Tales of Small Rebellions and Everyday Resistance
Bethany often had a sense of playing a part in somebody else’s game, and having to learn the rules of engagement by closely observing the behaviours of people around her. She studied hard and was relentless in her efforts to exhume the assumed norms of belonging that so often seemed to lay buried beneath the consciousness of the protagonists. She could understand them better as reflections. Learning about the expectations placed upon her as if seeing herself mirrored in the shopfront window mannequins of another’s imagination. She often sensed but couldn’t ever quite put her finger on the impact of day to day culture and taken for granted norms that were projected upon her mind and body. She experienced herself and her boundaries in relief — like Plato’s shadows dancing on the walls of a cave…
She was smoking a roll up in the back garden, and tapping away on her keyboard trying to unearth something insightful. Attempting to capture an existential and transient thought from the day before while the last rays of sunshine peeped through the drying washing on the line above her. She’d spent the morning clearing the garden in a vain attempt to create a space within which she might momentarily dissolve into her inner world. The anticipation of the nourishment and sustenance she hoped to find there was palpable. She craved it. Knowing just how hard it was to access, Bethany had evolved various devious and playful means of creeping up on it without being caught or confronted by her cavernous need for this inner connection.
The week before had been spent with her daughter in Cornwall camping in the garden of the YHA at Lands End with the most marvellous view of the sea beyond and perfect sunsets. Together, they had discovered many magical and indeed challenging moments amidst the sunny rainy coves, often hard to reach and off the beaten track. An epic low moment was in the carpark of the coop in Penzance when she completely lost herself in a painfully shameful menopausal meltdown. Leaving her daughter sitting silently and patiently waiting for the outburst to pass before being brave and tactful enough to confront her mother with what felt to her like bullying. The guilt of this episode etched itself quietly into her body taking up its rightful place alongside her many other privately held dark shadows.
She’d tasted something. Yet the proximity of that something remained tantalisingly just beyond her grasp and how she now yearned for the conditions in which the creeping up could begin and the possibility of finding what might lay hidden from view. It had eluded her however as the call on her parenting took priority. The potential for creative inspiration seemed to sit dangerously close to the lake of despair. Maybe their origins were shared?
One night in the tent she finally finished the book she’d been reading slowly over several months. A book about women art and the power of looking which had taken her back to being eighteen years of age and learning for the first time about feminism and anthropology. She recalled the intensity of discovering knowledge about the place of women in society that had become instantly and deeply pivotal to her sense of self and her emerging understanding of the world around her. Was there a universal truth common to societies across the globe — that ‘women’ constructed as closer to nature through the messy creation of life (perishable creations) were afforded less status and power than ‘manmade’ enduring monuments and buildings and dominant cultural narratives establishing the true meaning of all things?
This book had provided relief as it chimed so loudly with her formative education and resonated with many of her long held understandings of how the world operated. But it also disturbed as she read slowly the statements made so straightforwardly and boldly about for example, the ‘reservoirs of misogyny that Western culture has been steeped in for millennia’. She felt deeply guilty for not having done more in her life with the knowledge she’d been handed to try and change, challenge or improve things in some way.
She sat picking at her cracked nails, still loaded with dirt from the gardening earlier. She was wondering about her own ‘womanhood’ now as a fifty something year old. Small hidden acts of rebellion and resistance that she’d evolved to navigate life were starting to feel redundant as she no longer knew the place from which they came or what she was hoping to challenge or undermine in her efforts to flaut social convention. Had she inevitably evolved into the monstrous women she’d been reading about? The gestures that had silenced her younger years… ‘Calm down love’. Wind her up and watch her go’… had evolved into a potential for complete annihilation. Invisibility negated any threat or challenge to the acceptable norms for women in a patriarchal society that her aging, raging body represented. How was it possible to tap into the freedom and power that this might now afford her?
I don’t shave my legs or armpits — but who cares she scribbled in her journal? It’s an act of defiance and I only do it to show my 13 year old daughter that it’s an option. But I have long since lost any influence with her in that regard. She’s navigating her own relationship to life and besides she’s heard everything I have to say about life by now. I do not pose any threat — she thought. My power to subvert social expectations is diminished. I‘m redundant. Confused, lost, sad, angry and negated. Bethany had become matter out of place. Even the garden was tiring of her presence.
Where is my power to look and to see. To speak. To dissent. She asked herself these questions, and the answer came as it often did… It’s in my creativity. It’s staying with ambivalence. The unresolved. A moment of equanimity descended as the sun passed behind the next door building as it did most days around 3pm at this time of the year and the garden became instantly chillier.
The problem with binary thinking. She was tapping away again. It’s either… or… . It’s so hard not to do it. To make a judgement. This is good… I don’t like that. That person was out of order when they said that. Faux clarity. Bethany reflected, it’s like my brain finds it too easy a way to find sanity and peace. I can feel the pull to do it and to settle my mind and organise my thoughts as I try to make sense of the world. Ambiguity. Ambivalence. It’s So Much Harder (SMH) to stay with the anxiety and discomfort and not fall into resolving a complex thought by deciding its ether… or…Staying with mess. With the incomplete. It’s not really socially acceptable is it? Staying with how little you know. Remaining with the not knowing what you think about this that and the other. Reserving the right to be making up your mind and changing it all the time as you go along. It’s not really done.
Bethany found the excitement in life in conversations that rambled around. Like picking up stones on the beach, one after another, and turning them over to see what lurks beneath. Being surprised and caught out - over and over again. Yet she often found herself disappointed in exchanges with others that appeared little more than monologues. Both people missing each other. No real connection or new territory being created out of the unformed thoughts allowed to tumble forward. Perhaps people didn’t trust themselves enough to be or to find another interesting enough in any given moment. They had instead to fall back on telling a story regardless of the authenticity of the feelings evoked in the events of the original story. In the telling of the story the world is safer as with retrospect matter can be put back into place, made intelligible and digestible and more tolerable.
Like enjoying the week in Cornwall — only in retrospect and from a place of knowing. From home. After the event. You know how the story unfolds. You aren’t actually in it. Like living your life on instagram. A moment curated for an imagined viewer. Containment. Safe.
She had been thinking about needing a container for herself. What would that look like or feel like? She wondered. What would it be. She imagined that artists and writers had everything they needed for the containment of their creative expression. They had a place to put things, a practice to facilitate the daily explore and to work stuff out. She wondered at their discipline as she rolled another cigarette and gave into the shame of the feelings bubbling up that she really ought to take the washing in and get on with something more useful — like earning some bloody money — rather than indulging in these relentless meaning making exercises.