Signing Your Own Life Warrant

One year ago Mum died, and I was heading into a working Christmas at Monkey Puzzle Meadow, the ‘crisis house’.

Unlike those passing through Monkey Puzzle Meadow, Mum’s choice was not suicide. She was far too addicted to self-punishment for that. Her older sister, however, tried to take her own life as recently as last Spring, shortly after her 90th birthday. Aunt Ellen swallowed lots of pills but was found and, errrr, ‘rescued’ in time. During her subsequent month in hospital Ellen recorded her thoughts in a journal, mainly as a tactic to stay sane (for that is exactly what she was and is) and thus ensure a return to her home and to some semblance of control over her life:

“I once was caressed, now I am assessed. Have I become a commodity? I cannot imagine which end of the scale I am exceeding.”

“Life lives itself in two ways: one way we think we understand; the second way is lived for us by something other. Now and then we’re surprised by the latter. We give it all sorts of names, but nothing makes sense, save the eternal necessity of paying. Life is too strong for me, its gusts and heats, its deadly colds have left me stranded, gasping and afraid that I won’t be able to show a brave face.”

I have been slowly integrating the Monkey Puzzle Meadow experience, and I feel privileged to have been a sentient, learning human being in an environment coursing with the thoughts and feelings of women and men overcoming the often rational temptation to initiate their own death. I confess that I was not thick-skinned enough to ‘take it’, to shut off from the painful issues for long enough. I could do it on a day-to-day basis, and hopefully give meaningful support to individuals, but in the longer term I knew deep down that the toll was too great. Lack of support from above and politically motivated changes to the service were both aggravating factors, but I now understand that I had reached the limits of my ability to maintain (despite being Maintenant Man!) that teetering, ever-shifting balance between detachment and engagement.

Running a residential service is, by its very nature, hugely committing if you take the role seriously. The house runs 24:7 for 52 weeks of the year. At some enzyme-in-the-gut level it is always with you even when you are off duty. That partly explains both the fascination and the fatigue, but the biggest factor lies in the phenomenon of suicide itself. It is such a very human fact. No other animal uses this behaviour. It seems possible that certain creatures are capable of developing a rudimentary sense of ‘self’, but any claims to have witnessed animals actively seeking their own demise are just sentimental projections of human desire. And it is a phenomenon that touches most lives, whether via inner thoughts (as with sexual fantasies, the vast majority of people who think about suicide would never even get close to attempting it) or via friends or family members. A loved aunt on my Dad’s side killed herself with gin and barbiturates during my first year at university.

It’s the one thing that many people cannot talk about to the person(s) with whom they can “share everything”.

Perhaps this intensely personal quality is part of its allure. For those who are drawn into the mental health system it becomes a vital identity, something that it is hard to break from because what would remain? For the majority, it is a sign that the intensely personal has grown fat and demanding, that the self has bloated to a point where both the need for love and the needs of loved ones are eclipsed.

And then there are the entirely rational folk who are terminally ill, or who recognise no connections to other people (and who have aged to a point where that will not change). Ellen is in the latter category. Her words illustrate the power of the ‘lone self’, but also hint at a learning from her experience:

“At night I know different things. I look at a darkened sky and I try to understand what it is telling me. The night is for me alone, the day belongs to everyone. The day changes so quickly, the night is eternal. I shall stand under a tree and let it lift me – that will be the way to go! I have just had my first bath alone since coming home from the hospital. It is so necessary to pour water over oneself. A christening? A pagan purification?”

So right now Ellen is the baby that will not be thrown out with the bath water. Whatever we do, it just ain’t possible to escape from the tyranny of rebirth……though the Buddha is supposed to have achieved just that. To be honest, I’m not sure I would want to achieve that, there’s so much to relish about learning to be human, about signing your own life warrant with a defiant flourish.

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 Kamchatka!

Sami had travelled up and down the scimitar-shaped peninsula after completing her studies of the scattered remnants of the indigenous peoples of Eastern Siberia. This was still one of the last places on earth where the forces of nature had successfully conspired to dilute the Glorious New Monoculture. It was a losing battle, but Kamchatka was going down fighting. Kamchatka the place that is. The resistance of  certain people was important, but the knowledge implicit in place was the most crucial factor.

Despite her mixed feelings, Sami had been unable to resist the temptation to put a little of her inner feelings into Pull Yourself Together. The book was ‘safely’ set in the late 19th century and was about the love affair between an Alaskan fishing boat captain and a young woman from Petropavlosk during the period of the transfer of power from Russia to America in the new Alaskan state. She did not yet understand the pull that Kamchatka exerted on her spirit, but now, with little more than three days to go before her submission deadline, she cast an anxious eye over one of the paragraphs that she knew would cause trouble with the Slush Pile, the Fictitious Prose Narrative Commission.

“The commander of the Cossack unit called a halt to the search for Ahora Hombre at dusk on the twentieth day of the expedition. The trail had gone cold. ‘Ahora, the son of a whore, could be anywhere in Kamchatka by now…I hope he has been drowned in the lava of some volcano, or eaten slowly by a bear with a cruel mind’.

The commander surveyed the darkening river valley below the terrace on which the Cossacks had camped. Like all who know only power and who are therefore bound to abuse that power, he feared and hated the things he could not understand. The contours of the terrain, and the very fibres of the land itself, seemed to give off a peaceful, slumbering energy. It was as if the tundra and the hills and the sinewy river were smiling in some secret dream. The commander felt a violent urge to wake the dreamer up, to wipe that knowing smile off its face. Or better still to threaten and torture until the land’s secrets were revealed. But the commander was not a stupid man. He was of the breed of authority that would come to dominate the world over the next two hundred years: one foot in the naked brutality of the past; one foot in the subtle co-options and compromises of the future.

‘If you wake the smiling dreamer too soon, the secret of the smile will be lost forever’. He spat his mouthful of betel-pepper into the fire and turned his thoughts to enforcing a new tax levy on the village of Palana on his way home.”

Before Sami could weigh up whether to tone down the criticism of powers-that-be, her thoughts were interrupted by the live connection tone from her tele-console. It was the private line. In theory this was a service that the Corporates could not monitor. However, everyone knew that routine surveillance kicked in after ten seconds of connection, the ten seconds being a lingering relic from the days of token civil liberties. Even tokenism was becoming increasingly unnecessary.

Sami activated the line, fully expecting another pleading call from her parents.

An urgent, unrecognised male voice cut through her half-formed reassurances: “In two hours time, be in the poetry section of the Cowell Museum library. Act on the message written on the No Novel Underground leaflet inside Songs of Innocence and Experience“.

[tbc]

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Some lovely exchanges about signature tunes since the previous post…thank you, and keep them coming in. I won’t publish any here unless anyone specifically asks. As for my own, which I now have to deliver on (reluctantly because I still feel divided) I had decided to plump for an instrumental as words can become too subjectively loaded. And it’s not at all about one’s favourite songs.

However, no instrumental quite fell into place. Musically, The Liquidator by The Harry J All Stars is near perfect, but the title doesn’t fit. And Beethoven’s Late Quartets are just too long, even if a single section is isolated. So I returned to the notion of words being acceptable, and henceforth any human intercourse will be topped and tailed to the strains of  The Incredible String Band performing Big Ted. I will not reproduce the lyrics here, or speculate as to why a Maintenant Man might possibly identify with the diminutive form of the name Edward. Those who are interested can, no doubt, google the lyrics and Spotify the song (other internet-based download services are available…but beware of i-Tunes…).

’nuff said.

xox

Everyone Should Have Their Own Signature Tune….

…and carry a little audio device around with them to play it aloud before they speak to anyone. Literally every time they meet a stranger or a friend or acquaintance. People who live together (whether family members or partners) would be allowed to play each other their signature tunes once at the start of each day. Apart from that, it should be as natural and as obligatory as drawing breath to do it in every form of human intercourse: at home, at work, in meetings, in shops, in Parliament, before fights outside pubs, in schools and offices, when speed dating, when answering the phone or making a call (including to the Samaritans), when shouting at players in sporting events, when visiting the doctor, job interviews…nothing should be exempt. And the bit about people who live together could be amended to say that signature tunes should be mutually played prior to having sex, even if they have been broadcast to each other earlier in the day.

Parents would have to choose a signature tune for each new born baby, but the child would have the right to change it at the age of 7, and again at 16, after which it would require the consent of the Queen and the House of Lords to change one’s signature tune.

People with M.A.s or PhDs in Music would be allowed to write their own but everyone else would have to choose from i-Tunes or Spotify.

But only in countries ruled by unelected murderous military dictators would anyone be allowed to choose Angels by Robbie Williams…or anything by U2, or Sting. Or Susan Boyle.

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 ”We know you haven’t finished it yet….PLEASE don’t put us through this any longer….please…just finish it, and get it in to them as soon as you can. Do it now, lovely one, you’ve only got another 5 days you know! Get it done and ring us back to let us know you’ve handed it in. We love you. Your mother sends her love. We love you so much…”.

