Recasting The Romance Of The Rose [and other ['literary'?] 'conceits'].
+
'Originally' (always some doubts about 'orginality') written in 'vernacular' '13th century' (always some doubts about 'dating') French(ish) (always some doubts about 'language') by
Guillaume De Lorrris (more male than female) (early 13th century)
Jean De Meun (more male than female) (later 13th century - probably died about 1305)
+
Prose translation into late 20th century English by Frances Horgan (spelling?) (a translator more female than male, I take it, judging by the first name) first published 1994 - Oxford World's Classics series)
+
Chaucer (more or less):
... scholars and lay people were all agreed ... the guy was a crackpot ...
+
TSE[l[l]iot[t] (spellling?): 'Humans cannot stand too much reality.'
+
TSE: ''After the event He wept.
He promised "a new start."
I made no comment.
Why should I resent?''
+
Saturday 17_03_2007
+
What happens in [a] 'romance'? ... elements of the real world are taken and ... one way or another 'transformed' ...
Everyday realities are 'departed from' - in some ways 'transcended' - but never left behind completely ...
+
In the real world, today, the first caller of the day, at about 9.30 in the morning, was the young woman - whose name (in my own hung-over-drink-be-fuddled state) I could not remember - from across the road, cadging a cigarette for her partner/husband. She was dressed in a white dressing gown.
+
And when she had combed her hair carefully and decked herself out in her finest clothes, her day's work had just begun.
+
(Lady Idleness) '... to excite the desire of the featherbrained males, she had ...'
+
Back-bearings ...
'Heraclitus Society' stuff ...
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Thu Jun 27, 2002 2:14 pm
Subject: Re: B-Grade Stuff
Facing apparent checkmate - or worse, perhaps, stalemate - or just
dying of terminal loneliness and frustration - do you resign to get
it over with? or just go through the motions until the whole process
(which can seem to be mostly beyond your control) comes to an end of
some sort?
Sooner of later the pieces and the board will crumble to dust, and
the dust will scatter, and no one will be able to tell that a game of
chess was ever played where the board and pieces once were ... and no
one will ask who played it, or when it was played, or where it was
played, or how it was played, or why it was played ... and the small-
scale seeming events will not seem to matter then, and will not even
be known about as an event then ...
... but traces will remain ... and consequences will still be
reverberating widely ...
And when I resign and go into a torpor ... which can last months,
even years ... I do eventually wake up again ... to find that I had
not resigned after all ... and to find that, to my surprize, some
progress seems to have been made after all [of course that might be
an illusion ... or wishful-thinking] ... and I think: well maybe soon
it will reach a more satisfying resolution ...
... and then I think: that is some fucking hope ...
But when it just seems like a matter of waiting .. and enduring for
the sake of endurance .. there does not seem much point in struggling
on ... there has to be more recognitions and fellowship-sharing
feedbacks to make it seem more worth it ... otherwise it seems like a
futile exercise ...
+
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Sat Jun 8, 2002 4:34 am
Subject: Jane Makeover
Riverland is full of all sorts of fashions ... and girls who would
make natural models ... which is why we sent out own special
correspondent little Ms June Makeover to investigate a local
modelling course.
It started as a typical Saturday morning. It finished with her legs
aching, a £13 parking ticket, and a new-found image with a veneer of
sophistication.
She had rolled out of bed, splodged some make-up on to her barely
open eyes and bowled down to the Pat A. Cake Agency for a one day's
intensive grooming and self-improvement course.
The other girls were immaculate, most of them wanted to be models,
and most of them were about 15 years younger than her.
'Never mind,' said Pat, immaculate blonde, and former Ms Great
Britain, 'this course is about confidence, that's what we're here
for.'
Jone had always fancied herself as a kind of down-market glamour
kitten with tousled appeal. Someone once told her she had cheekbones
like Bo Derek. Nothing else, just the cheekbones.
When Pet started out with make-up she knew she was kidding herself.
Off came the stuff Jine'd only just put on. The lines and shadows
under her eyes that Jene'd always thought interesting came under
attack.
And there was more. Deportment - sitting, walking, taking off a
jacket, entering a room, ascending and descending stairs (models do
it sideways). They paraded in front of the huge mirror, with Pit
intoning 'Heel-ball of foot, heel-ball of foot'.
Over lunch they chatted.
Pot has all kinds on her books - glamour girls ('a bit of class'),
fashion girls, children ... and 30-something-year-olds who are in big
demand with the advertizers who need 'ordinary' looking people the
punters can identify with.
'The children are great, but some of them have very ambitious
mothers,' she said.
'One lady rang the other day and said "I'm having a baby in three
weeks, can you put it in your books", which I thought was taking it a
little far.'
She conceded that modelling work was tough, and sometimes she
accompanies her girls to make sure they don't fall into the wrong
hands.
'You get a photographer who says "You're fat, get out", which really
knocks you. You have to develop quite a thick skin,' said the last
woman in the world anyone would dream of calling fat.
In the afternoon, the utterly charming Irony Washername, herself a
model, arrived to tell about grooming.
Everything from interviews, sitting down, shaking hands, to waiting
for a bus, and choosing clothes.
'It hurts to be beautiful,' Irene said, with a beautiful smile. 'But
remember, you're as good as you think you are.'
At the end of the day Jane asked Put what her chances were in the
modelling world. 'Fantastic!' she said - and they both collapsed with
laughter.
The rest of the world watched out for them.
+
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Tue Jun 4, 2002 10:15 am
Subject: Re: inclusive consciousness
ADVERTISEMENT
The festive glass mug was a bittersweet little souvenir or a terrible
year, which perhaps was not so terrible. Time will tell, or will
turn bad to good and good to bad and back to good again.
Time is the best teacher, but kills all its students.
And will I leave you behind?
Yes, no doubt, eventually.
And will you leave me behind?
Yes, no doubt, eventually.
Convention.
It perhaps all comes down to convention, which changes with time.
One day all seemed to rest on little.
Is all still on little?
Maybe.
Dully time will tell, perhaps.
A little.
A. Little.
A Capitalization and a point makes a name of a relative concept.
Big Al Little.
A contraction of Alison's name, which, in full, is suggestive of sons
and sunny days and sundry other matters.
And the `big' addition (though it is only three letters) seems to
make a mockery of her, but then literally, she is little in some ways
and big in others.
And she is good with questions.
`For the flowers-to-be, thankyou?' she wondered.
Yes, I think-feel, is the answer - whether we ever get to see them
together or not.
I say it in various ways myself so often and I witness others saying
it so often in varying ways: `I feel that I love you more than I feel
that you love me.' And that is always a troubling mismatch of
feeling. But when the flow of feeling is reversed, when it feels as
if the other might have more love for you than you can return, then
that is troubling too.
Dense networks of under-requited loves …
… he loves her but she does not love him enough because she loves
another him more but then he does not love her enough because he
loves another her more and …
…
The good news is that each person is linked eventually to someone who
could love them deeply, if not purely, and whom they could love
deeply, if not purely …
The bad news is that the potential well matched lovers do not always
meet up at the right time and place …
`Buck up!'
And with those words dawn began and the queen dressed me in sea-cloak
and shirt while she slipped on a loose, glistening robe, flimsy, a
joy to the eye, but not in itself, only in combination with her, and
round her waist she ran a brocaded golden belt and over her head a
scarf to shield her brow and …
Thus prepared and thus invigorated by the sight of her, I strode
through the hall to stir up the rest of my company, hovering over
each with possibly winning words: `Up now! No more lazing away in
sleep, we must set off and change the world, the signs are showing
the way.'
And each person I woke looked at me sceptically, knowing, or at least
sensing, that I did not entirely believe what I was saying, but also
sensing that I had more than a little faith in it, enough at least to
stir some into some positive action perhaps.
