Sunsets and Bilgewater
Dear Blog,
When I was fifteen years old I was walking down the street with a boy, the sun setting over the trees and the rooftops, and he said: "That sunset would look so amazing if we were on acid." At the time I thought, how sad that he's done so many drugs even a sunset is dreary without them. I sort of knew what he meant: Math class was a bizarre adventure if I was high, dull and exhausting if not. Still, there was a difference between math class and a sunset and I thought I understood that he'd crossed some awful threshold and that I had not. I still loved the sunset. I was OK.
Well, maybe. I wasn't all that OK but I was more OK than he was and I think about him sometimes and wonder what became of him. He was young - so young, when I think about it now, heartbreakingly young to be so jaded and so damaged inside and out, and for him the sunset was as dreary as math class, the world pointless and without pleasure unless a little tab on his tongue brought back the color and vibrancy - the carpet swirling, raccoons whispering secrets, your tongue a hunk of meat you are afraid you might eat, wonder and terror, all that. I hope he is all right. He was not a kind person back then and I have no reason to feel kindly towards him, except that it made me so sad, that comment about the sunset.
Later, when I was rereading Jane Gardam's Bilgewater , something I did fairly frequently in my teens, I thought about what he'd said and understood him a bit better. I read it for the first time when I was 12. That time, and every time thereafter, I found the world made new through the farsighted eyes of Marigold Green (known to all as Bilgewater), strange and brilliant misfit, prone to falling in love and self-loathing. There is a remarkable physicality to the book. People are like giant flailing puppets, grotesque or too beautiful to be true. Clothes are important, in the way that costumes are. The settings are so vivid they hurt. For a twelve-year-old, the hints of sex were fascinating, full of hilarity and horror, so much more interesting than the explicit incestuous carnality of Flowers in the Attic, which my friends and I all devoured in sixth grade. The writing style was clever and quirky and breezy and totally unlike anything I'd read before. Bilgewater gave me a weird kind of high, one that did not impair me or leave me ill and furious as I came down. It lasted for days, sometimes weeks: my senses heightened, the world changed. The worst of my high school days, the most tedious and pointless and painful, felt so Bilgewater - like the book was rewriting the world for me in its own style. The world on Bilgewater was stranger, more interesting, more. Like a sunset on acid.
It is sad, it should not be so, but I think we all find the world losing its color and wonder sometimes. It often starts at school - being bored, I mean. All those hours. My kids are nearing school-age and my stomach clenches up thinking about it. I hated school. That Guy loved it and I desperately hope they will be like him. I don't know if it depends on the school or the person, but I don't want to think they will be like me, sitting in a desk and wishing I was anywhere anywhere anywhere but there for hours of every day, for day after day after day of my childhood. It is hard to hold on to the magic of just being, at school. Or it was for me, anyway. And then we grow up and the days roll by and we look at the sunset and think "oh pretty" as we hurry along, and we half-attend to the conversations we have and the work we have to do and we are never quite who we want to be and where the hell did I put the grocery list and the car is out of gas and ow i just sliced my thumb open on this can. So it goes and I know nothing better than a book to startle me out of this kind of funk and make the world new again. No book did it better for me, in my teens, than Bilgewater.
Here's a wee tiny taste of Marigold accidentally stumbling upon a garden party:
What was worse, there on the croquet lawn, at some little distance were some graceful, laughing people. They were moving over the lawn towards me in a way that was confident and amused and which scared me to death. They came on. They swung mallets, one wore a great romantic hat. They moved easily inside their clothes, cheerful, languid.
Experienced.
Older than me, younger than Hastings-Benson, but filled with blessed self-respect. On they came, four or five of them, across the lawn, laughing like what Paula calls County, smiling, enjoying themselves.
Water-snakes, I suddenly thought. Like Coleridge's water-snakes. "Slimy things that crawled with legs" - but phosphorescent, adapted, cheerful. I envied them. "I blessed them unaware." They scared me stiff but I blessed them unaware.
"And who is this?" asked water-snake one (The Headmaster), mellifluous and kind.
"Why, Marigold!" said water-snake two (Mrs. Gathering) and I took to my awful high heels and fled.
See?
