Sad like the Biscuit Layer of a Trifle

the imagery of emotion - with poetry and exercises

Jan 9^th

As Christmas approached - that time of high expectations and troubled melancholy - I found this diagram on Facebook (apologies that I haven’t yet found the author/ artist). It seemed to me to be great way of breaking down the vast landscape of feelings and experiences held in the tiny word “sad”.

I shared it on my thread, adding my own kind of sad to the list -

“a tugging sad, like an anchor snagged on rocks in a surging sea of anxiety”. Other friends joined me, and then more friends, creating a list of over fifty descriptions, which I’ve copied here:

Sad like the biscuit layer of a trifle. It's at the bottom of everything. The jelly might be happy but the biscuit is never far beneath it. Hiding sad. I know it's there, but I can't find exactly where, and it hides when I tried to sit with it. Standing on the edge of a sadness precipice. Tapeworm sad. Quicksand sad. Drowning not waving sad. Heavy, yet sort of floating sad weight in a series of anxious whirlpools. Giant lake sad. Wastwater under the moon. A still smiling sad, a winter tree sad. A pizza soggy in the middle, but somehow burnt all round the edges sad. Suffocating bog sad. The indelible will never not be there sad. Keith Jarrett's Vienna concert while decorating the Christmas tree sad. A sad that oozes into the body with an ache and then mixes itself with all the emotions and body processes already going on making any feeling or doing hard to focus on. Slime sad, blood sad. Smothering sad like a wet and mouldy blanket that creeps over you and wraps your face. Hanging about like an unwanted dog sadness. Waterlogged wings and boots sinking in mud sad. Keeps tapping at me on the shoulder sadness just to let me know it's still there. Sad as a bald robin. A fog of sad. I walked through the desert with a sad with no name. Heavy sad - I've been carrying it for a decade, maybe longer. Rising sad. Sad like a beautiful walk in the sunshine and remembering the people you used to walk with who have gone, and your sadness is like the Christmas tree in the corner, with its lights on. Sad on toast with occasional bouts of creeping and heavy sad. My sad is quiet, right behind me all the time with the occasional sharp tug on my insides that always comes as a shock. Sad like remembering that you left the hob on, sad realising the smoke you can see from the hill is your own house. Sad like getting an unexpected phone call at a worrying hour. Creeping sad. Sad like a heavy blanket, keeping me warm, but stopping me getting up. Sad like I want to engage with something complex and demanding but I only have the energy for very simple things which don't grab me. Sad like seeing the Milky Way in a desert sky and the cold and dark has a winter edge and the wind blows right through you like a flute and you wonder if anyone can hear the music.

There is something deeply rewarding about closely describing our human experiences, even in their pain. Having spent years in the psychiatric system acquiring all sorts of ugly labels, it’s always a relief and a delight to be able find the right words.

Exercise:

What’s your sad? Can you find a line, or an image, to describe it? Then expand that image with one more line – and then another - and another – and keep on going. Write into the specific detail of your sadness, drawing analogies and all of your senses, for at least five minutes.

Like me, the poet Bryony Littlefair has a list of psychiatric labels - and in her substack and her poetry, she finds a much richer, more descriptive language for her experiences. Here, she writes with stunning acuity about how rich an emotion sadness can be – and how language can be the means of transforming our experience.

“Whether you have OCD or an addiction or an eating disorder, it is always the ‘safer’ set of problems in a certain way, because they are all about numbing and control. In recovery, you are out of the submarine and on to the boat: you are truly at sea …. .

… Even post-recovery, if there is such a thing, you of course do not always feel good. I am amazed at the things I am sad about now. My parents ageing or I’m disappointed in someone or it’s my Grandad’s birthday three years after he died or I am appalled by the state of the world or I do not trust the government or any government or I love my niece and she is so tiny.