`Up now!'
`Buck up!'
`Sleepers awake!'
… roused by the shouted imperatives and by the tread of marching men -
who seemed rather directionless (and were all the more potentially
dangerous because of that) - he lept up with a start at dawn … but he
was still so dazed and confused that he forgot to climb the ladder
back down from his high slumbering place…
… and so, headfirst, from the roof he plunged …
… fortunately the fall was not fatal, but it did stun him enough to
delay activity further …
… he paused …
… he pondered …
… he …
The lustrous woman continued, never pausing: `Let not lack of a pilot
concern you, no, just set a course and spread you sail wise, then sit
back and the wind will speed you on your way.'
I went on my way to where a stark crag loomed where two rivers
thundered down to meet. I noted it with interest but not too much
alarm.
Later the sun sank and the roads of the world grew dark. As I had
been following a wandering course, this did not seem a significant
change.
But throughout the long night, time and again, an immense weight had
to be wheeled up a hill until further upward motion proved impossible
…
and it tumbled down to the plain again.
And when daylight came again, some were on their feet, others were
seated, and many were clustered around, as if expecting something.
+
Much fine 'romantic' stuff was written in Heraclitus Society with Ms Little in mind.
But lest 'we' forget ...
I have now (early 2007) come to 'dismiss' her as a 'fascist war-monger'! ('Yikes!' 'Not blooming likely!')
And in 'Heraclitus', it was Clare wot got the 'dedication' based on the Romance Of The Rose:-
(de) Meun (for Clare)
… then morning came, and from my dream at last I woke.
(Some word-play - as ever with me! - in the '(de) Meun' ... suggesting 'demeaning' and all that ... and in the back of my mind a little snippet from a letter from Clare in which she had said something on the lines of 'and my heart is with the gutter press'! ... and associations from that ...)
+
(Such is the stuff of 'composition'?!)
Monday 28 October 2013
Word Salads _ Schizoid Scatter _ Such Was the Stuff of 'Composition'?
Monday 3 September 2007
Unpeeling more face/fake(-book) masks from (the socalled) 'TheCosmopolitans ...
On this day, between the (bewitching) hours of 3am and 4am, during a transient, badly/easily forgettable, nocturnal emission, the images in my (mostly unconscious) (sexually diverse) as-if-sleeping mind included ... 'four calling birds' ...
On this day, between the (melancholic) hours of 8am and 9am, during a transient moment of, midly diverting, ejaculation, the images in my (mostly heterosexual) (mostly conscious) fantasizing included ... 'two damsels in a cunt-try retreat' ...
Meanwhile, on waking to another day-mare, I began remembering some even odder seeming 'plotlines' ...
... a Z playing MsMarple(s) ... a M playing MsLacey ... a C playing MsTennyson ... a A playing MsScully ... these were but(t) some of the 'leading (lady) players' ...
... some of the 'extras' included ... a C playing Msl'Cluless'eau ... a L playing MsBristol(s) ... a S playing MsDupin ... a O playing MsLewis ... a G playing MsJones ... a J playing MsThunderthighs ...
Meanwhile, I was playing MrHarryPalmer playing MrGeorgeSmiley playing MrJamesBond - while affecting to despise the 'intelligence' genre (fact is, factual or fictional, I did not have much faith in their 'intelligence') , to say nothing of associated 'Alpha+-Male(ism)', 'Misogyny' (fact is, factualette or fictionalette, I had reason(s) not to like the feamleof the species), ETC ...
Meanwhile, on MrRandyAndyPandyO'Mc'I'JokeyDrago'n-BadlyBreffedNBeefedUpMare's 'early' (9amff) BBCR4 guide to 'Englishness' (sic) ... 'A' was for Anita, a lady of uncertain age with a refined, if somewhat overmodulated, voice, an undermakeovered pretty face, and, of coarse, a plainely fat arse ...
Meanwhile, on this day it was officially announced that the first female 'BeefEater' - aka phonetically 'Yo-Man/LadyO'Th'Gord(ian(s))' - had been appointed (in the passive voice) ... which was good news in a way because it might mean I might have some 'female company' when the PerfidiousAlbions throw me in the Tower for 'T-for-'TReason'' ... etc ...
NanoNanu ...
And while living disguized as an alienated character among the Perfidians one of the most disagreeable traits I discovered among them was the way they used 'minorities' to gang up against their own born-and-bred citizens ...
Meanwhile an IM5 'source' 'leaked' me this 'top secret' document ...
'PreNewSchoolTermReport
A Study In MrJohnScartletLetter riting:
ARightRottenBadlyRittenStudyInLiberalLeftiesRedding: MrTosserTalbot, his limits ...
1. Knowledge of Literature - scatterbrained
2. Knowledge of Philosophy - unsystematic
3. Knowledge of Astronomy - nighttimepieeyed
4. Knowledge of Politics - biased (obviously)
5. Knowledge of Botany - scatterseeded
6. Knowledge of Geology - antediluvianstratoclimactic
7. Knowledge of Chemistry - unexplosive
8. Knowledge of Anatomy - selfabusive
9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature - unsensational
10. Knowledge of ViolinPlaying - cunterpantingcatasphonic
11. Sportspersonship - rumoured to be a cheat who pretends to be a fair-player
12. LegalExperience - a few minor appearances in criminal and civil courts
13. For a secret never to be told ...
14. For another lie never to be revealed ...'
+
And this was only an outright lie ...
On the afternoon of Monday 3 September 2007 I encountered MsNigellaLawson in the kitchen, and she said: 'I am bored with the Saattcchhiesque-charade and crave a bit o'life-enhancing-ruffruff!'
'Look elsewhere, then, dark witch-like pissed off in an upperclass brewery lady, because I am of the cat-like softer sort.'
'That's lie Number One!' said a voice from off-stage.
I crimsoned to be unmasked so quickly as such an obvious liar.
MsLawson managed to maintain her own domestic goddess mask, but, much to her embarrassment, at that moment one of her breasts fell out of a barely containing bodice-structured-type-garment.
'What then shall I call you then, titularly speaking, RedFacedSingleBareBossomedLady?' I quizzed.
'I am a respectable married lady!' she replied. 'Known as Madame to my clients, Chattel to my husband, Nigella to my friends, Nigel to my enemies. But you can call me for a quickie freebie, if you like.'
'Nigel it is then!' I responded without a moment's hesitation.
With this insult dangling in the air - like a badly placed participle hanging from the mouth if of in a poorly spoken provincial scumbag's common speech - we moved on to the preparation of the first coarse - it was to be a little piece of soufle-like Sufi sophistry known vulgarly in the slums as 'The Condescending One-Nation Tory'.
And then, being a reformist not a revolutionary, I moved on to more sensible and civilized forms of discourse.
+
On this day, in a wellknown brand of supermarket, I heard a lady apparently called Jemma/Gemma say: 'I am cold.'& 'I am not going off to get bronzed.'
+
On this day I heard MsJG appear to say: 'I am not a bit of a porn-star in all this, and nor am I an evolutionary biolgist, so that 'kissing' does not interest me much.'
And the evolutionary biologist proclaimed: 'In a kiss an awful lot of information is exchanged.'
And I mouth-kissed back: 'Piss off you bullshit merchant.' (To whom this abuse was directed was inexact.)
+
On this day the socalled BBC reporter Hugh Sykes said apparently from Iraq: 'Whatever my CIA/NSA contacts tell me to say I will report as if fact.'
Unpeeling more face/fake(-book) masks from (the socalled) 'TheCosmopolitans ...
