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2023 was my most productive year to date but it was a painful and toxic year which I spent, for the most part, being a truly despicable individual, lashing out and writing angry emails. The very end of the year, in which I found myself on medication and seeing two therapists, was a silver lining, a glimpse of redemption in an Annus Horribilis.
Torn Pages Underworld, the last book I began that year, was a further continuation of the personal cooling, icing over, even, that had begun in Not Ok and which, arguably, reached a crescendo in Presence (a book set in the Antarctic). Torn Pages Underworld was even colder and more bleak, set in the Greek Underworld and focussing on Juliet's ordeal after being abandoned by Alice at the An Inconvenient Spring. The majority of this book is very NSFW, dealing with Juliet's terror as her wedding night and "defiling" by Pluto approaches.
That I chose to look so much at this very dark aspect was influenced by a painting I had seen in the Los Angeles Modern Art Museum of Leda being sexually assaulted by Zeus in the form of a swan. Graphic and dark, I know, but it seemed to capture a specific feeling of utter despair that had been caged inside me since 2021. My time in America was very much shadowed by the time that, this time next year, they might not have a democracy so, instead of mourning, I thought about the feeling of being defiled, being used and abandoned, and how that might connect to Trump's rant about being "a retribution". In a way, I understood that feeling of needing retribution but revenge is an ugly, dirty emotion that can poison the soul, no matter how dark the act was to begin with.