Hero Harvest

Back

2007-05-07T21:42:00.000Z

I'm back, and back where I was too.

Haven't posted in a while, of course, and was thinking of calling the whole thing off. Then an episode happened. Was walking back from a gig in town, accompanying the female student with whom I had attended (as part of a course I teach her on), to ensure her safe return home. It's late, and I felt responsible.

Two blokes came walking towards us, and one of them hollered to me. "Hey! Are you two lesbians?... do you lick each other's muffs? Eh? Go on, go at it..." All I could muster was to tell him to fuck off. I should have asked him if he was surprised, with him as the alternative. I should have kneed him in the bollocks. I should have slapped him. But no. And I felt totally humiliated. I can put up with it... I'm used to it... but it always embarrasses me that I don't respond more forcefully. And tonight I felt so very angry that he had subjected my student to the abuse.

I will not teach this course again. I just won't. IQ can kiss my arse if she thinks I will. She has no power over me any more.

Here's to standing up.

Relief

2007-04-17T08:02:00.000Z

Olga, Rabbit and I won. It wasn't a fight, exactly, but we got just about everything that we were proposing, and the changes made were good, and it all went through quite smoothly.

IQ, Juan, and Quiffy weren't there. It would have been much harder if any (or all!!) of them had been... Quiffy would have bleughed his soul and bemoaned the difficultness of everything; Juan would have been drole and dismissive and full of anecdotes (and Olga would've had a hard time chairing that...), and bemoaned the pointlessness of everything; and IQ would have done her thing of returning to topics half an hour after they were done.

As it was, we made some good decisions that don't affect any of them too much. The boys had sent apologies, but of course IQ's off the radar at the moment, so I think none of us care much what she thinks any more.

We all went for a drink afterwards, and I was happy to be in the company of such fine people. Hurray for democracy not working!

Worried

2007-04-15T23:06:00.000Z

There's a saying, or a quotation, or something, that my lovely overgrown hippy M&P told me, in an effort to think outside or against (or something) The System: If democracy worked, they wouldn't allow it.

I'm nervous about tomorrow. Last time I wrote about being worried about days, it was V's funeral. That was worth worrying about. I'm quite sure this is not. We have a big all day meeting tomorrow for work, reviewing our curriculum provision. Oh, how lucky we are, in fact, that we are not bound by government ideas of what we should teach! And yet, with 13 full-time members of staff, agreement seems a thing only of fantasy. Some will probably not be there, for various reasons--Ylloh because she's not really here yet; Lion because she's not really here at the moment; and IQ because she's never really anywhere and (it is increasingly clear) is probably not entirely All There. But even with everyone else, and even hoping that Lion and IQ can make it, it will be a struggle. 7 hours of round-the-houses.

Olga says it's ok, because if she doesn't like what's agreed, she's in a position to make us all do it again, which since she and I are on the same side is Good News. But we've been planning this for a while; we carved out a stealth email that has given everybody the information ahead of time about what she/we were proposing, but was designed not to produce any thought or response. For the most part, it seems to have worked. As Olga says, you never go into a meeting not knowing what the outcome will be.

It's important that everyone feels like they've had the say that they want. But I'm worried that they'll all shout too loudly. Not literally--although that's crossed my mind--but in that one may call for one thing, another may call for another, and I can see it now... it'll be pulling in different directions, all individually... I can't expect anything else, but still... I want it to be easy.

I think Olga, Rabbit, and I have worked out a pretty sound proposal, and I just want them all to agree with it, without unnecessary backwardsing and forwardsing about notation and technical skills and oh-it's-all-the-A-levels'-fault. Big Sigh. I just want them to feel like they've had a say, but in the end to agree. It's really the only way....

More beautiful things: cycling, smiling, and listening

2007-04-05T10:50:00.000Z

I had a day of noticing more beautiful things around me. Her ethey are in no particular order.

1. Cycling out to Olga's house: lovely calm weather, and the coming of dusk accompanied me... I felt very much alive for expending the energy and not driving.

2. On my journey: I stopped at some traffic lights, and there was a little girl in the back of the car next to me--she was maybe 2 1/2 or so... I smiled, she looked away. I waved, she smiled and looked away again. I saw her look back at me, and I stuck my tongue out. She returned the gesture, and we waved at each other, smiling, as the car drove away. I liked that I'd made the connection, and I knew that if someone had done that for Little Lad, he'd have been talking about the mystery cyclist for miles.

3. In the middle of the day at work, the shuffle on iTunes graced me with 'Je ne regrette rien'. I paused my day for the duration, and remembered V as I floated somewhere in the sound of the power and Frenchness of Piaf's voice. I shed some tears, but was happy that I had this reminder.

Done

2007-03-17T17:36:00.000Z

There it is. It is done, and in the past. It is now just the Thing that ITHOM said it was.

The day for me started with the long drive, a drive that would have felt ten times longer had I not had the lovely, sensible, funny, and not too silly, L by my side in the car. We talked a lot, bitched about work, and then she slept. Even when she slept, it felt safer to have someone with me, just there. I put my mp3 player on, with earphones so as not to disturb, and listened to a lot of Yasmin Levy, a lot of Edith Piaf, and a lot of other stuff.

We found Rogers, who went straight to ITHOM and A, a grieving little triumvirate. We ate, I changed, and we drove to the crem. The weather was crap. It couldn't even rain properly. Rogers said he wanted thunder and lightning and a big gothic storm. I said, "This is weather for English grief, don't you think? Miserable but not really tragic or over-demonstrative." Someone else said, "No, this is really V funeral weather: raining, but not so much to ruin your clothes."

And that was really the tone of the afternoon: truly sad to have lost her, but with her somehow there all the time. We walked slowly into the chapel--a really beautiful building, modern, but nice--and waited more or less in silence. The service was bit heavy on the Catholic guilt for ITHOM and me... lots of 'condolence' knowing we'd 'meet our sister again in the house of the Lord.' Yep, been there, done that, scars to prove it. Ah well, as the minister and I agreed later, the ritual is a port in a storm. But overall, it was a truly lovely service. D, her widower, did fantastically well, and read the Shakespeare sonnet (116) that had been read at their wedding. I was of course a blubbering mess. Her sister-in-law and best friend had done her true justice in a fabulous outfit, and spoke of their shopping and dancing together. L had spoken a lot about the dancing in the car too. Rogers drew the short straw and read the bidding prayers. I was mightily impressed with how very obviously deeply he had committed himself to the role, despite his better judgement on the subject matter. And in between the readings, and the family politics, there was song: no hymns, thank God! no hymns. But Edith... who had coincidentally kept me company on the journey: 'Je ne regrette rien'. It was a fantastic recording, a live one, and I was only sad that they didn't let the applause run for longer in the chapel.

She was an odd-bod, in many ways... we all knew that, and everyone will admit it. But in the end, my judge of a good person is Posh, who had not warmed to V at all when we all had coffee in Montreal. Anyone Posh doesn't especially like is almost always a really good person. For myself, I'll always remember the Lovehearts sweets she sent after the book launch last September--a totally unnecessary thankyou for my organisational efforts, and such a very thoughtful one as we'd had a conversation that weekend about retro sweets. The choice of Edith was so apt: so very bright, and strong, and a sad story, but in the end we are left only with the strength, of Edith's voice; and of V's determination to do a really fucking good job of living.

So it's done. I've lost my funeral virginity, and I'll never hear that song the same way again. It's a Thing. But if for nothing else, I hope I can find one ounce of that determination and buff my own life up a bit.

I think I'm going to be sad

2007-03-16T06:57:00.000Z

I think it's today.

Yes, with my Bach on in the background--as a ritual piece of music that is melancholy and mournful without being tragic and emotional--it's definitely today. I think Rogers might appreciate it... I'm worried for him. I went and defended him against what seemed like a truly banal comment on his post. Bloody people. They don't know. I admit, up against Rogers, ITHOM, AD, and the husband I never met, I don't know either. But I felt I knew more than this commenter... maybe not. Oh, now I feel bad...

I've spent the week largely distracted from the coming of today, the funeral. It was always going to be a really stupid week, with extra jobs to do, the usual Wednesday hell, and that when's-the-Easter-vacation feeling, desperate for a break... I got really irritated with my students on Wednesday. They deserved it all: they behave like children, in and out of class, and I told them I wouldn't wipe their arses for them... but it's not like me. Perhaps it should be. Anyway, then it all got worse at work, and now it's all awful. That's too complicated a saga to speak about today, but it's all contributed to a feeling that today might actually not happen in the end. Perhaps we'd just jump to Thursday, with its exhaustion and impending misery, to Saturday, with the sun rising and a feeling that this first hurdle was overcome.

But no, it's definitely today. I wish Olga could be here. She'd know what to do, how to be, how to support our friends. I know nothing. All I know is that as soon as I found out V was dying, all of about 3 hours before she finally went, I wanted to have seen her more recently, to have been able to say goodbye. And I know that because that was not possible, as it so often isn't in these situations, I have to go today to do exactly that. I'll have company in the car--a colleague form another department--but, like Rogers, at least today I feel very much like not seeing anyone, perhaps especially people I don't know. Over 100 people, ITHOM says, maybe 200. It's too many. I'm autistic enough at the happiest of group occasions; this is likely to be awful.

Mustn't forget tissues, Posh reminded me. I'll take some for my colleague too, and maybe Rogers. But I don't want to cry, much less look like I've intended to or expect it of others. It would feel too much of a display, too public. Nonetheless, I'm weak like that, and I will, and I will feel I have no right to. Tongue-biting, apparently, stops it. But now, the practicalities take over... showering, ironing, packing...

What is there to say?

2007-03-11T22:04:00.000Z

What can I possibly say? Rogers and ITHOM have surely said it; they have said what they have the right to say; a friend is gone, and they feel the hole bigger than I; it's done... it's out there, and commented on, and so why do I feel the need or desire to say anything? What have I the right to feel?

I've spent the last week tied up in the comparatively banal, the mundane... IQ being a pain in the arse; worrying about my students; stressing about how many hours there aren't in the day to work; work, work, work... Others have spent the same time grieving, ahead of the time of passing.

Everything this friend could have done is now stopped. Anything more will be by the hand of those who are left. "Her book was nearly finished," said Rogers when I saw him... He said that efforts will be made to finish it for her. Good plan, I thought; seems right and proper. But what use is any of it? We are variously sad at her passing... but why does the unfinished work matter? I say this not to lessen her importance as a person while she was here, heaven forbid... but as another question about the importance of the work that any of us do. It is, for certain, what makes us Us. But none of it would help prevent a pointless death such as this one: isn't it all a little self-indulgent, what many of us do?

That said, perhaps "medical advances" and the like are in fact even more arrogant than the kind of work that we all do, and she did: perhaps those all-important scientific researchers, who are allowed to claim the moral high ground (indeed, to whom I willingly give said high ground so often...), perhaps they imagine they are doing something truly Worthy. At least I admit I'm doing what I do because it makes me happy, because I'm just interested; if anybody works to make themselves happy, to fill themselves with purpose, is that not one of the greatest things we can do to justify our own continued existence? And then, if we were to suddenly stop being able to do it, it would become pointless, unless it made someone else happy to complete it on my behalf, but only for them... this is not coming out right. My own instinct is to change, to try harder to make the most of the life I am lucky enough to have, to make my work more efficient, to make sure I finish as much as I can just in case... my counterinstinct is to consider everything totally pointless and jack it all in. But really, I guess I should just carry on what I do; we all should. Really, there's no point in doing otherwise.

As Rogers said of the passing of Baudrillard, we mourn to honour; if, at various conferences and in various publications, this friend is acknowledged in her absence, if her book is completed and posthumously published, it will be an act of honouring to mourn.

I don't feel the hole like Rogers and ITHOM, and others; but I feel a hole nonetheless. She was, it must be said (and it will be, many times, I hope), a singularly determined person who in that respect put the rest of us to shame. She was also, as ITHOM points out, utterly ready and resolved to her own imminent death. That, perhaps more than anything else she ever did in life, is something that totally humbles me. In a way, for my own part, it makes her death a little easier to take; it's cruel and pointless and it makes me angry, but in herself she was ready--it's the rest of us who weren't.

What did I do wrong?

2007-03-06T01:00:00.000Z

In a way, this post is in lieu of my 'reflective practice' that I should be doing for work. Sigh. As if I don't have enough on, I'm supposed to attend seminars and write about how I'm improving in my job as a result. Very worker bee. Big sigh.

In fact, I think I'm getting worse at it. The last two years, I've taught a course--it's been a challenge, but students have said afterwards they enjoyed it, and we all seemed to have a good time doing it. But I wasn't convinced I was helping them learn anything (see: I'm not a 'teacher'; I 'facilitate learning'...). So this year I'm totally overhauling it, with a view to helping them develop skills that will actually be useful for other modules, and, let's face it, do what the course is supposed to.

So last week, I used a tip I'd got from one of my damn seminars that are making my Wednesdays a regular hell for me this semester: I asked them for feedback on 3 questions--What's the most helpful thing we've done so far? What's giving you the most trouble? and What can I do to help with the things you're finding difficult. Apparently, the Carpenters are difficult, because 4 forms (out of around 55) came back asking for fewer Carpenters examples in class.

Well, I wrote everyone a long note in response to most of their collective points, and raised the Carpenters issue at the end. I pointed out that I used the examples because a) I knew them and b) they illustrated the point, and that if, for example, Stockhausen had been more appropriate I would have played that instead. I also pointed out that only 7 of around 150 examples were by the Carpenters.

I feel like I've totally lost any kind of connection I had with the class. Did I ever have one? Is this year group just full of bad apples? Will my real module feedback come back terrible because I sometimes play Patsy Cline, and they choose to ignore the Diamanda Galas or Led Zeppelin or Angelique Kidjo I play as well? How fucking unfair would that be? Or would it be? Should I work harder at finding examples that will speak to the students? How can I possibly? I'm not 18, and I'm not into rock--well, not in large doses, although I like a bit of Zep or GnR as much as the next man. Not all of them are either, and I know I've got mature students and Whitney fans in the crowd. I try and play a range, I really do. I genuinely listen to a range: not like some, "Yeah I'm into everything... Beatles, the Who, Stones"...yeah right. I often listen to fado, easy listening, tango, medieval plainsong, 80s pop, 19th-century opera... often within a mere 24 hour period and certainly within any given week. I try and have a sense of humour about the 'cheesy' examples I play, but at the same time I don't want to foster uncritical value judgements. Oi vey, the rock and the hard place already.

What to do now? Meanwhile, I have in the last 12 hours been party to information in praise of my colleague Rabbit, who is described in one piece of feedback from last semester as 'King'. No, I don't want to be bionic, like he is. No, I like eating and don't want to look like I'm harbouring a stomach ulcer or other wound-up-tight internalised-stress condition. But I would love his confidence, at least. I'm not jealous of his success... just his confidence. He seems to know what he's doing, and he seems to feel like he's doing it right, and that he gets more-than-adequate praise (from all levels) about it.

Maybe it's just a show. Maybe all his very visible neuroses merely hide a more deep rooted one. Or maybe I should play more Nirvana, like he does. What I hate is feeling like my teaching is not good enough simply on the basis of what music I play, which speaks of course of the music I know... and no matter how I know it... that PhD's no excuse, you know... fact is I have always listened to the Carpenters voluntarily. That's why I thought of them in the first place...

So why do these students get, potentially, to judge my capacity to do my job simply on the basis of a clash in musical taste? That seems really really unfair. Perhaps I should stop whinging, but it seems that my colleagues in Maths or History wouldn't get the same treatment. Perhaps it's really a different version of what they get, but I still feel very put out. Clearly I need to work this through somewhat, probably in my real 'reflective practice'--fuckin waste of time that'll be. All top tips welcome!

Sprechen Sie DoubleThink?

2007-02-23T20:22:00.000Z

However much I tend towards self-deprecation and self-loathing, I must on occasions admit that I am basically, fundamentally a Good Person. My natural instincts are, as Olga says, those of Winnie the Pooh--a stalwart friend whose first thoughts are "How can I fix that problem for someone?", even when it's not my job to fix it. And yet, whenever I have to admit that I am indeed a Good Person, the next thought that hits me is: "But really, why bother?" Because that instinct so often gets me into trouble.

Two particular events have occurred over the last couple of days. The first: I found a personal document, a diary? A journal? A set of sketched out thoughts and feelings, and drafts of letters to lovers and maybe not-yet-lovers, and although at first I had to look twice to understand any of it, or recognise the writing (which I did), I immediately knew that I shouldn't read any of it. I did, of course, read some... and with hindsight, I'm not altogether sure that I shouldn't, because I have seen a particularly human side of someone who seems otherwise not really to have one. But there came a point, a phrase that revealed too much, at which I knew that I mustn't read on. And so I returned the book, as a friend would.

Later that evening, after I had extended this hand of friendship, the dismissive hand of mere friendliness was once more waved in my direction, as I was passed by and left alone in favour of solitude.

And the next day, I finished a letter that I have been pondering for some time, addressed to my employers in defence of my friends and colleagues, and my department. It was a detailed letter that required quite some research into statistics. I read a draft to Olga, and--although she was appreciative of the principle I was trying to uphold--she pointed out that in fact the letter would have nowhere near the desired effect. Quite the contrary, she said, it would mark me out as "One of Them": I have shown myself to be able to talk their language. Because They have the power, They will ignore everything I say, all the content of my language, and see only the language itself, the instinct to defend my unit, and They will forsee that this instinct can be turned towards the defence of Their own unit.

So, I try to stand up and defend my fellow Us-es against the big Them; and They will simply turn the other cheek, and adopt me as one of Them. I try to be a friend, and I am turned into an acquaintance. I use their languages, and yet they all fail to understand me, what I am really trying to say.

All very Orwellian. Sigh.

Familiarity breeds respect first

2007-02-18T19:06:00.000Z

This, in many ways, is the coming together of several posts, all about music. It may be that to dance with music (not to it, it must be with it... to be a part of it...) changes the way in which we listen to that music, since it instils the body in the listening process. In fact, as I sit here and enjoy a new CD--Mariza's Transparente, an impulse buy--I want to ponder again what Rogers suggested after my string quartet virginity was utterly taken, without question. After my musings on a set of Russian quartets, he posed the question: "I wonder ... whether we might also think about the Affekt here as also in some sense about broader processes - not just your education, your special knowledge ... but also a more embedded (but not universal of course) or visceral thing going on here too. Are there shared bodily experiences of music which might approach a trans-cultural dimensions of meaning or am I a hopeless romantic as well?"

I have also been giving serious thought to conversations I have had over the space of months now with IQ, and various bits of teaching that I have done, or am dreading doing... I knew more or less from the opening gestures of this CD what I was to expect. Quickfire musical analysis, of the kind that my students do but don't think of themselves as doing. I 'teach' them how to analyse; they complain of not being able to; I insist that they have the skills anyway... there's nothing to read, just their own efforts to make... more of what they do anyway... The chord patterns, the strumming, the interplay of bass pedal and chords, all screams fado to me, and as the voice enters that screaming becomes supersonic. I feel the chord progressions before they happen, and if they don't happen as I expect, I am delightfully perturbed. I try to explain this to my students, to explain tension and resolution, and I am bothered by some of the blank faces. This I imagine to be something that they can do, they can surely feel it... no?

I often wonder what it is like to have had no musical training, to have dedicated no time to developing aural skills, not to have played through scales and arpeggios over and over, not to be able to see keys of a piano in my mind as I hear music play, not to be able to feel the chords beneath my fingers on the neck of a guitar... Perhaps if I could remember that time, that lost moment of my life, I could teach them better. My familiarity--over-familiarity, perhaps--with the object that I hear, and see by extension in what is sometimes almost synaesthetic... my familiarity has left me incapable of empathy. But my familiarity is also what enables me not only to feel and see as I hear, but also precisely to understand that I am doing these things.

I don't know if I would change my response to Rogers' question. I hope, like him, in a hopelessly romantic sort of way, that such things can be approached. Without it, perhaps my teaching is for naught. But as I listen over and over to material with which I am as yet unfamiliar, I know exactly how much I am learning to understand the structures, patterns, and gestures, and--more to the point--how much of the pleasure I derive from music comes from that understanding.

Bodily listening

2007-02-04T13:21:00.000Z

My body continues to amaze me. Not its physical state, of course, which continues to be radically different from how I want it to be (and to a certain extent, that will always be true)... my muscles are coming along nicely, but I seem not to be able to shift an ounce of fat...

But further to my recent difficulties, my body has now invaded my listening life. I can now work with music on, something I couldn't do for years, a skill I lost sometime in my first year at University... It's a skill I've trained myself into again, on the basis that while working is the only chance I get to listen to much in the way of new music (although my gym-time is another opportunity, but the kind of music has to be different...). Anyway, while I was training myself to be able to do this, a few months ago, I had a conversation with a friend, a fairly dedicated tanguera, about it. I had found myself very able to listen to tango while working (alongside fado, flamenco, chanson, and other rather lovely non-Anglotripe stuff), and asked her if she didn't feel the same... At first, she said, she agreed, but very soon she found herself unable to work with it on. Huh, interesting, I thought, given how much she liked dancing to it...

But since the difficulties of which I speak are in fact dance-related, I now understand this entirely, fully, completely, in my very bones. Logical thinking ought to have explained it to me at the time, but it is quite incredible to feel it totally. Of course she could not work with that music on; it is dance music. For me, it was not dance music, it was just music. And now, having taken up a form of dance myself (about which, no more for now), I have an entire genre of music more or less denied to me as work music... music that becomes dance-music cannot be work-music. I feel the music course through my veins as I think, even after only a couple of weeks of dancing. As time goes by, if I continue to dance, it will become more and more this way and I suspect I will only be able to dance to it.

As I say, logic can lead us to this conclusion, and yet I feel it. My body is listening. The vibrations of this voice that sings the tune of my dance move through me now not as waves but as steps and postures and moves and as an attitude. It is an enhanced relationship, I think... my listening time and space has been restricted, but my listening experience is beautifully improved.

Making life difficult

2007-01-24T08:01:00.000Z

Sigh. I seem to be fundamentally committed to the project of making my life difficult at every given opportunity. There are times and places where things could get more complicated, or stay simple, and I seem always to take the former option.

Moreover, there's very little more about it that I can say here, for fear of self-exposure. Which means not only that I've just said too much (see my previous musings on the not-/telling of secrets...) but that I have already exposed too much by revealing this space to various people. And which, in turn, brings me to a question Olga suggested I face at some point, and which I have long avoided (while my blog-buddies have faced it head-on), namely what it is to blog.

For whom do I blog? Right now, I don't want anyone to read this - I want a quiet space where I can know for sure that I am not at risk in any way by airing my issues. But now you must feel like I don't want you here... but who are you? Go on, come out if you're there. Show your faces. I need to know who's there... I've invited some people along the way - Rogers, ITHOM, Spurious, Necoh, Olga, RNM, for instance - and I know that some have come, some have brought friends, and almost certainly the greatest liabilities are not regular visitors. Maybe I no longer have any visitors at all. I know for sure that Olga doesn't come - she said as much, and told me she doesn't like reading blogs, because she feels like a peeping tom, and so she suggested I question why I blog. For whom do I write?