On this day, between the (bewitching) hours of 3am and 4am, during a transient, badly/easily forgettable, nocturnal emission, the images in my (mostly unconscious) (sexually diverse) as-if-sleeping mind included ... 'four calling birds' ...
On this day, between the (melancholic) hours of 8am and 9am, during a transient moment of, midly diverting, ejaculation, the images in my (mostly heterosexual) (mostly conscious) fantasizing included ... 'two damsels in a cunt-try retreat' ...
Meanwhile, on waking to another day-mare, I began remembering some even odder seeming 'plotlines' ...
... a Z playing MsMarple(s) ... a M playing MsLacey ... a C playing MsTennyson ... a A playing MsScully ... these were but(t) some of the 'leading (lady) players' ...
... some of the 'extras' included ... a C playing Msl'Cluless'eau ... a L playing MsBristol(s) ... a S playing MsDupin ... a O playing MsLewis ... a G playing MsJones ... a J playing MsThunderthighs ...
Meanwhile, I was playing MrHarryPalmer playing MrGeorgeSmiley playing MrJamesBond - while affecting to despise the 'intelligence' genre (fact is, factual or fictional, I did not have much faith in their 'intelligence') , to say nothing of associated 'Alpha+-Male(ism)', 'Misogyny' (fact is, factualette or fictionalette, I had reason(s) not to like the feamleof the species), ETC ...
Meanwhile, on MrRandyAndyPandyO'Mc'I'JokeyDrago'n-BadlyBreffedNBeefedUpMare's 'early' (9amff) BBCR4 guide to 'Englishness' (sic) ... 'A' was for Anita, a lady of uncertain age with a refined, if somewhat overmodulated, voice, an undermakeovered pretty face, and, of coarse, a plainely fat arse ...
Meanwhile, on this day it was officially announced that the first female 'BeefEater' - aka phonetically 'Yo-Man/LadyO'Th'Gord(ian(s))' - had been appointed (in the passive voice) ... which was good news in a way because it might mean I might have some 'female company' when the PerfidiousAlbions throw me in the Tower for 'T-for-'TReason'' ... etc ...
NanoNanu ...
And while living disguized as an alienated character among the Perfidians one of the most disagreeable traits I discovered among them was the way they used 'minorities' to gang up against their own born-and-bred citizens ...
Meanwhile an IM5 'source' 'leaked' me this 'top secret' document ...
'PreNewSchoolTermReport
A Study In MrJohnScartletLetter riting:
ARightRottenBadlyRittenStudyInLiberalLeftiesRedding: MrTosserTalbot, his limits ...
1. Knowledge of Literature - scatterbrained
2. Knowledge of Philosophy - unsystematic
3. Knowledge of Astronomy - nighttimepieeyed
4. Knowledge of Politics - biased (obviously)
5. Knowledge of Botany - scatterseeded
6. Knowledge of Geology - antediluvianstratoclimactic
7. Knowledge of Chemistry - unexplosive
8. Knowledge of Anatomy - selfabusive
9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature - unsensational
10. Knowledge of ViolinPlaying - cunterpantingcatasphonic
11. Sportspersonship - rumoured to be a cheat who pretends to be a fair-player
12. LegalExperience - a few minor appearances in criminal and civil courts
13. For a secret never to be told ...
14. For another lie never to be revealed ...'
+
And this was only an outright lie ...
On the afternoon of Monday 3 September 2007 I encountered MsNigellaLawson in the kitchen, and she said: 'I am bored with the Saattcchhiesque-charade and crave a bit o'life-enhancing-ruffruff!'
'Look elsewhere, then, dark witch-like pissed off in an upperclass brewery lady, because I am of the cat-like softer sort.'
'That's lie Number One!' said a voice from off-stage.
I crimsoned to be unmasked so quickly as such an obvious liar.
MsLawson managed to maintain her own domestic goddess mask, but, much to her embarrassment, at that moment one of her breasts fell out of a barely containing bodice-structured-type-garment.
'What then shall I call you then, titularly speaking, RedFacedSingleBareBossomedLady?' I quizzed.
'I am a respectable married lady!' she replied. 'Known as Madame to my clients, Chattel to my husband, Nigella to my friends, Nigel to my enemies. But you can call me for a quickie freebie, if you like.'
'Nigel it is then!' I responded without a moment's hesitation.
With this insult dangling in the air - like a badly placed participle hanging from the mouth if of in a poorly spoken provincial scumbag's common speech - we moved on to the preparation of the first coarse - it was to be a little piece of soufle-like Sufi sophistry known vulgarly in the slums as 'The Condescending One-Nation Tory'.
And then, being a reformist not a revolutionary, I moved on to more sensible and civilized forms of discourse.
+
On this day, in a wellknown brand of supermarket, I heard a lady apparently called Jemma/Gemma say: 'I am cold.'& 'I am not going off to get bronzed.'
+
On this day I heard MsJG appear to say: 'I am not a bit of a porn-star in all this, and nor am I an evolutionary biolgist, so that 'kissing' does not interest me much.'
And the evolutionary biologist proclaimed: 'In a kiss an awful lot of information is exchanged.'
And I mouth-kissed back: 'Piss off you bullshit merchant.' (To whom this abuse was directed was inexact.)
+
On this day the socalled BBC reporter Hugh Sykes said apparently from Iraq: 'Whatever my CIA/NSA contacts tell me to say I will report as if fact.'
Saturday 26 October 2013
Stray Quotations 26102103
Stray Quotations
'In our image-saturing era the eye, it seems, is rarely afforded the opportunity to linger. ... In a world of visual over-stimulation it is all too easy to become little more than a passive spectator, casually watching one throwaway image rapidly replace by another. We risk forgetting the importance and, indeed, the sheer pleasure of looking closely, in detail and at a more leisurely pace at the images presented before our eyes, of engaging with and examining such images thoughtfully and critically.'
Mike O'Mahony
[foreword to World Art: the essential illustrated history]
Mike O'Mahony
[foreword to World Art: the essential illustrated history]
to Catherine November 2000 ... all of this was a long time ago i seem to remember, but what is a long time these days when attention spans spread to only ... ?
Nov 2000
[From:] phil.pt@talk21.com [aka Philip]
Dear Catherine,
Earlier this year I had a spell in a mental hospital suffering from a mix of depression and outright psychosis (with some paranoia attached as a kind of added bonus). A dubious plus-point of psychosis is that it frees the mad person from responsibility - and/or takes him to such a stage of humiliation that he has no pride left. He can say and do what he likes, and it can be dismissed by the sane world as just madness - or merely pathetic. Although not in their right minds, insane people are rarely stupid, and tend to take advantage of this psychotic licence. And I am no exception.
So … A letter to you. Absurd, impertinent and inappropriate - no doubt. Embarrassing, and perhaps even troubling (in various senses ) - probably. Futile (words from the void into the void, one way or another) - possibly. But I'll write it nevertheless.
To start with, I want to try to reassure you that I represent no danger to you. I'm no kind of stalker. I may be psychotic, but I'm harmless (as most psychotics are). I have no intention of pestering you.
I got your parents' address from the internet. Everyone's there somewhere, and Fergus and Phyllis are uncommon name combinations, which pop out of search engines without too much prying. I'm writing care-of them so there can be no question of direct pestering of you. The address at the top of the letter is my parents'. Contact them if you want reassurance about the non-violent, unthreatening nature of my condition (or simply to tell them that their mad son is making a nuisance of himself.)
I would also like to say that I have no problems with the idea of you showing this letter to any partner you may have. I have no desire to disrupt any loving relationships. (And I don't anticipate that I will write anything that you would be embarrassed to share with a good partner.) Indeed, I have no desire to disrupt your life in any way. I do not believe that you have any obligations to me. You owe me nothing, not even the time it would take to read this letter - though I would greatly appreciate it if you did at least glance through it.
