books, art, rant

My reading lately has been short mid 20th century crime fiction - Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Christiana Brand, Josephine Tey - sort of escapist, easy to read, not very annoying... Not quite escapist but I find nothing really is. Keep coming up against weird assumptions and attitudes in the books, and for instance, one book set in 1938 mostly ignores the political situation in Europe apart from one minor character who comes across as rather interesting and I wanted to read more about her, her perceptions of the upper middle class English circle she found herself in. That was Ngaio Marsh's Death in a White Tie.

And now I am reading a book about sculptor Eva Hesse. One of her drawings jumped out at me in a modern art history book. So I've investigated her and used that drawing as an inspiration in my own art. (In my own practice in art college speak.) I now find her work evaluated using a little-known psychoanalytic article, one that my own therapist mentioned to me last year as something very relevant to my own issues. So feel quite excited by this - I was drawn by an image that unknown to me at the time was part of her own work to deal with something, the very thing I have been working on in therapy and in my art. And I am not going to tell you about the specific issue because it is still really intense for me and also I want my visual images to speak for themselves.

And finally a rant. I have just had it up to here with people saying "we are all people, mentally ill or not" and "we all have mental health struggles" which yes, are true. I know people often say this sort of thing to break down barriers. But I experience it as a way of silencing our different views, of erasing our experiences... Maybe I am clinging to my own sense of being special that I feel I have by having these experiences of distress, medication, pathologising, struggle, community. And these people say "we are all special" which to me means "no one is special, especially you, Anne".

I know some people with similar experiences to my own feel this is great, their humanity is being seen over their mental health status. Maybe I haven't had that depth of experience of discrimination that I feel that need to be seen as the same as everyone else. Maybe my own "pathology" is about differentiating myself from the mainstream in whatever way I can.

I don't know. But I don't like it. I see it as naive and uncritical and simplistic and silencing.