Late Style

I met E for brunch today in Holland Park. He seemed well and strong, talking about story structure and his interest in script development. I said at one point that he was “mid-career” and he corrected me, saying he was “pre-career”. It’s so hard to get into the career one loves, so often we work in second best.

We talked about “They shall not grow old”, and apparently there is now a whole industry of remastering old films. He thought the original footage was 16mm or even 9mm. I asked him why there was a such a dearth of good films in the summer, and he said it was when they released the block busters, and that the indie films (like They shall not… ) tend to come out in the autumn before the award season in the spring.

I’m already seeing some other interesting films reviewed – Wildlife by Paul Dano, and Black Mother, a documentary by Khalif Allah. The trailers are brilliant. In fact the review of Black Mother compared it with The Harder they come, the 1973 hit set in Jamaica, (which I’m going to watch tonight on Amazon Prime).

I got a long WhatsApp message from my friend S in Amsterdam today. He’s such a lovely guy. He lives with his partner P in small flat in the De Pijp area, just south of the centre. As he wrote today – “Amsterdam has always been a safe harbour for those needing to escape”. I have that need quite often, most memorably when my lovely Spring Spaniel, called Lenny, aged 3, died quite suddenly a few years ago. I remember at the time (having given up on humanity several year before) thinking that loving a dog was safe; but it wasn’t. I blame myself. I should have gotten him to the vets earlier, even a few hours earlier. Anyway, he didn’t make it and I caught the first train and boat to Amsterdam. I loved that dog. But I felt very held by S and P.

E and I went to Daunt’s bookshop after we had walked round the park. He bought a book of Notes on the Cinematograph by Robert Bresson, and I bought a book which I realised afterwards I’d already ordered on Amazon! It will make a nice Christmas present for someone. I love Daunt’s. I’m so glad that some bookshops are surviving, even thriving. That article by Bob Woodward is still lying on the table. Question: How do you like to read? Answer: Hardback books in the morning. (I rest my case)

The last six months has been so crazy but today the flat was listed for rent on Zoopla and tonight I’m putting my feet up (and listening to Fleetwood Mac). 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…

Well that was three weeks ago. I started composing this message and then a further series of crazy things started to happen. I got an ear infection and went partially deaf in my right ear. Everything sounded weird, particularly the traffic on the M25 near Colney Fields. I felt I was living in a roller-coaster world. Anyway it gradually improved, no thanks to the NHS.

I haven’t seen “They shall not grow old”, although I have just had a look at some trailers on YouTube. It is amazing and strangely present. I’ve grown used to the blurred pixelated videos of the 70s and 80s, and juddering 16mm B&W documentary footage of earlier years. Rather like vinyl records, I’m attracted to the materiality of celluloid film as if the noise somehow creates a necessary distance.

We can only view the past through a glass darkly. Digital remastering, colour and dubbed sound suddenly makes it all feel immediate. I find it fascinating, if a little disturbing, but I’m really interested in seeing the film. My grandfather was in the Somme and met my grandmother in a field hospital after he had been wounded. My father grew up with the consequences of shell shock, probably becoming a young carer. Reparation. Siegfried Sassoon – The Memories of … ; Ford Madox Ford – Parades End, the Good Soldier; Robert Graves – Goodbye to all that. Haunting silhouettes.

I was hopeless at history at school, probably because I was quite immature and had difficulty learning arbitrary facts. I’m endlessly fascinated by it now. A couple of years ago I read book called Age of Discovery which compared the rapid changing world of today with the original Renaissance of 1450-1550. Incredible parallels. Exciting times and a massive step forward with the printing press.

I don’t read the TLS regularly but tend to buy it when the NYT is not available. There was a letter in the recent Letters section about The ruins of Ypres – What did Tommy read?

[The article] explores the books which the average soldier may or may not have read in the trenches. But there were also books in the memory. One of the most touching stories is retold by Frank Laurence Lucas in his edition of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. In a note to the famous echo scene in the ruined abbey he adds the following from Robert Ross’s Reality and Truly: a book of literary confessions (1915):

“In some trenches near Ypres, there was quartered a sulky young Scotchman of my acquaintance. For many weeks he had not exchanged a word with any of his brother officers beyond what the exigencies of the trenches demanded. One early morning, moved by the silhouette of the battered city against the coming dawn, he murmured half aloud to himself Antonio’s line in The Duchess of Malfi.

I do love these ancient ruins:
We never tread upon them, but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history
….

A young Englishman near him immediately took up the quotation with the end of the speech –

Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men
Must have like death that we have.”

They became great friends. A common interest in literature achieved that which the terrible realities of warfare had failed to bring about. 

Of course I know none of the works that they refer to. But I just love the words and the nested references.

