A deserving foundation for anxiety?

When I was very young, I discovered an old book of poetry that I believe belonged to my Auntie Annie. It was as old as the primary school history book my mother had kept, the one with Romulus and Remus in the first chapter.

In this book of poetry, I found many rhymes that still conjure up much romantic thought today. One of them, hardly one of my favourites, has returned to haunt me. Bear in mind that this is close to 25 years after I first read it.

YOUTH AND ART BY ROBERT BROWNING

It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

Your trade was with sticks and clay,
You thumbed, thrust, patted, and polished,
Then laughed "They will see some day,
Smith made, and Gibson° demolished." °

My business was song, song, song;
I chirped, cheeped, trilled, and twittered,
"Kate Brown's on the boards ere long,
And Grisi's° existence embittered!" °

I earned no more by a warble
Than you by a sketch in plaster;
You wanted a piece of marble,
I needed a music-master.

We studied hard in our styles,
Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,° °
For air, looked out on the tiles,
For fun, watched each other's windows.

You lounged, like a boy of the South,
Cap and blouse--nay, a bit of beard too;
Or you got it, rubbing your mouth
With fingers the clay adhered to.

And I--soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind
And be safe in my corset-lacing.

No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turned your eye's tail up
As I shook upon E _in alt_,
Or ran the chromatic scale up:

For spring bade the sparrows pair.
And the boys and girls gave guesses,
And stalls in our street looked rare
With bulrush and watercresses.

Why did not you pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look or sing it?

I did look, sharp as a lynx,
(And yet the memory rankles)
When models arrived, some minx
Tripped up stairs, she and her ankles.

But I think I gave you as good!
"That foreign fellow,--who can know
How she pays, in a playful mood,
For his tuning her that piano?"

Could you say so, and never say
"Suppose we join hands and fortunes,
And I fetch her from over the way,
Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?"

No, no: you would not be rash,
Nor I rasher and something over;
You've to settle yet Gibson's hash,
And Grisi yet lives in clover.

But you meet the Prince at the Board,
I'm queen myself at _bals-parés_,° °
I've married a rich old lord,
And you're dubbed knight and an R.A.

Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy

And nobody calls you a dunce,

And people suppose me clever;

This could but have happened once,

And we missed it, lost it forever

The narrative in the poem almost fetishizes the idea that soulmates are given limited, finite opportunities to meet and make much of their God-given rightness for each other. My subjective experience extracts a slightly different message: a commonality of struggle and focus can potentially breed a soulful connection (happiness) but chasing security and the outward trappings of success makes us blind to the possibility of communion that could exist in one so physically and mentally - and so ephemerally - close by. And thus, we miss our chance and allow the ever moving train of life to chug us towards the end of a long list of checked boxes on empty white spaces.

I fear fear fear that I am giving up my freedom and my sense of self for security and warmth. I'm giving in to my neurosis, my demons. In effect, I'm limiting my upside greatly.

Who I am and why I'm doing this.

This post is a stand-in for the About Me section which, irritatingly, refuses to be saved whenever it is edited. It will remain an empty field and this post will fill in for it until Blogger resolves that issue.


Being the daughter of an old school colonial hang up and a new school Mao Tse Tong is my claim on the twisted and confused socio-cultural perspective that informs all my ramblings here. From time to time, that perspective will turn parochial or even self-serving; I am not apologising for that. There is great value in the subjective. It might be all that matters when it comes to living. From time to time, cute critters make their way onto these pages. My policy, like most policies by others in my generation, is simply a more liberal version of my mother's: any critter that enters my home IS home. Ta.


I'm doing this because until an idea or feeling is articulated, it is an unseen, un-managed force in your life. Unacknowledged thus, it could surprise you at the most inopportune time. Perhaps at a dinner party with big shots. Perhaps at 2.30am when you are lying alone painfully trying to recall the exact reasons you rejected that marriage proposal you got 8 years ago. These pages will be like the toilet in a house where adolescents live: a place where things that can't or won't be accepted in the communal spaces of everyday life regularly find expression.