But these are what I think of as good pains. They are interesting to me, they come from my heart. They exhibit variety! When I was at the height of OCD, I simply did not think about anything else. From dawn til dusk, my particular obsessions were literally the only thing I thought about. So, I am amazed at these pains, in awe of them, their colour and aliveness …

.. You have to get interested in the world and get interested in yourself and language is a good tool for doing that. I knew I would have to do with my own self what I do with language. Which is turn it over and over in my hands, no matter how boring or hopeless it feels. Thinking: how would fudgy sadness feel? What about the fondant of regret? Through the tedium of trying to write poetry, I have always trusted language, trusted that, every once in a while, it will flip over and show me its silvery belly”.

I was glad to be able to share these words with the Writing Hours participants as a response to the not uncommon assumption that writing about sadness is a dreary or depressing task. In a similar way, the poem “Giraffe”, Bryony writes with depth and dynamism from her difficult experiences, finding a language for recovery - and for happiness - which feels assured and delicate, precise and universal. By the time we are told that our happiness is a giraffe, we are so engaged, so convinced, so WANT to be with the writer that it feels like the perfect metaphor. Of course happiness is a giraffe! And because we trust the metaphor, we’re wide open to the work of making sense of it – and once the reader is actively involved in this way, the poem truly comes alive.

Giraffe

by Bryony Littlefair

When you feel better from this — and you will — it will be quiet and unremarkable, like walking into the next room. It might sting a little, like warmth leaking into cold-numbed hands. When you feel better, it will be the slow clearing of static from the radio. It will be a film set when the director yells cut! When you feel better, you will take: a plastic spoon for your coffee foam, free chocolates from the gleaming oak reception desk, the bus on sunny days, your own sweet time. When you feel better, it will be like walking barefoot on cool, smooth planks of wood, still damp from last night’s rain. It will be the holy silence when the tap stops dripping. The moment a map finally starts to make sense. When you feel better, you will still suffer, but your sadness will be graspable, roadworthy, have handlebars. When you feel better, you will not always be happy, but when happiness does come, it will be long-legged, sun-dappled: a giraffe.

Exercise

It’s your turn to describe happiness as an animal. Think of how the animal looks, think of its character. Then take that animal – and the poem – for a walk. Let it wander and drift and find its own way, in words and content and in form.

Selima Hill is, and long has been, one of my guiding lights in poetry - one of the first writers to disrupt and expand my expectations, to explode my understanding of the possibilities of language, and most specifically the possibilities of imagery, including metaphor and simile … In the London Review, poet Emily Berry writes “Hill was mute for a period in her twenties, and spent time in psychiatric care (she and Jenny Diski were inpatients together at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1960s). In an exchange of letters with Julia Copus, published in Poetry London earlier this year, Hill noted her tendency, when drafting, to ‘loosen, loosen, loosen’ and then ‘tighten, tighten, tighten ... Maybe one tenth of the original length remains ... I suppose I could say that I aspire to silence. Silence not as nothing but as everything. Not a retreat but on the contrary, a touch, or a touching.’”

Take “Chicken Thigh”, for example, which uses a strikingly unusual, extended simile to give form to an unworded question:

Chicken Thigh

by Selima Hill

The awkward question, like a chicken thigh
sitting in the fridge on a plate

in a sort of green and lonely glow,
is getting more awkward by the minute.

It’s hard to imagine imagery like this emerging from anything but the most open, uncensored brain, in a full flood of creativity. Let’s aim for that in the next exercise.

Exercise:

Take a situation you are struggling with – perhaps something small, or something huge – and for ten minutes, allow yourself to write freely, finding all the analogies you can for that situation, no matter how outlandish or strange or expansive.

Then for the next ten minutes – tighten, tighten, tighten. Look for the small powerful poem at the heart of your writing.

I’m a huge fan of imagery, and certainly, most poems live or die by their metaphors. But if we had the right language, would we need to compare our happiness to a giraffe, our sadness to the moon, our unspoken questions to a chicken thigh? In the final exercise, which I’ll publish separately just as a thank you to our paying subscribers who fund this Substack, I’ll look at Kate Berta’s “How Is a River like a Woman the Poets Want to Know”. With an additional exercise for you all to try, I’ll consider whether metaphor is poetry’s superpower – or whether, like Kate Berta suggests, it represents a failure of language. And as usual, we’d love to read any of your thoughts, opinions, and best of all, your poetry, in comments!