Who do I imagine you are? At least two Unknowns have found me - that felt kind of strange, and yet I was rather chuffed. 3BT has linked to me, after my 3BT post, and that was kinda nice too. But who do I think you are out there as I write? I have no idea. For what it is that I need to say, I want it to stay that way... I don't want to know you. Do I even want an audience? Evidently, some part of me does, since I type this and leave it for you to read. But why do I care? Can't I type this and save it in a journal? Yes, I suppose I could. But a part of me also likes the ritual of blogging, the search for a picture, the subtle commitment I feel to keep posting, because to post is to think... but more than that: to post is to unravel, to unpack; to type is to articulate is to formulate; without commitment to the Posting, there may be no post; with no blog, there is no post, only words. How fascinating, that you, my mythical, unknown, unfathomable and maybe non-existent audience, make my Words into a Post, and give my typing purpose.

I wear my life on my sleeve, and of course my blog (and even the existence thereof) is no exception. And so there are moments when I have something to hide that I need Posting to help articulate, and yet by definition that option is gone. I share my information with people who misuse it; I share in order not to think; and then, when I want to think and not share, I can't.

I walk tonight not in a battlefield seeking heroes but in forests with hidden eyes watching. Come out, come out, wherever you are...

All I have to do is dream

2007-01-21T09:19:00.000Z

What a bizarre night. A haze of images, all crystal clear at the time, danced just behind my eyes so I could only see them if I looked to the side - another pleaides moment... A woman, in a street - a dark, unlit street - taller than me, wearing a long overcoat tapered in at the waist, long dirty blonder hair worn up... we walk up a hill together and cannot leave each other at the top. She wants to overpower me, and although I like it I won't let her, and we agree to meet again although we still can't quite separate.

What do such dreams mean? I could pore over the signficance of any given element in it - the height, the power, the blonde hair - but would it really mean anything? Would my dream actually tell me anything I didn't already know? In fact, do dreams ever tell us anything we don't already know? If they come from within us, we have made them, and they should be no surprise.

What I want my dreams to do is give me advice, or comfort, not disrupt my morning thoughts with strange and exciting images that demand to be replayed. Surely I have such advice and comfort inside of me as well? Maybe it is already advice and I just can't see it - like, go out, anywhere, meet someone, anyone, give it a go; or something. I'm so utterly and divinely happy being single that I really don't want the complications that other people bring with them, even if you don't leap headlong into some big commitment form the start. Other people take up headspace, heartspace, they take time and I don't have any that I want to share. So what's with the dream? Maybe it is still all that, the advice, and I just think it's not right. Oh bollocks, I don't know. And I don't care, except that I feel I have to do what my waking self feels, not trust the mental ramblings of my sleeping self. Perhaps it was just porn - heaven knows I've found very little out there worth watching.

But anyway, I think I should forget it. I place too much emphasis on dreams and their meaning (see the monkey dream and ensuing posts... the monkeys keep accumulating, but I am learning to ignore them). So there. Be gone.

I think.

A rant about publishers

2007-01-15T23:43:00.000Z

Yes, that's what it is - no point in hiding. I want to SHOUT and YELL and find the IDIOTS who prevail despite their idiocy and SHOUT IN THEIR FACES. Or stick a sword through my head.

It's midnight, and I'm proof-reading. I wouldn't have to, if the publishers had got it right the first time, and the fact that they've F**KED IT UP before made me cross enough then. So, I came to some sort of peace with it, and awaited the second proofs. And there they landed, in my email inbox with a week's turnaround time requested... my poor inbox, just recovering from the abuse of the Great Festive Vacation (bah humbug) when nothing much gets done and the emails pile up, demanding rapid attention early in the new year.

At the time of receiving the second proofs, I was at quite a nice point - riding the crest of a wave of efficiency, getting things done (thank God), clearing my inbox (even better), getting enough sleep and being home for tea. And now, oh sweet Mother of Jesus. Last night, after getting back from dropping the Boys back home, I drank a whole cafetiere of coffee and managed to keep going till 3 am; and now I'm here, with plenty left to do, and it's all due in tomorrow.

My real beef is this: people thing a whole bunch of things about publishers, and published people, and people who publish, and it's all a PILE OF SHITE. It is widely presumed that if it's Published it must be Good, because people at every step of the way Know What They're Doing. Well, there' s enough tripe on all our bookshelves to put that one to bed. But the publishers... the people in control... the ones with reputations that we seek to benefit from... oh, now, they're Bad. Really Bad. I remember an Old School colleague of mine - retired, looks more or less dead but in fact isn't - raising his eyebrows in surprise when I told him who this book was with. "How did you manage that?" he asked. So, this particular house has a reputation. We all want a bit. Oh yes, if you can put it there...

And yet it's quite plain that there's not a sharp tool in the box. Between them, they must have a handful of brain cells. For the most part, they've incorporated the corrections I so painstakingly supplied from last time, after several very late nights... but more often than not, they've just done it really stupidly. Like a double-barrelled author's surname - they put it where it wasn't before, that was fine - but it now has an underscore instead of a hyphen. Frankly, I'd trust Homer Simpson with it more than this bunch of muppets.

So now I know this, what do I do with the information? What can I do with it? Can I make a dent in their solid, well-established reputation with my experience, if I tell enough people? Probably not. Like everyone still goes to Marks and Spencers for underwear, even though it's rubbish now, because it's always been understood as Good, the Place To Go For Pants. No-one will listen - the sand their reputation is becoming still looks like a rock from the outside.

So I guess it's back to the grindstone. Sigh. And perhaps I will keep to my vow this time not to do this particular kind of work again if it can at all be avoided. And perhaps I will just appreciate everyone else's efforts just a little bit more. Strange, though, how the body forgets pain...

Voices from beyond the grave

2007-01-09T18:43:00.000Z

I received some sad news last night from Rogers: DC, a former colleague of his at the university where we met, a man who inspired me to think in ways about music that I would never have thought of, whose first-year course baffled just about everyone else but got me really very excited, died in November. All these months, and neither Rogers nor I knew.

I was surprisingly sad. I hadn't stayed in touch with him especially, but he wrote me a couple of references along the way, and I always remember him so fondly. He looked like a tall and senior Hugh Laurie, and was so terribly posh. When he picked up the phone in his office, he would answer only with his surname. And if he called you back, he would only state your first name and then his. Terribly serious, in a way, but I guess just because he was so totally posh, while being really down-to-earth at the same time, not wanting to waste words, just get the job done. And in the vacations or at the end of term, he would sometimes wear red trousers and boating shoes with no socks, which always made me chuckle because it was so very Oxford.

I wrote to the University today, to do with this, and offered to send a CD of an electroacoustic composition written by a friend of mine from the year above, featuring DC reading Genesis I. I thought it was an excellent demonstration of him as a person, ready to give something a go, and always (at least from where I stood) amiable and smiling. In fact, on my way home tonight, something more than that occurred to me. This is a document of DC, it is some kind of his presence even after his death. And as I sit here with Maria Callas on in the background, trying hard not to veg out in front of the telly because it doesn't really relax me, something of the power of voice and recording is plain to me.

Fascinated as I have been for a long time with the voice, the singing voice especially, I have not really felt this. Callas, Karen Carpenter, Elvis... recorded voices. We can inhabit them at times, we can identify with them, and yet they are voices that most of us have never really heard, or indeed ever will. I have not and will not hear any of these voices in the same room as me, only through speakers. If I play back the recording of DC's voice, it will not be his voice, not the voice that is imprinted in my memory from lectures, but an approximation. A good one, admittedly, but there is always something missing. To listen to our own recorded voices is usually a terrible thing, as we become separated fundamentally from a thing that comes only from inside of ourselves.

There is a passage in Tomás Eloy Martínez's The Tango Singer, where the elusive title character hears a recording of his own voice for the first time, after paying to record a song onto acetate. The studio technician secretly keeps the first recording and makes the young lad record the song again to take home. He struggles to find a gramophone to hear his recording on, and is one evening surprised to hear the first cut on the radio:

"Estéfano immediately recognised the first recording, which the technician had pretended to discard, and he went pale. Separated from his own voice, he found himself still connected to it by a thread of the kind of admiration it was only possible to feel towards something we don't possess. It wasn't a voice he would have wanted or sought but something that had alighted in his throat. Since it was alien to his body, it could be removed when he least expected it. Who knew how many times it had been around in the past and how many other voices fit within it. To Estéfano it mattered only that it resembled one voice: Carlos Gardel's."

It is that disconnection that we feel on listening to our voice coming from elsewhere, and unless we find that thread of admiration, we are not connected to it at all. The gap between the sounding voice and the recorded voice of someone else is another matter, of course, because we are not often so deeply invested in their body as we are in our own. At any rate we do not feel the physicality of their vocal production. So although there may well be a noticeable difference between these two voices--especially if they belong (does the recorded voice ever belong? or just pretend to belong?) to someone whom we know very well--the gap is not one that we run from screaming lest we fall in.

But that gap is there for sure. There is no body from whom the recorded voice emanates, and we take this for granted and are blind to it now.

It is precisely the death of the voice's body that illustrates all of this. At the time of the phonograph's invention, there were famously concerns about 'capturing' the voice, perhaps 'stealing' part of the soul, and yet I seem to recall that listening to the departed after their death was one of the uses Edison suggested for his invention (music not being amongst them). So there it is, DC's voice, or something close enough, sitting in a jumble of magnetic thingies on a piece of brown tape, and I expect at some point I'll turn it into 1s and 0s in the beautiful binary way. And as obvious as it is that this is only an approximation of a voice I know, hampered by the absence of the body even before one thinks about magnetic bits and recording quality and the rest, I will listen to it as if it is DC.

As if.

This is how we always listen to the recorded voice. As if. Sometimes we become very aware of the as-if-ness. For instance, there's a Carpenters recording of "Trying to Get That Feeling" that Richard made after Karen's death with her voice track, a tape he'd found after she died. She'd cut the vocals, and they'd intended to do the whole song, but they left it and Barry Manilow did it instead. But this vocal track, obviously not re-recordable, tells the story, because at one point you can hear the turn of a page as Karen looks for the rest of the lyrics. Couldn't (or wouldn't) be edited out by Richard, and in that subtle noise that you can barely hear unless you're listening for it, that split-second, is the dead Karen Carpenter. That song I listen to knowing she's dead. The others, I listen to as-if.

At any rate, I shall listen to that recording of DC as-if and enjoy every second, with the as-if-ness clear in my ears. He was a man that you can imagine would never seem ready to die, always with something left to say or do. And so it's absolutely right that his voice still speaks, albeit as-if.

Discipline and punishment

2007-01-06T16:13:00.000Z

No, it's not as exciting a post as you want it to be... Sorry. But the picture's good, don't you think? :)

I reached a conclusion about myself a few weeks back. Madd was harrassing me to take a day off work and go into town with her, meet some cute bird at some cafe, hang out, have fun etc. Problem was, it was the last day before my 3 weeks of non-productivity were about to commence - Christmas, the boys, blah blah. So I was eager to get a number of things finished so that I didn't worry about them over the vacation. I was so stressed about I-didn't-quite-now-what, and she was so very persistent, I ended up in tears trying to take a raincheck, or even just that I'd try but couldn't promise anything.

Anyway, in the discussion/harrassment, she offered to help me with whatever I needed to get done. Admittedly, there were probably one or two things that she could've done without me worrying too much, like filing my articles. But truth be told, I understood then and there that I'm basically a control freak. I don't want anyone else to do my filing, or my tidying. It might be wrong. And they'd get in the way. I want my own space and my own system and for it to be right and Just So.

Now I sound like Posh, who took over a year at the beginning of our relationship to be persuaded to let me fold her jeans, and always harangued me about the way I hung the washing. In many ways I'm not like her: I didn't bat an eyelid when the boys told me they'd knocked over the clothes horse, whereas she would have had an apopleptic fit; I don't have some complex system of hanging things out to dry; I can think outside the box. But, in many other respects - mostly work-related, I think - I am a total control freak. It's not that I want to do things for other people, but I get very anxious about trusting them to do things at all, and it makes me want to do something to make them do it, and do it right. I prepared everyone's feedback forms for them before the vacation, pre-filled them and everything, so that they'd get done. Not even my responsibility, but I couldn't bear the idea of people not doing it. And I've got another thing going on next week: some complex memo about our computerised profiles, and how we all individually need to do stuff... I'm getting everyone in the computer suite and telling them what buttons to push, because it affects my job as webmaster. Why can't I just let it go? Why do I care so much about whether other people can get their own shit together?

Anyway, this is all part of an increasing reliance on (and yearning for) self-discipline for me. I want to be efficient, get things done. The gym is crucial to me at the moment - I haven't thought much about it for the last 3 weeks, but I'm raring to go on Monday, and lose the weight that I hate so much because it is visible evidence of my lack of self-discipline and willpower. I will lose those 2 stones again this year... I must, because not to is to fail and fall into the pit of apathy. Not that I regard weight in others as such evidence, but I know what it is for me - a total inability to resist tasty food.

And the weight is, in my mind, more important than the food. It's just that my tastebuds override my mind sometimes... so with self-discipline always comes punishment, or at least suffering, since I'll be "missing out" on tortillas and minstrels for a while now. The weightloss companies say you don't have to miss out totally - true enough - but rising at 6.30am to go to the gym is punishment enough for my lack of discipline so far! And cleanliness really is next to godliness, since I am a god if I can keep everything clean all the time. I feel untouchable having spent literally all day cleaning. In fact, I enjoy it all. Deeply masochistic, I'm sure, but it makes me feel good to think that I am in control. Eugh.

My natural instinct is to dislike control freaks and gym bunnies and people obsessed with tidiness and systems. They're generaly so dull, and often difficult as people. I don't want to end up like that, interesting only for being a pain in the arse. But discipline is my great hero at the moment, the thing that keeps me ticking over and makes me feel ok, and, I believe, makes life possible in a job that attracts disorder and panic: always so much to do, always needing to be done now. Discipline will guide me through, if I am at all capable of the journey.

Time goes by

2006-12-31T19:30:00.000Z

New Year's Eve and I'm staying in, getting an early night. It's a relatively new tradition for me, brought about by the heavy pregnancy of Posh with Big Boy 5 years ago, and sustained by the birth of Little Lad, and their continuing presence in our lives (for which I am utterly thankful). Even friends with children - I'm thinking particularly of Necoh - are a little bemused that I care very little for late night New Year celebrations, but since the boys are with me for a few days :) I have an early morning tomorrow,. same as any other day of the year. It therefore seems to fall upon me to tackle a great hero: Chronos, Old Father Time, Saturn .

Part of my issue with it is the arbitrary nature of it all. That's part of why I wasn't overly fussed about the boys being with Posh at Christmas - that day means more to her than it does to me, with my hippy upbringing and adolescent celebrations of the winter solstice. But it will come to mean a great deal to the boys, and so I think it will come to be more important to me. But I digress. What's really on my mind here is the calendar. Apparently, the Gregorian calendar was insituted in 1582, and Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania took it up there and then, losing 10 days and skipping from Thursday 4th of October to Friday 15th. England didn't take it on until 1752, and the calendar then skipped from Wednesday 2nd September to Thursday 14th. Even in 1882, Russia and Britain were running different systems, so I don't know whether or not I share my birthday with Stravinsky. (Big question....!) So it's all made up.

But it doesn't quite feel so easy to dismiss. We all agree to hang our time on this system, and thus it thrives, not only as an organising principle, but as a thought. And so I still sit here pondering the events of the last 12 months. It's very nearly that long since Posh and I decided to separate, after which, as most of you know, I spent 6 months living with Rogers, who kindly took me in and under his wing, including culinarily. Only in late July did I get my own place, this lovely little pad I call - and am making - home, in this strange city full of people who talk funny. My mother, Knower of All Things, said back in January that this was my Saturn return in action: it had all been kickstarted by Father Time himself.

It's been a big year for me, with Chronos at my side. I've been up and down, moving on, growing up. I've been back in time, and delved into corners of my mind left festering, I've looked into pits and seen monsters, and had nightmares. And I've looked up at the sky, and seen the stars, and ridden on clouds and flown. I've found new and old friends, and found out a great deal about myself.

I hope 2007 is good to us all, though it's always what we make of it. At the very least, I hope it deals us all a kind hand to play with. I resolve only to keep thinking and noticing things and learning. After 2006, I feel like anything is possible.

For you, if you're reading: May the longtime sun shine upon you, all love surround you, and the pure light within you guide your way on.

Laying ghosts to rest

2006-12-28T18:07:00.000Z

Heavy sigh. Weary heart. Lighter load, I think.

Today I went back to a place that has for 17 years been a place of trauma for me. I walked with an old friend up roads that I remember in my bones, through spaces and geographies that my mind didn't know it still knew, but that my body could still feel. We came to a school, a private girls' school - I started there when I was 12, and I developed my first major troublesome crush on a woman there. CS, my history teacher. She had a black MGB, she was young, confident, DPhil form Oxford, seemed smart. I didn't know what to do with my feelings and they raged through me, filling every cell in my body and making me incapable.

I stood with my friend at the school gates, which were open although I dared not pass through them - last time I had done that I was told I would have a court order taken out to prevent me going back on the premises if I ever went on them again - and we smoked. We talked about what places mean, how places come to have power even though they don't really. I remembered all the times I had thought about CS, while I was at the school and since. I understood how they just didn't get it. That system doesn't want to think about individuals - it wants girls to get good grades - the same system is screwing over Madd too. She's so smart, but being crushed by the system that can't think outside its box.

I cried. Last time I was there, I couldn't cry. When I was told not to come back, I was totally numb. A year later I was forcing other bodily fluids out of me, cutting myself and substituting blood for tears, giving myself a physical pain to feel. Today, I cried and it felt such a relief.

I experienced so many of my weaknesses while I was at that school, and in the years following my departure at the age of 14. I didn't understand them then, but I learned everything I needed to know about my weaknesses and failings. They are all the same weaknesses as I experience today - the leopard cannot change these spots. I am better at managing my weaknesses now, and its a little bit easier to wait for IQ's response to my latest inconsequential email than it would have been 10 years ago. But I guess what I have to understand is that this is just a lot of the way I am. I fall for women who are unattainable and unsuitable - truth be told, undesirable in their unsuitability. And I frequently find it hard to shake them from my feelings. It's like a bad habit, like biting fingernails. It doesn't have to get in the way, it doesn't have to cause trouble, unless I allow it to.

So there's a scab picked. I went to pore over the details of what has caused me trauma all these years, and it made me cry. But I have come away feeling stronger, just a little bit. I feel much less desire now to find CS again and have some kind of showdown with her. Not sure what I would have said anyway, but at least now I feel like I'm moving on on my own merits. That school, and everything that it has carried with it for over half my life, truly are fallen heroes, and I'm happy to be able to walk away from them on this battlefield.

Did you ever know?

2006-12-26T10:33:00.000Z

I'm in the best time and place for blogging. It's Christmas, and I'm daan saaf with my parents. It's been lovely, really, a nice break. I spent most of Christmas day in bed feeling (but not being) sick, which I suppose is my body's way of reacting to me actually stopping for more than 5 minutes, so in a way that felt right.

The price I have had to pay to spend the festive period with my folks, though, is spending it also with 2Shoes, a person I don't particularly like or even want to like. Everything that comes out of her mouth sounds like a sample from one of our parents, or a more annoying version of it. She's so very full of herself and unstoppably self-confident. Oi vey. It seems strange, though, that I would think that she's like that, since in many ways she would have every right to have self=image issues, as she's had a couple of major broadly cosmetic operations and a much worse time of things socially than I. Ah well, there thrives the hero of the sibling-grass being greener...

But what was lovely was on Christmas Eve, before she came over, having the biggest hug in the world with my dad. He's totally my hero. No good reason why, just that he's my dad. I beat him at chess for the first time ever earlier this year, and it was sooooo great! And he can be a real dick... he was pretty off with Posh when we first met, and his behaviour towards another sister's boyfriend was a big part of why she no longer speaks to either of our parents. He's also full of himself and arrogant and always thinks he's right, but 2Shoes and I have vyed for his approval for many years. That may be a big part of my resentment of her... I thought I was the golden girl, and then I started to grow up, and she took my place, and never grew up so she's still in that place. I don't want what she's got - God no, I'm so aware of the strengths of my life - but a small part of me felt for a long time like she'd stolen my dad from me. I don't think I care much about it anymore.

I've come to appreciate my parents much more since becoming a parent myself. And now I ponder what image my boys will have of me as they grow up. I don't want them to build me into something I'm not, but then I don't want them to think I left them, abandoned them, walked away. As utterly arrogant and self-aggrandising as it may sound, I do hope that on some level, and for some justified reason, I can be their hero, just for a bit.

Doctor, doctor...

2006-12-19T15:37:00.000Z

I jumped out of the bath this morning in a rage and ready to blog. Then got distracted by a whole load of festive rubbish and am now ready to vent my anger. I was having a lovely relaxing soak too, a rare thing... listening to Radio 4 (yum....) and a chat program asking about the relationship between 'scientists' and 'the public' (and let's leave aside for now the rant that could follow about the question itself...).

Anyway, one guest was on the phone, a Dr. Raymond Williams as he was introduced. The questions followed... "so, Dr. Williams, blah blah". I could feel it brewing in the air, what came next, but I hope beyond hope that banal sexism would not prevail. But indeed, the next guest was a Dr. Susan Kelly... "Susan, what do you think of blah blah". Absolutely stunning! Of course I know these hings happen, but the reality of it assaulting my warm and well-soaked ears was a shock nonetheless.

Olga had a similar experience herself recently - the guy on the phone from Telewest assumed the account was not in her name because she's a professor with an unusual (and not obviously female, to British ears) first name. Groovy's 'Professor' was also the only one absent when she was introduced at a conference immediately after two male doctors/professors.

Before I became Dr., people would ask me if I would change my bank cards and things. Part of me wanted to be cool enough not to care, but actually what I really care about is that it's a sex-neutral title. "Is that Miss or Mrs?" I would always stubbornly answer "Ms.", refusing to be boxed in by my marital status (something already complicated for someone of my preferences). But now, I can say "Dr." When I worked in call centres, for a while I hated people like that, thinking them to be cocky an full of themselves. And then I started deliberately offering a range... "Is that Miss, Mrs, Dr., Reverend...?" People often thought it funny, except for those who weren't the first two.

But apparently Dr is not so neutral, since if your'e a woman it gets removed at the first given (or ungiven) opportunity. This is a space women should not occupy, it seems. Maybe I should acquire a neutral first name and a deeper voice too. But for me it goes back to this whole myth of progress in such matters. We keep pretending we're really getting somewhere, and then even Radio 4 f**ks it up. Sigh.

Fantasy/reality

2006-12-02T00:17:00.000Z

I slip too easily between these two places. Olga and I have been swapping astrological profiles, from a site with which I shan't bore you, and both of us agree that our summaries are terrifyingly accurate on the whole. There are parts, though, that I might not have shared. Well, of course I would have done, with Olga, who knows me, and whose knowing makes me feel at home... but I felt somewhat exposed nonetheless, when it said something to the effect that I was prone to "retreating into a fantasy world", and "may become a drug taker".

It's true, I run a parallel universe right alongside the one in which I ostensibly function, and I have an addictive personality. These are my two major weaknesses (ones that sit with a host of minor ones, that I suspect are much more visible, thank God).

