Your mother’s tongue is cut from you. The language of strangers happens to use the same words, same accents, and thereby taunts: no voice is hers. No footbeat. You may as well stop entreating with your baby-cry bleat, the shuffling nurse might snag the sound as if demanding of a drug. Sedating. I’m not attempting to shut you up. I like your temper, like your fuss. Howling over such a loss makes sense. The reason for your howling: cost. Turn your tuned attention to your cot. Soft. To that which holds. To the moon which keeps the same face, same shine, for all of us, rock: surrendered or not. Updated photo is of me and my biological mother in 1989, just over 3 years after our reunion, (after being separated when she was just 20, me,10 days old, relinquished by her for adoption) jointly celebrating our close birthdays with champagne at her home (a free range chicken farm) in Bucks. Taken by my stepfather (her Palme d'Or winning film director/producer husband) Geoff. May he Rest In Peace, died recently, 2023.
“Adoptees, they’re all mad they are,” said one of the young characters in the TV series Misfits, or, since this is from memory, from back in approximately 2010, something very similar. As an adoptee myself, I laughed out loud. Later quoting it to a fellow-adoptee I’m renaming Lynn, hoping she’d be amused too.
“We’re all perfect.” Lynn countered, bristly. Which arrived in my ears like a sprinkling of fairy dust. Whilst laughter can be a tonic, Lynn had given me an example of an adoptee showing resistance to one of the several pernicious myths and erroneous assumptions about us. Not shaming me for having been amused: she got how the Misfits line worked for me as a joke. Yet was demonstrating how that perspective uncomically broached the level of respect she requires, desires, and deserves. Offended and hurt her.
Like magic. How had she learnt that trick, that honesty, that dignified resistance? That telling response which seemed to trump my can-take-a-joke amusement at the Misfits character’s words? It had seemed such a funny idea: I could easily grasp how non-adoptees might perceive adoptees that way, while knowing only too well how ‘maddening’ it can repeatedly be to be one, as any non-adoptee would know if they were one: including, other people casually, or even brutally, perceiving them that way. Treating them that way. If only they knew! the humour of it, for me, as I’d tried to share with Lynn, who did know. Share the tonic. Whilst Lynn was reacting to the jest as unjust. Offering me an alternative way of regarding that shared nerve being hit by it. As important, perpetual, real, and not to be trivialised.
As important an idea as not throwing a baby out with the bathwater.
After having traced my natural father during Lockdown – who wrote, civilly, but is currently unable to pursue a relationship with me or my family because his wife refuses to allow it – I got back in touch with PAC (the Post-Adoption Centre) after a gap of decades. For support. Beyond the telephone helpline of theirs I was gratefully and fruitfully able to use, there’s much post-adoption research and other material to catch up on. Bright new organisations, books, blogs, websites.
Thus, I recently read an article by an adoptee who’d asked her husband to help her write about what being married to an adoptee was like, at least, for him; a patient man. She said she was building up to a similar article – when she’d got the courage up to consult her children – about what it’s like to be the child of an adoptee, at least, for them. He did not call his wife ‘mad’ nor in any way suggest she was. He understood her situation. Neither did the counsellor on the phone suggest I was ‘mad’. On the contrary. She understood. Too.
Informed. Free of condescension, negative judgement, and confusion.
PAC seeks to provide support to adoptees lifelong. Time and trial – and social error, for example, misunderstanding of, and underestimation of, the consequences – has proved this to be necessary. One adoptee wrote that they found, rather than their life having become easier, in terms of coping with the effects of having been adopted, as they’d hoped and expected, the opposite was true. Much as I’d also like certain adoption issues to be discarded ‘water’, irrelevant, some adoption issues have remained ‘in-the-bath’ relevant. Pervasive.
BORING! I’ve railed, trying to escape those issues. HOPELESS! I’ve bewailed, in despair, unable to. But recognising that’s my lot allows me to embrace more of the wonderful aspects of my life, to nurture the ‘baby’, along with the barely bearable, default, ones, that ‘bathwater’. For example, a tendency towards a helpless, painful, emotional response which is an automatic reliving of early separation. In-wired, neurologically, indelibly. The ‘nerve’ the Misfits quote touched: ‘Ha ha!’ or ‘Ouch.’ Or, simply, WRONG…
Lynn’s response referred to the internal adaptations adoptees make and the processing we must do, refusing to allow it all to be sweepingly overlooked, discredited, invalidated, or mocked.
The validity of the stigmatising idea of ‘madness’ applied to people who had the protracted experiences of being transplanted, whole-bodily, from one set of genealogical lines into another, by those who had no such experiences, has been debunked by extensive information: the effects upon such ‘transplants’ are, by now, known to be normal and predictable, with variations according only to subtleties of personality, inherent genetic tendencies, and circumstances. Lynn exaggerated, since, who is perfect, adopted or not?! But made her vital, necessary, point. That, in terms of being an adoptee, both the beautiful baby and the same-old soapy bathwater of it, are intrinsically, perfectly, inalterably, linked. As adoptees, we’re perfectly alright, just as we are.
Photo is of me visiting my daughter, Beatrix Bee Hamilton Crinnion, in Sweden last month. Just as in England we have stock lines such as ‘as the actress said to the bishop’, to append to any hospitable statement to make it a (blue) gag, which was the example I gave, on hearing of this, of a similar joke-maker; in Sweden: one of their append-able lines, is, ‘that was my nickname in high school’. (To make a surreal-type gag.) Which, at the time, I could hardly wait to use. And, there, round the corner, in Stockholm’s very lovely Gamla Stan, this pub: “Ah, ‘Lady Hamilton’! Bee, that was my nickname in high school…”
Raised under my adopted, and still official name, Elaine Hamilton, rather than my birth name, Stella Bahin, did sometimes get called that as a child, as it goes, and still do. Then, almost immediately, back in England, I overheard a priest saying to another man, ‘…as the actor said to the bishop’ and could hardly believe my ears! Traditionally it’s always been ‘actress’ – lay off us adoptees, we’ve got enough on our plates already, thank you – but, has PC gone ‘mad’, or what?!!
When Lauren Burns’ mother confessed to her, age 21, she’d been conceived by anonymous sperm donor, not in marital union with the man who’d nurtured her lifelong as his own whom she knew and loved as Dad, Lauren was tilted. Found herself in lasting shock, according to her newly published book Triple Helix, My donor-conceived story, which I read on Kindle yesterday, Day 4 of Lent. After having read an article in The Guardian about it (as per above link).
Lauren’s subsequent quest to rebalance herself by uncovering the man behind sperm-donor-code C11, led her to friends and foes. On a mission that appeared to be reverse to societal life’s flow and at first, at least, destructive. By those – fogged by those conditions of unacknowledged or unadmitted relative privilege that create destructive prejudice – refusing to recognise it was Lauren’s life that had been deviated from a flow most take for granted. Artificially. (Biological heritage.) And by those – perhaps who might otherwise have been forced to concede power, or status, real or imagined – vested in cleaving to the established construction despite its concomitant need for perpetuated obfuscations, refusal of rights, and denial of feelings. Fears. For example.
Lauren had been supposed to accept the officiated block to half her ancestral family tree forever as her lot. Had been supposed to keep the medical and legal facilitators’ promise of anonymity – made before Lauren had been in the picture, before she’d been able to think, or speak, let alone agree or disagree; had been supposed to keep a promise made without the foresight of considering she wouldn’t remain a donor-conceived child forever; had been supposed to keep a promise made without consideration of her becoming an educated, inquisitive, scientifically logical adult, one day; and had been supposed to keep a promise made without consideration of her ever being at least equal to those policy-makers, with her fresh, expert, experiential point of view about the proceedings – permanently.
The arrangement, that is, had not been supposed to have been, from the offset, let alone to have ever become, tilt.
