Keeping Away the Spiders E-Book

Anne Pia

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 242

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In a series of honest, often humorous and brutally frank essays, Anne Pia discusses sexuality, gender identity, reluctant feminism, and food as a sumptuous, sensual game-changer. She conveys her exhilaration at the transformative power of music and learning, clothes and fashion. She gives an unflinching account of coming to terms with a daughter's disability. This life-changing book shows how positive energy can be drawn from life's most challenging experiences. Anne asks the central question: 'Who am I and who do I want to be?' and invites the reader to do the same.

Leseprobe

ANNE PIA’s creative memoirLanguage of My Choosingwas shortlisted for the Saltire Award for Best New Book of 2017. In 2018, Anne was awarded the Premio Italiano Linguistica. With the assistance of funding from Publishing Scotland the Italian translationHo Scelto La Mia Linguawas published in 2018 by MnM edizioni. Her first poetry collection,Transitory, was published in 2018. Anne’s poetry and essays have appeared in among others,The Blue Nib,Northwords Now,Poetry Scotland,Lunar Poetry,The Fat Damseland London’sSouth Bank Poetrymagazine. Anne has appeared at the Dundee Literary Festival and the Stanza International Poetry Festival and has done events in venues across Scotland including the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the National Library of Scotland, the City Art Centre, Glasgow Women’s Library and the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh. In 2018 she was invited to the British Institute in Florence and to the Torino Book Festival in 2019 to showcase her book.

Pia shows us that pilgrimages to places of the past are important stations to stop at, but planning the next odyssey into the future of possibilities can also be beneficial…JANETTE AYACHI

Keeping Away the Spidersis lyrical and candid… brimming with insight, poetry and music.SANDRA IRELAND

[Transitoryis] a beautifully eloquent mission of direct communication across the differences that give us identities.ALAN RIACH

[poems of] honesty and bluntness, as social convention is blown apartCHRISTINE DE LUCA

Language of My Choosingis book that will challenge its readers to ear up all the scripts society has written for us and find their own words…RICHARD HOLLOWAY

By the same author:

Language of My ChoosingLuath Press, 2017

Transitory(poetry) Luath Press, 2018

Keeping Away

the Spidersessays on breaching barriers

ANNE PIA

First published 2020

ISBN: 978-1-910022-31-3

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset by Carrie Hutchison

© Anne Pia 2020

A special dedication to my little granddaughter Stevie Iris, to my daughters, Camilla, Roberta and Sophie-Louise and to Geraldine whose love and humour keep me journeying.

contents

acknowledgements

author’s note

opener

reluctant feminist

insight

harmonics

runner

on miracles

moonstruck

game-changer

fika

shift

propulsion

wordscaping

variations

and final notes…

tailpiece

... then along came a spider

further reading...

acknowledgements

I want to thankthe following for their endless support and encouragement: Sheila, Aileen and Marian, and for excellent and honest commentaries at the crucial stages… Tamsin, Laura, Linda, Izzy and Sean. My special thanks as ever to Jennie Renton and to Carrie Hutchison, my editor.

author’s note

I finished writingthis book in early January 2020 when the pandemic loomed, but was still for me an unknown and far off. I wrote it in order to share my thoughts, to start a conversation about survival. I wanted to celebrate possibility, freedom, joy. I wanted to speak up for hope and optimism because, even in my darkest times, I live my life believing in these things.

The speed of the change in our lives as a result of the pandemic has been both shocking and humbling, confronting us with the things we can’t control. In the early days of lockdown, this book that I so believed in, no longer mattered and I grieved for it. I grieved for lost words and for vanished worlds. Most of all, I feared the future and everything around me that was outside my familiar. In bleakest lockdown, like millions of others, I took careful stock of my mental and physical vulnerabilities. I realised with unprecedented starkness, how flimsy and precious my hold is on my emotional stability, my own life and those of the people I care about; then slowly, through unexpected significances of my different every day, a smile or an ice cream cone, I did find new small, safe and happy spaces.

At this time more than ever, as we move into a new era, I believe and hope that these pages will steady, inspire, give confidence in possibility, confirm and reawaken the ingenuity and creativity that we possess, the innate and discrete capacities that we have, that help us not only to live and live fully, but to enjoy, flourish and maybe even grow a tiny bit taller.

