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.
On Sunday, I got myself along for day two of the two-day HowTheLightGetsIn Festival of Ideas, Philosophy and Music in the glorious gardens of Kenwood House, London, where it was far, far, sunnier than expected, and that was just Mr Will Self’s disposition. Inside the Big Hat tent, if I remember rightly what it was called. He was challenging, but radiant with joviality and bad attitude, frankly. And it was hot. There. And afterwards, he spoke further. Outside the tent, informally. Bonus. And it was hot there too in the airiness, sun-shininess and bustle.
The weather had been forecast as overcast and coolish with a chance of rain. When I’d last seen Mr Self speaking he’d been angry, in Soho. This weekend, at least on the second day, when I saw him, he was merrily defying his well-prepared and professional host by keeping almost entirely off topic in favour of teasing and interrogating the audience: prodding our consciences, investigating our practices such as our use of aeroplanes, confronting us with undeniable proof of our political apathy and indecisiveness.
He proved to us our intentions have been spread so thin, we don’t even know how to properly hate, let alone who to. After some effort, our nonetheless blithe speaker managed to get some noises out of us assenting our disapproval of the 500 who’d recently protested at Dover. Did we think it’s right that unsanctioned gangs such as that gather threateningly at our borders under their own volition?
“No.”
And he worked hard for that barely audible let alone passionate ‘no’: I put ‘bad attitude’, but in the best possible way. Mischief without mayhem.
Returning home, the train from Waterloo was delayed and therefore, I happened to end up travelling back on a longer-than-expected journey, with a detour via Clapham Junction and a further delay there, with an artist friend who lives in Southsea too. He’d collected one of his paintings from a London exhibition which he hadn’t sold on this occasion. He took it out to let me see it, a vividly colourful, totemic collage. We two natter-boxes nattered almost non-stop.
Approaching the end of our journey together, he finally asked me why I’d been in London: I’d thought he might never ask. He might’ve thought I might never say. And that would’ve been right. I’d been waiting to see if he would ask, or not ask, and I told him that, with a giggle (perhaps mischievousness without mayhem is catching I do hope so), then told him the name of the festival.
“Oh, ‘There’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’, Leonard Cohen, beautiful poetry,” he said. And we were soon onto nattering about poetry so I spoke little about the festival. Which festival was cracking. And gleaming with light, beautiful sunlight with the bluest sky above our heads (deep shadows at our feet), crows circled. Some of it, I think, is getting in.
(Photo by me, detail.)
A mate of mine recently said that, whilst they swear, drop their ‘t’s, and are not generally pedantic, they do wish people would consistently pronounce the letter ‘h’ as ‘aitch’, rather than as is commonly heard, with a ‘her’: ‘haitch’. They then suggested I might be tasked with teaching people to say it properly when I return to full-time education next week. I wondered whether they were sharing this bugbear and proposing that I do something about it as a chummy roast about my returning to university in my—albeit still early—sixties. Was it a tease that my late return to full-time study is unlikely to make any difference in the world, unless it’s something as trivial, impossible, or beside the point as this?
I couldn’t tell. It felt like they were being nice and quirkily funny as per. But I was very soon going to drop out of the conversation to give myself time to work out what it was about.
We’d been talking about how people pronounce things, or so I’d thought. I said that I like to use particular accents for my poems sometimes, for example, a 1950s-style BBC accent with one poem, and an Estuary accent with another. They replied that they think I speak perfectly well enough without needing to employ the Queen’s English. Which might be what got them thinking I might be the right sort of person to lead their mooted ‘aitch’ for an ‘h’ campaign. Or, lost cause, as I see it, being that it’s normal for pronunciations to change and vary within language systems.
But I kind of wanted to stress at this point (perhaps pedantically) that I did not mean I feel it necessary to put on an exaggeratedly cut-glass accent to deliver any particular poem, any more than I feel it necessary to put on an exaggeratedly regionalised accent for any poem: I’d just decided those two accents worked well as respective delivery styles in the case of those I’d mentioned.
Wondering why they’d selected one of my stated usages to respond to, and ignored the other of my stated usages. Hierarchical classism in hinting my use of the type of speech most often associated with the ‘upper’ classes for a poem was surplus; whereas my unmentioned use of the accent most often associated with the ‘lower’ classes for a poem was fine? More teasing?
This was where I broke off the conversation which had derailed itself from being one that was follow-ably on my wavelength to one I didn’t fully understand, wasn’t attuned to, and couldn’t share in. They’d effectively lost me; gone off on a tangent, which maybe wasn’t even a tangent from their point of view, but on a theme I hadn’t picked up on. Perhaps it was me, perhaps I’d gone off on a tangent mentioning my poems. I needed time to try and guess what could’ve elicited their, to my mind, non sequitur: or how saying that in a similar way to the way I’ve been composing tunes for some of my poems since childhood, I also assign a special accent to some of my poems; was a non sequitur of mine.
I sensed that the only way I could’ve possibly recovered the understanding between us within the conversation, about what I meant from my perspective, would’ve been either to explain further, or to quiz them, and either option would’ve risked widening the gulf between us. When I’d wanted our exchange to stay comfortably and pleasantly pally.
“I’ll get my coat,” was the sentiment. As it often is at times like these. Alienation. Awkwardness. Frustration. Embarrassment for having misjudged something suitable for conversation that wasn’t. Maybe even feeling punished for having introduced what I’d thought was a related subject with someone who didn’t take to it. Poetry, in the case of this friend; instead of having correctly assumed they wouldn’t have been interested. In a subject so close to my heart.
When, if they’d liked the subject, they might’ve told me that they create a voice or character when they’re writing sometimes, too; or that they never would do that because they rarely engage in any creative writing – but they like to make up voices to use when they’re reading books to children in their family for the characters in the stories; or they might’ve asked me what those poems I referred to are called; or they might’ve said something else about poetry. I do know poetry is far from being everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not even always me own cuppa, but I do think about it a fair old bit. Usually reading at least one poem per day. Often working on writing one (though, not currently).
I felt like getting my coat knowing if I’d tried the clarification option to get straight with my friend, I’d appear to be in the cagey position of trying to convince them of whatever it was they hadn’t grasped in the first place. Or – on very tenuous ground for me – be unwittingly acting as a defender of what I didn’t know was at stake because I hadn’t grasped it myself… More information probably wouldn’t have helped to make the first bits of information suddenly become comprehensible: we were talking at odds. I might’ve bored them by going on about a subject they had no appetite for.
Sometimes, I try to bridge a communication gulf by trying to say something entertaining. Or by doing something generous: offering a compliment, offering to make a cup of tea for them: placating them. As an apology for having failed to have caught their drift. In this case, their drift to do with what people say and how they say it I could only assume. Entirely changing the subject. Buying some thinking-time. Feeling I couldn’t possibly reply about it immediately – as was probably expected of me – with any confidence in my words landing the right way up in their mind; soon as I’d cottoned on to not knowing what they were getting at, or how to ask precisely what they were getting at, considering indirectness was the code of the moment.
I’ve become wary of doing this placating for a few years now, if and when it might be fawning behaviour on my behalf. Reckoning, there have to be better ways to respond, socially. Hoping to improve. I think this largely comes back to what I recently put about autism expert, Uta Frith, in my blog (200): that I share the trait autistic people commonly have of not easily being able to decipher other people’s motives and meanings beneath what they’re saying and read between their lines. Or to understand why or what they’re reading between my perfectly literal ones (when that’s what my lines are, which is very often exactly what they are, in speech, anyway). I think, the more I can understand this intercommunication factor, the better.