Lauren met social workers who could look up and know her natural father’s name. Medical staff. Bureaucrats. Whilst – belittlingly and unbefittingly – not mature, professional, highly literate, she. His own genetic daughter: barred paternalistically from those paternalistic records, much as she was able to comprehend what had made the system that way, empathetic (forgiving her beloved parents, with understanding and compassion, for their years of lying to her for example); and the reasons why, socially historic. Lauren, grown up. Also facing hurtful, inaccurate, and biased assumptions about her personality. Stigmatisation. Even being trolled thus – since she disliked those arrangements made with respect to her existence, she should abort herself, late – rather than sensitively and intelligently campaign, as she was.
Lauren, thank God, neither aborted her life nor her mission but persisted and won through, helping, eventually, to change the law.
Picture is of my first amaryllis, blossoming, from what was gifted to me as a bulb in a pot. It was handy for me to find out more about the plant it specially is, to help grow it fructuously (as it were) as poss.
Half Man is the best thing I’ve seen on telly since Small Prophets (which is nothing like it, except they’re both, it seems to me, lovingly-constructed). One reviewer complained it was too much Richard Gadd, what with him starring in it, and it being his creation and all. Similarly, Baby Reindeer was also Gadd’s creation, and he starred in that as well, although in that case, it was fictionalised memoir whilst Half Man is offered as pure fiction. Presumably with not a law suit to follow this time. Yet still, for more than one reviewer, it’s seemingly all about contradictory aspects of Gadd’s own psyche apportioned between two characters; the one Gadd plays, which is Ruben; and Niall, played by Jamie Bell. (Ruben and Niall are played by Gadd and Bell respectively in their adult incarnations, that is. Both compellingly. The pair’s youthful versions are played by other also-compelling actors.)
Even if Gadd had delved deep into his own psyche and experience to find these quasi-brothers, I don’t see that as any detraction or limitation: Ruben and Niall represent alternative types of the modern constructed male so well, they archetypically represent many a man today. Existing with unsustainable conflict. And the eye-wateringly unflinching story dramatizes their warped emotions as if in a long-drawn-out emotional car crash with the sound of sparking scraping metal and smell of blood and raw human meat throughout, to put it metaphorically. Painful. Which I enjoyed not sadistically, or masochistically as a watch, but as an admirer of the art which produced such a viscerally shrilling note.
So, when there are touches of connection, tenderness, honesty and insight, they’re dazzlingly poignant. Providing quiet moments when we can see the careening scathed story-vehicle coming to a halt before it’s been crushed into a blob of wreckage and we can imagine the terrible wounds that one can almost taste, tended and healed. Such as in the final episode, during a prison scene, when Ruben discloses his hidden trauma which is the very fulcrum of the entire series. A revelation which brings everything together across the decades for us, as the audience-members, and perhaps for Ruben and Niall at last…
I enjoyed this not being binge-watchable (at first, anyway) and being required to wait to watch it from week to week for once. As of old. It made it feel more retro, all the more aptly as its initial setting is in the 80s. The juggling of its timeline works well too, it tricked me, nicely, encouraging me to assume something didn’t happen because something else had. Almost completely fooled me, that is, but not quite, since it’s my tendency to keep an open mind when it comes to plots.
I had a terrifying friend from around the same era in which Half Man begins, the character Ruben reminded me of. Like him, she got into what she thought of as ‘fights’, but were really her taking out her life’s heartbreaks on someone random in the form of GBH. Her way of letting off steam, she said. A relaxation-type technique of hers, for example, after one of her brothers had recently died of a heroin overdose, believed to have been murder.
“I’ve just got to fight someone, anyone, I just got to do it,” she told me, dry-eyed, her hands fists, her jaw clenched, menacing with pent-up tears.
If I’d so much as flinched from her then, I reckon that person for her to ‘have a fight with’ would’ve been yours truly. I had not wanted that to happen. She was quite tall, Irish, wiry and muscular like a boy, her small breasts high on the chest like they’d been stuck on, not grown there. I imagined I would never have looked the same again. Instead, I’d quickly but calmly dropped to a sit by her feet, as if taken with the emotion of her brother’s loss (I was, it had been tragic, but I was also trying to defuse her aggression), crossed my legs, and talked about him. She soon sat beside me, talking about him too: one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known. She walked on her tiptoes and laughed like a gully. I remember her with a smile, warmly, and how I’d mostly managed to steer clear of her for years, even by then.
Unlike Niall with Ruben I loved her, but never sought her out. Like the brother, she died not as young as him, but still young, about a decade later.
My main way of letting off steam is, usually, writing stuff, and sometimes blogging fragments. Like this. In the prison scene in Half Man, their moment was close enough to the one that happened between my deceased friend and I, above, to bring it back. I cried. I think Half Man was excellently crafted.
PS Aren’t Gadd-as-Ruben’s (pictured) deep, thoughtful grunts iconic.
Professor Will Self had a stem cell transplant less than two years ago with only a one in five chance of surviving two years. This precariousness is partly why – while hoping he’ll attain many, many more than two years of life from then – I not only attended the professor’s April 30 public event, but also attended his public event on April 23, in Shepherd’s Bush. God forbid, but either event might’ve been his swansong. In fact, his appearing at all was a risk since his immune system is chemically suppressed to give his clever treatment medications an opportunity to do their work. The risk-taking was alarming. Why?
But now, with no such future events to look forward to currently, the weeks stretch ahead relatively anticlimactically. I could’ve got used to every week having at least one Professor Will Self event in it. (Safely distanced.) There’s plenty of his work to read each week instead though. I’m pleased to have already read, in the opening lines of his recent paper ‘Mortal Morality: Towards an Ethic of Finitude’, that he finally admits he’s a poet at heart. At least, that’s how I interpret the Wordsworth reference he makes there, anyway. Not a poet in form, or layout, or shape, or rhyme, or even by obvious use of metaphor and such, but his work is poetry.
On the Thursday evening just gone, at the venue – Hampstead Garden Suburb Free Church – I gently placed my copy of The Quantity Theory of Morality into the handy wooden holder for bibles and hymnals and song sheets and orders of service built onto the back of the wooden chair in front of me. Before bending down in my own seat to slip my bare feet into the sandals I’d carried into the building and buckling their straps to my ankles, trying not to unduly irritate the two men sat almost sardine close on either side of me, now I’d closed their perhaps mutually enjoyed gap by personally making the chair between them not vacant anymore with my latecomer’s presence. Having already squeezed past the man at the edge of the row, now on my left, to get there.
I hoped Professor Will Self was in as fine fettle and mettle as he looked and sounded, and quite as comfortable in his surroundings and with his pleasant-seeming Prospect Magazine interviewer as he appeared to be. The building’s lofty-ceilinged acoustics were well suited to his tones. I could only see him distantly and partially in glimpses revealing his cute fluffy-looking hair or his cute fluffy-looking beard, or sometimes – oh benevolent fortune – both his cute hair and his cute beard at once, between the other audience members’ heads. Mostly, if not all, much taller than me.
I could see more of the man when he stepped up to the raised pulpit to read from The Quantity Theory of Morality, which book was but one of several foci of the evening. He spoke with all the born-to-it authority of someone from the long line of vicars and rabbis that he there declared and seemed to prove he is. I thought about Russell Brand, in contrast. Professor Will Self held a book that was not even a bible, and still produced a veritably sacred effect. And even though, unlike Brand, the professor’s described himself as ‘faith adjacent’, not ‘Christian’, he seemed in place in church next to a vast banner decorated with crosses, natural and convincing. Perhaps there’s more religious faith (as well as poetry) inside the professor than he lets on.
When he sat back down at ground level, I couldn’t see him at all anymore according to the tilts of those audience member’s heads between my own and the front. I’d selected my seat, quite far back, in a reckless rush. Hoping to minimise fuss. I looked around admiring the light in the church instead, which was fierily beautiful, this Beltane Eve, prior to the arrival of the sunset’s reds that would emerge once I was back on the North Circular. Meanwhile, no less for my restricted view, I was pleased to my absolute brim to be there.