Anne Pia

October 2020

opener

…as I liein bed alone, I consider the spider that may be lurking underneath the bed frame. I see a large black shape, fast moving, as loose in her movements as a dusting cloth.This spider has some power over me. She hears my breath. Our movements co-ordinate. With each shift of my position she is alerted. In dodging my gaze she renders me completely paralysed. She is skilled in subterfuge; with a wide range of vision as she scans her surroundings; and hydrostatic impetus in her every move – at once still and then quickly out of nowhere, and then away. In these lone moments, I am unable to keep at bay the thoughts that linger around the edges of each day and of almost every joyful moment… the fearful, unremitting blackness of dying, plunged unexpectedly and in a flash into the void; a sudden, thudding body splitting blow from nowhere as I make my bed or dry my hair; or being eased gently with the help of drugs, against any decisive will of my own, into a terrible pitch black. I will have some minutes maybe, to assess what has taken place, my brain will question, scream and burn its panic, and then along with realisation, my brain function will slow to stop. Then nothing. The feeling of nothing. And I reject this imminent nothingness.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

(Jean Baudrillard)

I do not know who I am: Who are you? I often ask myself as I take in the streets of my city, the sound of church bells, wash the windows of my flat or ride a bus to the gym. Am I happy or a pathological depressive? Passionate, generous of heart or mean with my money? Arrogant and self-promoting or self-doubting and choked with anxiety? An irrepressible optimist or suffocatingly morbid? Am I an idealist, a romantic, caring and sensitive, empathetic and loving or a forensically cut-throat calculator, vengeful and envious; sometimes a brutal psychopath even, baying for blood? Would I resort to violence or am I the essence of finessed restraint? Would I declare myself spiritual or a selfish pleasure-seeking Hedonist? Is it the strength or the weakness in me that people see? A bully or meekly compliant?

The reality is that I am and have been all of these conflicting things and much, much more – a contradiction – as variable and complex as the chemistry of spice in a curry. And how much of what others say of us can we trust, should we take seriously? The determining factor, what defines or frames us is mainly external. The circumstances that are imposed on us or the situations that we choose. Who we are is often reactive and improvised within a given environment. We are unreliable. We continually construct and deconstruct, reconstruct and mutate. In the absence of our interaction or engagement with a set of circumstances, when all human contact is swept away, who are we then and what remains?

I believe that while we continually build, adapt and remake our identity, there is an aspect or thread which exists, irrespective of the words or actions of other people; an essential core, which is not brought into being by an external force, but is an enduring self-determining energy which drives us to continually build variable, sometimes competing, new identities. Christians might still refer to it as free will.

It is that vibrant surge, that often eclectic push of self-moving that wakes me some mornings with such a love of the physical world, its diversity, its mysteries and rewards, finds me so full of lust for life that I could, if my legs weren’t so short, my pace too slow, stride Colossus-like across the earth’s entirety in a day, place a foot in every continent and ride the waves of each of the earth’s great oceans.

There are occasions too when my day to day is not enough and I look for ways of living another life on a bigger, broader scale; when I need to expand beyond limits, when it is the big world stage that I seek.

There are days too, when I want to live on an altogether different level, to travel across London with nothing but an Oyster card and not a penny in my pocket to replace it should I accidentally drop it, to drive a luxury car, have afternoon tea wearing a hat or limit myself, for want of better, to a dinner of corned beef and tortillas in a small tent.

And I willingly throw myself into the unknown, take on new selves, impelled by basic instinct simply because I just want to keep on becoming.

Only one who takes over his own life history can see it in the realisation of his self. Responsibility to take over one’s own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.

(Habermas)

This book is not a memoir. It is an assertion about identity, about who we are, who we can become and the opportunities in our lives for transformation. All my experience in educating young people and adults returning to learning has taught me that safe, valuing learning environments can lead to fundamental, personal change and that transformation is always possible. I am convinced too by Buddhist philosophy together with events in my own life, that we live in a world where nothing is fixed or solid. Everything is impermanent and will pass. We therefore conduct our lives, broken threads against an unreliable background of constant change, continual motion, which require us to keep adapting in response. We gain, lose, choose, recycle and self-create through what we learn from others, what of theirs we value, through the lifestyles we choose and important decisions that we take, and in how we react to those major and unforeseen events that often overtake us and that we find ourselves confronted with.

In this book, I have drawn mainly on autobiographical material. The collages which follow are unrelated and inconsistent; as non-sequential and random as life. They serve as examples. In showing the extent of my own personal shift, reconfigurations, responses and reframing, the struggles, the gains, the ever-present shifting star just within reach, my purpose is to share what I have learned; to offer a certain philosophy and to comment on wider social and political issues in the world as I understand them.

reluctant feminist

… she had thehabit of keeping a basin under the bed and a nightly ritual of wiping her vagina with a wet cloth before settling down beside me, where unable to move or turn, though both fascinated and repulsed at the same time, I tried not to look. Silent, I hugged the margin of the mattress. Throughout my entire six-week stay at that house, the practice continued.

