Inward Sight, Outward Seeing

Dorset, then Oxford saw me mapping time and space in dormitories where girls crept under eiderdowns to whisper and ‘experiment’ on the blank canvas of each other’s bodies, after the Bible reading which was the customary sedative before Lights Out. My lights stayed on, internally, and I thought of home, and worried constantly about my parents, and wrote confessional letters to my aunt. 

With the years I mastered piano and viola, scratched symphonies onto spiral-bound manuscript paper, and refused all things that seemed to me prosaic. I needed a strong drug, but strictly a Platonic one, and music was the best life offered me. For years it was sufficient to drown out the babbling of peer pressure (which never bothered me) and to mute all sensible practical worries about the world. I took it as read that Great Art Would Get Me Through in life, that all else was insignificant, and that music was the true Balm of Gilead.  Sensibility overruled good sense, and I never understood those girls who went to cookery or typing school.

Not for me, the homely skills traditionally associated with conventional womanhood or the marital state. Few things were less attractive to me than marriage, which, when you consider the sheer dysfunction of the family I’d grown up in, was hardly to be wondered at. But alternatives were hazy, never well defined, and always happening elsewhere. They played out in some parallel universe, a world of Forms to which I aspired without knowing what it was I longed for. That I longed (and yearned, pined, panted, and all the rest) 

was sure. My emotional life was as tempestuous as any adolescent’s. But I felt no need to rebel, since the constraints against which I yearned were existential not societal. My tendencies to escapism worried everyone, especially my first boyfriend when I said I wished I did not have a body. His response (that he was glad I did) was all-too predictable, and only made me wish the harder for transcendence or annihilation.