Nimue Brown's Blog, page 248

Alternative history

What happens when an author deliberately re-writes history to offer us an alternative? It’s pretty much a given in steampunk writing, it can be highly entertaining but it’s also problematic. I’ve been pondering this for a while now, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

I think the first key question is to ask what the re-imagined history does with actual history. One of the things speculative fiction does well is to create coherent and fast moving realities in which you can look at real issues. If the alternative bits serve to drive a story so that you can explore real historical issues, clearly this is going to work out well. I recently reviewed Stephen Palmer’s Factory Girl trilogy which is a case in point, using automatons as a quick way in to talking about the rights issues of the industrial revolution and Victorian era.

Alternative history is problematic when it simply takes out all the awkward bits and creates an impression that they never happened. History without the racism and sexism, without the grinding poverty, the colonialism, the exploitation, can serve to prop up the illusions of people with privilege who don’t want to deal with how things really were. Entertaining though Gail Carriger is, I think she’s an author who is a case in point here.

Alternative history can go further than this in the harm it does, by deliberately minimising real issues. My go-to title for this is an alternate Second World War story were aliens turn up so the humans have to work together. I think it’s a vile premise, encouraging the reader to treat the whole Nazi project as no big deal. I cannot remember the name of the series, or the author.

What occurred to me as I was thinking about this is that all historical fiction is alternative history. Even when the characters existed, the author puts words in their mouths and comes up with motives and explanations that are entirely speculative. We see the past through the filter of the present, we take our beliefs and preferences with us, and we imagine historical figures on our terms. We focus on the kinds of characters we find appealing and ignore those we don’t care for. Every story about the past is a re-writing, and is no less vulnerable to the problems I’ve mentioned above than openly speculative work is.

Our willingness to tell stories – especially romances- about the upper classes, with scant regard for where their money comes from and what enables their lavish lifestyles, is perhaps one of the most pernicious problems in the fictionalising of history. We romanticise wealth and power, and all too seldom do we look at the exploitation underpinning it.

Speculative fiction can encourage us to focus on what’s been added to history, but often the most important question to ask of any historically set book is – what, and who, has been left out?

Ghosting for Beginners – a review

Ghosting for Beginners is a poetry collection by Anna Saunders. I first encountered Anna about a month ago when she read at Piranha Poetry in Stroud. So I put up a hand to review her new anthology.

There’s great delicacy and precision in Anna’s writing. I very much like that about her work. If she talks about a walk, a day, a bird, it doesn’t seem like a generic one conjured up to make a point, but something specific and individual. She writes a lot about encounters between humans and nature, or humans in the context of nature.

There are a lot of ghosts in the collection. The title of the anthology comes from a poem of the same name about the modern oddity that is ghosting – when people disappear out of other people’s social media lives, usually in a dating context. It’s not the bravest way of breaking up with someone. Many of the other ghosts are more traditional hauntings. These, set alongside poems about extinction and climate change meant that for me, the collection had threads of loss and grief all the way through it. I read it as a deeply haunted piece of work – and I think the title of the collection is an invitation to do just that.

There’s also just a whisper of humour running through these poems. A ghost of a smile, if you will. A feeling that this is an author who can laugh at themselves and who has a keen sense of the absurdity in many situations.

If you hop over to the publisher’s website – http://www.indigodreams.co.uk/anna-saunders-gfb/4594255832 – you can read a selection of poems from the collection. What’s here is a good representation of the book as a whole, and if it speaks to you, you can dive right in and buy a copy. Which I can certainly recommend you consider doing.

Essential table manners – flash fiction

I don’t tend to plan flash fictions. They just turn up…

One begins by delicately eating the garnish of the first course. For the second course, one will find a small and amusing dip to the left of the plate. That dip is specifically for your garnish. The third course does not feature a garnish – that would be vulgar. No one who is anyone eats the garnish that accompanies the fourth course. It is traditional to leave a longer gap between courses four and five than at other points in the meal, to facilitate the quiet removal of the ill-bred. Those who have not been taught the finer points of etiquette, poisoned by their own pretensions. The fifth course invariably has a celebratory tone to it, and from here it can be said that the evening truly begins.