When I’d stopped in my car, with the venue directly ahead of me, it had been 6.30pm, the precise time the event had been scheduled to start. The Eventbrite ticket details had warned latecomers would only be admitted within the first 15 minutes. Delayed within several traffic jams during my drive up from the south coast, I’d feared the threatened fate of refused entry was to be mine. But when I’d finally parked with my destination in sight inside the stipulated grace-time-limit, I’d still needed a few minutes.
I’d switched off my nav app, unplugged my phone from its cigarette lighter portal charger, and concentrated. Discombobulated. ‘Keys.’ I’d been driving for three and a quarter hours non-stop, often anxiously because of the unanticipated time-pressure, to get there. Which meant I’d been tethered bodily via my brain to my phone, and via my feet and hands to my motor car, the whole way. Punctuality-panic took over.
I’d yanked at one of my flat, worn, driving shoes; no, the laces needed untying. ‘Think.’ My hands felt trembly, though they didn’t shake. Untying laces, I drifted dreamily into the remembered pages of Umbrella, wondering – again – about the fictional Audrey Death who’d remained locked in repetitive mechanised action (a non-fictional, horrifying, illness) as if still in her old factory, decades on. A character who stands with me for any sense of motion having been uncomfortably retained beyond the action. I logged these latest Audrey-Death-type connections to apply them to my next attempts at formulating an opinion about AI. Then reminded myself to get into the venue where that very creator of Umbrella, was, right now.
Dumping my shoes and grabbing my sandals, too pressed to change into them, I’d climbed determinedly out the car, slammed the door, and done a Lola Budd towards the open door of the night’s venue, with a quantity of springiness that surprised me.
If any mind is hopeless for me to try and imaginatively project my own mind upon, with any degree of accuracy, I reckon it’s Professor Will Self’s. But, as I’d reduced my pace to what I’d thought was a perfectly decorous level to enter the church – and noticed the very gentleman sitting nearby in front of the already seated congregation, I mean, audience; though he didn’t look at me, he seemed to glance at the ground near enough to my person to have been able to have seen me completely in his peripheral vision. Though his expression – one of amusement – was micro at that point, it did seem to me that he was sophisticatedly suppressing a laugh. Which, in hindsight, occurred to me, might’ve been triggered by the sight of a flustered, decidedly mature woman, not behaving in the manner of a woman who’s decidedly mature, minutes late, padding into the church barefoot.
Near the end of the talk, I wondered if I might’ve missed the minister perhaps having said for some reason not to rest our new books in the chairs’ holders. I noticed that nobody I could see from my seat, at least, no one apart from me, had placed their book in their holder, everyone else’s lay empty in front of them. Their books on their laps. Did those people have a sense that putting the book into that place might break an ethical or moral taboo, or holy commandment, even? Too naughty? I’ve read it, it ain’t, but I love to think those people who’d sat with The Quantity Theory of Morality on their lap for the entire duration of the talk, might’ve thought so.
But, long before I’d noticed that, this happened:
A white dove landed in the window above the professor, facing the interior of the church, and stayed there for about a minute. Perhaps if I’d been able to see the professor, and had been looking at him, I might not’ve noticed that dove, so high up. I strained to try and see what the professor was doing. His left hand was raised. If he’d been raising both arms, I couldn’t tell.
Still not quite having shaken off the drive-mode, I took the dove’s presence in my stride, as one has to take what one perceives in one’s stride, while driving: pragmatic. I thought, ‘Oh right, look, so there are doves living round here, they perch up there, probably happens loads, no biggie.’ Scepticism-heavy. All executive – from having been on the road for quite a long time, for me, when making a small mistake could mean mashed metal etcetera – instead of being alertly open to what my senses brought me in an inquisitive, accepting, way. Still too proscribed-sign-follower (and signaller) as opposed to spontaneous-sign-participant.
I did consider jotting the professor’s words down just in case they didn’t stick, under the circumstances – I’d had the presence of mind to have brought a pen and pad with me – but that would’ve necessitated a deep rummage into my pocket like an irksome fidget, potentially elbowing the man to my right. Didn’t have the wherewithal to wiggle my pen and pad out. I also thought to take a snap, but my phone was in my left pocket, plus I didn’t think it was really appropriate for me to take pictures, and I also would’ve also risked elbowing the man to my left. I was feeling out of sorts about having been delayed – foolishly not having allowed enough time for my journey – and therefore, sheepish. I needed the loo, which I hadn’t had time to use, and needed a drink of water, or tea, or both. I lacked the required sense of confidence to have pulled either action off. So there I was, hemmed.
When I’d eventually got home, I found I could recall much of the evening. Parts of the talk. Like, how the professor had been the first to foresee and speak out about how mobile phones and social media culture were bound to damage literacy-levels. Now apparent, with Sweden very recently reverting to pen, paper and books for children, because of the appalling results after all these years, as he’d predicted. Alone. Not Martin Amis, not Dame Hilary Mantel, but Will ‘Casandra’ Self. Derided for it at the time like a then-Prince Charles over the climate changes he’d witnessed firsthand and spoken up about as an observant and concerned worldwide traveller. Now vindicated.
But, I failed and have continued to fail to recover my mental note about what the professor had been saying when the dove landed. Little natural moments like that, generally – a pair of crows flying together above my tiny courtyard garden, perhaps, and one shedding a feather that happened to land hot in my hand, for example – and similar moments, in church, specifically, charm me. I’d not expected to have an experience like it during a literature- rather than faith-based talk, albeit within a church, so it hadn’t properly dawned on me what it meant to me, there and then. How annoyingly remiss of me! Plus I’d thought I’d probably have seen many doves – ‘clearly doves live locally,’ I’d thought, ‘and they clearly settle up there, habitually,’ I’d thought – but by the time I’d left I’d only seen that one, that once, briefly. A symbol, traditionally, of peace.
Perhaps I should relax a bit. That professor really did look, and sound, very well indeed.
P.S. At the weekend (in mid-May) I saw a post on X that reminded me Professor Will Self did once sit on a game show summoning ‘the dove from above’ (Shooting Stars) by Jove. Funny old world, isn’t it.
Luke Wright, last night, appeared in Portsmouth UK with his one-man (we’re all men as a species, male or female, it would seem sexist to me to not embrace) show promoting and featuring his latest poetry collection, the autobiographical story of his life as an adoptee, Later Life Letter. At The Lens studio, Guildhall. I so happen to currently read at least one autobiographical adult adoptee story per week, sometimes one per day, because I follow an excellent online group dedicated to publishing them. None of the stories in that group, so far, have been written in rhyme or with particular attention to rhythm and other poetic devices. Of course, for me (and all the other audience members at The Lens, it seemed) the show was a very entertaining, highly structured, artistic way to experience Wright’s sharing of his story. The online versions I regularly read tend to be potted and factual. I subscribe to the online group, and others, as an adult adoptee myself. I attended the show as an adoptee. At one point I noticed Luke address the audience, generalising, as if, collectively, we were one big ‘non-adoptee’: “you”. Which is a good example of how the majority tends to exclude the minority, dog-whistled to a member of his minority there: “me”.
Mildly bruising, knowing Wright was alluding to the majority’s tendency to deliver such subtle wallops as one who’d undoubtedly been so walloped. Frequently. I don’t know if it would have felt more uncomfortable if Wright had said something like, ‘some of you here tonight were probably adopted too’ or not. I like the way he did it. And this is it, what I think is most important about Wright’s show: (Although I have another name for Wright too now after seeing his performance, as might anyone else who’s seen it.) The first time I saw Wright was in December 2005 at Lumb Bank (click to read earlier blog which also mentions that performance poetry week), Hebden Bridge, as part of Aisle 16, his ‘Poetry Boyband’ that had been awarded Time Out Critics Choice of the Year earlier that same year, including with ‘band’ co-founder Ross Sutherland among their number. Wright mentioned his ‘friend Ross’ yesterday, how he’d advised Wright not to try and write about the whole of life or he’d end up staring at a wall, but if he was to write about the wall…
(Feel I have to mention nominative determinism here, in Luke Wright’s case, the homophonic ‘write’ being like an imperative verb to him, although, poetry-writing was clearly in the blood… His genetic-potential ‘blueprint’ well-printed in his case at least in this way despite the extremely early familial abruption.)