It has not taken me long, being at Rogers' place and back in a kind of familiar place, comfort zone, to slip back into a lot of the fantasies by which I was troubled when I was here before. IQ has been making me crazy this past week, and yet my desire is not gone. It is much as it was in its early days - perhaps it's a seasonal thing, since this is the time of year it started!... The desire for power is manifesting itself - or perhaps masquerading - as sexual desire, and this despite everything she does. So part of me moves in the fantasy world I create for myself, where she might want me, where I might overcome her by seducing her, where I might win and get what I want.

And yet part of me knows that will never happen, and at the same time I am loathe to surrender this desire. Some part of me needs this fantasy, perhaps to work through all of my unhelpful fantasies - past, present and future - and perhaps because of my adictive personality. I find it so hard to give up habits.

Do any of us live in any kind of real world? Is there such a thing? Is not the idea of the 'real' always plagued by the unreality of the symbolic? Is it so unhealthy to dance amongst symbols, as I find myself doing? Is my attachment to symbols pathological? Where is the place I should be? Where do I go that is 'healthy'? Is 'healthy' the best place for me to be? For any of us to be?

If I were 'healthy' perhaps I wouldn't see these connections, as I have done... the monkeys, the men an their legs... it swims in my head and the pictures paint themselves, they shift, the morph, like capoiera, like tango, like some all-in-one-all-together movement where two are one and one is both and there is no start and no finish, but just movement, movement, movement... just dance. Dance, dance. Just fog, just smoke, nothing solid behind it, and yet something that overtakes me.

As I type I feel it coming out of me, it is something from deep inside that I didn't know was there, it is word, it is life, it is me. It is Me. I cannot stop, this is fantasy and addiction all at once, adn I am scared to continue and scared to stop, in case I stop being me all of a sudden. My fingers feel as they do when I play the piano, only better, this is music, this is the noise I could never make. Where and when will I ever stop this typing, this blogging? When will I step out of this fantasy world and back into reality? Or will I think I have stepped tehre and only trip, stumble back into a new fantasy world that I make for myself?

Coming home

2006-11-30T22:15:00.000Z

I've had a bonkers few weeks. The book I've been working on - the proofs came back and they looked like they'd been vomited up by some YTS trainee copyeditor. Eugh. And in the middle of trying hard to be not-too-late after the deadline, I had to write a paper of new material for a symposium back in the city-that-became-home, meanwhile organising a launch for a number of books, one of which was this one being vomited up... Oi, the adrenaline already.

Anyway, I got the paper written and bombed back "home" for the gig on Saturday. I stood with new material, making grandiose comments on the discipline in which I operate, with big heroes of mine watching on: Rogers, whose approval I always like; the Godfather - nuff said; and another man, whose work has informed a lot of the Godfather's and Rogers' (and a little of mine, I must confess). And I was nervous, trembling as I delivered nearly every word. It always happens when it's new material, a new environment. Conferences I've been alright in, more or less consistently. But here, in front of these, my heroes, I trembled.

It went fine, everyone liked it, I had interesting conversation with everyone afterwards... all ok, really. It's going to go somewhere - sometime in the unknowable future it will stop being new and start being great.

But there are two points of diversion here. First, another couple of "names" really let me down in the process of my preparation for the paper. They'd prepared some statistics which I'd taken as my starting point, and they've been precious self-satisfied men over the whole thing; not returning emails... being all touchy about the stats... And in the end (two days after I presented) they emailed back and said they were taking a conscious decision to keep them under wraps until they'd sorted them out. Stupid fuckers - they'd already presented them! A few of us had pointed out some glaring weaknesses, and now they're all ubersensitive and scientific and clever about it. Tossers. But they're "names", you know? They carry this weight of authority around with them. There's some reason behind it, but I think people stop questioning what these guys (and the others) actually do, because of who they are. Maybe that's what I do with the Godfather. I hope not. I hope I can see past The Name critique work and action on its own merits. Please!

My second point is that those Names who just pissed me off are from a certain brand of my discipline that, while I respect, I do not actively partake in. They are part of the police of my discipline; they are in the process of policing my work.

But Saturday was a treat. A real treat. In the middle of all this crazy shit - the proofs, the book launch, middle of term, normal life, blah blah - Saturday was an oasis. At points I would just sit, and enjoy, and think - aaah. I was so happy. Everything I said made sense to them; everything they said was interesting to me. No sort of, kind of, questions; no critiques coming from other branches of the discipline; just a bunch of people all talking the same language. What sweet relief! There's no place like home... And with that moment, it became fine to be an outpost of that kind of work. That we are dispersed was suddenly fine. I am happy to be working with others doing other things, because it would be monochrome otherwise. I relish my colleagues and their work, but Saturday was a bit like a really comfy bed and a hot water bottle. Mmmmm.

The monkey signifies

2006-11-23T21:04:00.000Z

OK, this is really getting too odd for my liking and it's clearly demanding that something be explored, or something, although I'm not yet sure what. Maybe I'm just looking for things now - it's always possible. It could be that I'm now on some kind of hypersensitivity mode, following the further subconscious activity that came at (what I thought was) the end of a wave of activity: the IQ monkey/stumpy-legged man dream... almost immediately followed by the stumpy-legged guy in the film recommended to me by IQ... and then the other stumpy-legged guy in the book I was also inspired to read on account of IQ (and, lest you think otherwise, I do actually have a significant mind of my own apart from this woman...!).

So all that was quite bizarre enough, in between the various slightly unsettling moments that continue to happen on a regular basis between the two of us. And THEN YESTERDAY... she sent me a picture as an email attachment. There's a reason why she would, with which I shan't bore you... suffice it to say I was not surprised that she sent a picture to me at all - she said she was going to, because she particularly liked this one - but I didn't know what the picture would be of. Anyway, it landed in my inbox, innocently enough. I opened it; and there it was: the monkey. So, I though I'd email Olga (with whom I have of course shared all my subconscious goings on, even though she's not a regular reader of this blog) and comment on this further strangeness, and as I typed - with the blog on my screen for reference - the door went and it was IQ (who almost never comes knocking on my door). Writing it all down, I really don't think this is just me looking for things.

I have something approximating a clue in the direction of settling what needs to be explored here: The Signifying Monkey, a reference I've literally just found as I'm reading an article on jazz improvisation. This monkey signifies; I don't know yet quite what, but I sense that between monkeys and stumpy-legged men I'm being guided somewhere. I'll send a postcard.

Good Mother Bad Mother

2006-11-17T10:50:00.000Z

What does a Good Mother look like? She is only a fantasy figure, I think. Parenthood is a journey always doomed to failure. There is so much SHIT around about what makes a Good Parent, that all of us can only ever fall short of the mark. I stumbled across a book being sold, called Good Mother, Welcome. The blurb on the internet page says: "This beautiful book contains a heartfelt welcome to new mothers, giving voice to the poetic and sacred elements of the journey of motherhood." Poetic and sacred? Give me a break! You do what you have to do to get through each day; you try your best and hope it's good enough; and get to the end of every day with the sure and certain knowledge somewhere deep inside you that on some level it won't have been.

Olga is someone whom I respect and love deeply, and whose parenting of a child who brings certain non-standard challenges I admire. The child in question is a stunning example of the human race. She's smart, funny, charming and witty; she's socially capable and lots of amazing things, let alone when you consider that she's only 16. And to no small extent, this is due to the ways in which she has been raised, the day-to-day parenting provided for her by Olga and the Great Dane, as well as the underlying philosophies that have guided them both. And yet I know that Olga worries intensely about the job she has done, the job she's doing; she feels the effort she puts in; and she feels it deeply that the Kid on some level will inevitably have "issues" with her parents.

Posh has a clear idea of what a Good Mother would look like, and I'm not an example of it. In fact, she feels that she is not an example of that idea either. Well, for sure, since the idea is an ideal, one that can never be achieved except in the minds of people who read Good Mother, Welcome. But the difference between me and Posh is that I feel like a good enough job is good enough; she strives for something higher than she can ever achieve. As I have noted, she subscibes to the MOMI-theory, and it seems that this comes as part of a package where 'giving everything' to your children is required. Of course, this is why I'm here and they're there, because I didn't 'give everything', being unprepared to sacrifice myself on one particular issue. But 'giving everything', by definition, also necessitates having everything taken, and that's not OK as far as I can tell. Posh is going through another bad patch with Big Boy. I feel like she gets too emotionally embroiled with him; she wants control over him, she wants to be able to predict his every move and response, and she enters into an emotional turmoil as soon as he's upset. If he kicks off, it affects her deeply, because she is 'as one' with him, and this is something she feels is part of being a Good Mother.

In fact, that 'giving everything' and then complaining when everything is taken is dumb, it seems to me. It's not productive for Posh, and it's not helpful for Big Boy. I'm not suggesting she's a Bad Mother - I'm not sure there's such a thing, just as the Good Mother doesn't really exist. All that any of us can do is our best, thinking all the while of ourselves and our kids, and how best to teach them how to be productive in the world. As long as we do that, we're as good as we can be.

Being on display

2006-11-15T18:35:00.000Z

Touch me without touching, when I stand in front of you and talk. I give myself to you, the part of myself that is my knowledge and my mind and my humour and my deep desire for you to like me.

I touch you, when you are in front of me. You sing, perhaps, you quiver, you seek approval from all of us who watch you. I do not have to reach out to touch you, but I touch nonetheless.

We meet somewhere in the middle - touching me, teaching me, teaching you, touching you... ours is a dance of power, of insight, of learning and wanting and knowing and not-knowing. And this we do in full display of everyone, it being the way it is designed to be. This we do with everyone else watching and dancing along.

And if it comes to the surface? If any one of us sits up and notices? It is suddenly abject, despised, source of danger. But it is precisely the way it is designed to be. We have no choice... it is what it is, and sometimes we will notice. Why can that threshold not be crossed? Why can we not reach out and touch with touching? The body is but flesh and bones - perhaps. But it is also mind and spirit and person and space and identity and boundary and definition. To touch is to step into all of those. Even not to touch is a step towards - the space of identity extends well beyond the boundaries of the skin. So maybe we will not reach out for fear of burning, but we will continue to touch.

Late nights

2006-11-10T12:44:00.000Z

When the sky outside is dark, the world inside seems closer. The air seems thicker, the noises louder, the colours more saturated, the smells deeper inside the sinuses, the flesh redder and softer and more alive. When two people talk late into the night, they become the only people awake; the only people to have talked like that; the only people in the world.

Zero gravity comes in the witching hours, and everything is possible. We can go anywhere, you and I, we can be anyone we want to be, say anything we want to say, any harmonic shift can happen, modes overlapping modes, dancing together feet over feet under calf over shin... unknown places are known without knowing that they are known... we can swim within each other, stuffed inside each other's marrow, and we are somehow as one...

...and yet we remain somehow constrained by the ghost of the daylight, the impending return to the realities of the sun... nothing moves and everything is fixed; the same false movements are made, the same predictable cadences, the stilted gait of walking through the world.

Hold back the night.

Media rape

2006-11-10T12:35:00.000Z

Two heroes are crumbling around me. The first, someone whom I respected greatly before I knew much about her, Groovy. What she does, she does well enough. But she revealed herself quickly... the seductively charming scattiness turned out to walk hand-in-hand with a harmful naivety, and I got burned. This has been manageable in most of my interactions with her thus far, but as time presses on, it seems the seductive charm is lessening and her true colours are showing. She's always been one of the boys, a rubbish feminist, despite her protestations to the contrary.

It was a recent and particuarly terrible action on this woman's part that brings me to my next crumbling hero: progress. I thought we might be getting somewhere, society an' all. I thought - hoped - that gradually, the old and bad ideas about women, women's bodies, and their rights, were being phased out. Until Britney.

So, obviously there was some outcry upon the release of 'One More Time'. Oh, that uniform! Oh, that cleavage! And, sigh, those eyes! (And yes, the joy of the taboo...) But it seems that's all come back to haunt her in a terribly Victorian way.

OK, for readers not familiar with the situation (as I wasn't until Dick enlightened me...), the brief backstory is this: some tabloid in the US put out a story that Britney and her husband had made a sex tape, and that the paper had it in their possession; eventually the paper had to admit that they didn't have such a thing; Britney took the paper to court, suing them for $10m for defamation. Well my first question is, why is it so defamatory to suggest someone's made a sex-tape? But that's another story... In the meantime, the judge threw the case out of sourt at the first given opportunity commenting, "The backdrop against which this issue must be addressed is that the plaintiff has publicly portrayed herself in a sexual way in her performances, in published photographs and in a reality show." Now the legal basis of the decision was that Britney couldn't sure over an allegation that she'd had sex with her own husband and that they'd made a sex tape (which I supposed is concurrent with my first question). BUT the POINT is that this is trolling out all the same outdated fascist straight-male-centred responses to women who report rape: well, you were wearing a very short skirt; well, you did invite him over; well, you're a prostitute and you do sell sex... BOLLOCKS.

OK, now back to Groovy, cos you'll be wondering how she fits in. She is in the business of discussing and commenting about matters such as the Britney case. And she and Dick (with some others) had a big academic row while discussing the matter. Dick and I concur on my previous points about 'media rape'; but Groovy... well, she took the opposite stance and agreed with a white, middle-aged, straight Texan who thinks that 'normative' is the same as 'normal'. He, like Groovy, is nice enough. Like that matters. What's the point in being nice when your politics are appalling?

Groovy's supposed to be on the ball on this one, but blatantly isn't. We were supposed to be making some headway on this kind of stupid attitude, but we're blatantly not. Maybe these sexual discourses are just especially slow going, but I sense that there's something else afoot. I'm not sure what it is yet... Maybe it's a systematic commitment to not moving too quickly on any feminist-relevant matter. So why would Groovy go along with it? Someone whom I imagine to have burned at least one bra; someone whose stories are filled with Summers of Love; someone whose career has been ostensibly concerned with questioning hegemonies and normativities... It makes me feel like maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe she's always been a rubbish feminist, as Olga says. Like, she's always One Of The Boys. Two heroes with one stone. How sad.

Changing rooms

2006-11-09T18:12:00.000Z

A while back, I mused over the changing room situation at the gym, pondering the systematic separation of the sexes. I continue to wonder what that separation has to do with the heterosexual imperative, and this was brought home very strongly to me last night.

I went to the gym late - usually I go in the mornings. I finished up and went to the changing rooms. I walked in and found the room empty apart from two members of staff, one of whom was doing a regular maintenance check. And who happened to be male. And (I strongly suspect by his general manner) almost certainly straight. The female staff member assured me, "He'll be done in a minute." In fact, it genuinely hadn't occurred to me that there was anything strange about finding him there. Maybe I would have found it odd when I started undressing for the shower, but until she said anything I honestly hadn't noticed.

So, sure enough, they finished up and went on their way, leaving me alone in the changing rooms. About 10 minutes later, I'd finished in the shower and was pulling on my boxers (a particular source of concern for me every time I go to the gym). My back was turned to the door, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walk in, having clearly just arrived in the building, and carrying a large rucksack. In a split second, I realised it was not a man, but quite clearly another lesbian (well, unless my gaydar's up the spout!), one with that tall, straight-up-and-down build.

And it just seemed very odd that in the space of 10 minutes I'd shared that changing room - supposedly such a place of vulnerability - with two very different people whose sexual desire is almost certainly directed towards women. Now, I don't imagine either of them consciously thought of it in these terms, but I felt totally non-plussed by the whole thing (except for noticing how funny it was). Because previously, I felt guilty, like I might be rumbled or ousted or something. The girls at school, when I was about 8 years old, used to make me go out of the girls' loos because they thought I was a boy... I guess part of me keeps expecting something similar to happen. But sharing that space with those two last night, I felt exonerated somehow. What a relief!

Until, that is, there was a dead fit bird in the changing rooms this morning... I guess there's very little to settle here. So here's my call for unisex changing rooms with blatantly not enough lockers. Can't we just get over it? It's only flesh after all... what does it really mean?

Crossing boundaries

2006-11-08T00:29:00.000Z

There are some people who are out of bounds, right? Like, there are just some groups of people in your life (or even just around) who you're not supposed to desire. Such as schoolgoers. Despite their short skirts, their low-buttoned shirts, their heels, their fresh and nubile bodies beneath it all... there are just some things you're not supposed to think about those groups of girls when you walk past them waiting for the bus in the morning. A more unequivocally taboo example would be family members. But what about those who are right on the edge of acceptable, nearly-but-probably-not-quite-allowed like schoolkids? In my daily life, my students are one such group.

Let me be clear. I do not have uncontrollable (or, for the most part, any) desire to bed any of my students. But the very fact I feel compelled to make that disclaimer so early on is indicative of how not-quite-allowed it would be. I know several people who have had affairs with or married a student (or two, or more, in the case of affairs...). Generally speaking, I like to think of myself as someone who would not cross that particular boundary. I don't find it to be unacceptable behaviour in those people of whom I can think... They're all perfectly respectable (well, mostly) and generally clear-headed and trustworthy types. But there's something about the idea of sleeping with a student - maybe even the idea of wanting to sleep with a student - that just sits not quite right with me.

Especially (but not exclusively) in the case of the 'proper', 'grown-up' relationships that I can think of that have sprung out of this slightly bizarre set-up, it's really just a case of two people who happen to meet under particular circumstances. As people, they're not forbidden to each other: it's their roles in life that erect the boundaries. They could have met any time, any place, anyhow, no? So why do the borders continue to be policed? Why might it not be OK for me to set off on an affair with a student? Because of the power dynamics, one presumes. Because ultimately I potentially hold some kind of power over them. Unfortunately, those same power dynamics are in fact what makes the whole thig so potentially appealing. That's surely central to why pupils fancy teachers; I'm certain it had a big role to play in my own overwhelming, desperate crushes on my teachers. So if it's so inevitable, why would it be frowned upon? I don't get it.

Further subconscious musings

2006-10-29T10:14:00.000Z

The divide between the worlds is thin now. It will be thinnest on Tuesday night, and spirits may move from their world to ours. In fact, I've been finding the divide to be quite precarious anyway. After my monkey dream and the legless man in that film, I already thought things were a bit strange, and I'm starting to wonder what might happen on Tuesday. Not like me at all to entertain such thoughts...

By a couple of weeks after the dream/film incident, my sense of paranoia eased, and I no longer felt vulnerable to the independent musings of my subconscious. But then.... Oh fuck, then... It continued. I realised where the man had come from in my mind (maybe...): about 3 weeks ago, I went back to a book I've been reading on and off since June. The 'main character' is in fact not the narrator, but an elusive singer, a man whose voice attracts people form across the city, but whose location is never known until it's known... and a man with withered legs, a cripple from a badly managed congenital condition. And there is a significant thematic connection between the film and the book, but I won't go into that. Suffice it to say that both book and film are in no small way connected to the ongoing saga of unrequited (and deeply misplaced!) desire. Around the same time as I'd come across this further connection, I had another dream, that it was IQ's 40th birthday and I'd missed it. Then last weekend, I learned from Necoh that it had been IQ's 40th birthday the weekend before. (As with many things surrounding IQ, this piece of information has taken on the role of State Secret.)

So this seems to work out as 4 significant moments in as many weeks: the dream; the film; the book; the birthday... moments of deep connection, but I'm not sure what the connection is with. I'm not as surprised as I was before, or as scared. I do feel vulnerable, but excitedly so...open to possibilities, open to information that I wouldn't normally be party to, that most people can't get to... like anything could happen, anytime, and it would all be divinely right.

We are family

2006-10-27T10:18:00.000Z

What is it that makes family? What makes relationships? I ask because the lines seem very unclear to me, more unclear this week than they did last week, but that's another story, maybe for another time. Are they not whatever we make them, whatever we call them?

Little Lad's favourite song to sing is 'I love you, you love me, we're a happy family'... he got it from his Barney video... it's sung to the tune of 'This Old Man'. I was with him, Big Boy and Posh, when LL started singing it... 'Oh, the irony!' said Posh. But I see a happy family in us. Yes, we're in different cities. No, we don't see that much of each other, realistically. But we are family, because we have declared ourselves to be. And we are happy, happier now than we were (except, perhaps, for poor BB, who is really very sad about it).

And what of more intimate relationships? If the line between friends and lovers is marked primarily by sex, then what about partners in times of long-term sexual drought? And what of friends who sleep together without commitment? And what then of friends who were once partners who went months without sex who then sleep together without commitment after the relationship is over? Can we call any relationship whatever we want, if everyone involved calls it that? Does sex have to make things messy? Is it always messier without commitment? What about commitment without sex, one-sided commitment? Is that loyalty? Fidelity? Or just delusion?

I think what's most worrying about all of this is the very fact that it is worth pondering. Monogamy and marriage and the institutionalisation of relationships is, I believe, all ultimately more in the service of capitalism than human happiness. The institutionalisation of marriage etc. serves to protect the movement of property more than it protects human feelings. Left to their own devices, uninfluenced by the massive media machine that forces monogamy (and mostly heterosexual monogamy of course) upon them, would most people truly pair off into life-long relationships? I suspect not. There are of course Darwinian arguments to be made in favour of male desires for multiple relationships, and certainly one must consider that in such arguments, women are figured as passive, waiting, receptacles for 'good genes', vehicles for the furtherance of male genetic codes. In fact, if the theory holds, women must almost certainly be willing to have multiple partners.

So maybe I'll go out tonight. Maybe I'll pull. Maybe I'll sleep with Posh again, somewhere down the line. Maybe I'll never have sex again (!!). But whatever happens, I am inextricably bound to those three people in Newcastle, all of whom could have existed their whole lives without ever having known me. It just feels ever so made up.

You are not alone

2006-10-25T09:32:00.000Z

What joy! Last night I stayed out past my bedtime, and didn't tidy up my flat as I absolutely must do... failed to buy any eggs or milk or bread... sigh. What a total waster. BUT joy! Instead of these useful things, I went over to Dick and Gilbert's, where the conversation turned to matters of identity, and I got to hear Gilbert say things about her relationship with her body, things that I've felt all my life, that I've said before (to Posh mostly, but also to 'professionals')... although in my head I've always kind of known that other people would have similar feelings, I don't think I thought anyone else would have articulated it in the same way, which is not a desire for 'gender reassignment surgery' (who'd want to be a man anyway?!) but an acceptance of not quite 'being a woman'. It was definitely worth staying up late for.

A diversion feels necessary here... Most times, when I try to explain how I feel about being in this body, people say things about how 'there are lots of different ways to be a woman'... But as I was explaining to Dick last night, who does not share any of the feelings that Gilbert and I experience, I have this unshakeable feeling that the way in which my mind and my body relate to each other is at the very least uncommon, and I start to wonder whether it actually counts as 'one of those ways'. By definition, since I operate in the world with a female body, I suppose I am to all intents and purposes 'a woman'. But really what does it mean to 'be a woman'? Is it just to possess this kind of body? Let's believe for a moment that 'being a woman' simply means having a female body. In that sense, yes, there are plenty of ways of doing that, insofar as people have different bodies based largely on one of two common templates. But what I think people actually mean when they say 'there are many ways of being a woman' is in fact something more to do with gender performance: they don't mean anything about ways of having a body, but they mean something about ways of being in a body, ways of operating in the world from within that body.

And, in fact, if we do extend the phrase 'being a woman' to one which means something about one's own relationship with that body, then things start to very unclear. Again, there are many ways of doing that, many relationships to have. But what if I actually don't want to have one? (If you give someone a present, and they refuse it, to whom does the present belong?) I don't have an alternative body, and I don't seek one or try to pass as having one, but I don't fully accept the one I have. Could 'being a woman' be to do with accepting one's female body (be that given or acquired)?