For some reason I remember those summer days in Italy in 1967 as pink days. I wore quite a lot of it and the youthfulness of the palest of colours counteracted the sluggishness that seemed to grip everyone in the house after lunch. I hated that time of day, everyone heavy, drugged with food and homemade wine poured from Coca-Cola bottles, and asleep; every bed full, mouths open, bodies slack, left to rumble, gurgle and wheeze, right in the middle of a fine, fine day, glorious before its leisurely cadencing to late afternoon and dusk.

I wasn’t meant to be there really, in that small Italian village near Atina. At the age of 17, just out of boarding school, I found myself in the Italian Lake District. And after several days of feeling lonely and increasingly anxious and frightened, I had to be rescued from suicidal depression. To my relief, I was carried off by my mother’s young man, at her fervent request, to his sister’s home in Ponte Melfa near Sora in the central Appennine Mountains. He deposited me in the safe-keeping of his sister and mother like a man bringing home the war-wounded. Which in a way I was. His mother then became my bedfellow. I still remember the soft grey of Garda’s lake, high on the banking, imagining its tender embrace, all fears vanishing as I gratefully let myself go, thankful of its depths. So, there I was in rural Italy, tall and substantial, outlandishly Scottish in manner and dress, lumpen and lacking any of the guile of a country Italian girl, but with a southernlazialedialect, the authenticity of which astonished the entire village.

I came home to Edinburgh after six weeks of stretching out on the Coppola family’s roof terrace, roasting in the fiery sunshine. I was about to start university, deemed by the world able for life but I had been distinctly unable to deal with sex, innuendo, a lustful gaze, the brush of a fingertip. Which is why I had to be rescued. Why I panicked to the point of walking through a glass window one afternoon and in those days, lying awake at night, fearful of someone standing outside my bedroom door listening. So, we maintained, my mother and I, the pretence of a successful summer school, for which I had truthfully won a bursary from the Italian Department of Edinburgh University, but never got as far as a classroom desk.

I was in hiding in Italy, all thoughts of my exclusive study programme banished. How would I explain my failures to a prospective professor? I was sleeping with the matronly mother of my mother’s boyfriend. I still wonder to this day, since he had not, I assume, given any account of the circumstances of his connection to my family, how he had persuaded his people to take me in.

Nothing had prepared me for a priest whom I automatically assumed to be chaste and God- fearing, conditioned as I was by the nuns that educated me to trust the wisdom of a dog collar. After a drink at our first meeting in Milan and some minutes in his car – he had been commissioned by my aunt to meet and drive me to my destination in Garda – he pointedly removed his dog collar and announced his freedom. And nothing had prepared me for the man sitting opposite me with his wife, all of us on the pontoon stretching over the lake, who on my first afternoon after my arrival at mypensione,suggested while she disappeared indoors, that I shave the pubic hair escaping from the edges around my prim swimsuit.

Up until that moment, I had never considered my pubic hair. Apart from a general look around that area, I had paid it scarce attention. But the sexual messages from these two men, my first experience of males outside my family circle, made me feel vulnerable and insecure. My inability to find words, to adopt a convincing expression or pose which might counter such intrusive behaviour left me feeling gauche, unattractive and ugly. I was rendered inferior, reduced, lost in a place that I did not understand, that I did not have the language or skills for.

There is a welcome honesty today in relation to unsolicited sexual attention and harassment and my problem was partly a generational one, part of an era well gone. I applaud women who have grown in confidence to the point where uninvited male attention is named, exposed and condemned. I glory in women who do not seek definition by men, who make their own choices, who are generally pretty confident of how they look, their attractiveness, who are not drawn in by the words, sideways glances or behaviours of men. And I regret not having had that strength and resilience. But I needed admiration and compliments. I needed that attention in order to feel okay.

My feminism was never in question, it came naturally and was well rooted. But it was my behaviour, my decisions and neediness which compromised it, disguised it or betrayed it. I have still not forgiven the boys I mixed with when I was about to leave school for fancying each of my school friends while I didn’t match up. Was it something that they saw or did not see in me? Was I so different? Was there some game at work that I hadn’t quite understood?

There was one boy that I really liked called Mark and I told my best friend. After arriving later than expected at a party, I was surprised when they opened the door to me clearly together. I was stung on both counts. I learned that even when friendship is deep, it is no match for sexual game-play. When it comes to the love tangle, it will always trump friendship, leaving you suddenly bereft.