Sami pressed ‘delete’ on the message service console. She wished that message services could somehow regress to the old audio stage. The high definition images of her father and mother, all beseeching looks and trembling anxiety, only served to pour more cement into the already brimming mould of her Writers’ Block. Capital ‘W’…capital ‘B’. Ever since the World Health Organisation had declared it to be number 3,008 on the official list of psychiatric disorders and mental health diagnoses.

Perhaps not as fanciful as many of the other syndromes, thought Sami. After all, it was now a matter of life and death.

In 5 days time she would be 40 years old. By midnight on that day she was legally obliged to submit her novel to the Fictitious Prose Narrative Commission (FPNC), the all-powerful agency known to her contacts in the No Novel Underground as the Slush Pile. She felt a sharp pang of guilt as she powered up the life-unit on her desk: she regretted starting her novel, getting two-thirds of the way into a book that she knew would be acceptable to the Slush Pile, thus giving her parents and her close friends and colleagues grounds to hope that she would meet the deadline. Virtually the whole of the world’s population managed to achieve this, most of them conforming well before their 40th birthday. As usual she was in danger of falling between two stools, only this time the ambivalence was terminal. She was failing to commit to the No Novel mutineers whilst sleepwalking into an early incinerator for not finishing at least one novel.

Sami brushed a finger over the options on the life-unit screen. Ignoring the icon labelled My Novel, with its pre-programmed throbbing counter showing “Five Days” in red letters, she touched on the icon labelled A Brief History of the Universal Novel Laws. All she had to do was write a concluding chapter and check over the bibliography. Her contact from the No Novel Underground was waiting out there in the ether in some lonely digital vault. Her research would help others to understand that there had been millennia in which novels had not existed, and some four centuries or so in which novels existed but not everyone was forced to write one. Even Sami, haunted by fear of arrest and summary execution, could not help leaning back and daydreaming a little as she scanned the opening pages of her illicit work. She sighed as she soothed her hands over her forehead and through her wavy terraces of dark hair.

She blamed the powerful elites who had seized on the first available opportunity to harness the energy of creativity and artistic endeavour. By 2020 artistic activity had become the only source of opposition or alternative thinking to the prevailing culture of materialism and corporate omnipotence. Many writers, musicians and artists had been bought and corrupted, but the creative spirit stubbornly continued to throw up challenges too threatening for the powers-that-be to tolerate. They decided to make the old maxim that “everyone has a novel inside them” into the basis for a moral, political and spiritual coup.

The oft-repeated laments of literary agents, publishers and editors that they were unable to cope with the sheer number of novels being sent in for consideration played into the hands of the growing global authorities. Draconian laws were introduced to make novel-writing part of the school curriculum and to make the novel the officially sanctioned arena for conformity and conservatism. The Slush Pile, the FPNC, became the vehicle for assessing the suitability of all novels, for owning the works themselves, and for policing the rigorous enforcement of the law – including the arrest and elimination of those rare beings who failed to do their literary duty.

Sami’s final hard-copy notice of Fixed Death Penalty Warning glared up at her from the floor beside her desk.

Things had been made easier by the sophisticated devices which had crowded onto the market after the early Kindle machines. Sami gave a wry smile at the choice of the word ‘Kindle’. It had certainly sparked a fire under the old concept of the sensuous, physical thing called “book”. Now the approved form of execution for arrested No Novel Underground members was to be burned at the stake atop a bonfire of books. She had seen old photographs of repressive regimes and fundamentalist sects burning books. Now she could almost smell the smoke in her own nostrils.

The Slush Pile exercised absolute control over which novels were allowed into the public domain. Sami knew full well that her unfinished work, Pull Yourself Together, would pass the basic Acceptability Tests put in place by the Slush Pile bureaucrats. But she was also fully aware that it would then simply languish for ever in the perpetual anonymity of the vast FPNC memory banks. Sami had not set out to write anything subversive, but the mere fact that her work did not overtly or metaphorically promote the prevailing ethos would be enough to ensure that it would never be made available. In any case, reading was most definitely not a legal requirement.

Three paragraphs into her concluding chapter Sami had to get up and refresh her brew of tea whilst she waited for a pre-programmed reminder to depart from the screen: Your novel is due in 4 days! You are already under suspicion for leaving submission so late. You must send a completed text for appraisal by FPNC experts by midnight on your 40th birthday. Failure to comply will result in immediate arrest and deletion of your being. “Submission”…another appropriate word. Sami looked on as the Slush Pile’s message was followed by a series of advertisements, mostly sponsored by ancient rags like The Guardian and The Independent offering expensive courses in Creative Writing.

The reference to “4 days” gave her a belated jolt. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly 1 a.m.

To wind down before trying to sleep she ordered her list of sources for the bibliography. After some indecision she decided to include her own paper from March 2049, “Oral Traditions of Extinct Peoples: a case Study of the Chukchi”.

She drifted in and out of sleep amidst images of subterranean safe-havens in Kamchatka.

(t.b.c.)

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 Of course, the concept of ‘signature tune’ may not have the same resonance for younger readers. At one time all radio shows and tv programmes were topped and tailed by a carefully chosen piece of music. Radio djs were especially identifiable by their choice of intro music. However, theme music (a.k.a. a signature tune) is still very much in evidence. A friend’s signature tune would become as familiar as the cheesy trumpet that (still probably?) ushers in Coronation Street. The whole range of recorded music would be fair game.

What would be your signature tune? It’s not quite the same as choosing numero uno from your Desert Island Discs.

I will play you mine if you will play me yours.

Ted xox

Maintenant! Encore!

Tall in the saddle again after nearly 7 months. I didn’t think there would be such a gap after posting the last one in March, but re-reading We Want the Airwaves today gives me excellent hindsight into what was about to happen.

Anyway, thank you to all who have expressed interest in reading more. This is a quiet re-launch, but I hope to pick up new readers too. I started the blog 18 months ago on leaving for a Yukon Spring. Engaging with it again in this Shropshire Autumn feels like a significant part of the healing growth that never seems to end. Life is lines. Lines of relationships, roles, learnings, forgettings, desirings. In any multi-faceted life the lines intersect: the crossroads is a wondrous, energising place to be.

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Facts since the last Maintenantman scribblings:

• I ended my time as manager of Monkey Puzzle Meadow at the end of August, just over one month ago.
• Over the last 6 months of my time there all the good, thought-provoking, care-giving, insight-enhancing aspects of the service continued, thanks to that dynamic presence created by the stories of the guests and the stories of the staff.
• The anarchic ‘white noise’ from external controlling influences grew louder and louder.
• The actions I took to preserve Monkey Puzzle Meadow ended in a stalemate. Which might have seemed better than an outright loss, but because of the power relations, I had to step aside.
• Life outside work was relatively minimal for nearly a year.
• No job to go to yet.

Truths since the last Maintenantman scribblings:

• I should have known better than to let myself get so close to burn-out.
• There must be reasons why Monkey Puzzle Meadow absorbed so much of my being (see next post!).
• Toxic hearts beat loud in high places.
• I have never attempted a more difficult job, and have never learned so much from a work situation.
• Despite any potential exhaustion or negative impacts, I have a clear knowledge that life is deeply satisfying and exciting in its opportunities to integrate all the learning….to be alive and breathing now.
• Community makes the difference. The inner life is essential, but more so is the love of Jack, of my sister Carol and Family and Friends, old and new. You all know who you are, and so do I.

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Past readers will be aware that sheer fun and the life of the senses are very much part of this blog. All that side of life has been hanging on in there over the last 7 months, but it has been a total joy to feel liberated into: more leisurely time with family; re-engaging with Friends and making new ones; spending an ultra-relaxed week+ at the south-west tip of Ireland; writing poetry again; renewing vows to adjust Pick Up The Pieces and get it out there; picking up on other prose and on visual collages; returning to the mountains; scrotting around beaches for cowrie shells; dancing!

As a snapshot of all this side of life, I’m including a recent poem.

Whilst in Ireland I was exploring the rock pools at the bottom of the garden by moonlight one night when I met a mermaid. I don’t think I had encountered one since I was in the womb. Even then I had wondered, since they are presented as so physically alluring, how a human could possibly have sex with one…?

Moonstruck

On her slick-liquored back

in the bubblewrap

bladderwrack, her late evening

sunset-drowsy eyes

invite me in, in

for warm, salt-honey juice –

secret succulence

amongst the slithery greens,

the slippery chromes

of the sea-rank clots of kelp.

Heart-pulse ripples of water

and of rhythmic sound waves

from distant rock-broken breakers

lap our silver-oiled skin.

We roll in fleshy cadence,

bursting wet briny breath

from the heat-pressed, swollen

pods of our seaweed nest.