I do know and have for years that when someone announces, in a lowered voice, “I’ve gotta go and see a man about a dog,” tapping one side of their nose with a forefinger, nodding slowly, and perhaps adding a broad wink with their closed mouth pressed down in gestural punctuation, that this is meant to mean they have some business to attend to, which they dare not, cannot, shall not, name… Dun, dun, dun.
Amusing theatrical behaviour which works like a joke, or a mini farce; stating one thing while indicating with deliberate actions the contrary. Thereby hinting at something heinous that they have to disappear off to do; when in all probability they’ll be heading off to complete a heinously mundane chore they’re trying to sex up with their dramatic intimations. I tend to guess it’s something like this: ‘Oh dear, they’re going because they must’ve done a skiddy in their pants.’
“Never trust a fart, eh,” is probably a good rejoinder to that little ‘man about a dog’ act. Finished with a knowing nod and a wink with a mirroring down-mouth expression of my own, right back at ‘em. Old school; including an elaborate stroke with splayed fingers over my chin to the end of an imaginary elongated ‘Jimmy Hill beard’, fingers finally closed at arm’s length before me. Double-bluff style.
Anyway, this type of two-messages-spelling-out-two-different-things-at-once is playful fun. And obvious even to ‘construally-challenged’ me. I can tell it might be a dry beg to be pumped for details of the genuine reason for their intended imminent departure: “Please don’t leave yet, first tell me the name of this so-called ‘man’ you’re meeting, at which precise place, what this so-called ‘dog’ is, and why you need or want it, and what precise time this meeting is! Need a lift? A companion?”
Deconstructing and demystifying the euphemism into its component parts. Or, maybe, they’ve just gotta go and I should just say, “Bye.”
I’ve been thinking, in the time since our conversation, that my mate might like me to do or say something about something they’ve heard, that, even though they’re quite a liberal person, they disliked. But they won’t spell out what that thing is. (Not about, or only about, ‘aitches’.) Perhaps it might get someone in trouble for having said it, or get my mate into trouble if they say it directly…
In terms of how people choose to put things: it’s not up to me to get involved in trying to influence the way people choose to say ‘h’. If they asked me, and I was convinced they wanted to know my thoughts on the matter, we could have a conversation about it. But why would someone who is not saying ‘aitch’ be interested in holding such a conversation as they’d likely have with me, with me? Especially if I’d be challenging their thinking on the matter. They surely wouldn’t want that. I’d sooner not get involved. Plus, they couldn’t expect someone as pedantic as me to change my mind and simply say it their limited way from now on, either, like I’d turned into old Spot.
Who was my birth mother’s pet parrot.
PS Some words below about the two poems I unsuccessfully mentioned above, for anyone interested.
‘CATFLIX’ is a poem about experiencing keeping a live pet, in this case a feline one, as if that’s like holding a subscription to a TV channel. It explores how the way we exist with so much of our waking lives and interactions being moderated through one screen or another influences our interactions with organic, physical reality and the natural world. Which unmoderated world offers more dimensions, the poem claims. I read that in a retro BBC voice because I think the anachronism of it suits the poem’s themes well.
‘The Speaker From Nazareth’ is in the present tense narrative voice of a visitor to a wedding at which the stranger, Jesus, is speaking while turning the water in their very hands to wine. I do it in an Estuary accent, but it works in any regional accent. This is to convey a sense of the narrator and Jesus being from separate regions within a country. The narrator will use a different voice again for part of the poem where they are repeating what they hear Jesus say, still via their regional voice, but trying to sound like Jesus sounds to them.
A male poet friend of mine once read the poem for me using a strong Brummie accent for the narrator’s own, which I thought worked really well. Particularly as I imagined the narrator as a male figure (like Jesus) too. I’ve heard and mimicked the Estuary accent far more than any other accents except maybe the Devonshire one, but that was when I was a child when my family had a tiny cottage in Axminster for holidays throughout the year (which local children called Ack’mer), so Estuary’s the one I choose to use because it’s the one I’m most confident and consistent in using when I’m voicing the poem.
Will there come a time when borrowing (or ‘appropriating’) any kind of accents at all for any kind of acting at all is barred?
And when government will decide which is the one and only way to pronounce ‘h’ and insist on it?
Aesop’s story of the tortoise and the hare is, as we know, a fable: a race between two animals with a moral attached. The powerful hare is depicted as louche, lazy and arrogant; precisely because of these vices, the lumbering tortoise, on its stumpy little legs, eventually wins. One person I discussed the story with argued that its moral was: “Keep going, never mind what anyone else is doing, and you’ll get there in the end.” To my surprise, they’d taken the fable as an encouragement of the tortoise’s more virtuous determination. I’d always been quite sure the fable delivered a caution about the hare’s bad attitude:
“Beware of resting on one’s laurels.”
Don’t let your innate talents—in this example, speediness—beguile you, or cause you to mock anyone who seems less talented. They might have other, perhaps greater, skills. Doggedness, for instance. Who knew. One year, as a child, I won two races at the district sports: the individual 100-metre sprint and the team relay. I was our final runner in the relay, and the last of the final runners to receive the baton with the penultimate girl in our team straggling behind all the rest. “Come on!” Then I managed to outrun the contenders already ahead of me. Wahoo. Even parents of children from other schools congratulated me that evening. Our team had been the underdogs, yet we’d triumphed. Very British, that: liking the apparently clear loser to surprise everyone with a win.
I suppose I’d represented both the hare and tortoise that day. Underdog and top one.
The conversation I eventually had about Aesop’s fable, adult to adult, taught me something about my own assumptions. The other person had never been the least bit sporty and had never won a physical race, so they automatically identified with the tortoise—a character I had automatically considered merely ‘supporting’. It’s possible to learn a lot about people by discovering which character they identify with in a situation or story, and which character they assume you identify with, or seem to want you to identify with, too. To them, the tortoise’s centrality may have appeared as obvious as the hare’s had to me. We might both have been wrong: it depends on the reader or listener, doesn’t it, and not even on the writer or speaker. Neither ‘hare’ nor ‘tortoise’ is the ‘right’ main character. I learnt that embarrassingly late in life, but at least I learnt it.
This is all relevant, I think, because I recently read Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (who has just released a children’s version), and found it most charming. One teensy leveret, by way of Dalton, seems to have been something of an Aesop. Or perhaps its author, also by way of Dalton, was Mother Nature. Dalton mentions the fable above in Raising Hare as one of literature’s numerous disparaging depictions of hares. Her hare displays no discernible vices whatsoever. With its strong, tufty feet, it gave me a new, more objective regard for my own. Feet: we creatures have these distinctive, remarkable, evolved animal appendages. Well, would you just witness that…
After having read Dalton’s book, and with autumn bringing spiders into our houses, I was reading in bed when I spotted a small black spider racing across my duvet and settling cozily on my lap. Its legs had stretched out as it ran; now it drew all eight in, tucking them neatly and symmetrically around itself. Curled like that, it could probably have sat on a thumbnail without touching the surrounding skin. It reminded me of Dalton’s description of the hare positioning its paws so tidily. The essence felt comparable: life contained within an evolved creature. Beating. Emanating. Spider-shaped in this manifestation. I considered slipping out of bed, finding a glass and a piece of cardboard, and relocating the spider to the garden. It had quite possibly come from there when the weather turned from hot to chilly. But I’d read that turfing spiders outside can kill them. So I shook it onto my bedroom floorboards, checked that the duvet was clear and got back into bed.
