Nick Around: 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.

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

Nick Around

Friday, January 02, 2015

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

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