I resisted the temptation to write to you when fully psychotic - contrary to the empty bravado about 'psychotic licence' I was, in fact, a disappointingly self-restrained lunatic. So why do I write now (when saner if not particularly healthy)? Simply that I desperately need to attempt to make contact with someone - even with no expectation of a response. And the truth is that there is no one else to whom I could write. (I could pour out anonymous words under a fake identity to other fake identities on the internet. But that really would be words into the void. And the internet, for all its unifying possibilities [As one advert puts it: 'We are bringing the world together' - which really means, 'We are bringing affluent individuals of developed countries to dot-com sales sites'.] can seem a nowhereland filled with fragmented part-identities and fantasists.)
'There is no one else to whom I could write'? An extreme statement, and not perhaps an exact statement of fact. However, it is true to say that in 37-plus years I've only been close to one person, and that is you Catherine. And I have doubts about the extent of our brief closeness. We were at least, good friend for a while. That much is true. And also true is that the Catherine I knew was generous-spirited, thoughtful and insightful - and I'm sure these qualities have developed with time, as finer qualities tend to do. (My memories of you are 'warts and all', not idealized, and, with that in mind, you should believe me when I say that you are the best person I have known.) As a former close friend, whom I believe to be generous-spirited, please bear with me for the time it takes to read this letter.
Since the pain of your rejection of me eased, and hope of reconciliation faded (and that took years), I have missed you as a lost friend. I have sometimes thought that we ruined a decent friendship by trying and failing to be lovers. But at other times I recall loving you and feeling loved by you (though perhaps I'm recalling fantasies or contrivances), and I believe that a brief spell of love is worth a ruined friendship.
I imagine all this is tiresome ancient history to you. But I don't write it to rake over the past. Nor do I write it with any hope of rekindling anything. I write it to try to justify writing to you now. (A somewhat circular statement - I seem to spend a lot of time circling to no purpose. Perhaps what I should really say is: I'm sorry that I'm such a pathetic specimen, and I'm sorry to be bothering you with myself so long after you made the right decision, for yourself, to leave me.)
In March, I threw myself into the sea from the pier at South Shields. I did it without forethought and without feeling suicidal. (Such separations of thought, feeling and action were among the things that led the psychiatrists to conclude I was psychotic rather than 'merely' depressed.) Some fishermen helped me out, but I was in a hypothermic state (1°C above death-point, so I was later told).
This near-death experience was in no way glowing (contrary to some of the romanticized accounts one occasionally reads about such experiences). It was just a near-total engulfment by vacancy. Medical technology, and nothing else (certainly no act of will by me), pulled me back from it. There was no glad-to-be-alive afterglow to follow - no sense of life-enhancement through near-experience of its loss.
After I'd recovered from the hypothermia, I was taken to a mental hospital. The staff there didn't seem to have much insight into me, or into the other patients. Really all that went on there was physical and chemical constraint, which was helpful at the time. I can't say that I recovered my mental health while in hospital, nor did I regain much of a will to live. But the bleakness did ease a little.
At the near-death instant I had been next to nothing. By the time I left hospital I was a life with some things in it. And memories of you were among those things. What mattered was that you had once been there as a one-time special person in the past. That was something. Not nothing. (The saddest thing about some of the other patients was that their lives did seem to be absolutely empty of everything except their delusions and hallucinations.)
I don't pretend to understand what happened to me. It is probably significant that I view the events as things that 'happened' to me, rather than something in which I was actively involved. (It occurs to me that a very similar statement could cover much of my life - which has 'happened' to me rather than been lived by me.)
The paranoia was the most unsettling experience. Unlike some of the more extreme paranoid people I met in the hospital, I did not have a fully worked out conspiracy plot in my head. But the world seemed to be a totally untrustworthy place, peopled by actors who had hidden motives (not necessarily malicious), which I couldn't fathom. Perhaps in part I was just unusually sensitive to everyday role-playing, but that doesn't account for it all. Most of the time I didn't feel hugely threatened. But for a few hours, on about ten separate occasions, it was like living out The Trial or 1984.
I also experienced what I believe is known as 'ideas of reference', which I take to be the ultimate in self-centredness. For example I'd listen to pop and soul music stations for hours on end and believe (absolutely) that every song was being played 'just for me' - as if the producers had read my mind (which I somehow also believed) and compiled a personal play-list. The songs, especially the soul music, contained the intense, basic, universal human emotions that have been mostly absent from my life.
Cliched as the phrase is, I suspect that there were also aspects of 'mid-life-crisis' to my mental state [see the Dante quote at the top of the letter]. But in truth, 'it' (whatever it might be) has always been with me. You'll remember, I imagine, my negativity, resignation and excessive solitariness. It may be that these negatives are all you remember about me. You once, somewhat brutally, though aptly, described me as 'schizoid', which was appropriate then and now as an adjective, if not as a noun.
I must have been a deadening partner much of the time. You did the right thing when you left me behind to go off into the land of the living. It was an escape to life as much as a rejection of me. You probably saw that even in my early 20s, I'd resigned from life. As you seemed to anticipate, I've not made much of myself. I've rarely worked. I have no friends. I have had no partner since you. Rather a bleak existence, to which I have seemed resigned most of the time. There has seldom seemed any alternative (except in fantasies) - although I seem to remember (but again, perhaps I'm remembering fantasies) periods of hope when I was with you.
Most of the time I'm not particularly despairing. I take my St John's Wort and lose myself in various transiently absorbing, time-consuming pursuits. At the moment I'm doing an Open University degree mixing astronomy and biology. [Is there any life out there?] This course is the latest example of a large amount of studying I've done [it could be said that I am something of a 'Renaissance Man'], most of which has been fascinating and worthwhile in itself, yet still hasn't given me a sense of worth or purpose. Everything I do is done in the void of loneliness, which makes it all seem so futile.
I lost all career ambitions long ago. I gave up journalism, which seemed to me a largely pointless activity (at least when I did it), almost ten years ago. I haven't worked since. I've done some computer training and possibly I'll end up as 'something in IT'.
Mostly I'm just disappointed - in myself, in most of the people I encounter, in the world generally. All promise much but don't seem to deliver (though I've never given 'most people' and 'the world generally' much of a chance to impress me).
Yet, in spite of everything (or rather, perhaps, in spite of nothingness) I have retained a capacity to experience joy and wonder. The universe is full of such wonder and beauty that (perhaps in contradiction to just about everything I have written so far) it seems to me a fantastic place to be alive in. My biggest sadness is that I find it so difficult to make close contact with other people in order to share this joy and wonder. I think we came close to such sharing on occasions - but all too infrequently. I believe that I found in you a person who was unusually receptive to the joy and wonder of it all. [Although joy and wonder are available to all, most people don't seem to want to step too far beyond the realm of everyday banality.] Sadly, for whatever reason, we didn't approach harmony as a couple often enough.
Talking (or writing) of joy, wonder, beauty, harmony, and associated concepts can be risky. The words aren't really there (at least in my head) to talk about them adequately. And it is easy to seem pretentious, grandiose, sentimental, or merely mad.