So, all of that said, what was so exciting about last night was not exactly that I thought about any of these things (because I have been thinking about them in various ways for the whole of my thinking life). What was great was that someone else said it. To hear Gilbert speak my mind was like watching everything make sense suddenly, in slow motion. In my head I always knew I was not the only one - that would be even stranger than anything I could ever feel! But every day I mix with people who understand virtually nothing of what I am. In all fairness, I understand equally little about them... I have no sense of what it is to truly desire the opposite sex; no idea of how it feels not to have an awareness of your own body in an uncomfortable way; no idea of how other women feel 'being women'... Ultimately, I have no idea what it feels like to be hegemonic in all those ways. And that's fine with me. You can keep hegemony. But just sometimes, it gets a little wearing being different in what feel like fundamental ways. So to be with Gilbert last night, explaining ourselves to Dick, was just such sweet relief like I haven't felt in a long time. Much better than an early night.

3BT: Harmony, ticking things off, and numbers

2006-10-18T14:04:00.000Z

Three Beautiful Things has revolutionised my bloggic experience. I'm normally so caught up with my own messes and amateur politics and theorising, and Rogers' much less amateurish and more highly theoretical politicising, and Polar's highly philosophical wanderings, and all the rest... but 3BT makes me happy. Every day. It's incredible how someone else's smile can turn one's own frown upside-down. It's easy to read and very happy-making. With that in mind, here's my first (and, if I'm honest, maybe my last) 3BT:

1. Harmonic shifts... unusually satisfying, or satisfyingly expected. I've been listening to lots of music today, mostly a bunch of tango and fado and chanson. Every now and then I'm struck by a moment of musical interest, such as in "Tango serenat" by Buddha Bar... there's just a really simple set of I-IV-V shifts that are deeply satisfying. And the extremes of tension and relief in some of the fado - ah!

2. Having a day of Writing Lists and Getting Things Done. Even though I know there's always another list round the corner, another one yet to be written, and a whole bunch of stuff in this job that doesn't even warrant a list, there is much joy to be had in knowing that some things can be ceremonially Ticked Off.

3. Received yesterday an agenda for a meeting (starts in 10 minutes - eek!) with two items numbered 14. 3BT's post yesterday has two number 2s. I realised that my new phone number contains three consectuive multiples of 3 in reverse order. I love spotting things like that. Not because it makes me feel superior - that would be mean and arrogant. Just because it means I know I'm paying attention.

Now I feel smiley!

UPDATE: At the meeting, it was announced that the next meeting of the same sub-committe will be on the numerically divine 06/12/06 - even more smiles!

Are we having fun yet?

2006-10-16T13:19:00.000Z

Today I have a hangover. One of the most unpleasant kind... the queasy, dizzy, hot-flushy, not-sure-if-you-can-stay-upright kind. I haven't felt like this for a very very long time.

I went out gaying last night with Dick and Gilbert, whose company I always enjoy. I was under strict instructions from them and Olga to "have fun." I took my bike with me, and Gilbert spotted it for the crutch it was - "you're just using it so you won't drink too much," she observed. How very right she was, although it failed as a crutch. My alternative for last night was to go to Olga's and watch Trainspotting with her and some others. Olga of course emphasised the importance of me going out. "Let go," said Dick... "You just need to let go."

So, I guess I did. I drunk way too much (although not nearly as much as I used to pack away as an undergraduate), and got terribly maudlin, and was hyper-aware of all of my movements without truly being able to control any of them. Got home and crashed out around 1.30. I finally dragged myself out of bed some time after midday, having made a couple of unsuccessful attempts in the morning.

And now I'm in my office not doing much except regretting every pint after the third and wishing I'd done more today... so much to do...

As comfort, Olga tells me that Heinrich is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear war so we might as well have lots of fun while we still can. I'm sort of inclined to agree, as per my previous post. And I did have a pretty good time last night, in amongst feeling guilty for drinking too much and drunkenly embarrassing myself. But in whose mind is it all fun? I would have had a perfectly nice time watching Trainspotting... choose a fucking big television... I like my life. I like working too hard, I like being a geek and going to bed before my friends. I like being able to get up early and go for a swim. I don't like feeling out of control, or unproductive. And maybe it's not other people's idea of fun, but I just don't like going out and getting bladdered. I'm quite sure no-one's suggesting that's the only way I should have fun, but I do feel it's indicative of my general misfitness that I am now resolved to continuing my so-called boring life. Choose life...

It just keeps on coming...

2006-10-15T15:28:00.000Z

Why do any of us continue to believe everything that everything's alright? All of us (or maybe it is just me...) blindly go through our days presuming we'll get to the end of it without any major disasters occurring, or even at all. And that blind faith leads us to make disasters out of nothing. Posh has called me 3 times today. First because she was a bit lonely - no-one to play with today, no adult company. I sympathise, really I do, but I also believe that she has consistently failed to take responsibility for her own position in the world. Then later to ask my opinion on buying a book for her work...I suggested inter-library loans or the University library, and she had to go because there was a suspicious quietness from The Boys. And then, 5 minutes after that, in tears because The Boys had trashed Little Lad's room... It all went a bit tits up then, lots of shouting and crying at her end, and I just have to sit on the other end of the phone patiently while it all calms down just enough for me to say virtually nothing of any practical use... A final straw for Posh was when Big Boy turned off her clock radio at the wall, meaning she'll have to reset it. I understand that she felt deeply irritated by him already and he is capable of being wilfully unhelpful, but I don't think that was what happened then. Nonetheless, it was a complete crisis for Posh.

And here I sat, trying to continue the marking I had left to take the phone calls, in tears because these crises of hers make me feel so utterly horrible. There's nothing I can do, and yet she calls me every time. And she says how much she hates Big Boy, and doesn't want him a lot of the time, but was so very self-righteous about parenting when we were together, and a lot of that still stands.

So she's there with her crisis, and I'm here with my own, and then my natural defence mechanism kicks in. Or maybe I was raised to have it, I don't know... But how can Posh or I really justify feeling this sorry for ourselves? I go to bed every night with absolute faith that I will wake up in the morning, and I wake every morning completely convinced I'll make it through till bed time. I suppose I'm alluding to the possibility of being hit by a bus or any other freak accident, but that's not really what I'm talking about. A Christian woman got sent home from work by British Airways for refusing to conceal a crucifix on a necklace; a Muslim woman is being threatened with being sacked for refusing to removed her veil at work; North Korea's got nukes... have we all gone mad? No religious expression... freedom of religious expression... freedom of speech... incitement to religious hatred... and I'm really utterly unclear why we're allowed to have nukes and North Korea is not - do please enlighten me, someone! I don't think the madness is in the to-ing and fro-ing in debates: debates are good, if they're calm, thought out, sensible... What makes me think we're all mad is that despite all of this - because let's face it, none of this debating is calm, sensible, or anything approximating it! - yes, despite all of it, we are convinced that things will continue more or less as they are.

The same goes for climate change. We're all very concerned, of course. Lots of us have seen Al Gore's film... but my place of work has put the heating on already, massive tower blocks pumping heat into barely-used rooms; and I have this ongoing battle with some other woman in my block: I go to the loo in the middle of the day, the lights are on, and I turn them off cos it's light... next time I go, they're back on again. It's not like I'm some moral guardian, either: I've got the heating on in my flat as I type, and it's not like I'd suffer unbearably without it: it's just comfortable.

We all think we're going to be ok. We think we're doing everything we can, everything we have time for... Maybe we are. Maybe nothing we do can stop crazy people with nukes destroying us all, and maybe governments are in fact deeply committed to allowing us to destroy ourselves with heating and lighting and appliances. But maybe we could at least live as if we knew that. Maybe I can stop being so affected by Posh's crises... maybe she could stop living as if her life was so terrible. Maybe we should all just be a bit more thankful for every day we do get through without being declared war on, for every day we're not beaten up in the streets for who we are or what we wear, or for every time we can turn on the lights, or for every friend or family member we have. Maybe we should all just be a bit more friendly. Heaven knows, if we're all going down in smoke, it'll be better if we stick together.

What are you hiding?

2006-10-13T09:11:00.000Z

I want to return to a picture I used a few weeks ago. I sensed then that I might have something to say about it on its own merits, although at the time I used it as an aside for other, more self-centred comments. And little did I know at the time that our very own Jack Straw - ah, such an innocent-sounding name!...little Jackie Straw, that cheeky little boy from down the road... (and probably no relation to Jack Straw, rebel leader of the English peasants' revolt of 1381... ) - yes, he managed to stir the whole thing up.

So, in my little blogosphere, it started here, with this picture.
I saw it then as a sign of separation, and used it to invoke that idea in the original post. That's how little Jackie Straw described it too: "a sign of difference and separation". He described his discomfort when talking to veiled women in his MP's surgery, and told of how he would ask them if "they would mind" removing the veil. He was at least (superficially) respectful enough to the women concerned to ensure the presence of a female colleague, but from what I understand of veil-wearing policies, that oughtn't to make much difference... The Qu'ran urges women "not [to] reveal their zeenah [charms, or beauty and ornaments] to anyone save their husbands or their fathers or their husbands’ fathers or their sons or their husbands’ sons or their brothers or their brothers’ sons or their sisters’ sons or other women of acquaintance or their slaves or the subservient male servants who are not attracted to women or children who have no awareness of the hidden aspects of women." Presumably, other women are also exempted (on the implicit basis that they are not "attracted to women", of course...), but since JS was present and he fits into none of these categories, veil-wearing women in Blackburn surely ought not to reveal their zeenah to him.

According to Jackie himself, most of the women "seemed relieved" at the invitation: ah, St. Jack, liberating the poor, oppressed Muslim woman from her obligations to the heathen religion... except, of course, that it's not entirely clear that "most" veil-wearing Muslim women feel in any way put upon for the call to self-coverage.

But that aside, should he be criticised for taking the position that he has chosen? Clearly it was a naive move, somewhere along the lines of the publication of the infamous Jyllands-Posten cartoons. Little Jackie's comments have, apparently, been fuel to the racist fire that rages largely unnoticed throughout this country, and in my own city a woman has had her veil torn from her face while standing at a bus-stop. And yes, one might argue that his comments were taken out of context, but it would be naive of him to think that they would have been taken any other way, in this era of sound bites and media frenzies. So, nul points to Jackie for his forethought at least.

But what about what's really at stake here? Is the veil a sign of "difference and separation"? Well, in short, I think so. BUT, my first more interesting question it seems to me is this: is it not a statement of my difference from veil-wearing Muslim women that I don't wear a veil? Are we not all always in some way - however small - stating our own difference? Yes, many of us like to blend in. Some people choose to be tattooed from head to toe; others choose facial piercings; some wear turbans, headscarves, kippot, and so on.

And Jack Straw? Well, his suit and tie, his short grey hair, his lack of moustache, his lack of headcovering... they all combine to state his position in the socio-cultural strata. He walks through the world making obvious his status as a middle-class white man, and that has its own meaning. Absence has meaning. The dominant order is invisible through its dominance, but we must reclaim it as another order.

Finally, and more to the point, what is really wrong with difference and separation? Adherents to many faiths are keen to state their difference. In my wayward Christian days we spoke of being 'set apart for God'... Jews talk of themselves as 'a chosen people'... There is implicitly some superiority complex in much religious conformity: I'm doing it right; I've got God behind me; I'm going to be rewarded for behaving the way I do. But it doesn't have to be a threat. Isn't variety the spice of life?

What makes me most cross about little Jackie Straw's comments is not really to do with the complex relations between Islam and the default-Christianity that plagues this country, or the tensions between colours of skin. No, what really riles me are the fundamental assumptions on which his comments were based... the basic arrogances of his position: that Islam is Different, not one of many differences that can co-exist; that his identity is a benchmark by which other identities can be guaged; and that he has any right at all to state what is Normal. So, I wonder not what the veil is hiding, but what Jack Straw's self-defensive comments, his reassuringly clasped hands, and his insipid poly-cotton Marks & Spencer smile are hiding... what sinister project of enforced assmilation lurks behind?

Leopards etc.

2006-10-10T19:16:00.000Z

Who says anything really changes? Olga and I had a discussion last night - she was bemoaning her continued inability to deal effectively with the fantasy-reality gap, specifically in relation to her crush on Heinrich.... She says at her age she should be able to deal with crushes better. I said that I still deal with mine more or less like I did when I was 12, and that if there'd been no change in the past 17 years of my life, I didn't see why anything would change now. She conceded - we concluded that we were both better at identifying our problems, naming them, seeming effective in the world despite them...but that essentially we were still feeling the same things as we pretty much always have done.

On the up-side, I had my appraisal today at work. It was quite amazing how similar Giovanni's report on me was to my school reports from ... er, well ... when I was 12. Readily accepts new responsibilites... leadership potential... underselling.... All extremely nice, and a great ego-boost so early in the morning, but just soooo reminiscent of those school reports!

So, I'm not quite sure what to think. Was there any time at which I could have changed my spots? Have my spots really stayed the same, pretty much, all this time?! How can that be?! I thought - hoped? - that I'd changed, since there are so many aspects of myself that I dislike (the crushing, the this-is-definitely-not-my-room, the inappropriate manifestations of my "leadership potential"...). Maybe I hoped I'd get better. But I guess all of us have malformed spots, unfinished circles, blemishes, birthmarks, scars, that we tote around with us. Maybe all any of us can really hope for is knowing what spots we've got, and how they might join up.

Cartography

2006-10-09T09:46:00.000Z

Inspired by ITHOM, I have generated my own map of places I've visited. Rather interesting, I must say - almost entirely northern hemisphere...

(Click here to make your own...)

The whole idea of map-making has therefore come to mind. It goes almost without saying that the "projection of the map" is not only that imposed from outside by the cartographer, but also that information which is projected by the map...the way in which any given map is constructed has enormous consequences for our perception of the information contained therein. To site the UK in the centre may be practical, given its status as the home of zero degrees longitude, but also (therfore, and of course) reminds one of the very history of Greenwich's occupation of that privileged position: the days when so much of the world was pink, when the sun never set on the British Empire.

The Peters projection in some ways rectifies the distortion of the sizes of landmasses that is created by the traditional World Map, the Mercator projection.... The Mercator represents shape more or less accurately, but distorts relative size as its compromise. Peters' projection represents the opposite problem - a distortion of shape at the expense of accuracy of size. Cartographers refer to this dilemma as The Greenland Problem. In the Mercator, Greenland looks roughly the same size as Africa, but the Peters demonstrates something closer to the truth, namely that Africa is in fact 14 times the size of Greenland. The Peters projection is readily available, and circulates in some circles of map-users, but the image that we all remember from school, and that our children will no doubt remember, is more like the Mercator (albeit rather less pink). It's all a matter of perspective, in so many ways...

And still, in both the Peters and the Mercator, the picture is still anchored by zero degrees. The pink map above shows the problem most clearly: Britain is quite literally the centre of the picture (well, just above the centre, in accordance with our habit in the west of reading from top to bottom...it's at a nice, comfortable place for finding Home...). Peters is slightly less biased in this respect, but even so...And we still have the northern hemisphere at the top. How discomforted we would feel if we were to open an atlas one day and see this:

Even saving it to my hard drive from its location on the web, the file is named "Upside-down map". Just double check it - it's not all upside down... the text is all the right way up. It's just got the southern hemisphere at the top.

But it's these maps that I found most interesting. Worldmapper is, in the site's own words, "a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest." So, there's one according to land area, which looks kinda what you normally see on a world map. Then you get this, where the territories are sized according to the proportion of illiterate young women:

Such maps as these are, in my opinion, a stroke of genius. It's quite a different picture from those where the Mercator projection is simply coloured in different shades according to a key...we can too easily gloss over the implications of those maps. But Worldmapper has achieved something altogether else...it seems that size over colour is what has the effect here. But, quite probably, that's precisely because we're so very used to the sizes imprinted in our brains by Mercator.

What's in a name?

2006-10-05T11:36:00.000Z

To name is to identify. It is to state existence. It marks out a thing, can tell the world what it is. But it is more than that. To name is also to create, to bring in to being. To mark out a thing, to say where and what and how that thing is, is to say exactly that the thing is. It makes it be.

And why do we name, call, identify, mark? Perhaps it is so that we ourselves can move through the world, for naming creates the passageways through which we travel. Without naming, there is not being, and if there is not being around us, we cannot be around. Of course we must name ourselves too. Not just Daisy or Mark or John or Penelope. But all sorts of other formations that mark us out in the world. I am this, I am not that...it all allows me to be not you.

What is the good of naming, identifying? It is no good simply knowing what something is - sometimes we must know why or how or what to do about it. So I can tell you much about myself, I can name myself and articulate My Self. But where does that really get me? How does it really help any of us to be able to mark ourselves out?

The act of blogging enables some of my most difficult naming. Here, I can carve out a shape from the fog of my feelings. A great number of my posts have been an act of identifying, describing, articulating....stating existence in order to achieve clarification. But does that in itself help, does it contribute to avoiding the problems next time? Well, I can recognise all the places I am at the moment. I have suffered the blushing, the embarrassment, the feeling-without-touching, the recurring throbbing sense of absence...I have been here before. So I can name those things. But I still don't yet have a clue what to do about it.

But to name is surely to start the understanding. A problem shared is a problem halved. To admit the problem is the first step towards solving it. When we see what there is, we see what it means, how to be in its presence, maybe even how to avoid it. And this is why, in some really perverse kind of way, I think maybe I will benefit from not getting over this current state, not just now. Because while it's there, I can't avoid confronting it. While I have a manifestation of my recurring nightmare, I have some chance of tapping in to what it means. It's just a case of not being sucked in to the quicksand along the way. Just...

Something very strange

2006-10-03T21:26:00.000Z

Something very strange is going on. I came here to write about relationships, to ask why any of us continue them, particularly when they are not seemingly going anywhere, and I came here via Bloglines. Which means I came here via the spurious Polar.... who is either my psychic twin or who has been watching me again, and sees fit to comment on my recent and ongoing traumas in some general and non-specific way. Who knows which of these is the truth? Most likely it is another example of the state of "coincidence" that has been plaguing me for a few days now (see previous posts. Whatever the reality, whyever he is commenting on relationships in a way so deeply meaningful to me, now... the fact is I feel (again) unnervingly watched. No, exposed. That's it - exposed... In fact, I have exposed myself recently in this hall: letting it all hang out for anyone to understand. I feel vulnerable walking back to this place, as if the investigators will be here waiting for me. Can I not have even one truly safe space? I have said too much, but that is only possible while I am watched, and specifically only while I am watched by people of whose motives I am not sure (and Polar, you are not one of these)...

But, back to the reason I came here... Polar writes:

And for you who have only what failed to complete itself? You are not the lovers who rejoice in the fact of their love, and can recount its story: 'that was when we met'; 'that was when I caught your eye.' What, then do you have? Perhaps the dream that one day you can speak of it together, and what did not happen can be called to account. 'Why didn't we speak about it before?': now 'it' has a consistency, a substance: it has come together like love's future anterior. The non-event is at last born as an event.

It happened - not then, but now, and can be called a failure by the measure of loving. 'It couldn't have worked out for us'; 'it could never have begun, not then'. Imagined scene: the two of your talking, at last, about what did not happen. Together, at last, and talking about it, and happy in their speech.

Yes, this is precisely what has been present for me for some time. The dream. Not really some idealistic state, a lover's dream...the lover believes - truly, somewhere at least - that the dream may come true. Do I believe such a thing? Maybe, if I'm honest. Do I want it to come true? Increasingly not. I am dismissed, derided, ignored, humiliated. Not I am these things: she makes me be these things. She derides me, dismisses me, ignores me; she humiliates me...

Which ultimately leads to my original question, the reason I turned on my computer this evening: why do we invest in relationships with others? What is it that human interaction does for any of us? It must surely feed some desire in us - it always gives us something. Enjoyment, maybe; company; lightheartedness; amusement; sex. Something. And typically something positive, at least on some level. But is that always true? If we engage in interaction with an other whose mission it seems to be to bring us down in some way, as unconscious a mission as that may be, why would one go back for more?

Well, often, of course we don't. If I am ignored, dismissed, derided, and publicly on occasions, then usually I am filled with anger, maybe not hatred, but certainly I find such behaviour despicable and deeply unpleasant and I avoid that person as much as possible. But sometimes... sometimes we go back for more. The promise of something. What? A body? Why would a body override my natural instincts to run? I keep searching, yearning... maybe less now for Her, her body, her approval, her touch... but more for the reasons why I would want any of those in the first place. And maybe, then, despite the reasons that IQ gives me to run, and regardless of whether or not I do, She - the idea of She, generic Her - is someone to whom I will keep returning. And for now, IQ is that She: what she gives me is a manifestation of the Idea of She, to which I can keep returning not for immediate pleasure (God no!), but for something tangible on which to hang my desires, in the search for an understanding of those desires.

Because I know only too well that I have been here before. Others have pushed me away, or only had so close I could get, and I have continued to walk forward, into a glass wall. But I keep finding these people. And now, soon - God soon please! - I have to try and understand why...because I am tired, tired by my own inability not to do this. Exhausted by my own persistence.

This, then, is my document of what failed to complete. That was when I caught her eye. That was when we talked easily together. Now is always the failure of completion.

Touching and Feeling

2006-10-02T15:07:00.000Z

Must we be touched in order to feel touch? If all my nerve endings conspire to feel touched, and my brain is convinced of their information, can I not feel Her face against mine simply because Edith sings it so? I don't know what is contained in that voice, nor what spills over from it (this, surely, is the more significant question...), but when she sings - even the words I can understand, that I know have nothing to do with touching - I am touched. Something in the materiality of that voice, at the point of intersection between body and language, langue et parôle, something is there that spills over beyond my ears and onto my skin, as if it is a God of Music infiltrating my body having sneaked in through my willing ears. At this vulnerable point, plagued as I am by having had a second Exposure-And-Rejection Anxiety dream in the space of a week, at this point I can feel touched only by sound or thought. Such intangible things, they still seem to move within me, and spark my nerves into action. I am indeed a bundle of nerves, and all of them are shooting off against each other, misfiring and mixing feeling with feeling, emotion with touch. It seems all in the face, Her face against mine, in my daydreams at least, but also in the blush, the bloodrush, that painful self-exposure... Now, I am exposing my self to myself: meaning is coming from somewhere, but I cannot fathom what that meaning is, only that it is coming. If I can generate feeling without touch in this perverse way, would any real touch mean anything? As much as I am loving my single life, I long to be touched. As ridiculous as my desires are, they still rage beneath my calm exterior. And does my listening add to that rage? Does the music I choose stoke the fire, piling gritty voice on top of bandoneón, and curt syncopation on top of mourning melody as fuel? Certainly. Can I stop listening? You're joking, right?

Giving the game away

2006-10-01T21:33:00.000Z

We spoke, not quite as easily as we have done, but somewhere just beyond our normal mode of arm's length... It was a surprise to see her... she wasn't supposed to be here today. She mentioned something about not quite being a hundred percent... a little out of it... she had mixed up her travel arrangements... out last night more or less until she was due to come here... a new milonga. "You know what a milonga is?" She asked, presuming my answer would be "no." But in my rush to look confident, I answered "yes," which is the truth. She was surprised, and it was only then that I realised the answer she wanted me to have given. Of course, then I was on the spot... had to tell her what I thought it was, since her surprise invited my definition. I always feel on the spot with these things - anyone would, right? Or maybe not. Anyway, since I fear myself to be utterly Britcentric, I always feel exposed when in the face of the foreign, particularly when I'm with someone who I know knows more about it than I. I told her roughly, nervously, what I thought... it's a place to go to tango, no? I know it's where you go (you go) to dance. How do you know? she asked...I just know.

