Late Style

Eleanor Oliphant has now reduced me to tears twice, and I’ve barely passed half way. First time it was just ordinary everyday human warmth, and the second was someone sharing in another’s loss. But then I came to a passage I couldn’t read – the beginning section of chapter 22 which I sense is a particularly pernicious telephone call from mother. I skipped it and Eleanor’s life goes on with the incidental kindnesses of social encounters. Staying on the surface people can extend a generosity of spirit. Eleanor and Raymond, Sammy’s family, the shop assistants and waiters.

And then this morning I turn the page and see “Bad Days”. I had missed the earlier heading Good Days and didn’t notice that the book was divided into parts. I wonder whether it has a third part, like a three act play. If there’s to be a resolution then what could it be. Some unexpected reversal or are we going to sink into despair.

I saw a film a month or so ago called Stations of the Cross (Dietrich Bruggemann, 2014). It’s a German film about a young girl who is destroyed by fundamentalism of an ultra conservative Catholic family. I felt like screaming at the film, screaming Stop, Leave her alone, and somehow breaking into the story line and rescuing her. I think all those years of psychiatry have left me with a view of humanity that alternates between despair and anger. Why are people so cruel and destructive? Why do they want to tear everything apart? I know that’s naive but I find it so hard just to sit by and watch (or read), as if I’m somehow complicit in letting it happen.

The heading Bad Days is like opening a door into my worse fears for the vulnerable soul at the centre of the story. I actually don’t like the word “story” or rather I think it’s overused in the media. Everything in the World Service news bulletins is referred to as a story. “And now for some more stories….”, the announcer announces as the tales of one disaster after another are recounted without hardly any shift in intonation. Drama is supposed to transport us safely into worlds outside our reach. To be a witness, to challenge our responses should we ever be a participant. I suppose I have been a participant in life’s conflicts. Anyway despite all the above I am really enjoying the book.

I love interweaving story lines especially real ones. I think it is deep shared experience that draws people together, the inter-subjectivity of the soul.

I’m enjoying reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. I’m such a slow reader that it takes a while to get into a book. The good thing now is that I’m in no hurry, I just read books at the rate I do. Also having had such trouble reading as a child, I’m still catching up on the classics. I discovered Henry James only a few years ago and it takes me months to read one of his novels.

In fact 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.

Anyway, I’m a slow readier, unlike my sister M who gets through a book a week from her local library. I wonder how much she savours the words and how much those stories impact her own life story. I do think that 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.

The narratives we construct about our lives are fascinating. Eleanor Oliphant’ story in the first person is (at least to where I’ve got to) very understated, in contrast with the startling delayed exposition. And (so far) it’s full of her observations, of events occurring to other people, not to her. The sheet of medical notes that slips out of her file is full of “lies lies lies”. I remember in the anti-psychiatry days of the 60s, the narratives constructed by professionals about their patients were denigrated as “totalisations”.

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

Just been cooking briam, which has become one of my staples since a cooking evening class in Crete a few years back. I love cooking, even just for myself, although so much better when there’s company. I also cooked some lamb and green beans.

The quote from Fleetwood Mac was from Go Your Own Way –

If I could
Maybe I’d give you my world
How can I
When you won’t take it from me

(Long pause as I think how to follow that). I think that the cynical naffness I stupidly ascribed to those lines before is because the intensity of the feelings are so much in the moment. I remember when I was 28, living in Shepherd Bush, working as an SHO in Barnet, and being left by someone I really cared for. I had a blue MGB GT and I cried so much in that car, driving backwards and forwards to work. Every song on the radio was about breaking up, it seemed that that was what so many songs were about.

Interesting the word maybe, “Maybe I’d give you my world”. Hedging bets. Is living really about hedging bets?

There’s something very special about books that reaching emotions, as if we are all shut off from them and need to find a way of reaching them. It was certainly true about me in the past. I remember going to the local cinema in my teens (it was the Regal in Uxbridge) and feeling emotions that I had never felt before. I fell in love with film, or at least with the magic of it, the illusion of sitting in a camera obscura and observing an unknown (or as yet unexplored world). Maybe we never do explore it all. Perhaps that’s what books and films are for.

I was just listening to another of my three vinyls, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. That was 1977. I was 30. Ten years later I used to listen to the same album on my yellow Sony Walkman every evening as I travelled home from UCL. I was doing my PhD at the time, and E had just been born. Strange listening to it now. Looking out the window at the people driving back from work, and the kids playing. Almost a lifetime ago.

I went to my second Spanish class last night. It’s so hard, I don’t think I’ve got the right brain for languages (although I love linguistics). Anyway we always practise in class by telling stories about our lives – where we live, what we do, what was our favourite holiday, etc. Probably all too much information. But it stirs up emotions.

London is full of emotional memories for me, places and times. So I was thinking where was I in 1977 when Fleetwood Mac made that record. Strange thing is that I was right here, working as a junior doctor, living not more than 100 yards away. And the asylum has been transformed into a beautiful park, like a campus, full of homes and families and health, and surrounded by countryside. It’s very magical and I am very happy here.

