones - whatever the word is - of your voice, leaving it thin and reedy, tinny, plaintive. When Matthew was an unnaturally, hilariously, deep-voiced toddler we all tried to capture him talking but on tape he sounded like everyone else. Everyone's voice sounds different to themselves, vibrates through your bones or whatever so you don't hear along the wavelengths everyone else does (or whatever, you know what I mean, though I grab at the first words I can think of to describe it). My own voice is pleasant enough in my head, a voice I'd take seriously (a voice I do take seriously - the source of all my trouble!), low and clear and moderate, free from quavery tics or speech impediments, or what have you.
Not sure if I was just nervous in the interview, but whoever's speaking on this tape has a voice higher by about half an octave, swallows the endings of most of her words, lisps a little, has a prissy upward intonation at the end of her questions, soft plaintive vowels, on the whole sounds about four years old. I've always hated what people think is my accent - what I got ain't an accent, it's practically a speech impediment - now I've got to hate what I have to accept is probably my own voice, shrill and prissy though it is. Maybe my iPod earphones just suck.
Dunno, to reassure myself I have been playing recordings of Matthew's voice and reflecting that they are barely recognisable, why should recordings of me be any more accurate? Acey muses what the hell kind of neuroses this must give opera singers, to hear their own singing voices (which surely sound way better in their own heads) and be like ... you fools! what's the matter with you!!! Still, if I don't sound the way I do inside my head, and I don't sound the way I do on tape, then ... how? I think everyone's better inside their heads - better than in the recording, on the page, in the photographs - sadly this is all of you that's gonna last. That's history! The girl in this recording sounds hysterical.
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More weekend angst? I guess so. My mother's theory is that in school I am rushed off my feet, too busy to navel-gaze, too caught up in what's happening around me to turn inward and mope (and so should keep as busy as possible).
My mother always draws prescriptive conclusions, what I am coming to appreciate as one of the great distinctions between us. I overanalyse, overcomplicate, describe, but increasingly in my late adolescence come to no actual conclusion on what I should do, where I should go. Just a phase, is what I tell myself, but what is adulthood but a phase that sticks? Only thing for it is to make sure it's not this phase, and thank god it wasn't any of the earlier ones. Adulthood, an unhappy concept. Supposedly whatever you're like at that magic age, whatever it is, eighteen or twenty-one or older, when you're suddenly an adult, you're stuck with it, adults don't have 'phases'. However vile or petulant or unformed you were when you cross the line into adulthood, seems as though you're stuck with it, as if you were making a face and the wind suddenly changed. But perhaps this idea is foolish as that old story told to scare children into keeping their features pleasantly schooled. I grew up with the notion of adults as static, stable, dependable, and change as the exclusive province of the young, but lately I've realised ... nah. A more hopeful vision for the future?
Anyway, she's wrong: these days I am older and better able to multitask. While it was truer in Nanyang that my one-track mind was able to angst about only one thing: either school stress (in no short supply) or insidey pancreatic mopery, these days work is no barrier to mopery. Case in point, the whole of the first term this year? Never mind. Or maybe my priorities have reversed, in keeping with the inexorable, overarching thematic shift towards the hobo way of life - in Nanyang where I'd put work first and put angst on the backburner, these days I've lost my drive, preferring to sit around feeling sorry for myself rather than buckle down to it and just zham.
This is an uncharacteristically fatalistic attitude for me! Oh, don't worry, my pride, will and vile ambition are as intact as ever, really I'm just self-flagellating on some instinctive level (insofar as one can ... self-flagellate on some instinctive level) because my History H3 is going less well than might be hoped. It's kind of done, but it sucks, and in filling in the (large) gaps I am, characteristically, making more extensive changes than I have the time for. Unfortunate, when we are a month from the prelims and I haven't so much as cracked open a file. Well, it'll be done tonight! If only because it has to be.
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Love poems. Googling my own name ... as one does, you know ... when I Google my full name in inverted commas I get a girl from CAP whom I've never met quoting my poetry from the Eye on the World anthology. FAVOURABLY. O warm glow! I think the real function of Eye on the World, though, is to spur you on with horror: I don't know anyone who's had their stuff published who didn't hate it a year later. A good sign, I think not looking back on your old writing with loathing indicates stagnation, and uh look at Keats! I guess the question is also whether one grows out of one's poetry when one grows out of whomever it was written for - and I don't mean my CAP mentor, very funny. Oh well! The one poem quoted is a somewhat forced sonnet not really written to anyone in particular. Would love poems lose what power they had if you knew to what unlikely and inappropriate recipients they were addressed? Almost all my poems have a 'you', the surest sign of adolescence (but don't worry about me, I'm on the road to recovery and strongwilled adulthood). Idle musing, I suppose the point of love poems is that they never reach their recipient these days, instead falling forlornly into the ether, which lends them an especial poignance. No? Or best of all, I say conjuring up tragedy, to read love poems that were written for you, and not recognise yourself in them. Tragic for the poet, that is. Well, if so that's more the fault of the poet, I suppose, for writing to some image and not to you. O take note, you safely solipsised ...
I used to be really proud of getting the word 'sex' into the Eye on the World anthology, but Amanda outdid me as usual and got 'whore' in. Moving on to thematic subversiveness, no one seems to appreciate that I have a whole poem on necrophilia, hello, even if the extremely unlikely and inappropriate addressees of the other poems will never know who they are, thank god. (I having carefully edited out what at one point seemed very clever and subtle hidden clues. Clues are only clever if you want them to be found!)
There are only three ... four? love poems that I know, offhand, that I really like: Love Without Hope by Robert Graves (and I suppose Symptoms of Love); A Dedication to my Wife by T. S. Eliot (notable for being the only love poem I like that is not about doomed love: but I think 'private words addressed to you in public' are what love is all about) and ... hahahaha shit I've always liked Elizabeth in Italy by Richard Weber. Matthew and I were playing a game - which came distressingly easily to me - where he'd give me a situation and I'd have to respond to it or sum it up in a literary quotation. He pointed out that the only love poems I know are either sad or dirty. Very true! We pay attention to what is of um practical relevance to our lives. My favourite dirty poem is, predictably, An Argument by Thomas Moore. Valentine by John Fuller is not about doomed love, but it is absolutely filthy - in my book, no bad thing.
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TOO MANY LETTERS
TOO MANY BOOKS
NOT ENOUGH DAYLIGHT
ONE MONTH TO THE PRELIMS
HOW DID WE COME TO THIS