Late Style

The Christmas hiatus is almost done. It’s been good in its way. Bit too much cooking on my part, but great to see people and spend time together. Everyone thinks my Christmas tree is great.

Just before the festivities kicked off, I had a bit of a minor burnout on my neuroscience project. Too much hacking, too little reality. I’m used to it so I didn’t panic, just backed up the work, took all the papers off my desk and put them into a cardboard box, and walked into another room, and another life. The night before I had woken very early and felt again the heaviness that had been building in my stomach, something I wanted to shift but couldn’t let it go. But when I got up it was easier than I thought, no dissociation, no derealisation, no cathartic emotional meltdown, just turned it off and moved on. And immediately I was back in that space that I cherish so much. Bernard Zeitlyn’s house on the outskirts of Cambridge, 0845 on Thursday mornings, 1974, the smell of fresh coffee and newly baked bread. Marie Singer (Mother Sugar), my first analyst in her cottage opposite Little St Marys, the books on linguistics, the narrow stairwell, the window frame, and that mocking chuckle “I just lerve aristocrats”. Alex, my last analyst, in 14 Fitzjohns Avenue, his infinite patience. The silent echos of a monastery, double doors to protect the secrets and lies, space and time, and honesty. Like Camus in the Wind at Djemila- “the right word here between horror and silence to express the conscious certainty of death without hope”. No more illusionment. I sat down and breathed in. I was my self again.

This morning for some reason I spent three hours sorting out my old diaries and photographs that I have kept in another cardboard box. I find it hard to describe how that left me feeling. Sad about the lost past, the hopes and opportunities, and how things turned out. I wish I hadn’t done it. Bits are missing, particularly my 20s and teens – although they would be darker. There are still loads of files to go through. Why? Isn’t memory enough? Those days are gone, the bad days thankfully are over, the good days – they are the problem, they are the ones that threaten to overwhelm.

I then started reading a book called Being Mortal which I was given for Christmas! A dear friend was having a breast scan this afternoon, and I babysat her two-year daughter. I stupidly worried about her being alone. I thought of the time when I will shut my eyes for the last time, the thought of not being is terrifying. A fog had swept in and I had completely lost my bearing. The scan was normal.

This evening I started working on “comp” rhythm and found some brilliant YouTube tutorials. I have so many plans for the new year, including going back to see my old piano teacher in Yeovil, but only after I have something to show her.

Getting tired now. I tried to watch Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev last night but was just too exhausted. I’ll try again now.

Thursday before Christmas. Suddenly I am feeling so deeply tired. I woke at 1:30, read, dosed, and got up at 3:30. I even dreamt about my neuroscience project which is not a good thing. In fact it is an indication that the left brain is taking over. So I wandered around, sat in my easy-boy chair and tried to calm down. I remember being on holiday on some Greek island and feeling so relaxed. But I can’t seem to unwind right now. My GP has asked me to record my blood pressure but I keep forgetting. It was very high during my last years in the NHS but dropped dramatically when I retired. It’s quite high again so I’ll have to increase my meds. No problem.

I was the first through the door at Waitrose when it opened at 8:00. By 8:45, when I was driving out of the car park, there was a queue developing up the road. I popped into St Albans Hospital for a blood test, and whilst waiting for my number to be called I read the following in a recent TLS

It is not a conventional dates/people/events diary, nor is it a thoughts-in-progress journal, or even a commonplace book. It is just random stuff that pops into [his] head, jotted down. He has here perfected a tone of Pooterish complacency

Oh dear, self-importance, mundanity, unimaginative. The trivia of my life. I was discussing Knausgård’s My Struggle with a friend. Her reaction to the book was unprintable. Five volumes of personal trivia. I suppose the difference is that my trivia is potentially of interest to the people I’m close to. My trip to Waitrose, my musings in the blood queue, …

