A handful of people got a kick out of my last entry, they say, which comes as a relief close to the end of a working week in what can only be called -- and has by pairs of lips other than my own -- a Madhouse, no mere Factory.
It won't stay this way for long -- nothing does -- but while insanity prevails among
enough people temporarily to take the upper hand, all the rest of us can do is channel anger at it into laughter when we can. I can't be sparing when jokes are banned, as some would almost prefer. Nor when people who seem a little ... hmm, close to the edge, insult the ability of veteran journalists to understand "modern agency journalism" because they can turn out a good story and swap views on the world's absurdities at the same time.
It's hard for a nice fellow like me to be mean, but people give me practice.
One or two friends don't appear to have realised that when they insistently 'phone, get no answer and leave no messages, this is usually because I'll take nothing but messages when I know who's calling and that their aim is simply to suck me a little bit drier -- for reassurance, comfort, consolation or whatever it might be -- when I have none to give.
Experience teaches who almost invariably calls because they've something to share, often upbeat and amusing, and who does so often because they feel they "need" something when either it's sticking plaster or to be found only in themselves. One joy of modern tech is a telephone which warns you which it's likely to be before you pick up. This frees us to decide to talk to those who come to "cry wolf" -- or just "help" -- as a near-automatic reflex, made easier by no-dial, punch-button tech, only when we're really "there for you".
Tonight I added a second book by my ever favourite writer to the "current reading" list on this page, having long listed 'Ursula's world' among "fantastic bookmarks" because she is. Fantastic. For most of my life, I've enjoyed reading and re-reading almost anything by Ursula K. Le Guin as a constant source of guidance, first-rate writing in a whole range of styles, and a wisdom she found early in her own career, which has matured without cease.
I come later than most of her "fans", but with immense pleasure, to 'The Other Wind', now out in paperback for almost two years, and can only agree with 'gretelhallett', whose Amazon UK review states she "always felt that the issues raised at the end of the Quartet were too big and powerful to just be left where they were and Ursula Le Guin obviously realised that too". Gretel also says it's best to read the collection of 'Tales from Earthsea' first. Right again.
This is no kid's stuff even if booksellers insist on classifying it there. No mere fantasy either, to be heaped on the ever-growing pile of such writing by escapists offering brief reliefs from the "real world" for others the same way inclined.
At one point in this slim book, Le Guin tells of a fellow who
"knew he had asked Tenar to come to Havnor not only to take counsel from her but because she was the mother that remained to him. He wanted that love, to give and be given it. The ruthless love that makes no allowances, no conditions. Tenar's eyes were grey, not dark, but she looked right through him with a piercing tenderness undeceived by anything he said or did."
Now that passage struck right home, setting the atoms resonating in harmony to the core of my being. They are not words my own experience -- since I can write from nothing else -- has taught me, moreover, to be confined to relationships between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters...
I can't predict what more the fellow will learn in a novel I've yet to finish, but if I know Ursula, by the time the tale's done, he may also find "wanting that love, to give and be given it" has no part in the tough task of living.
Some of us seem simply to live lives, I guess, where one day we have no choice but to accept there's no other right way -- as both Tao and 'I Ching' would have it -- to turn or behave than to take just six of those words: "ruthless love: no allowances, no conditions."
And to say, "Yup, it's that simple."
Or that complicated! Whichever you prefer.
I prefer it simple, since I've of late had reason to tell people it's all I've got left for them, take it or leave it. Bearing those six words in mind and heart, from a while before they struck my eye put so succinctly, has helped me begin to deal with a lifelong anger problem: the kind of anger I'd once hurl, for instance, at that 'phone, which still rings every half hour or so.
Failing to pick it up would then have filled me with guilt! What if, just for instance, this was the real "I can't take any more" close-to-suicide call? Now it's just a mild nuisance to have to wipe eight calls, no message, off the home 'phone, and another eight calls, no message, off the mobile, which was switched yesterday on to silent anyway.
I know when she's calling, as with others. It vibrates. There's no way I can teach her and others like her it's pointless trying to tap into me this way when all the odds are that she wants one of around three or four things from me today which I've dispensed in the past, to the best of my ability, for so long and at such cost she's been trained to take it for granted.
Thing is, "you don't always get what you want", however desperately you may feel the need of the hour. Nobody can teach anybody this because, one day or another, if we're lucky enough to live that long or hurt that bad, we wind up with no choice but to learn there's only one person with all the resources to get us through a day to the next: ourselves.
Am I being ruthless with her?
Undoubtedly. I feel no shame in it any more and will simply bury the phone under a cushion if she persists once I'm ready for bed, knowing a hard day lies ahead. Today, I have "been there" for enough people as it is. Tomorrow, it will be the same, with other people, other difficulties. As for her problems, almost certainly a variation on themes already tackled countless times, well I'll perhaps be ready for more come my weekend. Not before.
Tonight there are "no allowances" for her, because I feel to my core that what Ursula also means is that a time has to come when we stop taking people on the "conditions" they've become too accustomed to choosing themselves, rather than living with and accepting my need, your own need, to resource yourself in yourself, the better to be ready for others again and more often with a laugh than a sob.
I'm uncertain about the "wanting". Or the "need". We all have them. But I'm sure that love -- however ruthless -- is about "give and take" and learning how to do this with real freedom based on a respect for oneself, because if you've got no respect for yourself, then how much can you really have for others?
So if anybody reads these words and gets "a lesson" from them, then I've really taught nothing. All it means is that you've read them, you may agree with them, and if you do, it's because you agree with what you've found for yourself, by experience. They resonate with what you've got, no more, no less, much as it happened to me, reading 'The Other Wind'.
Solitude and loneliness can be almost unbearably horrible, true.
Being unable to live with them is worse still. I only know because my life took me so far down that road and into myself for so long that when it was done and what I am was no longer of much interest, it became relatively easy to turn elsewhere, free to choose a fresh wind.
11:12:04 PM link 
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