Conorthoughts

Accusation

 

You let me down, I feel. I thought that you would see me through that difficult period, thought that your ability to dig and make things flow and free up laughter would be enough, thought that you were in touch with some layer in me that simply needed visiting for the day-to-day to right itself. I have lost faith in you, but not completely. Otherwise I would not be writing this. Now that I want to return to you, need to, all I can do is trust you more blindly than before, give myself over to you to speak and dance and play.

 

This is a letter, short, to the writer in me whom I believed could unlock, sentence by sentence or page by page, me.

Here is a paragraph from Roland Barthes (If you need me to translate it, please leave a comment):       

 

Mais en même temps, écrire (au sens curieusement intransitif du terme), écrire est un acte qui dépasse l’œuvre: écrire, c’est précisement accepter de voir le monde transformer en discours dogmatique une parole qu’on a pourtant voulue (si l’on est écrivain) dépositaire d’un sens offert; écrire, c’est remettre aux autres de fermer eux-mêmes votre proper parole, et l’écriture n’est qu’une proposition dont on ne connaît jamais la réponse. On écrit pour être aimé, on est lu sans pouvoir l’ être, c’est sans doute cette distance qui constitue l’écrivain. (From his essay  Littérature et Signification, published in Tel Quel in 1963, reproduced in Essais critiques, Editions du Seuil, 1964, p. 275)

 

I am writing this in an attempt to love myself.  Perhaps you cannot write to be loved without doing so to also love yourself and, perhaps, if you can't love yourself, you cannot write. 

Almost

I've stopped writing here. I've stopped writing but here I am so I have only almost stopped. Maybe this will be a new beginning. Here, in lieu of a thought, in the hope that copying something that gives me pleasure will help my writing juices at least trickle, is a poem by the American A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). It is taken from the Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler. I read poetry mainly on the toilet and read this for the first time this morning:

 

                          The Eternal City

                         After the explosion or cataclysm, that big
                         display that does its work but then fails
                         out with destructions, one is left with the

                         pieces: at first, they don't look very valuable,
                         but nothing sizable remnant around for
                         gathering the senses on, one begins to take

                         an interest, to sort out, to consider closely
                         what will do and won't, matters having become
                         not only small but critical: bulbs may have been

                         uprooted: they should be eaten, if edible, or
                         got back in the ground: what used to be garages,
                         even the splinters, should be collected for

                         fires: some unusually deep holes or cleared
                         woods may be turned to water supplies or
                         sudden fields: ruinage is hardly ever a

                         pretty sight but it must when splendor goes
                         accept into itself piece by piece all the old
                         perfect human visions, all the old perfect loves. 

 

 

Here is another one by him that I've just read, not on the toilet this time, on my sofa, two for the price of one:

 

                        Grace Abounding
                        for E.C.

                        What is the misery in one that turns one with gladness
                        to the hedge strung lucid with ice; is it that one's
                        misery, penetrating there as sight, meets neither

                        welcome nor reprimand but finds nevertheless a picture
                        of itself sympathetic, held as the ice-blurred stems
                        increased: ah, what an abundance is in the universe

                        when one can go for gladness to the indifferent ghastly,
                        feel alliances where none can ever take: find one's
                        misery made clear, borne, as if also, by a hedge of ice.

 

 

It is midsummer here.

 

Career

I feel sometimes this job I'm doing is even more stupid than my first job, as the fruit and veg man in a small supermarket on the Old Brompton Road over twenty five years ago, well over. Maybe, to move things ahead, I will need to first pass through another fruit and veg stage, Eternal Return and all that. Career progression. Keep laughing.

    

Entry

There are no entries yet in this category apart from this one. 

 

Group

I started a group therapy shortly before Christmas. I've been to about six meetings, even seven. There was a meeting last night. They last an hour and a half. After it, I slept poorly and have a headache today, set off by things I said last night. It has lowered my mood. Is this progress? Probably. Something is going on.

It is quite a serious business. Lying in bed this morning, I had the urge to get up and write something humorous about it. Humour is many things, a form of defence but also a form of release and it is the latter I need.

