Paging Mr Mybug?
There must be a dumb, dark, bitter, belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?
This was one of the thoughts that sprang to mind when reading TS Eliot's whingey statement sent to accompany the letters he sent to Emily Hale which she deposited in the library at Harvard, much to his disgruntlement, and which have now been opened.
I was also reminded of reading Robert Graves going on about the White Goddess and the poet needing to find muses who would embody her and make him SUFFER in order to create POETRY, when Eliot wrote of his marriage to the profoundly unfortunate Vivienne: To her, the marriage brought no happiness: the last seven years of her life were spent in a mental home. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land. And it saved me from marrying Emily Hale.
Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive. In retrospect, the nightmare agony of my seventeen years with Vivienne seems to me preferable to the dull misery of the mediocre teacher of philosophy which would have been the alternative.
You were well out of it, Emily.
And on this fetishising of pain, quite by coincidence I came across today this article on women endurance athletes (and we note the generalisability over many fields that the women 'wouldn’t turn up unless they were well-prepared. Whereas men can be a bit like, how hard can this be?'): “I’ve got this bee in my bonnet about the current narrative for cycling - the male narrative,” she says. “A lot of it is about pain and suffering and the pain cave and the glory of pain and seeking out pain. Oh God, it’s so boring. So the working theory I’ve come up with is that people who do endurance sport are often people who have quite comfortable lives, and they are almost looking for pain elsewhere. I know it’s making generalisations, but what if men are looking for the pain they lack in life, and women are looking for the freedom?”
It’s a persuasive theory. So many endurance events are marketed with a hefty dash of machismo - “tough” this, “ultimate” that, “warrior” the other. But is this constant reminder of suffering really the best way to approach an ultra event, when managing your head is as - if not more - important than managing your body? If you buy into this narrative that you are here only to suffer and endure, rather than have fun, then maybe those who start relaxed, looking forward to the journey, might have a head start.
....
Dr Josephine Perry, a sports psychologist and author of Performing Under Pressure, goes a step further. She believes women are better at dealing with pain. “Eighty per cent of women get period pain at some point in their lives and around 10% have conditions like endometriosis, which can severely impact their ability to perform in sport,” she says. “If a large majority of women have developed strong coping mechanisms to deal with this regular pain, then the short-term pain they feel when running a race will fade in comparison.”
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comments.
This was one of the thoughts that sprang to mind when reading TS Eliot's whingey statement sent to accompany the letters he sent to Emily Hale which she deposited in the library at Harvard, much to his disgruntlement, and which have now been opened.
I was also reminded of reading Robert Graves going on about the White Goddess and the poet needing to find muses who would embody her and make him SUFFER in order to create POETRY, when Eliot wrote of his marriage to the profoundly unfortunate Vivienne: To her, the marriage brought no happiness: the last seven years of her life were spent in a mental home. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land. And it saved me from marrying Emily Hale.
Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive. In retrospect, the nightmare agony of my seventeen years with Vivienne seems to me preferable to the dull misery of the mediocre teacher of philosophy which would have been the alternative.
You were well out of it, Emily.
And on this fetishising of pain, quite by coincidence I came across today this article on women endurance athletes (and we note the generalisability over many fields that the women 'wouldn’t turn up unless they were well-prepared. Whereas men can be a bit like, how hard can this be?'): “I’ve got this bee in my bonnet about the current narrative for cycling - the male narrative,” she says. “A lot of it is about pain and suffering and the pain cave and the glory of pain and seeking out pain. Oh God, it’s so boring. So the working theory I’ve come up with is that people who do endurance sport are often people who have quite comfortable lives, and they are almost looking for pain elsewhere. I know it’s making generalisations, but what if men are looking for the pain they lack in life, and women are looking for the freedom?”
It’s a persuasive theory. So many endurance events are marketed with a hefty dash of machismo - “tough” this, “ultimate” that, “warrior” the other. But is this constant reminder of suffering really the best way to approach an ultra event, when managing your head is as - if not more - important than managing your body? If you buy into this narrative that you are here only to suffer and endure, rather than have fun, then maybe those who start relaxed, looking forward to the journey, might have a head start.
....
Dr Josephine Perry, a sports psychologist and author of Performing Under Pressure, goes a step further. She believes women are better at dealing with pain. “Eighty per cent of women get period pain at some point in their lives and around 10% have conditions like endometriosis, which can severely impact their ability to perform in sport,” she says. “If a large majority of women have developed strong coping mechanisms to deal with this regular pain, then the short-term pain they feel when running a race will fade in comparison.”
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3023321.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.