feminish

We’ve temporarily decamped from our damp, draughty, dilapidated four (almost) square walls to the creature comforts of a windowed, insulated and plumbed-in home.

Already I’m missing the mice, with whom I have declared peaceful co-existence since the noble field-mouse Balthazar accidentally drowned himself one night in our wash-tub. The guilt runs deep.

It’s strange to see my book pages un-crinkle as they un-dampen, and stranger still to have airport. There was something faintly and reassuringly magical about the internet when it was a mere occasional gift from the Gods who, when the mood took them, broke through the usual “no carrier detected/ modem has unexpectedly hung-up” status-quo to squeeze, at snail-like speed, the entire World Wide Web down my phone line.

And it’s odd to not have to risk life and limb to descend the collapsed outside steps to go for a wee in a makeshift outdoor washroom, and a bizarre surprise to have hot washing water that hasn’t been slowly heated by the sun all morning.

I miss the neighbours yapping at their dog and the warm yellow glow of the evening sun as it sets behind the cliffs and Mirandole.

I miss it because living there is stark and brutal. The only soft thing’s the bed and the rest is clear and bare. Not clean, mind, and not ordered, but immediate. It’s not wadded by insulation nor lined by carpets and wallpaper. Wallpaper seems only to plaster my brain with a repetitive and stultified imitation of reality; a crude and mind-numbing alternative to hand-brushed paint strokes or the complex grains of wood.

And I find myself thinking,

Is wallpaper women’s fault?

The Patterner suggests that it’s a product of rationalism or industrialisation. The fault of “all the people who think straight lines are a good idea despite the fact they don’t exist in nature, crystals excepted”.

But I’m not so much worried about the straight lines as the dulling comfort of it. Of course there’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper where it is, quite literally, maddening:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

But what I think troubles me is what women have been trying to do wallpapering their homes for the last 300 years (at least). The historians tell us that in the 1700s they were trying to “emulate damask, velvet and needlework”; that in the 1800s they wanted stripes “reminiscent of a military campaign”; and that in Britain they wanted simple, repetitive motifs “to accommodate the ancestral portraits”.

Given that I’m not a fan of women’s devotion to expensive cloth, nor of wars, nor even the Brits’ attachment to primogeniture, you’d think my case was over. But my objection is much deeper than that.

I don’t want there to be a feminine interior a woman must be proud of or judged by. Nor do I want an interior so demanding it requires a stay-at-home partner to “keep up form”. But most of all, I don’t want an interior that dulls and cushions me from the gritty reality of life.

I want to look up from my computer and see wood that was once a living tree, stretching out its branches to the rain. Or see brush-strokes lazily, delicately or slap-dashily painted to the wall - by me, by my lover, or an un-known hand. I want to know: this is the wall. This is the boundary of this warm, dry inside space. I don’t want to think: there’s a pink flower, again. Not least because after a while I don’t see the flower any more - my mind switches off, stops registering: it is dulled, it thinks it knows what is there.

But in fact, if I had a wall to look at, I’d see much more in the wall than I’ll ever see in these damn pink flowers that keep tricking my perspective. I’d see the stone that makes the wall, and perhaps the men that, once upon a time, spent many many days putting the stone there. I’d see the ways in which the wall hasn’t always been here, and the ways in which the wall won’t be here forever. How will this house look when it has crumbled? And when will that time come? Will humans be here to bear witness, or shall it just be the beautiful red-black bugs, crawling through the rocks and ivy, utterly oblivious to the fact that their immense mountain-world was once a house, with a first floor, floorboards, a table, a computer and, God bless our souls, pink flowery wallpaper.

We’ve temporarily decamped from our damp, draughty, dilapidated four (almost) square walls to the creature comforts of a windowed, insulated and plumbed-in home.

Already I’m missing the mice, with whom I have declared peaceful co-existence since the noble field-mouse Balthazar accidentally drowned himself one night in our wash-tub. The guilt runs deep.

It’s strange to see my book pages un-crinkle as they un-dampen, and stranger still to have airport. There was something faintly and reassuringly magical about the internet when it was a mere occasional gift from the Gods who, when the mood took them, broke through the usual “no carrier detected/ modem has unexpectedly hung-up” status-quo to squeeze, at snail-like speed, the entire World Wide Web down my phone line.

And it’s odd to not have to risk life and limb to descend the collapsed outside steps to go for a wee in a makeshift outdoor washroom, and a bizarre surprise to have hot washing water that hasn’t been slowly heated by the sun all morning.

I miss the neighbours yapping at their dog and the warm yellow glow of the evening sun as it sets behind the cliffs and Mirandole.

I miss it because living there is stark and brutal. The only soft thing’s the bed and the rest is clear and bare. Not clean, mind, and not ordered, but immediate. It’s not wadded by insulation nor lined by carpets and wallpaper. Wallpaper seems only to plaster my brain with a repetitive and stultified imitation of reality; a crude and mind-numbing alternative to hand-brushed paint strokes or the complex grains of wood.

And I find myself thinking,

Is wallpaper women’s fault?

The Patterner suggests that it’s a product of rationalism or industrialisation. The fault of “all the people who think straight lines are a good idea despite the fact they don’t exist in nature, crystals excepted”.

But I’m not so much worried about the straight lines as the dulling comfort of it. Of course there’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper where it is, quite literally, maddening:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

But what I think troubles me is what women have been trying to do wallpapering their homes for the last 300 years (at least). The historians tell us that in the 1700s they were trying to “emulate damask, velvet and needlework”; that in the 1800s they wanted stripes “reminiscent of a military campaign”; and that in Britain they wanted simple, repetitive motifs “to accommodate the ancestral portraits”.

Given that I’m not a fan of women’s devotion to expensive cloth, nor of wars, nor even the Brits’ attachment to primogeniture, you’d think my case was over. But my objection is much deeper than that.

I don’t want there to be a feminine interior a woman must be proud of or judged by. Nor do I want an interior so demanding it requires a stay-at-home partner to “keep up form”. But most of all, I don’t want an interior that dulls and cushions me from the gritty reality of life.

I want to look up from my computer and see wood that was once a living tree, stretching out its branches to the rain. Or see brush-strokes lazily, delicately or slap-dashily painted to the wall - by me, by my lover, or an un-known hand. I want to know: this is the wall. This is the boundary of this warm, dry inside space. I don’t want to think: there’s a pink flower, again. Not least because after a while I don’t see the flower any more - my mind switches off, stops registering: it is dulled, it thinks it knows what is there.

But in fact, if I had a wall to look at, I’d see much more in the wall than I’ll ever see in these damn pink flowers that keep tricking my perspective. I’d see the stone that makes the wall, and perhaps the men that, once upon a time, spent many many days putting the stone there. I’d see the ways in which the wall hasn’t always been here, and the ways in which the wall won’t be here forever. How will this house look when it has crumbled? And when will that time come? Will humans be here to bear witness, or shall it just be the beautiful red-black bugs, crawling through the rocks and ivy, utterly oblivious to the fact that their immense mountain-world was once a house, with a first floor, floorboards, a table, a computer and, God bless our souls, pink flowery wallpaper.