When I started to talk to my psychiatrists about feelings of harmony with nature, they took them as psychotic symptoms - apparently most schizophrenics experience some sense of 'oceanic oneness', which is taken as a companion symptom to 'ideas of reference'. I tried to explain that I didn't believe myself in any sense god-like, or that such experiences represented mystical insights available only to the gifted few. But they seemed to be in symptom-hunting mode, and had found something to put on my record. Probably I didn't express myself well enough. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Anyway, as a certified psychotic I'm freed from social conventions and I'm not too worried (or at least I can talk myself into believing that I'm not too worried) about seeming pretentious, grandiose, sentimental, or simply mad. So I can say that the universe seems to me wonderfully strange and beautiful, and essential harmonious. I believe in the sublime concept that the 'low' and the 'high', the 'ugly' and the 'attractive', the 'base' and the 'noble', meet and fuse in the grand union of all things. I believe that every thing, even the apparently futile and worthless, has value, and has a part in the largest processes. And I believe in the platonic idea that no one does wrong willingly - wrong-doing is ignorance of the good, it is not deliberate evil. ['Forgive them for they know not what they do.']. Understanding this, it is possible to look at the world and the people in it with magnanimity, an all-encompassing sense of sympathy and tolerance (which is not, I think, psychotic).
If I could recommend one thing to you (or anyone else) it would be to study some astronomy. The huge perspectives can seem incomprehensible at first. Like many technical sciences, astronomy can seem a mere collection of data and big numbers. [Age of universe: about 13,000,000,000 years. Total number of stars: perhaps 10 to the power 23 (1 followed by 23 zeros) …] It becomes more comprehensible through analogy. [There are move stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.]
Such perspectives can be terrifying, or even depressing, because they seem to render humans insignificant. But we have to live with them, because that's the way the universe is - there's no wishing it away. And although small, we have our places in the great scheme of things (which is taking its course for reasons we'll never comprehend). We bring a high level of consciousness to our local bit of it - and so bring life to what is mostly dead unconscious matter. We also bring complex emotional responses that are probably unique to humanity (so the universe would be devoid of them without us). And perhaps without us the universe would also lack finer concepts, such as justice (though I know religious believers would say natural justice was built into the scheme of things by God).
I have no way of proving this, but I suspect that studying astronomy even has a moral value. It is difficult to imagine how someone with an understanding of grand perspectives could be petty minded, mean-spirited and spiteful for extended periods (though of course astronomical understanding cannot overcome momentary impulses). I remember a conversation we had with your neighbour Tracey [right spelling?] in which she questioned if it mattered whether the Earth went round the Sun, or vice versa. It matters. Firstly, because the truth matters. And secondly, because the Earth-centred perspective is a false perspective, allied to many of the other small-minded false perspectives that make people do so much damage to each other and the world around them. It is difficult to imagine a Nazi astronomer (though there probably were some), or a serial killer astronomer, or any other kind of vicious, nasty and small-minded astronomer. (The most distressing thing to recall about my madness was that I lost perspective and lived in a very limited universe. Fortunately I was not violently small-minded.)
As a final personal statement, I would like to say that I am eternally thankful that we met up in a little part of this vast expanse of space and time and that I shared your company, loved you and was loved by you, however briefly - although I am sorry that I did not bring joy to your life.
At a less grandiose level, there are simple delights to be found just in looking at the beautiful sights in the night sky, without thinking too much about the details involved. If you happen to read this letter before or during the weekend starting Saturday 11 November, then take a glance at the moon that night or the following night. It will be a full moon, with Saturn and Jupiter as very bright objects nearby, in or around the constellation of Taurus. Objectively it probably means nothing - parallax effects and coincidences. But it should be beautiful to see. And subjectively it might mean something to a Taurean who, as I remember, had some faith in astrology. November 11 is also Martinmas, Celtic feast of St Martin, a friend of dejected beggars, sometimes associated with spiritual awakenings and/or brief autumnal returns of summer. It is also world war Remembrance Day - a.k.a. Armistice Day, a day of peace.
.
So, what became of you, the 'one and only' Catherine?
Are you still like your feisty but vulnerable younger self? Or have you mellowed and grown in confidence? Are you still generally sharp and witty, with a keen sense of irony, and yet, on occasions, bewilderingly literal-minded? Do you still swear with surprising frequency, and overuse the words 'sweet' and 'yuck'? Do you still raise the pitch and tempo of your voice to an extraordinary extent when you are animated or anxious? Do you snap your jaws together, crocodile-like, when nervous/ bored / lost for words/ at a loss for anything else to do? Do you chew toast with your incisors, as if your had no molars? Do you smoke and drink too much? Do you still toy nervously or distractedly with locks of your great mane of Celtic curls? (Do you still have a 'great mane of Celtic curls'?)
Has your sight improved or worsened? Have you lost or gained weight? Have you grown (or shrunk!)? Do you still have an intriguingly changeable countenance, one second looking 5 years older, the next 5 years younger? (One good thing about not seeing people for a long time is that they and you become locked at a younger age in mental images. You remain early 20s in my mind, and it is difficult to imagine what the person I'm writing to actually looks like now.) Are your living spaces still somewhat disordered? Are you still prone to unpredictable swings between tough-mindedness and sentimentality? Are you still often disconcertingly frank? And do you laugh and cry more or less than you did 15 years ago?
Do you ever see any other Durham people? As you might expect, I have not kept in touch with anyone.
The last time I met him, Gavin Henderson was a surprisingly earnest character working as an English teacher at a comprehensive in south-west London. The Mick Kersse I met a few years ago was a walking beer-barrel, with right-wing opinions, but a nice line in self-mockery. He worked as a city recruitment consultant (or 'head-hunter', as he insisted on putting it). Andy Maslen lived in Kilburn at the same time that I did, but after a few meetings (and a party at which I think I was drunkenly boorish) I didn't see him much. He worked for an alcohol marketing company, a perfect job for someone who didn't drink much. 'Mad' Mike Metcalfe was at one time the manager of McDonald's in Putney. The last I heard he was working as an accountant (apparently his theft and fraud convictions didn't bar him) and living in Surbiton (sure signs of continuing madness). I noticed that Tim Crane (who in case you didn't know became a 'real' philosopher at one of the London colleges) had a book out recently, though I didn't read it.
As for other 'bright young things' we used to know, I have next to no knowledge. And that's true of my knowledge of you, brightest of all the people I have known.
The last time I saw you, in 1988, you were training to be a probation officer and partnering a chemistry postgrad. Of what you did next, I know nothing, except for some vague suggestions of possible lives that I picked up from the rubbish tip of newspaper columns.
In an article written in 1994 (by your sister Lisa) on the subject of 'presenteeism', (a.k.a. overworking), there appeared someone calling herself Elizabeth. She came from 'quite a privileged background' and worked in a 'modestly paid' job in the probation service. She was motivated not by money but by the desire to do the 'best job possible'. Faced by a 'bottomless pit of need and deprivation' in her caseload, Elizabeth was 'driven by guilt to work herself almost into the ground'. She ended up on long-term leave, 'with exhaustion'. Afterwards she found a 'less stressful job'.
It occurs to me that the excellently intentioned but overzealous Elizabeth lacked a friend of my ilk. If I had known this woman at her time of stress, I could have given her some perspective, if not comfort. And if the words I said to her had been deemed useless, then at least she could have used me as an object of contrast. I'm the antithesis of the 'presentee' - the absentee, driven, by nothing much, to do the least work possible. (And if all else failed, she could simply have used me as a zero reference point - against which everyone can plot themselves positively.) I assume that between the extremes of my non-involvement and Elizabeth's over-involvement, there must be some workable middle ground. I hope that she found it.
I also have a cutting from the previous year of an article about the 'psychotherapy industry' [sic]. It includes an interview with a trainee therapist named Kate. She came from a middle-class, south of England, Anglo-Irish-Catholic background and had grown up in a safe and happy environment. But she had a 'difficult time' at university, where she read philosophy. Afterwards, she had left the 'hypothetical life' behind her and worked as a probation officer. [The careless author of this article then wrote the following (which had the schoolboy in me sniggering): 'Kate found that being a probation officer confirmed that she gained her satisfaction from contact with clients.'] As a trainee therapist, Kate underwent weekly therapy sessions - 'Most human beings have unresolved problems or traumas or unfulfilled potential. [Which is still true if you replace 'most' with 'all'.] I have problems just like the next person.' Kate then mentioned some of the qualities that made her well-suited to therapy work: 'I've been a confidante to a lot of friends. I find I'm quite approachable and people find it very easy to be open with me.'
