From bad to worse

Infertile women will understand that it is hard to hear friends are pregnant. Particularly just after hearing you never will be. I (or we) got a card today, from a close friend and even closer colleague, who, with his partner, has been on IVF even longer than us. It's twins for them. So good for them. I am happy for them.

Then I took three Valium and drank a bottle and a half of wine and cried more tears than I thought I could possibly contain.

Grief is real and deep. Some people get addicted to grief, but I do try just to understand that there's something to be respected in grief's grip and tenacity. I don't want to get off on it. I understand that it allows for levity, although it will not let you be flip.

I hang fast to beauty. I know I'm being a wanker, but it strikes me that grief is pretty weighty with beauty. This is my favourite poem about beauty.

Assault

I

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

II

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Here are five other things that are helping me tonight.

1. You've probably all seen this before, but Phillip Scott-Johnson's Women in Art video is a perpetual comfort to me.

2. This poem.

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice

3. This video, which I shamelessly copied from Elberry, after giving him a lecture about feminism, which he didn't need, because he's one of those irritating perosnages who is younger than one, yet smarter than one.



4. Australian wildlife. Particularly with loved members of my family forming a backdrop.



5. And, more than any other, this poem.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of a wood:
They never forgot
That even dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry.
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden