![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootA terrible night, my mind awake and anxiously leaping from trivia to trivia. Why?
There is a meeting tonight. The last one exhausted me within 2 hours. I'm worried, not least because I genuinely don't want to go anywhere. I need sleep and then...
And then what?
Whatever the case is with Poor Donkey Body, I cannot become more of a recluse than I have been. I like people, but my alone times are intense and necessary. My issue is that I severely overestimated my ability to keep going or, let's be more accurate, I pushed myself throughout the year, did things, achieved things, until I had nothing left and here I am. I see friends today, I take a break, I see friends at the weekend. Everything I am meant to be doing remains undone, on my own account and on the account of others. Language lessons, editing, all discarded. I am in difficulty and puzzled by it. The cancer's gone, or mostly gone, so why is this hard in a way nothing else has been? Maybe my anxiety is growing because next week I learn if I need another op. My husband is exhausted, I am utterly drained, we need... What do we need?
I close my eyes and lean forward, my hands nearly slip off my coffee cup. Coffee! I need lots of coffee today!
***
Watched the first episode of The Mirror and the Light last night. Mark Rylance is playing a blinder here. He does know, this Cromwell, that there's something wrong with his king. Not just shouty man wrong or imbecile wrong, but something else. There's a reflection too in the awkward and seemingly terrified Jane Seymour, the realisation that as The Only One Who Matters discarded before so he might discard again. Better get it right. Every single time. Dangerous times as these were for women in childbirth, whatever complications she faced, her immune system cannot have been helped by the knowledge that God's Anointed was a wife killer who now stood waiting for her body to justify his actions. And I think my anxiety's bad.
Turned out that she did all the right things, gave him a son then died before losing the varnish of success... and I wonder at what point did she or Cromwell, or Wolsey or Anne or any of them look into Henry's face and think This man is going to be the death of me? I wonder when the real Cromwell saw it? Mark Rylance's Cromwell seems to know already with a kind of preternatural resignation. They say, and I hope it's just a saying, that Cromwell's execution was very nasty butchery. In reality Henry regretted it later and blamed his courtiers, natch, for manipulating him into killing 'the most faithful servant' he ever had. Tiresome whining creature! Damien Lewis is great at portraying this increasingly strange king, ever more glass-like and empty eyed. I look forward to the rest of this.
And at some marvellously caffeinated point in the future, I really should read the novels.
There is a meeting tonight. The last one exhausted me within 2 hours. I'm worried, not least because I genuinely don't want to go anywhere. I need sleep and then...
And then what?
Whatever the case is with Poor Donkey Body, I cannot become more of a recluse than I have been. I like people, but my alone times are intense and necessary. My issue is that I severely overestimated my ability to keep going or, let's be more accurate, I pushed myself throughout the year, did things, achieved things, until I had nothing left and here I am. I see friends today, I take a break, I see friends at the weekend. Everything I am meant to be doing remains undone, on my own account and on the account of others. Language lessons, editing, all discarded. I am in difficulty and puzzled by it. The cancer's gone, or mostly gone, so why is this hard in a way nothing else has been? Maybe my anxiety is growing because next week I learn if I need another op. My husband is exhausted, I am utterly drained, we need... What do we need?
I close my eyes and lean forward, my hands nearly slip off my coffee cup. Coffee! I need lots of coffee today!
***
Watched the first episode of The Mirror and the Light last night. Mark Rylance is playing a blinder here. He does know, this Cromwell, that there's something wrong with his king. Not just shouty man wrong or imbecile wrong, but something else. There's a reflection too in the awkward and seemingly terrified Jane Seymour, the realisation that as The Only One Who Matters discarded before so he might discard again. Better get it right. Every single time. Dangerous times as these were for women in childbirth, whatever complications she faced, her immune system cannot have been helped by the knowledge that God's Anointed was a wife killer who now stood waiting for her body to justify his actions. And I think my anxiety's bad.
Turned out that she did all the right things, gave him a son then died before losing the varnish of success... and I wonder at what point did she or Cromwell, or Wolsey or Anne or any of them look into Henry's face and think This man is going to be the death of me? I wonder when the real Cromwell saw it? Mark Rylance's Cromwell seems to know already with a kind of preternatural resignation. They say, and I hope it's just a saying, that Cromwell's execution was very nasty butchery. In reality Henry regretted it later and blamed his courtiers, natch, for manipulating him into killing 'the most faithful servant' he ever had. Tiresome whining creature! Damien Lewis is great at portraying this increasingly strange king, ever more glass-like and empty eyed. I look forward to the rest of this.
And at some marvellously caffeinated point in the future, I really should read the novels.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2024-11-12 12:34 pm (UTC)I love the original series, and I love the first two books, Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies. But could not finish the third, The Mirror & the Light—which I suspect was not the book's fault but the timing: TMATL was published in March 2020 just as the pandemic was starting & my mind had shriveled to the size of a walnut. These novels require active reading—-the syntax, the language, the time period turn the prose into a kind of puzzle that you have to solve while you're reading. I've really never run into any other novels remotely like them. But they require mental fortitude, & the pandemic robbed me of mental fortitude.
My dear, your Donkey Body has been through a lot. The heart & brain that run the Donkey Body concession, too. Whatever you feel like doing is the right thing to do.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-12 04:43 pm (UTC)I assume Henry, like every other male at that period, had brain-rotting syphilis and the brain-rot showed early. I wonder none of his wives died of it-- though most didn't stay wives long enough to show symptoms, I suppose.
Umm yeah. You run and run and run and then can't run anymore. Know it well. Can you just not-do for a bit? Aside from drinking coffee?
no subject
Date: 2024-11-13 07:52 am (UTC)But I still think it fits.
Not-doing is sage, and yet it feels to me as though the last two months have been all about not-doing. I want to be active, but I also want to just sleep!
no subject
Date: 2024-11-13 08:14 am (UTC)