What My Disease Looks Like

What a shock, to follow the links on the BBC website to an article about breast cancer researchers at the University of London, and see this lovely image of 3D breast cancer cells that they have made in a test tube. They are using this form of modelling to see how the healthy cells respond to cancerous ones, and may be able to reduce the use of animals in testing the progress of the disease.

"They discovered that one type of cell - myoepithelial cells - from healthy breast tissue can suppress the growth of breast cancer cells, but this ability is absent in cancerous breast myoepithelial cells."

I'm not sure, really, what we're looking at in this image. Is this one cell, a cluster of cancer cells, or one or more of these clever little myoepithelial cells? Either way, all I can think of when I see this image is a nipple. I can't help feeling there must be a figure of speech to describe this resemblance: a form of synecdochic mirroring, perhaps?

Voicing, blogging, working and recovering

One of those weird mornings, today, given the recent non-disclosures of the Chaucer blogger, in that I found myself lecturing on Chaucerian voice and constructions of authorship. How could I not close the lecture with a viewing of the Chaucer blog and his guest spot on In the Middle? I was talking about questions of genre, of course, and medieval contexts for authorship, and the odd temporality of Chaucer's relationship with the so-called renaissance 'authorship' of Petrarch and Boccaccio. There is such pleasure in thinking about the mystery of Chaucer as a medieval writer and his fascination with his own modernity. This is another reason for the Chaucer blogger's spectacular success: not only does he seem a kindly presence (even the vitriol against Gower seems to have subsided, much as Gower's own blog has [Update: Gower is Back!]), but he offers a perfect suspension between the medieval and the modern.

But lecturing about voice and authorship (still in a very part-time guest appearance kind of way myself) made me think again about the distinctive blogging voice we all adopt, and the extent to which it's conditioned by the genre, or influenced by the blogs we read; and the nature of the differences, if any, between an 'authored' blog like mine, and a scrupulously pseudonymous one like Chaucer's. There are lots of in between possibilities, too: the group blog of In the Middle, the third-person voice of Whitebait, the semi-pseudonymity of Pavlov's Cat, who names herself on her profile, but comments on other blogs in her feline voice (so to miaow). I also read a fair few academic blogs by graduate students and early career scholars who are very careful about revealing their identities.

At first blush, a blog looks like a very personal piece of writing, yet the fact that the majority of bloggers use a persona of some kind underlines the affinities of blogging with the kind of alternate universe of Second Life. Pavlov's Cat and I discussed this in Adelaide in February, and she reminded me that most bloggers were much younger than we are. There are a handful of blogs I read regularly (note to self: must update blogroll soon), but sometimes in moments of inability to work — and no, I'm not going to say how often they recur — I'll trawl around the blogs and follow a link from each blog to another. This takes about five minutes before even my own blank screen looks more interesting. I'm just not of the right demographic for most bloggers, I think. Occasionally I come across a gem of a new blog, but mostly I'm happy just following the threads of a few lives and discussions.

Oh, but I did feel for one of the commentators on In the Middle who said how much he/she was loving the discussion about Chaucer's blog, but felt too intimidated by the senior scholars debating it back and forward to offer any more in the way of a comment. What a lovely thing a pseudonym is for such an occasion. And what a good reminder of the capacity for academic hierarchies to cut across the democracy of the blog.

In my own case, I never thought of making my blog pseudonymous. Partly as a result of my great age, and longevity around the university, I don't feel that blogging puts me at any risk. This means there are lots of things I don't write about, though. I was struck by Jeffrey Cohen's picture and description of his first-born reaching double digits today; and was momentarily tempted to write about my own son, who is as gorgeous and clever and lovely as anything. But this is one of the constraints I put around my own blog, to limit mention of him and my partner. And I'm completely superstitious about posting his photo, though I really wanted to post a picture of my nephew, in London, in his surplice. I'm not saying I'm consistent; I'm saying it's complicated.

