Zoom and its Discontents

Monday 11^th May

Zoom and its Discontents

Some early thoughts on online work under the pandemic (Nick Mercer)

Therapy in the online Underworld: shadow food in a shadow land or an authentic return to the mysteries? 

(Illustration below - Early Zoom Social Distancing)

Do Covid 19 and therapy share the same 2 metre gravity field?

John Osborne’s verdict on Waiting for Godot – counter to the general adulation – “A very long chew on a very dry prune”, comes to mind, along with the pallor of the Greek underworld as I sit squinting in an unnaturally hunched position at the tiny screen of my phone with knotted brow, straining to hear the communications of the ghostly figure before me. I indulge the various whims and fancies that drift through my otherwise empty transom - try them on like suits – now I’m Hamlet on the platform at Elsinore straining to hear the fading voice of the old king as the cock crows and the daylight shines through him, now Socrates back in Plato’s Cave - Withnail-like - by mistake - struggling to decipher the shapes and wondering why he returned.

These delinquent wanderings flourish in the lack of that physical proximity – why? Because these ghostly images lack the power of presence – cannot hold - that total immersion in the same air. Language is presence. Like Covid, therapy operates best around 2 metres … but also, like Covid, sometimes travels mysteriously.

The above were my thoughts a few sessions in, still struggling with the technology and pronouncing with spurious authority to avoid the pain of feeling stupid. Since then, since Friday 13^th March to be precise, I’ve done at least 10 hours a week on Zoom and Facetime, on phone, laptop and  iPad, and seen a whole rich new world open up, one almost unthinkable in the gloom of the old consulting rooms. Heresies abound. A brave new world, and such creatures in it, I muse, as a woman carrying a baby waves to the screen as she passes through the room, touches my client on the shoulder in gentle apology – a cat appears. Meanwhile at my end the postman calls and I have to answer. Each time, the space resumes without fuss and each time I’m less fazed as the old orthodoxies crumble. And each time the soup of it feels richer, that’s the thing that quickens the pulse…that the relationship – the allotted time and space of it -can not only survive outside the physical confines of the room but actually increase in potency by expanding to include the everyday.  Much like the realisation of those other rooms - AA and NA - the healing is not just in fellowship, but also in the incorporation of the ordinary – and, more specifically, in the unpredictability of the space – you don’t know/can’t control who’s going to be there – sometimes the interruptions are the free association equivalent – the memorable moment rather than the central spiel. The mad share that pierces the drift to collective bewitchment.

So, too, in the Zoom sessions – the ringing doorbell, the incoming call that darkens the screen at a crucial moment, the insistent scratching of the cat, the need for a piss – at both ends… for the first time I’ve had to go for a piss during a session – and be transparent about it afterwards – no use trying to retreat behind a blank screen after that - as tragi-farcical as a bullfighter sprawled in his own gore in the sand,  ineffectually waving the muleta at a newly woke bull.  

  I’ll say more on this and don’t mean to simply binarise it and say it’s good or better than the physical encounter.  Of course, we need the silence and the privacy as well – and the physical contact – the journey to the place of what is a dead ringer for an assignation year in, year out. The suspense of it all.  I’ve heard the sound of the arriving motorbike, the bicycle being locked up, a certain cough, a pause, and then the shock of the entry phone, the manner of answer, the tone of the voice, the use of the name, the creak of the stairs -  all those physical realities that herald and filter the entrance into the room.

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions, (TS Eliot – Ballad of J Alfred Prufrock)

Well - unlike Eliot’s Prufrock - with Zoom there will be no time. With Zoom a message appears telling me someone’s in the waiting room awaiting admittance. I press the key and a second message tells me they’re joining with audio, a pause of electronic fumbling - a disembodied voice - and they appear, suddenly, shockingly, in a flash of ectoplasm, usually with a magnified out-stretched hand describing a mudra in front of my face as they adjust the position of their screen. It’s different. In that receding physical past I’ve shook hands, hugged, given a barely perceptible silent nod to punctuate the arrival or parting – whatever felt right with that particular person. But with this all niceties are bypassed.

