walkingtalkingwriting

Nurburgring : Writing Across Boundaries (mmj)

A cast iron handle to a trap door, then down some steep slippery steps. Are you counting? And then a passageway. At the end of which a glimmer of light. A group of men. Laughter. A nightclub, and a red light inside.

Then down some slippery steps. Are you counting? Have you reached thirty nine? And what makes you think that your story last week “must be a dream”?

And, another thing, don’t apologise (it is editorial policy here not to). Don’t apologise about “James”: James Hunt (sic: meaning ‘as it is’). World Racing Champion. 1976. Hot year. Driving for McClaren and smoking forty a day. On the edge of the racing line and going flat out on the Nurburgring circuit heading for that corner where your friend’s car is already on fire.

I am counting. Because at a precise moment, the story goes that it is at the number thirty nine or in the next few seconds, I am meant to do something. Maybe it is to change gear. Maybe it is to hit the brakes. Maybe it is to start running. Or to stop. At this split-second moment I can’t remember which. How much adrenalin is pumping? Or is it the fear? Fear driving the fear.

The next six seconds, thirty nine steps, or 127 Hours. I hadn’t thought about that film much until about a month ago (based on the true story of professional mountaineer Aron Ralston). I was looking for books to recommend for a ‘Navigating Serious Illness’ section of a health chapter I was writing for a book for maturing men, and came across The Power of Two: Surviving Serious Illness with an Attitude and an Advocate by Brian and Geri Monaghan (Workman Publishing, New York. 2009). Brian and Geri keeping going; he was seriously ill, she became his health advocate, and it was Brian who told me how much he had got from the film 127 Hours. Theirs is one of the best books of "experience and common sense" I know on the subject of serious illness.

The path of Conscious Ageing? An Elders Rite of Passage? Post-traumatic growth? “James”: this time another James. James Hawkins writes across the boundaries in his latest two posts in his Good Medicine blog about the “most intense, prolonged, potentially catastrophic experience of my life”, and about the “lessons, self-compassion and post-traumatic growth”.

About his 3 Hours: three hours down a snow shute above a cliff in the mountains of Skye. I dwell on every word and rejoice in his rescue! James says he writes, “both personally and as a therapist”, and, I would add, writing across the boundaries of humanity about:
…wayfaring / the primacy of movement / the nature and constitution of the ground / divergent perspectives of earth as ground of habitation and scientific object / the intercourse of earth and sky, wind and weather / the fluidity and friction of materials / the experience of light, sound and feeling / what it means to make things / drawing and writing/ storytelling (this list as it happens is borrowed from Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, by Tim Ingold (2012)).

I am not there yet, but I am still counting.

Oh what endless fun (ak)

Sometimes, in conversations, in responding to what others are saying, we (I) say what we want to be, or that we believe should be, true rather than what is true. As usual watching our politicians is enormously instructive in this regard. It is not possible to say nothing because, well, they are supposed to be pretending to be in charge, to be responding positively to whatever crisis has arisen. But on the other hand they often have nothing intelligent to say, they are in fact overwhelmed, but obviously can’t admit it, so then they are dependent on slippery advisers to dream up some form of words that they hope will hide their nakedness. Time has become so condensed and is in such short supply that effectively there is no time. All those who cannot pretend to keep up fall by the wayside. In fact, it seems that we need new migrants coming in with each tide who are desperate enough to work flat out for any number of hours for a pittance before they are reduced, burnt out and the next wave are ready to take their places.

    At least they don’t lie about ‘trickle down’ these days. The gloves are off: this is how it is; you better get used to it. How long will it be before the financial elite and their propagandists persuade us that democracy is actually not working and it should be jettisoned in favour of . . . what? An unelected national unity government?

    Hello, this cosy little foxhole on Dartmoor is getting rather crowded – surely we can’t all fit in. Alright, alright, I’m moving up, don’t shout.

    Don’t get in a panic, our current form of democracy was always a bit of sham, a bit of a first attempt; after all those two arrogant posh boys – Giddy Osborne and Pinky Cameron – have been educated at the country’s finest establishments, so they must know what is best for us.