About an hour later, it returned in almost exactly the same way, to almost exactly the same spot. This time I shook the duvet so sharply that I heard a tiny pat as it landed. I felt queasy. Had I harmed it? I thought, ‘It’s one thing to allow spiders to live in the house, quite another to share a bed with them.’ I didn’t see it again until the next night, when it crossed my duvet towards my lap for a third time. On this occasion, God help me, I let it be. All night. Before I put out the light and fell asleep, it ran to the foot of the duvet, where, I realised, it might easily follow the curve of the cloth and double back underneath towards my bare and biteable legs. Or where I might accidentally squash it, being a big wriggler in my sleep and between dreams. But in the morning I found myself unpunctured and no bed-kill: the spider had left.
My dreams had been filled with fantastical, insect-like animals. None had scared me.
Dalton’s wild leveret’s lesson is still working on me. Not every creature is as harmless, but applying the same objective attention and detached identification helped me to interrupt my reflex to recoil from allowing the spider to be on my bed while I slept. A hare’s a hare: a creature with a hyper-fast heartbeat, almost 360-degree movement-sensitive vision, hyper-sensitive hearing and whiskers that register even the slightest of air currents. Made mostly of running muscle. Capable of extraordinary speed. A tortoise is a tortoise: a creature inclined to live far longer, carrying its shell-home, mostly at an unhurried pace, on its back. A spider is a spider. I’m wondering, what is a human?
I’ve also revised this blog, like the previous one, after having first removed it, fearing in this case that there were too many inaccuracies in it. Or that it was too much about my impressions; that I hadn’t taken enough in of the speech’s important content. The eagerly awaited video of Mr Will Self’s keynote speech was released today on X, on ‘9/11’ 2026, twenty-five years after the original ‘9/11’, and I rewatched the speech attentively, taking in more in some ways than I’d been able to, there, at 21 Soho, on the night. He speaks far better of course, for himself. Although, after watching it a paltry once, I haven’t been able to find it again since. I would’ve liked to have watched it a few times.
Still, here’s an abridged version of what I originally wrote about the speech:
At the end of his talk on Martin Amis on Tuesday 25th August 2026, during a day of events celebrating the deceased author’s work on what would’ve been his birthday, Mr Will Self asked his Soho packed-in-to-capacity audience if there were any more questions, if anyone thought themselves hard enough? There were none.
“No. I thought not,” he said, wry: that had obviously settled that.
The audience, well-disposed towards Self from the get-go, had begun by laughing so easily and frequently, that Self might’ve assassinated us all via comedy, but he clearly hadn’t wanted either our hilarity or our death by laughter en masse. (I imagine the news… Self is reported to have shrugged and briefly raised his palms, his eyebrows and his eyes heavenwards, unsmiling, then stared. Unblinking. When pressed for a comment, he said: “Oops?”) By complaining about it, he eventually stopped us laughing during his hour-long speech, or even smiling. The audience duly quietened and subdued. Just as he’d wanted us: all ears. He’d had many no-guffawing-matter things to say to us. Urgently.
Clearly needing us to stay alive to hear them, and for us to live to spread the word…
Looking at the video afterwards, he seems relaxed, but on the night, I think he conveyed tension. Mr Self conveyed much beyond words and their meanings. Vibrating the air humanly, within the group, music-like with his man-purr-growl-song-voice TING. I had my own impressions as to what he meant.
There. With us. That meant something. It isn’t always a mark of anything good, that a person showed up: a crazed bowman shows up at the public swimming pool with their bow and arrow, but the showing up Self did, is almost miraculous, I think, considering the treatment it’s taken; that he’s had to take, so far. I just appreciate that. He was there. He is still here, thank God.
“Gosh! What a beard he’s got there!” said my brand new friend Steve, impressed, when Mr Self punctually appeared in the street-doorway by the stage, far to our left.
“Steve, gosh, what a thing to think!” I said, shocked. “That’s no ‘beard’ that’s his beloved wife, Nelly!”
No I didn’t say that, that’s a joke I made up just now writing about it: an ‘esprit de l’escalier’ which phrase, as many phrases and also individual words, I learned with glee and gratitude from reading that mister called Self. Boom, boom. Instead, I more than agreed with Steve, feasting my the-very-sight-shined eyes to confirm, smiling, that Mr Self’s beard is fabulously splendid! Lush and stylishly sculpted and his hair grown to a fine-and-dandyish length that matches it perfectly. The professor was a perfect picture, one that I didn’t take with my phone, only – blink – in the live organic in-the-moment way. When retaining images via cameras can give us a false sense of security and detract and distract from the now.
Steve had also said, earlier, how much he delighted in Self’s extensive vocabulary too.
It was both normal and extraordinary to see the man deliver his talk by that open venue door, for the fresh air, and safety from germs, guarded by his most beautiful wife from the doorway – who would pass him a small glass of water for a sip from time to time – her position reinforced by one of the hosts (who would sometimes pass a drink of water too) so that no passer-by could step in through that opening, or loiter there, and no drawn crowd could form there. Speaking of death, I reckon Self might well have been more ill than very many men who’ve already died, of far less; and is currently probably more unwell than many men who are bed-ridden or wheelchair-bound. Upstanding.
I pray he continues to forebear.
I got the idea that Self wanted to establish about Amis was that he’d become so distracted by, and secure within, his lofty fixed position as an author – he’d made it! – that he’d forgotten to keep up with a rapidly evolving world as a responsive and responsible mind. A world in which, in that case, Amis was one of the last writers of his kind who became caught in a manneristic and ludic loop of reproducing what he’d already achieved as if that were more than enough now; self-referentially ‘Amis-ist’; not, vitally for Self, world-referentially ‘temporaneous-ist’. Amis ‘took a picture’ of his authorial self – or allowed one to be taken – and framed it in a gilded frame, boxing that authorial self in, I think.
Self said, with indignation, he was often invited to events like the one this evening when Amis was alive, as we might well imagine! The audience laughed at this, and initially, he tolerated it. Self’s attitude as an honourable keynote speaker among Amis’s devoted readers, admirers and academic scholars seemed surprising. ‘He’s irritated?!’ But it transpired, yes. Amis was a ‘top literary persona’ like a ‘top sportsman’ who’d won almost all the laurels. Self, while Amis was alive, had been inordinately famous too. They were competitors at the ‘top author Olympics’, with Amis just pipping a public type of ‘win’ that Self had had to grudgingly and covetously concede to, and Amis could gloat about; but they were never, for Self, competitors as novelists.