 

Wrecking other people’s stories

People like stories. We build our lives around the stories we have about who we are, where we come from and how the world works. If you are part of a shared, dysfunctional story, and you decide to step out of that story, there will be consequences and it is as well to be aware of them.

For people dealing with domestic abuse, the time of greatest danger is the time when you try to leave. Not just because you are physically trying to get out, but because you are putting the lie to the story about how right, virtuous and justified your abuser is.

People will fight and kill to protect their stories and their take on reality, even when those stories are clearly harming them. As the person breaking the story, you are perhaps more likely to be seen as the destructive oppressor, and not the rescuing angel you may imagine yourself to be. Those still in the story may simply recast you so that they can keep the story going. “You used to be such a nice little girl. I don’t know what went wrong.”

Sometimes, the only way out of a story is to break away from the people whose story it is. Sometimes, the only option is to play the role consciously and then escape into spaces where you can properly be yourself. Sometimes to do that, a safe house is required, a new identity, police protection. Sometimes you have to ask difficult questions about the price of your relationships, and the implications of leaving them. People can die as a consequence of misjudging this.

If you call out a story as a lie, even if you can evidence it, people may fight you. They may fire you, take you to court, lie about you, attack you on social media. They may deprive you of key resources. If you refuse to play your allotted role you may be harassed, ridiculed, threatened or abandoned. You have no control over how other people respond when you stop acting in line with their story.

But you have the right to live your own life, and you have the right to be safe. So, if you’re wrecking a story, plan your escape routes first – more or less literally as required. Do some risk assessment. Consider the consequences. Try to break the story as calmly as you can, with minimal drama. There is nothing like drama to keep a story moving, because even as you think you’re resisting it, you can find the energy of it being sucked in and used to reinforce the existing story. You were always a useless child. Now you’re upsetting everyone with this stupid idea that you can do something. It’s all your fault… These are the outcomes to avoid.

It’s natural to want justice, to want recognition. It’s reasonable to want the people who have miscast you to realise their mistakes. It’s also very likely that you won’t get that. If you choose to stay and fight, you may be pulled back into the old story. Sometimes, it is better to go quietly and start a new story of your own somewhere else.

Am I the architect of my own problems?

You’ve seen the repeating patterns in your life. You’ve seen the roles others have cast you in, and maybe the roles you’ve created for yourself. You’ve seen that this isn’t working for you. It may, at this point, be appropriate to point a finger of blame somewhere else, and take a dramatic leap out of the story you’ve been trapped in. If you can do that, then it wasn’t your story. But what happens when you point the finger of blame, and then after the drama this brings, you settle down and find that you’re back in that same story again, playing the same role?

It is a hard and painful thing to consider that you may be the architect of your own problems. It is the least comfortable outcome to find that you are the one making up the roles and doing the casting that keeps the same story playing on repeat in your life. The good news is that you have great power to change things in this situation. The bad news is that you may put up massive resistance to admitting your own role.

When we spend our time casting other people in roles, we don’t get to know them as people. We just treat them how we treat the story we have about that role. This can be deeply disorientating for the person put into the story. I’ve had a few rounds of people treating me in incomprehensible ways, telling me I am things, or I do things, or that something means something else… This is what it looks like when a person is relating to an idea, not another person. And I think this indicates the best way out of such a mess, too.

If you are making your own problems by repeating stories, all you have to do is quietly stop casting people in roles. No one has to be your twin soul, your nemesis, your mother, your perfect lover, the child you never had… Without creating any drama or weirdness, you can just let go of these ways of relating. Replace it by getting to know people as individuals. Find out who they actually are and where they want to be in your life and you’ll be well under way to creating new stories full of open ended possibility.