    You are right, of course, we are endlessly corruptible. Perhaps the only person existing on this planet who isn’t must be Aung San Suu Kyi. The rest of us are constantly caught with our trousers down in the midst of overwhelming confusions of desire. I want to fit in but I don’t agree with you. I wish I could be you but I can’t, I’m not; there are these different thoughts in my mind but on the other hand it’s a bit too scary to be separate for more than a few moments so I’ll shut up and agree with you even if I don’t agree with you. It’s simpler this way and maybe I’ll get something out of it. You know what I mean!

    I mean, could you, you know, make it worth my while.

    Anyway, what do I know?

    Did you see that grinning buffoon James Hunt after he was outed by all those emails? And the only way he managed to stutter though his statement in the Commons was to have Cameron’s finger thrust up his fundament. Or two fingers, perhaps. Come along, Jimmy, let’s see if we can talk our way out of this one. At least there was a submissive special adviser ready to fall on his sword to protect the boss who knew nothing about what was going on.

    Oh, what endless fun. A sudden possible insight: has something been done to our politicians, some surgical procedure performed in an exclusive private hospital to change politicians into stand-up comedians. And are the real politicians those who have admitted to being stand-up comedians? Or am I simply a slow learner and politicians have always been stand-up comedians?

    I think you should institute an immediate investigation.

    And I suppose by this time you have already ordered that book, but please don’t talk about being alive to Giddy and Pinky. Nobody has told them. Yet. They will have such a shock.

 

Fighting for Intentions in Berlin (ak)

Or at least spying out the cracks that allow some sort of resistance. What is the nature of our intentions? Resistance? Yes, that must be high up on the list, but what form might this resistance take?

    Shivering on Dartmoor? Yes, tick that one.

    Advancing, not terribly bravely, into the strange world of life beyond 60? Yes, tick that one.

    What about that hooker, that our old friend booksmith talks about? Does he have s someone in mind? Is Michelle available? Is she cheap? The first and last prostitute I knowingly had anything to do with was one who shouted down to me from her first floor window in Berwick Street. It must have been 1970 or 71 because that was when I was working in Soho. There is no memory of how I responded. And for that matter, I can’t remember what her precise words were. ‘Do you want to come up?’ she might have said. And I might have responded, ‘no thank you, darling.’ Though it was probably without the darling. These days I seem to have started using ‘darling’ or ‘my dear’ to almost anyone I might have met once or twice. Perhaps all vaguely intimate contact is something to be treasured.

    Though working in Soho for what was probably a few months or at most a year must have meant that I encountered (in passing) any number of what have become better known as sex workers. What was my work? Just in case you were wondering. Overseas Telegrams. How quaint! The  technology of teleprinters and sticking strips of paper with their stream of words down on what I assume was an A5 sheet of paper has been completely superseded except for the nostalgia of wedding telegrams.

    Resistance must primarily have as its target the huge industrial force of commodification with its accompanying reduction of human value. I guess what it mostly amounts to is a tiny (but maybe not irrelevant) action of human solidarity. Like walking. Which is where this all started – something very simple: walking. Doing it and naming it. And even in the face of the divine comedy, talking and writing: endeavouring to nail the fragile sheet of paper, with the ink running, obscuring, losing the possibility of anybody actually reading it, in the howling wind and lashing rain of the night. ‘For f---ks sake, everything is fine; keep shopping’ is what they said when I protested.

    Can we put our little shoulders to the wheel of Debord’s détournement. Turning it round. But it’s hard not to feel trapped by the appearance of Beckett’s angel- tramps seemingly stuck in some sort of purgatory, sensing the ticking of the clock, the winding down of one’s life force, and standing back in amazement as the younger generations come forward to take their places in the world, full of creative pizzazz.

    It feels like a narrow passage that I have to force our way through . . . sounds rather like another session of rebirthing doesn’t it. Oh dear, do I have the energy?

    Yes, come on, get on with it. OK OK. What sort of soap opera is this? Is there anybody there?

 

Beckett, Bakhtin, Balaño . . . (ak)

Having just finished 2666 – jaw dropped, stunned, amazed – how did he do that? is it all done with mirrors? – I am obliged to question your surgical violence (Being Cut in Half). Do the nearly 900 pages amount to a big book? Yes, I guess . . . but, of course, it's not about the number of pages, rather, like Dr Who's Tardis, it's about what's inside. And in this case, all of us poor, lost humanity streams through those pages.