Charming, fey-but-coy, wistful:

mermaids have been censored

into garden-safe disneyed sprites –

but she was all abawd lustrous

lickering, suckling voluptuary,

all sensuous moonlit motion.

Gouts of moist film thick-coat

the silken scales that glisten

the weigh to her tender

plashy pleasure.

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In this present passage of time, I feel very much as I did when returning home from the long trip to BC / Yukon / Alaska in 2007. Re-examining and ordering the physical and the abstract components of life with almost autistic care and scrutiny. Getting accustomed to a life-affirming rhythm….gorging on appreciation of the potential of the crossroads.

Materially it’s a fool’s paradise. Money quicksilvers away into little runnels before disappearing into the earth.

But I have not felt quite so awakened since the nights I built darkness-lasting fires on wilderness stravaigs in Canada, making a space for light and warmth to control various infinities.

Infinities of space, stars, fears, creatures in Canadada. Infinities of the mind in Monkey Puzzle Meadow.

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I mentioned mountain walking above as a valued experience to be returning to. Over the last year I had begun to see myself as the Hill-Walker Who Never Walks a Hill.

A very short book has just been re-published which I would recommend both to those who love mountains and to those who have never quite understood their appeal. It is perhaps my ‘Desert Island’ book, but I won’t over-burden it with hyperbole….do check it out for yourself.

It is called The Living Mountain and has just been brought out in a new edition by Canongate. The author is Nan Shepherd. She wrote it in the last weeks of the Second World War but couldn’t get a publisher until 1977, which seems crazy now that it is seen as such a unique classic. I picked up the 1977 edition, a small paperback produced by Aberdeen University Press, in the early 1980s. It became one of those books that once read and re-read (it’s not much more than a long essay really) gives a warm glow simply be being glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. A friendly flame in the grate when you are engrossed in something else.

I haven’t seen the new edition yet, but I hope it retains the grainy black-and-white line drawings of Ian Munro that add minimalist, shadowing delight to the original text.

Shepherd’s book is nominally about the Cairngorms, but all true essences are transferable. From The Wrekin to the Tombstone Range above the Yukon tundra, Shepherd’s book reminds me of RS Thomas:

“It was like a church to me.

I entered it on soft foot,

breath held like a cap in the hand.

It was quiet.

What God was there made himself felt,

not listened to, in clean colours

that brought a moistening of the eye,

in movement of wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness

of the heart’s passions – that was praise

enough; and the mind’s cession

of its kingdom. I walked on,

simple and poor, while the air crumbled

and broke on me generously as bread.”

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Warning – I cannot promise that future posts will not contain any of the following words: wonder; life; Oxford United; cowrie; erotic; paranoia; joyful; yoghurt; alienation; Alice Munro; teeming; Beelzebub; moss; love; Robert Crumb; respect; poetry; racketball; Texas; desire; rip-rap; crisis; sensuous; live music; maintenant; topiary; risk; fulfilling….to name but a few.

Ted XoX

We Want the Airwaves

Nearly a year since the first post on this blog. This time last year I was winding up a short-term job in Telford and jolting my easy heart with high voltage anticipation: Yukon midnight sun…wilderness roaming off the Dempster Dirtroad…sagebrush canyon yomping in British Columbian Sun Country…backcombing the beaches of Gabriola Island…becoming awakened by the silence of the Northern Rockies…being with friends from Vancouver to Whitehorse…and promises, promises, promises – the galore of the road.

No re-cap on the partial version of subsequent events meted out in these Maintenantman posts. Read ‘em and leap.

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I do want to keep up a post per month, for many reasons (including the great interactions by email and comment). The two month gap this time reflects the fact that I am not writing at all, no development on the projects in hand, no pushing of the novel manuscript, no poems worthy of the name. I have been here before with a full-time job that absorbs the hours, the creative energy and the psycho-emotional attention span.

However, I have achieved certain things and it is not quite the same as in previous attempts to unicycle a balance between professional work and writing. I may be wobbling crazily in the saddle, but this time I do believe I am staying on the damn bike. I wonder if they accept unicyclists in the Tour de France? Now that really would make ‘King of the Mountains’ a title to be proud of! Loving the luminously lurid lycra too…

In particular, Monkey Puzzle Meadow is inspirational as well as draining. The realities of operational difficulties and hostile external circumstances have conspired to make January and February tough months. But the profoundly fulfilling and energising aspects still prevail. The stories that the guests embody, and the brief but intense chapters that are added in the house via the chemistry with the staff, are simply life-affirming. And I mean life-affirming in ways that go beyond the hollowed out, Disney grinning, New Age comfort zone gloss that the concept has acquired.

Most guests at Monkey Puzzle Meadow affirm life by choosing not to take their own. Many move on from extreme crisis in ways that show learning and insight and passion for simply continuing to be. Some need more time and more support. A few are so damaged that only strong chemicals and hospitals can help.

Recovery is as recovery does. The theme is summed up in the previous post on this site: whether we prefer equilateral, isosceles or scalene, we inhabit that unique triangle between our thoughts, our feelings and our actions. Maybe the point closest to the centre of our individual triangle is the safest, the most recovered, the most balanced between the three extremes. “Qui sas, qui sas?” as Nat King Cole sang, as brilliantly utilised on the soundtrack of In the Mood for Love (a great Wong Kar Wei film about what happens when two triangles attempt to overlap…).

One of the actions that Monkey Puzzle Meadow guests perform is the completion of an evaluation form before they leave. The responses are always thoughtful and interesting and occasionally thrilling in their creativity and humanity. Sometimes these documents contain the well of inspiration that gives the wherewithal to douse the stresses and frustrations. Recently we had a young would-be animation artist amongst the guests: her evaluation was covered in exuberant sketches; in the ‘any other comments’ box she had written – “Before I came to Monkey Puzzle Meadow I had not been able to draw for 6 months…’nuff said!”

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So what do I miss about the alternative (north-west chunk of the American continent) way of being that has flickered into my life at various points in recent years?

It would take more than the average length of one of these posts to answer that question. Some of the many points would come under the heading of  ’the experience of wild, spacious nature whilst alone’. If you live in a city, or live in a small, densely populated country like Britain, you know intellectually that your world is conditioned by the close proximity of teeming humanity. But you do not know it in your gut, in your heart, in your senses, until you experience the opposite. You can get a very diluted version of that hard-to-name opposite in little corners of your life (mostly called “holidays” or “vacations”) but the supreme intoxicant about Yukon / BC / Alaska for me is the sustained experience of wild, spacious nature whilst alone.

You might think that the ‘alone’ bit is optional. I also love being amongst mountains, lakes, forests, rivers, wild fauna and flora whilst with friends or lovers or acquaintances or strangers. But there is something extra, something both troubling and soothing, about spending time out there alone. Meeting fear head-on and dealing with it, not letting it dismay you and flood you is part of it. There is also the sheer primal ‘awakeness’ of taking in and appreciating everything around you with all five senses, and with your brain and with your heart. Learning to be alone in certain situations is learning to be fully alive.

I have never fully understood what is meant by the term “feeling lonely” or “loneliness”, but perhaps the learning that comes from appreciating solitude includes lasering “loneliness” out of one’s consciousness. John Vaillant, in The Tiger, quotes a Siberian poet called Solkin: “The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation…a human being is a very social creature, and 90% of what we do is done only because other people are ‘watching’. Alone, with no witnesses, I start to learn about myself – who am I really? You have to have something, some force, which allows and helps you to survive without witnesses. Once you have achieved this, you have absolute confidence in yourself, and there is nothing that can seriously damage you afterwards”.

I do not mind his use of the word “terrifying” in the first sentence. The existence of danger makes small events and intuitions precious. Danger enhances awareness, it gives every moment significance.

So here’s to the danger of some of the things I love: the risk of getting lost; the consequences of sustaining an injury in a very remote place; the sounds and the unexplained shadows in the night beyond the friendly fire; the bears; the chanting of the wolves and the coyotes; the dicey river crossings; the possibility of falling asleep when life is so much more fun awake!

And, to demonstrate either my holistic being or my sheer contrariness, I also miss my Friends on Gabriola, in Vancouver, Ashcroft, Whitehorse and elsewhere. Oh yes, and the way that you can get a great mug of coffee even in the most out-of-the-way communities!

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One strange aspect of being around Monkey Puzzle Meadow is the renewed exposure to television. The tv in the lounge area is usually on in the evenings, even if guests are having 1-to-1 talks with a staff member in another room, or playing board games or whatever. There is also a tv in the staff sleep-in room.

I haven’t had a tv for 5 years. I am occasionally aware that I may have missed something interesting, but this recent, limited re-exposure has made me realise that I am very happy to live without television. There is something alienating about the way the whole package is presented, the narrow range of what is expressed and what is seen as acceptable, including routine humiliation and cruelty. The news seems to be about 5% reporting and 95% emotive commentary. Drama and documentary, comedy and sport – it all gets processed and homogenised and fed out in shiny fast-food morsels. And it is relentless, remorseless, ever available to lull and to anaesthetise. A machine to sanitise desire and control envy.

