Announcing a not-quite advice column

Would you like an honest response to an honest question or dilemma?

Image by Zain Ali on Unsplash

I keep coming back to the poem September 1939 by W.H. Auden. It’s long, and I won’t reproduce it in full here, but if you have time I’d recommend the whole thing. It opens with:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden reflects on the strange dissonance of living our very ordinary lives, sitting in a bar perhaps, doing our emails, picking up the kids, while knowing the geopolitical tectonics plates are creaking and grinding underfoot. He sees clearly how mixed up the so-called personal and so-called political get, the way they bleed. Many of the themes and reflections in the poem will ring an ominous note. He observes how the rest of the patrons “cling to their average day/ The lights must never go out/The music must always play”, even as the lamps are going out across Europe. He is, as ever, grimly realistic about how humans often react to unusual times: with denial, with hoarding, with crude cravings to distract ourselves. He ends with a stanza I now know off by heart, so often have I repeated its bracing, self-deprecating phrases:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Since I was a little girl I wanted to be an agony aunt. I gather this is a “Britishism”, but I much prefer the force of the term over the functional “advice columnist”. It gets to the relational heart of the thing. The magazines of my youth were full of these raw, painful letters. They were a place people could admit the longings they mainly hid in public, all the things they didn’t understand, all the ways life had blindsided them. There is a tenderness in the idea of an aunt, or sometimes an uncle, listening, nodding, acknowledging the sore spot. This always seemed more of the point to me than the actual advice, which was rarely startling or original.

I was joking with a friend recently about this childhood dream and they said “well, why don’t you just do it? No one needs to wait for someone to give them a column in a magazine anymore”.

I hesitated. While the agony aunts I loved and still love (Philippa Perry, Dolly Alderton, Nick Cave) don’t come off as arrogantly assuming they know all the answers, a certain amount of confidence in your ability to guide people is baked in. The longer I live, the more I know how much I do not know. So I definitely cannot offer advice. What might be possible, I realised, was something close to the end of this stanza of Auden’s. An exchange of messages to illuminate a shared night. I don’t think I am “Just”, and frankly, neither are you, but what we might have in common is a desire to be more so. My guess is readers of this substack also often feel like Auden at a bar, experiencing existential vertigo at the state of the world. That context doesn’t make the more proximate details of our lives disappear - money worries, heartbreaks, vocational roadblocks. We live in both these realities, and that can be really confusing to navigate. I am wondering if having a place to express some of these honest questions and painful dilemmas might be of use.

In response, if you choose to send them to me, I am going to experiment with “showing an affirming flame”, which does not mean pretending I am not also “beleaguered” (some days) with “denial and despair”. It might mean sharing what has helped me in those times, going digging in my medicine cabinets of theology and philosophy and poetry and seeing if I have received from others anything I can pass on. I may, in true coach style, respond with some (hopefully) clarifying questions. What I know I will be able to do, at least with some, is offer acknowledgement. I can listen and affirm the signal sent out into the dark, and perhaps that is enough.

Here is what I propose:

If you have a meaningful dilemma or painful question, especially ones which relate to your deep values and how we wisely navigate the times we are living in, send it to affirmingflame@elizabetholdfield.com. Depending on volume I am unlikely to be able to respond personally to everyone, but will select some and write inspired by them here. Please make clear if you are happy for your (first) name to be used, which would be my default, would like your full name, or would prefer to be fully anonymous. I will publish (a probably condensed version) of the letters I use so please make sure anything you would worry about being public is either removed or clearly marked. I am very keen this is a blessing rather than making things worse!

I look forward to hearing from you,

Elizabeth