That Self was (at least at one time) the only living author Amis ever endorsed was something Amis had evidently frequently repeated in a way that sounded as ungentlemanly as a man reminding a former sexual conquest of his about that – one and only time – but that one time that there was, when they were had. Amis treated his endorsement as a conquest. In polite company. Which I imagine made Self squirm, enjoyably for Amis who’d openly revered Self’s terrific intellect. This is what we were hearing this night: the incisive application of that towering intellect to Amis’s body of work. Self was sharing his knowledge, his thought-powers, his literary-critical acumen, his vision, his wisdom and his fury at having been able to perceive how and where Amis fell short, in his superlatively well-read and uniquely expert judgement (as Amis knew), yet always to be wrongly assumed Amis’s devoted, aspiring, Amis-endorsed junior in more ways than chronological. Rubbed in by Amis. Understandably irritating.
Especially given that Amis’s ‘literary persona’ was simply bigger and brawnier than Self’s: Amis was less brainy and under-qualified to judge. When Self knew what he knew – and that it wasn’t as it appeared – with few others having the nous to discern the truth. Self was spelling it all out, lest anyone should be in any remaining doubt as to how it really was. Absolutely not funny for Self, but quite possibly highly amusing for Amis in his day:
We of course had been laughing with Self with joy in him, not at him, when he closed us down. But he’d needed to make this point: Amis’s parading of him as his protégé, and also, Amis’s disrespect, and in particular, xenophobia, in front of Self’s wife, Nelly; had been so far beyond a joke that Self could not even accept that outpouring of Self-love from this group, under these further Amis-revering circumstances – again – as of in the days when he was still alive. (Though Nelly had grinned when Self had mentioned it, as if confirming she recalled it too, yet as if somewhat shrugging it off as she might well have felt obliged to by good manners at the time. Indicating, yes, it had happened, but no, she hadn’t and wasn’t making a big deal of it, I thought.)
And the truth was, that by the time Amis had accepted his laurels and settled into his fixed position on top of the fixed pinnacle of literary achievement and accolade, Self had stopped reading him altogether and moved onto other reading he could learn from, as a writer. Amis’s views on Islam, his lack of inclusion of ethnic minorities, his having cleaved to the British establishment in accepting his Knighthood (taking the royal pay, as it were, as if in no further need of his tongue), his disinterest in the influence and change brought on by the growth of the internet and social media, were all unconscionable to Self, who was busy embracing and deeply researching and writing about those very topics. Often relatively thanklessly (in terms of awards and rewards) but, in accord with his authorial calling and integrity.
Amis’s responses after 9/11! At the time, I hadn’t quite been able to be sure where those quotations were coming from nor if they were meant, until I saw the video. It was confusing to hear: from a character? I still could not quite take in what Amis’s thoughts apparently were on this. We need much more on this alone, I think. This was one part I wanted to go over again.
For Self, as a writer who engaged with all those issues Amis eschewed perhaps before any other writer previously, a pioneer: unimpressed by him, yet mocked by him and assumed to be emulating him. How, well, inaccurate. Self, I think, needed us, at last, to know. And to know what Amis’s views were: quite how far his xenophobia went. Despite probably guessing that his careful words and his fully transparent motives would be misconstrued.
Much as Self nonetheless found Amis’s early turns of phrase wittily entertaining and delectable – he awarded some of Amis’s early work a chef’s kiss, there and then, quite the sight from the professor: MWUH! – blink – but not only because of the limits in his themes and subjects; that Amis began writing in a ‘famous Amis’-style, rather than a how-the-world-is-now-style, was another reason Self had had to leave him to it. Unread further, as Amis reproduced his own highly successful brand. Not understanding that the pedestal upon which he stood had been replaced by pixels. And his hanging on in there, unbudging, made him an anachronistic, stiff, fixture in the speeding bidirectional digital landscape of meaning and existence. When a living writer – in Self’s opinion and practice – must be in the flow of the world’s changes to be of note, interest, or esteem. I think is what Self was saying.
Just before the event, in the adjacent bar, was where Steve and I made friends.
Short silver-haired, round-faced Steve, is an Amis completist whereas the only book he’d read of Self’s so far was his psychedelic Walking to Hollywood including cartoon characters as characters, as he recalled.
“Ha ha. Hilarious!” we agreed, warming up for the event. We both loved Self on A Point of View, now sadly no more as a show on Radio 4. We were both soon to appreciate the fact that Self had scripted his entire speech for the night, as tightly.
“I’m an almost-completist of Will Self, but I’ve read next to nothing of Amis: London Fields, The Zone Of Interest,” I told Steve. “But I’ve taken an interest in his talks and interviews. Such an interesting, articulate man. Riotous in his work, yet, as a person, so still.”
“Oh yes, he did have that. Yes. Stillness. Yes, that is a good word. He was still,” said Steve, companionable.
“So funny, with that stillness, and seriousness, though. He made a joke I truly love, in one of his interviews.”
“Yes, he was very funny, as well as serious. What joke was that?” said Steve, smiling expectant.
“He said his mother was very young when she had him…”
“Yes, yes, she was young…”
“…so young, they were basically the same age.”
Steve laughed, delighted; we laughed.
“I’ll use that! My mother was 18 you know, when she had me, I’ll say, ‘We were pretty much born the same year!’” said Steve, happily. “How old are your three children, Elaine?”
“You want to know how old I am? OK. Well, my eldest is 41…”
“Forty-one! Gosh, crikey, you must be…” he looked mildly distressed, having to calculate such an indecently high number with respect to the lady by his side, impolite.
“I was very young,” I prompted.
“Oh yes, 41, you’re 41, of course!” he said, relieved.
I will probably never have a better encounter with a stranger that I’ve bumped into in a bar than this one, and certainly hadn’t before. But, that was because we were both there to see Mr Will Self speak about Sir Martin Amis.
“He wrote a book called Elaine, have you read it?”
“I have read that one, yes.”
(I’ve read far more of Self’s books than I’ve not read yet.)
Shortly after this I also met in that bar one of the organisers of the preceding event at Birkbeck University earlier in the day. He approached me, warm and brightly smiley, to thank me for having attended. He was there with his elegant wife. They were both in London specially for the Martin Amis events. But, she confessed, she’d rather been ignoring London because she’d become captivated by reading Will Self’s Dorian.
I can understand that, no shame at all, and where better in the world to read Self’s Dorian for the first time than London. (That’s one I’ve listened to on cd, read enchantingly by Mr Self. As well as having read the book. As an Oscar Wilde fan, also: divine.)
I introduced them to Steve as a friend I’d only just met, too.
Later, directly after Self had left the building, his speech delivered, Steve said:
“I thought they [Self and Amis] were friends!”
The event organiser passed near to where we were still sitting in our audience seats. Steve asked him what he’d thought of the talk?
He said, apologetically, how angry Self had seemed and that he hadn’t been his choice of speaker but he’d wanted someone else, who was a full admirer of Amis (a man he named, whom I didn’t know of). He said he thought Self’s anger was because of what Melissa Kite had written about him recently. (Not about what Self had blatantly been speaking angrily about.) He said it was an excellent comeback to what Self had written about her in his article about Jason Arday. He told me that Self, with nothing to lose, had lied about her in it.
He didn’t saying Kite was accusing Self of lying – currently unproven either way – nor that Self may or may not even have quoted her (which I didn’t think he had), no: he said Self had lied as if it were proven simply because Kite seems to have claimed so. As if cut and dry.
I explained that I’d read that article by Self on Arday and hadn’t interpreted the passage about Kite in that way myself. I explained I’d also read the piece Kite wrote in response which implied, it seemed to me, that she was about to take legal action against Self, but that there had been nothing more published about that yet, far as I knew.