I’ve finally made peace with The Return. Yes it’s full of the boasting trivia of a privileged son of a wealthy paterfamilias. But chapter 6 is entitled Poems. Talking of the time when his brother discovered that [the author’s] father was also in one of Gaddafi’s hellhole prisons, he says

Perhaps on hearing his brother’s voice, Uncle Mahmoud’s response was like that of Dante when, descending into the depth of hell, the poet come upon Ciacco, a man he had known in the life before but who was now completely unrecognisable, and tells him –

The anguish you endure
Perhaps effaces whatever memory I had,
Making it seem I have not seen you before;
But tell me who you are , assigned to so sad a station as punishment – if any is more
Agony, none is so repellent

And it seemed that Hisham Matar is moving back and forth between narrative events and the emotional memories they evoke. If so, then he is my man.

Knausgård’s error was two fold. One, he apparently did not reflect on the events of his life. And two, he published them. I suppose he could claim that he became a publishing phenomenon. Bit like Damien Hirst in the art world. Tedious personality and no content.

I’ve not read The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz but I’ve heard so many references to it. “The unexamined life is not worth living” is apparently something that Socrates said, not that I have read anything by him either. I am a very un-read person. But I examine things, I mull over them, as if that is my true nature. It would help if I was more interested in action and doing something about what I mull over, but in some very deep sense I doubt the possibility of informed action. Life is the product of unintended consequences.

Off to cook some chicken. Waitrose was a nightmare, and the worst thing was that my 15% off offer expired three days ago.

Wednesday and everything is speeding up to the Silent Night. Down in the country, in Gasper, just next to Stourhead, where I lived for 15 years, a new neighbour was moving in up the road. She had bought the beautiful cottage with a summer house in the garden. We chatted and then suddenly she had to go because someone was coming round for lunch. She said “the secret of happiness is a full diary”. Keep busy, the old claustrobia-agoraphobia oscillations of my 20s. Nowadays my diary is largely empty. I like to say, when anyone asks, that I am free for the rest of my life. Largely true. And I get panicked when there are too many things going on and I don’t have my space. Christmas is like that. Like a storm that thankfully will pass.

I went on a couple of acting courses at the City Lit in the early 2000s. It was all to do with my interest in making films. I really enjoyed the first Introduction to Acting course and read loads about Stanislavsky and Brecht. However the second course was about improvisation and much too advanced for me. Most of the students were already actors and I just couldn’t keep up. But I read the course book called Impro Games by … from which I learnt that the main aim of improvisation was to create opportunities for others to improvise. Like a chain reaction nuclear explosion, one idea triggers a thousand others. I have that problem in writing anyway, but in correspondence the chain reaction is amplified. Where do I start. How do I stop. Do I want to stop.

I’ve been watching Mrs Wilson, currently only one and a half episodes. It’s fascination but quite disturbing. Not just the social settings of the 1940s and 1960s, particularly the pebble dashed semi-detached houses, in bright sunlight. Like Hillingdon where I grew up. But then the growing entanglements, the skeletons in the cupboard, the fighting over the body. A double or triple life. Or was it that he had a series of relationships, and divorce was not as easy as it is today, particularly for women. My father was a captain during the war, but there any similarity with Alexander Wilson ends. He was not a man of the world. I never really understood him, what made him tick, or perhaps he just didn’t tick. A sad unfulfilled life. He was so dutiful but emotionally absent. I can’t believe that he might have had affairs or a secret life.

I sometimes think that people will fight over my body when I die, that is if anyone turns up for the funeral. When Don died, the church was packed full of people who had never met one another. Entanglements. Analytically it’s all to do with 3-person relationships, with jealousy and rivalry. Freud rather clumsily called it the Oedipus complex but it’s really all about who is excluded when the bedroom door is shut. Who is the favourite, the preferred. Maybe the door is not shut firmly, maybe there is some ambiguity about who is inside and who is outside. With Mrs Wilson I’m wondering where the story arc is going, if it is going anywhere. In real life we usually get stuck in Act II, there is rarely a resolution. The poor actress is always having to play the same indignant emotion in every scene. Does she get stuck. What does she do with her anger.