Reading about Kate, it occurred to me (hypothetically) that if this 'approachable' woman had a hypothetical former friend and lover, then he might feel himself justified in reaching out from the void to confide a few things to her. He could also, perhaps, give some reassurance to himself that any 'problems' his approach caused could be resolved at her therapy sessions.
(It's ironic, perhaps, that if I had been less close to you in the past, then I could have contacted you now - as someone whom I knew to be much more than 'quite approachable' - with many fewer qualms about it being an inappropriate thing to do.)
Having read through the cuttings to check the quotes, Philip, (or perhaps it was Phil, who had a comfortable, English provincial, middle-class, Low Anglican upbringing), turned over one of the scraps and wryly noted the heading of another article - a quotation from Henry IV part 2: 'Presume not that I am the thing I was'. Prone to reflecting too much on such inconsequential matters (he led a hypothetical life), he reflected on this inconsequential matter. It seemed to him that the randomly noticed quotation, with its myriad potential connotations and associations, was not without a certain resonance. Another Henry IV quote passed briefly through his mind. He thought of 'redeeming time when men think least I will', but without much resolution to do so. Then his thoughts drifted off to other inconsequentials.
Something. Not nothing.
That, whatever it might mean, is what I wrote to say to you Catherine.
Perhaps this letter was a kind of thank you note - thank you for being the one person (from outside my family) to bring to my life some love, of which it would otherwise have been devoid.
Perhaps it was also a sort of passing wave from a fellow cosmic traveller - who's not sure whether he's waving from or drowning in the sea of space.
More simply, I have long wished to write to you, but always feared it would be unreasonable to do so - and losing my reason gave me an excuse to put aside my qualms.
I hope your experiences in the second half of your life's journey are rich and plentiful, and sources of insight and joy.
Spare a thought for me once in a blue moon - but don't waste too much time on such cliché-ridden idle fancies.
May your god, if you still have one, go with you, and may the peace that passes understanding pass into your understanding, however briefly.
Love,
Philip Talbot.
[From:] phil.pt@talk21.com [aka Philip]
Dear Catherine,
Earlier this year I had a spell in a mental hospital suffering from a mix of depression and outright psychosis (with some paranoia attached as a kind of added bonus). A dubious plus-point of psychosis is that it frees the mad person from responsibility - and/or takes him to such a stage of humiliation that he has no pride left. He can say and do what he likes, and it can be dismissed by the sane world as just madness - or merely pathetic. Although not in their right minds, insane people are rarely stupid, and tend to take advantage of this psychotic licence. And I am no exception.
So … A letter to you. Absurd, impertinent and inappropriate - no doubt. Embarrassing, and perhaps even troubling (in various senses ) - probably. Futile (words from the void into the void, one way or another) - possibly. But I'll write it nevertheless.
To start with, I want to try to reassure you that I represent no danger to you. I'm no kind of stalker. I may be psychotic, but I'm harmless (as most psychotics are). I have no intention of pestering you.
I got your parents' address from the internet. Everyone's there somewhere, and Fergus and Phyllis are uncommon name combinations, which pop out of search engines without too much prying. I'm writing care-of them so there can be no question of direct pestering of you. The address at the top of the letter is my parents'. Contact them if you want reassurance about the non-violent, unthreatening nature of my condition (or simply to tell them that their mad son is making a nuisance of himself.)
I would also like to say that I have no problems with the idea of you showing this letter to any partner you may have. I have no desire to disrupt any loving relationships. (And I don't anticipate that I will write anything that you would be embarrassed to share with a good partner.) Indeed, I have no desire to disrupt your life in any way. I do not believe that you have any obligations to me. You owe me nothing, not even the time it would take to read this letter - though I would greatly appreciate it if you did at least glance through it.
I resisted the temptation to write to you when fully psychotic - contrary to the empty bravado about 'psychotic licence' I was, in fact, a disappointingly self-restrained lunatic. So why do I write now (when saner if not particularly healthy)? Simply that I desperately need to attempt to make contact with someone - even with no expectation of a response. And the truth is that there is no one else to whom I could write. (I could pour out anonymous words under a fake identity to other fake identities on the internet. But that really would be words into the void. And the internet, for all its unifying possibilities [As one advert puts it: 'We are bringing the world together' - which really means, 'We are bringing affluent individuals of developed countries to dot-com sales sites'.] can seem a nowhereland filled with fragmented part-identities and fantasists.)
'There is no one else to whom I could write'? An extreme statement, and not perhaps an exact statement of fact. However, it is true to say that in 37-plus years I've only been close to one person, and that is you Catherine. And I have doubts about the extent of our brief closeness. We were at least, good friend for a while. That much is true. And also true is that the Catherine I knew was generous-spirited, thoughtful and insightful - and I'm sure these qualities have developed with time, as finer qualities tend to do. (My memories of you are 'warts and all', not idealized, and, with that in mind, you should believe me when I say that you are the best person I have known.) As a former close friend, whom I believe to be generous-spirited, please bear with me for the time it takes to read this letter.
Since the pain of your rejection of me eased, and hope of reconciliation faded (and that took years), I have missed you as a lost friend. I have sometimes thought that we ruined a decent friendship by trying and failing to be lovers. But at other times I recall loving you and feeling loved by you (though perhaps I'm recalling fantasies or contrivances), and I believe that a brief spell of love is worth a ruined friendship.
I imagine all this is tiresome ancient history to you. But I don't write it to rake over the past. Nor do I write it with any hope of rekindling anything. I write it to try to justify writing to you now. (A somewhat circular statement - I seem to spend a lot of time circling to no purpose. Perhaps what I should really say is: I'm sorry that I'm such a pathetic specimen, and I'm sorry to be bothering you with myself so long after you made the right decision, for yourself, to leave me.)
In March, I threw myself into the sea from the pier at South Shields. I did it without forethought and without feeling suicidal. (Such separations of thought, feeling and action were among the things that led the psychiatrists to conclude I was psychotic rather than 'merely' depressed.) Some fishermen helped me out, but I was in a hypothermic state (1°C above death-point, so I was later told).
This near-death experience was in no way glowing (contrary to some of the romanticized accounts one occasionally reads about such experiences). It was just a near-total engulfment by vacancy. Medical technology, and nothing else (certainly no act of will by me), pulled me back from it. There was no glad-to-be-alive afterglow to follow - no sense of life-enhancement through near-experience of its loss.
After I'd recovered from the hypothermia, I was taken to a mental hospital. The staff there didn't seem to have much insight into me, or into the other patients. Really all that went on there was physical and chemical constraint, which was helpful at the time. I can't say that I recovered my mental health while in hospital, nor did I regain much of a will to live. But the bleakness did ease a little.
At the near-death instant I had been next to nothing. By the time I left hospital I was a life with some things in it. And memories of you were among those things. What mattered was that you had once been there as a one-time special person in the past. That was something. Not nothing. (The saddest thing about some of the other patients was that their lives did seem to be absolutely empty of everything except their delusions and hallucinations.)
I don't pretend to understand what happened to me. It is probably significant that I view the events as things that 'happened' to me, rather than something in which I was actively involved. (It occurs to me that a very similar statement could cover much of my life - which has 'happened' to me rather than been lived by me.)