Thinking about it, then, I thought for the first time that Self might’ve been indicating Kite had used the words he’d included in the passage about her in the Self J’Accuse (as being those he could imagine her using). He has an extraordinarily retentive memory: and she’s now set many scenes for numerous chats to have taken place. He hasn’t stated that he ever heard her say those words, but I reckon if he does state that, he’ll know. I wouldn’t think the matter has been settled yet. In my opinion, he hasn’t lied about her whatever she said or didn’t say, because he wasn’t framing what he put as factual.
The event organiser then told me that Self ‘picked on’ far more women than men.
So Self, in this personable fellow’s opinion, was not only someone who would turn up to a professional engagement so angry about something someone had written about him days previously, with nothing to do with the proceedings, that he would take it out on an entire audience at which the writer presumably was not a member among; he was a liar; and now, a bully?
“Are you saying he’s a misogynist?” I asked.
“Yes, he is,” he asserted, smiling handsomely.
As if explaining how I ought to understand and read Self and his attitude. As if kindly towards me. Maybe, I wondered (but am not asking to be told), he’d noticed that Self had turned his head during points in his speech to look directly at me and had thought I might’ve been upset by it. So needed to know ‘what he’s like’ to feel better.
What Self is like is that he’s a feminist. I liked this organiser, and his wife. I think his ideas about Self – which are wrong – might go back to his previous marriage to the sadly deceased mother of Self’s two younger offspring, Deborah Orr, who also on speaking out against him publicly had been assumed able to condemn him, untried.
I’d naturally wondered if Orr’s allegations were true at the time, and had resolved to gauge what I thought for myself. I’d eventually remembered reading (and reread) a strangely scathing and bitter article Orr had written about, and – in a retaliatory tone – against all the friends of hers who were supporting her through her cancer, upbraiding them for doing it wrong. I’d seen my adoptive father die of cancer and how his thought-processes had been affected. It had seemed to me Orr’s mind had not been working healthily at the time she publicly spoke against Self. Did anyone properly investigate, before reaching conclusions about Self that would so deleteriously affect him?
Or did they leap to them, based on similar sexist assumptions as those of this organiser, that each woman was right? Speaking factually and accurately? Honestly?
I was distressed – not because Self’s eyes had rested on me a few times during an angry speech, if that’s why the organiser had seemed to have felt the need to reassure me with his defamatory comments, conclusions and assumptions – but because this intelligent-seeming man should speak about Self so casually in such stark condemnation of him. I’d been listening to what Self was telling us during his speech, taking as much in as I could and I liked (and like) his eye-contact very much – blink – even when he’s, rightfully, enraged, he has such adorable – blink – ice-blue eyes.
I’m replacing here a blog I removed with revisions, now it’s no longer August and I’ve officially left Portsmouth Mediation Service to return to full time education this month (September), at least for now. Blogging sometimes allows me to think through an experience reflectively, process it, summarise it, then move on. But, I closed this ‘door’ and found I’d stranded inside a fly which buzzed and bumped to be let out. Hence the delete. But here’s the blog again with the fly released to the now-autumnal skies.
Though I’m remaining a member, at the start of next month, I’m leaving my role as a volunteer restorative community mediator with Portsmouth Mediation Service, or, PMS, to return to full-time study. I’ve been reflecting on my time with PMS. Here, I begin by concentrating on one important tool in the restorative practice toolbox I’ve learned, having embedded my learning through a sequence of initial training, frequent structured staff meetings and a variety of regular CPD sessions: how to swap the ‘I’ statement for the ‘you’ statement and stick to it.
In this blog I argue that ‘I’ statements can be restorative when they reveal lived experience, but can become confusing and even harmful when they covertly carry accusation, command, or social signalling under the cover of self-disclosure.
This key learning feature has led me to a vital new understanding of myself. About how my own personal style of communication and view of the world affects my interrelations. Often, unfortunately, in ways I don’t wish. This revelation began to dawn on me while writing this blog; initially my attempt to think through a misunderstanding in a relationship. I’d begun by thinking and writing about them, and their behaviour, as if that might be the right path for me to follow if I should be able to discover a fault, or faults in them, but soon began asking and answering these questions of no one but myself, instead:
What happened and why? Do I have enough information to discern that, or do I need more? If so, what information do I need, exactly, and how do I get it, if I can? What have I done, if anything, that contributed to the misunderstanding? What can I do, if anything, to repair it? Is repair truly possible or even the best objective? If so, how would I know if I achieved it? What do I want, ideally, to change? What would I like to happen next? What actions, if any, will I need to take next? Am I able to take them?
Can I just, review it, then forget about it: no further action required?
From my involvement in PMS casework, and my subsequent reflections, I’ve developed a deeper reflective process for addressing problems centred upon my own accountability in this way. What I’ve uncovered about myself through this process is applicable to all aspects of my life. It began because of ‘I’ statements, which led me to ‘I’ thoughts, not ‘you’ thoughts, although it was my experience of unwanted ‘you’ actions – indicating that I needed to create new boundaries – that nudged me in the direction of examining my own attitudes afresh.
‘I’ statements are favoured in restorative work because people telling one another how they feel, think, and what their experiences are, is capable of generating empathy and understanding within a listener. Under certain circumstances and conditions, people saying what ‘I’ feel and what ‘I’ think, to one another, rather than ‘you’ are this, and ‘you’ are that, can make all the difference. Applying its principles to me, myself, and ‘I’ with respect to all my own relationships, starting with one puzzling incident – of scepticism about a fundamental fact – has brought me an important insight into my own nature and its effect, as perceived by others. A relationship that had seemed to have gone awry – or at least to not be as eye-to-eye as I’d previously believed – has succeeded, with some work on my behalf, in giving me the gift of seeing a new aspect of what I’m like nobody was telling me.
For my over a year, by now, working with PMS as a community mediator, encouraging a mindful and reparative use of ‘I’ is one of the best tools in the metaphorical PMS box for quelling grumbles in the community. That is, encouraging those in conflict to speak about it to one another using ‘I’. Two examples below demonstrate how people will typically air their disputes in a PMS-mediated meeting, having willingly allowed themselves to be influenced beforehand by our guidance:
Party A) “I feel disrespected, unhappy and worried when your music keeps me awake till 2am when I need to get up for my NHS job at 6am and then can’t get back to sleep.”
Party B) “I feel intimidated and sad when you bang on my wall and shout at me – I suffer from anxiety and am a survivor of domestic abuse and I’ve been diagnosed with CPTSD – I need to play music to wind down after doing my evening shift in the busy bar or I’ll be staring at the ceiling all night, ruminating.”
If the new information about one another’s working hours and their respective needs leads to these neighbours, above, who are at loggerheads, becoming less hostile, and leads to them making pro-social changes to their behaviour – the evening worker, ‘B’, using headphones when they come home late, or relaxing in a different room than the one next to where the NHS worker is trying to sleep; the NHS-worker, ‘A’, sending a WhatsApp message to ‘B’ if their sleep has been disturbed instead of banging the wall and ranting – then the job of the restorative mediator has been well done.
The mediator will have facilitated a change for the better and perhaps have helped neighbourly bonds form in place of tensions.