 Nonetheless, an interesting way of working… and this new way of working borne out of necessity has a different gestalt than pre-Covid on-line work. Like the virus, it’s new.

And as for ‘transference’ in the virtual world. Does it operate? Well, a mischievous comparison – pornography - does…. evokes a whole story within the spectator provoked by those pristine images of labyrinthine flesh -  a newly shocking fusion of bodies  in Rabelaisian abandon in a clarity and perspective/ point of view seldom seen in real life, amplified in impact by the new taboo of ‘proximity’. That works… albeit a tad one-sided.

So, what are the losses of time and distance – do fixed things like books, plays, poetry work? Things that need to be re-animated. Do they still stir us - evoke the ghosts of autobiography subtly different with each individual?

A resounding yes. So, too, a conversation, prefaced on the idea of a therapeutic encounter to evoke the trauma into visibility and release it with words,  to lend it a language other than bodily ailment and the mute reproach of silenced thoughts – a healthy freedom as opposed to thwarted rebellion.

That last an aside, really – more to do with the difference between Freud’s analyses of Leonardo Da Vinci and Schreber and his encounters with Dora and The Rat Man than the efficacy of online therapy.

But these encounters on Zoom are neither, especially if fleshed with the memory of previous encounters in the physical. Their meaning and potency is contextual - directly related to the proximity of the plague without. I’m on total lockdown, cannot stray beyond the steps of my house - some of my clients, too - and this concentrates – imbues these encounters with an increased valency.

Many things new become evident – a cat appears, my own, a doorbell rings that has to be answered – a baby cries then appears briefly in the arms of the mother who waves to me as she crosses to another room. Fort-Da. All these can be seen as obstacles to ‘the work’ (the hushed reverence of which speaks its deadness) rather than the work itself.  But view them as a dream-like stage set – a manifestation of the man or woman before you – the pictures, the discarded clothes – the books the cat and the woman and child - and a rare mirror glimpse occurs that shatters the frame of orthodoxy once considered essential to the rites of psychoanalysis. A good thing.

Last, I’m conscious that practically all the clients I’m currently seeing on-line I’ve previously seen in the room… even a couple who have come back after years away, so I don’t know how different it would be with someone known only through the screen from that crucial first encounter on. Though I’m sure I’ll soon find out.

Another last observation of note – in the sudden shock of the initial transition a couple of clients baulked, understandably, took time out, then joined with me in exploring the technology together. Thus, we entered this brave new world together and there is something about the transparency of that parity that yields the unexpected. I’ve seen them struggle with the sound, the camera position and the errant signal – and the occasional reach for the headphones to ensure privacy from their partner in the next room. And they’ve seen me struggle…oscillate between Zoom and FaceTime – change rooms to be nearer the router in the middle of the session in the early days when the picture froze – rather than sit transfixed straining to hear a fading voice while pantomiming empathy and vainly hoping the sound will recover before they ask me anything significant (In my defence, that last only a fugitive thought in the flicker of initial panic).

Like the virus, this new way of working finds you out – keeps you honest and challenges in a way the old encounters on familiar turf did not. A client with an artist’s eye instructs me, “You’re looking down on me…tilt, yes, yes, no…too much, too much…too deferential – back up, up… perfect”. And I listen. The old saw – embrace humility or suffer humiliation. In short, be seen.

 It would be good to hear how other therapists are finding their way with what looks like a permanent change for all of us. I share a room with another therapist in Cavendish Square and we were discussing this morning whether we continue or not. The dawning realisation that it’s not just us who won’t fancy a trip on the tube to Oxford Circus in any immediate future – nobody else will either. Interesting times.

Footnote: Final Diary entries… The world I wrote from below is gone, perhaps forever.