I blushed.

I felt the heat build on my cheeks and prayed for invisibility.

But she saw.

She told me: "You've gone all red."

And then it was out. Without me wanting it to be. It doesn't matter how hard I try to cover up - sometimes I give myself away. "It doesn't take much to make me blush," I explained.

"You've done some research," she replied. An air of joking, slight teasing perhaps, maybe thinking I'd spent any time finding out about these things.

Of course I have.

"No I haven't!" I responded, somewhat indignantly. Heaven forbid.

But I squeaked that response. An utterly, painfully, shamefully girly response. Blusing and squeaking. Eugh!

Nothing more came of it, so maybe I got away with it this time. At the very least, I haven't yet had to have that horrible conversation, where I truly get rumbled, and all my protestations are for naught.... uncomfortable ... GO.

No, I have not yet been dismissed. But I can't help feeling it will come. It always has done before. Why should this time be any different from the last two?

More significantly, is there any way of truly hiding myself? What about, I can't see you so you can't see me? That might work, but the only way would be for me to withdraw, retreat, cut myself off from her. Not such a bad thing, maybe. Olga says I need a new crush. Of course in a way she's right, but it'll probably just get me into more trouble. Why would the next time be any better? So, withdrawal, retreat... maybe. Maybe it's the only way.

In the meantime, while I derive any joy from it - as tinged as it is with torment and alwaysalready loss - I find mysefl returning, always returning. And whenever I return, I open myself up to betrayal by my own body. My own stupid fuckwit "English rose" cheeks that insist on displaying my embarrassment for all to see at the most inopportune moments. Damn them. Much of my body I can control. My actions I have some power over. I don't do anything suddenly "inappropriate." I can control my urges, or at least the manifestation of those urges... But my desires? No, they're not for controlling, and nor are the symptoms of those desires. I will retire to bed now, and maybe dream. Almost certainly, since I have been drinking again. I always dream when I drink. And it's rarely pleasant. I am exhausted by my own tension and the trauma of my dreams, and I drink to obscure them.

Why do I think it'll be different this time?

What just happened?

2006-09-30T07:27:00.000Z

coincidence: [koh-in-si-duh-ns] n. a sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged; a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.

chance: [chans] n. the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled.

Of course it was never going to be coincidence. There was always going to be something in the film I saw last night, which I chose to watch because it had been recommended by IQ. It was a horribly self-indulgent film (on the part of the writer/director/lead actor)... some poor acting and a high cheese factor in place, but interesting in parts and in all fairness I was too tired to finish the whole thing last night. But two things really struck me. The device used for the structuring of the narrative: The First Lesson; The Second Lesson; and so on. And the character in the protagonist's fantasy world with no legs, shuffling around on his arms, his withered stumps hanging a little below his torso. Given my previous post, and the structure thereof, I thought both of these things more than a little noteworthy.

There is a short conversation about chance in the film: "Do you believe there's a reason why people's paths cross?"..."That depends if you believe in chance or destiny." The conversation continued: "I believe chance gives us the opportunity to create our destiny."

So what hero is this I stand over on the battlefield? Free will? Destiny? Those two warriors can surely never sit comfortably with each other, and yet I can't leave either behind: I cannot choose just one of them to haul into my hall, but neither can I allow them both in, unless they are both wounded enough from battle. Even then...the danger! what scenes might ensue?!
I'm not altogether sure where I stand on this. But over these last 24 hours, with the dreams, and then the film, it is as if something has opened up, some information is getting through to me and I'm not sure how to make sense of it. Something from the depths is rising up, lurking just beneath the surface...I am no longer entirely my own.

Maybe it's not rising: maybe I'm descending into a pit, a dark and murky cavern of alternative mental states. Would I even know if I was? Wouldn't it be exactly the case that I didn't realise it, and then I'd get sectioned for being over the edge and would protest my sanity to no avail.... Could the fact that I feel my own sanity slipping away be precisely what saves me from such a fate? More importantly, how can I stay in touch with all this that is on the edge? Must I wait until it chooses me again? Is there anything I can do that will allow me further in, to welcome this information, and help it come? And ultimately, what the fuck will I do with it anyway? Maybe I'll know when it comes. If it comes.

Evil monkeys

2006-09-29T15:29:00.000Z

Two rooms, abodes, bedsits, separated by some corridor, a door at one end, a lightweight curtain at the other. One room, functional, not clinical, but clean and tidy, and well-lit with proper furniture. The other, darker, thicker air, thicker furnishings, floor cushions.

The first experience: in the corridor, aware of the door, standing with IQ. It was that brutal conversation: you need to be careful; you need to give me space; you're always too close, too near, too around; it makes me feel uncomfortable...I see the way you look at me; sometimes you touch my hand, briefly, but too much. I can't give you what you want. Go.

The second experience: in the tidy room. Slouching on the sofa. It is Olga's space, that's clear to me. She's there too, on the sofa, or a nearby armchair. Two monkeys are roaming the room. There's a cage, but Olga doesn't like to keep them enclosed. I sit there, lie there, my arm resting on the side of the sofa, and feel uncomfortable with these vile primates that seem to me more like rodents. The monkeys come closer, to investigate, intrigued by this new person in their space. Soon I can smell them, see their whiskers, their saliva, hear their chattering ad breathing as if it is coming from within my own skull. It sends a shiver of tightness up my arm, round my shoulder, and all down my side until it shoots down my leg into my foot. One monkey sniffs my hand, starts nibbling my little finger...it tickles, but it's a bit too hard. I'm squirming, trying desperately not to jump up and scream because I know it would be rude. These are Olga's pets, after all, and I am in her space. But she senses my discomfort and curses my immaturity, my inability to deal with this minor assault, all in friendship and curiosity as it is. It's touching that the monkey sits on my shoulder; he's waiting for the day

The third experience: I am re-entering the building with the two rooms. Somehow I have to go through the darker, thicker room to get into the safe space of Olga's room. The monkeys no longer figure in my mind. That dark room is IQ's space, that is clear. It is plush, well-dressed, the air clings to me with its wild smells and sounds. And there, on a velveteen floor cushion, is her Corona. He sits half-propped up, and looks at me, as if I have caught him. I turn to IQ, and it seems I have caught her too. I should not have seen him. He is not for seeing. He is warped, deformed, a broad humped back and short, shrivelled, useless legs. This is why he sits - he cannot stand. He is clearly incapable of carrying his own weight. He is an embarrassment. And she is beholden unto his impotence and disability.

Last night was filled with too many dreams, not one, but this series, linked together by restlessness and turning...too much information, my senses overloaded with sounds and feelings and textures. They were all so very much there, so real, so present, and yet I am writing this precisely to try and hold on desperately to those non-experiences. Can I learn anything from them? Would they make any more sense of my life than my waking, daytime analyses? I have felt today as if I might have kissed her, had we seen each other. As if something had been exchanged between us, a pact, a confirmation of something that means something. But there is nothing, not really. It's all still the same - I write, she doesn't write back. I offer friendship, she returns only friendliness. Damn dreams, - they seem always to promise some meaning, and yet their meaning is as intangible as the things themselves, and in this case, as intangible as the very thing I'm trying to work out.

I'm here again and I want to go

2006-09-27T21:48:00.000Z

Yes, here I am once more. My point of refuge, a solace, safe place in the wilderness. I come here to write, and to formulate my thoughts, my self, to articulate, to systemise, to refuse the chaos of feeling that otherwise ensues.

I am feeling increasingly unable to say anything useful or productive or right or anything. I mean that in all contexts. Here, I feel my hero harvesting project has taken a sudden nose-dive, since the start of the new term and the personal struggles that brings with it for me. Apart from here, my safe place away from the others, I feel almost entirely out of it. A fake, a fraud, the baby of the family. I'm not working effectively, I'm quite sure of that. I feel busy all of the time, and yet I look at my colleagues and can only conclude I'm barely doing anything by comparison. I'm huffing and puffing and only treading water. I'm not really used to feeling this incapable. And with the incapability comes the sense of personal absurdity. I feel told off or belittled when it's not really happening, or maybe it is - I jsut can't work it out any more. I feel out of place all the time, and as if there is no possible way anyone would say anything behind my back except bad things. Not really bad, just irritated, and probably patronising.

It's not like I haven't been here before, but I hate it every time. And I wish I felt motivated even enough to go and ask a doctor for some meds that would help, that I know would help in some surface, inane way, because they did before. I don't even have that much motivation. It's a new doctor, in a new city. A new system, and I don't like it. I want it to be safe all around and it isn't. I just want it all to go away. The out-of-control-ness at work. The same in my emotions. The lack of ability to articulate accurately. The missing-the-essence of situations - I'm missing a sharpness in social contexts. I just want it all to stop, and to feel like I function again. Even writing this, I feel whingey, stupid, childish, pathetic, like my complaints about myself are pointless and self-indulgent and that you will only agree if I air that concern, even if it's just for a moment before you try to placate.

Fuck everything. Nothing useful here. Move away from the blog - there's nothing to see.

The worm has turned

2006-09-26T11:31:00.000Z

...and come full circle. About a year ago, I was deeply suspicious of IQ, and particularly her modus operandi in the world. Any time I mentioned her to anyone who knew of her, I was responded to with raised eyebrows and/or negative comments. Then came the lust - a control mechanism, I'm sure. Defence against the potential problems she could cause me. Dark, violent lust, a deep desire to disempower her. That soon faded, and I have tried to describe some of this process before. The violence faded, but not the desire...that remained, and has tormented me since.

But over the last few days, something has shifted. Not that I don't feel this desire any more, but I have had a few insights. I have been dismissed, laughed at, snubbed, and prevented from being somewhere I had every right to be. And this morning, after being more or less turfed out of my own territory, having been pushed aside in favour of her own ego, I was cross. Not cross, Angry. Really pissed off. Just the other day, I was cross at myself for being a fool. By this morning, I was angry with her. And yet, still desirous, I have come back precisely to the place I was almost a year ago...

Well, not precisely there. I am no longer suprised and bemused by my attraction to her. It's old-hat now, something I'm quite used to, having been a part of my life for this length of time. So, I'm not quite so scared of it. But I'm still basically back where I was.

The worm has indeed turned, but it has come back to its starting place. To continue the animal metaphor, can the leopard ever change its spots? Is there any hope for me now? I'm hoping - planning - for this worm to take a different path now, maybe move on from what is currently a place of ugliness. But maybe I'll get sucked in again...if not by her, maybe by another. Still making the same mistakes I was making nearly 20 years ago, and have continued to make ever since. Yes, I keep picking my scabs...can I let them heal? Will I not always be subject to the scars? Can any of us really change the path we take through the mud and soil and humus of life?

Priorities

2006-09-21T17:21:00.000Z

I feel like a totally rubbish person. I let down a friend today for utterly selfish reasons. Not utterly selfish, but 99%. I should have given my time to someone who gives me hers, someone I know I can call on, and have done, in times of trouble. Instead, I gave it to someone who deserves it significantly less, as much as she could use it at that moment, in order to satisfy my own desires.

I don't think it would have looked like a big deal to anyone else, and quite possibly I'm doing myself down. That's the rational part of me. And I also know that I was completely and wholeheartedly genuine when I pledged my 24-hour-anything-you-need friendship to Olga last night - she's still having a rough time in several ways, and I feel her hurt deeply. That is truly genuine. She is a true friend to me and I want to return that friendship.

I asked Olga over for dinner tonight, but only after my original plan hadn't yielded fruit. And that plan, as I'm sure you can guess, was misguided, based on misplaced loyalty. I feel like a total total fool. Like someone who really doesn't deserve friends, and certainly not of the likes of Olga or Rogers.

I wish I could get my priorities straight. I wish I could actually live by the rules of life that I set myself, honour the principles I profess to hold dear. And yet all of my reason and rhyme and my capacity to think straight go clear out of the window when I'm with Her. I must confess this: I actually, at this moment, believe wholeheartedly in everything I used to say was total bollocks... the myth of feminine wiles, charms, mystique. Right now, I speak as if under a spell. I've been perfectly reasonable for a few weeks now... but there she is. And whatever politically correct, critical theoretical sensibilities I might profess, I have to say I can also bear witness to the whole stinky mess of women. What a sucker I am. I can say nothing useful, nor harvest any heroes.

Making connections

2006-09-19T22:30:00.000Z

A friendly face. A smile. A warm sparkle in the eyes, saying that all is well. How often do you see that? Honestly? And when was the last time you saw it on the face of someone you'd never met , had no cause to interact with, and were never likely to see again?

I have been lucky enough to experience this today. In - of all places - London. I hate London. Out of principle. It can't possibly be right to presume that things will function sensibly when so many people live in one place. Of course they don't - they live in a whole load of places that they pretend is one place, but all of which really have their own quite distinct locality. But still, there's very little space between people. Lots of place, and not so much space. No breathing room. No air to breathe, hardly. And so they try desperately to separate off from the other people: there's no real space between us... I'd better make some.

Londoners, I swear (or maybe just suspect...) would watch someone choke to death on a bus before asking them if they were ok. This is why I'm happy I'm a Northerner. I'm not really, of course: Oxford, if I'm honest. Then lots of south-west. Then lots more Oxford. But I wouldn't live south of Birmingham again if you paid me. So I have converted to Northernerism. Yeugh. - Southerners. Rude; ignorant; humourless. And all of them in one place - London. Why am I here?! Home tomorrow, all is well!

At least this is what I maintained for the majority of the journey here. I took the tube from Euston - commuters, most of them terribly precise and efficiently trying to get back as quickly as possible to their hermetically-sealed IKEA-showroom flat. Who cares if you're here, you're just in the way, especially with that bag... And then I picked up the bus from Finsbury Park. It's a bus I've caught several times before, and it's always pretty painless. Today, it was joyful. I was sad, for various reasons, one of which being that I was in London (the sadness of that fact is more complex than I can be bothered with tonight). I was drowning my sorrows in Alison Moyet's Voice. And then I looked down at the boy in the buggy next to me. Maybe he was 18 months? Probably not quite. Beautiful - lovely dark brown skin, and shiny eyes to match, and gleaming they were for his mum, sitting next to him playing with his hand. He looked up at me, and reached out for my hand, which I gladly gave him. He had the best laugh - that proper belly laugh you only really hear from children. And I held his little hand, played with it, hid it and revealed it, and he kept on smiling and laughing at me, periodically checking with his mum, all the way to my stop. Just before I left him, I complimented him on his friendly manner and urged him to hold on to it, rare a quality as it is, all over this Godforsaken country of ours, and most acutely in our great capital, the streets paved with gold and then covered in shit.

Mostly here, or at least what seems mostly in recent months and years, strangers connect only in sadness. Deaths. Anniversaries of deaths. 9/11. 7/7. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Thousands killed, millions mourning. The nation brought together in grief.

But why do we have to wait for sadness to be with each other? It makes that connection so false, in a way...too temporary. The country joined together...did it? Londoners displayed great resolve...did they? They all went back to normal as quickly as they could - great resolve, maybe, or perhaps a desperation for the comfort of the normality of insularity. And why, really, do we have to wait for anything to be happy to be with each other? I am here, and you are here, and that's a good thing. I am pleased to share this journey with you. I don't propose anything idiotic, anything that might upset the smooth running of things, heavens no! But would it really be so dangerous if I smiled at someone on the bus, offered a friendly face with absolutely no conditions attached to it?

Fear and (self-)loathing

2006-09-18T17:52:00.000Z

Oh dear. That time is coming again. Rogers seems all excited about the impending resumption of normality, the potential for achieving a new normality, keen to carpe the diem, champing at the bit of the new year. ITHOM seems weary at the prospect.

I come to this point in the year with dread, a sense of impending doom, physically queasy at the prospect. I want to make something new and brilliant in my work, in my teaching especially, but suspect that (as in most of my endeavours - of our endeavours?), that I will fall short of the mark. It is like standing on the edge of a terribly high cliff... not sure when you will fall, not sure if the fall will be chaotic and panicked, and cease with your rag-doll body smashing on the dark grey rocks below... or if it will turn out that you can fly, and land slowly and gracefully with a perfectly round ripple in the warm, welcoming waters below.

It is something about the change of season. Not S.A.D. like my friend Blow, but more of a fear. A physical sense that something is awry. It is like an evil déjà vu, a horribly warped and malformed nostalgia. Something in the smell of autumn, in the feel of the September breeze on y cheeks, and regardless of whether that breeze is warm or crisp, something in the way the sun sits in the sky...something takes me back to a place I don't want to be. I'm not even sure what place that is. It has to do with people, though. People I haven't met and am afraid of, in a RainMan kind of way. People I know and will find comforting - this is the bit that stops me just jumping off that cliff and screaming, and hoping my heart stops from fear before I find out whether I can fly. But most of all, the recurring theme in my life, the villain that lurks in the dark corners of my mind... people I want to know more than I do, who I want to see more than I should, whose presence and absence both will always be sources of tension and disappointment.

Resolve to try harder. Could do better. Concentrate. Don't think. Work really hard at not paying attention and maybe it'll go away. Maybe this time I can make it go away, and maybe next autumn won't be so dark.

Separation

2006-09-07T13:11:00.000Z

So, I've been swimming and gymming for a few weeks now. Feeling pleasantly more butch, although no more indefinite (this will take time, I know), and certainly nowhere near enough of either to see IQ: indeed, by the time I'm properly sculpted, I sense the moment will have gone, but at least I'll have/be the sculpture...but that's all another story. In the meantime, the act of entering the changing rooms has been on my mind.

The germ of these thoughts developed several weeks ago, when I attended a service at an Orthodox Synagogue. It was a truly beautiful building, and an extremely interesting experience, the length of the service (3 hours) and my lack of Biblical Hebrew notwithstanding. What most got me thinking was the segregation. The rabbi was a very helpful and welcoming man who invited me to attend when I asked about another, Liberal, synagogue. So I did - why not? Then of course the the small print came. I'd be expected to wear a skirt if I came regularly. There were no fire escapes in the Ladies' Gallery upstairs, so women were to sit on one side downstairs. And so there I sat, in my one-time-only trousers, but dutifully on the women's side, and met some people who were visiting from London...I was then promptly mistaken for 'a gentleman' by one of the regulars.

I suppose the true germ of my confusion stems from a visit to Germany as a teenager. On a trip to Köln catherdral with an all-girls school... I was wearing a black trilby (having recently seen an Indiana Jones movie)... and the priest approached me. Started going on in German - didn't understand anything, my German comprehension being rather poor, and my teacher stepped into help. The conversation apparently went something like this:
- Priest [gesturing towards me]: He needs to take off his hat: this is a church
- Teacher: Oh, you're mistaken...we're an all-girls group!
- Priest: In that case, she should definitely keep her hat on
In a few seconds the imperative changed from uncovering my head to keeping it covered, and all on the basis of the M or F on my birth-certificate.

Meanwhile, back to the changing rooms. This is one place that's not for passing. It is much more a statement of difference than the public toilet: if you're confident and indefinite enough (and that's not much, especially if you're quick...) you can quite easily swap toilets. But the changing rooms...! The act of undressing of course reveals all. And even if I could avoid that, my choice of swimwear would give me away. More intriguingly, perhaps, is the very queer space I feel myself entering every time I go. It is a very bizarre sensation, realising that you have been put in this room instead of the other in no small part because of the threat of desire, only to be thinking desiring thoughts about the people in the room with you.

It's all very well separating people on the basis of sex, but it leaves no room for anything other than the standard two options of sex, and presumes completely that those two options map exactly and always on to two standard options of sexual desire. Mine is, in a sense, quite a privileged position: how many naked women do most straight men get to see on a daily basis? But oh, the guilt! The fear of being known! And the shame - what if there's someone else like me in there, judging me on the same basis? And at any rate, what are the other options? All-cubicled communal changing areas I guess, although they're always cramped and impractical for actually getting changed without getting bruised in the process. In fact, what about non-cubicled communal areas? What really would be the worst that could happen?

Goody 2Shoes

2006-09-07T12:38:00.000Z

Well, how very exciting. What divinely good news. My delightful younger sister 2Shoes is about to start a Performing Arts degree course a bike-ride away from her hippy-house. See my excitement...feel it spring off the screen... :|

So, some history: 2Shoes managed to skive most of school. She was a sickly child, and contributed to her sickliness with psychosomasis (?) and to her image of sickliness with some general acting skills. Whenever we moved house, we'd start a new school. I would be desperate to fit in; 2Shoes would be desperate to get out of it. Poor 2Shoes...she suffered...with asthma, wearing glasses, having an oversized jaw and an oversized belly, starting puberty before anyone else...blah blah. And of course she was clever, so our parents built her up into this Special Person who needed Special Treatment, and harangued school after school to put her up a year (she was, after all, an October child, so old in her year as well as bright). But of course the schools all knew she hadn't covered enough from any given year to skip it and move ahead. So eventually she got into ballet school, her party trick being the dance of the sugar-plum fairy, and eventually quit school altogether at 14, with 4 GCSEs to her name. Meanwhile, yours truly was working hard. By the time she'd quit school altogether, I'd done 3 schools over the 2 years of my GCSEs, and still came out with a good set of grades. I went on to fuck up my A-levels, but I was busy with other things ;) Got a place at uni, was the only 1st in my year, and onwards and upwards from there. But she didn't need all of that: she's going to be a star when she grows up. Poor special 2Shoes...how we were all supposed to pity her lot in life. It's hard being a star before everyone else realises it.

So my hero today is an amalgam of hard work and playing by the rules, and I'm not sure whether to sling it out the window or frame it for display. I'm happy where I am, don't get me wrong. She's 4 years my junior, so by her age I already knew where I was trying to go, and was well on the way to getting there; she's just starting this degree. And I get that not everyone is suited to any given system, so in a way I've been lucky. But there are several things that annoy me, not least of which is the absolute commitment displayed by 2Shoes and our parents to denouncing The System, particularly the education system. She's managed to blag her way on to a degree course with 4 GCSEs and a talent for little other than arrogance and self-promotion. Maybe that's all you need for Performing Arts...So now she's taking the education where it suits her, with no heed to all the hours of trigonometry and tectonic plates and Thomas Hardy that the rest of us thought we had to suffer. If only I'd known! I could have avoided the lot! Or, should I adpot the moral high ground? Or what? Is there any point in feeling anything about it? And if not, why does it make me so very irritated?

And the other thing is this: I had an email recently from my mother, whom I saw recently at a family gathering. I had played the piano, been doing caricature dancing with Little Lad... and she sees fits to suggest that I get into amdram, or musical theatre, or some kind of performance... 'real music' she says, not just theory 'which might get a bit boring after a while'. We exchanged emails; I defended my choice of direction against no explicit attack; and all was well. But right under the surface of that exchange, and her excitement over 2Shoes's recent fortunes, is this: the age-old privileging of 'doing' rather than 'thinking about'. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And what about those-who-can-teach? And am I really not Doing? I Can what it is that I Do. What makes singing better than writing about singing? Oh, of course, it's the drama and the skill and the joy given to others and the specialness of it. By comparison, I'm rather dull...regular salary, direct debits, permanent address - no touring - terribly drab.