Even now, a lifetime later, when his or her name comes up, I still feel a small stab of pain. My anger and shame still a pinprick. It was a determining event. If I wasn’t able to compete in the arena of sexual attraction, I could mercilessly compete in all the others areas of my life. A new driving energy had sprung into being and has lasted to this day. Some of those boys have crossed my path since, as elderly and mature men.

My response has been cool.

As a child, I never for one moment considered myself in any way less than my male cousins, and as an adult, never less than male colleagues, than the husbands of friends, or indeed inferior to my own husband. My difficulty arose rather from my lack of self-belief both intellectually and as a woman. My mother had always told me that I was special and different to other people, but I didn’t believe it. She used those words more as an exhortation to do the right thing, whatever that was. Her intention was to make me conform to norms and expectations. So, faced with a man, rather than assert, I either punctured his soliloquy or I adopted a grateful, submissive approach, listening to his orations, deferring to his pronouncements as infallible, as this approach offered some stability in a world I was discovering but did not understand. I performed the femininity expected of me. Male attention had passed me by as a teenager but overwhelmed me when I played the game of the flirtacious, second-class being who flattered egos and satisfied male need for being central to any conversation or gathering.

I still see young women who carry the values and stigma of my diffident generation of women who mothered them, who are complimented when a man touches them without consent and who regard an invitation to drinks, bed or a club as affirmation of their attractiveness. But more and more, there is an intolerance of sexual subjugation; an intolerance of a lack of respect for womanhood, women’s choices and women’s needs. The impatience I see among women in relation to male dominance, men putting their needs first, is now spoken, acted upon and illegalised. We are witnessing a massive showdown, a reckoning. With the unveiling and vocalising of female experiences, historic and present day, across the Western world, there is public shaming of furtive, forward, ignorantly impudent, dodoesque menfolk. We both and not just you, will agree the terms of this engagement across the sexual divide. And if I dress in a way that you think is provocative or inviting, I do so not to impress or excite you but because I want to feel like a woman for myself. I want to enhance my own sexual appetite and fanciful imaginings. My presentation is my ritual, my identity and my chosen currency. It has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

I have not been a good feminist. I recognise this. Susie Orbach, Judith Butler, Roxane Gay, Caitlin Moran, Mary Beard, for example, and worthy authors of such books asReclaiming the F WordandCome as You Are,might welldespise my cowardice. While in the ’70s, my good sisters were claiming ownership of their bodies and equal status with men, I was not only swaddled in middle class wifeliness, which despite my professional journey, I was happy to inhabit, but I was critical of the politics and iterations of that second wave of feminism.

There are, of course, mitigating circumstances. As an Italian Scot, having arrived in a competitive world and gaining promotions over men, having travelled from the counter of a café/ice cream shop, leaving the rawness of an immigrant family behind, I did not, would never then take, what I saw as a backward step to left wing extremism, to presentations of myself as a woman who could not afford better because that was too close to where I had come from. My social foothold was not yet entirely secure, my birthright still only a breath away. My purpose was to display what I had fashioned for myself, to parade what I could afford. I had lived and done the other. That breadbin with our Christmas money, salvaged from the pubs that my pitiful, drunken father visited, the screaming disagreements and hair pulling, all were not far enough away. I found then, that capitulating to the norm, giving way to role stereotyping, relaxing into society’s expectations of womanhood was not only easier but undemanding and very pleasant. In that there was an order about it. No confrontations, no hard edges. My nights were peaceful, my days untroubled by any thoughts other than planning my next lesson, the contents of my freezer and how to fill a cheeseboard.

Though while I indulged a superficial, materialistic identity, I remained at all times, starkly realistic about myself and my lifestyle. I knew what I was doing; I had made the easy choice. So the battle was won by others while I fiddled, so busy was I to make, feather and gild my nest. It was maybe easier to stand for a cause from a firm middle class footing at that time. But so much braver to challenge sexism, class and elitism when you are financially and socially vulnerable, to articulate and pursue your beliefs when those around you, men and women may see you as motivated by envy and anger.

I am not sure at what point my feminist revolt began. My family background had a great deal to do with it. The men that surrounded me as a child were violent and ominous and I saw strong women degraded by them. As I grew up, I became more and more enraged by those power relations, observing the submissiveness of women who ultimately crumbled before their might. My husband on the other hand, was a civil, happy and loving man, courteous and calm and our home was a welcome oasis, a delightful respite after those earlier years. I remember a scene in one of Ferrante’s novels where a father throws his daughter out of the window in temper, thus breaking her arm. This has stayed in my mind. While no limbs were broken in my childhood home, this distressing, crude display was not unfamiliar. As a newly married woman it often seemed that I was two people: when confronted by a family situation, it was hard to maintain dignity and composure, and I descended to a level that I was and am not proud of; back in my own space, hours later, I was the essence of self-styled, middle class refinement and good behaviour.