Getting late. I do like writing in the evening, when the clock is not ticking, when time stops, when it is quiet. I’ve been reading the Travel section of the NYT, which today was “Books that roam far away and deep inside”.

Watching from my window I see the rain falling on a large puddle in the road outside. Cars passing. The view partly obstructed (or enhanced) by a tall tree. It must be over 100 years old.

I googled video cameras. I love existence. I remember hearing a poem read on the radio by someone who had died. They no longer existed but their poem did, as did the moment when they wrote it, when they were so alive.

My parents bought me an 8mm camera, a Bolex B8, when I was in my early teens. I shot family stuff, but one day I went into the garden and shot as I was just moving around and between and within the trees and plants. It was what I saw, it was me, the person within my mind, (there’s a word for it on the tip of my tongue). It was my existence.

I picked up The Return this morning and only managed to read two sentence, the second of which was…

Friends would turn to him [my father] towards the end of one of those epic dinner parties my parents used to host at our Cairo flat.

Well good for you, Hisham Matar, and for your rich cultural capital, and your connections and expectations… and the inevitable success that you feel you have.

There were no dinner parties in my family home. My parents had no friends. My mother was socially anxious. My father was totally lacking in any social awareness. We, their children, grew up totally unsocialised. I remember when I was about 9 or 10, the Dennis girls (three of them lived a few doors away) laughed at me on some particular occasion. I don’t know what I was doing but, as my mother described many times afterwards, the shutters seemed to come down. I went inside my self. I became, like today, a cave man, looking out of the window.

Many years later, I thought of a film about someone who lived in a room, never going out, never looking out, only seeing cracks of light under the door or around the curtain, or hearing sounds of life, and then noticing that when people went by outside the rays of light on the wall moved, like in a camera obscura. It was then that I realised that I was an homunculus (that was the word) living within a camera obscura. I don’t know what solipsistic means, but maybe there are echos. I was so alive, yet so alone, so outside of what was inside. Yearning, aching to be with people.

Just after lunch today, I got a WhatsApp from an old friend, with a YouTube attached which was Tangled and Wild by Oh Susanna. It totally destroyed me. Within 30 seconds I went from bland everyday world to utter despair. I went to my bedroom and cried so much, like when Lenny my dog died, like when my mother died, like when… So intense. I didn’t know what to do. I sort of got myself together after five minutes or so, and then (yes) went back to the shed. Btw, my father didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral, and I didn’t cry at his.

So back to the sentence that got me slamming the book back on the night stand and bounding out of bed. Who are these people? Or is everyone like them and I’m not? Are they the intelligentsia, whatever that means? I don’t know. But they are certainly inside whilst I am definitely outside.

I have a routine. After I have read my book in bed, I walk round the house with a torch, take the half-drunk cup of tea back to the kitchen, and put the reading light on on my desk. This morning I thought for the first time that maybe now in the early hours I should write. I almost immediately gave in and started doing something else.. at least until that WhatsApp arrive, but even then I got back to it. But the curfew for hacking is 5pm and I always stop. Tonight, I felt calmer than usual. I had a drink, put on a record, and was looking out the window when I noticed it was raining.

Going to cook now. But reading this through, the big question is what was “like when …” that is so Tangled and Wild. (Cue. It’s happiness and joy that trigger my warded off emotions). But I prefer another version, which is more lyrical and reminds my of the 8mm film I shot in the garden. (Can’t find the link)

It’s the Lebanese lamb again, so it will take an hour to cook.

I had a friend once, a psychologist, who went on to work for the CAB. Whenever I would talk about stuff, she would immediately come up with a solution, some advice to deal with (and close down) the problem. I also remember being at some horrible psychiatric conference, and there was a workshop and I ended up being part of a group discussing a particular problem that someone had, and she suddenly turned on us and say “I’m not asking for a solution”.