Such a great tip, from Ross, I think. (I noted what looked to me like a useful contribution or two to the show from the poet, comedian, and minstrel, John Hegley, as well.) The restraint was repeatedly evident throughout. It seemed that the way Wright approached every potentially painful event, every profoundly deep fact with far-reaching implications, he examined the bricks and mortar of it, only implying the vast things. Metonymy. The sky beneath which any wall sits implied. The land it’s necessarily built on, with its politics, its kings, etc, indirectly alluded to. And he also used humour, frequently self-deprecating. (Bringing disparate ideas together.) For example, he said when checking his privilege, as is so frequently required of us all nowadays, that it was taking him so long – he stated the next using an exaggerated posh accent – that he had to outsource the work to someone with less privilege ‘who lives in a hot country’. He hadn’t even added ‘handsome’ or ‘tall’ by then, not that it was also-UK-dwelling also-white me who got the job of finishing the list for him. But I noticed how his making that joke disarmed audience members who experienced giggly laughter to hear it, members clearly without some of the privileges he listed. (Though maybe other, different privileges of their own.) One thing an adoptee raised in a society largely comprised of consanguineous families, among people who wouldn’t dream of being separated from their close blood relatives, learns, is a sensitivity to not having, or having been deprived of, what others have, often take for granted, and dislike being reminded of.
That’s what Wright was doing there, acknowledging his good fortune, acknowledging his blessings. The gift of language is one, an excellent memory, another. Almost the only part of the show he read, rather than recited, was one description of ‘the primal wound’. That is, a list of negative factors that might affect a person, lifelong, who was relinquished when young (for whatever reason) by their mother and other biological family members. Wright contrasted that diagnostic list with an attitude that having been adopted was no big deal at all, a version he’d long-held, reckoning in hindsight that the truth might lie somewhere in between. (Or paradoxically, in Wright’s case, those opposites brought together, to produce near-to-tears laughter.)
He resisted and resists a diagnostic and pessimistic view of being an adoptee – received as read – with the words and words and words he himself has carefully composed and written. Poetry as resistance and a way of maintaining mental health… But, at the end, when Wright jokes he wants his own kids to know the life he’s known (cliché), and states he’s therefore going to give them up for adoption, the audience knows enough to react with shocked noises indicating a rejection of that idea, as well as laughter. He’s made his point. Agreeably. With respectfulness to all his family members, biological and adoptive. Movingly, without manipulation but with stealthy steady craft. When adoptees who speak about the experience in person-centred rather than society-centred ways – from a firm (limited) position of suppliant gratitude, for example – so easily alienate or even anger others. What an achievement, bravo to Luke Wright, poet, family man, adoptee, for putting his adoption-relevant story so beautifully, fully and impactfully.
To properly ponder Will Self’s latest novel, which I’ve only read on Kindle so far, I need to read the book in the form in which it was intended to be enjoyed, as a book. In the same way some films can be watched on the little old boxes that are all most of us have to watch them on at home, but really need to be viewed large on a cinema screen: I need to hold this novel print-scented and organic in my warm organic mitts. Incidentally, I’d read one section before, since it had been published as a short story, then made into a short film starring David Tennant. My recollected images from that film wove into my reading experience, pleasantly. I wondered how The Quantity Theory of Morality might be filmed from start to finish with the fluidity of the characters it contains, now the ideas in the short story have been expanded to novel-size.
After having read, years before, the third in Will Self’s epic trilogy of novels, Phone, it had taken me a while for my reactions to occur. Waves and waves of overwhelming visceral grief, at the prospect of there maybe being no more Zack Busner: mourning a fictional character. Because, at once, I’d also been taking on the seriousness of Will Self’s health condition – all the way back then – which had seemed to have placed a much-reduced limit on the remaining years of his life.
In The Quantity Theory of Morality, dear Zack Busner’s back! What’s the opposite to having been surprised, as I’d been, by an extreme experience of overwhelming grief? Well, this was it; I felt the opposite while reading The Quantity Theory of Morality. It was as if I’d been rolled up tight and packed away by those initial feelings of grief, and now felt those feelings unravelling me like a whizzing sparkling Catherine wheel. Joy.
From what I’ve read and heard Will Self say in interviews about it, he’s been through many uncomfortable treatments and much medication to have been able to achieve this. Not that he’s said much, as far as I’ve seen or heard. Publicly. Very little, I think, considering the extent of it, only simply, minimally, describing something of what it’s meant to him to have, so far, survived cancer. What he’s had to do. Apparently, he even has several more projects on the go. There’s hope. Not only hope, but celebration of the huge success of what he’s done here. Again. After all.
I’ve only seen glowing reviews so far of The Quantity Theory of Morality and cannot disagree with any of them.
A female fan at one of Will Self’s events at which he was promoting the second of the books in his epic trilogy, Shark, over a decade ago, asked him how she should pronounce ‘Zack Busner’: “Is it Bus-ner, or Bhuz-ner, or what?”
He laughed a little, seemingly to himself, and said, “However the hell you want!”
Will Self is not a pedant. That though, seemed brusque. However, the woman was clearly more impressed by the originality of his answer, and by her astonishment at discovering he truly didn’t care about things like that as an author (who still seems to care about every single word he writes so very much), than put out by his suggestion that it had been a dumb question to have asked him. (Perhaps partly because of her dimness that he’d just pointed out.) When she could’ve found the answer, with a little online research, another way. And how boring for authors to be asked questions they already know the answer to, over and over. And then Will Self amiably enlightened the somewhat pitiable fan as to how he pronounces Zack Busner, anyway.
She lingered and I hadn’t brought a book with me, nor was I going to buy one, but I’d been hoping to get a body part signed. It was likely the author had a train to catch and there was still a queue between me and the table piled with his books he was sitting at, pen in hand in a way that made it look he was writing with his off-hand. I noted she was wearing a nice frock and wished she’d frock off.
I’m enjoying adding to my review in my interpretation of the style of The Quantum Theory of Morality, I suspect doing so is addictive and have decided to stop before I end up spending at least ten years writing this as a long-form tribute to Will Self’s work (knowing I wouldn’t be the first to get themself locked into a project such as that).
About 10 years ago, I was in a job as a contractor offering help to Job Seekers, who needed it, to expand their travel horizons. I would find out about their travel habits and experiences by questionnaire, then issue links to apps, give out maps, award free public transport passes, and organise a bike loan, or a free or subsidised refurbished second hand bike, accordingly, to them. Some of the permanent staff in some of the Job Centres had trouble making ends meet and wanted the travel freebies for themselves, so the scheme ruffled feathers, but got good results with Job Seekers. Training a new young contractor I’m calling Clive, who’d recently started in the same job as me, after me, he asked me a question about what he termed ‘difficult customers’. Meaning by that, he specified: customers who spoke to him about their personal ‘mental health problems and feelings of depression and suicide’.
I applauded Clive for having developed such a professional attitude with his Job Seeker customers that they were already feeling able to confide in him about what’s for many, a private and perhaps embarrassing matter, and wrote some of my thoughts about it, below. Trying to tactfully deter Clive from thinking of unemployed people who spoke about their mental and emotional suffering as ‘difficult’. My opinion was, and is, that presenting a positive and sympathetic attitude can be the best option for both the customer and the professional. It might be that some people are able to be blunt and rude to some people, effectively. But now I’ve begun studying formal counselling skills, in 2025, I find this to be a fundamental principal: offering unconditional positive regard. (One of the three pillars of the type of the humanistic type of counselling I’m studying: 1) unconditional positive regard, 2) empathy, and 3) congruence.) I was on the right track, I think, with the ideas I tried to convey to Clive, without alienating him.