Looking at our histories, it's me that's been the Goody Two Shoes, toeing the line (no, it's not towing: there's a story about the phrase and I'll tell you if you ask), doing what's asked of me, complying. And yet she's the special one. In conclusion, the only possible way to validate my continued existence is to celebrate this hero of hard work and systems, in the hope that others might understand something of the value of compliance.

Holy Mother

2006-08-30T21:44:00.000Z

I've just re-read my post on me, Posh, and parenthood, and it's made me really angry. Like badly jump-up-and-down and shout-at-the-world-ranty CROSS. (So this is a long post: bear with me.)

Not the post, exactly, but the truth of some of my observations, and how I have been pretty much screwed over by some of it. Like the 'mystery of maternal instict' theory (MOMI - how fortunate an acronym!). And the outrageous extent to which it prevails. And the fact that it's not just Posh being some nutter about it, but that she occupies this MOMI-world that's existed for God only knows how long, and will continue to exist long after any of us, and that it carries on like a horrible fungus, an ineradicable virus with which the western world seems to be riddled.

The MOMI theory's central premise, of course, is that there is this natural, instinctive, biological, uncontrollable urge that women feel, to be pregnant and bring a child into the world, and that she would give up everything for the child and fight with her life to protect it. Now that's not such a terrible thing in and of itself, but in the wrong hands it's positively dangerous. Because the sub-text to the whole thing is that women should feel that way.

Now, a brief detour to justify that, because I can hear the 'buts': stick with me for a moment. It seems to me that there was, for a while, a kind of thing about 'career women' and how it was really ok not to want kids, and there was a little effort being made (or at least sufficient lip-service being paid) to suggest that women didn't all have to be reproductive machines. And then came the worst thing: the 'we can have it all and we want it' stage. So now what you get is all the women's mags (VILE VILE things - another rant, another day), going on about 'how to have a successful career and a perfect family' (dependent, no doubt, on being able to give the perfect blowjob...but I digress into that other rant...). ANYWAY, now it seems we're all expected to want a career and kids, but the subtext of being-prepared-to-give-up-everything has still maintained its fierce grip. Considering how many people agree with the blog post "Women Who Don't Want Children (Aren't From Mars)", I do wonder why the reproductive imperative remains. (BTW, response number 10, from Livia, is a particularly interesting example of MOMIsm. And do check out Howard the moron.) To get all Darwinian about it, I guess that people inclined to reproduce will necessarily pass on their genes in the act of reproduction, thereby producing more people who want to reproduce - a cunning evolutionary trick (but there's no doubt a whole Darwin discussion to be had there another day).

Just look at the photo I started this post with: the way the baby is "kissing" the "mother" woman. It's such crap. She's so utterly smug about it, with this baby "kissing" her - but it's so tiny; anyone with half a brain can work out that baby's got absolutely no capacity to kiss the woman, demonstrate love in that way, but that's what we're all supposed to see, and you have to look twice to realise it's just an optical illusion. Isn't it sweet? And doesn't she look good? Isn't she truly glowing, radiant with the love of a mother and her satisfaction at realising her womanly potential? (What I really like about the picture is the look on the baby's face: like, 'ha ha, tricked you, you stupid cow!')

We're all attacked with these things, beaten over the head with these pictures and their insufferable ideologically loaded cuteness...like Anne FUCKING Geddes. I don't want to give birth: I can only just bear the monthly ritual humiliation. I don't want to be pregnant, to have a parasite wriggling around inside me for months on end, and causing me hours of agony before spewing out of me like a scene from Alien. I love my boys. Absolutely I love them, without question. But I object SO strongly to the whole MOMI system. It was absolutely crucial in my journey to parenthood. I'm sure I would still be childless if it hadn't been for Posh's MOMIst stance, and happy with that. Like I say, I love my boys dearly. Never let it be said I don't. I'm gutted not to be with them now. But I so utterly resent Posh for leading me down this path. I went willingly, for sure, but it was a dark alley and I followed her like a fool. She has used the so-called naturalness of it all to justify so much crap, to excuse her really shitty behaviour, and I'm really angry about it, that I'm left in this position because of the MOMI bullshit.

And there's just been a call from the British Fertility Society for a national policy on fertility treatment (good...), and for lesbians and single women to get the same rights as married women (good...), for obese women to be encouraged to lose weight before receiving treatment (yes....although everyone's got the wrong end of the stick of course), and for very obese women (BMI >/= 36) to be denied treatment altogether (I kinda see...but again the response has all been a bit off-centre). The thing is, the debate in response to this call seems to be centring a lot on the 'right' of people to have kids. Posh's sister had two successful IVF (ICSI actually) rounds, and has two kids without whom she would have (of course) been utterly despondent. I resent portions of my tax going to fucked up military shit, and tridents, and all that crap. But I am also beginning to have issues with the whole 'everyone should be able to have IVF on the NHS' thing too, frankly, because it's fuel to the MOMI fire.

I don't blame Posh for my situation, I can't. She's at the mercy not of any truth in the MOMI theory, but of her unknowing commitment to its image and its propagation: it's a devious mechanism that somehow sustains its image of Absolute Truth. And I could have decided differently. So I'm philosphical about it all. But I FUCKING HATE the MOMI theory. Long live drunken fucks and mistakes and accidents and bonus rounds. We'd all carry on fine that way, wouldn't we?

Can you tell what it is yet?

2006-08-30T11:11:00.000Z

Well, not quite: she's still there, and not here...but I've been thinking about IQ for a while (obviously!) as I said, and I was thinking about her a lot yesterday. I had a flatwarming do - absolutely lovely; a bunch of my favourite people came over and I felt good...I cooked tortilla and oily peppers and made a nice dressing for a salad, and there was bread and sangría, and I did a good job. I hadn't heard back from most people as to whether or not they'd come, and IQ in her typical fashion went underground for quite some time and didn't respond to the email. I suspected she wouldn't come... had no reason to believe she would... and of course she didn't. But I had hoped: maybe she just hadn't let me know she was coming; maybe she'd want to surprise me... but it was all predictable. And there it was, that unjustified tinge of disappointment.

But today: an email! About our formal connection mostly, and with that slight sense of distance that I expect from many others but had grown used not to getting from her...it was friendly enough, but I think it's all in the salutations: Hi; all best; no more te extraño fuertemente, as I enjoyed a few months ago. So, with the extended absence and these normative salutations, I presume things have gone back to the way they were. Or were they ever like this? It seems to me that I disliked and feared her, and my feelings changed as a defence against that - wanting to take her, control her, have power over her - and then we became closer over a distance as she was on an extended holiday (that's when the fuertemente came...). Things have only become less formal since then...signing off with initials and x's, and multilingual phrases and greetings that speak not the language they're in but of a growing informality. So I'm not sure things have really been like this before between us, or maybe they have but I didn't notice because it was a waxing not a waning moon. Or maybe it's always been like this, that it never waxed as far as I thought or hoped. There is certainly something familiar about the tone of the email - not familiar like friendly, but familiar like I've seen it before. Perhaps this is just where we've been all along.

So who knows what will happen next time we see each other? I'm still trying to fix some meaning, to find something out with limited information...I've offered the hand of friendship in a very specific way, as she said there were some personal reasons for her lack of contact. Here's my new number; I'm thinking of you; let me know if I can help...will she take it up? What will the significance be if she does or doesn't?

I know full well this is going nowhere. It's a complete dead end...I have concluded that she's someone who is used to having other people fawn over her and stumble in the face of her, and she wants - maybe she doesn't even quite know it - to see what it would be like this time, to have me at her feet. But I'm working hard (and have been succeeding for a while) not to give her the satisfaction. But still I wonder, what does it mean, what does it mean? Is she playing the game I think she is? What does she think? Always living with a little hope, but equally knowing that the hope is false. More significantly wondering what she knows, how close to the edge I am, how thin the ice beneath my feet. Mind games are one thing; it's quite another when you're not even sure the other person is playing them.

I Am What I Am

2006-08-27T21:22:00.000Z

So, I'm back...I was away for the weekend with Big Boy and Little Lad, I've dropped them home and now I'm back in my own lovely little flat, having driven for a total of about nine hours today - such is my dedication to both work and the boys.

And I really miss them. So much more than I thought I would - although I could never have admitted that to Posh when she identified this evening that I do miss them, as she would then think she'd scored a point. She always warned I'd miss them, and I always agreed that I would. I just never understood how much. And it makes me question one of the other stories of my life, that of my relationship with parenthood.

Are people born to be parents? Do people learn to be parents? I had parenthood thrust upon me. Posh has always been obsessed by the idea of parenthood: she had a small collection of baby clothes when we met, which was 6 years before she had Big Boy. This collection gradually grew, and there it was, ready and waiting for someone to fill it. Anyone. She subscribes to (and preaches) the 'mystery of maternal instinct' theory...that she'd just 'had this feeling' that she wanted to be a mother...not even wanted; had to be a mother, so overwhelming was this urge. And that same theory is at the heart of her judgements of me. It is her belief in such a thing that enabled her to say I was wrong - just wrong, absolutely and without question - for not being willing to choose between kids and career. A freak, she said.

I, on the other hand, had always maintained my innate lack of design for parenthood. I decided pre-Posh that I was too selfish to have kids, and for some years I've thought maybe I should have stuck with that initial instinct. But in the last few weeks, I'm really starting to realise what Olga keeps telling me - that I am in fact a quite reasonable parent. Without Posh around I'm much more relaxed around the boys - not constantly feeling that my parenting is not good enough; not picking up all the time on her own stress; and just starting to chill and hang out with them and enjoy them as people. I wish I had known all of this before, but hindsight's a wonderful thing, eh? A crucial part of what was incompatible between me and Posh, it seems, is this difference in understanding of parenthood. And I understand my position as a parent much better now that I ever have done. I fail sometimes, and it's ok. I don't have to be perfect with them. I want desperately to do my best, and I love them enough to sacrifice whatever I can for them.

But I will not sacrifice me, which is what Posh wanted from me...And, I think, what she is doing to herself...Or maybe (more likely?) the pre-erasure of herself was in place all along.

OOSOOM or AMTHGF?

2006-08-24T07:51:00.000Z

That is to say, Out Of Sight Out Of Mind or Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder? (Credit must go to Rogers for these acronyms.)

I experience the summer as a period of absence, with people away, doing their own thing, getting on with their own lives and (in this job, supposedly) their research. Before my relocation I experienced loss more regularly, each week containing a period of separation and reuniting with my colleagues and - in my mind - with my work as well. To be entrenched here in housing terms is also to feel mentally more involved with the job.

But still I experience lack. I'm taking Big Boy home today. He's sad about it and so am I, but I have to try and teach him that separation is not always sad, even as the tears in my eyes will show that I don't believe there can be a happiness in this particular separation. I'll be with him and Little Lad all weekend, but then I have to leave them both with Posh, leaving them (BB is my particular concern) to Her control. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about IQ most days for some time. It's been a while since she was in contact, and although she is not Out Of Mind, my sense of urgency is lessening gradually. But, as with the other times I have felt this way, I know there will be a resurgence when we meet again. Perhaps there won't: perhaps my emotions are not always that predictable; perhaps they don't have to be subject to such recurring cycles. I am prepared for the worst nonetheless.

Almost certainly not, but what is intriguing to me is the frequency with which I experience what I described above...Out Of Sight; frequently On My Mind; but no Growing Fondness. With IQ, with the boys, when Posh and I were first seeing each other, living in different cities...in each situation I have missed someone, and wanted badly to see them again, but there is no continuing sense of the desperation that comes immediately after the separation. It plateaus out, and is easily manageable. Is this really different though? Is there not a sense that I have been creating some imaginary version of the person, a version more desirable (in whatever sense of that word)? In between seeing him, I certainly blot out the terribleness of Little Lad's 6 o'clock wake up call; and I suspect I have turned IQ into more agreeable a person in my mind...the aloofness and disdain will be there all the same next time, and I know this, but I can't feel it in the absence of it happening. So in that sense, there's a layer of OOSOOM: no actual disdain or no actual 6 o'clock crowing from a toddler equals no sense of the reality of the impact of those things. And while that process is going on - the mental erasure of the occasional pain of interaction with an other - the by-product is one of AMTHGF, since the idea of the experience of interaction becomes more pleasant in the mind, and thus these two heroes of loss, the two modes of relation to absence, are co-dependent.

Under Pressure but I'm Feeling Good

2006-08-22T10:11:00.000Z

Big Boy's here for a few days. Posh says she can't cope right now. He's kicking back against the unsettledness after visiting last week, but she has limited capacity / resources to tame him when he's in this state. I want to help, really I do. But I can't solve her problems. I know part of her resents me for not being there. And no small part of me resents her for making me pick up the pieces of what was her desperation. She seems to have some need to fill a gap, and to fill it with children. She found it hard with just BB, but still pushed for Little Lad. And even then, even when she found that hard with me away, and even when I said I didn't want any more, she started again...pushing for another plug in the hole of her life - whatever that hole is.

So he's here, in the middle of a really bad time of year. I was finding it difficult enough to wade through my admin to the refuge of my research, as traumatic as that place was (see here and here). And now I have him around, taking up time and space and brainpower and energy.

But at the same time I'm pleased to be his point of refuge. He's been lovely since he came. With just him, and no Her, I seem so able, so competent, so perfectly capable of looking after him and loving him and doing right by him. So although the pressure's really on for this paper - and I'm sitting here typing with That Voice screeching through my brain, taking advantage of a brief respite afforded me by Necoh - I'm not suffering. I will do, I'm sure...I'll be back here when he's gone, sad at his absence and terrified of my deadline. But for now I'm feeling fine, happy to be capable. Hurray!

I can resist everything except temptation

2006-08-16T18:30:00.000Z

It's no use. I have to blog. I know full well that I should be writing, and I desperately want to write, in a funny kind of way, but it is the trauma of writing that has been preying on my blogmind all day. I blame Rogers, for getting me started, and for his text urging me to be here instead of there. I have resisted so far, but here I am nonetheless, an addict.

I have started the dreadful task, finally. I have put fingers to keyboard and produced new combinations of words about things I have not truly pondered before. But I keep failing, so violently failing, and getting tangled in the web of my thoughts and ideas, and all the things His Voice makes me feel all at once. This Voice is everywhere and nowhere and everything and nothing...it is itself quicksilver, cobweb, dust, particle, and it dances around me, laughing a cruel laugh, as if to say - I am here, and I make you see things, things that are not there, or that might be there, but I will not tell you where they are.

So then I start again. Blank page. Formulate. Systemise. And then I fall at the sheer PAIN of the blank page, so I write words in desperation...Voice; Monster; Queer; Cyborg; Horror; Body; Diva; Death...and try to connect them in a unilinear fashion, to explain them. This is the impasse of the medium: I want to make this Voice, this Music, into words, so that when I tell Them about it They will understand and Know this Voice.

And yet the pain is exacerbated by my own fears that they will not know. Because however hard I try, I suspect my opus will collapse. Its logic, peculiar logic though it may be, will not be theirs. They want Real Things, and Real People, and What Actually Happens. And I cannot give it to them. I won't, since I actually don't care. Or maybe they won't know for a much more likely reason: that I cannot tell them what it is I am trying to tell.

So here I am - corseted, vacuum-packed, shrinkwrapped by my own inability to escape the cycle of complaining about not being able to do something I'm not currently trying to do, and continuing to torment myself by listening to His Voice, looking too directly at the Pleaides he leaves behind him. He says it himself: Make it stop. And I could stop at any time, apart from my dumbass commitment to Them, my inevitable fate. But I can't: it is an addiction, His Voice - now I have started to seek to understand, I must continue to wallow in the vocal quicksand. God it's messy being on a blank page.

Being some body

2006-08-15T18:20:00.000Z

There's something utterly queer about bodybuilding, complete dedication to the cause of realising the extremes of the body's potential, leaving men with chests like Lolo Ferrari and women looking like they might have been men until recently. But, the story goes, this is all within the scope of the body's natural potential...just a case of understanding how to make it do what you want it to, how to sculpt and mould it and make it look like you want.

This is invariably aided by various supplements and nutritional aids, in combination with a strict dietary regime. And sometimes there's a little help from injections, hormones most likely. But we all eat and we know that affects our body - so we avoid some things because of a higher fat content, or ignore advice to the contrary. So there's not much unusual in that side of bodybuilding. But then if we all have hormones pumping round our bodies anyway, what's so wrong with putting them places they don't get made, or adding to the ones we already have? The seemingly constant flow of athletics doping scandals at the moment also makes one wonder: if it's safe, why is it necessarily against the rules to take certain performance enhancing drugs? Caffeine's ok, but amphetamines aren't...Presumably we could solve the problem of cheating by changing the rules...And yet under other circumstances, hormones are not just against the rules of sport but against the unwritten rules of our society, as any transsexual will tell you.

Where does 'normality' end and body modification start? How far can one go in toning and sculpting and building without overstepping the boundaries? How close can one go to the edge without falling over it? And does going close to the edge constitute a violation in itself, since to sculpt and mould is always something of an attack on the status quo?...answers on a postcard please...

What I'm really wondering, though, is how far I can go...how much commitment I can give to the higher cause of indefiniteness: with all my bumps and curves and flab, my body is (I think) unavoidably female, and I defend against this definiteness with clothing and hair and physical mannerisms. But what if I too can do something to my body to shift that? What I want to achieve is not the queerness of the bodybuilder: to me, they are repulsive, monstrous, too detailed and confining somehow. Instead, I wonder how unfemale my body can be without breaking the rules of how to sculpt and mould a body: how sculptable am I?

I don't know how to write it

2006-08-09T14:38:00.000Z

Where do I start? After what feels like weeks of moving, and months of non-productivity (and yes, these are mostly just feelings...), it falls upon me to write something New. I want it to be Bright and Shiny and Entrancing and to flit around the reader like the music does that I am writing about. Every time I start something new I feel this, and it is as if an image emerges from behind a fog in the distance, its contours becoming briefly perceptible before fading and shifting again...like the Seven Sisters, you can only see it when one looks to the side of it.

But the fading and shifting are relentless, the shape of the work-yet-undone taunts me, teases me, declares itself to be there and yet refuses to be caught and tamed. And so I feel, as I do every time, a sense of impending failure. Not that the work will be bad, or unworthy, just that it won't quite hit the mark. And so I feel pushed and pulled and stretched in all directions as I try to see the shape of this quicksilvery thing that may not even be there, and understand all the time that I will never catch it anyway.

All the usual tricks from school are useless...mindmaps, spider diagrams...too organised and logical for this. Maybe that's where I go wrong, though. I do in fact tend towards the principle of organising, explaining, clarifying...and what I really want is an interplay of language and sounds and textures and senses. I sometimes get close to that here in the Hall, but that's a different arena. Here failure is acceptable...I am hidden enough and this is casual enough that there is less pressure to Get It Right. But there, in the World, in Work, what I say and do will haunt me for years if I get it wrong.

So I start the writing with fear, which is why I have spent all afternoon in my office not writing, because I am screaming to write something like the unearthly symphonic mass that fills my ears and is the subject of the work, and yet I feel I will inevitably fall into the same old trap of Clarity and Safety that I suspect is more likely to garner approval from my audience on the day.
I suspect we all have aspirations for our work that exceeds what we manage to achieve, so I don't pretend to be special or different. But oh, such ambition, to want to be rewarded for pulling it off!

Things I have learned

2006-08-08T18:04:00.000Z

I learned things at school,
Like: internal organs do not move inside you.
Knitted together, they stay where they were put
and do the job for which they were designed.

I learned things at school,
Like: before we knew what we know now,
there were other explanations,
and they were wrong.

I learned things at school,
Like: every action
has an equal and opposite reaction,
so the world stays balanced.

I have learned things in the world,
Like: my organs can move.
My stomach dances, and my belly wanders and makes me crazy,
not the jobs for which they were designed.

I have learned things in the world,
Like: there isn't always an explanation for everything,
a right or wrong one,
despite what They would like you to believe.

I have learned things in school,
Like: love is not an action,
but it causes imbalance nonetheless.

I'm going tell you a secret

2006-08-01T13:08:00.000Z

Or rather, I'm not. Or perhaps I just did.

If I have a secret, I should keep both the fact and the content to myself. That is to say, there is some violation, some breach of both security and etiquette, in telling you that I have one, even if (or exactly when) I don't tell you the piece of information that is secret. So, whether or not I actually have one is irrelevant. Of course it's not - but this is not a post about any specific secret, merely the idea of secrecy, and I wouldn't want to overstep that boundary by telling you I had one, if I did. Which I might. Or might not.

See? It's terrible isn't it? Now you no longer know whether I have a secret at all. We all have secrets, always. There are always things we don't tell each other, and some of those things constitute secrets. But then the-thing-we-don't-tell is not always a secret - a secret is a specific thing-which-shall-not-be-told, which is slightly different. Still, we all have secrets from each other at some point, and sometimes they are told eventually, when it matters less.

Plenty of what covers the walls of this hall is stuff which in another realm might be considered a secret. All my writings about IQ, for instance, come from a place which is very secret from her: the content and location of this blog are things she simply must not know. And yet I tell you all about my experiences in relation to that secret place; I share with you my deepest darkest feelings, which are secret from many.

I wonder if there is something in my life that is even more secret than the IQ Saga? Shining light in public on the darkest corners of my psyche, while keeping those corners hidden from the very person who makes me uncover them, is surely the biggest risk I could take. The consequences of IQ finding out are not something I wish to ponder, since I can only imagine it to be terrible. So is there anything worse I could share? Maybe, but I won't.

The days of abjection

2006-07-22T11:35:00.000Z

Peeling back the skin on the custard, watching it pull against the tepid, luminous liquid it covers like a scab, seeing it tear a little...feeling it stick to the roof of my mouth, and retching as it worms its vile way down my throat, not quite slipping smoothly down but getting caught between my mouth and my oesophagus. The acrid smell of vomit, catching my soft palate and making my mouth water with vinegary saliva in preparation for more. The days have come, as I predicted, the days of tearing and breaking and becoming One again... Again? Just Becoming One. The moment of separation is here.

Posh has moved into her new house with the boys, and I am now legally homeless. I have cried for 4 days, as together we packed up the final pieces of our life together...mine are in storage, hers are her business, and the wax model of our joined hands has been buried. I had wanted to be out of the relationship for some time, feeling intensely the suffocation that she brought...the pull she had over me (...indeed, that I allowed her to have...), and yearning for the freedom to Be One. But now that freedom is here it seems like such a vast expanse of space and nothingness that I don't know where to start, or what to make of it. So where is my Hero today?

If I've learned anything about nothing, it is that there is always something. A vacuum always attracts space from a place of higher pressure; the only void is a black hole and even that has a name; the only silence is in death, but even then there is the munching of the maggots. I have tried hard not to feel anything for the last few days....I have longed to feel nothing, trying to block out the Unbearable Weight of Sadness with drink and drugs, but to no avail.

My life begins again next week: my things arrive on Tuesday, and my Moon in Cancer will be glad for the creature comforts. I will have survived, and I will become my own Hero. I will.

Still trying to separate

2006-07-16T21:12:00.000Z

I have never lived alone. I mentioned this before...I moved out of home into lodgings into student halls into Posh's house into our life together, and then in with Rogers, who has been an utter love to take me in. I write this, aged 29, only days away from living alone for the first time in my life, and it seems to be time to justify my own place in the Hall, to pick apart one of the Heroes with which I have lived my life thus far.