Anyway, in the spirit of the mixture of the personal and professional this blog is trying to celebrate, I'm proud to report that today I gave a lecture without paroxysms of nerves beforehand; and even hung around the department a while without feeling anxious or teary. I saw the psychologist linked with the breast clinic for the second time and was happy to agree with her assessment that while there was still a fair way to go (at least a year, she said, no matter how difficult or short the treatment), I seemed to have most of the bricks in place for a gradual restoration of equilibrium and the finding of a new path in the utterly changed university (of which, more another time). I then saw Mitchell for my monthly injection and the six-monthly questionnaire related to the drug trial I'm on. He examined my breasts and reassured me, by poking and pushing till it hurt or didn't hurt in various places on both sides, that the tenderness and aches I was feeling are all within the area affected by radiotherapy (Meredith, you were right!). He also said the magic words, "no focal points". So, seven months since diagnosis, and ten months since starting the blog, things are looking .... just very good, today.

Confessional blogging

Medievalist bloggers, and many other bloggers or blog-readers with half an interest in the genre's potential will probably at some stage have come across the wonderful blog of Geoffrey Chaucer. Like me, they will have marvelled at its brilliant simulacra of Chaucerian voices and temporalities. Whoever this is, he or she has been able to channel that aspect of Chaucer's writing that addresses his own times in his poetry with an immediacy that produces the contradictory and irresistible effect of timelessness. Alternatively, it's our complex history of reading Chaucer as a writer for all seasons that allows us to "recognise" as Chaucerian the Chaucer blogger's extraordinary take on Brokeback Mountain.

But what community wouldn't love to see itself treated so kindly by its presiding spirit? Even though I've never made it to the big medieval congress at Kalamazoo in Michigan (about to start any day now), I relished Chaucer's advice to those attending, even though, since his own paper on himself was rejected, he didn't actually get there. He volunteered "thes lynes of picke vppe – sum shorte, sum longe, sum of noble caste and otheres churlishe, sum onlye vseful at kalamazoo and otheres of applicacioun more generale." This one comes under the penultimate category, I think: "Ich loved thy papere, but yt wolde looke much better yscattred across the floore of myn rentede dorme roome at dawne."

In medieval circles, speculation has been rife as to the true identity of Chaucer. Many of us refer our students to the blog, which itself links readers to a range of scholarly sites such as the Harvard Me Websyte or the Newe Me Societie. Did he or she make it to the New Chaucer Society congress in New York in July? Have we met him ... or her ... without knowing it?

Imagine the anticipation, then, when In the Middle staged the blogging coup of persuading Chaucer to post directly to that blog! But who could have imagined the curious disappointment I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling to find that the confessional disclosure is written in a voice with an uncanny resemblance to that of Holden Caulfield. As Jeffrey Cohen himself commented, "It is somewhat disconcerting, I admit, for the curtain of the Chaucer blog to have been pulled back and for J. D. Salinger to be revealed standing there. But you know, what were you expecting? Carolyn Dinshaw?" (who, for the non-medievalists, is the most elegant, clever, kind, original and famous Chaucer scholar who also works in queer studies you could possibly imagine).

Of course it makes sense for the writer to disguise his/her voice. It's clear that anonymity is important. For whatever reason, this person doesn't want to be known as "the Chaucer blogger". And the virtuoso Caulfield voice is something else; it really is. Even apart from its narrative voice, this "confession" is a remarkable document. It tells us a lot about the genesis and development of the blog, though there is little here that will come as any surprise to attentive or regular readers. But the entry has attracted only a handful of comments on what is a blog with a huge readership; and I think that's because it gives so little away, in terms of a personal voice. I also wonder how "Chaucer" will go about returning to his Chaucerian voice on his own blog... It's clear that many blogs have a finite, or natural life; "Chaucer" seems to be struggling to keep his blog going. Is this the end, or the beginning of the end? Chaucer says he has plans for the future of the blog: they sound rather earnest to me.

I'm thinking some other thoughts about this question of voicing, confessions and blogging; perhaps another post on this topic in a day or two.

Coming Home

No matter how long I stay away, it’s always the last few days that are hardest. The temptation to phone up Qantas and come home early is always very strong. Paul has done it twice, and just turned up at the front door a few days early: usually it’s just in time, as we have found that things tend to go wrong around the house when he’s away. It’s as if the house loves him as much as he loves it… I seem to have less impact on the house when I’m away, but I know my little Mima will be ready, after her initial disdain, to forgive me and settle down for a good long conversation.

These last few days of my trip I’ve been staying with my sister and family, though, so it’s been easier: I’ve not been tempted to call Qantas, though I am badly missing my own family. I’m writing the first part of this entry on the train down to Windsor Castle, where I have an appointment with Eleanor Cracknell (Miss) in the archives. I’m supposed to arrive before 10.30 to miss the changing of the guards, and have to check with the police on duty when I arrive.