However, this deliberate use of ‘I’ can miss when the statement carries more charge than self-disclosure alone: ‘I’ still means ‘you’, to an extent. Saying ‘I’ and meaning ‘you’ has the danger of being perceived as manipulative. Arch. Passive aggressive. It’s a fine balance. It works well in the type of mediation where the information that had been lacking on either side was precisely what the rational and reasonable citizens in conflict, needed to know. And believe. Truthfully, non-manipulatively and non-aggressively delivered information. That the other is also then able to imagine: what it might be like to be in the other’s ‘I’-shoes. In which case, their each having used ‘I’ has been perfect, when an accusatory ‘you’ would’ve been likely to have escalated the tensions on both sides, and to have prevented the information from having been absorbed and becoming transformative.
If there are deeper problems of character, or deeper resentments, pre-judgements, assumptions, biases, from where the hints of aggressiveness and signs of thwarted control stem, the word ‘I’ can be used to cut down the other to size, not resolving anything unless one of the parties capitulates. This might lead to a less successful and less sustainable outcome. Because, when a mediated dispute becomes competitive in this way, the ‘I’ statement can tempt people into exaggeration, selective truth, or posture, in order to win individually rather than to reach any genuine win-win change. Or might carry with it all the unexamined tensions unbeknownst to that ‘I’.
With an indignant (and probably preposterous) “Don’t ‘you’ know who ‘I’ am?!” between the lines. Both neighbours might have their own motives, assumptions, and blind spots to examine; sometimes the most deeply restorative work will begin not with a polished ‘I’ statement, but with the harder question of what the speaker is avoiding, defending, or projecting. And this is what I’ve been doing, having a good look at where I must have been coming from, with as-unflinching-as-possible detachment.
A mediated meeting will be a success if the neighbours hadn’t really thought about each other’s lives and now they have, and henceforth want to keep thinking about that as they carry on living theirs, more accommodatingly and moderately.
“I went to the opera yesterday evening,” says one colleague to another, amiably. “What did you get up to, anything, or was it a quiet one?”
‘They’re saying my life’s boring because I nearly always stay in and watch the box!’ could be the ‘I-meaning-you’ internal translation, and the colleague’s attempt to connect, missed. The quite opposite impression given, or anyway taken, instead; of rivalrous baiting. This ‘I-means-you’ thinking could even manufacture conflict. When ‘I’ statements become the default carriers of complaints, demands and insults that aren’t otherwise articulated, how can we tell when the ‘I’ statement is a no-strings communication indicating trust, warmth and hopeful congeniality, a nice, ‘perhaps you and I could become friends’?
In addition, sometimes people use ‘I’ to carry an insult when under internal pressures of frustration:
“I think that I’m one of those people that no one ever listens to!” they might snarl in a hapless ear. Or about whatever factor it is about their addressee which is irking them, but in this case, the addresser’s desire to quash the addressee’s authority as a speaker as equal to, or greater than, their own. Perhaps not once having truly thought of themselves as not listened to, but hoping the addressee will absorb the negation as their own with covert pressure for them to become quieter, smaller, or more self-doubting. Hoping to shift their initial internal pressures onto someone else.
The difference between a person confessing their own insecurities, or admitting their tendency to be blanked; or acting with malfeasance, abusively, for personal gain of the sort abusers find empowering, is motive: to connect, or ‘correct’? Of course, ‘correction’ is sometimes what’s called for, when appropriate, but not when the addressee is innocent and the addresser has no business in interfering with another’s life or behaviour. Even to redress what they perceive to be an unearned equity or unfair inequality, unasked.
I’m calling this as an ‘I-as-psychological-implant-attempt’: a statement offered as self-revelation but in fact a derogating insinuation. Whether or not that is always the speaker’s conscious intention, the effect can be corrosive, and recognising it matters.
While I was studying this past year, more on this shortly, one of my fellow mature students – who dropped out of the course a few weeks later – said right in my ear, so no other student or the tutor could hear, directly after one session during which they and I had participated in group discussion: “I might sound like it, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!” and I’d laughed, thinking it an intimate confession, a quirky candid friendship-move, on their behalf. But I’d quickly noticed, puzzled, that their expression had remained serious-looking, and had noticed in the weeks following that that there was no warmth from them. In hindsight, it had been an ‘I-as-psychological-implant-attempt’. My apparent confidence might have undermined their own, unintentionally, and they’d wanted to knock it.
I hadn’t been speaking with confidence in the subject, which small and tentative confidence I have by now, I didn’t gain until I’d completed the course successfully , and I wasn’t speaking as if I’d known what I was doing either, but I’d known I authentically wanted to be learning and had been determined to succeed if I could. So, that inauthentic statement wasn’t going to land on that ground, was it. It had seemed, comical and promising at first, then bizarre.
Whenever we are assessing a case at PMS, we need to keep an open mind about what one person says about their own situation in relation to another’s. They might be attempting to enlist us in stealing another person’s thunder in some way.
Sometimes people use ‘I’ as a ‘polite’ command: “I am going to unpack the shopping in a minute…” Meaning they want the tardy addressee to unpack the shopping in the hallway for them immediately, unable to bear seeing them sit there idly for a moment longer! The addressee’s role, at this ‘I’ statement-cue, is to leap up saying, ‘I’ll do it right away!’ That is an ‘I-means-you-must’ statement.
I’d already identified that those types of ‘I’ things happen before I started at PMS, of course, but I’d thought they happened rarely. And idiosyncratically. I’ve tended to shrug off ‘I’ statements like that, within my earshot, kind of as gibberish. While thinking about the person’s frustrations, empathetically. (Knowing that fully empathising with those intent on harm should be limited to experts’ compassionate understanding.) Wondering why they didn’t just say. By now I’m realising that my thinking this way about things like that is because most people don’t ‘just say’, socially, ever, or hardly ever, and I’m the one who’s idiosyncratic here…
Witnessing mystifying interactions that are based on inaccuracies.
Anyway, apart from being wary of the person issuing those sorts of statements, and perhaps feeling some pity for them, I’ve obstinately not obeyed them. If I’ve caught onto them, that is. Sometimes, when it’s been subtle, I’ve complied with something not in my best interests when I really shouldn’t have. Perhaps giving the person a false sense of command over me, rather than conveying my circumstantial agreeability, friendliness and convivial obligingness towards them which crass manipulation or over-advantage-taking could spoil. At least I’m beginning to know now. Now more than ever before. Seeing it. Because, largely, of PMS.
And also because, during the past year, I completed my college course studying the basics of humanistic counselling skills. As mentioned above. With its three famous foundational tenets: empathy, congruence, and unconditional acceptance. The ‘I’ statement is key to that type of work too, though in a slightly different way. At best, ‘I’ statements can be useful in relation to a general mission of maximising mental health, peace and goodwill to all men, and between all men, whether it’s through mediated conversations or talking therapies.
My brain tends to work (along with the other working parts of my body, my emotions, and my soul) with a default preference for speaking with maximum accuracy. While I’ve had some understanding that this can be kind of antisocial, I don’t (usually) mean to be antisocial by it. And I didn’t really know why this was till now. Why I sometimes fail on the relationship-niceties score when I’m wishing with all my heart to succeed. Fail, for speaking in the literal way I do. How it makes me prone to sounding either as if I’m fabricating – by not mincing my words in the way that’s generally expected – or as if I’m driving at something else entirely, even when I’m not, I’ve found. Time and again. Without having previously got to the bottom of it.
