journal — six
On the mistakes, rewilding, and the horror of loss
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Hello,
Here are ten things from the past week I’d like to remember.
one
It's you. It's me. It's us.
This mantra, chanted with the latched eyes of most characters in The Haunting of Bly Manor at one point or another, permits another person’s spirit to enter & combine with one’s own. An echo from my note two week’s ago, we could ruminate on either side of this coin: the damnation of overwhelming, trapping love, or the tightening knot of two souls made for each other.
two
When I watched Lowery’s A Ghost Story, read Zusak’s The Book Thief, and listened to Bowie’s Lazarus, I knew those things had stuck to me for the rest of my brief eternity. I believe Bly Manor’s final episode may have achieved the same feat — it hooked & broke me.
[Spoilers:] The episode went like this:
I won’t ruin the rest of the series: Simply, by reaching this final episode called ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, the screams of Bly have been silenced; we move onto a new type of horror. Resolution came at the cost of Dani (the young, kind, bright, compassionate nanny) accepting Violet, the spiteful, violently furious ghost of Bly Manor, into her body to save the life of the young girl in her care. As peace falls on the home, sunshine breaking through its large windows & doors where haze & gloom had previously reigned, Dani leaves Bly with Jamie (the tough, also kind, reserved, bushy-haired gardener). They travel across America, confess their love for one another, build a home & open a flower shop together; they exchange rings, eventually ‘upgrading’ to a civil partnership depending on the legalities of the time for two women sharing a life. Both know that the ghost of Violet, seething with rage inside Dani, may take her at any time — they agree, then, to not plan too far ahead; to take their lives one day at a time. They do this for years. This is a love story, full of unbounded fun & affection & immense vulnerability — but horror remains & tragedy returns. Dani starts to see Bly’s ghost in reflections and, one night, wakes to find her hand round Jamie’s throat. Come morning, Jamie finds herself alone in bed, and a note from Dani on the bedside table. Jamie travels back to Bly, walks to its lake, swims down to its bed, and howls under the water upon finding the love of her life there. Dani’s suicide ends the haunting of Bly and, indeed this majorative part of the series; we’re sent back to the start of Episode 1: an older lady has finished telling the story she started. She, of course, is Jamie, telling this forgotten story — the forgetting being another curse of Bly, and of growing-up. The listeners are grown-up versions of the series’ other characters, including the young girl Dani saved who is, the next morning, getting married to the love of her life. We see them all dance, stand with smiles around people, comfortable it seems in the lives they have, and Jamie stands alone. She returns home, the home she had shared with Dani so many years ago now, and performs her nightly ritual: run a shallow bath, some water in the sink, check those & the mirror into the sink — none show the reflection of Dani she hopes for. She opens the front door — just a crack — turns a chair to face it, and settles in. She waits. Nothing. Dani doesn’t come; we see Jamie drift into asleep as the camera drifts backwards; we see: the cracked door, the back of Jamie’s sleeping head … and a hand, a wedding ring, resting softly on Jamie’s shoulder.
The suggestion: Jamie may not see her, but she’s there the whole time.
Bly Manor is based on the home & characters (but very little else) of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, following Mike Flanagan’s previous literary adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, from Shirley Jackson’s same-name novel. On a London-to-Edinburgh train quite some years ago, I read Henry James’ supposedly terrifying book & thought: this is terribly dull. As a series, though well-cast & beautiful to watch if you’re fond of the clipped British countryside, held my attention for more notably but, at times, felt a little slow — that said, my head’s been a bit messy this week, distracted by lots of work & tumultuous family affairs, so it may just be me. That final episode, though, Flanagan’s willingness to play with fear as a concept, is more than enough reason to (re-)watch.
three
Fear, I think, is borne from the threat of losing something we love, the most obvious thing, of course, being life itself (or, at least: the current absence of gut-wrenching pain) — the horror genre’s go-to.
What Bly Manor achieves is the exploration of other losses: our memories, our legacy, the people we love. Dani (Victoria Pedretti) & Jamie’s (Amelia Eve) phenomenal chemistry shouldn’t be reduced by the lazy categorisation of lesbian relationship on-screen — that, its commentary on healthy / toxic relationships, and a black, female lead (T’Nia Miller as Hannah Grose is a presence in any scene), are all absolutely worth their individual applause. This final episode, though, shows how fear can be moving — the horror of losing someone we love, be that to their own death or, for a broader example, to dementia or trauma, may be something we’re more regularly attuned to, and see ourselves in more readily.
It’s a specific take on the genre I plan to explore & talk about more. I’ll finish the point by sharing another line many of the series’ characters use — it echoes & aches in the final scenes.
‘Dead doesn’t mean gone.’
four
Declaring the (sub-)genres or movements of creative things feels restrictive, like best of lists or award nominations — the person experiencing whatever creative thing it may be is gifted, for better or worse, with pre- / mis-conceptions of what they’ll get, which surely removes the occasional moment of wonder.
That said, labels & lists can direct us towards more things we like. It got me thinking: how much research should be done before experiencing creativity? Should we aim to be as blind as possible, depending on the tastes of others we trust, then, and only then, researching the finer details afterwards? (Ten seconds of any trailer, or a three sentence blurb, and I can generally (I think) tell whether I’ll enjoy the thing, so I stop teasing myself & try the thing out for real. Plus, trailers have a habit of giving away the entire bloody narrative.)