Dear Clive,
A uniformed army representative was stationed in Gosport JCP [Job Centre Plus] last week handing out fliers and talking to Job Seekers about joining the Army Reserve. I chatted to her so I could refer any of the right customers to her at her leaflet-strewn table. She explained that all they needed was to be healthy and under 50, except, by ‘healthy’, this meant never having taken antidepressants, since someone who ever had, was deemed to be untrustworthy with weapons.
Therefore, the Army Reserve was most probably not for those customers you find ‘difficult’, Clive.
The rep said someone who’d been accepted into training was later found to have taken antidepressants a long while ago, for a very short time, after a sad and disruptive event in their lives, and been expelled for it once this fact had come to light. I was surprised, thinking how this rule must exclude such a large percentage of the population. I wondered if GPs know that by prescribing antidepressants to somebody who’s perhaps appropriately miserable after one or other of life’s knocks, whom time might possibly have healed if they’d been allowed to go through a process of grieving naturally instead, it might limit the patient’s future work opportunities? Possibly making things worse for the patient in the long run? Someone who might otherwise have been so perfect for the Army Reserve that joining it there and then, instead of beginning a course of pills, might’ve been just the cure. Maybe GPs only prescribe antidepressants when they think there’s no other way. But are patients informed that accepting a prescription for antidepressants means becoming permanently unsuitable for certain employment, I also wonder? Patients who might’ve been excellent with a gun, if they only could’ve accessed the training.
Clive, you say you’ve ‘never had any training or work experience previously re people’s emotional wellbeing’ and even if you had, you’re right, it isn’t your job here at the DHSS ‘to be their counsellor’. I think it’s good and appropriate you recognise that. I agree. I haven’t been trained on how to deliver that specific training you might need, but can offer you my thoughts.
When being a counsellor is the job, I do know counsellors always have the support of professional colleagues to do it. Though counselling is neither your job, nor mine, I think you’re instinctively right to turn to others for guidance in at least learning ‘how to deal with these clients better’, as you put it, thanks for turning to me, for one. Yes, I’ve ‘been a part of the JCP for quite a while’, as you say, and also had years of previous experience of frontline work, all told, with other sectors of the community that could be perceived as ‘challenging’ – the homeless for example – and have spoken to many what you term ‘difficult clients’. I’m pleased you felt able to ask me about this even though it’s not a formal part of my induction-role with you.
At work yesterday, a baby was crying loudly in public while his parent was busy, so I sat up the baby’s fallen-over, or thrown-over teddy bear to be now ‘looking’ at him, slightly out of his reach. The baby looked from teddy to me, I smiled at him; he looked to teddy to me again as I walked on – and stopped crying. I then heard a woman ahead of me referring to this same baby as a ‘horrible screaming baby’ she’d had to get away from. Calling him ‘horrible’ because he was expressing horrible feelings and making a horrible sound.
When you describe those customers who tell you about their depression and suicidal ideation, or suicidal tendencies, as ‘difficult’, Clive, I wonder what you find difficult about these customers, precisely? At a guess, perhaps you’re like the woman with respect to the crying baby; that you’re finding those depressed customers’ statements unpleasant, difficult to listen to, perhaps unnecessary, certainly unwanted, and disturbing; like the woman had found that baby’s ‘screaming’ unpleasant. So, just as that baby is deemed by the woman ‘horrible’; those openly depressed and suicidal customers are deemed ‘difficult’ by you. I think those people are expressing their difficulties, not showing that they are difficult in themselves. To imagine that those two things are the same thing, I think, might very often be wrong.
I do believe it’s natural to label people who speak about unpleasant things. Things we might rather prefer them to have kept to themselves. Or to have kept from our own ears, anyway. I think the woman who responded that way to the baby – getting quickly away from his noise, venting about him once she had, name-calling him, out of earshot – seemed like a normal woman, a normal person. I didn’t dislike her for it. I’d be extremely miserable working in Job Centres if I much minded that sort of behaviour. It’s her way, and the way of many. ‘Other-ing’; ‘us and them-ing’; as a means of self-preservation, I dare say. Colleagues here in the Job Centres use an ‘other-ing’ approach a lot, far as I’ve seen, distancing themselves from maybe ‘difficult’ customers by ascribing negative labels to them they wouldn’t consider wearing, or choose to wear, or wish to wear, themselves:
‘That is them, thumbs down; whilst this is me, thumbs up.’
In the past I’ve heard colleagues call their (vulnerable) customers: ‘stupid’, ‘thick’, ‘lazy’, ‘nasty’, ‘a shit’, ‘an idiot’ as well as ‘horrible’. In contrast to their favoured ones whom they call: ‘clever’, ‘brilliant’, ‘nice’, lovely’, ‘genuine’; ones more like the professional ‘us’ identified with. Thinking of the people in those judgemental ways is sometimes what people seem to need to do to hold it together. Their own sense of self, values, ego. That might be your modus operandi too, Clive. I don’t want to start judging you, for judging, do I.
In terms of people with depression and some of the other mental illnesses, it seems to be a quite commonly-held assumption that any person suffering in that way, particularly if they’re suicidal, is in some way or another, a horrible person rather than a person with a horrible illness: nasty, selfish, weak, navel-gazing, undeserving of happiness, an emotional wallow-er, a saddo. Balking themselves up in contrast as: nicer, more giving, stronger, more outward-looking, more deserving of happiness, a pick-myself-up-er, more cool; as a self-comforting, distancing, rationalisation.
But does assuming a position and attitude of superiority over a suffering human make us better humans? I think disdain might be best avoided, if possible. Over time, you might find this. That thinking about the person as being in pain, if possible, rather than indulging in any sort of revelling in that pain by scapegoating them as a pain, easy though it might be to get a short-term ego boost out of doing that, will prove to be the best policy. The projected pain could grow sticky, eventually, for one.
Suicidal depression and depression and other mental illnesses are frightening debilitations. It’s understandable that those of us who’ve remained free of such illnesses – at least so far, or at least currently – like to believe our freedom is to do with our finer character, deservedness, and greater willpower; to do with elements that are possible to own, assume, or control, rather than believing that such dreadful illnesses could afflict anybody, helplessly, no matter who or how we are or what we do. Partly luck. Partly fate, or, partly how the cookie happens to crumble mucky into the nice cuppa tea.
Do you, therefore, with your ‘difficult’ customers, as a ‘mentally healthier person’, feel threatened by what they say to you about their depressed conditions, reminded of your own potential susceptibility? (That isn’t the most healthy response to a person who’s unwell, for either person, I think.) Are you made to feel guilty about your greater fortune in mental health, as if that’s the intention of the customer? Do you feel challenged about your mental health by them, or brought down emotionally by them? Bullied by them for some response or other? If you hold the mentally ill person accountable for your possibly discomforted responses to them and perceive their discomforting as willed and witting on their part, no wonder you label them negatively! Maybe even someone with PTSD and who’s suicidal after having fought in the army? Who’d never taken antidepressants till afterwards? Is it just a recoil-reaction to the tone of the vibration of their words?
Would you feel threatened by, shamed by, challenged by, brought down by, a person speaking about their cancer, for example?
It might well be easier for most to hold sympathy for a person whose life is threatened by cancer, for example, who dearly wishes to live, than for a suicidal person whose life is threatened seemingly only by themselves; a person who apparently doesn’t wish to live. But that actually in some ways makes it worse for the prospective suicide in that there is, at best, little sympathy for them, at worst, repulsion towards them, from others, and from themselves to boot, I think. To view such a person with empathy, if possible, seems kinder for them, and surely better for our own mental health in the long-term, if we’re going to be meeting as very many people like that as we’re likely to meet.