I am up now and coffee-d but what I am writing is not humorous. Well, at least I'm writing, which makes a change, and I am out of bed, always an achievement.

Long faces.

There are six of us and the, I don't know what to call her, leader maybe. Analyst, facilitator, conductor? I've just found this last word in a book by S.H. Foulkes and E.J. Anthony Group Psychotherapy sub-titled The Psychoanalytic Approach (Penguin 1957, 1965) that I bought second-hand through Amazon the other day for £1.79 plus £2.75 'shipping' and that arrived last night. Foulkes was the main founder of group-analytic psychotherapy, at least in Britain. The place where I go, an old-fashioned, upper middle-class set-up in a large apartment - definitely an apartment not a flat - in a mansion block flat near Baker St., it could be two apartments knocked into one, I must ask, with a whiff of Harley St. not far away about it -  is the practise that Foulkes (died 1976) set up with others.

I'm having problems with what the group is, what a group is. I am resistant to it, very.  Foulkes writes in the above book (Some chapters are Foulkes, the others are Anthony.):

"To look upon any natural group as if it was the result of a confluence of isolated individuals is untenable. Paradoxically our own particular groups are really constructed of isolated strange individuals [I think he means 'stranger'. English was not his mother tongue. C.J.] meeting for the purpose of treatment. Yet behind this strangeness [same problem again, I think. The German word is Fremdheit, here in the sense of 'being strangers'] are certain pre-conditions - often silently made - of which the most general ones are as follows:

1) That the biological species is the same.
2) That the cultural background is similar, which means among other things that there is agreement as to what is desirable, normal behaviour; what is sick, good, bad and so forth.
3) That the patient and therapist speak the same language. literally as well as metaphorically - otherwise there cannot be an efficient communication between them.
4) That the patient has reasons to lay himself open to the therapeutic process (his motivation by suffering).
5) That we have a method of access to unconscious processes.

The last two points, 4 and 5, indicate why there is a premium on psychopathology; because it does appear that without disturbance, these conditions are not fulfilled."¹

Foulkes then lists two more pre-conditions.

I have 'issues' with this (I hate the use of 'issues' in this way. Do I use it because I hate it?).

I will have to come back to this later. Also, this is all terribly serious again.

The woman whom I will call 'I' - everything is strictly confidential, of course -  who sat beside me in the group last night is tall and thin with very long legs. She was wearing, as she usually does, short trousers with black leggings and designer, plimsoll type, trainers.  She usually looks at her shoes, has dyed black hair and is rich.

To be continued, but please drop me even the shortest of comments if I have made you smile, which will have made my getting out of bed worthwhile.      

Notes
1. Pp. 24-24 of the 1965 edition.            

Post Job

What a job I am making of posting here. It's been so long since I've written here - it's not that I haven't been trying on and off - that I received this email recently from a friend:

"Conor - how are you? It seems a long time . . . And a long time too since you posted on your blog. People disappear for a while generally because they're distracted by happiness, or by wretchedness or something awful has happened, or sometimes just inadvertently. Reassure me - Jenny"

Jenny is not his real name though he has published a novel under it recently, receiving a very positive review (of the 'go-out-and-buy-it' type) just before Christmas in one of the broadsheets. What, by the way, are these newspapers called now that they have almost all shrunk towards tabloid scale?   

Colin Burrows ended a review in a recent Saturday Guardian of a book by John Mullan Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, on the business of publishing under a pseudonym or under no name at all, with the following lament:   

"Anonymous authorship was more or less killed off by the literary marketplace, and Mullan's book makes one feel more than a little nostalgia for its teasing concealments."

I'm not so sure about the killing off. I only know a small number of writers in London - I could count them on the fingers of one hand if a couple of my fingers were amputated - and they have published, taken together, two books anonymously within the last two months. Now if I knew twenty writers ... 

Where am I? Having made a hard job of posting, I am now sewing together, or trying to, what I have just written with a piece that was to be called 'Job' of all of eight months ago. It is a rough bit of sewing.

The

thread

is

'job'.

                                                         Job

 

Not the Old Testament Job.