I only do a little of that kind of beating-around-the-bush-talk. Hint-talk. Hint-hint-talk, even. Unfortunately far less and far less well than others.
When I say: “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” I tend to mean that I have a collection of etchings I think they’d enjoy looking at which I’d like to welcome them into my home to show them. I do know, in the case of ‘etchings’, that the person I’m asking might well be thinking I’m offering more. ‘See my etchings’ being a famous old euphemism for what’s nowadays framed as ‘Netflix and chill’. But frequently, I did not guess or predict that my addressee would typically make of what I say something other than what I meant. With almost every exchange. Until now.
“Would you know it, Elaine propositioned me!”
When, ha, ha, no Elaine did not.
If you and I have been kissing deeply and passionately and she says (‘I’ say to ‘you’): “When I went to the bathroom just now, I inserted a femidom.”
Elaine (ha, ha) did. (Probably better to say than risk a surprise discovery in my opinion, only, one of my former darlings did suggest, amused, that that wasn’t what one says in a situation like that: as if discovery’s better. I think that was unchivalrous of him, in a situation like that, with someone like me.)
Despite miscommunication having happened a lot in my life, I didn’t get it before now. Despite knowing that, by meaning exactly what I say, I’m often erroneously speaking as if – as Steven Pinker puts it in his book The Stuff of Thought – ‘conversational partners are modems downloading information into each other’s brains’, when they’re not. Or not only like that. Because I often don’t know how else to put things to ensure that people reliably do know what I mean, unambiguously.
To connect. Not to ‘correct’. Or to direct. Or to misdirect. Or to subject. Like, when we sit down in front of an orange and candyfloss-pink sunset. ‘Sit with me please and see this with me, companion?’ To be part of it. Its witness. The participant in the event of it. Making a lanky shadow happen because of it, and because we also exist in a form, too. Beautified by it. Lit.
That is I’m saying: Here is an objective thing for you it pleases me to share, albeit subjectively, with you…
I suppose it’s knowing when bald accuracy is required: “Meet you at such and such a place at such and such a time”; and when anything quite as precise might be misinterpreted. Might sound weird. I go, ‘Sit with me and see this lovely sunset?’ They think, ‘Arrogant show-off!’ or something. My epiphany is that most people know an unspoken language that I don’t know and get so wrong that I wind people up. That I don’t know is something I can see has held me back in many ways in my life.
Although it has brought pleasures. And, at least now I know.
Know that I will have to work very hard to gauge when the time is right for straight talking and when it’s not. If I can. Know that I will still get it wrong. Know when I need to log evidence before I do talk factually, to reassure anyone who is listening. Yes, I know about analogy – I used one above, I don’t really have any etchings – and I know about metaphor, and jokes, and double entendre, and multivalence, and hyperbole, and can use all those language forms. Especially in writing. And extra-especially in creative writing. But I do tend to speak as precisely as possible about things that in my opinion are facts, and about events I have experienced; and feel uncomfortable when I’m not speaking in that manner.
I’ve been told by a close friend that I sometimes sound like I’m lying, even to her, when she already knows I’m blatantly speaking nothing but the truth – as she was there – purely because of the very level of detail I typically go into. What chance do I have with people who don’t know me, unless they’re unusual in at least some of the ways I am, or a specialist expert? Particularly when the new person I’m telling – who, for example, wasn’t there – seems not to be getting the picture and I then automatically double down on detail to try and help my recounting land with them. Accidentally pushing their credulity and faith in what I’m saying further and further away by doing more of the thing that gave them to doubt me in the first place.
Will I ever be able to change now I’ve seen it more clearly than ever? Maybe learn to improve on that? Maybe. I hope so.
But. Meanwhile, I also have a default way of listening that causes frequent intercommunication problems: I tend to listen as if what I’m hearing is literal and true, unless it’s blatantly obviously not. Gullible? At times. Not always. I do have something of a ‘jaydar’ to help me spot when someone is trying to make a jay of me, pulling the wool over my eyes. An outright scammer. But the subtle stuff gets through. The ‘jaydar’ is no defence in itself, just, gives me some indication sometimes.
I wonder now how many people have deliberately got one over me. Realising that I’m not attuned in the way most are. And taken advantage.
Uta Frith who is the world’s leading expert on autism says during a 2016 interview on the subject, “…[that] when we listen to others, we always read between the lines and don’t take utterances literally. These are tricky things for autistic people…” I definitely share that particular trait with autistic people, I realise. I can read between the lines in the written word, but in live conversations, only in a very minimal way since I’ll be too stimulated by the information I’m receiving and facing the social demands on myself in the moment to be able to do much speculative translating. To what degree this might make me an autistic person, I don’t know. I’ve not sought a formal diagnosis. Not yet. What Frith tells me though, with this, is something about what is going on, that I’m constitutionally not a part of. Or haven’t been yet.
I have the ability to lie, but find it so costly to my peace of mind, I’d first have to be or feel completely cornered. I’ve never seemed to be able to get away with it. But then, I hardly ever seem to get away with telling the truth, either, evidently. Another friend once observed, “Most of us don’t even notice when we’re telling lies: but you would notice every time.” She’s seemed not to mind that about me. I prefer not to lie so much that being in a situation where I do, nonetheless, is always a horrible situation for me to be in.
And as a case in point, isn’t me saying all this exactly the sort of ‘I’-based account a liar would offer? Proving the converse? It’s true, but that’s the bind I’m in I see it now: the Cassandra effect, I think I will call this phenomena…
Lying and white lying are not rare, and I have done both myself – I’d so rather not! – yet I’m still surprised by how often ordinary conversation treats a small lie as the socially competent thing to do.
And it’s amazed me time and again how often people lie to their partners, “Oh, it only cost £20!” when the T-shirt cost £50, etc. Telling the truth at all times – give or take human errors – is generally accepted as dumb. It is not appreciated. It’s mistrusted and disliked. Even while we all profess to have truth on a pedestal, social discourse and the role play of etiquette etc. keeps that pedestal a very low stand.
I’m finally beginning to realise that any person I’m speaking to is used to listening through the ‘clever’ and entirely unacknowledged, unspoken, aggregately agreed filter of white lies, exaggerations, ironies and prevarications that are such an integral part of normal conversation, that the person will likely have difficulty grasping my meaning expressed in the very words. I’ll say the T-shirt cost £50 – when it did – and they will think ‘£20’, as it were. ‘She’s boasting that she had £50 to spare, liar!’ I sometimes watch a person’s face as they’re making a quiet calculation for a few moments until they arrive on what they’ve decided the meaning of what I just said is. Then they speak, and, oh no…
I learn that the pure truth of my statement failed to compute with them. Though I hadn’t been talking quantum physics. I think the words perhaps landed like unintelligible nonsense because the content of them would’ve stung, if what I’d said was about something painful they didn’t wish to empathise with, didn’t wish to feel. Or think it might be about something nice in my life they don’t think I deserve as much as they do, that they don’t have? I speculate… ‘Why did that land so badly?’ Now I know that social conversation cannot land the same way I say it because it has to soothe to schmoose too.
Is it deliberate sometimes – pretending to disbelieve something clearly true – as a way of taking advantage though of someone who talks not in riddles, but in factual units?
A junior relative told me that knowing I disdain to lie, “People will try and see what they can get out of you.” Which had sounded threatening, not helpfully informative as it might’ve done had I known where to turn.