The train is heading southwest past back gardens and allotments and row after row of houses. It’s spring, and there is blossom everywhere; it’s making me homesick for the garden and the pleasure of watching things grow. I wonder how far the stephanotis plants have climbed up the columns of our garden folly.

We had a lovely day on Sunday morning. My nephew James is a chorister at Temple Church; the church of the Middle and Lower Temple Law Courts, between Fleet Street and the River. He’s been singing there for about 6 months, I think, and on Sunday he graduated to full chorister status. This meant he was invested with his white surplice, to wear over his long red gown. The church is the one that features towards the end of the Da Vinci Code. It’s been there since the twelfth century, I think, but was partially destroyed in the great fire of 1666, and then again during the blitz in 1941. So much of it is reconstructed, but much of the old “round” is still intact. It has about eight medieval effigies of templar knights. Some are badly damaged, but William Marshall is there…




The music was wonderful: lots of Purcell and Buxtehude. James and the four other boys knelt in their red tunics before being robed in their surplices and blessed as they rejoined the choir, which sang beautifully. I took a photo of James afterwards for my parents, but he has his eyes closed a little:



But then another boy helped make a better photo:



We then had a little picnic in the Elm-Tree Garden, with champagne, smoked salmon and goats cheese sandwiches, tarte tatin and chocolate. I’d invited a few select medievalists …








and we pondered the nature of religion, ritual and medieval studies. Nothing like watching a ceremony of installation in a medieval setting while pondering the rituals of the Order of the Garter.

…


Ok, it’s eight hours later, and I’m sitting with a glass of chilled white wine at Windsor station, waiting for a train, having just missed one.

A pretty good day in the archives, all things considered. It was easy to pick up my pre-arranged day pass, stamped by the Royal Protection department of the police. They took my photo and the policeman said, “One for The Firm; and one for me!”, so they really do use that phrase for the Royal Family. (I hung around at the end of the day long enough to get a glimpse of Prince Charles going into St Georges chapel for a service…) The documents I wanted to see were all ready and waiting for me, but there was no dusty archive here. The catalogue says the archives are held “in the Garter Chest” in the Aerary, but in fact I was working in a lovely modern (though originally sixteenth-century) room, with space and light for the laptop; convenient catalogues, and a really helpful archivist. I’ll ponder the nature of what I read and saw later; at the moment, on the eve of my departure for home, I’m pondering the nature and the limits of my project in more general terms.

A true and comprehensive history of the Order would not be possible from Australia, since there are so very many records in the UK. Luckily for me, there exist several pretty detailed histories, so it’s a case, really, of just identifying the documents and ideas that intrigue me the most. They’re not that hard to find, either, since I’m interested not in who was in and out of the Order at any time, but rather how its monarchs and officers negotiated change; how they saw themselves honoring the medieval origins of the Order every time they made changes to its costumes, rituals and statutes (or its silver underpants: honestly, I’m not making this up: you’ll have to buy the book!).

Even so, and even while I feel I’m just about ready to sit down and finish drafting my book manuscript, I still feel a bit overwhelmed, sometimes, by the dizzying potential of the archive. It’s partly because my Latin and my palaeography could be a lot stronger, so I am slow, though I’m ok with most English texts (even ghastly sixteenth-century hands), and with formal medieval French ones (it depends very much on the script). It’s partly also that the depth of the archive is so profound. Again (am I sounding defensive yet?) it’s not as if most of the material hasn’t been looked at yet, and there’s no point combing through wardrobe accounts that have been edited and translated and commented on already. But I know enough to know there are scholars who could plumb every depth, who wouldn’t be content with the sixteenth-century printed edition, and who, given a couple of days in the British Library, would make mincemeat of the fifteenth-century Latin manuscript. Even then I have to transcribe the bits I’m most interested in and will have to translate them properly later. I console myself by saying all kinds of things, that I am interested in different kinds of issues of cultural history; that I know a whole lot more than I used to. And in the end, I’m confident that I can write the book, pretty much as I want to. And that is a Good Thing.