Friday, the 6th of March, watching the moon, waxing gibbous, crystallise and define at 10 to 5 on a sunny day, ahead of us the plague, coronavirus, COVID-19. like the lull before the storm 

Here we are on Tuesday the 10th of March 2020 not quite in lockdown, but it feels inevitable. In Italy the deaths rise and rise the whole country is on lockdown 60 million people confined to their homes unimaginable they reckon we are two weeks behind them and here am I high in my eyrie in Cavendish Square John Prince's Street looking down on the people hurrying to Oxford Circus tube. It’s hard to imagine the virus scything through the crowds and more so beneath the ground in the swirling maul of Oxford circus tube but I know it is and I know I’m watching it hurrying past... one can imagine it radiating out from there - the Victoria line the Central line spokes of the wheel criss-crossing the great city interacting with other spokes -  everywhere columns of people hurrying along, hurrying out from the big city with the deadly cargo throughout the countryside seaside towns rural towns market towns and villages posh enclaves all open to the enemy within – all Danae to the stars. I sat in the PA this morning in Hampstead with my antibacterial wipes and my antibacterial gel, my bog rolls and my water in the dawning knowledge I won't be coming back. 

Final Footnote

 Monday 29^th June 2020.

Since I wrote the above, I’ve been working solely on Zoom and FaceTime. I have new clients who I’ve only met online… only known as a flickering image in the scrying stone of my computer. After 3 months on total lockdown I see myself beside them, hirsute and wild, somewhere between Faust and Ben Gunn – a case of lockdown lycanthropy – and I’m torn between wonder and bewilderment. The encounters feel of a different richness – the defence of distance, the muting of affect welcomed by some. “I feel freer, it’s allowed me to say things I couldn’t say in the room”, says one. “When will I see you again”, says another, more a lament for a gone world than a question just for me. “Yes, I miss you, but also the going there, the being there.” Like some Newtonian law the novelty of the changing locations – seeing where they and I live - and the knowledge that it brings, offers some compensation for the loss of that shared air, the firefly rhythm of intimacy whereby we minutely mimic and accommodate in stretch and gesture, pulse and breath, the speech and action  of the other. In this strange new world I’ve listened through Tuscan pastures, the grass on the feet like the whisper of a brush on a snare, sheep bells clanking in the background and swallows arrowing by, trudged the wastes of Wanstead Flats, the gulls keening the deserted pitches, a world eerily bereft of meaning where the client becomes a Munch-like figure in a vast flat landscape. I’ve watched the weight of bookshelves bowing the shoulders and making supplicants of those before me and shared the sense of awe when something shifts and the shoulders unbend, the head comes up and we apprehend each other, perhaps for the first time, with direct eyes – and there’s nothing. A moment of equivalence. These are historic times, and what we do now matters. Much of the old stuff already feels irrelevant. But there’s great permission in it – an encouragement to the humility of not knowing what comes next.  

The Politics of Experience - Drugs - the ups and the downs 7.15pm Friday 8th February 2019

All welcome

I'll be riffing on the night - and I've only got 15 minutes - so no idea what I'll actually say - but my pull at this moment is toward an exploration of that '60's trajectory from the wild surmise of acid, dope and anarchy - and the hope thereof - as echoed in the work of R.D. Laing and others - into the dreary domesticity and conservatism of narcotics, benzos and all - technicolor to tarpaulin and primal roar to a round of whispering in the hushed drab homespun of the therapy room in 50 years.... what happened?

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”

What is it about the freedom of that moment – the Heraclitean Fire - that always evokes – or has us reaching for - a Cromwell, a Napoleon, a Thatcher...or a strong narcotic to restore 'law and order', contract the universe to the reassuring safety of the parish...and make us all miserable again? inevitable? I don't know... but worth exploring…

It would be really good to see folk who have been part of this history – who participated  and can bear witness – from the PA, from The Site, The Arbours…and everywhere else where the sparks of that time still glow.