It’s also amazing how much of what we don’t want simply enters our consciousness without us even making the effort to watch tv or engage with the media or communications machinery in any direct way. The airwaves are throbbing with signals and beams and tsunami waves from and to mobile phones, radios, televisions, consoles, computers, satellites, relay towers, i-this-and-thats, trains and boats and planes. I swear that some of this gets in unbidden and unwelcomed! How else can anyone explain the fact that give or take an obvious face-mask or two, the cast of Coronation Street and the front benches of Parliament are just as familiar to me as they were 5 years ago??

Up to less than 200 years ago the only hidden traffic that human beings had to cope with  were the occasional electro-magnetic pulses sent out from distant life forms on planets in the far reaches of the ever-expanding universe. I’m with The Ramones on this one, “We want the airwaves” – and we want them de-toxed!

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

Some random proverbs arising from Monkey Puzzle Meadow thus far (for further discussion and testing):

*A sense of humour, especially if it includes the ability to laugh at yourself, is a dividing line between good and bad mental health.

*When women are in psycho-emotional crisis they still seem able to attend to personal hygiene. This is not always the case for the male gender.

*Some people who are mentally unwell will still be functional enough to use their condition to manipulate people around them. This is not a judgemental observation. Such manipulation is learned survival behaviour.

*When you enter certain rooms and certain beds as a child, you never really leave them.

* Society’s fear and denial about mental health problems are often embodied by the close family of the sufferer.

* Big healing steps can be made on a path to recovery without knowing why illness occurred.

*Being ‘unwell’ can easily become a fixed identity, with much to lose by leaving it behind.

*Beware claptrap about being negative or pessimistic about things. Sometimes the world really does shit on you. Pretending it’s not shit makes you an idiot not an optimist. So you are in crisis. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

*Nicotine is probably about 58th on the list of medication that can help you right now, though it might pass the time in small, regular, redundant chunks.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

I Crawl, You Caw

 

Rib me, rag raven, razor eyed

black laser dyed

carbon claw-print

on hard ash flint.

 

Mock my white knuckle rock-face stance

show off your prance,

spring-heeled crag hop

dance on stone-crop.

 

Pointedly, your jet-thatched coal beak

labels me weak.

Take flight! Swoop! Soar!

Crow in my craw!

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

Miss the northern BC and Yukon ravens…but there are some fine ones here too.

Ted x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Get Stranded This Winter – 24 Hour Recovery Service

In fact, “Don’t Get Stranded This Lifetime – 24/7 Recovery Service” could be a useful strap-line for the crisis house where I am working, the short-stay haven described in my previous Maintenantman post. I should give it a fictitious name for ease of reference: Monkey Puzzle Meadow, in celebration of the wondrous araucaria tree that complements the gnarled carbuncles of the massive oak.

There have been many problems to solve behind the scenes at Monkey Puzzle Meadow, and just as many still awaiting solution. However, it provides a service that is deeply valued by the guests, a warm and empathetic environment for those who are at a point in their journey where they have ‘recovered’ enough to be able to appreciate a brief stay in a supportive space. Occasionally a guest may not be at that point and may need to go into psychiatric care, or may self-harm in a way serious enough to warrant immediate hospitalisation. Most, however, are able to use the time and the place and the persons (their fellow guests and the staff) to truly good effect.

The old cliché image of the swan gliding upstream sums up the experience of working at Monkey Puzzle Meadow. To the house guests it is meant to look smooth, calm, effortlessly progressive. Beneath the surface it is about hard paddling, churning energies, perpetual motion, careful tacking and steering. Human beings who are deemed to be in need of care and support to aid their recovery are being looked after in a humane way by human beings who are deemed to be motivated and qualified enough to provide that care. And, I would add, the latter human beings need to be humble and open and reflective enough to learn from every guest that to be human is to be in recovery.

The (capital letters) Recovery Model has specific and contemporary meaning in psychology and mental health services. I won’t go into definitions, or pros and cons, here. Suffice to say that it broadly offers the most positive way forward in the sector, especially when augmented by an understanding of the social and political construction of mental illness. Medication remains a crucial support for many in their path to recovery, but the Recovery Model is at least based on concepts of hope and engagement with real life.

I am learning, or perhaps re-learning, that phrase in bold type above. All sentient beings are on a continuum, a line that has no end. At the beginning of that line we experience a breakage, a puncturing, a loss of imagined wholeness. Call it being conceived within the womb, call it being born, call it the first moment we cause pain to another person, call it when we tell our first lie, call it our first selfish thought, call it the first time that someone misuses power over us. Most people survive, or even thrive, via good enough parenting, friendships, work, creativity, a sense of humour, creature comfort, and growth of identity. But they are still ‘works in progress’. And in the lives of some people, factors both internal and external cluster to such an extent that the damage and the vulnerability require some kind of special attention to promote recovery.

To be human is to be in recovery. It’s a dynamic process, not a single magic gateway that we go through into a state where everything will always be ok. It’s a narrative that does not need the judgemental, guilt-infested filter that organised religion imposes, with notions of the Fall and redemption. I’m trying to imagine a 3-D version of Snakes and Ladders where the dice is loaded by our individual nexus of nature and nurture: we can land on a ladder and move onwards and upwards; we can land on a snake and move backwards and downwards; we can land on both at the same time (the dual nature of events and experiences); we might possibly reach that zone of relative peace beyond the last snake and the last ladder, but we’ll never shake the six that will get us to the Shangri-la of the big fat final square. There really is no reason to approach it as a competitive game after all.

Monkey Puzzle Meadow is one small respite ‘miss a go’ on some folks’ journey. To work there is joyous, frustrating, fulfilling, scary, big, difficult, inspiring, funny, small, tragic, extraordinary, mundane. It is a wonderful opportunity to learn how to learn.

Sometimes it is helpful to miss that go.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

People who know that to be human is to be in recovery: any artist, musician, writer, craftsman or craftswoman, composer, sculptor, photographer or poet worth their slot; you; all babies; Katy Jurado in High Noon; me; any person who has ever looked into a mirror with insight; all those who “find they’re touched by madness” (from Sit Down by James); anyone who has been on the receiving end of power abuse; anyone who has tried to exercise power with emotional intelligence; lovers; shamen; traumatised soldiers; Elsie Tanner out of Coronation Street.

People who do not know that to be human is to be in recovery: torturers; religious fundamentalists; Margaret Thatcher; people who hunt animals for trophies rather than subsistence; dictators; Grace Kelly in High Noon; commissioners of television shows; Rupert Murdoch; anyone who steals power from others; people who operate in the higher levels of bureaucracies and financial institutions; suicide bombers; Nick Clegg; conscious promoters of racism and active bigots of any kind; arms dealers; Ken Barlow out of Coronation Street.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

Going into 2011 I’m finding it hard to believe that last year was packed with such extremes. From true wilderness experiences in Canada to a guiding role at Monkey Puzzle Meadow, via warm Friendships on both sides of the Atlantic and great times with Jack and Carol and family, and highlights such as Rosie’s wedding. Since returning from Canada earlier than expected I have put up occasional posts about my mother and kinship in my experience, and I feel proud of those writings.

Mum died just before Christmas. I included a poem in an earlier blog entry and am rounding Mum’s passing with another poem. I wrote this after visiting her in hospital on an occasion where I took a small electric shaver in to clear the unsightly hairs off her face…rest in peace, Mum.

Visiting Hour

I.

Glimpsing her languid tongue,

and gentle with her folds of paper skin,

I feather this neat grooming-razor

across my mother’s chicken slack jowls,

chin, upper lip, wick-and-tallow neck.

Some infernal life-preserving drug

is forcing thickets of silver filament

from her fear-becalmed face;

I must re-enact this tender shaving

perhaps three weeks from today.

If necessary.

II.

Before setting out

I selected a brand new battery

to ensure a true swift whirr.

Long-life’s double-edged alliteration,

old-gold and black,

childhood charged with Wolves’ colours

of my Molyneux afternoons,

a mother’s rest time

from my restless mind.

III.

We sprinkle lavender

about her hospital pillows

that she might sleep,

though not yet deep enough.

The purple label

on the vial

perfumes another memory,

the only time I saw her joyful,

excited, full of hope.

Our first council house.

I was four and she sat me

on the painted concrete floor,

and we gorged on sweet tarts

with lilac icing with

deeper mauve scented

hundreds-and-thousands.

IV.

Without touching her waned flesh,

her sputtering waxen veins,

I strive to trim the bristles close.

She looks better for this

as drowsing steals across her.

She feels better

(I tell myself).

Some inner guttering flame

warms her jaws apart,

searching out oxygen morsels.