Squaring up to this, you may feel silly, or fraudulent, or like everyone can see what you’ve been doing. You may feel shame, and regret and misery. And actually, this is all ok. These are fair and appropriate responses to having been making a mess of things. It’s when we’re unwilling to feel difficult and discomforting emotions that we are most likely to make a mess of things. Fear of our own dark sides can be a big motivator for casting other people in roles rather than properly relating to them. Feel the things, but don’t let it turn into an excuse for mostly just feeling sorry for yourself or you could find you’ve wandered back into the old story again.

Am I a terrible person?

Any sane person looks for external evidence about who they are and how their behaviour impacts on others. However, a person in a toxic environment may be dealing with a chorus of voices telling them they are awful. This might happen in a family context, in a school or workplace, or anywhere else one person with little power can be made scapegoat, or whipping post. For the person who is fundamentally kind and well meaning, this sort of feedback can cause immense distress and psychological difficulty. And if the harder you try, the more you fail, the more distressed you will become, and the more you may feel you have to stay and make up for your mistakes.

This is a common domestic abuse scenario. The innocent party in all of this may feel personally responsible and may come to believe that they are a terrible person who really must try harder to fix everything. It can be very difficult to find your way out of one of these. I honestly have no idea how anyone does it alone. My own experiences and the stories I’ve heard others share tend to suggest that friendship, and the people who refuse to buy into the scapegoat story are key to getting out of one of these roles.

Blaming and shaming isn’t just something that happens inside small, abusive groups. It happens on a much bigger scale with the blaming, shaming and gaslighting of the poor, the disabled, migrants, the mentally ill, the unemployed. We live in a time where those with most power routinely punch down, and blame those who suffer for that suffering. Collective resistance is the only possible answer to this.

If you’ve been cast as the villain in someone else’s story, how do you tell what’s going on? How do you tell if you’ve been obliviously awful? Have you been indulging a sense of privilege and do you now feel hurt for being called on it? Are you more upset about being called out than about the harm you may have caused? These are not easy things for a person to judge. Wounded pride and challenged privilege tend to get defensive at this point. People who mean well try to sort things out, make amends, and improve.

Here’s something it took me a long time to learn. If you’re the sort of person who listens, learns from mistakes, tries harder, says sorry and means it… then you will still fuck up now and then. But, you’ll sort it out mostly. You’ll move forward if you’re dealing with people who allow that. If you’re trying, truly trying and nothing you do is ever right, or good enough, then the odds are that you aren’t the problem here. If you can get it right with some people and not others, look hard at that. The odds are it’s because some people meet you half way, and some people don’t. If you’ve been cast as the villain, you will never be allowed to put things right and move on.

It look me years to establish that if someone was ok with me, it was not simply because they didn’t know me well enough yet to hate me. Sometimes, you have to collect a lot of evidence before you can demolish a role you’ve been cast in against your will. There are plenty of people out there keen to make others responsible for their own shortcomings. If you’re kind enough to internalise that, they will keep shitting on you, and telling you that the shit is your own.

Being a kind person doesn’t require you to keep on being kind when people are routinely shitting on you. It is perfectly reasonable to move away from people who can only criticise you, and for whom you are never good enough. Even when that’s family members. It is perfectly ok to give your time and life to the people who see you as a good thing. Trust them. They may not be labouring under any illusions at all.

Am I repeating a story?

How do I tell if I am repeating the patterns of a story? It’s not easy to see until you’ve been round it a few times – patterns, by their very nature, must be repeated to be observed. So the odds are that you won’t spot one until you have repeated enough times for you to see it as a problem. For people trapped in repeating patterns of dysfunctional relationship, or other things not working out, it is not comfortable looking at where we’ve contributed to that.

The only way to break out of a pattern is to start by acknowledging it. The only way to change a pattern reliably, is to change what you personally do. You probably didn’t get here alone, other people may continue to play roles, but you are the only person you have the power to change. If you label is at fate, karma, bad luck, you throw away your own power to change things.

