Conorthoughts

Weekend away

 

I've got to bloody well post something and it has taken me three-quarters of an hour to get this damned photo to the size I wanted so this will have to be short. I went away the weekend before last to stay with Jonathan and Louise in Stony Stratford near Milton Keynes and it did me a lot of good, as close to a country idyll as I have access to at the moment. They made me very welcome, as ever. The painting of their house, the red door, is by Louise's father whose name I cannot remember.

I'm partly posting this to compete with and try to emulate my friend Charles - I am losing hands down, emulating my hat - who posts with ease and style and flair and all round brilliance on his blog, usually using a photo with humour to start on which he hangs his piece. I thought if I could at least use photos for a start, some of Charles' ease and creative flow might rub off, mimetically. It is maddening all these people who can produce, the millions of them. They should all, I feel sometimes, be shot, unless I am made to join their number by a decree of some higher force (not the G20, meeting down the road today).

I'm also posting this to cross-reference to a post of Charles' - done, his latest -  in order to finally try to work out how the cross-referencing works in the blogosphere, hopefully with Charles' help. In theory, when I link to him on my blog, for example two lines above, he should automatically get a message in his email box informing him of this fact, I think. In theory then, the conversation and cross-referencing goes on - I've even bloody well forgotten what the cross-referencing is called in blogo language - forming a network of references spreading out across multiple bloggers, towards Mars. Until you have this aspect of the blogging software going, my understanding is that you are not blogging in a full sense.        

Caffé latte

What's in a caffé latte? There's enough in the remains of this morning's one you half-see above for me to celebrate it with a photo. It is Monday 10th March and I haven't made one - usually a Saturday or Sunday morning treat - since about 21st December. What makes it a caffé latte rather than a milky coffee? It is the little Italian coffee-maker, made, it so happens in China, and how the words link each one - each milky coffee I've ever made - to the first such, made in Italy in the apartment of Andrea's parents above the pharmacy on the main street of Santa Margherita Ligure in, I think it was, August 1980.

So pleasurable is the preparing and partaking of a caffé latte that I have, it seems, to already be in a pleasure zone, have to already have enough pleasure in my life, for it - the idea of making one - to form. It is clearly not enough to see one of the parts of the machine for a latte to come into my head: in my tiny kitchen, I must have seen them dozens of times over all the mornings between 21st December and 10th March.

That I made one this morning - it was good - is a sign that my mood is finally improving, following disimprovement on the 22nd December connected to an unpleasant meeting to do with this. 

And the geek in the corner? That's Siegfried Kracauer, the German writer, philosopher and theorist of photography and film. My own theory about him - of which, some other time - is that his ugliness played a defining role in the development of his thinking. Harry Graf Kessler writes in his Diaries, in the one fleeting reference to Kracauer, of his "monstrous ugliness I can't get used to"¹.    

And the photo?

                                         (To be continued)

                                           

Notes

1. Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher, Ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, Insel Taschenbuch, Frankfurt, 1996, p. 763. 

Night out

I've got to get out. Anything. Maybe there is a lecture at the L.S.E.. I check in my bookmarks in the folder 'lectures & seminars'. 'Can the EU make a difference in the Middle East? Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu. 6.30-8pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building'. It doesn't sound that promising but may be marginally more interesting than 'Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today', with Polly Toynbee. At least there will probably be some ranting and raving. It is 6.15. Damn it, I'll go. I'll only be 20 minutes late.   

Career update

I walked out - resigned, that is - a month ago from my latest job, as a marketing writer in the asset management division of Bank of New York Mellon in London, before the job resigned on me. My boss who was not an easy person had become unhappy with my performance, unfairly I thought, and then made it difficult for me to continue in the New Year to the end of my probationary period. I am having to repeat a mantra - simple thoughts about what happened, a string of positive thoughts overall - every time I have a new thought about the experience, for new thoughts risk opening things up in an unproductive way. I have a tendency, in difficult situations, to think negative thoughts and these are to be warded against here. Writing this is a new thought, though an oddly gentle one, and I will bring it to a close by substituting the mantra for it, and, where I would normally put a full stop at the end of this sentence, say in its place the string of words  

New girlfriend, old boss

Girlfriend in the sense of woman friend. No, that is my desk where I am writing this. I tried to get rid of those two awful sort-of-garden green chairs but my landlord said he had nowhere to store them and there was no question of putting them out with the garbage.     

I noticed her towards the back as I walked up the steps of the far aisle in the almost empty, dark, cinema. She had shopping bags spread out around her, ordinary supermarket white-ish ones – there was something of the bag lady about her – and she sat at the end of the row, on her own.

She let me through, with grace.

Did I get her to let me through to the middle of the row because I already wanted something of her? Or did I want to sit in that row? I did want to sit somewhere around there. Happy-Go-Lucky was the film, about Polly, a light-spirited North London primary-school teacher, her day-to-day life and her friends, incidents, trouble with her driving instructor.