Yours in fellowship

Nick Mercer

Escapology - The Art of Addiction

A short succinct film about addiction made by the very talented Alex Widdowson. He managed to condense 2 hours of my ramblings down to 3 minutes. Click on the link below to view the film (ps. the link's safe!) Enjoy



https://vimeo.com/250087447

On the occasion of the showing of the film documentary The Work at the Philadelphia Association

The Work

The showing of the documentary film The Work produced one of the best discussions I’ve experienced at the PA. The evening was well-attended and the ensuing discussion was lively and inclusive, i.e. everyone got a chance to speak.

It provoked particularly powerful feelings for me as it recalled my own experience of standing and participating in similar circles, specifically an incident that happened at the very beginning of a weekend like the one shown.

It was 2001. I was working in Reading gaol - gone now, but back then a young offenders remand prison. I was managing a 12 step treatment programme for young men with drug or alcohol problems. I asked a friend with experience of addiction if he’d be willing to fill the outside speaker slot on our treatment program that week but he said he couldn’t because he was staffing a men’s weekend and needed to prepare. I expressed polite curiosity and he told me it was a Mankind Project weekend (the same guys who facilitated the Folsom prison work shown in the documentary). He described it as a kind of rite of passage for men; but said little else.

Foolishly, I said, ‘I’d like to do that one day,’ despite my inner sceptic having already dismissed such a possibility – judging the event, on scant or nil evidence – as a con for the gullible. ‘Why not this weekend?’ he said, ‘I’m busy!’ I said immediately. ‘Well, if you’re busy, fair enough…but if that’s just a defence - your stock response to anything new – it might be worth thinking about’. Beneath my indignant dismissal of his suggestion, it got to me, because it was true. I recoiled from anything threatening change to me even as I cheerfully urged young men on the prison programme to realise their potential by launching themselves into the unknown of a new way of life. Unusually, I heard myself – almost from some vertiginous distance – saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’

 So, I found myself waiting outside St John's Wood tube station that Friday evening to meet my fellow participants on this strange adventure, full of trepidation and clutching a huge bag of food I’d been ordered to bring for the communal kitchen. There were four of us - a journalist, a healer, and an Italian businessman. All, like me, were struggling to navigate the mysteries of their own masculinity, and often feeling alone and mired in it. By the time we reached our destination, an old RAF station at Sopley in the New Forest, we had all shared our stories and grown a little closer and were looking forward to the adventure ahead though we had no idea what it would be like. Most of our ideas of male initiation rites were culled from The Emerald Forest or A Man called Horse. Little were we to know it wouldn’t be that easy.

We arrived in good time at a rather forbidding pad-locked gate, rang the bell and waited…and waited, our small group growing increasingly nervous against the gathering gloom. Eventually, a man appeared walking briskly down the pock-marked concrete drive from a clump of forlorn-looking out-buildings. The military bearing of his gait seemed in keeping with the iron-grey cropped head, the fatigues and the clipboard he clutched. On arrival at the gate he gave us a peremptory glance and said simply, “Yes?” in a clipped South African accent (which did little to dispel our initial misgivings).

‘We’ve come from London,’ we chorused and enthused as one.  ‘We’ve come for the adventure – together!’

‘What time were you told to be here?’

‘5 o’clock’ we said.

 ‘What time is it now?’

 ‘It’s 4:45pm’ said the healer, hurriedly squinting at his watch.

 ‘Come back at 5pm,’ he said, and turned on his heel to go. ‘OK,’ said my erstwhile comrades sheepishly, ‘We’ll drive round the block – shall we?’ This last muttered ineffectually in the vague direction of our oppressor, as they scurried back to the sanctuary of the car – an attempt to placate.

 ‘Hang on,’ I said, as I felt a cold fury rising through my limbs like magma from a suddenly awakened ancient volcano, long thought dormant. ‘No-one’s going anywhere’. They froze; half-in, half-out of the car. I drew myself up to my full height, squared my shoulders and turned to address our inhospitable host in no uncertain terms – ‘You’, I said with cold authority; but he’d already gone.

