003: Rumination
the genesis of our desires, cows, summer
When I stretch my hands above my head to reach for the damp cotton on the washing line my dress slides over the backs of my thighs and exposes the milky flesh that has been hiding from the sun. Last summer when I fell off my bike (the bad time) I got a livid purple scar that streaked up the flesh of my inner thigh but it’s long gone now, as are the fingers that once probed it. Now there are mottled bruises on my calves from tramping through stinging nettles to reach an observatory, which was locked, but which opened other doors.
This summer I have been chewing the cud and the remnants have been showing up in my dreams. I dreamt of intimate dinners at dusk where things turned sour and house fires that raged against air as thick as a wool blanket and wake up with my hair plastered to the back of my skull. Likewise last year I dreamt of pouring champagne into the wrong person’s mouth, a dream I think of often, and craggy mountain passes and the invisible entity that roamed the peaks, hunting me down. I didn’t have enough time to escape the monster in that dream last year, but now I am twenty one and time stretches impossibly far in front of me — three months convalescing in the countryside before my return to university.
At Eights Dinner last year, around the time I was having these dreams, I sat next to someone much older than me and told him that I wanted to be a writer. He commented that being a good writer must also be about having something to say, about having good thoughts, and I said yes, that must be true, although then I was scared because I didn’t think I had anything to say. Nowadays all I seem to do is think but I never seem to get to the tail end of the thought and it remains in a Gordian knot, and what’s the use in writing anything down if there’s no conclusion?
Ruminating is the process by which cows and sheep and deer repeatedly regurgitate and re-chew on their food to aid in digestion, and also the process by which people are supposed to arrive at the answers to their questions. This I was told by the Senior Tutor at Mansfield the day I rusticated nearly two-and-a-half years ago, although I can’t remember what I was supposed to be ruminating on.
If cows stop ruminating they can become seriously ill. This week I read Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan and last week I was reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, both of which share similar themes (the former’s introduction mentions the latter). Both were censored for being too explicit for 20th-century sensibilities, but, more interestingly to me, both are in a sense hedonist. Lawrence advocates for sex and passion and physicality over the ‘mental life’ as it calls it (although perhaps because the intellectual conversations his characters have really are boring). You cannot be solely a res cogitans, because there are pleasures other than the intellectual — like the sun on the backs of my thighs or jumping into the cold river or watching the first stars appear.
In Bonjour Tristesse, the teenaged protagonist Cécile lives her life on a whim and her whim is the pursuit of pleasure. This pursuit leads to machinations which cause her father to be unfaithful to his fiancée (whom Cécile dislikes because she is too intellectual and aloof, and will ruin her life of self-indulgence with things like philosophy), after which the fiancée discovers her beau’s disloyalty and drives herself off a cliff and into the Mediterranean sea. Cécile is unsettled by this and shocked to a new, adult sense of reality (bonjour, tristesse!) although not for too long — she meets a new man which helps alleviate her disquiet. The story is over.
So recently I have read two books where the moral has been either that too much rumination is bad for body and mind or that such rumination can be easily put to the side in favour of things that are far more fun, like boys and summers in the South of France. But I think I am more like the bovine with the great big mournful eyes who cannot stop chewing the cud lest she becomes distended with great big globs of thought. I cannot only enjoy the sun, I must think and digest. Only it is still the case that none of my ruminating seems to get me anywhere. My project for my time in bucolic isolation must be to sit with the ball of yarn clogging my insides, to repeatedly sick it up, like a cat might with the grass it swallows from the garden, and to diligently follow one strand until I find its end and then I can write the thought down and lay it to rest in a notebook or even on Substack for some fifteen people to see.
Only I now see it is the case that some thoughts do not have ends that can be wrapped up neatly in a bow — like six-stranded embroidery thread that becomes unwound and unruly and can never be put together again, or thoughts like thin wisps of silk that one can only try to grasp for a second before they float away again. On trains and by water and in beds I remember hands around my neck and sitting on the floor in an Oxford college at 4am asking to be treated like something more than flesh and getting only anger in response and I try to trace the thought back, to try to resolve the case of why someone who says they loves you (and does, presumably) would want to cause you harm, even if only pretending (and sometimes when they are not).