While family on both sides acknowledged my career choice, it became clear that they had no appreciation of my aspirations and at any mention of promotion or moving on, I detected a slight unease, a discreet change of subject towards more domestic matters. Clearly the expectation was that as a wife and mother primarily, my role was to support and enable my husband’s career advancement. Self-sacrifice was a woman’s lot.

Not long after the birth of my second child, we went on holiday to Italy with my mother. I was still struggling with post-natal depression which no one seemed to notice and which only myGPknew about. After what had been a difficult and exhausting car journey to a beautiful Tuscan resort, I woke up one morning feeling crushed and lonely. There was no one who made me feel valued or cherished. I had been assigned a role that I did not want and that was not me. I was 35 and I felt as if my life was over, submerged as I was within the patriarchal structure I grew up in and married into. I wanted more from life, I demanded more and I knew that I was capable of better.

My subsequent and decisive move out of the school system into wider, more prominent roles in education was significant. In doing so, I left well behind me the traditions and norms of Catholic education and those of family and community. Liberated from those repressive attitudes, active on a bigger stage, I began to meet and mix more widely. I was influenced by able women who were independent, whose work commitments and the impact of responsibility had equal currency within the family structure, women who conducted their lives very differently to what I had been used to. The dismal staff room chat among Catholic wives about Rome and bishop-approved methods of birth control and how to make good ‘stovies’ for the men, coming home hungry after football, were well behind me. Instead of hosting or attending Sunday lunches with extended family, these other women went to the gym or a sauna to relax after a demanding week, they met friends for lunch or went to an art gallery or wrote papers on a Sunday night about policy and educational development. Better still, they took trips away with friends. In Italian eyes, it would have been outrageous and negligent for a mother of three to behave in that way and particularly for a mother who was scarcely at home through the week, albeit working.

As I grew in confidence, feeling increasingly able and free, I challenged the settled status quo at home. I stopped the dinner parties, and theduck à l’orange, replacing them with walking boots. I started smoking cigars and I finally ventured full of fear, into the feminist and lesbian community. I started to protest at offensive male behaviour, oracles and dogma. To my astonishment however, if the heterosexual world demanded conformity, the radical feminists and the lesbians were not far from that mark either. Not for them the brave new frontiers of sexual behaviour, of gender bending, androgyny and sexual fluidity. Had I wanted to indulge in it, polyamory would certainly not have won me many friends. I found the Scottish lesbian community uncompromising and illiberal, with set rules for living, bizarrely replicating heterosexual patterns with clearly assigned roles, protocols and uniforms. To me, feminists were often loudly radical, angry and unrelenting. I had hoped for open-mindedness, liberalism and creativity, a community of individuals defining their lifestyles, non-hierarchical in the manner Marge Piercy imagined in her amazingWoman on the Edge of Time.

Having dreamed of a network where I might meet brave, like-minded women (for these women had been brave indeed in asserting their sexuality), somewhat bruised, I retreated. By my love of clothes, fashion, make-up and large, dare I say, sophisticated gatherings around my table (I favoured whole artichokes dipped in a wonderful vinaigrette rather than a humble pie and beans), by my love of classical music, my enjoyment of the company of both men and women, I stood judged, both by feminists of the ’70s and ’80s that I met, and who would have preferred me threadbare rather than clad in Jaeger tailoring, and lesbians who would probably have taken to me more readily had I deserted my husband, home and children but would have despised me for abandoning my cat, had I owned one. My closest relationships have though, always been with women, the closest fit emotionally and instinctively; my even closer relationships have been with my daughters.

Two years ago, I was reading from my memoir and poetry collection in London. In order to open up the discussion, my eldest daughter asked if I would call myself a feminist. ‘Oh no!’ I said, ‘I don’t like labels.’ Aware that I had not met the challenge she set me in public, I was shamed. Since then, with her occasional guidance, I have made it my objective to read some of the literature and poetry around the current feminist wave. To my sheer delight, I found a language, an outlook on life, a way of seeing the world, a way of both understanding, being with and countering men which had silently been developing within my own consciousness and mind as an academic, a professional and more recently as a writer. The discovery was both empowering and overpowering.