I am “moved by the silhouette of the battered [world] against the coming dawn”, and that’s the early hours when I read. By the time I get up, my left brain is racing away and I work on my mad neuroscience project in the (metaphorical) shed. By lunchtime I’m almost all spent but after a nap I push myself through the TODO list of emails. Late afternoon, my right brain starts to function. I play the piano. I read the newspaper and LRB. By 5 pm I start to wind down and find a quieter self, listen to some music, text and phone people, and write (like now, 20:50).

I seem to have retreated to my metaphorical shed this last few days probably because of a lot of incidental stuff, like the hassle around renting the flat and trouping off to the GPs with my still unresolved ear problem. Private Eye used to refers to such mundane preoccupations under the title Great Bores of the Today.

However my metaphorical shed is in itself a strange and exciting place. It’s my mind, or rather it’s the blue skies academic space that I love where ideas can be pursued without any justification or accountability. I’m currently exploring …

I saw the film On Chesil Beach at the weekend. I haven’t read the book but I found the film rather disturbing. It’s a tragedy and hints at the underlying causes without really exploring them, although they are probably explored in the book. Maybe I should read the book. The characters are so young and so screwed up by the repressed post-war culture. I was born in 1947 and some of that rubbed off on me. Then of course we had the 1960s.

I’ve almost finished Go Went Gone. It’s about a guy who is in many ways like me, but he befriends a group of economic migrants from Africa who are seeking asylum in Germany. Since he’s a retired academic, he decides to do a project which involves recording their life histories. I don’t know how the book ends, but I imagine they are all sent back. But their stories are very strong and as I read the book I increasingly agree with their motives in trying to get into Europe. If I was in their situation, that’s what I would do and should do.

E told me recently that however liberal his politics, he now realises that this society is not going to look out for him, and that getting married and having a family means that he has to look out for himself and his loved ones. I’ve been so lucky with scholarships and maintenance grants and job for life and public sector pension. I never had to think about survival.

I live a partly nocturnal existence, up at 3am, read for an hour in bed, doze and then get up just before 5am. I love the time before dawn, in fact when I see it getting light I feel the day is almost over. I sit at my desk until about 8.30 then get dressed. I’ve got one of those green bankers desk lamps and it’s the only light I switch on. I read in bed with a torch. I love driving in the early hours, 3 or 4am, when the roads are empty. Timeless.

Writing this is a special time when everything else stops.

Thursday evening. Been a sort of ok-ish day. I always wake early, 3 am is quite common, and make a cup of tea and read my book, which is (still) currently Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Go Went Gone” (a book that describes a man so very much like me that it’s eerie).

Going through some back copies of the NYT that I keep to re-read, I came across an article about Bob Woodward (15/09) which included the highlighted question: “What books are on your nightstand?”. (On the whole I don’t like articles which have interviewer’s questions and direct speech answers; why can’t they turn it into indirect speech? Seems lazy.) Anyway he had tons (Spanish “montons”) of books on his nightstand, both non-fiction and fiction. I didn’t think I recognised any of them, but looking at them now they seem quite interesting and I’m going to cut out the article (using a brilliant device for newspaper clips I got from a Time Management course in the 80s).

For some reason, this made me think of Sebald – Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, … He was such a lovely man. I love his mind, how it meanders through and annotates everyday life. Go Went Gone meanders a lot. I suppose it’s about how our lives become entwined in others, and become richer and at the same time less precious, and wilder.

That cold I had last week morphed into an ear infection and now I am (hopefully temporarily) completely deaf in one ear. Very disappointing contact with my local GP surgery mid-morning hasn’t progressed either the diagnosis or the treatment. Apparently taking military grade Co-Codamol is the standard response to our NHS failures. (This sounds like some low-life article in the Spectator).

OMG what a day in politics. I’m off to cook myself a risotto. A friend told me that the name comes from the sound of adding white wine to frying rice; apparently it’s just from Italian “riso” rice. But I still hear “risssottto” in the sound.

I think it’s not healthy to live alone in the long term. It is the basic stuff that’s so easy to forget. There are lots of thing I miss – the experience of joy in particular, and the feeling of being held or desired. It’s been a while.

I’m off to Bristol again today to see my brother J. He’s booked a table at the Cauldron in St Werburghs which will be warm and cosy on this autumn evening. He’s been talking about moving to the Gower peninsular to be nearer to nature (and further away from everyone else). It’s strangely opposite to my recent direction of travel. I’m coming in from the cold, trying to rejoin the human race.

I’m very interested Edward Said’s concept of Late Style which argues for the possibility of finding a new way of expressing something core to ourselves, something that has been eclipsed by the expediences of work. I wish my late style was writing, not writing for posterity, but for myself. Sadly I don’t think it is.

Funny how school can turn those subjects that are hard into subjects that you hate. I hated English lessons at school, and foreign languages, and history. But I love them now. I remember discovering literature in my early 20s. I had “dropped out” of medical school and was living in a commune on the coast in mid Wales. It was winter and very wet and cold. We had hurricane lamps and I sat by the window one night and picked up Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I was amazed. I was transported into another world, and in a very different way than by film. I still read my book by torch light in the early hours.