But I am heartily sick of carrying around my computer, and will look forward to putting in back on my desk where it belongs. I’ve bought a ridiculously heavy snowdome for Joel (big as you can get; Tower of London; a police call box; old bus; houses of Parliament; glitter; plays a tune — I wonder what?) and will look forward to checking that in at Heathrow tomorrow, too.

I’m sure it’s carrying the computer around that is making my breast sore. I was warned that there might be post-surgical pain for several months, and a heavy back-pack is surely to blame for soft tissue damage and intermittent pain. Still, it’s horrible to feel this uncertainty. It’s definitely time to come home.

The Paper

After all this time, it’s still a bit of a mystery to me how a paper gets written. The deadline or the topic is given months, or up to a year before you actually stand up behind the lectern. Vague ideas about the topic circulate in the background of the mind at odd moments over that time, but it’s usually not till much closer to the time that you sit down to write.

Often it seems smarter not to write in too finished a way too close to the day. This is not just intellectual brinkmanship (how close can you leave it?); it sometimes does just make a better paper if it isn’t all signed and sealed months before it’s delivered. A good conference paper, as opposed to a good essay or chapter, should be rather interrogative than conclusive. A paper that has all the answers to the questions it raises can often seem rather flat. It’s easy to forget this as you write, though; and I’ve heard a lot of papers that seem designed to forestall questions, rather than invite them.

There’s another school of thought that says it’s best not even to write and read a paper; rather, to speak from notes. I have sometimes been able to do this; and I know Paul does it every time, no matter how formal or grand the occasion. It’s usually lovely when that happens, when someone does it well. The nature of literary criticism makes it a little harder, though: our discipline does require a degree of precision in our textual work.

For me, the longer the paper is to be, the more likely I am to write a formal talk (though a good fifty minute lecture to my first-years is often no more written out than a few notes on the power point slides). My gig at this conference in London was a full 40-45 minute talk and I also wanted to take the opportunity to make some clearer formulations of the issues I wanted to talk about. I also had in mind that the talk might be published in some form or another. In addition, I had a chunk of about 15 minutes’ worth already written as part of the project with Tom, and so it seemed a good opportunity to generate more of that work so I could turn the paper into more of the book draft. (One of the things about collaborative projects is that you nearly always feel you are slipping behind the other person. Or perhaps it’s just me who feels like this!)

Monday was an odd day. At lunchtime, I was a genius, and the paper was brilliant. By about 4 o’clock, I was a sloppy scholar who couldn’t write a footnote to save my life. By 7.00 I was just another of the hundreds of scholars and students starting to stream out of the library. I knew that some of them would have had great days; some would have had terrible days; and some would have had a mixed day like mine. A bad writing or research day is a horror like no other, though.

The day before the conference I had a date at the College of Arms with David and the producer of the BBC programme he is making about Malory. We spent a few hours with Bluemantle Pursuivant, one of the heralds, looking at manuscripts and talking about chivalry and heraldry. I then gave myself the rest of the day off, and went shopping. What is that thing about being in a different city and needing to spend my money there? In any case, I bought a pair of shoes, and so my conference preparation was done.

It was a perfect-size conference. Two days of papers on a pretty restricted topic — Chaucer and Time — with barely any parallel sessions; and a wonderful Indian banquet on the first evening. I heard some really excellent papers, caught up with some old friends, and made some new ones.

My talk was on last; and so I had to cool my heels till Friday afternoon. The usual nerves, butterflies, last minute adjustments to the opening and closing paragraphs. But it went well enough; and the question session was really helpful to me. Perhaps it’s something about having been so sick, or perhaps something about feeling my Garter project and the medievalism project with Tom are both taking shape that I felt confident — I would even use the word ‘fearless’ — at some moments in writing and speaking this talk, which was a kind of continuation of the panel on Medieval Studies from the New York Chaucer congress. But of course it makes sense that a brush with mortality and physical vulnerability of the kind that cancer offers might make us less fearful in putting ideas and questions together.

A few of us went for a beer and then dinner, and I got back to the hotel in good time. But at 3.00 in the morning I was woken by various revellers out in the square and wrote/am writing this in the middle of the night. I’ve been here two weeks but it feels like jetlag. Or it’s adrenaline, after having given the paper. What is the time when one writes a blog entry in a hotel room, but has to wait till morning to go down to the lobby to post? A good question for a conference on time.