Of course there are no solutions to anything, there are no complete answers to any emails, complete in the sense that every problem/email has an infinitive number of facets, of meanings or interpretations, like a poem. So I have no idea of what I am doing or why I am doing it, or writing it, or not. And it is a state of being that I am very comfortable with, in fact that I seek out. LOL. Having said that… Having said that, what? I suppose the point is about closing down rather than hanging around. The tidy or untidy desk. In fact I have two desks. A standing desk in my study for my left-brain neuroscience, and a very old worn and uneven table for my right-brain musings.

When I started at the NFTS in 2001, I thought that I thought visually, but I don’t. I think in words. Images are always lyrical, poetic, evocative. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like narrative film, it’s just that … When I left the NFTS two years later, broken, another flop, I believed that I had no stories inside me, I had nothing to say. Certainly I had failed to say anything in the film that I made, but in my notebooks there are so many ideas. After that I didn’t go to the cinema for 10 years, and my Eclair ACl 16mm camera now sits on a shelf, like my brother’s guitar hanging on the walk.

There are images that complement words. Sebald’s books are full of “snapshots” he took as he went along his way. If I had a simple SLR video camera, I would put 30 seconds of the rain alongside today’s blog. And a photo of my Christmas tree.

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.

Saturday morning, 3:52. Been up an hour or two. Reading “The Return” by Hisham Matar which I haven’t quite got into. It’s about a Libyan writer and his return to the country after many years of exile. I’m such a curmudgeon. I’ve always slightly resented biographical books in the first person about how successful the author and their family have been, how erudite their reading, how prolific their writing. Maybe its just envy. Well done, good on you! It’s something to do with separating the work from the person, which is not very fashionable today. Everyone wants to know everything about the writer, the film director, the artist. I don’t. I like reading introductions and reviews that discuss the book, not the author. I suppose in autobiographical books it can’t be separated. Maybe it’s the success aspect that I’m envy of.

I mull things over. We do live in a very immediate world. Text SMS, WhatsApp, Twitter – short quick reactions defining the events of our lives. But there is something about this blog which has more the quality of writing letters. My mother found a collection of letters that her parents had exchanged whilst courting. Yorkshire, early 1910s. Not much happened but it was the tone of the writing, and the incidental trivia, that captured the moment. I can imagine them sitting down at a desk and composing their letters. In slow time. It’s a pace that I try to emulate.

I got WhatsApp from C at 0100. Of course they’re five hours earlier so it was just evening there. It’s a good time to exchange thoughts, in the middle of the night, whilst the rest of the world is sleeping. C and I have a sort of back-channel correspondence, quite separate from the social communications. It’s special for us both. I feel close to her even though in her late teens and early twenties she was very hurt when I suddenly got married again, even though that didn’t last long. In her early teens she and I used to go on long weekends and backpacking holidays. Anyway I was telling her that I’ve started writing this blog which is mainly ideas but with some carefully edited diary and bio pieces.

The NYT leading article yesterday was titled Paris Burning. “… the French favour change in the abstract but abhor it in practice”. Riots and the “casseurs” and “deepening malaise”, but also “Macron… failed to see the anger rising”. Anger. I was looking at a WhatsApp I sent to S in Amsterdam a few weeks ago – “I’ve given up handling the ambivalence, and I’m done with passive aggressive. Now I’m just aggressive. Everyone is angry and so am I …” I must have been in the context of letting the flat although I do seem to be getting more passionate about things generally. I worry about what it happening to civility.

P has a whole collection of mandolins in his green room. He lives in Glastonbury in a terrace house deep in the alternative world of planets and crystals. He bought the house some years ago and is gradually doing it up, but when you walk into the green room it is so magical, fully of music and instruments and books. Maybe it’s his metaphorical shed. It’s where he retreats for days and weeks at a time. He’s certainly had a rough time with some crazy relationships, and needs some space, both geographically and emotionally.

