OMG. What absolute chaos. We must be the laughing stock of the world. I keep coming back to something I wrote a couple of days ago about how people used to coexist peacefully but now that’s all been torn apart. No one outside the conservative extreme right even considered whether we should leave the EU. It wasn’t an issue. I reckon a peoples vote will be won by remain, to be followed by descent into civil disorder and rioting in the streets, and an attempted populist coup.
It’s like one of those ethnic or religious wars where people who used to live together peacefully turn into warring factions and hate. I don’t know how society recovers from that polarisation. It makes me think about the whole concept of divorce, and the illusion of the grass being greener. I’ll dig into that cardboard box under my desk. Desiderata. Haight Ashby, 1968. Walking those streets.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
I’m sometimes struck by a deep loneliness, particularly when all my closest friends and family are otherwise engaged, or unreceptive, or too engaged and opinionated. I don’t have a lot of baggage. (Gosh that’s a very ugly word, emotional baggage.) Anyway, because I rise early, I tend to nap during the day, whenever I find my concentration waning. I have a chaise-lounge in my study and I lie there and snooze, or not. And when I can’t nap even though I’m tired, it is because of stuff.
Back in the 1990s, in Fitzjohns Avenue, No 14, with Alex, my analyst, I used to lie on a chaise-lounge, with him sitting behind me. I remember, after several years, that I notice that the tension in my abdomen had gone. I no longer felt bad about myself, I no longer felt guilty (critical super-ego). But sadly I still sometimes feel shame (ego-ideal). And when I cannot nap, I feel that tension back in my abdomen, conflicted, troubled, in a bit of a pickle. Ha! LOL.
So much more to say about Snowden and wikileaks and secrets and warded-off thoughts and access to patients notes and the naivety of open information and the consequent implications re the conscious self and unconscious primary processes, ie our defence mechanisms. But that will have to wait.
So, just cooked myself a aubergine and courgette bake with North African spices, roast potato and some M&S marinated chicken. Delicious, particularly with San Peligrino mineral water. Oh dear, the postprandial wave has begun.
Also have watched the Little Drummer Girl. Brilliant and interesting. Pressing on with The Return, but it’s so hard, at 2.30 in the morning to read.
It was one of the first interviews I gave on the publication of my first novel,… p45.
Monty Python – I look up to you…, and I look down on you… Status, envy, resentment, spoiling.
Country music. I just love it. In fact America is such an amazing rich source of music. I wonder whether its because of the contradictions – the safe blinkered nowhere states, and the raw political coasts.