 

You use the word pornography, but that's not the right word. There's tremendous fluidity and a graphic force (a comic book!!?) but without the limitation of a specific image. A world broken by our violence, by our loss, mediated through a vast range of characters, and the nature and practice of writing; a world that is opened through the work of literary criticism, looked at, examined through the lenses of Europe and Mexico. Opens up the proverbial can of worms: violence, male violence to women, sexuality, war and our heroic attempts to make a life, to make it real, to make something of ourselves, to make understanding. The dynamic of borders and depth: deep inside Mexico, yet right by the US border; the trampling of borders as the Wehrmacht marches east and west, expanding and then contracting in retreat and defeat. There's the mysterious writer von Archimboldi - lost, invisible, a giant striding the world, dragged from the sea into terror and violence.

 

And talking of giants, who is this gaunt, paunchy figure striding, no, more of a stumbling, dragging his skinny nag behind him? Could it be Don Quixote? No, I do believe it's Squire Maxie up to his tricks. It seems we have an arrangement to meet in the tiltyard . . . I shall have to knock my armour into shape, look for a few weapons, or perhaps I can hurl some bricks from behind this wall.

Flushing out (mmj)

Aaand - Maxim, what about him.

Maxim heads off for two nearly back-to-back (creative) writing weeks on Monday. His fantasy had been that, having stepped off the Pall Care academic merry-go-round in September, with 'all that freedom' in the last two months he would have 20,000 words of his best seller book under his belt by now, and be up and roaring and ready to go for the next 20,000. The reality was he slipped into abjection [ref: J Kristeva. Powers of Horror, An essay in abjection, tr L Roudiez. 1982, Columbia U Press... essential reading,  absolutely essential] having lost the ability to write one word. One thing was the need to stroll [ref: W Benjamin, tr H Eiland, K McLaughlin. Das Passagenwerk (the arcades project). 2002, Harvard U P - (almost at random) P555: ' Baudelaire in his review of Madame Bovary: "Realism-a repulsive insult flung in the face of every analytic writer, a vague and elastic word which for the ordinary man signifies not a new means of creation, but a minute description of trivial details." Baudelaire, L'Art Romantique, p413], another thing was a deep longing to hear the voices of other languages in his ears [ref: The Dialogic Imagination, four essays by M M Bakhtin, ed M Holquist, tr C Emerson, M Holquist. 1981, U of Texas P] and other reading (currently Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, bueno, bueno, bueno).

In other words… grace for our needs, grace for our needs, while, my beloved began her fourth year of pschoanalytic training in London, ak was finding his feet again in the Dartmoor wilderness , and I began learning another tango song which I am due to perform (scary but so good) in two weeks, Chiquilin de Bachin (listen to the Roberto Goyeneche version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCT5FYVIbu0 on U Tube, bueno, bueno, bueno) ... grace for our needs, the gift of space.

Here is the working title for my book, Life Before. Life before death you might imagine it means, and I did and for quite some time, in a 'depressed dissident' sort of state of mind thinking of all the things I had learned about this year that need to change about End of Life care and so on, We know them all, don’t we, We do, We do. Then I recently began to see the meaning as being life before birth, an umbilical or ur-meaning, or both meanings in fact but, muchas importantes, in that order, decreation before creation. So Life Before... it is, Es, ça, sa, one way or another, the mix of friendship and aloneness, flushing out our conversations into the light of day.

 

mmj

Little minds, big minds (ak)

There's the brain-ache of attempting to force thought into existence, into a form recognisable in language (or image, or music, or dance). I was tempted to put the word 'new' before thought, but I fear that 'new' can be something of a weasel word, perverting, distorting, distracting. After all it might be just as valuable to rediscover an old thought. At the same time we (humans) do need to find (new?) solutions, to give birth to those thoughts that move us towards the paradigm shifts that will enable us to, for example, remake our world in conformity to evolving ecological concerns; to manage a better balance between egalitarianism and individual freedom.

There is the push in me to think, to grapple, to struggle . . . but then a doubting thought intervenes: well, what difference will my little bit of thought make? Why not leave it up to them? The big guns, those gifted with great minds.

From shuffling to sauntering (ak)

Two figures – they could be out of Beckett – shuffle on to the stage. One represents darkness, stupidity, density; the other I think of as "occasional sparks of brilliance." Bereavement rendered me stupid. I couldn't think. The trauma of it seemed to break my connection to my previous life, as though the event had brought my own 'old life' to an end but at the same time I had to continue going through the motions of a life.