I see her tongue loll

lax behind her lower gums.

Release is a swallow away.

Should I tell nurse?

*                    *                   *                    *                    *

So, 2011!? Monkey Puzzle Meadow, yes, yes and again yes. Very ‘maintenant’ in both the French and the English meanings! But what do I miss, what do I desire to say ‘yes’ to that may be for future posts here: the hills and mountains and natural world that I need to remind myself are not just for Canada-time; the attempts to get Pick Up The Pieces out there in the world; visits to loving Friends in Ashcroft, Vancouver, Toulouse, Plymouth (and all English points between), San Francisco, Scotland, Australia, Telford, to name only the very furthest flung…….

My recovery plan includes a courtesy carthorse.

Ted xox

Renewing My Working Vows

Two whole months since the last post. Have you missed me as much as I’ve missed me? No need to answer that.

There has been plenty to say, but I suppose I have been stealing bouillon (taking stock…keep up!). Many issues from the material world have needed addressing, most of which can be packaged up into the news that I have returned to full-time employment. Three weeks ago I began an as-permanent-as-anything-is-these-days contract with a charity that works in the field of adult mental health. I am managing a 4-bed house for short-term crisis work with women and men at varying stages of psychological and emotional turmoil.

And it is deeply fulfilling to be able to say that the strength of positivity I feel about the job has taken me by surprise. Some of my thinking was originally driven by a sense of ‘needs must’……but I had lost touch with the simple beauty of that ‘needs must’ concept. We tend to use the phrase for the imposed and unwilled stuff of life. However, shine a light on it and you see what a gift it is to be able to identify what you really need, what’s uncompromisingly necessary.

This appreciation of true need applies to all aspects of becoming an alive human…from the ‘spiritual’ and psychological through to the necessity to eat and drink. And breathe.

Perhaps this is why simple breathing exercises are the basis for helpful reflection and meditation. Breath is need made physical and practical.

To quote a sufi: “Breath is the current which is established between all planes of one’s existence. Its currents run from the life unseen to the life on the surface, thus uniting spirit and matter both……the breath may be considered as a lift which may take you to any floor of the house you desire. The planes of one’s existence are like these floors; through the tower of breath, one can reach any floor”.

It would be a mistake to see all this as somehow divorced from the reasons why I am embracing my job with passion, energy and desire.

*                    *                    *                    *

So, apart from the above (“doin’ a what comes necessarily”) what are the good things about renewing my vows to the full-on, full-time working life?

• giving something that is of service to other humans (a port in a storm, food, verbal and non-verbal communication).
• getting paid and therefore being able to pay my own bills and enjoy some modest engagement with things I enjoy doing or consuming.
• the chance to build a team of fellow workers on a base of values and ways of working that will be safe, effective and fun.
• the learning that comes from interacting with people who have the intelligence, creative grace and humane vulnerability to act out the fact that they have lost balance in their lives.
• the daily opportunity to absorb the splendour of the colossal, beautiful 400 year old oak that adorns the garden of the house.
• working in an environment that is free from the savagery and mendacity of the upper reaches of corporate Babylon.

I’m realistic enough to know that something could go wrong, or that the current ideologically driven spending cuts could sneak a blade to the jugular, but right now I feel just plain inspired! From the Latin ‘inspirare’ – to breathe in.

*                    *                    *                    *

I last worked full-time in 2006.  Since then external life has been a round of temporary, part-time contracts plus travel in western Canada plus writing my book. In one sense I tried an always unlikely gamble: get Pick Up The Pieces published and revolutionise life by earning something from writing whilst cherry-picking professional work. It doesn’t even feel as if that gamble has been lost…I have emerged from that period with a book that’s significant to me and to some others, and that one day will be ‘out there’.

By the bye, I am still feeling like slapping myself for not pushing the book more…and am relishing tales of famously rejected authors. There’s a recent book on the subject full of crass quotations from editors and publishers turning down manuscripts that went on to become well accepted classics. The ultimate consolation for a literary fantasist like me is John Kennedy Toole, whose fine works (The Neon Bible and A Confederacy of Dunces etc) were roundly rejected during his lifetime. They were only published in the end after his mother went on a determined crusade to see her dead son’s work in print before she herself went to that great slush pile in the sky.

*                    *                    *                    *

Another consolation for the Maintenant Fantasist lies in the increasing sense that the world is already full to bursting with noise and words. I imagine that intelligent beings on distant planets see the earth as some kind of case study in Tourette’s Syndrome: phone signals, radio waves, texts, facebooks, twitters, emails, televisual beams (and blogs)…a Babel overload surrounding our world in the same way that clouds of gases envelop other planets.

A character in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse remarks that “the very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare”. In an earlier draft she had apparently used Plato instead of Shakespeare. The time-distance from Plato to Shakespeare is itself less than a nano-second to the stone. It’s neither a bad thing nor a good thing that our most heartfelt actions and thoughts and productions will all disappear into unimaginable infinity…it’s just something that will happen (to the stone too eventually).

Which brings me to the question: how does the Ted who gets up at 6.30 a.m. to negotiate traffic queues on dark wintry mornings in order to get to work square with the Ted who bivouacs at night in dense boreal forests or on remote mountain ranges…or who combs Alaskan beaches or sits in Canadian coffee bars for that matter? Or who washes dishes and dances like a hillbilly dervish in Ashcroft Opera House?

No problem. That was now, and this is…now. That stuff lives on, alongside all other formative experiences, both good and not wholly good. It will happen again too.  And eventually I’ll have travelled far enough to engage the future in this gradual instant, perhaps even leave it behind!

Meanwhile, expect some pictures of the gorgeous, voluptuously austere oak on flickr very soon. No grizzly bear sharpening its claws on the trunk, but the bark is so intricately riven and wrinkled that you can read many images into its splits and channels and crevasses. What a comely, healthy presence for the needy houseguests.

Ted xox

 

Giving Birth To Your Own Parents

A warm ‘thank you’ to those who have been in touch to ask after my Mum. She is currently in hospital, where a sinewy fibre of physical toughness is sticking two fingers up to her emptying mind.

Some readers and friends have shared stories of significant aspects of their relationships with their mothers and fathers. Inevitably, those relationships are unique…..though common patterns and connections constantly assemble and multiply between personal narratives.

Here’s a theory: there can be no meaningful understanding or communication between those who have had straightforward, relatively untroubled, economically comfortable, emotionally conventional childhoods and those who have had complex, psychologically ambivalent, economically stressed, socially unconventional childhoods. There may be all sorts of variables involved, but, unless a lot of good learning happens, the two groupings will scarcely even speak the same language. Such ‘good learning’ is possible, and the key to it has to be the development of empathy.

Neither grouping is better or more blessed than the other. Both gain and both lose.

I am in the second category, so I know it more intimately and subtly than the first group. The presence or absence of unconditional love is the key. The likelihood is that it will be present in the first grouping, though possibly taken for granted. A gift from the universe. If you grow up in the second grouping with the vital added ingredient of unconditional love, then you have powerful and infinite resources of light and dark. A gift from the multiverse.

We can either follow the models offered by our parents or we can react against them. Having been brought up without unconditional love, I made an absolutely conscious choice to build unconditional love into my own being as a parent. There were plenty of other things I wish I had known about, but I was certain of this one elemental, explosively joyful force.

And in the last ten years, after periods of estrangement and many tortuous paths, I have found that I feel unconditional love towards my mother and my father. I would say that my father reciprocates this. I think that my mother has been too ill for too long with a profound obsessive-compulsive disorder to be capable of such a huge change. Perhaps it is also because of the similarities between advanced age and early childhood, but there is a sense of being part of the process referred to in the title of this post…gestating and delivering a rebirth of relationship with my own parents.

It is a process with many nuances. For example, I wrote this poem about 2 years ago.

Bye, Mum. Bye, Dad.

‘Ring us, please, when you get home

just to let us know you’re safe and sound’

stood for decades as your parting refrain,

a ritual nod to ties of blood and common ground.

The perils of the journey once behind me

I would pick up the phone on closing the door –

I could sort myself out, relax, unwind the road

as soon as I’d performed this empty family chore.

Now, if you were dead I could pretend

that you might care enough to still require

my reassurance that I had survived the miles

and had not fallen prey to earth, water, air or fire.

But in your gathering painful numbness,

your farewells no longer make that small request.

How my heart beats for you to ask me this again,

as if your child’s safety might help you rest.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

As soon as you’re born they make you feel small,

by giving you no time instead of it all,

till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.

The worst thing I ever did to my parents was to sit them down and play them John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’. And make them listen to the words. Very carefully and distinctly. Looking back it is a darkly comic scene: on one side of the radiogram the arrogance and insensitivity of youth, fired up by R.D. Laing and the 60s questioning of the role of the family (valid but one-dimensional); on the other side, the intolerance and incomprehension of a couple who found Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ a lyrical challenge.