From now, I will mostly wonder if it’s happening because that’s what’s usual before I go anywhere else with it. Hearing non-truths. Whatever it is, the quirk of my words being read through to something analogous, not as, on the nose in a perfect label-on-tin-and-contents marriage, amounts to me saying the socially wrong thing. ‘Should’ve said £20, then perhaps they’d know I meant £50,’ as it were, is what I have thought, temporarily glum, unwilling to say it.
It’s been as if, even though I’ve spelt out every letter of an email address, to get the right thought to land fair and square in that person’s mind, what’s landed in their head is an email from somewhere else instead. Making mine vanish into the spam. Whereas, it was meant to be a shared anchoring fact that we now both know about, together. With any other facts and ideas and coincident resonances merely adjacent, not the ones to land in its place, missing the fact and factualness of what I verbally gave them, altogether. The imagined ‘message’, or the association that they make, is what lands first, not what I said. Whether that’s wilful of the listener, or not.
When I realise such a rerouting has happened, I regret having shared what I shared.
I thought they might begin to think I wanted them to speak ‘falsehoods’ in ‘return’, if they believed I’d say any old guff to make a point like ‘the point’ they got, instead of the fact. Which of course, provided no equal exchange in my mind; a light lie offered as a response to an accurate-as-possible truth is disappointing. A truth for an accurate-as-possible truth would be nicer for me, as long as it’s not with attitude. From my point of view, conversing with accuracy is respectful, not only of the person I’m speaking to, but of myself, and to reality. To nature. But I realise, now, I realise, it’s not how people generally do it! Speaking ‘falsehoods’ at me, is, often, generally, just, speaking to me!
Sometimes, I’ve noticed people repeating my own authentic phrases back at me whole, as if they applied to them, like interchangeable soundbites. When I know what they are saying isn’t true of them, isn’t the same, isn’t authentic, sounds false and unsettling coming from them like a parrot. But now I understand that that is how I sound to them speaking that way. They’ve done me the favour of holding up a mirror to myself – perhaps to say, ‘you faker!’ – but in fact showing me that the authenticity and intimacy of how I live my life is not appropriate for conversation.
Or, not with them.
A peer on my recent college course was intending to lie to their spouse and say there was a class the next week when the college was closed for half term in fact. I suggested it would be better for them not to lie to their spouse. They said, my saying that, made them not trust me. I asked why my saying that didn’t make me seem more trustworthy. Nobody answered within the small group we were in at the time. Maybe I’d already sounded like a liar to them, the way I talk.
‘NB: I will sound like a liar if I speak that truth. That’s the only way they will be able to understand it, without documentary assistance, as false…’ I tell myself at this point.
A liar on the apparently punishable level. Or maybe, because it’s such odd behaviour, speaking out against normal day to day fibs, that it made me seem untrustworthy, just that. When I’d been trying to prevent a marital barney if the college student’s spouse had found out they’d lied to preserve their time away from their extremely demanding family life to study. Friendly to both partners. Their union. Their trust.
Being the way I am, as I mentioned earlier, has had some upsides, if not nearly so many human allies as I’d have wished. Perhaps deriders. Enemies, even. I’d like to change my ways slightly now though, and boundaries, and improve my communications if I can.
Whenever I’ve found myself straying towards fudging and fluffing in what I’ve said, it’s been a clue to me to get out of that conversation as quickly as possible: it’s been my cue that the person I’m speaking to is off my wavelength so much that I should find someone else to talk to. That I’m ‘malfunctioning’ in their presence. Their reactions somehow corrupting my ability to think (and speak) clearly, for whatever reason. As I write this, I’m thinking that I should try harder and resolving that next time it happens, I’ll see how far I get…
“Hang on, I didn’t mean to say what I just said, it was inaccurate, I’m having difficulty conversing with you with a degree of authenticity I’m comfortable with, would you be prepared for me to think for a bit longer before I say anything more and try again?”
Nope, that wouldn’t work, would it… The point is, I can’t really do it comfortably. Or well. Yet.
Similarly, if someone had begun speaking to me in any number of ways that were obviously false, my tendency was to think that (again, for whatever reason) they should get away from me! That I must have been accidentally corrupting their truthfulness. If possible, I would help them by creating distance between us. Perhaps there’s a better way for me to handle that type of situation though, too, henceforth.
They might enjoy what appears to me to be spouting falsehoods at me. It might not mean anything I need to be concerned about. It might just be just normal…
With the mediation work, the members of PMS have regular team meetings in which we each take a turn to speak discreetly about our cases, our work generally, or about anything that might be happening in our lives. Online weekly, apart from one week in every four when we have our meeting face to face, during which we always have ‘circle time’.
I might well have appeared to have been speaking with a moral to my stories too when I hadn’t, not deliberately anyway. Inadvertently insulting someone perhaps! I’ve noticed when I’ve done poetry in front of an audience, there’s usually at least one person there that one or other poem will mean something to, by chance. They’ll tell me the significance to them afterwards, which would blatantly be a coincidence considering we probably didn’t know one another. Of course, there can be meanings beyond the intended ones, and you could say, if the cap fits, wear it.
But there’s a big difference between writing a poem about a person, announcing it’s about a silverback gorilla called Alpha, but giving the nod to everyone else in the room apart from the one person it’s really about: that tall bloke with the dark hair in the front row. Wink, wink. (Actually, a chap like that would know it was about him without being told.) I didn’t see it in ‘circle time’ more than in a glimmer!
Like, sometimes, when our team has met, I’ve wondered what’s being referred to when someone says something obviously metaphorical; perhaps as well as being true; or perhaps invented. I’ve wondered during online meetings from our homes what the manager has meant, for example, when he’s announced:
“There’s a fox in the garden.”
I can tell, at least, that there may or may not be a literal fox visiting his garden, and that the phrase may also be functioning metaphorically. It might name a person perceived as watchful, clever, disruptive, or sly; or it might simply be a vivid aside which connotations I am over-reading because I have become newly alert to this kind of indirection.
And that’s all OK by me.
But, me; when I say there’s a fox in my garden, there definitely is. Returning to the idea of the etchings. (There never is a fox in the garden where I live, because the back to back gardens are walled all the way round the block by the fronts of tightly-terraced buildings, but, just supposing one arrived…) I’d state it, (if I wanted to mention it) then let the connotations and associations, if any, ripple out from that occurrence naturally. Perhaps coincidentally. Stemming from there, any synchronicities.
“There’s a fox in the garden.”
Coming from me, such a sentence would almost always mean an actual sighting; from someone else, it might be observational, tactical, metaphorical, or all three.
(I have just realised what it means when I can’t talk straight in someone’s company as above, precisely. But, I’m not giving up all my ideas in one go… It’s an example of how blogging can bring clarity.)
Now I know though, that there’s so much more of the cryptic anecdote than I’d ever dreamed, as I mentioned above, I’m hoping to work on my communication style and skills. Remembering, any statement with a noun or pronoun might be about anyone. Knowing me though, I’ll probably blunder in with: “Come on, who’s meant to be ‘the fox’ then?” (No I won’t.) Knowing from now on, that any utterance I hear, or speak, is… Well, not quite how I had previously imagined.
I am stopping this now. ‘I’. Meaning you are stopping, too. ‘You.’
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).