Listening to my Walkman all those years ago, I was haunted by the rather broken female voice that touched me so much. Of course I now know it was Stevie Nick who was in love with Lindsey Buckingham. All the joy and anguish of their relationship is there, not just in the words, but in their sound of their voices behind the crackle of the vinyl. The lyrics still crack me up. It’s so hard to find, love.

It’s Wednesday evening and I’m listening to one of my three or four vinyls, Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Windy evening outside. I’m off to the West Country at crack of dawn to visit an old friend in Glastonbury. Last week I met my brother in Bristol and we saw Cold War at the Watershed. Brilliant film, although it got us talking about relationships…

My brother is counsellor and we usually end up talking about family and friends and relationships (and politics, which is probably the same thing). But we had a lovely meal in Sergio, an Italian restaurant in a small hidden road near the cathedral. Then we walked back via the old Bristol Infirmary and down the Cheltenham Road and Montpelier. I love Bristol, it’s like a little London. He always cooks me a good breakfast in the morning and then we walk round St Werburgh’s park before I head off.

I started my Spanish class at the CityLit last night. Level 3 lower. It’s always a bit scary the first class of the year, with a new teacher and new fellow students. But I survived. The teacher, an Argentinian, is lovely, and speaks Spanish all the time – which is a struggle, but what I want. I’ve been doing so much homework these last few weeks in preparation for the start of term. Eternal student.

I’ve been exploring a space to work in London, just a hot-desk one day a week, but in a “hub”. Last year I was a member of the Health Foundry near Waterloo. The best thing was the street food in the Lower Marsh market nearby.

Autumn and time to head back to the gym. I love running in the fields during the summer but the activation energy is too great when it’s cold and wet.

I need more vinyls. I know it’s no different from YouTube, but it feels like it.

And I miss going away, going on holiday. I hate travelling on my own. People keep telling me that you meet people, but I don’t. That’s what I miss most, company and conversation.

I’ve always found human behaviour fascinating, probably because of my strange family. But I think that as I’ve got older I feel I understand less, or rather I am more aware of the enormous gulf between understanding and intervening. I am a great believer in the listening ear. And I’m very non-directive which is not fashionable today. It’s probably due to my analytic training. We all fall into traps, old familiar patterns of responding that we never learnt to change. I feel that therapy is like walking together though a maze and occasionally saying “perhaps not”, but never suggesting where to go. There are no models of health, only of pathology.

When I was working at UCL, one very influential book for me was Psychology as Metaphor. It was about qualitative science (or the feminist critique of science) and contrasted the white male approach of control and measurement (in order to predict and exploit), with the alternative approach of interaction and understanding. Of course the latter is embedded in language and its truths are rhetorical. If I can persuade you of a particular theory, then it at least has some temporary and local validity.

Wind forward to today where rhetoric is everything. In psychology/psychiatry, diagnosis is no longer just the prerogative of professions, we all can identify illnesses in ourselves and others. A proliferation of labels, pathologising, self-diagnosis, victim-hood, disability and entitlement. We all had bipolar disease after Stephen Fry (who has a narcissistic/cyclothymic personality disorder). Last week on Loose Ends, Jack Monroe was talking about her “autism”. What?! All these terms have been hijacked and now have some positive status in terms of identity politics.

I could claim I’ve got dyslexia and a touch of Asperger’s, but I don’t, I’m just me. The danger of diagnosis, of pathologising, is that it absolves people from personal responsibility. It’s not me, it’s my illness, I can’t do anything about it. So I have a very tight definition of mental illness. The rest of mental health is just the human condition. It is the stuff of literature… And maybe in a way, psychology gets caught between being the (frequently denigrated) experts of objective science and the free-for-all pedlars of popular opinion.

Perhaps I’ve become more idiosyncratic as I’ve got older. I certainly feel more passionately about things, about what to me makes sense and is true. I find myself shouting at the radio! But I think there is a danger of caring too much, of becoming distressed about the way the world is going, of feeling that there has to be something to do that will make a difference.

I remember a couple of years ago I was down at Compton Abbas airfield and met a guy who had been flying for 40 years. I had only done 16 hours. He asked me what I did, and I said I had been a psychiatrist for 40 years. “Too much caring”, he said, and he was right.

The greatest observers of humanity are novelists. Some years ago I was making a biographical documentary film and struggling to capture authenticity and intimacy. I met a novelist who said that that was what fiction was invented for. Carefully contrived events played out by actors convey more about the human condition than any observational footage.

Or perhaps not.

Sitting in my kitchen in the Wiltshire/Dorset borders on this Thursday evening, listening to Colombian salsa on YouTube, connected to the rest of world by rural broadband, yet it doesn’t quite do it.

I love conversation. I love reading and stories, and sometimes think I have lived vicariously through the lives of others. I live in the beautiful countryside of the Wiltshire/Dorset borders and run every day with my dog in the hills around Stourhead.

After years of psychoanalysis and the usual traumas of life, I really like myself and am excited about the future. I suppose most of all what I miss is joy.