Emotion at high altitude

My very dear blog,

I’ve been in London nearly a week, now, and a little surprised to find I haven’t had time to update you. It’s not as if it’s been technically hard to do so, either. My laptop’s wireless function allows me to sit in the British Library and order books from the catalogue without leaving my seat; I’ve paid a modest sum so I can also access my email and the web there; and have even worked out how to take pictures on my new cheap little phone (which has a thousand more features than the old Australian one) and download them (see below). My hotel also has free wireless in the lounge. Here's the view from where I'm sitting in the lobby.



I also realise that the nature of the blog means that I could write, as normal, from London and still seem to be writing from within the blogspace, but I feel so far from home that it is as if I am writing back to my desk at home, hence the epistolary style.

The flight over was pretty punishing, as always. I had a nice seat, but the plane was crowded and we were stuck on the tarmac for two hours in Singapore before we took over for the second leg. I read a little (Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces) and watched a couple of movies: Shakespeare in Love and The Holiday, and wept, indiscriminately, at various points in both. My friend Peter calls this "emotion at high altitude", and it's true that there's nothing like a long distance flight for exacerbating and accentuating emotion. This trip seems harder than some too; and it's true that this last week has been rather mixed, workwise. If I'd been smart, or able, I would have finished the paper before I left Melbourne, but it just wasn't to be. I've thus been uncertain as to how best to use my time here: in the archives, at London or Windsor, or just writing the paper. It's an awful feeling, not knowing what to do, what to transcribe, what to read, what to write. However, the pressure of the paper has come to the surface, and I've written a punishing 1200 words today. Still, it's the usual mix of anxiety about conference papers; again, what to read, and what to write.

Having friends and family in London makes it much easier, I must say, and I don't get a chance to be lonely. I'm also keeping up some little routines. I get up and have breakfast, then head out for a good 40 minute walk. The first few mornings I looked for a nice route around Bloomsbury; now I just settle for several turns around Gordon Square:



This takes me past the house where Woolf lived:



So I guess, as I take my "turn" around the square (though at top pace, and about eight times!), I am walking in paths she trod. I then skip over to the slightly larger Russell Square, for more of the same, where there is a rather odd floral display:



I then come back and shower and head off to the library, along with thousands of others. The library is under financial pressure, so they have allowed undergraduates to come and use it, to make it look as if the service is being used. Which is fine and dandy, except that it is unpleasantly crowded, and you cannot always get a seat. Which, if you've come a long way to read Edward VI's drafts of his changes to the Ordinances of the Order of the Garter, and know that your seat has been taken by a student falling asleep over the notes for their first-year biology exam, is not conducive to happiness and calm.

Well, I've spent long enough at the computer today, so I'll sign off for now. I hope you're checking out all the other blogs for me while I'm away.

Wish you were here,

Stephanie

Medievalism in Australian Poetry

Lovely to see Melanie Duckworth's essay on the medievalism of Les Murray in yesterday's Australian. I heard Melanie give this paper at ANZAMEMS in Adelaide, and it's great to see an academic paper make such an easy transition to the national newspaper. It's also good to see someone else writing about the topic of our current grant application!

Melanie works from Murray's defence of the Boeotian sensibility (rural, natural, creative) as opposed to an Athenian one (urban, artificial, rationalist and colonialist) and shows how he associates this with the vernacular, with the first phase of European settlement in Australia, with the medieval, and even with Aboriginal art. Murray's vision is counter-intuitive, provocative, sweeping, but in the end, not all that convincing. He writes:

"Within our civilisation we repeatedly see a pattern of autonomous, distinctive art at the beginning of each people's cultural history ... Each New World people gets, as it were, a short period of anarchic, makeshift cultural independence in which to produce its Chaucers and Langlands and its literary and artistic gothic cathedrals, or at least the foundations for them."

There's something about such sweeping statements that makes me very nervous. All I can really see here is Murray's desire to make his own genealogy, to find a distant analogue for his own tradition of "anarchic, makeshift cultural independence". The identification of this vernacular as a medieval is problematic, as Melanie's article shows. Murray's self-marginalisation (even though he is perhaps Australia's best-known poet) draws on a set of associations between the medieval, the vernacular, and the underdog. This last, in many forms of Australian culture, is a sure fire way of attracting support; but Melanie comments further: "If Murray medievalises himself, he is also medievalised by others, positively and negatively."

