For whom the bell tolls

I feel...how shall I put it? Sullen. Sullen intermixed with a pinch of numb and sad. Sometimes, for a bit of variation, I add a bit of pissy/bitchy/cranky into the equation. The mood combinations usually go something like this: Sullen/sad. Sullen/numb/sad. Sad/bitchy/cranky.

Sometimes I am deep into a good sullen groove, and then suddenly somebody will say or do something to catapult me abruptly into full-on cranky mode. I'll be staring out the window, thinking vague depressing thoughts. The gray skies, the trees bending awkwardly in bleak wind, the smallest flakes of snow melting on the salted sidewalk. And then..that guy with the extremely wet hacking irritating cough? COUGH COUGH COUGH. Yeah you, asshole. Go get a bottle of cough syrup, or go home or something, you are bugging the LIVING SHIT out of me with your constant phlegm-globbers over there. OK. Where was I? Oh, yes, the bleak February skies, the cold ducks shivering on the frozen pond.

And so forth.

Actually, I am three quarters through reading a most enjoyable book which has a recurring theme that sums up the feeling rather nicely. The book attracts comparisions to a certain series about a Mr H. Potter, a lazy and not entirely accurate sort of conjoining of genres, indicative of careless critical pigeonholing. I mean, really, is every novel with the word "magic" in the text ever published for the rest of time going to be compared in this way? Let us hope not.

Anyway, the book, which has a leisurely pace, is about eight babillion pages long, with incredibly detailed footnotes. (The footnotes alone could actually be an entire book- I happen to like that kind of thing very much). I won't try to explain the plot, which is both straightforward and convoluted at the same time, except to say that it is set in England, in the early nineteenth century. And certain characters keep getting drawn/kidnapped/lost in a very eerie and otherworldly faerie land.

This is not a pretty faerie land of daisies, tinkerbells and small talking toadstools. No, this is something else entirely- bleak, ancient, discordant, spectacularly grand but at the same time dark, dark, dark. The transfer into this world is usually accompanied by the mournful tolling of a peculiar, far-away bell. Throughout the book, the sound of this bell signals that a shift is taking place, and with it a sense of uneasy dislocation.

I hear a bell of my own lately. One moment I'll be trundling along, engaged in some task, or conversation. And then, usually without warning, a distant melancholy ringing. When I look up, I realise I have lost my place. Instead I find myself trapped in some strange gray landscape, with the faint taste of salt and tears in my mouth. Some days, it's so very hard to bring myself back again.

It can be difficult to properly explain this fugue state, particularly people who have never been there. Sometimes lately, when I speak of it to people outside of blog land- I see a certain look in their eyes. A look which says, "Oh dear, is she still going on about that? I thought they had decided to fix it, so why don't they just get on with it already? How long has it been now? Really, one of these days she is simply going to have to accept that this is the way things are. Pull herself together and stop talking about all this emotional stuff. Like strange bells. There is no bell. I don't hear a bell."

Of course by that point, the sad ringing is usually overwhelmingly loud. It drowns out their voices, and their quizzical eyes.
By that point, I am already far, far away. Wishing someone would cough, or slurp their coffee, or chew their potato chips with their mouth open- if only to jerk me back to this world, and anchor me with anger.