Yours, still loving sunsets and fleeing garden parties in the wrong shoes,
Catherine
When I was fifteen years old I was walking down the street with a boy, the sun setting over the trees and the rooftops, and he said: "That sunset would look so amazing if we were on acid." At the time I thought, how sad that he's done so many drugs even a sunset is dreary without them. I sort of knew what he meant: Math class was a bizarre adventure if I was high, dull and exhausting if not. Still, there was a difference between math class and a sunset and I thought I understood that he'd crossed some awful threshold and that I had not. I still loved the sunset. I was OK.
Well, maybe. I wasn't all that OK but I was more OK than he was and I think about him sometimes and wonder what became of him. He was young - so young, when I think about it now, heartbreakingly young to be so jaded and so damaged inside and out, and for him the sunset was as dreary as math class, the world pointless and without pleasure unless a little tab on his tongue brought back the color and vibrancy - the carpet swirling, raccoons whispering secrets, your tongue a hunk of meat you are afraid you might eat, wonder and terror, all that. I hope he is all right. He was not a kind person back then and I have no reason to feel kindly towards him, except that it made me so sad, that comment about the sunset.
Later, when I was rereading Jane Gardam's Bilgewater , something I did fairly frequently in my teens, I thought about what he'd said and understood him a bit better. I read it for the first time when I was 12. That time, and every time thereafter, I found the world made new through the farsighted eyes of Marigold Green (known to all as Bilgewater), strange and brilliant misfit, prone to falling in love and self-loathing. There is a remarkable physicality to the book. People are like giant flailing puppets, grotesque or too beautiful to be true. Clothes are important, in the way that costumes are. The settings are so vivid they hurt. For a twelve-year-old, the hints of sex were fascinating, full of hilarity and horror, so much more interesting than the explicit incestuous carnality of Flowers in the Attic, which my friends and I all devoured in sixth grade. The writing style was clever and quirky and breezy and totally unlike anything I'd read before. Bilgewater gave me a weird kind of high, one that did not impair me or leave me ill and furious as I came down. It lasted for days, sometimes weeks: my senses heightened, the world changed. The worst of my high school days, the most tedious and pointless and painful, felt so Bilgewater - like the book was rewriting the world for me in its own style. The world on Bilgewater was stranger, more interesting, more. Like a sunset on acid.
It is sad, it should not be so, but I think we all find the world losing its color and wonder sometimes. It often starts at school - being bored, I mean. All those hours. My kids are nearing school-age and my stomach clenches up thinking about it. I hated school. That Guy loved it and I desperately hope they will be like him. I don't know if it depends on the school or the person, but I don't want to think they will be like me, sitting in a desk and wishing I was anywhere anywhere anywhere but there for hours of every day, for day after day after day of my childhood. It is hard to hold on to the magic of just being, at school. Or it was for me, anyway. And then we grow up and the days roll by and we look at the sunset and think "oh pretty" as we hurry along, and we half-attend to the conversations we have and the work we have to do and we are never quite who we want to be and where the hell did I put the grocery list and the car is out of gas and ow i just sliced my thumb open on this can. So it goes and I know nothing better than a book to startle me out of this kind of funk and make the world new again. No book did it better for me, in my teens, than Bilgewater.
Here's a wee tiny taste of Marigold accidentally stumbling upon a garden party:
What was worse, there on the croquet lawn, at some little distance were some graceful, laughing people. They were moving over the lawn towards me in a way that was confident and amused and which scared me to death. They came on. They swung mallets, one wore a great romantic hat. They moved easily inside their clothes, cheerful, languid.
Experienced.
Older than me, younger than Hastings-Benson, but filled with blessed self-respect. On they came, four or five of them, across the lawn, laughing like what Paula calls County, smiling, enjoying themselves.
Water-snakes, I suddenly thought. Like Coleridge's water-snakes. "Slimy things that crawled with legs" - but phosphorescent, adapted, cheerful. I envied them. "I blessed them unaware." They scared me stiff but I blessed them unaware.
"And who is this?" asked water-snake one (The Headmaster), mellifluous and kind.
"Why, Marigold!" said water-snake two (Mrs. Gathering) and I took to my awful high heels and fled.
See?
Yours, still loving sunsets and fleeing garden parties in the wrong shoes,
Catherine
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