Tegan (Slant Postscripts)

“I hate myself. I hate this world;
And I long now only to quit it,
But tell me, oh God, where my place is,
In the new world, or don’t I fit in it?”
― Lilian Morgan, Poetical Works

“Today, finishing this, I am feeling better, but perhaps, tomorrow, I will not. That is okay. It is okay not to feel better. It is okay not to produce art. There is so much pressure, in narrative, for us to 'recover', to reach 'catharsis', to find 'resolution', to 'speak out'. I offer resolution here because I have found it, but that resolution is as much truth as sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. I may never manage to 'resolve' what has happened to me. In naming it, I have learned to live with it, and this in turn breaks a pattern of suffering. Naming is, for me, a magical act: it is a way of saying daily, I am alive. I have harnessed naming to bring order to chaos. Naming maps experience into history. Contains, within it, a legacy and a lineage: it offers up a spectrum of thought. But naming cannot undo what was done. Hope, for me, is found in the telling.”
― Jessica Cornwell, Birth Notes: A Memoir of Recovery

“What Am I to Write?

What am I to write for you?
Blank page,
White emptiness,
Broken words are not enough
Nor spluttered ink spat out in ignorance,
Contemptuous of its desire to mark
And maim,
Indulges so at first,
And then again.
But No
I will not take to mediocre ways,
Nor overplay the passion song in muse,
For the heart well tuned
Needs not the head
To pump its life,
And the arteries awakened to the rhythm,
Subtle rhythm,
Should suffice.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect

“I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play–grand, with an iron will... But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda