Book Notes, Fiction # Milkman by Anna Burns, 2018 ★★★★★ First read in April 2023 --- What a beautiful read, the novel I underlined the most so far. It talks about **two big things** in the world and they're both things that I have first hand experience in, so the read felt familiar and validating.  - **The first big thing** is living life as a female - and as the consequent receiver of associated forms of normalised aggression. - **The second big thing** is living under precarious social-political circumstances and as the consequent receiver of its associated forms of normalised aggression.  While I had an intuition of the universality of the first big thing, given that half the planet’s population identifies as female, I hadn’t realised just how universal this second big thing also is. Precarious social-political circumstances don’t necessarily mean full totalitarian rule, internal war or starvation-level poverty, but troubled times. It felt to me for a long time that being born just before the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe was a particularly unfortunate stroke of bad luck, drawing the short straw in the genetic lottery out of a handful of normal sized straws - being born in any of the free, democratic, stable, peaceful, thriving societies that I thought were the norm. I rationally understood that could not be the case, but it didn’t feel like **troubled times** were actually the norm, until I read this particular book. --- Lead female character: **Middle-sister** Middle-sister is 18 years old and lives with her mother and three younger sisters in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, during the height of a difficult historical period known as _**The Troubles**_. --- ## Quotes I liked My most underlined fiction book so far. "On the plus side, I wasn’t physically frightened of him. In those days, in that place, violence was everybody’s main gauge for judging those around them and I could see at once he didn’t have it, that he didn’t come from that perspective. All the same, his predatory nature pushed me into frozenness every time. "" --- "His words were brief and a little strained because of my pace of running, and it was of my place of work that he spoke." --- "Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well." --- "I didn’t own this territory so that meant he was allowed to run in it just as much as I was allowed to run in it, just as much as children in the Seventies felt entitled to drink their alcohol in it, just as slightly older children would later in the Eighties feel justified sniffing their glue in it, just as older people again in the Nineties would come to inject themselves with heroin in it, just as at present the state forces were hiding in it to photograph renouncers-of-the-state." --- "(...) when some people might shrug and say in life, about life, ‘Oh well, there’s no point in trying, probably it won’t work so we must just not try and instead prepare ourselves for bitterness and disappointment’ but maybe-boyfriend would say, ‘Well, it might work, I think it will work, so how about we try?’ and even if it didn’t work at least he didn’t downgrade himself to misery before having a go. After he’d weathered his disappointment if it hadn’t worked, once again, with renewed vigour, with that mindset of ‘can’ even when he couldn’t, he’d be straight on to the next thing. Curious and engaged and eager – because of passion, because of plans, because of hope, because of me. And that was it. "" --- " I couldn’t help noticing a similarity between what these individuals were doing all these years forward during what is now the era of psychological enlightenment, and what maybe-boyfriend was doing, way back when enlightenment didn’t yet exist. "" --- " This brings up the mental aberrations because in our area there existed two types of mental aberrations: the slight, communally accepted ones and the not-so-slight, beyond-the-pale ones. Those possessing the former fitted tolerably into society and this was pretty much everybody, including all the various drinkers, fighters and rioters who existed in this place. Drinking, fighting and rioting were run-of-the-mill, customary, necessary even, as hardly to be discerned as mental aberrations. Also hardly to be discerned as an aberration was all that repertoire of gossip, secrecy and communal policing, plus the rules of what was allowed and not allowed that featured heavily in this place. Regarding the slight aberrations, the convention was to rub along with, to turn a blind eye, because life was being attempted where you had to cut corners; impossible therefore, to give one hundred per cent. You could not give fifty per cent, you could not give fifteen per cent, you could give only five per cent, maybe just two per cent. And with those deemed beyond-the-pale, impossible it was to give any percentage at all. The beyonds had funny wee ways which the district had conceded were just that bit too funny. They no longer passed muster, were no longer conformable in the mystery of the human mind as fully to be accommodable and this too, was before the days of consciousness-raising groups, of personal-improvement workshops, of motivational programming, basically before these modern times when you can stand up and receive a round of applause for admitting there might be something wrong with your head. Instead it was best then, in those days, to keep the lowest of low profiles rather than admit your personal distinguishing habits had fallen below the benchmark for social regularity. If you didn’t, you’d find yourself branded a psychological misfit and slotted out there with those other misfits on the rim. At that time there weren’t many on the rim in our district. There was the man who didn’t love anybody. There were the women with the issues. There was nuclear boy and tablets girl and tablets girl’s sister. Then there was myself, and yes, took me a while to realise I too, was on that list. "" --- " Whenever I pondered this, which I didn’t like to do for again it exposed to me my irreconcilables, those uncontrollable irrationalities, I felt uneasy. --- "This time I didn’t want to go because this was not the moment to be sitting down but one in which to think and always my thinking was at its best, its most flowering, whenever I was walking." --- "‘Back then,’ she’d say, meaning the olden days, meaning her days, their days, ‘even then,’ she said, ‘I never understood your father. When all was said and done, daughter, what had he got to be psychological about?’ She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions. Ma herself didn’t get depressions, didn’t either, tolerate depressions and, as with lots of people here who didn’t get them and didn’t tolerate them, she wanted to shake those who did until they caught themselves on."  --- "What these people with the moods and heavy matter should realise,’ said ma – and not just once would she say this but almost anytime da was mentioned in a conversation – ‘is that life’s hard for everybody. It’s not just for them it’s hard so why should they get preferential treatment? You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, get on with life, pull yourself together, be respected. There are some people, daughter,’ she said, ‘people with much more reason for psychologicals, with more cause for suffering than those who help themselves to suffering – but you don’t see them giving in to darkness, giving in to repinement. Instead with courage they continue on their path, refusing, these legitimate people, to succumb.’" --- "So ma would be back to her onwards-and-upwards talk, to her hierarchy of suffering: those who were allowed it; those who were allowed it but fell down badly by outstaying their quota in it; those who, like da, were upstart illegitimates, stealing the right to suffer that belonged to somebody else. ‘Your da,’ she said. ‘Your da. Do you know that even his sister said he’d lie abed during the sirens with places around him on fire and not go to the shelters with the other people? Only young too – sixteen, maybe seventeen – with me twelve years old at the time and having more sense than he had. Crazy. Wanting those bombs to fall on him. Crazy,’ which at first time of hearing – for this was not first time – also before my own depressions started – I used to think was crazy too." --- "Of course the whole household knew that the Holocaust and the world wars and animals eating other animals, all those anaesthetics which also included our political problems when he could get back to them didn’t cheer him up either. It was clear though, they served some purpose, some sense of ‘See! Look at that. What’s the point? There’s no point,’ thus confirming for him, solacing him even, in his despair, that as things stood, as always they’d stood, there couldn’t be triumphs and overcomings because overcomings were fancies and triumphs were daydreams, effort and renewed effort a vain waste of time. ‘I knew your da was in a good way,’ said ma, ‘when he’d sing, and I knew he was in a bad way when he’d lie abed all day, be up all night, not sleeping, not opening curtains, instead filling in chinks, blocking out the nightlight and all the natural daylight. His melancholy, daughter. Not natural. If it were natural, would he not have felt good on it? Would he not have looked well on it? Would he not have looked well on it? But what reason, what reason, tell me, had he for keeping himself always in that dark, brooding place?’" --- So with da and his type, unlike ma and her type, it wasn’t a case of ‘I must be cheerful because of the Holocaust’ or ‘I’ve a boil on my nose but yer man down the street’s missing a nose so I must be cheerful he’s missing a nose whereas I’m not missing a nose and he must be cheerful because of the Holocaust.’ With da it was never ‘Must get down on knees and give thanks that others in the world are suffering far worse than me’. I couldn’t see how he couldn’t be right too, because everybody knew life didn’t work like that. If life worked like that then all of us – except the person agreed upon to have the most misfortune in the world – would be happy, yet most people I knew weren’t happy. Neither in this workaday world, in this little human-being world, did we spend time counting blessings and eschewing the relative in favour of the eternal. That relative, that temporal plane – where sensitivities vary, where no one has the same personal history even if they have the same communal history where something which is a trigger for one person passes off unnoticed by another person – definitely was the plane where the raw living of life and the imperfect mental response to that living of life took place. Even ma and her type – for all their intolerance of depressives and of especially getting down on knees in the face of tragedies to offer thanks that there for the grace of God would have gone them only some other poor buggers had been selected by God to suffer such dreadful fates instead of them – even they didn’t rest easy. As for the few, those very few who did seem to rest easy, or who at least continued to give off a constant goodwill and a trust in people and in life even in the face of not exactly resting easy, well, both ma and her type, and da and his type, pretty much everybody I knew, including me, had difficulty coming to terms with that type too.  --- " My attention was first brought to the issue of the shiny people, those rare, baffling, radiant type of people, by that film, Rear Window. I saw it when I was twelve and it unnerved me because of what I believed initially to be its point. A little dog gets killed, strangled, neck broken, which is not the message of the film but for me was the message of the film because its owner – bereft, in shock – wails out her window over all the apartment building, ‘Which one of you did it? … couldn’t imagine … so low you’d kill a little helpless friendly … only thing in this whole neighbourhood who liked anybody. Did you kill him because he liked you, just because he liked you?’ and it was that ‘killing him because he liked you’ that caused shivers to go down my spine. I knew immediately, oh God! It’s true! That is why they killed it! They killed it because it liked them! Turned out that wasn’t why the dog was killed but before I discovered the real reason, absolutely it made sense to me, in the world I was in, that it had happened that way. They killed it because it liked them, because they couldn’t cope with being liked, couldn’t cope with innocence, frankness, openness, with a defencelessness and an affection and purity so pure, so affectionate, that the dog and its qualities had to be done away with. Couldn’t bear it. Had to kill it. Probably they themselves would have viewed this as self-defence. And that was the trouble with the shiny people."  --- "Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that. As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on. All this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see. I knew even as a child – maybe because I was a child – that this wasn’t really physical; knew the impression of a pall, of some distorted quality to the light had to do with the political problems, with the hurts that had come, the troubles that had built, with the loss of hope and absence of trust and with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed willing or able to prevail. The very physical environment then, in collusion with, or as a result of, the human darkness discharging within it, didn’t itself encourage light. Instead the place was sunk in one long, melancholic story to the extent that the truly shining person coming into this darkness ran the risk of not outliving it, of having their own shininess subsumed into it and, in some cases – if the person was viewed as intolerably extra-bright and extra-shiny – it might even reach the point of that individual having to lose his or her physical life. As for those living in the dark, long attuned to the safeness of the dark, this wasn’t wee buns for them either. What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away? This was why you didn’t get many shining people in environments overwhelmingly consisting of fear and of sorrow. In this environment which was my environment, there existed but a few." --- " This is what happens when doors swing open on inner contraries. Impossible then, with all these irreconcilables, to account, not just politically-correctly, but even sensibly for oneself. Hence, the dichotomy, the cauterising, the jamais vu, the blanking-out, the reading-while-walking – even my consideration of whether to forgo the current codex altogether for the safety of the scroll and papyrus of earlier centuries. Otherwise, if unmediated forces and feelings burst to my consciousness, I wouldn’t know what to do." --- " So yes, keep the lid on, buy old books, read old books, seriously consider those scrolls and clay tablets. That was me then, age eighteen."  --- " I knew he knew that finally I’d grasped what it was he was saying to me; also what it was I was socially conditioned into pretending he hadn’t said to me – which wasn’t just social conditioning, but a nerves thing as well."  --- "There would be the injustices too, thought the traditional women, those big ones, the famous ones, the international ones – witch-burnings, footbindings, suttee, honour killings, female circumcision, rape, child marriages, retributions by stoning, female infanticide, gynaecological practices, maternal mortality, domestic servitude, treatment as chattels, as breeding stock, as possessions, girls going missing, girls being sold and all those other worldwide cultural, tribal and religious socialisations and scandalisations, also the warnings given against things throughout patriarchal history that were seen as uncommon for a woman to do or think or say. But no. Not that, which in the middle of a local curfew-break would have been bad enough. Instead these local issue women spoke of homespun, personal, ordinary things, such as walking down the street and getting hit by a guy, any guy, just as you’re walking by, just for nothing, just because he was in a bad mood and felt like hitting you or because some soldier from ‘over the water’ had given him a hard time so now it was your turn to have the hard time so he hits you. Or having your bum felt as you’re walking along. Or having loud male comment passed upon your physical characteristics as you’re passing. Or getting molested in the snow under the guise of some nice friendly snowfight. Or getting hang-ups in the summer about the summer because if you didn’t wear much clothes because it was warm, if you wore a little dress, that would bring upon you all that general summertime street harassment.  