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,

they hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool,

till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.

I was the first kid from my secondary school to get into Oxford University – very much part of a small wave of (mainly) boys from working-class backgrounds who were useful to the Powers-That-Be as token examples of how higher education was diversifying. There are some fine books, films, plays and songs about the painful limbo this inflicted on us: not accepted by the middle and upper classes at university and rejected by our society of origin back home. I still feel the use of the word ‘clever’ as a stinging insult.

No apologies, by the way, for the regular use of the word ‘class’, deeply unfashionable though it may be. It is still a flinty bedrock of a presence, even if the constructions on top of it are more complex and intricate than was once the case.

And younger readers may be wondering what a radiogram is or was. It was a combination of a radio and a record player, enormously bulky by today’s home listening standards. Our’s was an amazing luxury. It was probably bomb-proof and once survived being picked up and slammed down on its back by my father during a parental row about money.

When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,

that’s when they expect you to pick a career,

when you can’t really function you’re so full of fear.

I had no concept of what university could lead to, and especially no idea of the significance of getting into Oxford. It was, however, a wonderful escape route and much more interesting to me than going into the army or the airforce. I spent the whole of the first year trying to avoid the braying self-confidence of the dominant majority, the public school brigades (for Canadian readers, public in this English phrase means the opposite….public schools are for the wealthy private students). Gradually I found a like-minded cohort of creative misfits and became an ideal candidate for all things counter-cultural.

Hence the ‘Working Class Hero’ confrontation. I never fought overtly with Mum and Dad, but I felt I had been passively finding my own way, and this was by way of a statement.

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,

and you think you’re so clever and classless and free,

but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

John Lennon may have been responsible for a truckload of bland, hippy-drippy placebo music (like ‘Imagine’) but he could also connect with justified anger, intelligent insight and tough humour when he occasionally chose to step outside of his hotel rooms. However, in my parents’ eyes I had done the wrong thing by going to university, let alone all the ensuing politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll. So I think they heard the edge in the song’s voice, felt paralysed by it, and ignored any meaning.

There’s room at the top they are telling you still,

but first you must learn to smile as you kill,

if you want to be like the folks on the hill.

I was trying to explain that I had seen the folks on the top of the hill, and that they were nothing special and that if you had no inherited wealth and were having to fight your way up you had to become someone else, someone inhumane and devious. All that has happened in the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Clegg dynasty bears that out…..a parade of ruthless corporate materialism that has created a stifling, toxic culture of self-interest. But Mum and Dad were deferential working-class Tories. I was stupid enough to imagine that hopeful things were happening, but they knew better than to live by anything other than fear.

A working-class hero is something to be,

a working-class hero is something to be.

If you want to be a hero well just follow me.

It’s a truly great song. Not perfect, but exhilarating in its sheer rejection of any comfort zone. Looking back at that scene around the bruised and bruising radiogram, I realise that my relationship with Mum and Dad now has been forged from a lot of unlearning as well as learning.

I unlearn the fears they instilled in me from birth. I unlearn the arrogance of my breakaway years. I unlearn the model of conditional love, of love withheld as a punishment. I learn to appreciate their strengths and their moments of weathered humanity.

Ted xox

On Discovering a New Form of Writer’s Block

Why are hares so cool and rabbits so naff?

Today, the first sunny day so far this month, I took a joyous bike ride around the languid loops of my favourite North Shropshire lanes. The map of this part of the world looks like the map of the London Underground, only designed by someone with a lusty passion for curves rather than a prudish need for straight lines. One of my goals was an area of scruffy fields where hares both abound and bound.

Hares are lithe, sinewy, intelligently alert, fibrous with subtle fur-flecks, assertive within the landscape, characterful. Rabbits seem dull and stupid by comparison, soft marshmallowy victims devoted only to manic reproduction and endless nibbling. No wonder hares have been central to various mythologies over several millennia. They are capable of strangeness. They appear to know stories that include fucking and eating but which go far beyond those rabbit preoccupations as well. And they allowed me to watch them for a happy hour today.

What else did I encounter, tall in the saddle and given extra motivation by a new pair of inexpensive cycling shorts (designed to protect the correspondingly cheap areas of my body)? Well, there were: swathes of 80% cocoa dark chocolate bullrushes weighting down their sword stems; lots of serious men with metal detectors hoovering their way across one particular field; lots of regal ravens stalking the stalks and walking the walks; fat caterpillars in gold and black hooped sleeping-bags sack-racing across the tarmac; rows of rich men’s cars parked outside the private airfield at Sleap; wall-to-wall lily pads with waxy yellow flowers across the village pond at Loppington, allowing the moorhens to Jesus-walk the water; heavy sprays of fattening berries along the hedge gauntlets, including the wonderfully named Baubleberries; reeking, teeming dollops of horse manure for me to slalom around; supple breezes interleaved with pockets of warm, still air.

*                    *                    *                    *

During the writing of Pick Up the Pieces, and in the various Word docs I am now working on, I haven’t really encountered the proverbial writers’ block (or Blighters’ Rock according to some). I am adept at finding excuses for not writing on any given day, and eager to look for opportunities for ritualised breaks once sat at the keyboard, but have yet to hit the dry stone wall of extended non-writing angst.

However, after a bit of frustrated self-examination, I have recently identified a new strain of the disease. Since returning from Canada, I seem to be blocked about sending my manuscript out into the world again. The current state of play is 14 rejection letters from literary agents in the UK, plus rejections from 1 large and 1 small independent publisher. With the greater knowledge gleaned over the last 18 months, I realise that 6 of those agents were non-starters anyway. Of the remaining 8, I have had encouraging hand-written notes from 2 (meant to be a very good sign). I have had 1 rejection from a small publisher in Vancouver, and an offer of publication some years in the future from another in BC (small publishers tend to have a backlog of books.

There are at least another 30 relevant agents I should be sending out to in the UK, plus a number of independent publishers. I have a fantasy list of famous people I want to write to in an attempt to interest them in the project, people who have some connection to the text or who inspired aspects of the narrative (Paula Rego for example). A kind friend who has read the book and enjoyed it has even written to Alice Munro (referred to by Jack Maintenant in Pick Up the Pieces as ‘Big Al’)…talk about going straight to the top! And she’s quite a small person too, so her nickname might not go down too well…

But now I do not seem to have the will to package up the usual bundle, which is always: the first 3 chapters or 100 double-spaced and wide-margined pages; a 2-page synopsis; a biog sheet; a stamped addressed envelope; and a covering letter. From all the advice in websites and books, the covering letter emerges as somehow more important than the text itself. Not too long, not too short; must sell yourself and your work but not overdo it; must identify who your readership might be, where it can be placed in the market; must show awareness of who the agent or publisher already represents; must bear in mind that everyone concerned is incredibly busy and first-time authors are last in the queue etc etc.

So why am I finding it hard to re-double my efforts?

Possible answers to that question might include -

1. Fear of rejections. Hmmm…not really. Rejections are par for this particular course and many writers have racked up a huge number before finding that vital sympathetic reading. It’s not a wonderful experience to receive a standard, impersonal rejection letter, but it’s certainly not devastating and is easily integrated into the universe. And the couple that have included personal notes of encouragement (“…this is very well written and definitely publishable but just not for us at this present time…”) have felt like major achievements in a culture where the system makes you feel very powerless.
2.  Doubts about the book itself. I have amended the text in response to the external edit done by a kind retired book editor, and I have tweaked and revised along the way. I have maximum faith in the work as it now stands. I feel very drawn to the advice of various artists in different cultural fields who say how important it is to back your own vision, to have faith in the unique way you express your own individual take on the world. I have doubts as to whether Pick Up the Pieces is an obviously commercial proposition in the current market, but I have no doubts about its quality or meaning. It will find an audience one day, even if that is after my ashes are blowing around Castlerigg Stone Circle (hopefully up the nostrils of some holidaying literary agent…).
3. PTSD : Post-Travels Stress Disorder. Could be…partly because one of the forms this has taken is that, in the insufficient times I am sitting at the keyboard, I am working on four separate pieces. Each of these enthuses me, but I need to focus on one and finish it. This diffusion of concentration seems to extend to getting Pick Up the Pieces out there. It is now 15th August and I was originally not due to fly home until the 25th. None of the numbers in life seem to add up right now. I need an abacus, not a computer…one of those gorgeously tactile wooden ones that used to be part of every child’s first years…

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As well as Shropshire’s hares, I have had memorable leporine experiences in the mountains of Scotland and in Alaska and The Yukon. I once camped beside the Bear’s Paw glacier in northern BC, opposite Mount Patullo in the Cambria Icefields. It began to get dark at around midnight and the icy crevasses in the glacier kept up a rhythmic creaking and cracking as the temperature dropped. In the dusky gloaming a gang of hares came out to play among the earthy, stony moraines alongside the glacier. I had stretched out on my back, kidding myself that I might sleep, working my shape into the soil just as a hare makes its ‘form’. They played around me and at one point one of them bounded onto my still booted feet.