As a third date I am taken to a lecture on the morality of sexual desire (if you know me, I am disgustingly easy to please) where the speaker defends the in-vogue view of desire that it is sometimes apolitical — we like what we like — and the obvious argument that actual policing of our desires goes far beyond what any liberal would desire in the arsenal of the state. More than that, we might sometimes go to the wellspring of our more unorthodox sexual desires and find they are not formed by unpalatable structural forces (racism, sexism, any other -ism) after all, so that we might not have to rip them out at the root. As an example the speaker uses submission (in heterosexual relationships the overwhelmingly female role) and she says that this might not be because women can be easily overpowered or are the fawn in the headlights, but because of trust and mutual respect.
At the end I ask the question of why as an intellectual exercise we seem to be able to trace back palatable geneses for women’s desires (I am quite sympathetic to the explanation of trust as a placeholder for submission) but we cannot seem to do the same for the dominant, overwhelmingly male, desires to choke and hit and overpower. The lecturer replies that we might be able to justify these desires if we trace them back to the source and find that they are not formed from patriarchal thought — having these desires justifiably is not a logical impossibility. I suppose this is true but sex was not an exercise in Volker Halbach’s Logic Manual and nor it is a particularly intellectual activity, so I was not satisfied by this answer. It is something which is felt, and feelings are something which supposed logical consistency cannot magic away. And I will remain unsatisfied by these popular defenses of mankind’s sexual proclivities until someone can construct a story that can tell me how the desire to hit and to choke is not necessarily violent and unloving.
This was the point I got to in this particular ball of yarn when I realised that my rumination alone, my repeated sicking up and chewing the cud was only making the train of thought sticky and tinged with bile and this is where I did something that I perhaps I should not have done and went to the wellspring to ask why they had wanted to do these things to me. Of course, I could not get an answer that satisfied me, that could reconcile love and a hand around my neck, and it was likely an inappropriate question to ask. And perhaps some things cannot be reconciled, I am increasingly learning — knowledge and scepticism, Descartes and his circle, loving people and hurting them. But it did teach me that sometimes we can do all the sitting and thinking we want and things will not end up the way that we want them to be, and that we will have to be fine with that — that sometimes the yarn will end before we finish the jumper. Ruminants — cows, sheep, deer — both chew the cud and bask in the hot July sun. There are times to be a thinking thing and times to know when the game is gone and to become one of Lawrence’s or Sagan’s young protagonists who want to simply feel and be.
I also realised that perhaps sometimes good writing does not need to have a conclusion (not that this is good writing). Last week I also read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of the first year after her husband died, and of the course the thought there is that there is no conclusion to grief, and that grief and mourning are different things, so even after the mourning period that Victorian etiquette prescribes is over and sandwiches from the wake are cleared away, the grief still bubbles away on the stove. This is something I know well. So if Didion can finish her book and her year and the conclusion can be nothing but that it still hurts, then my conclusion here can be nothing but that one cannot be entirely a res cogitans or a res extensa, but both.
I toyed whether I could or should write about this about this because it was very personal and perhaps inappropriate to some of its subjects but then I opened Substack to be confronted with a piece of writing about me — my 'myopic’ love of Eve Babitz and my ‘expansive’ (excessive?) rowing knowledge. Of course I have no interest in being anyone’s muse (I am the artist after all, and I would hate for anyone else to chip off the parts of me that might jerk tears or get me a job at some arthouse publication before I could get there myself) but I also am angry that I am having to spend my summer trying to straighten and iron and fold my memories before shutting them in a drawer for good while the titular characters of those memories are free to write about me with a rather more careless pen. I’ve never been one to be tactful or private, but I do like to act on principle, and the principle is that good writing is the end product of proper rumination, and perhaps others would benefit from a few more cycles of regurgitation.
Enough of all that. The sky turned overcast as I wrote this but it is still warm in my bedroom. In an hour I will watch the Eugene Diamond League (I have varied interests and one particular interest is seeing Faith Kipyegon break the women’s mile record this evening) and tomorrow me and a friend go to Henley. After that — chewing the cud, walking up and then down Somerset’s hills, slogging through D. H. Lawrence. Aren’t the possibilities endless in the West Country!