Soldier 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.