A Hare in the Mountains

 One alert touch of a singular energy

tingles the collar of my boot

as tough pad flat back feet

startle my wakeful doze,

golden fatigue gift from

the red-eyed midnight sun.

Beside my prone form

a tight single sinew

squats all ready-steady,

one taut muscle with dark eyes,

a cocked crossbow of a hare.

The mere focus of my glance

triggers a starter pistol

in the crackling air between us;

the throbbing tendon untenses,

snaps like a sheet in the wind

and lithes away, springing

a crazy-pave hopscotch;

a unique half-sane path

sprinters the alarmed rocks.

*                    *                    *                    *

Raven invented a hair-dryer sized instrument that he called a Mental Detector. He flew around his nearest city running it over the heads of everyone in his path. What do you think he discovered?

No…the vast majority of people turned out to be perfectly sane (in a good way, which is not necessarily the same as a clinical definition of sanity). But they didn’t seem to know it, they seemed to think that they needed something more than they already had.

Ted xox

International Bog Frog Blog Day

At least two months had passed since my last sighting of a full-size adult woolly mammoth. Then, just two days ago, I encountered one here in north Shropshire.

The Beringia Centre outside Whitehorse in The Yukon boasts several versions of this extinct behemoth. The permafrost beneath a tundra landscape preserves all sorts of specimens from 10,000 years ago and beyond. Beringia is the geo-scientists’ name for the land mass that once covered a joined-up Siberia and North America. The woolly mammoth is the star of the show in any recreation of life before the comings and goings of the ice sheets and the voracious hunting peoples who used the land bridge to colonise present day Canada and America.

Just a few miles up the way from my home in Shropshire is an extensive area called Fenn’s, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses. After 20 years of careful work to undo the depredations of man and allow nature to take its course, the Mosses are beginning to resemble what the Beringian tundra would have been like when vast herds of mammoths grazed. And therefore to resemble what the tundra may return to if the permafrost continues to recede via climate change. The remains of mammoths have been found in Shropshire too…..hence the hulking, shaggy presence in a disused barn on land owned by Natural England, guardians of the Mosses.

Last Sunday was International Bogland Day, and I was lucky to be part of a group given a guided half-day tour of the Mosses. Part of the north Shropshire landscape is notable for a smattering of small lakes, the Meres. These are the relics of glacial melt in the deeper hollows. The Mosses are the spongey, peaty, fibrous chest-wig that covers the slightly more raised ground. Since industrial peat-cutting was stopped in 1990 the Mosses have gradually regenerated and now sustain a rich roster of insects, birds, plants and small mammals. Things can only get better too as efforts continue to persuade farmers to complete a surrounding barrier of sympathetically managed land, thus retaining the life-pulsing moisture within the Mosses.

On a warm July day the swathes of exposed peat shimmered like a desert runway, only without the benefit of direct sunshine. The temperature on the Mosses is routinely well above the temperature just a few yards away. You can see why early hominids made the link between peat and fire. Left to its own devices, peat is very good at retaining moisture and sealing in carbon. It is a living organism with myriads of fine filaments that weave and bind and inter-penetrate and support many forms of life. When people bag it up and spread it on their garden they pulverise thousands of years of growth and release a belch of carbon equivalent to 50 miles of high-speed driving in a standard car.

As well as the more usual flora and fauna, the Mosses are home to growing numbers of nightjar, curlew, lapwing, hobby, short-eared owl, snipe, shovellers, teal, peregrines, brimstone butterflies, water voles and rare species of frogs and toads. Moths are somehow always seen as less sexy, but the walk guide did casually mention that there are over 300 varieties on the Mosses. Some creatures are poling their way back from the brink of extinction, particularly the raft spiders and various kinds of dragonflies and damselflies. We were buzzed continuously by platoons of neon dragonflies, including plenty of white-faced darters, long since thought to have taken the same involuntary redundancy package as the dodo. Some of the clumps of sedges and sphagnum moss pillows looked like miniature versions of Piccadilly Circus, throbbing with garish lights and pulsing signals.

There are plenty of adders, but they are fortunately shy types (go to the island of Jura if you want to see adders…along with George Orwell’s writing retreat). The other main predator is the insect-eating sundew plant, which is all over the Mosses in tiny, spore-like clusters, very close to the sweating turf. Innocent-looking beaded droplets tremble on the end of each sundew frond, hovering over the tiny,oblivious, flies. Now that’s a scenario they should have included in the classic 1950s paranoia movie The Fly. It wasn’t even in the over-blown (fly-blown?) remake starring Jeff Goldblum.

There are pine stumps that date back 3,500 years, but the Mosses do not support any current tree growth, though there are plenty of dwarf species amongst the reeds and buckthorn scrub. There is an area in the middle splendidly called Oaf’s Orchard. I’d like to start a campaign to reinstate the word ‘oaf’…as in “Parliament is now home to a particular breed of political oaf, and Cameron-Clegg is merely the current Über-Oaf”. Is it mere coincidence that the manifest drivel phrase ‘Big Society’ has the same initials as another BS acronym? I digress. I digress therefore Iam.

The mammoth in the disintegrating barn looks to be in need of some energetic grooming, but is perhaps all the more true to life for that. In the dark interior, lit only by shafts of daylight pouring through rust patches in the corrugated iron, it has a presence somehow more lumberingly grand than its partners-in-taxidermy in the Yukon Beringia Centre.

At the other end of the scale, the day after the ramble round the Mosses I became acutely aware of another connection with the wetter parts of the Canadian tundra. My legs are now mottled with assertively cheerful red bite bumps. If I had been in Yukon or Alaska I would have automatically slapped on my Muskol pheromone forcefield and biked home with unbitten legs and a female sasquatch on my trail. I will be going back to the Mosses and Meres regularly, but I’ll be Muskolmaintenantman…safe in the knowledge that I will have gone the way of the woolly mammoth by the time the sasquatch has been reintroduced to north Shropshire.

*                    *                    *                    *

Which conjures an image from an early Robert Crumb comic strip, Bill Ding Meets Bigfoot, where an uptight all-American male meets an Amazonian yeti woman in the woods and is turned on to all sorts of interesting new experiences. Crumb was one of the first artists to illustrate the comic book narratives of Harvey Pekar, who died last week.

Pekar became better known after his graphic novellas under the title of American Splendour became the basis of a successful documentary film about his life. He was a notoriously grouchy and cantankerous individual, but also a gifted writer who paved the way for greater talents by prising the comic book genre away from its superhero imagery. Pekar made it possible for ’ordinary’ lives to be seen as rich material for graphic art, ensuring that cutting edge comics caught up with other media such as films and novels. He was lucky to get the support of someone as skilled and artistically cunning as Robert Crumb in the early stages. Pekar’s stories are best when interpreted by a sympathetic and talented draughtsman, but he is a symbol of the determined outsider, stubbornly convinced of his vision and sticking to it until the world learns to see with his eyes.

In the UK there is still a lingering snobbery about comic book narrative, a snobbery not shared in Europe, Latin America, North America, Japan and many other places. Crumb himself remains supreme (and interestingly controversial), but in my own limited knowledge I’d certainly recommend Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Joe Sacco, Linda Barry, Aline Kaminsky, Chester Brown, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez…and from these shores, the genteel but biting satire of Posy Simmonds.

There are some lines on pages that make words. There are some lines on pages that make drawings. When the two are combined by someone who knows what they are doing a whole world of subtle inter-connections opens up.

A farewell tip of the inkwell to Harvey.

*                    *                    *                    *

Owww! Those pink pingos on my legs are itching. “Something in my veins bloodier than blood”, as Jeff Tweedy out of Wilco sang…

*                    *                    *                    *

My Mum has now been moved to a different nursing home. I picture her travelling along on a gentle conveyor belt. A gentle speed, but still enough to create a soft breeze, a breeze that catches at tatters of her memory, teases at them, then detaches them so that they drift away behind her. Those tatters can no more be collected and put back than a dead leaf can be grafted back onto a tree.

Fortunately a stage arrives when there can be no memory of ever having possessed memory.

There is real consolation in seeing my Dad enjoy some days of simple, unremarkable pleasures after stretching his own frailty into the thinnest of threads through dutiful care over the last few years.

*                    *                    *                    *

 Whilst travelling up and down the country, writing, looking for gainful employment, trying to get Pick Up the Pieces picked up by a publisher, and starting some d.i.y., I am also doing a little life laundering. I don’t have very many possessions to whittle down, but I am trying to do something about my books and my music.

I realise that I have been what might be called an obsessive-completist. I used to think that if someone had written some great music, or a fine song, or a good book, then everything they touched must be gold. It must be right to gather as much of their art as possible, mustn’t it? Errr…not true if you think about it – very few, if any, can survive the ‘complete works’ test in terms of quality.