And ... what can it mean to describe Aboriginal culture as "a Boeotian resource of immeasurable value for us all." I don't think Murray means to speak in the voice of the coloniser here — just the opposite — but it's very difficult to agree that there is any easy kind of alignment between the medieval and the Aboriginal. All the same, Melanie's essay pulls out this neat thread: "If the Middle Ages are vernacular, they are living, present and local."

Three Happy Endings

Within two days last week, three projects came to a happy conclusion. Not mine, alas, though I did manage to send off my draft of the Piers Plowman essay to my long-suffering editor.

No, I went to two book launches, and had the pleasure of ringing a PhD student to say her examiners' reports had arrived, and that all she had to do was make a handful of tiny changes.

The booklaunches were of two friends, and what a contrast they made! First was Paul Salzman, launching Reading Early Modern Women's Writing; and the second was Ken Gelder, launching Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practices. Paul's launch was held in a lovely room at La Trobe University, with the sulphur-crested cockatoos flashing white through the soft greenery of the bushland campus against stormy grey skies. Speeches were thoughtful, modest and heartfelt; food and wine were plentiful; but the hardback Oxford volume was very expensive. The next night was Ken's turn. The launch was held in a Carlton bookstore (in fact, see Whitebait's terrific evocation of the event): more crowded; less food and wine; longer, cleverer, more self-referential speeches. Two immortal lines: a sentence from Justin Clemens, the launcher, beginning "My tattooist's sister... "; and another from Ken affirming that reading the book was a bit like a slap for the reader (for the record, Ken said he thought this was a good thing). The Routledge paperback was half the price of Paul's.

This is the divided world of scholarly publishing, then. It's not completely schizophrenic, though you don't need a degree in semiotics to decode the contrasts here. What is particularly wonderful about these two events is that Ken and Paul are friends and collaborators. They've already produced a study of Australian fiction, The New Diversity, and are at work on a sequel. Both their careers are models of versatility and productiveness. Paul's, in particular, I find instructive, as he balances work as a specialist in early modern literature with his work on Elizabeth Jolley and Australian fiction. For better or worse, it's pretty hard, in most Australian departments of English, to focus just on one research and teaching area. Most of us medieval and early modern folk have very few colleagues in our immediate areas, and often end up teaching and supervising in other areas. Which is why we travel so much; and why we love blogs and conferences so much. I say this with some feeling today, having just given a lecture on D. H. Lawrence to the first-years this morning...

On the other hand, last night we had about eighteen folk gathering for the monthly Medieval Round Table, hearing a wonderful paper from Kathy Troup on the patterns of marriage amongst medieval brewers. This group has been meeting for over ten years now. It's a very diverse group, but meetings are always fascinating, and people are always friendly, interested and supportive of each other's work.

In my graduate supervisions, I usually have about a third of my students working on modern women's writing, which brings me to the third moment of closure last week. At Melbourne the PhD is a thesis of 80,000 words written under the supervision of one main supervisor and an auxiliary supervisor whose main role until recently has been to step in at the end of the probation period, whenever the principal supervisor is away, and at the end of the candidature. On completion, the thesis is sent away to two anonymous readers who can't have had anything to do with the supervision process. With any luck, they'll agree the thesis is ready to be passed, but they can sometimes send it back for re-writing and re-submission. They are supposed to take only about six weeks to do it, but it's often a much longer wait until the candidate gets a phone call out of the blue with the good, or the reasonably good news. This was a part-time enrolment, so it had been a long haul project. Larissa had had two children over the course of her candidature, and more than her fair share of health and other kinds of interruptions to her work. The reports are in, now; and say lovely, positive things about her work: an analysis of Foucauldian heterotopic spaces in Australian second wave women's writing. We met last night to look at the reports together, and a mutually satisfying exchange of congratulations took place. Congratulations again, Larissa!

My own work now is to sit down and puzzle out what I need to take and do before I climb on the plane to London on Saturday. I'm off to the fabulous-looking London Chaucer conference on Chaucer and Time, and will spend some time in the British Library, the College of Arms and the Public Record Office in Kew.

Eco-systems: birds, fish, grief, magic

Pavlov's Cat has recently written a beautiful post about scattering the lint from her clothes dryer around the garden so that birds can use it as a soft lining for their nests. Apart from my feeling the way about her clothes dryer that some people feel about my dishwasher (and of course, I use it several times a week, instead of just when it is raining), this is a lovely notion; and her comments box indicates that others are similarly taken with this idea of co-existence.