So, I was left spluttering in impotent rage, shot by both sides, feeling equally bullied by the para-military and betrayed by my companions, and, as the fireworks of rage began to dim, an increasing sense of bleak loneliness, and, if truth be told - shame. As I climbed back into the awkward silence of the car to sit in sullen misery, unable even to make eye contact with the others, something else arose within me that implied something extremely uncomfortable – the sheer familiarity of it all – that sense of exile, injustice and muffled rage was mine, no-one else’s…little to do with the actual detail of what had just happened. Ditto, the perverse comfort derived from that sense of absolute aloneness. A man had simply told us to come back at the designated time and my fellows had agreed to do just that. The rest was my projection – one I’d made earlier. Unusually, a thought came to me that I needed to be there, that this was ‘the work’ - and it broke the dam. My whole body changed as that stiffness flowed out of me. I suddenly knew I was in the right place and was eager for more. The rest of that weekend didn’t disappoint though the specific detail  must remain a secret as  we were asked to respect the content of the weekend and were given the simple reason, ‘Don’t spoil it for the men who come after you’…  because it is a kind of story – an odyssey of sorts. Some of it about finding compassion and acceptance for that lost, furious boy and welcoming him home.

Today, when I conjure the memory of that moment of arrival, I cannot help but imagine it - more farce than tragedy – not so much King Lear and his fool out on the stormy heath – or even Hamm in Endgame flushed with the grandiosity of his own misery – but more Withnail and I under the pounding rain, Withnail beseeching the farmer – ‘Are you the farmer? You must help us; we’ve come on holiday by mistake!’

What I learned that weekend and on similar groups and weekends over the following years has informed not just my practice but how I live. For me, the experience had the opposite of a shelf life. Rather than wear off it grew deeper with the years. Something happened that allowed me to cast off the mind forged manacles of my cynicism and faux world-weariness, the contempt prior to investigation that is always companion to a fear of life, and simply surrender and embrace the weekend. I still remember it with great affection and etched-in intensity. It gave me something I hadn’t experienced previously. There was something about finding oneself in a circle of 60 men that left no hiding place but paradoxically exuded safety – a sacred place where the shadow could fully manifest and be assimilated.

I hasten to add I didn’t leave there shrived of my stuff, I didn’t ‘go clear’ or whatever, but I left there having re-discovered my courage, with a respect for honesty and accountability and a little more acceptance of my own frailties (which of course were commonplace and shared by practically all the other men there, the same fears and doubts, the same acting out; I was not alone – who knew!).

I’m told the Masai, who still practise rites of passage in order to initiate young men into adulthood, have a saying – ‘Uninitiated men will burn down the village – just to keep warm’. After working with men in prison for many years that same absence of any guidance is a constant trope that confirms the truth of this, hence my support for initiatives like ‘The Work’. If you haven’t already seen it, and you’re interested in group work outside the confines of traditional therapy, the therapeutic value of one human helping another, then I urge you to go and see it. 

A Footnote

The other aspect of it which felt particularly relevant to the PA for me was it also recalled one of the great regrets I experienced on the PA training – the loss of the experiential group when I moved upstairs from the introductory course to the training proper. In the introductory year our seminars on Heidegger, Freud, Buddha or whatever were preceded by an experiential group facilitated by Marie-Laure Davenport, a vastly experienced therapist with a great knowledge of groups. It gave us a safe space where we could show up and say how we felt, explicate and explore dynamics and challenge each other in a respectful way.

Consequently, we could hear and engage with the following seminars with clarity because we’d cleared all the psychic debris of that particular day and the group had an idea of where we were as individuals, what difficulties we were facing in our own lives outside that space.