Identify exactly what you think the pattern is. One of mine, for example, is being willing to bleed myself dry metaphorically speaking, to try and impress people who are critical of me and difficult to please. I have to prove something to them. I have to win them round. I have to be good enough. It’s taken me until recently to decide that I don’t have to prove anything and that ungrateful gits just waste my time and energy.

To get to this point I had to see what I was doing. I had to look at what happens to me emotionally when I deal with demanding and unreasonable people. I had to ask why I feel moved to give so much to people who are never satisfied. I traced the threads of this back through my own childhood, and back to one of my grandmothers, and I thought about her grandfather as well. Some of this has grown over a very long time. I had to ask what I owe anyone, and what’s in it for me. And I broke the pattern and stepped out of the story. This is a fairly painless example.

When you’re playing out a story like this, the roots of it can be deep in your family past. Digging those roots out can be painful and may cause shifts in other relationships. You may have to look at what forgiveness is needed, and helpful. You may well need to forgive yourself for what you’ve done as you’ve played the role. If the person most hurt by your actions is you, definitely work on self forgiveness. If your role has had you hurting other people, look at making amends, or at least learning lessons. It isn’t your right to forgive yourself for harm you’ve done to others. If you need to deal with people who set you up in this story, that can be complicated. Forgiveness isn’t obligatory. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it just traps us in doormat and martyr roles.

Changing the story, breaking it down, opening it out to make new endings possible… this is not easy work. It can be exhausting and it will likely take time. You may have to go some rounds with your story shape before you can properly escape from it. Be patient with yourself, and keep doing the work. If you can escape from a story that is really just a trap, life will open up for you in all kinds of ways and it is worth the work to get there.

Playing a role

We all play roles in our lives in deliberate ways. We have work roles, family roles, social roles, community roles. Where we take these on consciously and deliberately, they can be wholly functional and useful. However, we can also occupy roles that other people have cast us in, and we may unconsciously play out roles we’ve created for ourselves. When this second kind of role playing occurs, it can make a sense of authentic self, and forming genuine relationships very difficult.

One of the things that makes playing a role problematic is that those of us doing it will assume what we are doing is normal and reasonable. We seldom come to this alone. We may be playing the role our family, or our culture has ascribed us. We may be replicating stories handed down from our ancestors – and not even the most recent ones. If we think what we’re doing is the only thing a person could do, we won’t notice it. Recognising that roles have been given and people are expecting each other to play them can be difficult.

Roles become a problem when they have rigid boundaries and do not allow us to grow or change. Roles like victim, aggressor, saviour, martyr, doormat, useless one, the problem, the one who is always wrong… are relentless. You can’t be a complete and happy person when stuck in one of those roles. Often these can come in clusters – a family cluster might give you one saviour parent, one martyr parent, one useless child and one problem child, for example. We can spend our lives playing that kind of dynamic out and passing it on to the next generation.

People who cast themselves in specific roles – the victim, the one who is always right, the one everyone must love – need other players to compliment their role and maintain the story. Victims often need both aggressors and rescuers. The person who is always right will need scapegoats who are always wrong. People often don’t realise that they’re repeatedly playing out the same basic story and just drawing new people into the supporting roles.

Over the next few blog posts I’m going to be exploring ways of looking at the stories we might have written ourselves into, or unwittingly been drawn into, or cast in from birth. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and challenging core stories about who we are and the roles we play can be deeply uncomfortable stuff. We may not like what we find, and dealing with it probably won’t be easy. So, bring cake and blankets and be patient with yourself if this is a relevant journey to take.

Aspecting the Goddess – a review

I really like Jane Meredith’s books – I’ve previously read Aphrodite’s Magic, and Journey to the Dark Goddess. While I can find a lot of Goddess writing alienating or difficult to connect with, I never have this problem with Jane’s work. She writes about Goddess in a way that I can relate to.