After a few years I found my way to the Mass of the Catholic Church. A place of respite, of refuge; it seemed to make sense, give a form to what could barely be put into words. One way of looking at it might be that the Church grew, expanded, developed following the traumatic loss of Jesus. Jesus, God incarnate, his only son, murdered by us, a sacrifice for us, lifted up to his father's side, and the promise to return to us. The Mass enters into and remembers the crime, the loss, the sacrifice, the rising . . . we too can rise from this . . . in death.

Does the Church merely wish to lock us into endless bereavement, the guilt of the survivor? I wish it were that simple. There is also talk of love and the freedom to be what we really are . . . but always in the light (yoke) of obedience to authority.

Yet to grow up is to assume that authority ourselves. It is stunning to bear in mind how recent it is that we've taken on the exploration of full democracy, the rights of and the respect for each individual life. And the argument is not finished; there are many among us whose instinct is to clamour for authority.

It appears self-evident to me that the Church should be on the side of democracy but its own psychological and organisational structures are monarchical and habitually non-trusting. A state which leaves it seeming to pull against us. Instead, what would it take for the Church to celebrate our long and problematic growing-up? Rather than (as it sometimes appears) enmeshing itself in a sulking ressentiment.

Don Cupitt, in his Jesus and Philosophy, marks the line of moral teachers from Jesus, through Blake and Dostoyevsky to Nietzsche. Those four have made and continue to make the wires hum. This reminds me of the impact they had on me: Jesus in my childhood/adolescence, the latter three in my late teens/early twenties as I pretended to saunter nonchalantly into adulthood during the late sixties/early seventies - informing my notions of morality.

What a lovely word - ressentiment (ak)

An evocation of younger years. I'm thinking of the task of protecting one's self-esteem from the knocks of misadventure and the drudgery of daily life in those years before one's life has really got going; discovering that one is nearer the bottom of the pile than the top; working out those strategies by which one might not only survive but relish the small victories, the grim satisfactions of clawing out a niche in the pellmell anarchy of social life. Three words: defensiveness; resistance; ressentiment. 

I'm not exactly in that ressentiment but there's a memory and a taste of it and suddenly (as it were) there's so much studying to do. Earlier in my life I was too busy being angry and following my own path; yes, studying, but through narrowed eyes - all that one is likely to do (at best?) is reinvent the wheel.

It is necessary to get up to speed before launching oneself (again) into the world. And what about joining the club – a place to think with others.

Always trying to find a place to stand (ak)

During yoga practice ( usually at the beginning) I endeavour to (re)find the way of standing in which I sense a verticality of muscular/skeletal connection. It comes when I've got my feet 'sorted out' – heel, outside edge and ball of foot in good contact with the ground. The result is a flow of connection from feet, up through legs, spine to crown of head. Shoulders relax; I'm alive and easy, light and balanced.

Like planets orbiting some sun, a variety of psychological/emotional aspects circle a me, an ego, some central identity: faith, critical thought, reason, 'I'm passionate about . . .', the unconscious, irony, humour, and all the rest. A spectrum of attractive/unattractive, another of comfortable/uncomfortable draw me this way and that.

I cannot live without faith.

I cannot live without reason.

Left and right. Nought and one. Being and not-being. Balance and off-balance. I believe and I doubt.

Me and other.

Rich Pickings (ak)

A line in Jorie Graham's poem Later in Life caught my attention: 'there is something I must tell you, you do not need existence, these words, praise be, they can for now be said.'

You do not need existence. I do not need existence. This is one of those underneath ideas, beneath the surface; ideas that make me wobble, crash to the floor. Back on the surface of things, there's a line of thought: consumerism has highlighted NEED. I need this, I need that. I need to live, I have a right to live. Consumerism segues into rights; we understand about life, about stuff through the distorting lens of consumerism and human rights.

To not need existence opens up life as outrageous, gratuitous, miraculous gift.

Yesterday the Guardian (guardian.co.uk)reported on the findings of research conducted by Nuffield Health under the heading 'No sex please, we're British and we're lazier than ever.'

We don't necessarily like the gift of life because it demands something (a lot) from us. On the other hand we are very addicted to life and don't like the idea of its removal.