I had forgotten the film's name other than the 'happy' but in the little 'What is on' magazine in yesterday's, Saturday's, Guardian (that I use as my weekly radio and T.V. guide) I happened to notice that it is now out in DVD 

Had I seen her face as she let me in? Not really, but I had got a sense in the rhythm of her movement of how she felt, warmly, about her appearance and imagined something positive about. She was my age group, that I could tell.

The film was gentle and warm and funny. Three and a half stars. Afterwards in the foyer - had she left first or did I go past her? I think I may have passed her as we walked out -   I did not take a deep breath and asked her whether she had enjoyed it. She replied and we talked and walked and found our bicycles, her's almost as elegant as she, and we walked, and further north she had a water and I a rough - gaseous, too lively - pint of Carlsberg, never Denmark's best. Let me call her Anna. She is a foreign lady, from the Balkans, talkative, funny.

J - let me call him Rob - was waiting for me at Sloane Square tube, I could see, as I locked my bicycle and, before presenting myself, took my trouser legs out of my socks, put in there in place of cycle clips. I insisted on buying in the trendy cocktail bar, two pints of German Hefe Weizen beer at the staggering trendy-bar-in-Sloane-Square price served in fine, vertically thrusting, Hefe Weizen glasses. It only strikes me now, five days later that they were served without the lemon slice they always come with in southern Germany. Finding no room to sit inside, we stood outside, Rob's suggestion, in the English manner.

Do I make people talk? Perhaps I should put up a plate as a psychoanalyst, and listen for a Sloane Square hourly rate. Rob talked. I let him. I enjoyed his talk, always have. Because he was my boss, I know, and thus can follow, his quite particular and lightning thought processes. I do have to get him to repeat himself a little. The connections are indeed electrical. Why do I defer to him? Why do I become so passive, the shadow of my person, charming, listening.

Do I feel inferior? Rob lives intensely in a world I have begun to live in again in my pay-check life, investment. He mainlines it, as he always did, now mixing on Sloane Square comments about quoted companies with accounts of his work place and of lunches with bosses of public companies, mixing them like the barmen inside the open door are shaking cocktails. I find it intriguing, peppered with investment advice of icy quality, through the Hefe Weizen.

I say nothing, other than ask the next question. Rob works at an analytical coal-face of the industry that I am in as of two weeks and two days ago, 'asset management' it is called.

We have got on to the Georgia. Rob, naturally, has been there - he has travelled widely - and has tales to tell of the South Ossetian economy and explains to me the Ossetians' ethnic origins, how their language is essentially a dialect of Farsi, that they were a Persian population who had moved east and then had been driven by the Mongols moving west high up into the Caucuses like a number of other peoples. There they remain.

Why did I not question, sensitive being Irish to national questions, Rob's line on the Georgians and the viability of their state?

To return to Anna. We are on the South Bank and it is raining and she is talking and I am not. I had waited for her to emerge with her soft silver bullet of a bicycle from the lift that brings you from the level of the pedestrain bridge over the Thames from Embankment to the South bank level. She emerged from Anna's lift, as I call it, in a green cyclist's smock. Such a sense of colour - mainly subdued colours - and of line, of hats. These things are probably passed from mother to daughter. Her face is oval, her eyes dark, smiling like the areas around her eyes. Her straight black hair is artfully cut - she is to go roller-skating with her hairdressser - quite tight to her head, with some thin stray strands bringing out the angularity of her features. The grey woolen hat, pulled tightly over her head, to half way down her brow, mirrors the tight fit of her haircut, bringing out the slim alertness of her features and body. A touch of a Modigliani female form. Is it possible to try to describe in written words a beautiful woman's looks without ... ?

Afterwards she texts "Poor thing I didn't let you speak yesterday. Filling guilty" (I like the "filling" as if guilt is a liquid you could pour into the tank of your soul). "I wouldn't blame you if you newer" (I like the "newer") "want to see me again. A." 

What did she talk about? I cannot remember. It was amusing. What am I looking for, from her, from them?

Lately, she texted me for the first time, mis-spelling my name not for the first time, something to which I am sensitive, feeling that knowing and spelling correctly a friend's  name is a basic mark of respect, more than mis-spelling it, giving me another name. I was pleased that she texted me, unprompted. I think she might like me, not in the love sense.

Does Rob respect me? Does he respect my intelligence? Do I respect him, or her, Anna? Do I defend myself against the arrows of possible disrespect, of not being esteemed, of un-love by getting my retaliation in first, if only in my mind's eye, by judging, seeing or imagining a weakness and categorising the person as less than me on some abstract scale and then saying nothing? Is writing this an act of revenge, for nothing? Did my father do this? Was he getting revenge? Did I internalise a way of thinking about others, my cognitive and emotional make-up being genetically so close to his that his relation to others got encoded in my personality? How?    

                                                                  To be continued (or not)

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.