I have always conceived of myself as a sociable being, someone who thrives on company. 2Shoes was always the loner, as we grew up. She played by herself, was happier with her own company, self-contained. Whenever the family moved, we moved schools. It made 2Shoes more withdrawn and incapable of making friends; in me, it exacerbated my natural ability to socialise, and this is partly how the Story of Me developed. I always had friends, and made new ones whenever I started a new school. And I can still pull the same tricks now, fitting in (enough, at least) more or less wherever I go.

But then I go to parties at friends' houses and end up feeling autistic and, frankly, nothing short of socially retarded. People seem to believe I function perfectly, but they are fooled by my tidying: I tidy at parties so as to have something to do, because I can't bear the silence of my own head at those moments, when I have nothing to say and plenty to think.

And as I sit here, on the verge of having only my own room to play in - nobody downstairs watching the telly - I am both excited and terrified. I know I have learned the basic practical skills - washing clothes and dishes, shopping, etc. - and I have learned them well thanks to Posh and her often unfathomable systems. So I know I can manage. And I want so much to find out what it will be like. I want to be ruler of my own space, with no-one else's opinion to care about unless I ask them in to that space. But I am scared of the dark corners in my head whence the monsters come. They pulse and lurk and crawl and are murky, deep creeping cellos and double basses and chromatic twisting and turning trumpets, eating away at the stuff that makes me what I am, devouring all the sense and logic and spark and ideas, until it is indeed a void.

So, it seems that the Story of Me is a bit more complicated. I am sociable, indeed I am, but I find it hard to get very close to people (for fear, I guess, of having to move away again). And it has for a long time seemed true that many of my friends are parts of circles of which I am not quite part. I don't care much for circles it's true, but it's interesting that I have tended to flit from one to the next never quite settling. Now I'm a grown-up, supposedly, I don't suppose this model even means much any more, but I was like that when there were circles - when I was at school - and I understand myself in those terms still. And so I flit, juggling the rings of friendships, because I am scared of dropping one.

It is crucial that I mark my own territory soon: the days of abjection will come, and rain plagues upon me, and I will collapse under the weight of it all, and then I can rebuild and I will be worth being again.

Int-: -elligence and -imidation

2006-07-06T09:03:00.000Z

I've just been moseying through the streets of Blogostan, checking out the latest from ITHOM, Rogers and Spurious...ITHOM's street is treelined and playful, even in the dark; the sun is shining today and it's a beautiful boulevard to be on; the mirrors there do not confuse or confine me, but allow the play of light and image and gaze. Rogers, as always, demonstrates the breadth and depth of his knowledge at every turn. This is a concrete jungle, much like the campus where we first met: a place of learning, with twists and turns and the ease-of-getting-lost. Spurious's realm is a motorway, a superhighway of information, a speed and a persistence in the epic that is his blog. Yet I notice I have described Spurious as 'intimidatingly intelligent' on my links list, and this reminds me of another conversation....

I sat with IQ in the bar, surrounded by strangers but with something of that closeness in our speech that is becoming joyfully frequent. She illustrated for me the nature of her relationship with Corona, her lover in her other life. 'Watch,' she said, and she conducted on the table a little dance between two finger-people...one set of finger-legs moved closer to the other, and the other moved a little back...step forward, step back...and gradually - bit by bit - the two moved closer. It made me laugh at the time, and I remain glad that she shared this with me, as she does such a good job of not allowing me to see much in the way of truly personal information. We discussed for a short time her relationship with Corona, and she explained something about a mutual intimidation that they experience of each other, based in no small part on their experience of each other's intelligence.

I explained that I - as someone who, like Corona, finds women sexually attractive - can relate to the notion of a woman being intimidatingly intelligent: good-looking, intelligent women are intimidating in some way, I explained. She seemed to be amused, and I remain unsure as to the extent to which I exposed my feelings at that moment.

But it's true: I experience a sense of captivation around her, and I have done it before with other intelligent women who I find physically attractive. I will no doubt do it again - it seems to be my pattern in life. What is intriguing is the difference of my experience of Spurious. He has a kind of cheeky charm that I could be attracted to if I were that way inclined, but I'm not. Nonetheless, I experience the intelligence he displays in his blog somewhat intimidating, but this is nowhere near the same sense of the word as I use it in relation to IQ and other Int women. In response to Spurious (and, for that matter, Rogers), I feel small, like I'm playing games I can never keep up with...like when I used to play Chase on my own in the playground as a child, hoping someone else would join in, but they were always busy with their own game. This is not a bad experience, exactly: on occasions it inspires me to attempt greater things, to jump higher, to run closer to the pack of other kids in the playground. With IQ and her kind, I feel intellectually more equal, like I can learn and teach and engage, like a game of chess...slowly organising our thoughts and ideas across the board, the pieces moving purposefully in a slow Sarabande. Yet, at the same time, I feel secondary, as if I am playing with the black pieces, led in the dance...and all this because of my other desires.

How do my sexual desires and the functions of my sexuality play with my experiences of int-elligence and int-imidation? Is it because Spurious and Rogers are men that in some way I automatically feel deferential? This feels like it might be part of it...there is maybe a sense that I could become what it is I desire in IQ and her kind, but I will never become what it is that I admire in Spurious and Rogers. And maybe it is partly my old, dormant desire to become what they are that leads me to avoid intellectual vulnerability with them by sharing my thoughts as I might with IQ, or do with Olga. (Although herein is evidence of the dual-INT: that I am not intimidated by Olga is the reason I can share in this way.) Because ultimately, I do not want to be like IQ or the other INT women I have wanted to have. I feel caught in a state of neither-nor, my self destabilised...wanting to be something I can never become; wanting to have something I can never have; admiring them both and with my response always generated qua response, rather than an autonomous act.

And there is a third, even more tricksy Int-: it is a difficult thing when int-elligence and int-imacy meet in someone so able to manipulate both of them.

A note to regular readers

2006-07-05T18:14:00.000Z

You may be interested to know that I have finally completed a post I had been working on for a while. Out of respect for Chronos, this new post appears much earlier in the proceedings, here . Thanks for dropping by.

Decisions, decisions...

2006-07-04T17:08:00.000Z

The saga of my search for accommodation has led me to ponder (as so much in this world seems to do...).

I've been working hard, investing bucketloads of emotional energy in an attempt to find a place to buy, and it now seems that the house I had been going to buy is not going to happen. The survey was a stinker, and I just don't think I want to take the risk. So I'm faced with two options: to search for another purchase; or to search for a place to rent. I've settled (I think) on the latter, since I just don't have enough emotional energy left to start from scratch, or, for that matter, much time, because term will start again before I know it.

Olga agrees heartily - full of sensible advice, she is. Posh, however, has made her feelings quite clear (as she is wont to do...), that buying would be far preferable. And their different responses has intrigued me. I was oscillating last night, and Olga also made very clear her thoughts, that renting for a while would give me the breathing space I need to make a proper decision, and that it would be perfectly reasonable to rent for a significant period of time. But, at the same time, she understood very well all my reasons for preferring to buy. Posh, on the other hand, did what she does best, which is to make me feel like my decision was wrong, almost entirely on the basis that it was different from what she would do.

How does she do that? She says all the right things - "It's up to you"; "It's not what I would do, but you have to make the decision"; "It's not up to me but...". These are all the same sort of things Olga would say. And yet Posh makes me feel like I'm just wrong. Maybe it's the tone of voice...maybe it's just my story...Can we ever honestly say that we know what someone else thinks, or intends us to think, or to what extent do we import our own baggage into the whole scenario? If there's something in Posh's voice, what makes me think that means anything? For sure, that age-old ideology that voice and meaning are entwined, that irrepressible notion that we can tell something about the speaker from the speech.

Posh subscribes to that ideology: her troubled relationship with her mother is based largely on "the way she [her mother] says things"; Posh "can just tell", she says, what her mother's subtext is when she says things. I like to think that I don't buy it, that our interpretation of what people say is always intensely filtered through our own stories about people and the world. And yet when Posh says these things to me about the buying/renting question, it feels very clear to me that she means to indicate my wrong-ness, even if she doesn't intend for me to understand that. Very complicated.

Can we scrub out the stories? How are those stories formed? All I can suggest is why they are formed, which goes back to an earlier blog point I made, when I suggested that we are all always so desperate to fix meaning. We want so desperately to understand, to know, and not to have meaning left hanging. And that is surely why we import our stories, because they allow a fixity that we could otherwise not achieve.

As for whether we can scrub them out...who knows? But the realisation that they are there and informing my feelings about people and the world takes me at least one step closer to being able to choose whether or not I accept them and their influence.

The limits of space

2006-06-27T17:35:00.000Z

Why does space matter? If space is the nothingness between places or people, how can we own it - isn't 'personal space' therefore an impossibility? IQ insists on standing close to me, walking close to me. We walked together around parts of the city today, and then we stood and talked about practical things. As we stood, I could see the hairs on her cheeks, every line on her face and the tensions of skin, the tiny dabs of mascara, the slight clinging-together of her lips as she spoke. She was too close for comfort and I felt like a rabbit in the headlights. Afterwards, all of the details of her face were imprinted in my brain, an aftershock, and for a while I couldn't rid myself of it.

It feels like a kind of space rape. When she's too close, I try to back off, for fear of seeming too close myself, and because it is not quite close enough and that taunts me. And yet she persists, forces herself into my space, that part of the nothingness which I do not even own or control. And once she has done that, it seems she has penetrated my mind against my will. I know too much of her face now, and I feel somehow violated.

That space is important, central to the comfort of two people standing together conversing, but how can I articulate the discomfort? Clearly it is impossible, because it all works so subconsciously. Maybe she understands me pulling away and wants to push forward. Maybe she thinks I am pushing, and is happy to be led closer. Maybe (most likely, I suspect) her comfort level is different on account of her different cultural background: perhaps this is my English politeness hard at work. But I cannot simply say anything: that really would not work, although it is not clear to me precisely why I cannot just say, "You are standing too close. Can you please give me some space?"

We have already been playing games, as I suggested before: step forward, step back. But now this is a physical reality...it is a dance indeed. If only the music were not so dissonant and harsh - if only it would play!

To see oneself being watched

2006-06-25T10:56:00.000Z

Today again I have sought my hero purposefully...here, I want to drag back the limp body of Authority and seek to understand the life it has and has not.

They say that every diary or journal is written for an audience, even if it is only the time-lagged audience of the one who wrote it. This of course is true - even more so of the blogosphere - and I have confessed to several people that I am an upstanding citizen of Blogostan. Nonetheless, I am shy at the thought of being watched, read, seen. Or rather, I blog-blush when I find that I have been read and commented upon.

Rogers has hauled me into his own little blogosphere again - along with some significant others: spurious and ITHOM - for examination, commented on my previous posts, and spoken about my leaving, my flight in some way from him as a teacher. I see that in the 10 years in which we have known each other - primarily in this role - I have grown, and I am at a natural juncture in my life now when I am moving on from various parts of an old life into new places, personally and professionally. (Saturn return, sweetie.) Yet I feel as if he will always be my mentor in some way. Even as we are working on equal terms, side by side, I still naturally defer to what I perceive to be his greater authority.

And this - as Olga would say - is a complicated thing. It is partly because I am so very used to Rogers knowing more, understanding more clearly, articulating more eloquently, that I wonder if I will ever experience myself as equal (even as we are of course different). And it is partly to do with my constant awareness of That Which I Don't Know, the things I Am Not, that awareness that is part of my personality and that makes me tend towards deference.

When I met Rogers, he gave me some utterly flippant advice, advice that Posh has since criticised as being rather unprofessional (although we'll leave commentary on Posh's position for a different day...!). At any rate...I was young and wet behind the ears, and he sat there in a position of authority, getting away with this flippantry. And then for months I sat with my fellow pupils and listened to what he had to tell us, not questioning a word as far as I remember. I believed him. Utterly. And somehow he taught me to think. And now - ten years on and because of him - I am where he was then, with the same responsibilities, and still some part of me refuses to accept that he had at that time any of the same failings I have now. I don't believe him to be perfect, of course not. But since he has not remained static either (as no-one does), he still seems bigger than me, and even that image I have of the historical Rogers will always be bigger than I will ever perceive myself, because the image I have of him at any present moment is bigger.

And this is what I understand to be a kind of Authority. That structure is deeply etched now into the way I interact with Rogers. To think that he could learn anything of worth from me is not impossible, as I understand that I have started to travel a different intellectual path, and we will always be able to teach each other as we meet at intellectual service stations along the way. But he will always be my mentor and, for me, he will always have Authority. It seems that Authority has managed to sustain itself in some cunning and devious way, grown its roots deep not to be pulled up, clawed its way into the mortar like ivy. This is not such a bad thing, I don't suppose, but I guess I have to start somehow to understand that I too can inhabit a position of Authority without guilt.

Ceci n'est pas aujord'hui

2006-06-14T11:44:00.000Z

So much in one short day. We greeted again, as we had done before. We spent the afternoon together - formal circumstances, but with a vague and undefinable sense of comfort and closeness and familiarity. Once or twice she looked at me, in the way she does sometimes, and the sense of closeness grew a little. It is growing slowly, and its growing is becoming something I can see and watch. But this is certainly no sunflower, shooting ever upwards, as if there is no time to wait for growing...this is an apple tree: plant it and watch it grow...but the waiting! I saw her off when she had to go again, back to where I think she believes her life really is. It gave us a little time, and it was good time. Intense, though: a short, sharp burst of that Growing.

There were more of those fleeting moments, snapshot images that I can still just about replay in my mind, pictures I want to hold on to tightly so that I can look at them whenever I choose. Apparently banal moments: I offered to take her rubbish; she joked that she wasn't one of my five-year-olds; and I apologised for being overly parental. She brushed it off, but with those eyes again, those damned eyes. She asked if I was still smoking: ah, she cares! We were close, physically close, and it was comfortable...charged...and good. We took the escalator and she was on the step above me, higher than me, taller for once. I had to concentrate hard on not exploring the beautiful architecture of her partial objects...I looked away, and then back at her, and as I was starting to fall once more into her eyes she asked what was on my mind: again, she cares! Of course I didn't explain...the best I could come up with was 'thinking about a blog post'!, which meant I outed myself as a blogger: oh dear - I am entering dangerous territory now...if she finds me it will be a dance with death.

It doesn't feel good to look at these images, though. It makes me aware of the gap I feel, the loss, the hole in the centre of me where I ought to have comfort with myself. I feel that gap physically when I take out these photos: I experience a falling sensation, as if I am collapsing into myself, caught by the trap that is my desire and falling headlong into the gaping hole that it has dug. And yet I try to fill that gap with these images, against all logic. Logic can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. This is not a hall for reasoning and rationality. I experience myself as fatally incomplete, and I feel myself trying to fix myself up, albeit with the very things that make me feel that incompleteness. Isn't this in some way true of us all? Are we not all fixated in some way on the things which remind us of our lack, our loss, the mourning which characterises our lives? Are we not entranced by it?

It became quite clear to me over that short space of time - the driving, the dropping off, the drink - that the closeness is deepening, but I am scared of losing myself again, in the hole inside, or in an other.

When we parted, I had to pull myself out of that hole and drive home. As I drove, and tried to claw my way up the sides of the abyss, I was aware that I couldn't bear the idea of sound. No music would have helped me - it would have made it so much worse. If it had been able to articulate the loss, give voice to my position in the hole, then it might have covered over the gap while I was still inside...buried alive.

When I awoke in the morning I was safe again, as if I had emerged from a coma, and it feels good to be able to listen, to bear music, to take the articulation. Amalia is singing for me now, giving me voice...Oh Amalia: the grit and the grain and the gone-ness of it all!

When Not-Paying-Attention works

2006-06-13T20:41:00.000Z

It was revealed to me several weeks ago that I was like a fox prowling outside a group of fenced-in chickens, impatient for my prey, pushing for the thing I thought I wanted. It seemed I did not trust that justice would prevail, that all would work out as it should. I still want what I wanted then, and there is still no balance, but things started to shift when I stopped paying attention.

A closeness has developed between me and IQ...there are moments of intimacy and charge and joint movement and synchronicity and when seem - ever so briefly - to move as one.

They always say that the right things come along when you stop looking for them...a watched kettle never boils...treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen. And yet I have been totally taken by surprise to see how much things changed when I started seeming disinterested. It has been a thoroughgoing shift, and there have also been snippets, brief moments or scenarios when it has emerged that way. Such as when we passed in the corridor, and I was on my way somewhere... he seemed otherwise engaged, and I smiled and said hello and turned to leave: she stopped me, held me with her eyes again, beautifully and intriguingly bespectacled as they were, and asked if I had time for a coffee.

The same so often works in my listening. Olga maintains there is no discernible difference between listening and hearing, a common distinction to make in the experience of music. And while that goes against my instinct, I am increasingly of the opinion that my instinct is just a training of sorts, that I have been led to believe in that distinction without ever having questioned it. I have been training myself to work with music on. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't, and a lot of the time it has to be the right kind of music. What I get from that kind of listening I'm not yet sure, apart from the benefit of listening to more music than I would otherwise have time to do. But in those moments when I'm not working, and yet not paying attention, such as when I'm driving - switched off, determinedly not-thinking lest I suffocate with the boredom of the A1 - then I can fall in and out of the music, experience something new and worthwhile.

I must learn to trust that Not-Paying-Attention works better sometimes than pushing, prowling, digging a hole under the fence and snatching the chickens. Maybe the farmer will leave the gate open...

To think or not to think

2006-06-13T19:58:00.000Z

Woe, woe! The sheer agony of mediocrity! I have been subjected to such banality over the last few days, such utterly mind-numbing pointless RUBBISH I have had to read...it just makes me so CROSS! My head wants to IMPLODE from the PAIN it...Woe! Woe, and triple WOE!

So often, they tick the boxes, robotic regurgitation of STUFF...just not stuff that DOES anything, or SAYS anything. It is so EMPTY. They write as if they simply don't care. Quite probably they don't. There's so much they don't know, don't want to know, don't care why it might be exciting to want to know...

I took the final step today in the story so far of my own brilliance, or at least my own CARE. Five years - nearly six until this day - of THINKING, prepared for by a previous four years, led up to by a lifetime of wanting-to-know, wanting-to-understand. There's a lot I don't care about: Wayne Rooney's f***ing metatarsal for one. But like Alice in Wonderland, 'I feel curiouser and curioser...'. I have always been curious, inquisitive, and wanted to know STUFF. I find it interesting to UNDERSTAND and KNOW. And being curious in this way seems to have made me curious...a curiosity.

I am among friends now, other Curiosities, and I feel safe. But the perennial display of banality that is Marking always makes me wonder whether it's all worth it. Maybe it would all be so much easier if I didn't THINK so much; maybe I would live in that state of ignorant bliss that is Not Paying Attention; maybe I would still have my home, the Happy Little Life that I thought I could have had...

My boys make me wonder too. As they are growing, they are displaying worrying signs of caring. Big Boy especially always wants to understand, to know how things work, and why things happen...always asking questions; he talks of beautiful flowers and lovely smells...he pays attention. He too is already doubly Curious, and I worry that I won't be there to help him be happy being so. I am not with him because my own Curiosity was considered too much. She-who-decided-this was also Curious, once upon a time, but she has decided to be a victim...she has quashed much of it, and it has made her dangerous and frustrating. The stuff of caring is there...she can care, she just doesn't want to, and she doesn't seem to want anyone else to either. Is it just safer and easier not to think, to care, to be Curious?

Utterly normal

2006-06-03T11:37:00.000Z

Well, I've always liked these little tests...tick a few boxes and learn all about yourself blah blah. So I stumbled across the Moir-Jessel Brain Sex Test. My results?...If I'm male, I score 40, making me a Normal Male. If I'm female, I score 50, making me a Normal Female in Overlap Range (most females score between 50 and 100). Utterly normal whichever way, right?

I touched her

2006-05-31T00:14:00.000Z

I went to meet her, and when we found each other we greeted. The world stopped for a moment, and we greeted...not as acquaintances or friendly people or friends of friends, but as friends. There was no Peck on the Chic-o this time, but a moment of real reunion, friends who had not seen each other in a few weeks. But friends who perhaps didn't quite know yet that they might be friends, still pretending hard to be acquaintances or friends of friends or friendly people.

I touched her as we greeted, in a way I didn't mean to. In a way I didn't even notice at the time. But in a way that I cannot shake from my fuzzy little head. Did she notice? Would she have cared? We are certainly not friends enough that I could have laughed it off, so it seems I have to live with the guilt or the doubt or the self-doubt...or the excitement.

In that one moment I realised that we were more friends than I'd dared to believe, and yet less than either of us would admit. Step forward, step back: I don't think we'll be dancing for real any time soon.

Performing the tangible

2006-05-15T18:19:00.000Z

I have picked my hero-target deliberately this time, instead of stumbling and falling at its feet as I have tended to do so far. Today I want to dance in the network of sound, performance, recording, score, analysis...an unending dance, to be sure.

This post is something of a continuation of my thoughts below, on the Shostakovich concert, and previously on other concerts, liveness, and so on...So, here we go. There is, it seems to me, a series of words - ideas and things and ways of being - that bear down heavily on music and musical experiences and intersect in interesting and complex ways, and I would like to start by naming some of them: score; performance; original; affect; effect; liveness; recording; listening; understanding...These things attach themselves like leeches to our reception of music in various ways, and wherever and whenever they entangle themselves with each other they send anyone who's trying to explain or account for them into a complete headspin.

So, where to start? Whenever I try to untangle one part of the knot, the other parts seem to tighten. In the 'notationally centric' world of music that I was used to and (until embarrassingly recently) used to endorse pretty much wholeheartedly, the score is The Thing. Without the score, the little tadpoles dotted meaninglessly around the page, demanding that they be understood and making little effort to clarify themselves, the music made is not quite as valid. Improvisation, for instance - a flighty little whore, displaying itself for everyone to see with no heed to decorum or the merits of reproduction...Folk - far too gregarious and disrespectful of author-ity, and also showing little care for the possibility of exact reproducibility.

But pop, rock, techno, house, any of those musics which enjoy their circulation primarily as recordings? These also revel in display, displays of technology, of 'authenticities', and are more communally authored as opposed to being validated by a single father figure. But they also often hide behind a single face, forging their author-ity, impostors; and there are so many occasions on which the technology serves to write itself out, covering over its own footprints. The recording also seems to try to circulate as a score, offering itself up as an exact, authentic, authoritative object to serve as a reference point for anyone wishing to reproduce it.

BUT two things...First, that potential for reproduction is always forestalled; and second, The Recording is not always in the singular. To elaborate...There is often more than one recording of a single track, even if they are all author-ised by the same artist or group: an album version and a radio edit, perhaps; or a remix, or a remaster...Sometimes a live version circulates, and then one has to wonder what to make of the audience noise: is that part of the musical object too? Just as, in film, one might ask how to balance diegetic noise with non-diegetic music in the act of listening. And even if one could tie The Recording down to a singular, the figure of the Author is more overbearing than it is in any piece of Classical, Romantic, or other Notationally Centric music: at least I, an amateur pianist, am allowed to play Beethoven; as soon as I leave the Steinway for a Stratocaster, or leave Beethoven for the Beatles, I am no longer a performer but a trespasser. The rules of my freedom of expression are altered, my freedom itself radically constrained, my 'success' always measured against The Recording.