Then there was menstruation and how it was seen as an affront to being a person. And pregnancy too, how that couldn’t be helped but all the same, an affront to being a person. Then they spoke about ordinary physical violence as if it wasn’t just normal violence, also speaking of how getting your blouse ripped off in a physical fight, or your brassiere ripped off in a physical fight, or getting felt up in a fight wasn’t violence that was physical so much as it was sexual even if, they said, you were supposed to pretend the bra and the breast had been incidental to the physical violence and not the disguised point of the physical violence, making it sexual violence all along." --- "Thing was though, before I’d gained the understanding of what was happening, my seemingly flattened approach to life became less a pretence and more and more real as time went on. At first an emotional numbness set in. Then my head, which initially had reassured with, ‘Excellent. Well done. Successfully am I fooling them in that they do not know who I am or what I’m thinking or what I’m feeling,’ now began itself to doubt I was even there. ‘Just a minute,’ it said. ‘Where is our reaction? We were having a privately expressed reaction but now we’re not having it. Where is it?’ Thus my feelings stopped expressing. Then they stopped existing. And now this numbance from nowhere had come so far on in its development that along with others in the area finding me inaccessible, I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My inner world, it seemed, had gone away." --- "My distrust had been phenomenal to the point where I could not see that probably there had existed individuals who could have helped, who might have supported and comforted me – friends I could have made, a support network I might have been part of – only I lost that opportunity through having no faith in them and no faith or sense of entitlement in myself. However, at the time, given my intention had been to keep the nerve and to hold it together in a place where everybody in their own way was also trying to keep the nerve and hold it together, impossible it would have been for me to have glimpsed, to have understood any concept of help or comfort then. Certain individuals did continue to approach me, however, and some of them might have been trustworthy, might have intended good offices. But I continued to withhold, even if not always from my usual fear and stubbornness. There was still my lack of certainty as to whether or not there was anything to tell." --- "That was the way it worked. Hard to define, this stalking, this predation, because it was piecemeal. A bit here, a bit there, maybe, maybe not, perhaps, don’t know. It was constant hints, symbolisms, representations, metaphors. He could have meant what I thought he’d meant, but equally, he might not have meant anything."  --- "If I’d said, ‘He offered me a lift as I was walking along the interface road reading Ivanhoe,’ it would have been, ‘Why were you walking along that dangerous interface road and why were you reading Ivanhoe?’ If I’d said, ‘I was running in the parks & reservoirs and he appeared also running in the parks & reservoirs,’ it would have been, ‘What were you doing, running in such a dangerous, questionable place and what were you doing, choosing to run?’ If I’d said, ‘He was parked in his wee white van up the entry opposite the college while I was with my French class looking at the sky enduring sunsets’ it would have been, ‘You left the safety of our insular area to go downtown to a mixed area to study foreign languages and view life as a figured representation?’ If I’d said, ‘He expressed condolences on my sister’s loss of her murdered man while at the same time linking my almost-maybe-boyfriend to a constantly recurring carbomb,’ they’d have said, ‘How come you’re not married and why do yo go out with maybe-boyfriends in the first place?’" --- "Friend then said that even pre-Milkman there would have been a file with my name on it anyway because of my other associations. I was about to ask what associations when she interrupted. ‘God. I can’t believe this. Your head! Your memory! All those mental separations and splittings-off from consciousness. I mean me! Your association with me! Your brothers! Your second brother! Your fourth brother!’ And now she was shaking her head. ‘The things you notice yet don’t notice, friend. The disconnect you have going between your brain and what’s out there. This mental misfiring – it’s not normal. It’s abnormal – the recognising, the not recognising, the remembering, the not remembering, the refusing to admit to the obvious. But you encourage that, these brain-twitches, this memory disordering – also this latest police business – all perfect examples they are, of what I’m talking about here.’ She paused then to turn round and stare at me fully and I felt hurt but also panicked, as if at any moment she was going to hurl me into some dimension where I did not wish to go. ‘No wonder,’ she said, ‘they’re clocking and stopping you extra.’ ‘Not extra,’ I objected. ‘They’re clocking and stopping me without previous stoppings because Milk—’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re stopping you because you’ve drawn attention to yourself with your beyond-the-pale reading-while—’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘If that were true, how come they weren’t stopping me before Milk—’ ‘But they were stopping you! They do stop you. They stop everybody!’ And here her tone became resigned rather than monitory. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that even at this minute we’re entering another bout of your jamais vu.’" --- `Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---