Proof of the efficacy of this system is that I remember the content of those seminars, from Joe Friedman on Leslie Farber to Paul Gordon on Heidegger – with greater recall than much of the stuff we discussed upstairs in later years. Those discussions seemed more alive, somehow. I have come to the conclusion that an experiential space is essential for a training that revolves around community and holds that our distress or joy is contingent on our immediate environment as well as our history. Individual supervision and therapy are only a part of this work. There isn’t a professional environment I’ve worked in over the last 25 years that hasn’t understood this and begun and ended the day with some sort of formal check-in and check-out. It keeps the decks clear of resentment and allows us to best serve others. Enough for now, more of these matters later…  

Nick Mercer February 2018

Philadelphia Association - How I got here - a few asides from the last stretch of my psychoanalytic psychotherapy training

How I got Here

To Hilary, and, with thanks, John Heaton and Noel Cobb

"There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be."

(Bhagavad Gita)

 

“I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.” (First Love – Beckett)

 

Saturday 15^th November 2014

How I got here

‘My name is Legion, for we are many’

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.’ Beckett – The End

Dream before the weekend

I woke up in mourning yesterday because I dreamt my mother was going abroad to France with my sons and this was somehow synonymous with her death, not symbolic of but somehow both/and. I walked around my room in my house, though we’d agreed it was time, and clutched myself and child-like wept, then realised I was ok, it was time and… wept again and panicked - how can I prevent? Then, once more reassured - Be still … and on. Not the first… these dreams a wave of ancient grief, like new light, from some interstellar fastness old and familiar.

I awoke refreshed.

So, How did I get here, other than from her,  26 years on since I last used heroin,  34 years since I first came to London, 64 since first came. The horror of those last years on a script - my sons - London - both of us - and then Clouds House, 17th of September 1988.

It was as if before this we all wore motley

All transformed, utterly transformed

A terrible beauty was borne

And here

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

Me quoting Paul Gurney quoting David Bowie quoting Wordsworth, ‘Some lines written above Martyr’s Yard’, for it has indeed been five years all told… this strange apprenticeship, ‘this frail travelling coincidence’.

It’s a way of saying it, like Horatio’s resume of Hamlet… but we all know it doesn’t begin to contain or describe what we have heard in the preceding play.

English ambassador – “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Where should we have our thanks?”

Horatio - “Not from his mouth, give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads.

All this can I
Truly deliver. “

 

 

All this can I truly deliver

Really?

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in all our philosophies, not just Horatio’s

So, how does one speak a life, recount a journey

How does one describe the way we came when dramatic events seem to roll up behind us like so many carpets and hermetically seal themselves from memory... like dreams… or leprechauns. You can’t look away, and you can’t keep watch. The fall of the Wall, for example, which chimed with my own freedom, 6 months after the half-grasped horror of Hillsborough, sitting in a halfway house in Clapham – I’d totally forgotten till the 25 year celebrations…

There are no linear routes to the past, no railway lines, only vistas evoked by who knows what? A smell, a push, a word,  a sudden glimpse, a madeleine if we can find one… and fan-fared and fully clothed the ‘past’ appears, and , look, there’s me… but it’s not me, only someone who looks like me, forlorn and ill-clad. I would say ‘alone and palely loitering’ but that would be to romanticise it and palliate the pain by further violence. No, not even Morrissey could alleviate this with angst. It’s ordinary.

Like the torturer’s horse, the boy falling into the sea – “We’ll bind you to a rock like Prometheus and let the past memory of your greatness gnaw at your vitals. That will be your fate” – Wellington to Napoleon after Waterloo.

No… not me…  yet I feel his shame reach out and seek to pull me back into the abyss of hopelessness I strived so hard to leave… I deny him, disown him and I want to shake him like Mr Hyde, like Caliban, and say gird up thy loins, motherfucker, and throw off that cloak of shame, you slipshod, stuttering cunt. Take up thy bed and walk… but he can’t. And I know this – and I too am eviscerated. The boy remains.

(Wittgenstein’s family resemblances… they may look like last week, but they aren’t; so, thankfully, require no introductions. The freedom from the compulsion to connect is like the freedom from the distorting gravity of desire which seeks to sublimate memory into a metanarrative of someone else’s design – a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury and apropos of nothing.)