A suicidal person might view people who are desperate to live, who yet have far less apparent good fortune than their own – perhaps in terms of physical health, or wealth, or whatever it might be – as a shaming contrast to their painful and unwanted death-drives. The mentally healthy individual faced with another’s terminal illness is poignantly reminded of their own healthy, taken for granted, lust for life; whereas the suicidally-depressed might well be reminded of their incapacitated – most precious, most vital, most humanising – will to live. Their ‘crumbled-ness’. Although, your mind, whatever I say, might respond with contempt towards any person who talks about ending their own life, or of their depression, I tend to think: That sounds tough, in situations like that, and say something like this: “Sorry to hear that. Hope you improve soon.”
Maybe you could try thinking along those lines, not just saying those words as a tactic, but, genuinely meaning them?
There may well be things we can do to help make ourselves more generally robust in our mental health, and genes of course play a part, as do circumstances, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the fault of an individual who succumbs to mental illness, I believe. A smoker and drinker might become a centenarian whilst a teetotal non-smoker might die young of leukaemia. Or of suicide. Even if they talk about it, or have talked about it, first, despite the myths on this matter rather like the one that goes “You can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up” and is belied by the ensuing births. People do talk about suicide, then go ahead and do it.
In the course of my day, when I’m talking to Job Seekers and they bring up any mental health issues they might be having, I try to think of anything appropriate that might at least improve their symptoms. A fitness course? They might still be desperately depressed at the end of it but at least could perhaps be a little more toned up, be getting a bit more fresh air, by the end of it, for example. Perhaps they’ll be out on their Council-loaned bike and spot a particularly beautiful sunset one evening, that marks, somehow, the beginning of a turn in their lives. Worth a try perhaps…
Some people will die of suicide whatever anyone in contact with them does. The person who speaks to you, while you’re working with them, about their suicidal ideation, or previous suicide attempts, or of their depression generally, might be one of those who does die that way very soon, or years later. Just as someone who ‘declares’ their lung disease might well die of that. I tend to think of whatever ailments or woes any Job Seeker presents in a similar way (this is me): with empathy for the customer, and caring-ness, and I just think if there’s anything I know about that might be of use – which might be the firm suggestion that they go to their GP immediately – if they’re not under the GP, or if they are, but things have worsened for them since the last visit… If that was the case, I would tell their Work Coach I’d done so directly following the meeting – if the Work Coach didn’t already know about the situation which so far, I’ve found they always do – so they could check the customer had done as advised.
Incidentally, there’s a six point plan to follow in every JCP regarding those who say they’re intending to commit suicide, or appear to be intending it, or are in the process of suicide, and it works, evidently. If someone was extremely mentally ill, they couldn’t be a Job Seeker and wouldn’t be for us to see. I did speak to a very physically ill customer yesterday at some length because he wanted to talk, though there was no question of his health or situation improving since the condition was incurable and degenerative. I had nothing to offer him but a bit of my time. Basically, I wouldn’t take voiced complaints or ‘confessions’ or pronouncements about any customer’s mental health any more personally than I would take voiced complaints or ‘confessions’ or pronouncements about their physical health, in a nutshell.
I think the temptation is to view physical and mental illness very differently and many do. I even know of a trainee counsellor embarking on their course with the declaration that they’re doing this, for once in their lives, entirely for themselves… Would a person entering the nursing profession as a trainee think it was ‘for themselves’, I wonder? The same trainee currently thinks people who contemplate suicide are ‘selfish’… Perhaps they will have changed by the time they’ve completed their studies, or perhaps they would find the need to continue to think that way to get on with the job…
And so might you yours.
Any results I achieve by thinking of anything to possibly help a depressed/suicidal customer might be as fleeting as sitting up a baby’s teddy bear. I know that. And I know I might not be able to help at all. I sat that baby’s teddy bear up, by the way, in the hope that it would give the baby something to think about other than his obvious frustration knowing that, though I wasn’t going to be there the next time, or the next time – with a bit of luck – his teddy bear would be. (I had been suggesting to the baby that he try and rely on his teddy bear for his emotional regulation a little bit more.) How you deal with your adult customers’ noises, their however softly-spoken ‘screaming’, will be partly personal to you and can’t be fully suggested by me, I reckon. I always tend to think ‘do no harm’ is a good guiding principal though.
Which doesn’t mean never rile. Sometimes getting some people a little bit narked can be effective…
(Maybe some few people in need of support can benefit from the shock of witnessing that some appointed professionals do not give a damn about the state of their vulnerable clients’ mental health, and begin to fight against what there amounts to an attempted damnation of them by the privileged professional.)
Some would see sitting up a teddy bear for a baby as a means to ending the unpleasant noise the baby was making (if it worked). Unsympathetically. For me, it’s sympathy that gives me the impetus to try if I can, given the time, and the energy, to help. I suppose because it’s possible to cheer someone up by chatting to them; to help someone turn their life around through counselling or psychotherapy or psychoanalysis; or even to talk a person who is right in the middle of the very act, out of suicide; it’s tempting to think that a good talking-to, and with, might be all that’s required in the case of someone with certain mental health conditions and therefore, that they’re being stubborn if that fails. I think it might be more the sustained support and attention of a professional that is effective in some cases; a person supported in turn by others, therefore, a societal thing. And even that won’t always work. Plus, some health care professionals are better than others, in all areas of medicine or therapy.
In my role – as you do, similarly, in yours – I only see my customers once or very few times, for very specific reasons, that is all. We can be consistent, though. Upbeat? I hope this has helped? Perhaps a trip to the library to read up on your areas of concern wouldn’t hurt?
Kind regards.
Rereading this so many years on, there’s a strand to it which still eludes me to define, to do with the personal-interactive element of Clive’s words to me, ostensibly about the clients he was finding difficult, but about our inter-relationship. Either in addition, or, most significantly. He might have been addressing something else. Finding a way to quash me, an older woman, who was his senior in the role, same pay grade, but I’d been doing it longer, and therefore in his way, professionally. He spoke to me, afterwards, several times, about how he felt sorry for his dad for having such a rubbish job as he’d happened to have had at his mature age, for example, as the one he’d had to take to get a start in work. I think he might’ve felt he had to best me in some way, get the better of me. Discussing approaches to people with suicidal tendencies, that topic, can be a covert way of making hierarchical, pecking order, negotiations with another, I suppose as any topic can, but that’s a potential killer of a conversation, given its themes.
I’d wanted to respond in a way that was considerate towards the clients he’d mentioned, and to him.
Clive eventually bagsied the one permanent role on offer, when our temporary contracts were ending, and I suspect, within my response, he’d got some of the ammunition he’d needed to win, despite my greater experience. I’d handed it to him. I look back now and think how much motive is often coded in language. What was he really saying to me when he asked me about his ‘difficult customers’? How might I have responded more intelligently, without saying anything that didn’t align with my integrity either? Identifying the arch irony and responding to it self-defensively? The hidden heckle? The mysterious metaphorical machinations? All I can do is live and learn, and keep thinking, reflectively, hoping to continue to grow and to catch on fully, sometimes. The TV show Would I Lie To You shows how difficult it is to tell if people are being truthful or making stuff up.
Only days ago, after a chat that was only days ago, I thought afterwards, in reflection, but not at the time, not having seen it coming or happening (even though I use understatement covertly, I usually do also mean exactly what I say at face value too): They didn’t really mean what they said, did they!
Perhaps I ought to have responded to Clive’s questions about ‘difficult people’ entirely differently.
“Finding the job harder than you’d expected, are you, Clive?”
Having enjoyed a TV series, film, or book, I immediately reach for any available reviews, enhancing my pleasure by examining others’ perspectives, perhaps increasing my understanding of what I’ve viewed or read. Usually. Perhaps increasing my knowledge. Review-type accounts I’ve read so far of BBC’s Small Prophets are chocker with superlative praise, which only reinforces my sense that it’s all round good work – writing, plotting, acting, filming, setting, tone, originality – rather than illuminating anything additional or other for me yet. Likewise, I’m really only adding my admiring recommendation to the many that already exist.