My own feelings have come under some pressure in this regard recently, on several fronts, as I have been thinking about back yard ecosystems. Our own back garden was re-built with a series of ponds, stone walls and benches last year, and by the time I was recovering from surgery, the plants were settling in, the goldfish were breeding and learning to eat from my hand, and we had started to marvel at the difference made by these small bodies of water in the garden. Over the course of spring and early summer we progressively scooped out fallen quince, pear, and dogwood blossom, then elm tree seeds and jacaranda flowers from the ponds. I entertained my visitors in my "folly", a stone pergola with a wrought-iron cupola, and encouraged the stephanotis plants to race each other in climbing up and around their concrete columns. The garden was also the place where I taught myself, in a very rudimentary way, to meditate; even if this involved nothing more elaborate than sitting still and doing nothing.

When the eastern tree frog we called Herbert (von Karajan) came to live among the violets, we congratulated ourselves on having built something that might complement the indigenous plant environment, in the heart of the city. (We live on a busy thoroughfare, complete with trams running past the front door; but we can also cross a side street and be on the Merri Creek.) Paul then built a special swampy frog pond, in hopes of attracting more frogs. The garden, then, is an eclectic mixture of the "natural" environment, with more than a hint of gothic folly in its architecture and sculpture.

We were a little concerned about the fish and Mima, my fifteen-year-old cat, but she is more interested in following me around the garden, making nests in the mulch, and drinking the fish-flavoured pond water than risking getting her paws wet by going fishing. Since our neighbour's great-niece, partner and three-year-old daughter have moved in with him next door, we've also had to put a lock on the gate between the two back gardens: the human eco-system around us has also undergone a major shift, and we are conscious that small children and ponds, even shallow ones, are a dangerous combination. But the real sign of change in the relationship of people, water and animals has been the birds. We've always had thrushes, honeyeaters, wattlebirds, lorrikeets, miners and odd kookaburra perching in the elm-trees, a very odd sight indeed. And it's always seemed like a kind of blessing, when they fly into and through our trees.

Even when the garden-builders reported seeing a kookaburra swoop down and lift a goldfish out of the little trough under the tap, I was more thrilled by the oddity than scared for the fish. Then a few weeks ago I saw a lovely grey heron, standing awkwardly on its spindly yellow legs, up on the roof of the house, watching the pond, and watching me watching it, but not venturing any closer. And one day last week Paul saw a cormorant flying in and around the garden. He chased it off several times, and was concerned, but I was still blithely confident that the fish would be able to hide away, and was pleased at this sign that the garden was becoming such a rich eco-system.

Then one morning last week I came back from my walk along the creek and went into the garden to walk around with the Mimacat, and was horrified to see empty ponds, with not a single fish in sight. It seemed that cormorant or heron had come in and fished out the ponds completely; and I was overwhelmed by desolation and the destruction of it, and sympathetic horror for the experience of being a fish with a large bird swimming around and picking off the family members, one by one. Our little eco-system seemed no system at all, if the birds could be so comprehensive in their fishing. A few hours later, I went out again in disbelief, but saw one small shubunkin swimming quietly. Then an hour later, one or two more; and by the end of the day, most of the larger goldfish, two-thirds of the silver perch and all the rainbow fish had re-emerged. It seems they had been fast enough to take cover under the rocks and plants, and smart enough to stay there for most of the day. It was like a magical visitation. The destruction had seemed so comprehensive that all I could do was wish, against all hope, the fish were back. And there they were: the big comets Merlin and Charlotte (I like to think these are the breeding pair), and the two black ones Beadle and Bugelow, though the majestic black and gold one I called King Olaf Tryggvason (around the time Joel was doing a school project on his "ancestors") seems to have been amongst the casualties.

It's been a chastening event, all round. We are now thinking about putting tightly strung wires around and across the ponds: these catch any breath of wind and vibrate in a bird-deterring way. I know that cats and birds, and cats and frogs, and dogs and lizards are equally difficult combinations in the domestic garden. "Nature red in tooth and claw", my mother would say; and this was well before David Attenborugh showed us just how red Nature could be. But weirdly, the fact that the bird did not fish the pond out completely suggests that this *is* a functioning system: the bird hasn't exhausted the food supply, and has left enough fish to make it worth a return visit. Just let me get those wires strung across the water first.