So, I have been carrying out a cull of the book shelves and the cd racks. I have been making compilations of loved music and getting rid of the rest. In this context it’s interesting to see who so far remains complete and unweeded.

In fiction it is Alice Munro. In poetry it’s Don Paterson (though poetry is easy in a way as you get your Blake, your Yeats etc all there in a single volume). To be an obsessive-completist in classical music was always beyond my means and my space, but in non-classical music it is Richard Thompson whose cds just will not crunch down into my own version of a Best Of.

And now he’s rubbing it in by bringing out a new album later this year, Dream Attic. Will that also pass into the hallowed shelf space occupied by the rest of his music? Maybe obsessive-completism never disappears entirely, it just gets more narrowly focused. I see it has a track called Demons In Her Dancing Shoes so I’m hooked already…

Ted

xox

Take What You Need You Think Will Last

“But whatever you wish to keep you’d better grab it fast”.

Over the past month, various events and thought patterns seem to have conspired to give extra force to that great song (It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue by Bob Dylan). Memory has been one theme. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that we can grab our most prized memories and keep them safe…to think that it is those memories that will remain uncorrupted by age and sickness…wouldn’t that be nice? If only will power could extend that far.

The second verse of Baby Blue alludes to another theme that recurs in this blog: “Take what you have gathered from coincidence”.

One of those glorious moments of chancey synchronicity hit me between the eyes the other day when I wandered into Southampton City Art Gallery. I have been staying at my sister’s in Southampton since I came back from Canada and felt in need of a break between visits to my Mum and to my Dad. I have a long list of previous convictions for wandering round art galleries. Socialism? Communism? Conservatism? Hinduism? Calvinism? Give me recidivism every time…I repeat my follies therefore I am.

Anyway, I walked up the stairs and made a turn to the left in order to view the permanent collection before checking out the special exhibition. Slap bang in front of me, the size of a fat barn door, was a work called Old Crow, Yukon by David Tremlett. Instead of a gasp of appreciative surprise (it is a magnificently striking abstract evocation of Yukon essence) I found myself laughing with the shock and pleasure of such an unexpected gift, such a moment of nourishing connection. It felt like one small salve towards an eventual healing of disappointment.

Old Crow is the only community of any size in Yukon that I have yet to visit. You have to fly to Old Crow, there are no roads, and a canoe trip would take many days of linking together various watercourses, probably starting from Alaska. Old Crow lies within the Arctic Circle and has about 300 residents, most of them from the Vuntut Gwitch’in First Nation. Shirley, the Tagish / Carcross lady who invited me to the rattle-making described in an earlier post, is originally from Old Crow. Shirley was also a prominent organiser of the Solstice event I wrote about in the last entry. Much of the impetus for the Solstice celebrations in Carcross came from a dream that Shirley had and described to the local Elders. Shirley now has an anglicised family name, but her original Old Crow family name translates as ‘Two Rivers Meeting’.

My house-sit for the wonderful 5 weeks referred to in the early parts of this blog was in a home built on land once occupied by Shirley. She helped design and build the house itself. From Old Crow, Yukon, to Southampton, England, via several human links along the way. Apparently David Tremlett lived in Old Crow for a couple of years in the early 1980s and has made various paintings, drawings and art projects from his time there. His large canvas in Southampton City Gallery is underscored by a warmly appreciative paragraph by the writer Helen Simpson. I won’t attempt to describe the image, but it has a powerful simplicity and an overall sense of harmony and wholeness. The sheer scale of it evokes the vast dimensions of the Yukon elementscapes.

A spore of wilderness seed amidst the pounding traffic and the dehumanising malls, the paving-concrete-steel-glass brute force of the city.

“The empty-handed painter from your streets / Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets”……

*                    *                    *                    *

Mentioning art galleries reminds me that I have been intending to put in some words of encouragement for UK readers to explore a little of Canada’s art history. Before I first went over in 2005 I was truly ignorant of Canadian art. The European and British movements and big names tend to dominate over here, with liberal helpings of American art from the last 60 years. Other cultures are given headline exhibitions from time to time, but Canada has remained better known for its music and writing than for its painting or sculpture.

So it is nice to record (and how many nations can say this?) that probably the best known single artist in Canada’s short history is a woman – Emily Carr. Her life story and her bold solo expeditions around the Pacific North-West coast are fascinating in themselves, as are many of her treescapes and paintings of aboriginal life. I love her swirling, dance-of-life forest images that teem with energy and hum with depth.

The other key figures to check out from the formative period spanning 1915 – 1970 are Tom Thomson and the artists known as The Group of Seven. Thomson produced a batch of highly influential landscapes in a few feverish years before dying young. The Group of Seven were partly motivated by a desire to carry forward the breakthroughs in colour and composition that Thomson had achieved. And they also had a deliberate mission to explore the idea of a specifically Canadian and ‘Northern’ vision. Perhaps the most interesting (in his writings as well as in his painting) is Lawren Harris, who pared down his landscapes to bold and increasingly abstracted forms. They each deserve to be much better known outside Canada…do check ‘em out if you are not already familiar with them.

Of course, within Canada itself the reaction against the ‘national’ art that The Group of Seven came to embody has been going on for some time, with all contemporary currents and eddies well represented (Canadada anyone?). When I was passing through Prince George in northern BC recently I re-visited the excellent Two Rivers Gallery, where the current exhibition included a huge representation of Tom Thomson’s iconic The Jack Pine, but where the tree and rocks consisted of densely packed images of enthusistically copulating wild animals.

Not all modern or contemporary Canadian art uses The Group of Seven, Thomson and Emily Carr as touchstones, whether ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. I saw a fine retrospective of Jean-Paul Riopelle in Calgary…like luscious mosaic takes on the best of Jackson Pollock. Jeff Wall has been at the forefront of photographic art for some 40 years. I’m ashamed to say that the only others I have heard of, and know to be Canadian, are Michael Snow, Janet Cardiff and Peter Doig. And then there is also the wealth of vibrant art produced by First Nations and Inuit carvers, sculptors, craftsfolk and painters, much of it astonishing in its simplicity, symmetrical beauty, and updating of traditional forms.  

Becoming even a little familiar with another country’s art is a happy aspect of travel as opposed to tourism. As the world becomes rapidly more and more uniform and a globalised monoculture becomes more and more entrenched, art is one of the few unique experiences left. When I am too decrepit to ramble the mountains, lakes, forests, rivers and tundra, I would love to make an east-to-west trip across Canada, zigzagging a trail around the musical and artistic map.

*                    *                    *                    *

I seem to be inhabiting a strange bubble of unasked for time just now. As I write this I am conscious that at this point in July I had planned to be exploring the area around Inuvik and beginning the long trek back down the Dempster Highway, with lots more to come. Instead I am starting to bring forward everything I had assumed would be happening in September: a search for some paid work; renewed efforts to get Pick Up the Pieces out there; consistent work on other writing; reconnecting with family and Friends; work on my home-nest in case I have to sell up; getting my prize sweet peas up to competition standard (…not…).

Except that it is all in a slo-mo daze and haze, a waking dream of motorway drives, infinite subtleties of maternal madness, and an overwhelming sense of several lives on hold…the double bars of a ‘pause’ key firmly pressed down.

*                    *                    *                    *

As a special gift for Owl’s 500,000th birthday, Raven organised a collection. He received contributions from Bear, Coyote, Wolf, Salmon, Turtle, Eagle and many other entities. After much deliberation they decided to buy Owl a state-of-the-art digital camera. The camera could take the best still pictures in the world, and could shoot hours of video film as well.

Owl was suitably grateful, and everyone was very pleased that they had given Owl such a fine present.

However, over the course of the next 12 months no-one ever saw Owl taking any photographs or filming anything with the camcorder function. Finally Raven made a series of spy flights around Owl’s nest and was shocked to see that the camera was still in its unopened box, propping up a bookcase and gathering dust and downy feathers. Raven reported this to all those who had contributed to the gift, and on Owl’s 500,001st birthday they came to confront him.

As spokesperson, Raven did not mince words: ‘We clubbed together to buy you the most expensive, most versatile and most wonderful camera in the world…but you have not even bothered to take it out of its box, and you have not taken one single picture or captured one single minute of film…why?’

Owl gave them a piercing look, shrugged his wings a couple of times and replied: ‘I am very grateful for your generous gift, and I considered very carefully after you gave it to me, but, you see, I don’t really want to take any photographs or video film of my world…I want to see everything, to remember everything as I want it to be, not as it is.’

(This is a true story. What happened next is less clear but legend has it that Owl gave the camera to a charity shop in aid of cattle, called Oxenfam, and Coyote stole it. But that’s another story).

*                    *                    *                    *

“Strike another match, go start anew…”

Ted xox