It was the writer, and one of the stars, Mackenzie Crook (playing the part of an overly-officious and repeatedly disrespected manager with a greasy-looking rat’s-tail of a hairstyle) who said in a televised interview that the fantastical creatures of the title, the small prophets, or, homunculi, were physical puppets animated in incredibly painstaking stop motion rather than created by the use of CGI. How delightfully old-fashioned and good to know, I reckon.
I add that fact to my mini-review here, because I think it’s nice and it’s important: Small Prophets had a great deal of time spent over the details. Like The Detectorists clearly had oodles of time spent on it, without, in that case, having contained any preternatural beings (although The Detectorists often touched on supernatural themes and uncanny resonances of happenings from the past). After having hugely relished The Detectorists (also along with many other fans), I was positively excited anticipating Small Prophets from the moment I heard about it, and haven’t been disappointed.
On the contrary, I’m on my second ensorcelled watch-through. Focussing on the way the story’s being told, rather than being more passively carried along with its unfolding, this time. How Michael Palin’s intermittent memory-loss, as the main character’s old dad, allows for expository explanations to come naturally as his son, Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley, patiently repeats the important elements of the backstory to him, necessary for the audience’s grasp. Necessary for his fictional forgetful dad. And how that same son’s friendship with his colleague, Kacey, played by Lauren Patel, is a newly developing friendship, and therefore, again, allowing plot-type information to be imparted with extra theatrical ease. (Quigley and Patel pictured.)
It’s occurred to me how often the lead actor Michael tells lies, when the homunculi he brings into being are bound to tell the absolute truth. Michael lies to tease his any questioners for asking questions of him they might’ve known better than to ask, not to deceive them, since he’ll often eventually own up, lightly, to having made whatever he’s made up, up; whereas, conversely, the homunculi aren’t necessarily telling the truth out of any commitment to moral notions of honesty and philanthropic goodness. Perhaps the seraph has a heart…
The homunculi’s existence is something of an endurance to them, perhaps a penance, via dark means, at one time rankly stinking means, and destructive forces, which yet all has an intriguing sense of inevitability. The shape of a random not-random oil slick followed by the soot from a random not-random meteor, and their relative positioning, suggesting pagan machinations, unleashed, for example. Deliciously. Tantalizingly. Indicating that the magic Michael uses has unpredictable magical costs: for small profits, when all will have been said and done? It’s a small-hairs-up-ender, anyway, Small Prophets. Hurrah that it’s to be continued…
I’ve been writing some poetry, at least, writing some poems until they have become poetry in my opinion. Continuing a sequence of sonnets I began many months ago. I aired one at a local spoken word open mic and it seemed acceptable as a poem, I rewrote it slightly afterwards to define its meanings more sharply. I’ll give it another public airing soon, but I’m pretty sure I’ve completed it now. It had got a laugh from the small audience, at an apposite place. I didn’t change that bit. It’s an intense process for me, writing poems. Checking them out, rewriting. The effect I’m after in the end is that I feel sure there’s nothing to be altered anymore, when I read them through, out loud, and though I know they’re still ‘mine’, they’ve evolved to exist independently of me, it will seem. The poems eventually not needing a further word, or comma, from me.
I’ll be kept out from altering them, by them, at a certain point.
So, I wanted to write something light today. To remind myself of the playful, fun, aspect of writing. This:
There’s a photo of a radio accompanying this blog, my radio, in my kitchen. I saw an advertisement for an object that looked like a radio on social media and clicked on it, interested, for a closer look. Then realised, within a split-second, that although I admired the design of this shiny brand new radio, for sale (if that’s what the cuboid object was), I already have a radio I love. And I went to the kitchen to photograph it and have a little listen with renewed box-fresh appreciation for it, although I must’ve bought it around 15 years ago, preferring my retro-style radio to any up-to-the-minute design. I kind of rebought it, for free this time, today.
I thought it worth sharing the idea of rebuying what we already own, as if it were brand new to us. With gratitude. Remembering why we chose whatever it is.
I recently read a book called The Signs by Tara Swart, a doctor in neuroscience, and would’ve liked to have blogged about that instead. I’m too tired for the time being. Knowing doing so will involve thinking and over-thinking (not overthinking), checking, researching, and double-checking. Swart’s beloved husband died a few years ago, and she connects frequent coincidences she experiences as communications with him from beyond the grave. Aware how ‘unscientific’, if not loony, her words will sound to many, or most. The experiences Swart describes in her book are ones I can often closely relate to. However, her conclusions and assumptions about what she’s experiencing differ to mine, both as her reader, and in my own case. But it’s all very meaty stuff, as it were, in my opinion, and right up my street.
The poem I recently aired at the open mic is one I wrote about an experience I had when I was thinking deeply about someone who, most thankfully, is alive. I noticed that my foot had brushed into the carpet, in passing, a perfect likeness of that person I’d been thinking about. With – saddeningly to me – a distinctly troubled expression on their features. Which distinct apparition felt not at all ghostly, but like a very lively and exciting current communication with that very living person. Or, if not a communication per se, a glimpse of them in real time, remotely.
Expressed unconsciously through albeit keenly willing me. And I wrote the poem to communicate back, consciously this time, but also indirectly. Trusting (in theory) if it had worked one way, it could work the other: “Cheer up! Love you!” That is, send them an uncanny glimpse of me, somehow, back. When reading the poem out to other people, or for anyone reading it, though, they would have to believe that that happened to know where I’m coming from with it. Or, believe that if it did apparently happen, from my perspective, that it wasn’t simply pareidolia, or coincidental, and in my mind. I could’ve photographed the image, but that would: i) have identified who I was talking about to whosoever knew that person (the likeness was unmistakable I’m proud to say) which I didn’t want, and; ii) considering how I once worked as a street portraitist, for example, I would’ve been entirely capable of creating the image using my fingertip or a brush and then have pretended it had arrived by accident.
In recent years I’ve created rebelliously off-perspective portraits, without altering them, for my own amusement, which probably would not have been generated via technology being too warped and naive-looking… Mine! This image was mimetic, proportionate, and traditionally a likeness. But, who’s to know for sure that that accidentally happened, or happened at all? Who but intrigued me. Intrigued, not for the first time, as to how the body can be/is at times, a creative conduit. Very similar to how the radio is a conduit.
One thing about writing I’ll begin with and return to: right now, I have a yen to write about Frank Skinner’s series of podcasts about poetry after having listened to approximately 80 of them in total, so far, via Audible (over the recent festive season, with relish) and I set out now with nothing but that ambition. To do so: to write about his podcasts. With only blank pages on the subject so far: no notes (unfortunately, my bad) since I’ve listened to it all in passive receptive mode (as yet). I do have some informal ideas about what to include rumbling in my head, but that’s little to go on.
To get any batches of words down (that I can live with having written) takes effort and energy, and of course, I have to be alive to do it. I’ll be spending some of my precious life on it: time. And writing little else while I’m doing it. These things might be taken as ‘self-evident’, but I do think, often they’re not. Or might not be. It matters to me, anyway, this self-appointed task, and I want to do it justice. I want my any required research to be thorough, only putting sensible, verifiable, authentic, information in, as much as possible, plus some of my opinions, too. But I don’t want to spend as long doing it as I very easily might. Of any time and energy I’m able to allot to writing, I have poetry to write of my own. And, almost every poem I write takes me a lot of time. I want to write this as easily and quickly as possible.
At least for now, the series does warrant a thorough review, so maybe I’ll return to it and do that at a later date…
I already appreciated Frank Skinner as a comedian, interviewer, and presenter, when I first came across him as an astonishingly excellent and articulate poetry-enthusiast in 2021, via his miniseries with Denise Mina, following in the footsteps of the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. Which miniseries I heartily recommend as well as recommending – Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcasts – to anyone who likes or writes poems or both. I feel thankful to him for it all.