I don't know whether it was just in my family or whether it was a middle-class Dublin thing or an Irish thing generally – I'm pretty sure that the word is not used in this sense by English people – but, when I was little, 'job' was, em, what you did on the toilet by using the muscles in your bottom to press hard when you had a pain there. You did a job. The job was the result of the push. It bobbed around in the water or there might be two of them or even three, with nicely curved ends. Jobs. Each time you did one or more, it or they were an impressively different brown to the time before. They were a different size and texture, the most interesting ones having a rougher, granulated, surface, irregularly encrusted with tiny pebble-like structures, often a different brown or a different colour, such as a shade of cream.

Was I proud of them? I cannot remember but as I write, pride comes to me, so I suppose I must have been. They were fine jobs, jobs well done. Sometimes they were big jobs, darker and even more solid than usual.

I had a dream last night of three jobs. The toilet was a German rather than an Irish one, that is to say, it had a water-less plateau where you can inspect your faeces before flushing them down. To talk of an Irish toilet is not correct. Like Irish law and public administration and indeed our language, the Irish toilet is English. The Slovenian philosopher Žižek has a rich passage in one of his books - I cannot remember in which, it is on my shelves but they are far away as I am in the back of beyond in Umbria and I cannot do a quick search on the internet since I have not yet asked Santi, the owner of the retreat house where I am staying, whether I can use his computer, I know that there is an internet connection (Could it be broadband?) but now is not the time to ask him, he is cooking -  yes, there is a passage in Žižek where he gives a comparative analysis of English, French and German toilets¹. He delves into the toilets'  cultural meanings and what their different forms tell us about the differences between the cultures.

There were two huge, quite dark, adult jobs in the German toilet in my dream. I knew that they were not mine. The third job I produced. It was just as impressive and adult as the two that were there already.

When I was three, my father got a big job. He hadn't had a job until then. We moved from Dublin to the town where the job was. My father was a doctor and the job was in Mallow County Hospital. It was a very difficult job. My father would come home after work - he worked long hours - and talk at length to our mother in our presence of the difficulties he was having at work.

                                                        (To be continued)

Notes
1. I am now back in London, so can give the reference:  Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 4-5.

Knocked out

I'm having a party tonight to celebrate my em, em, 29th birthday. Preparing for and holding one can be a form of self-administered general anaesthetic lasting a day. Hope I've got the dose right.

 

Flatshare ad

(This post is the continuation of a message that is part of a flatshare ad on www.moveflat.co.uk. I ran out of space there.)

perhaps share two or more meals a week plus do some shared shopping. To be together and alone!

I feel that I've already had at least one life and am in the process of constructing a new one. I would be interested in sharing with people who have lived through a change of direction or two in their lives. This is not a must!

My interests?  Ideas, books, politics, art, literature, the arts generally, music, world, classical, and jazz but I’m open to music of all kinds.

I work in financial publishing. I’ve worked mainly in financial journalism in London and in politics in Dublin. I’ve also worked as a writer – a critic – in the art world here. I went back to my studies in my thirties and did a doctorate. It was a great thing to do but has slowed my life down in some ways.

To get a fuller idea of who I am, please click further around my blog!

I would like to be able, if possible, to have a good-sized room. In terms of nearness to town, I am spoilt in Pimlico but would like to live pretty centrally or not too far away, in a pleasant area. Zones 1-2!

Thank you for reading this. That's it for now!

Space

That space when I come back to the flat from a trip away and find myself at two millimetres' distance from my life, allowing me to see it from outside, or from above, the sense the space gives that I can intervene in that life, nudge it, then, two hours later, in fact, already disappearing and nothing done in it, but perhaps this, a sentence running to its end, with enough structure to be the eye in a needle of the self through which other words may be threaded, later.

Breakdown

Like evil, the banality of it.

I went into work this morning , having failed to go in again yesterday  - another blue Monday to join the blue Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays I've been having over the last ten weeks or so -  and said that I needed some time off, as of immediate effect. Agreed. A break. A breakdown. My third, each one smaller than the last (I think). Must have some lunch.

                                                           (To be continued, hopefully)