A little adjustment disorder

Over the last few weeks I've been struggling hard to find a rhythm and a routine for reading and writing. My dear visitors have gone home; my teaching has mercifully been reduced to about eight lectures over the course of the semester; and I have few regular meetings or commitments. I'm feeling stronger, physically, than I have for ages, and have established a good routine of walking along the creek for about 45 minutes each morning.

These would seem to be ideal conditions in which to catch up on some reading and writing, after the last five months since my diagnosis; and also, it must be said, after the few months last year when I was flinging myself from pillar to post, hardly ever sitting still long enough to read or to put a sentence together. Yet it has been almost impossibly difficult to work. I can barely sit at my desk, and check email, blogs, news and weather sites to a ridiculous degree, yet I'm unable to take myself off to the cinema or break the cycle. If I sit down to read, I fall asleep within minutes. I can feel physically strong when on the creek path in the morning, or on my bike, or even on the tennis court (had a great workout last Sunday, though I still can't serve), but when I go in to work I come over all feeble, and have to hold onto the stair rail, or the back of a chair, or sit down, when I used to dash about, and sometimes even literally run along the narrow corridor between the two halves of my building. And when I think about going back to full duties in second semester, I am liable to start panicking, start crying and feel anxious. This has been very distressing to me, as I have always loved my job, and loved going in to my office and seeing folk. I've revelled in the busy-ness of trying to balance my teaching and my research; and if I've moaned about committees, I've also enjoyed my share of knowing what's going on and how things work, and my part in making good decisions. All this seems to have changed.

It's taken me a while to work at untangling the threads making this particular knot. I don't think I'm over the worst of this (I had a cheerful and interesting appointment with Tash and a stand-in oncologist, Craig, on Tuesday but sobbed all the way home and for most of the rest of the day), but things look a little clearer than they did a few weeks ago, so let me try.

Some of the anxiety and fatigue might be attributable to the after-effects and side-effects of treatment and the effects of menopause; but I suspect this is more psychological than physical. At a party a few weeks ago, I was talking about some of this to Sandra, who named a psychological condition "adjustment disorder" which I looked up. It seems to appear within about three months of a shock such as illness or bereavement, and can be accompanied by depression, anxiety or other such things. It is to be distinguished from post-traumatic shock disorder ... but I'm far from trying to make an accurate self-diagnosis. I took great comfort in the idea that there might be a recognisable pattern to the way I feel. Someone else likened having cancer to traumatic shock, and I took comfort in that, too. I don't want to overdramatise the problem, but I don't think I have ever experienced anxiety of this kind before, and it was helpful to see that there might be a shape — a beginning and an end — to it. So I made an appointment with one of the counsellors through the breast clinic, but my appointment isn't till May (I'm in London for most of April).

I was so desperate the other night I let my partner sit me down and pretend to be my counsellor, and we came up with some concrete suggestions for how to manage the time at my desk, and I'm pleased to report that for the last two days I haven't opened email till after lunch. Mornings are for research; I don't have to accomplish any number of words or tasks; but all the reading and writing I do in those hours has to be on the project I've set myself. And I think I will get close, finally, to finishing this little essay on Piers Plowman soon. Ironically, I'm writing about Langland and the nature of work. Here's a sentence I wrote today: "Langland knew that writing was hard work, but seems unable to say this directly; and so in this regard, as in many others, the poem proceeds by indirection and dialectic." That's pretty funny, really: I wonder if that sentence will still be there in the final version!

So I'm trying to untangle the small-scale problem of how to read and write, while also tackling the larger issue of facing up to returning to work. It's certainly not made any easier in that the University is still in the throes of a major shake-up; my Faculty is suddenly deep in debt; my department has vanished; and my new school is facing staff redundancies as we all write new subject outlines for 2008 and beyond. I even found myself experiencing a sense of grief, and loss: I have spent my entire adult life at the university, and suddenly feel strangely detached from it. It's possible this is a good thing. This was Manfred's view, when we spoke about this at another party, that a little adjustment disorder might be beneficial, if it loosens the ties of duty and obligation in which I have bound myself so tightly. When I was talking with Suzanne in the meetings before my surgery, she said, "cancer changes your life." I am starting to see what this might mean.