Part of what makes her writing so great is that she tries to avoid assuming anything too much about the reader. You can come to her work as a devout Goddess worshipper, sure. But if you’re more interested in archetypes and psychology, that’s fine too. If you’re ambivalent, uncertain, even if you find gender issues difficult, there’s room here.

Aspecting the Goddess offers the reader a range of ways for working with Goddess. This goes from how to make the most tentative explorations through to drawing down a Goddess in ritual. There’s a wealth of detail here the like of which I’ve not seen before. At every turn, Jane offers multiple approaches and possibilities, methods she’s tested, and permission to explore and experiment. While it’s a book that goes confidently into some really woo-woo territory, it does so in an utterly grounded way, with wisdom and good sense and regular reminders that just because things can get magical, doesn’t mean they always will.

Alongside the practical insights, Jane tells stories of her own experiences working with Goddesses in different contexts. There’s an array of deities from different pantheons, and experience that is personal, for community ritual, that which is sought and that which is unexpected. And again, the clear voice of a woman with both feet on the ground, who is not turning her Goddess experience into dogma or personal power, who shares the awkward bits, the anxious bits, and the things that did not go as planned. It’s ultimately a very human, very relatable body of work.

This book is a beautiful piece of writing, full of ideas and stories to engage with. Anyone interested in Paganism and Goddess will find treasure here.

More about the book here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/aspecting-goddess 

Overcoming our own thoughts

I’ve done CBT work – I was given a booklet by my doctor some years ago. It gave me a few fire-fighting techniques, but I found it of limited use. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy assumes that the problem is you, and if you change your thinking you won’t feel as depressed or anxious. When the problems originate outside of you, changing your thinking can be like stepping into a gaslighting program where you start having to persuade yourself things are ok when they aren’t. This does not improve anyone’s mental health.

So, when your thoughts spiral out of control into anxiety and depression, and learning not to think those things isn’t the answer, what can you do? This is what I’ve come up with…

1) Define the problem. Pin down exactly what is making you feel anxious or depressed. If that’s triggering you into other problematic things, acknowledge it, but don’t dwell on the triggering any more than you can help. Take yourself seriously.

2) If you can get away from the trigger at all, do so, and then get whatever respite you can and your mind will eventually calm down.

3) Risk asses what’s going on. If the source of your distress is primarily functioning as a trigger and isn’t a threat in its own right, then go for self care, and maybe if you feel brave, look at the mechanics and see if you can change anything. Affirming that the threat is in the past and not with you now can help. Talk to someone about it, try and build a new perspective. If it’s an out of date coping mechanism, you can unpick it on those terms.

4) If you do your risk assessment and feel that the problem is happening right now, how you progress will depend a lot on the nature of the problem. Dealing with the threat or removing yourself from it are your best bets. If you feel the threat is small, then talking through how it makes you feel, or getting some help to tackle it may suffice. A scary bit of paperwork can be dealt with, you can recover and move on, for example. If you have a history with something it is perfectly reasonable to find it difficult. You can get on top of this, and you can feel better about things.

5) If something panics you so that you can’t think clearly about it, try and find someone who can work it through with you.

6) If the threat is real and larger, see what help you can get, be that the police, medical assistance, etc. There may be support groups out there, or advice to be had. If you are dealing with a significant threat, it is not irrational to feel anxious or depressed. Be clear with yourself that your feelings are totally appropriate, and vent them where you can to try and avoid being paralyzed by them. Work to remove the threat or to escape from it – you won’t be able to recover until the problem is dealt with.

7) If the threat is ongoing, it is going to take a toll. This includes situations like domestic abuse, workplace bullying, dealing with institutionalised racism, or any other misery created by the wider society and political structure you’re stuck in. Sometimes there is no ‘away’ to escape to and as the person suffering it really shouldn’t be your responsibility to fix what’s broken. If you take damage dealing with something like this it is not a sign of weakness or illness. It is a natural, human response to something inhuman. I wish I had more to offer you than this.