‘Their father’s world is too strange’

 Posted by at 10:54 am  Hitting the Potholes  Comments Off
Aug 162013
 

photo-2

The title is a phrase from The Tunnel and it provokes the question: What happens when the link cannot be made? I went to visit my cousin last week – he is about the same age as me, a couple of months older to be exact – but he is now suffering from vascular dementia and needs 24 hour care. His partner is looking after him; I think, heroically: I don’t know how long she will be able to maintain it. She explains the world to him so that he can manage it. And I lift up his hand to shake it or maybe simply to hold it in a way which I hope is reassuring. Later she takes him to the toilet and then goes out to take the car out of the garage in preparation for a doctor’s appointment and asks me to help him after he has washed his hands. He stands with dripping hands not knowing what to do. I hand him the towel and then he dries them.

On the way back into London I drop into Westminster Cathedral and light a candle and sit in the Lady chapel. Upset and maybe bewildered is the right word. Later I notice that I can almost envy his having her explain the world to him.

Soldier boy, soldier blue

 Posted by at 3:31 pm  Echo Effects  Comments Off
Mar 082013
 

photo-1Soldier boy, soldier blue which war were you fighting? Ah huh, the Freudian father wars I think it must have been back there in 1960s Berlin. Play therapy you might call it. Or ‘it does no harm,’ as the family visitor responded. It does no harm. But we thought the war was over even though some war or other was in the news all the time or at least almost all the time. Or to put it another way it was always in the imagination, in our dream work. Monsters chasing us down darkened streets as we dived this way and that to evade our would be captors, until like in the movies we come up against the dead-end of torn corrugated iron and barbed wire and turn to face what we know we have coming to us. What we deserve.

What heroes we were back then. Heroes of a thousand battles; yet to discover the endless  possibilities of wrong decisions and misconceived thoughts. And every piece of writing leaves the trace, or perhaps it’s a shadow, of what I should have been writing. But I have to get on with the next piece – I can’t spend (waste) time going over the same old ground again. I have to move on. To finish a piece of writing is to realise that it is not finished – to reveal merely the trace waiting to be realised, the shadow of a what is waiting in the wings.

Is this a different type of war? What about the peace studies? What about leaving the war behind?

Does purging help? What filth do I have to get out of this thing I might call a body or life or something else. Receive it, take it in, transform it, put it out. Transform it – what Freud called the dream work.

I tried to call it retiring but it seems that I just have to work harder.

It would be good, I suddenly have the idea, to be a stand-up comic.

I would be so hopeless – so better not.

Reflect.

Keep writing.

There is a certain hard graft in reading Geoffrey Hill’s poems. This is a few lines from one I’ve been working at:

‘Prowess, vanity, mutual regard,

It seemed I stared at them, they at me.

That was the gorgon’s true and mortal gaze:

Averted conscience turned against itself.’

From Funeral Music 7

It seems to me that he works at language in a way that I can barely imagine.

Keep writing, the ancient clown shouted.