I’m glad I read slowly. I savour the words, I linger in the moment. I think I see the world lyrically. I’m hopeless at plot, as if it doesn’t matter as much as the observation. At film school I did observational documentary. Sometimes I feel that I’ve just observed life. Certainly in psychiatry you hear so many stories. I love constructing chronologies and then weaving narratives between various parts. Like the threads to catch a memory of a dream.

I worry sometimes about living life vicariously, being the observer or the listening ear. But I don’t see that as passive. In fact I think my greatest strength was as an active listening, helping people to tell a new and less damaging story of their own lives. Although it was just called an Assessment Interview, I thought it could be the most powerful therapeutic tool.

Some people experience emotions more deeply than others. And that in a way relates to a capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence. I find that emotions often catch me unawares as if coming from some deep hidden away part of me. But whatever that part is, it doesn’t seem to be fading with age.

I love the autumn and the peace of mind it seems to bring. Time to read, time to breathe. I’ve always been excited by the autumnal promise of new beginnings.

When I was younger, much younger, I noticed a pattern in my life which seemed like an agoraphobic vs claustrophobic oscillation. There would be times when I seemed almost socially addicted, I needed to be with people, with someone, all the time. Probably as a result of this I would then get involved with someone, and after a while I needed to get out. And then I would swing back in the agoraphobic phase. Luckily this pattern gradually faded in my 30s.

For some time now I have been living alone. I could say I am acquainted with solitude. Sometime that feels like loneliness, but most of the time it’s OK. I am independent. I have my rhythms to the day. I am busy. I get up early, I love the early morning, the time before dawn. Evenings are more problematic. It’s then particularly that I miss someone. Ditto when I am on holiday. I have somehow accommodated to the agoraphobia by avoiding the agora, the market place, the (potential) meeting place where we offer ourselves.

Where you start/end a story can change everything. I got very interested in narrative and story structure when I was looking at psycho-analytic theory, and later when I was a documentary student at the NFTS. It’s as if there is always (in history and in fiction) a chronology of events which has no beginning or end, and that story somehow segments this into meaningful chunks which start somewhere and end somewhere else.

I love Raymond Carver, What we talk about.. and particularly Elephant. And David Lodge’s Art of Fiction in which each chapter starts with the opening line of a book. I have mini background project to chart out a chronology of my life, a card index of times with the events and people, almost as a pointer to recalling or reconstructing a story of what happened. Kundera also wrote about writing. I never really liked him, he seemed arrogant and sexist. But I loved the Incredible Lightness of Being, or at least the idea of the heaviness of repeating the same safe action, and Being being so light it cannot be held. Ha! If only… I read a review in the New Yorker today about a poet called Max Ritvo who was dead by the age of 25.

Very unlike me, I took a last minute short break holiday to the Red Sea last week to try out scuba diving. Every day we went off on a “dive boat” to some reef or bay. I didn’t always dive and enjoyed just hanging about the boat, gazing at the sea and the sense of awe that is life. At midday, I noticed some of the Egyptian crew wander off to the front of the boat to say their prayers. They wrapped a sort of clothe around their legs and quietly spent some minutes together. I envied them. They were also lovely people (unlike many of the diving fraternity with whom I shared the week). I’ve developed such a disdain for religion which seems so easily to become a dangerous delusion. But I miss it. I miss the ritual, the silence, the honesty, the sharing.

I had a long and (looking back) not very successful career as a psychiatrist. In fact I’m not sure medicine really was the right choice for me. I never really found any affinity with other psychiatrists or doctors. But all that is over now. The job I really loved was as a senior lecturer at UCL in the 1980s/90s when I got involved in AI and neuroscience, and teaching. I loved teaching. Bit of a clinical burn-out in the late 90s left me rather misanthropic but I’ve bounced back from that.

I love music, particularly live music. I drift from one type to another (and back again) entirely on mood. Sometimes I just listen to classical music, via a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic digital concert hall. I’ve watched them so much I feel I know the individual members of the orchestra. I bought tickets to a concert in Berlin, but didn’t go. Then I love Latin jazz and salsa and syncopated Afro-Cuban music, and dance. It’s got so much energy, and youth.

For me, live music has really been festivals, from Hendrix at the Isle of Wight 1970, to Leonard Cohen at the Big Chill in 2008, to the Port Eliot music/literary festival which I’ve gone to each year for a while. And of course YouTube which has so much live music from the 1970s and 80s.

Opera too (Opera101 byFred Protkin). Not surprisingly I like Wagner, particularly Tristan, but I’ve never been to an opera. I get slightly socially anxious in bid auditoriums, and am tired of fighting my demons, so find a way round. The concert I was going to in Berlin was an open air one at the Waldbühne. Magical