So, a couple of tools & an experiment:
Story log: I’ve settled on the name of this document (for now) and added three genre spaces per creative-thing, to allow for a little flexibility. (Yes, I’ll clean up the sheet this week. Promise.) With the before / during / after ratings, I’ll also soon be able to see how accurate my assumptions are from whatever information I do gather beforehand compared to my thoughts after.
Sharing plans: I’ve spritzed my dusty old Trello board. something I’d previously used for work, then found to be a fiddly, pain-in-the-backside when it came to team management — useful, though, for keeping track of where I’m personally at with things, and particularly working through lists.
Blind experiment: (I dreaded the thought of doing this with my books, as each can take hours spread across days to get through and I don’t fancy committing that kind of time to the experiment.) I’d like to see what happens when I work my way through a list of suggested films without having seen what they’re about beforehand — the trailer-twitch often determines whether I bother watching it at all, in that moment or generally, which I assume has led to many a decent thing being missed. I’m going to work my way through Little White Lies 100 Best Films of the 90s, using my current subscriptions, maybe a random number generator rather than going from 100 through to 1, then I’ll find some method of watching the rest without blowing the bank — Cinema Paradiso (here’s 30 days free) came to mind: basically, DVDs by post.
five
A note on the visual effect and another on the style of language.
Elle Griffin’s recent thread about ‘doomerism’ threw me onto this website — there’s so much going on; my brain loves it. Visual text tweaks, like emojis, using ALL CAPS, or three !!!s, make me twitch a bit, but should they? You may notice I use ampers&nds quite regularly, not to mention inconsistently, for no reason other than they visually feel right in certain places, nestled perfectly in a sentence when writing a short list, for example. Bold words are heavy; there’s tangible emphasis in italics. You achieve a feeling with these small design tweaks. Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers & Lanny come to mind for experimenting with this, too.
The audiobook for Recovery is read by its author, Russell Brand, who I’ve heard mocked for the breadth of language he uses, mixing complex words with chapter titles like Are you fucked? — it feels … respectful isn’t quite the right word, but the swearing & his playfulness, even his Essex accent, makes him relatable, friendly, while the speed & complexity of language shows his trust that you’ll get what he’s saying. His language through the lens of a thesaurus, when you slip into lucid listening, is kaleidoscopic.
six
Jeff VanderMeer’s writing (I’ve only given Annihilation a go, to be fair) seems remarkably over-hyped. I should give that trilogy another go. That said, I admired & enjoyed this article about his garden rewilding efforts.
(I also reached 0 on my Instapaper, mentioned last letter.)
seven
‘More sinister, we’re changing the fundamental media through which sound waves move. The carbon load in the atmosphere is making air hotter & wetter or sometimes hotter & drier, throwing the planet’s instruments out of tune. It is causing the ocean to be warmer and less saline, and so sound waves move more quickly. Cyclones, wildfires, storms, and floods are becoming more prevalent, altering the planet’s geological voice.
The impetus? The mounting realisation that humans have not just warmed the planet and altered its landscapes, not just pushed a million species to the brink of extinction, not just fiddled with the patterns of rainfall and wind and seasons, but that we’ve also meddled with the ancient, secret way wildlife communicate in order to survive.’
I paused to wonder, reading this Canadian Geographic article, what material out there existed that looked at true moments of recognition between human & animal, where some barrier or fourth-wall was broken by that moment of clarity: animals experience this world, too.
I remembered Axolotl — a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, which I have on my shelves in this Hopscotch and Blow-Up collection of his writing. I’ll have a look for more.
eight
In chapter three of Recovery by Russell Brand, titled: Are you, on your own, going to ‘unfuck’ yourself?, I had a similar reaction to Brand’s in this brief conversation.
‘A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said: ‘How clever of you to find drugs. Well done. You found a way to keep yourself alive.’
It’s made me feel quite tearful, I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn’t judge me by telling me I was stupid or tub-thumpingly declaring that drugs kill. She told me I did well by finding something that made being me bearable.’
nine
On mistakes being ripe with new answers.
‘… take Franz Kafka‘s incendiary beginning to his unfinished 1927 novel wherein European émigré Karl Roßmann arrives in New York Harbour and from the bow of his ship he studies the Statue of Liberty, describing how the “arm with the sword now reached aloft.” Is this a mistake — did Kafka not know what the statue actually looked like? Is it a comment on the United States, perhaps? It’s uncertain, and yet as with all of Kafka’s oeuvre, such a strange detail seems pregnant with meaning, even if a slip-up. … we can’t quite dispel the desire for purpose, and so we read even blunders as having import.’ — Ed Simon (The Millions, 2022)
ten
My hopeful plan last week was to lasso some dates & times to the too-many plans I’ve running about my mind, rather than just talk about them. I’d like to have a simple list of what I’ve done, and what I’ll do next. Have I done that?
Of course not — it’s been one of those everything-is-fucking-happening weeks and I’m knackered. Now, I have chores to do. But, this evening, once the chores are done, dinner has been eaten, and I have a hot tea in front of me, I’ll plan my week with everything I’ve written so far.
I trust myself to do this, forgive myself for not getting that far, and applaud myself for publishing something for, now, seven weeks in a row.
&
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