Cat's Eye- Margaret Atwood

Should have been edited more; and I'd like to know if it's autobiographical or not. It feels more like a novel written for an exorcism than anything else. It could have done with a lot of condensing; I didn't enjoy the last hundred or so pages. I got irritated because Elaine quickly martyrs herself to her childhood, and consequently seems to exile herself from the rest of the world. Even her relationships with men aren't properly close; it's as if she's always shrouded, like there's permanently a wall there between her and other people.

There is no laughter, on her part, in the book, and she seems to disdain those that do. This is a common theme in Atwood's work; the heroine never laughs, or is never caught laughing properly, never properly happy deep down. People around her are allowed to be content, her teacher, Mrs Finestein, but not her. Not that laughing and happiness are the same, but that the absence of both, or rather, their presence as a facade in her books always make laughter and happiness seem fake and contrived in those who exhibit them, or at least underpinned by a major tragedy.

Conclusion: Margaret Atwood needs to display some sort of happiness, not just round the peripheries. Noone lives an entire life of wallowing and abject self-pity. But her Klein Bottles are good.

So the story begins, City Dweller, Professional fella.

Your face is merging and blurring; pictures of you aren't what I remember you like and they're showing a different one. But it's still an image I feel a residual fondness for, though I know the real thing isn't that, and it's the real thing I'm thinking of that I want most. The pictures of you are just false icons; they're posed for fun, and look almost unnatural. The real you is sedate and comfortable that lies beside me in an alcove when we fall asleep together; and that isn't how you look there, loud and painted. But loud and painted you is still a piece of you, and I appreciate it as well as the rest.

I think I have been reading too much Margaret Atwood for my own good. She's very talented but I can't help feeling slightly annoyed with the fact that all of her heroines are the same; disdaining, injured and vaguely wistful, and wise, and melancholy. Of course, I am jealous, of these fictional women. I find myself becoming irritated because I'm not up to scratch with a woman in a book. Elaine Risely is bright and seductive without knowing that she is; disdain comes so easily, so does aloofness. I wish I could be aloof but I simply care too much about trivial things; everything that she cares about is invested with some sort of depth, everything she describes. She lives in a different world. I cannot be that way; because I refuse to let people sink beneath me. Every chance she gets she places someone under her in a mysteriously secret way that must be plain to everyone else; she is the protagonist, miles above everyone else. I worry that I am one of the flabby flittering flake girls that she muses over, who produce halfhearted work. I worry about what we would do if we met, and how boring and menial she would find me, and she is completely fictional; and even in a book, I find her tiresome and self-involved, so I should not care.

It's exhausting being in a constant competition with everything around me, even inanimate paper women.

The Tyger- Blake 1794

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Chimaera

Changing change change.

There's something lovely about the name Moreau, and the name Finn, or Quinn. If I ever become a novelist I shall be Moreau Finn, Moreau Quinn, Quinn Moreau, Finn Moreau. Finn Moreau, I like this name. Beautiful and strong.

I worry that I will go mad; and people already think me verging on the line between sane and insane. A friend read my palm and said I'd lose it completely by the time I was sixty, and she knew of other things that were already true. And it is a terror.

I would like to be one of the crazy clean people; the ones who must arrange everything at perfect angles and spritz twice a day and only eat tuna, spinach and mud pie cake on Thursdays, with styled hair and surprised eyes and large expressive hands. The sort that rules an empire or opens an art exhibition. I fear that I will be the kind that smells of urine and stool samples, who fears the aliens will penetrate her tin hat.

It's times like this that I would like someone to laugh at me and tell me what they think; family can't really, you need a backup.

I wanted to write about a chimaera.

My Life is not like this, it's just at night alone that the fears come

There's a fly buzzing in the corner, minor irritation that's forgettable and crops up until you free it or kill it, else it persists, and there always seems to be another, no matter how many you let loose or murder. Neither way means an end.

Feeling like this

Makes the back of my head feel hot and tight and the feeling you get of an ache, but without the pain, and acknowledging it makes my throat feel full of a cool liquid balloon, and my eyes tingle. That is the feeling of despondency.

Chimaera goes back to beast,
Knowing what she was at least
As ancestry reclaims nail for claw
Incisors sprout from feminine jaw
Tyger Tyger burning bright
Whose fearful symmetry's displaced
Wishes she was back inside
Not roaming crudely unabase.