I love Country music – Johnny Cash, Willy Nelson, Lucina Williams, Nora Jones… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJpZzQ_FKs Most of it was on CDs (which are now down in my container) but maybe I can find some old vinyls.

I was going to write about Transference but it’s almost dawn now. Time to go.

I enjoyed the drive back on Sunday, very early. Empty motorways, on cruise control all the way. I got up at 3, read but could not go back to sleep. When I went down at 4.30, B was in the kitchen. We talked. He always calls me Dave, with his Bermondsey accent. He still writes every day, in the early morning. And reads books that are well thumbed. He said it was difficult to explain but that it was to do with Zen and enlightenment. He often includes some of his writing in letters to J. More recently, he has become anxious when travelling, worried that he has forgotten something, as if his memory is not so good.

B, J and P had spent two nights on the Gower in some dodgy accommodation. It had been raining. The area was quite touristic but they met a shopkeeper in a small village who seemed warm and friendly.

Saturday night, J cooked. We drank and laughed but we kept slipping back into silence as if we couldn’t keep it going. We were all tired, but not sure what of. Tired of something, or missing something, not able to find it. P played the mandolin and guitar. Then they all sang Goodnight Irene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSDyiUBrUSk. We had all gone to bed before Match of the Day.

When we were children, J and I weren’t close, and there has always been a competitiveness between us in the background. Sometimes on social occasions he says quite hurtful things, seemingly in jest, particularly after a drink. It always takes me back a bit, and I wonder whether he deeply resents me inside.

I took a detour down to Gillingham (Dorset) on my way to Bristol. I’ve got a 20 foot self-storage container on a farm in Great Milton, full of stuff, most of which is not mine. One of my projects for 2019 is to empty it, no doubt to the annoyance of friends and family who have used it for years.

I popped into Plant World in Gillingham and bought a Christmas tree. Last year I was the last person to buy a tree there before Christmas. This year I’m almost the first. I chatted with the woman who runs the place about living in London vs the country. She told me she had worked for British Transport Police in Kings Cross for many years before coming back to the country to look after her mother. “They need good people”, she said, both in Kings Cross and in psychiatry. Not me.

I’m up early now, 3.30 and only 2 degrees outside. I think the need to protect “self” and “space” is a concern about entanglement. Klein used the term projective identification for the way people can put feelings into other people. I think it is one of the core processes that operates in inter-subjective space. As in – you make me feel… In analytic theory it is important to be able to separate feelings evoked by the patient’s transference, from one’s own feelings. Of course this happens all the time in everyday life but particularly in close relationships. We feel lost, confused, intruded upon, stuck. Living alone is one way of avoiding that. I think being honest and open is another way. Unspoken feelings are the problem, particularly when you don’t know where they are coming from. So easy as it goes.

Gosh, what a week. Feels like Christmas is on us already. And winter. I’ve already sent some presents off to Ecuador, although apparently they got left behind by KLM in Schiphol. For some reason I have a way of trusting people in whose hands I place my life – people like doctors, surgeons, anaesthetists, pilots, sea captains, bus drivers… Maybe it’s misplaced trust. Maybe the alternative is just too terrifying.

However what I do not trust is the technology, the “intelligent” features build into every new release, features like the anti-stalling algorithm which combined with a faulty sensor, kept forcing the aircraft’s nose down leading to that recent crash. It’s the paradox where what is claimed to be “intelligence” is completely lacking in any wider understanding of the context or common sense. Artificial stupidity. And it also leads to de-skilling of humans whose role is relegated to just monitoring the machine.

Someone asked me “What is there at home that you want to go back to?” but the implicit answer is “my self” and the space, physical and mental, that I have constructed to live in. Bogart and Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not.

B: Walk around me, clear around me
L: Hmm
B: You find anything?
L: No. No Steve. There are no strings tied to you. Not yet.

Such an amazing scene.

Not yet.