I also think, with mild discomfort, that Frank Skinner positions himself right on the boundary of trespass within the expressions he makes in his podcasts. By which I mean, perhaps not quite intruding upon the rugged planes, wildflower-filled fields, and tufty hillocks of poetry, or quite launching himself out upon its hefty salty oceans, or quite stuffing his bared feet into its ice-fed babbling brooks; but definitely perching on its fences, walls, embankments, banks, and shores, with a screwed up face and a pair of binoculars near-welded into his sockets. Frank Skinner may well object to the idea of there being any such boundaries to poetry as I’m imagining here at all, perhaps idiosyncratically and unfairly. Perhaps highhandedly even. Surely he may place himself anywhere and say anything and who am I to state otherwise! But, what it is, time after time, Frank Skinner says that, unlike all the many poets he enthuses about, he’s not a poet. And I’m given to think, ‘So what on earth is he doing there then?! So close to The Poetry, he’s nigh on in it?!’
Frank Skinner seems to me to be positioning himself as an extremely nosy visitor to poetry, if poetry is a family home, or village. Or positioning himself as a backseat driver to poetry, if poetry is a journey within a mode of transport. Albeit a hortatory nosy visitor, or backseat driver, rather than a critical either, since he only selects poems and poets he loves, not poems and poets he has problems with and takes exception to. And each and every selected poem with a level of difficulty that gives him exercise. He doesn’t enjoy poetry that too readily conveys all its meanings, subtexts, and potential references. The poems he includes in his podcast have complexity. He likes a struggle. A puzzle. He likes to have to had to have made an effort to produce each podcast.
He’s meticulously thorough. Humble. Informative without being either preachy or condescending. His vast range of knowledge is impressive, and imparted in a pleasantly educational tone. Lightly, in the delivery, deeply, in the content. Sometimes, when Frank Skinner is talking through a poem phrase by phrase, stanza by stanza, that’s new to me, I’m hanging onto his every word, not wanting it to end, enjoying the suspense and pleasure of hearing a new-to-me poem read in his intense, broken-up way, from beginning to end, but with pauses for intelligent and attentive textual analysis. Happy. Entertained. Stimulated. Rapt. I feel sure I’ll return for a relistening to many of his podcasts, a few, I’ve already heard more than once.
(Incidentally, decades ago I wrote a poem which mentions Frank Skinner.)
And now to return to what I began with, as intended: for anyone to write anything takes life glorious life. All the devotion Frank Skinner puts into his poetry podcasts, writing them, preparing to deliver them, extremely closely reading the poems, and as he delightfully puts it, exploring the words and images they contain as if he’s ‘opening doors on an advent calendar’ one by one, with evident childlike glee, could surely, surely, be applied to him writing some poetry of his own, I can’t help but think! How can he indulge so earnestly in poetry and not engage with the writing of his own?
I think if Frank Skinner ever found enough to enthusiastically chew on in any single poem of mine I’ve ever written, as he so spectacularly finds to chew on in any single one of the poems featured in his podcasts (so far), I’d feel fully red-faced honoured. His focussing on a poet’s poetry is an estimable endorsement of it. But. The albeit brilliant way he goes about his analyses presents a challenge, from my point of view, as someone who’s written so many pieces within the genre of material he (selectively) celebrates. I would want him to see that, however much he knows (which is a heck of a lot, and much more than I do, for example, in oh so many ways), he won’t really know – I believe – certain important things about poetry, until he gets stuck into practicing as a poet himself. I believe it’s not all visible or tangible from where he is, not as I see him, there at my imagined borders of poetry, anyway. I’ve said it.
Each poem, once written, is a whole and complete unit of expression, irreducible, non-expandable, in fact. The whole live goose and its golden egg come to mind. Not that Frank Skinner exactly states to the contrary that a poem is reducible or expandable. But his activity around poetry suggests otherwise. Much as I value and enjoy that activity! I do feel, though, that I would now want to make Frank Skinner know, contained within the poetry I write, that, although there’s plenty that can be said – and how few, if any, say what might be said, quite as well as Frank Skinner? – there’s actually nothing more to be said, with a poem. Too. Except to respond to it, or to poetry in general – keeping on reading it, and learning about it – but responding to it, I say again, by eventually writing one’s own.
In that way, Frank Skinner’s given me a new ambition, after having listened to so many of his podcasts, as a writer of poetry: to have that message in it for him, if possible, if he were to ever read anything I’ve already written or will yet write, since listening to many of his podcasts: to try and get him to that speechless sort of point where the only articulation possible, and necessary, is a personal, daring, failure-risking, frustrating, onerous, poetic one. Facing the blank page I started with for this blog. As he does as an author, and writer of comedy so successfully already, I’d love to read his poetry too. But at this point, I’m going to stop writing this blog and return to working on the poem I’m working on currently.
(Photo, stock.)
Happy New Year.
When I padded to Southsea Beach early this evening, I found it fenced off, heaped with hillocks of shingle, and with numerous heavy machines parked on it. How I longed to wriggle under a fence and stomp up and slide down those heavenly little hills; make shingle-angels on my back in them; but I resisted, law-abidingly, health- and safety-consciously, age-appropriately, and padded on to the left of the pier where it was open, packed with people (rather than completely deserted), and safe to swim. And a very nice dip it was.
The sea was such an incredibly pretty, vibrant, light-turquoise, any artist reproducing it accurately might’ve been thought a sentimental exaggerator; or any faithful photographer might’ve been thought a fraudulent photo-shopper. Through the struts under the pier I could see the sunset trail reflected pink on my forbidden favourite stretch of coastal waters and my eyes travelled the trail a way towards the low red sun. The trail I would’ve swum along otherwise.
I find it an energising thing to do, swimming along the shimmering road of light. Involved. A poet friend has told me the equivalent moonlight trail reflected on the sea at night is called the moon path, so perhaps the sunlight trail is called the sun path by some. A rose by any other word…
The last time I swam, last week, the work had been just beginning, and I wrote to a friend, who’d asked if I’d enjoyed my swim on a day just before the fences went up:
My swim was chilly and the tide was out when I prefer it in, but there was a fabulous sunset so I also bathed in rouge light all the way home, and warmed up quickly and well with no problems. Felt good, feeling my circulation aglow within.
There were vast heaps of new shingle in piles with digger-troughs and lines like giants’ children had been playing in the sand and stones with toy construction vehicles. One left on the shore. The scale of it! (Another stage of the sea defences, you probably know.) I was pleased to see my footprints deep in smoothed sandy patches.
My ‘vast heaps of new shingle’ had grown, that had only been the start…
I have finally achieved the condition of skin on the soles of my feet I’d been hoping for: on both walks to the beach and back, above, I was barefoot, able to stomp naturally, no mincing, and each time I’ve arrived home without the slightest damage to either foot.
Result.
Enjoyed a retreat day in a beautiful ancient church called St Peter’s on Hayling Island yesterday, with a lovely group of people, meditating on stones and seeds. Thinking of stones, and pebbles, I was frequently transported to Southsea Beach (in my imagination).
I’ve also written a new poem. I think I’ve finished writing it, that is; I’ll give it another sleep-on-it or so, and perhaps give it an open mic airing down the road at Hunter Gatherer before I’m certain it’s complete. It’s another in my connected sequence of sonnets which I hadn’t added to for about 14 months. This latest one is called, The Ghost On The Train.
This is a celebratory blog for having got this far with it. Having the idea for a poem, and yen to write it, but not a word of the poem written, is like peering underneath the pier at the fenced-off favoured beach, seeing it looking more fun and inviting than ever! And now I’m on it, on the beach I yearned to be on, as it were… But thinking, making an accompanying illustration might be good… And I haven’t even started that yet!
Photo accompanying this blog, stock photo.
stellabahin 