Cutting the Gordian Knot and Kicking Librarians Out Of the Shuttlebay!

Dear Juliet

Funny thing. I came awake this morning, found myself wondering where you were and felt a moment's worry about you.

Well, I think I know what that was and I suppose it's to be expected. After all, I like having you around and you mean the world to me. A feeling I'll acknowledge and openly articulate.

But the other day, a profoundly simple thought occurred to me. Apart from a couple of extraordinary times, I've never really heard you say how you feel.

Jenny explained to me once that you're like that. I understood that but while I can do a lot of guesswork, I can't actually read your mind!

However, I wasn't really joking about locking yourself in the loo with Two Little Boys and Ben & Jerry the other day. The healthy release of emotion keeps us sane and quite probably helps us avoid intestinal cancer.

Bjorn Borg's trainer told him to bottle everything up and I don't think it did him any good. I read at the time that suppressed emotion will inevitably come out, usually in a pretty destructive way.

I avoided this nearly twenty years ago by articulating my terrible frustrations over librarianship and hopelessness in an article called The Gordian Knot. Cutting the Gordian Knot means solving a problem via bold, decisive and unconventional action. The term derives from the legend of Alexander the Great cutting an impossible knot with his sword.

By that time in my life, my intestines were so knotted up I honestly thought that if I didn't vocalise how I felt I might actually go down with stomach cancer or something. Please note this was before you, Dru and Buffy; and I could not possibly know the shape of things to come...

So I went and wrote out everything I felt, and I can't stress how clearly I knew that I was taking a hacksaw to my threadbare hopes of employment and deliberately committing professional suicide. The first sentence of Knot says it all:

"It’s not often I start to write an article intending to crucify myself, commit professional suicide and probably get myself beaten up by a rampaging mob of respectable librarians into the bargain, but I can’t even preface the following heresies with the caveat 'I’m retiring this year, so it is all academic for me' ".

I sent it off to a library journal but seven pages of suicide note was a bit too much for them, so I found a blog called The Good Library Blog who published it instead. More about that later.

It felt like I'd cleared out a fouled-up drain and my insides straightened out rather quickly. The webmaster also informed me that a couple of librarians had contacted me on the quiet and confirmed my feelings.

So I decided to go right on contributing to his blog.

And I did. I took the piss out of librarianship fortnightly for over five years. It was a bit like Last Week Tonight With John Oliver or David Frost's ground-breaking That Was the Week That Was in the nineteen-sixties.

Yes, I absolutely did say that:

"Senior library managers should be shot out of the USS Enterprise's shuttlebay doors in their underpants."

And that was one of my nicer comments.

To say I articulated my feelings was a bit like saying Angelus wasn't a very nice guy...

And if I hadn't, my publisher wouldn't have discovered me via that very blog, there'd probably have been no Dear Miss Landau and I don't know how our respective futures would have turned out.

It's important to stress that I vented my feelings professionally and to a high satirical standard, but vent them I did and healthy it was.

I'd also say you don't have to make a meal of it. I'll take a very good bet that even expressing yourself quickly and concisely will make you feel a lot better.

You know, you are a bit like Mr. Spock and there's a couple of paragraphs in an original Star Trek story from 1976 which perhaps captures it a bit:

Kirk chuckled softly and continued. "Look, my friend, it's time you and I stopped fooling ourselves. I know you have emotions, you know I know, so why not admit it? At least in here." - Kirk smiled - "I promise not to tell McCoy."

Spock didn't speak for a moment. He seemed to be struggling with himself; then he looked into Kirk's eyes and smiled ever so slightly as he said, "Captain... Jim. I am what I am. I cannot change."

Kirk didn't insist. Even this much was a great concession. "I know, Spock. I hope you don't change - too much."

(Mind-Sifter / by Shirley S. Maiewski)

I've also got an example to prove you don't have to be perfect to be loved about ready. Not sure if I should do it before London or after?

Oh well, time is the fire in which we burn...

Love,

James