To co-exist rather than connect

Then, like the blood-flecked locks of Banquo’s ghost shaken in reproach, at the banquet of my pomp, Jeremy A appears, and, sotto voce, says once more - “you need an editor”.

I deflate, and as sobriety dawns, return to the task at hand.

So, how?

How do I say how I got here?

 

Perhaps like this.

As best as one can with fading light and threadbare clothes.

Let the light shine through the rags of words that barely cover. Let the sun of others illuminate

Surrender

Bring your fragments to the altar

Set them down

And go.

My name is Legion for we are many

Like the glowering portraits of the beast in the old house perused by candlelight by a beauty who trembles with terror not at the peril of the unseen presence but at the unwished for flicker of recognition  – the understanding  that cannot be denied… that she is seeing something of herself. And in the inevitable fusion that follows the realisation, the fevered consummation… a whole race of Caliban’s…

Caliban to Miranda in the Tempest

- You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

 

 

But what’s to be done?

(I had not the language back then)

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

(1.3.3, Richard II) Mowbray to the king on learning of his exile.

So, what is my profit on this whole new language?

I speak

And I acknowledge I do need an editor

But that’s not me.

I don’t grind my grain in advance to put on a good face at the mill.

(Well, more honestly I do… more accurately, I clean the toilet before the cleaner comes; and sometimes rearrange the bedside books to give a better account of myself. Replace anything smacking of smut - lurid covers overgrown with multi-coloured writhing fonts - with some grey tome brimming with inertia and earnest purpose. I hardly know what grain is, let alone grind it, and I’ve never frequented mills. )

Which brings me neatly back to my mother

If you moved, she moved. If you went to the kettle she somehow beat you too it… then forgot to switch it on. Endgame.

Scheherazade tells stories - to live.

 

“I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven … I admire the authority of being on one's knees before the event. “
- Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead” – Harold Brodkey

My name is Legion for we are many

You need an editor – Jeremy Ackerman

 

 

And as we raced across

Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail

Travelling coincidence; and what it held

stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

(Whitsun Weddings Philip Larkin.)

I am here, there and everywhere.

Between The Beatles and T.S. Eliot

Between a charnel-house and heaven

Martyr’s Yard

Nickm

November 2014

 

Sunday 16^th November 2014

 

Stay where you are!

(In response to the inner clamour and the raised voices – half-plea, half demand – “I’m a nonentity, get me out of here!”)

 

A dense forest alive with movement and noises.

It is night.

An old man and a boy sleep in the lea of a mighty oak, its boughs wrapped in ivy.

Young Arthur, awoken by a rustle from a fitful sleep – fearfully -

“What is that?”

Merlin, serene and at ease with his surroundings –

“It is the dragon!”

Where!

All around us!

What shall we do?

Do? Nothing!

Sleep; sleep in the coils of the dragon!

 

 

 

YOUTH

 

First time around my youth eluded me by its ubiquity; unseen, everywhere.

Second time distorted by rage in recollection.

Third time sadness.

Fourth time seen ­– but faded.

 

 

WHERE I’M FROM

 

Population once four hundred, now, three years later, four thousand.

The erstwhile village sprawls over the steaming fields. The incomers, Liverpool over-spillers and first-time buyers. One bus an hour. A bleak, brown, clay-logged landscape producing potatoes, cabbages, turnips and backbreaking misery. Comfortless pubs, the Ratepayer’s Club, and the British Insulated Calendar Cable Company Social Club.

 

Whilst grateful for the fellowship that saved my life I am first grateful for the drugs that provided fuel to burn me out of the dim potato landscape. Out of the dark.

 

RECOVERY

 

As cold earth receded beneath me I was drawn upwards – effortlessly lifted up by the firm fingers that hooked under my arms and restored me to my feet gave me back my dignity, my health, my self-respect, all that I had lost.