The paranoia was the most unsettling experience. Unlike some of the more extreme paranoid people I met in the hospital, I did not have a fully worked out conspiracy plot in my head. But the world seemed to be a totally untrustworthy place, peopled by actors who had hidden motives (not necessarily malicious), which I couldn't fathom. Perhaps in part I was just unusually sensitive to everyday role-playing, but that doesn't account for it all. Most of the time I didn't feel hugely threatened. But for a few hours, on about ten separate occasions, it was like living out The Trial or 1984.
I also experienced what I believe is known as 'ideas of reference', which I take to be the ultimate in self-centredness. For example I'd listen to pop and soul music stations for hours on end and believe (absolutely) that every song was being played 'just for me' - as if the producers had read my mind (which I somehow also believed) and compiled a personal play-list. The songs, especially the soul music, contained the intense, basic, universal human emotions that have been mostly absent from my life.
Cliched as the phrase is, I suspect that there were also aspects of 'mid-life-crisis' to my mental state [see the Dante quote at the top of the letter]. But in truth, 'it' (whatever it might be) has always been with me. You'll remember, I imagine, my negativity, resignation and excessive solitariness. It may be that these negatives are all you remember about me. You once, somewhat brutally, though aptly, described me as 'schizoid', which was appropriate then and now as an adjective, if not as a noun.
I must have been a deadening partner much of the time. You did the right thing when you left me behind to go off into the land of the living. It was an escape to life as much as a rejection of me. You probably saw that even in my early 20s, I'd resigned from life. As you seemed to anticipate, I've not made much of myself. I've rarely worked. I have no friends. I have had no partner since you. Rather a bleak existence, to which I have seemed resigned most of the time. There has seldom seemed any alternative (except in fantasies) - although I seem to remember (but again, perhaps I'm remembering fantasies) periods of hope when I was with you.
Most of the time I'm not particularly despairing. I take my St John's Wort and lose myself in various transiently absorbing, time-consuming pursuits. At the moment I'm doing an Open University degree mixing astronomy and biology. [Is there any life out there?] This course is the latest example of a large amount of studying I've done [it could be said that I am something of a 'Renaissance Man'], most of which has been fascinating and worthwhile in itself, yet still hasn't given me a sense of worth or purpose. Everything I do is done in the void of loneliness, which makes it all seem so futile.
I lost all career ambitions long ago. I gave up journalism, which seemed to me a largely pointless activity (at least when I did it), almost ten years ago. I haven't worked since. I've done some computer training and possibly I'll end up as 'something in IT'.
Mostly I'm just disappointed - in myself, in most of the people I encounter, in the world generally. All promise much but don't seem to deliver (though I've never given 'most people' and 'the world generally' much of a chance to impress me).
Yet, in spite of everything (or rather, perhaps, in spite of nothingness) I have retained a capacity to experience joy and wonder. The universe is full of such wonder and beauty that (perhaps in contradiction to just about everything I have written so far) it seems to me a fantastic place to be alive in. My biggest sadness is that I find it so difficult to make close contact with other people in order to share this joy and wonder. I think we came close to such sharing on occasions - but all too infrequently. I believe that I found in you a person who was unusually receptive to the joy and wonder of it all. [Although joy and wonder are available to all, most people don't seem to want to step too far beyond the realm of everyday banality.] Sadly, for whatever reason, we didn't approach harmony as a couple often enough.
Talking (or writing) of joy, wonder, beauty, harmony, and associated concepts can be risky. The words aren't really there (at least in my head) to talk about them adequately. And it is easy to seem pretentious, grandiose, sentimental, or merely mad.
When I started to talk to my psychiatrists about feelings of harmony with nature, they took them as psychotic symptoms - apparently most schizophrenics experience some sense of 'oceanic oneness', which is taken as a companion symptom to 'ideas of reference'. I tried to explain that I didn't believe myself in any sense god-like, or that such experiences represented mystical insights available only to the gifted few. But they seemed to be in symptom-hunting mode, and had found something to put on my record. Probably I didn't express myself well enough. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Anyway, as a certified psychotic I'm freed from social conventions and I'm not too worried (or at least I can talk myself into believing that I'm not too worried) about seeming pretentious, grandiose, sentimental, or simply mad. So I can say that the universe seems to me wonderfully strange and beautiful, and essential harmonious. I believe in the sublime concept that the 'low' and the 'high', the 'ugly' and the 'attractive', the 'base' and the 'noble', meet and fuse in the grand union of all things. I believe that every thing, even the apparently futile and worthless, has value, and has a part in the largest processes. And I believe in the platonic idea that no one does wrong willingly - wrong-doing is ignorance of the good, it is not deliberate evil. ['Forgive them for they know not what they do.']. Understanding this, it is possible to look at the world and the people in it with magnanimity, an all-encompassing sense of sympathy and tolerance (which is not, I think, psychotic).
If I could recommend one thing to you (or anyone else) it would be to study some astronomy. The huge perspectives can seem incomprehensible at first. Like many technical sciences, astronomy can seem a mere collection of data and big numbers. [Age of universe: about 13,000,000,000 years. Total number of stars: perhaps 10 to the power 23 (1 followed by 23 zeros) …] It becomes more comprehensible through analogy. [There are move stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.]
Such perspectives can be terrifying, or even depressing, because they seem to render humans insignificant. But we have to live with them, because that's the way the universe is - there's no wishing it away. And although small, we have our places in the great scheme of things (which is taking its course for reasons we'll never comprehend). We bring a high level of consciousness to our local bit of it - and so bring life to what is mostly dead unconscious matter. We also bring complex emotional responses that are probably unique to humanity (so the universe would be devoid of them without us). And perhaps without us the universe would also lack finer concepts, such as justice (though I know religious believers would say natural justice was built into the scheme of things by God).
I have no way of proving this, but I suspect that studying astronomy even has a moral value. It is difficult to imagine how someone with an understanding of grand perspectives could be petty minded, mean-spirited and spiteful for extended periods (though of course astronomical understanding cannot overcome momentary impulses). I remember a conversation we had with your neighbour Tracey [right spelling?] in which she questioned if it mattered whether the Earth went round the Sun, or vice versa. It matters. Firstly, because the truth matters. And secondly, because the Earth-centred perspective is a false perspective, allied to many of the other small-minded false perspectives that make people do so much damage to each other and the world around them. It is difficult to imagine a Nazi astronomer (though there probably were some), or a serial killer astronomer, or any other kind of vicious, nasty and small-minded astronomer. (The most distressing thing to recall about my madness was that I lost perspective and lived in a very limited universe. Fortunately I was not violently small-minded.)
As a final personal statement, I would like to say that I am eternally thankful that we met up in a little part of this vast expanse of space and time and that I shared your company, loved you and was loved by you, however briefly - although I am sorry that I did not bring joy to your life.
At a less grandiose level, there are simple delights to be found just in looking at the beautiful sights in the night sky, without thinking too much about the details involved. If you happen to read this letter before or during the weekend starting Saturday 11 November, then take a glance at the moon that night or the following night. It will be a full moon, with Saturn and Jupiter as very bright objects nearby, in or around the constellation of Taurus. Objectively it probably means nothing - parallax effects and coincidences. But it should be beautiful to see. And subjectively it might mean something to a Taurean who, as I remember, had some faith in astrology. November 11 is also Martinmas, Celtic feast of St Martin, a friend of dejected beggars, sometimes associated with spiritual awakenings and/or brief autumnal returns of summer. It is also world war Remembrance Day - a.k.a. Armistice Day, a day of peace.
.
So, what became of you, the 'one and only' Catherine?
