Run Towards the Danger , livre ebook

September Publishing - Sarah Polley

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69 pages

English

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FROM THE DIRECTOR AND SCREENWRITER OF WOMEN TALKING'Fascinating, harrowing, courageous, and deeply felt, these explorations of "dangerous stories", harmful past events and trials of the soul speak to all who've encountered dark waters and have had to navigate them.' Margaret AtwoodSarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling skills, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory and the embodied reactions of children and women adapting and surviving. The guiding light is the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then.In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one's body, in a constant state of becoming, learning and changing. As she was advised after a catastrophic head injury - if we relinquish our protective crouch and run towards the danger, then life can be reset, reshaped and lived afresh.'[Polley is] a stunningly sophisticated observer of the world and an imperfect witness to the truth.' New York Times

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

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Publié par	September Publishing
Date de parution	14 avril 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781914613227
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First published in the UK in 2022 by September Publishing
First published in 2022 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Copyright © Sarah Polley 2022
The right of Sarah Polley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
“Let It Go” from Frozen. Music and Lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez © 2013 Wonderland Music Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
“There’s No Business Like Show Business” by Irving Berlin © 1946 Irving Berlin Music Co., admin by Williamson Music Co. (ASCAP), A division of The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization: A Concord Company. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder
Book and cover design by Kelly Hill
Interior illustrations by Lauren Tamaki
Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books
ISBN 9781914613210
EPUB ISBN 9781914613227
September Publishing
www.septemberpublishing.org

Mrs. Beverley Panikkar let me write stories all day every day in Grade 2 and told me I would be a writer one day. I told her years later that if I ever wrote a book, I would dedicate it to the space, presence, and attunement she gave to the children she taught. So here you go, Bev. And thank you.

Made possible by Eve, Aila, and Amy, who have rewritten my life. I love witnessing your stories unfold, and you with them.

Contents
Preface
Alice, Collapsing
The Woman Who Stayed Silent
High Risk
Mad Genius
Dissolving the Boundaries
Run Towards the Danger
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Preface
“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”
“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”
“I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
The working title of this book was “Living Backwards,” inspired by the Queen’s suggestion to Alice that memory can work more than one way. “Living Backwards,” though, sounds like a memoir that covers the scope of a lifetime. If this were a memoir or an autobiography, it would be woefully incomplete. I am both far luckier than these essays would imply if they were read as a map of my life, and I have experienced more trauma than I have given chapters to.
I originally wrote these essays as stand-alone pieces. I wrote some of them over many years, in some cases decades, abandoning them for long stretches, unsure if I had the courage to finish them or if they had a place in the world. As the essays began to shape themselves into a book, I realized that the connective tissue between them was a dialogue that was occurring between two very different time frames in my life. The past was affecting how I moved through the world, while present life was affecting how the past moved through me.
I’ve been acutely aware that my childhood experiences inform my current life. I have, until recently, been less conscious of the power of my adult life to inform my relationship to my memories. When I was lucky enough to have experiences in adulthood that echoed pivotal, difficult memories, and to have those experiences go another, better way than they had in the past, my relationship to those memories shifted. The meaning of long-ago experiences transformed in the context of the ever-changing present.
The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind of reciprocal pressure dance.
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When I first met concussion specialist Dr. Michael Collins, after three and a half years of suffering from post-concussive syndrome, he said, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.” In order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered my symptoms. This was a paradigm shift for me—to greet and welcome the things I had previously avoided.
As I recovered from my concussion, “run towards the danger” became a kind of incantation for me in relation to the rest of my life. I began to hear it as a challenge to take on the project of addressing and questioning my own narratives.
What follows are some of the most dangerous stories of my life: the ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. These are stories that have haunted and directed me, unwittingly, down circuitous paths. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.
These stories don’t add up to a portrait of a life, or even a snapshot of one. They are about the transformative power of an ever-evolving relationship to memory. Telling them is a form of running towards the danger.
Alice, Collapsing

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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At least twice a week, I used to find myself in a periwinkle-blue poufy dress with a white pinafore. My stockings were striped and my hair was held firmly by a headband that dug into my head behind my ears. My breasts, still tender and growing, were painfully flattened by a tensor bandage. It was a dream that I frequently found myself in, where nothing anyone around me said made any sense and it was all hostile: hostile towards my common sense, hostile towards my youth, hostile towards my growing up. I knew I didn’t want to be a child; I wanted to be a queen but I didn’t want to be left alone, or tested, or made fun of or to do all the things that seemed to be necessary to become a queen. I would follow corkscrew paths. I had to run in order to stay in the same place. People would scream in pain before they were hurt. There was a mint in my mouth for good luck. I wanted to kill myself.
Sometimes when I woke from this dream, I remembered that I was, in fact, wearing a rose-coloured dress and not a blue one. Sometimes I corrected my subconscious. Most of the time, though, I woke up incapable of differentiating the portrait of myself from the iconic John Tenniel illustrations, coloured in modern reprints. I wonder if Alice Liddell had had the same problem.
The real Alice was a sullen-looking child with dark hair and eyes. In one of the photographs that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took of her, “The Beggar Maid,” she looks alarmingly sexual, taunting him, challenging him to want more. At least that’s how I viewed the photograph when I was a young teenager. As I look at the same photograph now, as a grown woman, I wonder what instructions the adult taking the photograph gave to her to produce such an alarming effect. In the books and movies that were consumed by millions, though, Alice is golden and fair, WASPy beyond measure, and exudes innocence. The books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass , have passed through children’s hands for over a century now, cloaked in this deceptive costume.
Ever since I can remember, these books inspired a terror and an exasperation in me. Every one of Alice’s attempts to make sense of her new, irrational world, to find anything approximating normalcy, or to simply get home is thwarted by mean-spirited creatures with their own irrational systems of logic. Despite my father’s love of these books, I never, as a young child, wanted to hear them read at bedtime. They left me exhausted, haunted by a kind of relentless uncertainty. I feared that if I took any time to live inside these stories, the walls and ceiling of my childhood bedroom might soon collapse into dust and be replaced by kooky angles of drywall.
As an adult, I experience this same aversion to movies that remind me of the Alice books or that mirror this same quality of someone constantly trying to get somewhere and failing. Movies like After Hours make we want to scream. They make me feel nauseous and aggravated and goosepimply.
I hate stories in which people can’t get to where they’re going.
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As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag . . .
“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”
“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!”
“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
————————————————————————
When I was fifteen years old I got caught through the looking glass in a pink dress, in a crisp white pinafore, with my breasts bound, playing younger than I was. My spine had by then bent—perhaps, I thought then, under the weight of grief—to a forty-five-degree angle, so along with the tensor bandages pulled tightly across my chest, the pink dress itself was lined with various strategically placed pads to make my shoulders,