This is one way of looking at it.

But not strictly true.

The restoration was more akin to that experienced by Job. The lord gave unto him twice as much as he had before, having stripped him of everything including his skin.

But the sons of Job remained dead and could not be restored.

So our youth cannot be restored.

We can uncover the past.

We can accept it.

We can mourn it.

But we cannot recover it.

 

 

LONELINESS

 

Lay out and display the artefacts that best express the land we know. The land of the water margins where brigands and rebels habitually sought sanctuary. East of Eden – Adam and Eve's country of exile. The marshes and fosses and badlands and wastelands; sea-torn coasts and deserts and gorges and caves and mountains that traditionally provided solace for the lonely.

 

Lay out and find the things we left behind.

Not let go of but hidden.

Secreted.

Not lost but concealed.

Not forgotten but denied.

 

DEATH

 

Freud observed that ‘the aim of all life is death’. Life becomes merely a detour.

A series of wanderings that return inevitably, by increasingly diverse paths, to death. The addict daily re-enacts this drama.

‘Time held me green and dying, yet I sang in my chains like the sea’. (Fern Hill – D. Thomas)

And so say all of us

 

 

 

Home

And always Ithaca, omnipresent, sometimes a world away, sometimes half-seen, a stone’s throw or a favourable wind away. Eventually, unpredictably, when conditions are propitious the gates of the harbour beckon, but, until that mysterious other time, simply a vision woven by the song of the siren.

 

In the meantime…  your task?

Don’t get divorced!

(Olivia Harrison, George’s widow, on being asked the secret of their long and happy marriage).

 

By day I’m old and grey

'By day, I'm old and grey, foxed at the edges and faded away.

By night, under the softness of sepia lights, I look alright,

Handsome almost, in a well-worn way.

So perhaps the Mahabharata is absolutely right,

And all beauty is simply a question… of perception… and light.

Nickm

 

 

 

 

Appendices

An analogy for psycho-analysis from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

‘Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales’ - Oedipus, Electra and all.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

It’s here that Larkin creates a kind of heightened platform for the drama of his statement “There we were aimed” (the opening sentence of the final stanza). It’s a dramatic moment in the speech-act of the poem:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

 

 

From ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ Helene Cixious

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and its "silly."

---

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; it's up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.

Now women return from afar, from always: from "without," from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond "culture"; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to "eternal rest." The little girls and their "ill-mannered" bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto them- selves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath!

We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking.

What happiness for us who are omitted, brushed aside at the scene of inheritances; we inspire our- selves and we expire without running out of breath, we are everywhere!

From now on, who, if we say so, can say no to us? We've come back from always.

 

 

From Plato’s Symposium

 

I am going to speak the truth, if you will permit me.
And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates … When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman, and child who comes within hearing of them. And if I were not afraid that you would think me hopelessly drunk, I would have sworn as well as spoken to the influence which they have always had and still have over me. For my heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me to such pass, that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad, if he were to die: so that am at my wit's end. Yet, where others use high-flown phrases to achieve their effects he does it with the language of the artisan.

 

The Delight of the People

The conveying of a drunken man with a cut

head to the hospital by the police (in the ancient

fashion) was a more hilarious ceremonial. The

" patient " would be hooked up on either side by

an official arm. His body would sag between

these two supports so that his shoulders would be

above his ears. His clothes would be worked up

in folds about his neck, and he would appear to

be in danger of slipping earthwards out of them.

As it was, there would be a display of shirt and

braces very evident below his coat. His legs

would dangle below him like roots, while his feet,

as they dragged along the pavement, would be

twisted now in one direction and now in another

like the feet of a badly stuffed lay figure. He

would probably be singing as he passed along, to

the delight of the people.

(From The Elephant Man and other Reminiscences by Sir Frederick Treves)

 

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element's below!

Let me have surgeons.

I am cut to th' brains. (King Lear)

 

Nick mercer 2015