BUT something else: that Recording is already troublesome, before it reaches us. The medium by which it arrives leaves a gap between sound and experience. I spoke before about the intense tangibility of liveness, albeit a temporary one...But I feel increasingly as if that tangibility may be part of the music, like the brush-strokes are part of a painting but not of a print...Oh, so Benjaminian! Sigh. But when it comes to analysis - and by that I mean something I ought to explain in a moment - I am wondering whether the analysis I mean is better facilitated by live performances of music without scores (or deciding not partake of that abominable practice - bringing a score to the performance when such a thing exists).

If we care about the experience of music in our analysis, shouldn't the score come afterwards? Indeed, should it even come at all? Maybe it should remain a private thing, available only to perfomers of music where scores matter, and the rest of us can stay busy with our inadequate transcriptions. We already accept that transcriptions of non-score-based music tend to leave a gap, tend to miss out the level of The Music which makes it worth listening to. I think it's time to accept fully that The Score generally is also inadequate, more inadequate than The Recording. And that The Recording also misses the mark somewhat, since it denies much of the physical possibilities of The Performance. But, until Elvis and Karen come back from the dead, until it is possible for me to have Liveness every time, whatever the music, I have to do with recordings, and I will have to continue with the crude ways I have of enhancing the listening experience, lifting it above mere Listening.

My requiem

2006-05-15T16:15:00.000Z

Music touched me again, defined me--two nights ago-- ...broke me, but that has been since...Prokofiev's 2nd violin concerto, followed by Shostakovich's 8th Symphony; Mariinsky Orchestra (The Orchestra Formerly Known As the Kirov); conducted by Valery Gergiev; violinist Vadim Repin. The Prokofiev was beautiful...more of that Russian fire which has left me scarred...But it was the Shostakovich which has kept me thinking.

In what is turning out to be a typical move/response for me, two things arose - more accurately, more than two things have arisen in the day-and-a-half since being violently musicked.

The first thing that struck me at the concert itself was the sense of threat, especially in the Shostakovich. This, I'm sure, is not a new response, but since I had been giving thought to my previous posts on ones and twos, I was intrigued by the ways in which the threats were achieved. There were intensely menacing moments, those in which I was not on the edge of my seat--as it had been suggested that I might be, before the concert--but pinned down in it, unable to wriggle free of the music enveloping me, drawing round like a thick smoke and denying me breath. At those moments, the orchestra moved as one...from the very start, with the cellos and double basses creeping and lurking over a minor scale, leaving their dark stringy slime behind them. It was the unity of the orchestra that most threatened, contained most power.

There was danger in the solos too, something like an egotistical virtuosity, breaking away from the group which had offered some safety in its mass. These moments of disunity might--on the surface--seem to be the more threatening: they are embodiments of disruption. But it was the collective whole--a fragmented whole--of the orchestra as one, guided skillfully by the single, simple figure of the unadorned Gergiev, that built up the tension, represented the mass, collected conscious. The solo parts broke that tension--the tension demanded to be broken--gave moments of relief, lest I be crushed being pinned to my seat.

The intense physicality of the experience has also stayed with me, and this is the second thing I wanted to start pondering, especially because it seems to tie in with a whole set of feelings. I had a conversation with IQ at a concert once about the in/tangibility of live music. I said I found it more intangible than the recording--she argued the opposite, suggesting that it had an overwhelming presence and tangibility that was part of the musical magic we were both experiencing. At the Shostakovich, the musical text and the acoustics of the space combined to allow the percussion to pulse right through me, resonating in counterpoint with the natural rhythms of my body, such that I felt the terrifying power of the gong, the cymbals, the side drum, and--worst--the timpani. This was an unbearable tangibility, one that made my skin freeze and all of my internal organs shake.

But then it was gone, as quickly as it had come...quicker, even, since the composer had led me into it in some way--tricked me into accepting its inevitability. It was gone in a flash: like quicksilver...Mercury. But Mercury is the communicator, lord of language, giver of the gift of the gab...What was communicated here? Something intangible. Unbearably physical, visceral, tangible, and yet gone in an instant without having communicated anything on the surface level. In fact, very Mercurial in its shiftiness and shadowiness. Live performance--especially at moments like this--seems to be always entirely tangible and intangible. Not wanting to sound pathetically diplomatic, but it seems IQ and I could both be right.

This experience has broken me since, as I suggested above, and I am waiting to rebuild myself. After the concert, I felt in my mind's eye like a Charming Man...another delusion, another moment of dislocation between fantasy and reality, a dislocation brought into view by those moments where the two collide. In my fantasy, I can woo IQ, charm her, persuade her of things which she has not yet imagined. I can do to her what Shostakovich did to me. But in my desperation to recall all those moments I felt in the concert hall--those flashes when my fantasy and my reality both ceased momentarily to exist, when I had the power to do anything--I have been clutching at straws. I cannot place exactly the turns of phrase, the shifts in musical texture, the building and breaking of musical tensions...I am unable to specify those points. In no small part, this has to do with my unfamiliarity with the symphony, as I had not heard it before that night. But in my desperation to recall them, I have realised that this dance between the tangible and the intangible is precisely the dance I am engaged in with my fantasy. There are brief flashes of recall, moments that are gone as quickly as they come when fantasy and reality coincide.

So many dualisms...

2006-05-10T10:02:00.000Z

...so little time.

Male/female; mind/body; masculine/feminine; nature/culture; natural/synthetic; machine/organism; sane/insane; right/wrong; inside/outside; Self/Other; me/you...

And one in each of them is exalted as the hero. Or, more accurately, each of them is exalted by different parties who invest in their hero.

But again the alterity of these things perturbs me, especially as each of them gets mapped onto other dualisms: male-mind-masculine-culture-blah-blah-blah...And they never seem to stand up as properly dualistic. Synthetic is Bad, but links through machine to culture and then to mind, which is Good...so how does that work? I am confused.

Most exciting (and terrifying) are those moments when the dualisms fail, or are stepped outside of (or simultaenously held inside...inside or out?!)...when things occur that are perched precariously on the slash between the two. The cyborg, the transsexual, the voice that refuses meaning through language...Teetering on the top of that already unstable character - unstable insofar as it means through its angledness: the slash is waiting to fall over, and the top of it is a dangerous place to be...I find myself waiting to fall one way or the other, land on a side, but continue to wobble...the tension mounts to an unbearable state and I can only find refuge in the box in the centre of the Geminian glyph...contained, held in by the sides. In that insideness (ironically?) I find the freedom to dance through the other dualisms.

Maths for beginners

2006-05-04T23:15:00.000Z

One plus One = One: two trees intertwined, each propping up the Other

One plus One = Two: independence from the Other

One plus One = One: when one of those Ones is not really One. I chase and do not catch.

Why can't I stop running?

Because I am not One, but Two. I have always been Two: Geminian and split. More split than the average developed subject, I sense. No reason not to be, but it intrigues me: there are two sides to me in nearly everything I do.

I am Two. She is not really One. That ought to leave me complete - more than complete - without the Other. Q.E.D?

I think, therefore...?

2006-05-04T22:26:00.000Z

All I know is that I exist. This ultimately confuses me and sends me into a spin about what to say. It seems to me that the general belief is upheld that a number of things/people/animals have some semblance of reality and/or autonomy. But, of course, since all I can say is that I exist - and not even my body... - then all I can really determine is that I manage to sustain the conception that other things outside of my mind have autonomy.

So, my utterly confused position notwithstanding, let me identify the iconic culture which I wish to dissect, namely the culture of mind-and-body (leaving aside, for now, and in sheer desperation at the already tightly-tangled knot of the situation, the spirit...). On the one hand, we are faced with the deeply-scored line that is the idea of the Mind/Body Dualism; on the other, the equally strong-standing notion that the relationship between the two is not so dualistic. (In fact (of course) the latter relies heavily on the former for its sustenance.)

It is quite clear to me that both the Dualism and the Holism parties have some validity in the world which may or may not 'really' exist outside of my own head. Experiencing physical pain affects one's capacity to function effectively on a mental level; when one exercises one's mind to a high level for a sustained period, physical exertion provides the ultimate balance; overwork seems obviously to result in sickness, the act of the body demanding respite...and other examples, such as the case of 2Shoes, the origin of whose childhood bronchial problems was never clear to me as either physical or psychological.

How I operate in relationship to these two heavily guarded outposts is this: as someone who persistently experiences the body as a traitor to the mind. This, in part, is because I hold my mind in infinitely higher regard than my body, but allow me to explain further. As I have explored in a previous post, I experience a significant discrepancy between my gendered self and my embodied sex. The ways in which this manifests itself constitute (to my mind...) nothing short of High Treason against my mind. The hormonal cycles to which I am unfortunately subject are a prime example. They reduce me to pain, for one, and force me to confront the reality of my sex. In fact, I believe the entire female reproductive system to be deeply flawed, but specifically I feel evolution has let us down somewhere: there are some of us who categorically have no desire to reproduce, and this - we are somehow led to believe - may be a trick of the body also; and yet those of us in this position are still born with the capacity to do so. The ugly and regular rearing of my reproductive system seems to me to be my body deriding some more settled and 'real' version of my self - my mental self. Moreover, the hormones are cunning, sly, and little short of evil, since they also work by disrupting the mind, bringing emotion where there was none, undermining concentration, and generally hindering the realisation of mental potential.

Other bodily systems conspire against my mental control of myself. On the one hand, I have certain relationship with my reproductive system; on the other, I am still subject to that desire for physical, sexual, intimate contact with an other (which is itself an iconic culture...of which more another time...). This desire is, I presume, also a trick of the body on some level. Again, my raging desires, which I feel bodily, work against my mind specifically by working through my mind, and I suspect I am not unusual in this respect: who hasn't found themselves playing mind games in the pursuit of physical satisfaction?

It seems then that the two factions - Dualism and Holism - are not as valid as I first believed. There is in fact another element, which may be a third member of the Dualism/Holism dualism, or instead may make those two fall on the sword of their own dualism: that third element is that the Mind and Body, instead of working independently or together, in service of each other, in fact work against each other.

But, Mind Over Matter, eh? Maybe the Mind can come back and win the day, as it did for Vaughn...

On music and sense(s)

2006-04-30T19:51:00.000Z

I drove blind through the city streets last night, sick with the internalisation of my emotions. It was music again that carried me along, directed my soul. The blindness was crucial. My sight was no longer important...Dick questioned the importance of sight in her comment to a previous post, and now I have understood. Only my hearing was enabled as I drove. Hearing creates my emotions...amplifies them so I can hear them. Smell also has this effect from time to time: I walk through a smell and into another emotional state, another time and place. It is not sight that does this. Sight does not recall things for me. It gives me things to recall, but hearing is what allows me to access them. I was blind, but now I hear.

I am living my life through music and sound at the moment. I experience feeling through music...It is music that saves me, and deadens me sometimes, awakens me to death and void and the safety of oblivion. It takes me away and gives me feeling again, focuses my soul. I ask again: what is it about music that can do this? This hall of harvested heroes is not for visual display. It may be looked upon, but it does not display itself for looking. It contains sounds, it is sound. Sounds and music give me space; visual objects restrain me. I see things that are representable; what I hear cuts straight to the feeling, bypassing the obviously symbolic. Of course it is a thing of symbols, codes, the making of meaning, and it is only a certain level of understanding that allows its effects, as I have already suggested. But the visual just doesn't do it for me. The aural gives my internal state something to attach to.

Of course there are different modes of listening...attentive, critical, indifferent, unconcentrated, distracted, physically-responsive...[Rogers, btw, in his great and densely eloquent way, ponders listening as a cultural-historical category.] But what is to be said of those moments when all of these modes collide, as they did for me last night? I could hear absolutely all of the instrumental and vocal parts, as if they were being written out in front of me: as blind as I was, it seemed as if I saw the music.

On reading Rogers' response to Kafka's Auf der Galerie [Up In The Gallery], I should acknowledge that I am writing under the shadow of what Rogers calls "the great post-Schopenhauerian articulation of music as a kind of narcotic." Certainly, at this juncture in my life, music has serioulsy narcotic powers over me: I have already written of taking it as a prescription...I was, in the music, everything that Kafka and Rogers between them suggested, but at the same time it was so utterly different. I lost my self, and the dangerous pleasure of self-pity overwhelmed me. But so often I seem to find my self in a musical space, when it gives voice to my internalised, otherwise inaccesible state. I cried last night, but hardly without knowing it: it was a fierce, sick crying, one that not only foreclosed my masculinity but my femininity as well, a foreclosure brought about by their violent collision.

I could have cried 'Stop!' at any time...but it would not have been a thrusting over-articulation of masculinity, or at least not in the way that I immediately understand such a phrase. At the most, it would have been a desperate defence against being swallowed up by the womb which enclosed me and stripped away the handles on which I hang my identity, and in this sense maybe it would have been a masculine kind of response. But overall, I feel that the cry of 'Stop!' which did not come would, in its desperation and response to complete submission, would not have articulated my masculinity.

At the time, it didn't seem to matter what music, but of course it did matter intensely: the next track took me somewhere else, allowing me to externalise again. It was the change of track - the Stopping that happened without my request - that gave my masculinity its space again. All of this is more evidence, for me, that the ever-exalted heroes of gender are more troubled than the idiots believe.

Todo sobre mi madre

2006-04-28T15:24:00.000Z

So, I left home 10 years ago...seeking my independence and my self, as any teenager will...breaking away from home, enjoying the potential of that moment of separation. And yet I never really left. I still seek the approval of my parents. I understand that's not uncommon, but it bothers me. More to the point, before the potential had been realised, I fell straight into a relationship with a replacement mother, one who became a mother during our life together. I've never been an adult without her, and now I am finding it really hard to grow up.

A few things have happened recently (the details are boring) that remind me that I'm too reasonable as a human being. I sacrifice myself in a search for the approval of others. Can I start to grow up at this stage in my life? I live in almost constant fear of not being liked. I know people like me...I work hard to be likeable. I just don't know how to like myself and treat myself well in the process.

The mother is that which presides over me and my realm...The mothers whom I have loved and left. Is it too late for a proper separation from my mothers? Perhaps it is time to start seeking that abjection which comes at the point of separation, which also allows the separation.

Death and the maidens

2006-04-27T13:50:00.000Z

Filth.
Loathsome, abject, despicable filth.
Hatred and Desire merge into one; at the apex of Desire emerges the unfulfillability of the desire, and Hatred ensues. I have been on the verge of death again, the death of my self. I felt void last night: it was everything I had wanted to feel the night before, but when it came, it brought the filth.

It is a battle of boundaries. The fusion of everythingness and nothingness again, but this time anti-sublime. The collision of me and the other. Close to the implosion of my desires, I walk on the battlefield, where the canons echo around me while inside and outside each attempt to destroy the other. My body is scarred; the scars are remnants of a previous battle where no winner was declared. A ceasefire was called, but the violence has begun again. No bloodshed yet...no shots will be fired while Hatred and Desire remain externally directed. But the point when they retract and turn in on themselves will see me walk into no-man's land, at the centre of the gunfire, which I will no longer be able to hear.

The inside and the outside collide brutally. My scars are symbols of the points where the inside has broken free, and they have become parts of my border with the world. They represent the collapse of boundaries which long to be transgressed again and again. I am not the only scarred body in my life: there are other scars whose stories I want to learn, and which I want to kiss better. The mouth too is a checkpoint, a bridge, between the realms of inside and out: can it heal the other border, the open border of the scars?

There was temporary relief in Annie's melisma of 'bliss'. It was a carefully placed melisma, timed and pitched deliberately, no loss of control. But it became the very jouissance that it articulated, and I fell once more into music, saved by one maiden as I am crushed by another. I will take this as my prescription. That voice - that moment of only voice - is another transgression of boundaries. The voice breaks free of the body which produces it, roams, and launches itself into the ears and soul of the listener. It is not the mouth that heals, not the borderline...but the voice that it projects, the transgressor of borderlines. Alterity risks falsehood; distinctions on the basis of Otherness are not worth much to me at this time, as I sense little value in the borders on which they are founded. Thresholds are a source of great danger to me, and I find myself constantly falling into the black spaces between what they try to keep apart. Some of these spaces are not so black, but as long as the value of boundaries is upheld, the experience of falling in between them will frequently be a dark one for me.

Last night a DJ saved my life

2006-04-26T08:48:00.000Z

Actually, it was a string quartet. I went to the concert feeling on the verge of death, emotionally. After the emotional excitement of the last couple of days, the anticipation and the anti-climax, the continuous low-level tension which I experience at the moment, I wanted to feel void, oblivion.

It was a programme of Russian string quartets: Borodin 2; Prokofiev 2; and Shostakovich 2. The first movement of the Borodin was fierce, captivating. Indeed, most of the faster movements were like this...played with fire, and I must confess I got burned. But the slow movements: oh! the slow movements! They were nothing short of sublime. The Borodin slow movement had me feeling weightless, and the Shostakovich took me beyond reason and physicality into a space of utter nothingness and everythingness all at once. It was without a doubt one of the most intense musical experiences of my life.

What is it about music that can do this? I do not wish to revive any kind of hero of music as the most sublime of the arts, capable of universal meaning and effect. I was deeply irritated, and frankly concerned, to have been involved in a discussion once with otherwise intelligent people, music scholars, who were defending this idea. For me, that hero carries too much risk of resurrection to be able to lie slain in my hall. The music that became part of me last night was only able to do what it did because I understood something of it. I understood the structures, the play between instruments, the changes in texture and dynamics, the tension and release of harmonies, the musical and performative construction of passion and torment and pain and divinity and beauty.

It is only because of my understanding of such things that I was allowed to take the journey I took last night. The idea of music as universal may not live on in this hall; but the live idea of music's potential for the sublime is more than welcome.

The eyes have it

2006-04-25T16:29:00.000Z

Eyes. The eyes of the desired one. Bespectacled, they ignite a
terrible urge to remove the glass obstacle, in which action there is the collapse of the fascination. With or without the prosthesis, eyes can do amazing things. Some eyes seem to look with hooks that embed themselves in the back of your brain and suck out your reason. So much can be said with the eyes, even as they do not speak. And yet they do not say anything reliably. Windows to the soul? Or black holes into which I fall and fall until I cannot feel the weight of my limbs any longer?

In the speech of eyes there lies the truth about all speech: that there exists a gap between what is said and what is heard. In spoken speech, we manage to pretend there is no such gap: it is a matter of survival in the symbolic. But with the eyes, we want so hard to fix the meaning, to comprehend, that we reveal the gaudiness of our desires, our desire to fix meaning at all times.

The eyes are fixed in their sockets, and yet they roam, they come out and capture us, draw us in, retreat again. Few pairs of eyes are very remarkable, and yet all of them have this amazing potential to be cosmically special.

You always want what you can't have

2006-04-24T19:25:00.000Z

Anger.

Self-loathing.

Failure.

Mourning.

Wishful thinking.

Desire.

Lust,
Violent lust.

Hate turns to want,
Want turns to need,
Need turns to need not,
Red hot, Desirous attachment.

I'll see her soon, and maybe she will dance. I want to dance with her, moving as one, as she says it happens.

I ache for another moment like the ones we had before, those fierce minutes when we talked as if there was nothing else in the world, encapsulated in the dark and the leather and the candles and the wine. Maybe if we had another such moment it might...might what? It would do nothing that is good for me.

I build up my heroes, and preserve them, pinned to a board like butterflies...maybe still quivering involuntarily and dead...for examination later: a morbid fascination; picking at the scabs of my life like a child.

To P or not to P

2006-04-23T15:10:00.000Z

As happens on occasions, a few small moments have merged in my life to give me cause to ponder. The first was a conversation I had with IQ several weeks ago; the second was a comment from my eSpanish friend Compost; the third was a short article in a psychoanalysis journal. IQ and I were discussing everything and anything about gender and sexual identity; Compost said "Lots of lesbians I know don't like penetration"; and the journal article was reinvestigating Freud's judgements on vaginal versus clitoral orgasms. The author of the article seemed to conclude that there was little use in trying to distinguish between the two, in part because of the physiology of the act of penetration, and the metonymic relationship between the two female genital areas in question. It occurred to me that throughout the article, the assumption had been made that the orgasms for discussion were a response to stimualtion by an other, and that the other was male. Two obvious gaps present themselves to me: lesbian penetration, and self-penetration.

Why is it that penetration (regardless of what it is with or of) is equated with certain modes of femininity? If one does not subscribe to the most common modes of femininity, those modes most commonly accepted, what happens when one is penetrated? Can penetration and butchness not work together? Does butch always have to imply penetrator, top, active? It is, the story goes, about submission: the gay male top is less of a fag than the bottom. In the case of self-penetration, though, there is no other to submit to: one submits to oneself...and if one is a butch, then might one be submitting to a gendered model that seems to fit within the normative power dynamics prescribed by the psychonalysis deployed by the above-mentioned author?
Perhaps butch penetrative lesbian masturbation can collapse the model...Hero slain?

You're only as good as your last post

2006-04-21T15:06:00.000Z

...and thus I enter the blogosphere. After being inspired by my good friend and companion Rogers, who in turn was inspired by the spurious Polar, I have decided to give it a whirl, and - as Rogers suggests - harvest the heroes of the blogosphere. Or, more specifically, do some unpicking of the heroic fabric outside of said blogosphere. The heroes which I intend to target are not only physical beings, but ideas, modus operandi, ideologies, and the like. I want this to be a space for planting ideas about some of the prevailing value systems, and to this end I will ruminate over cultural icons and iconic cultures, and no doubt talk a lot about myself in the process...Not that I am either a cultural icon or an iconic culture myself, of course, but I operate (don't we all?) within and between the spaces which those things carve out, and with certain deeply embedded ideologies which they both symbolise and create.

And so to the body of the first post, at the time of writing also my last. In fact, perhaps to my own body. It is an average body, average height, about average weight, averagely attractive, I suppose. And yet it does not map averagely on to my self. My mind is not average. I am neither unaveragely stupid nor unaveragely intelligent, but my mind works in ways different from the minds of many, or at least this is my assumption. The details of my mind's workings will, I'm sure, become clearer over the life of this blog, but for now I want to discuss the mind-body relationship. The sexed appendages with which God blessed me express a body to which my mind is not committed.

Today's hero, then, is the notion that one's physical sex concurs with one's gendered experience. We already knew, of course, that the two do not entirely and always concur, and yet somehow the myth is sustained that they do and/or should. Herein lies the story of my blog alias: like Pinocchio, and since I can remember, I always wanted to be a Real Boy. I have long had an idea that such things exist. But of course, one is not born but is made a boy. In my case, I was made a boi, since I never learned how to be a woman. I now purposefully refuse to pay attention in class, and cultivate my boihood.

At the same time, since being captivated by the beautiful IQ, I have contemplated my own femininity as well. I now experience more consciously something of what she meant when she suggested that one's gender is an alteritous formation. Again, I guess we already knew that, but I feel very strongly now that I am consciously living my gender. Not forming it consciously, exactly...not cultivating some activist gender-bending identity...It is as if I am watching my gendered self from the outside.

Maybe most people have this experience. I have no vested interest in being the only one who feels like this--frankly I don't care either way. I just wish there were a bit more room for gendermorphing, and expressing one's gendermutability. In an effort to create some such space, space in which I somehow intend to operate in this blog, I hereby slay this hero.