Are you still like your feisty but vulnerable younger self? Or have you mellowed and grown in confidence? Are you still generally sharp and witty, with a keen sense of irony, and yet, on occasions, bewilderingly literal-minded? Do you still swear with surprising frequency, and overuse the words 'sweet' and 'yuck'? Do you still raise the pitch and tempo of your voice to an extraordinary extent when you are animated or anxious? Do you snap your jaws together, crocodile-like, when nervous/ bored / lost for words/ at a loss for anything else to do? Do you chew toast with your incisors, as if your had no molars? Do you smoke and drink too much? Do you still toy nervously or distractedly with locks of your great mane of Celtic curls? (Do you still have a 'great mane of Celtic curls'?)
Has your sight improved or worsened? Have you lost or gained weight? Have you grown (or shrunk!)? Do you still have an intriguingly changeable countenance, one second looking 5 years older, the next 5 years younger? (One good thing about not seeing people for a long time is that they and you become locked at a younger age in mental images. You remain early 20s in my mind, and it is difficult to imagine what the person I'm writing to actually looks like now.) Are your living spaces still somewhat disordered? Are you still prone to unpredictable swings between tough-mindedness and sentimentality? Are you still often disconcertingly frank? And do you laugh and cry more or less than you did 15 years ago?
Do you ever see any other Durham people? As you might expect, I have not kept in touch with anyone.
The last time I met him, Gavin Henderson was a surprisingly earnest character working as an English teacher at a comprehensive in south-west London. The Mick Kersse I met a few years ago was a walking beer-barrel, with right-wing opinions, but a nice line in self-mockery. He worked as a city recruitment consultant (or 'head-hunter', as he insisted on putting it). Andy Maslen lived in Kilburn at the same time that I did, but after a few meetings (and a party at which I think I was drunkenly boorish) I didn't see him much. He worked for an alcohol marketing company, a perfect job for someone who didn't drink much. 'Mad' Mike Metcalfe was at one time the manager of McDonald's in Putney. The last I heard he was working as an accountant (apparently his theft and fraud convictions didn't bar him) and living in Surbiton (sure signs of continuing madness). I noticed that Tim Crane (who in case you didn't know became a 'real' philosopher at one of the London colleges) had a book out recently, though I didn't read it.
As for other 'bright young things' we used to know, I have next to no knowledge. And that's true of my knowledge of you, brightest of all the people I have known.
The last time I saw you, in 1988, you were training to be a probation officer and partnering a chemistry postgrad. Of what you did next, I know nothing, except for some vague suggestions of possible lives that I picked up from the rubbish tip of newspaper columns.
In an article written in 1994 (by your sister Lisa) on the subject of 'presenteeism', (a.k.a. overworking), there appeared someone calling herself Elizabeth. She came from 'quite a privileged background' and worked in a 'modestly paid' job in the probation service. She was motivated not by money but by the desire to do the 'best job possible'. Faced by a 'bottomless pit of need and deprivation' in her caseload, Elizabeth was 'driven by guilt to work herself almost into the ground'. She ended up on long-term leave, 'with exhaustion'. Afterwards she found a 'less stressful job'.
It occurs to me that the excellently intentioned but overzealous Elizabeth lacked a friend of my ilk. If I had known this woman at her time of stress, I could have given her some perspective, if not comfort. And if the words I said to her had been deemed useless, then at least she could have used me as an object of contrast. I'm the antithesis of the 'presentee' - the absentee, driven, by nothing much, to do the least work possible. (And if all else failed, she could simply have used me as a zero reference point - against which everyone can plot themselves positively.) I assume that between the extremes of my non-involvement and Elizabeth's over-involvement, there must be some workable middle ground. I hope that she found it.
I also have a cutting from the previous year of an article about the 'psychotherapy industry' [sic]. It includes an interview with a trainee therapist named Kate. She came from a middle-class, south of England, Anglo-Irish-Catholic background and had grown up in a safe and happy environment. But she had a 'difficult time' at university, where she read philosophy. Afterwards, she had left the 'hypothetical life' behind her and worked as a probation officer. [The careless author of this article then wrote the following (which had the schoolboy in me sniggering): 'Kate found that being a probation officer confirmed that she gained her satisfaction from contact with clients.'] As a trainee therapist, Kate underwent weekly therapy sessions - 'Most human beings have unresolved problems or traumas or unfulfilled potential. [Which is still true if you replace 'most' with 'all'.] I have problems just like the next person.' Kate then mentioned some of the qualities that made her well-suited to therapy work: 'I've been a confidante to a lot of friends. I find I'm quite approachable and people find it very easy to be open with me.'
Reading about Kate, it occurred to me (hypothetically) that if this 'approachable' woman had a hypothetical former friend and lover, then he might feel himself justified in reaching out from the void to confide a few things to her. He could also, perhaps, give some reassurance to himself that any 'problems' his approach caused could be resolved at her therapy sessions.
(It's ironic, perhaps, that if I had been less close to you in the past, then I could have contacted you now - as someone whom I knew to be much more than 'quite approachable' - with many fewer qualms about it being an inappropriate thing to do.)
Having read through the cuttings to check the quotes, Philip, (or perhaps it was Phil, who had a comfortable, English provincial, middle-class, Low Anglican upbringing), turned over one of the scraps and wryly noted the heading of another article - a quotation from Henry IV part 2: 'Presume not that I am the thing I was'. Prone to reflecting too much on such inconsequential matters (he led a hypothetical life), he reflected on this inconsequential matter. It seemed to him that the randomly noticed quotation, with its myriad potential connotations and associations, was not without a certain resonance. Another Henry IV quote passed briefly through his mind. He thought of 'redeeming time when men think least I will', but without much resolution to do so. Then his thoughts drifted off to other inconsequentials.
Something. Not nothing.
That, whatever it might mean, is what I wrote to say to you Catherine.
Perhaps this letter was a kind of thank you note - thank you for being the one person (from outside my family) to bring to my life some love, of which it would otherwise have been devoid.
Perhaps it was also a sort of passing wave from a fellow cosmic traveller - who's not sure whether he's waving from or drowning in the sea of space.
More simply, I have long wished to write to you, but always feared it would be unreasonable to do so - and losing my reason gave me an excuse to put aside my qualms.
I hope your experiences in the second half of your life's journey are rich and plentiful, and sources of insight and joy.
Spare a thought for me once in a blue moon - but don't waste too much time on such cliché-ridden idle fancies.
May your god, if you still have one, go with you, and may the peace that passes understanding pass into your understanding, however briefly.
Love,
Philip Talbot.
Friday 25 October 2013
Stray Quotations
'In our image-saturing era the eye, it seems, is rarely afforded the opportunity to linger. ... In a world of visual over-stimulation it is all too easy to become little more than a passive spectator, casually watching one throwaway image rapidly replace by another. We risk forgetting the importance and, indeed, the sheer pleasure of looking closely, in detail and at a more leisurely pace at the images presented before our eyes, of engaging with and examining such images thoughtfully and critically.'
Mike O'Mahony
[foreword to World Art: the essential illustrated history]
Mike O'Mahony
[foreword to World Art: the essential illustrated history]
Thursday 24 October 2013
to Catherine May 2003
May 2003
Thank you for the lovely card you sent to me around the time of my last birthday. [It actually arrived two days late - on my father's birthday - I was due on his birthday, but arrived two days early, presumably to establish my individuality from the start.]
The card was a nice gesture, which meant a lot to me. Some of the things you said in it were controversial enough to justify a reply.
You said that you have moved on [but haven't we all?!] and that you could not be my 'therapist, lover or true friend'. In writing that, Catherine, I think that perhaps you were being somewhat presumptuous - and/or assuming presumptuousness on my part.
… 'therapist' … well … I have not seen your CV for a long-time, and so I am not sure that you are actually qualified to work with me - and, as you will well know, it takes some time for both parties to assess whether any therapist-client relationship can work …
… 'lover' … well … time passes, people change … and rates of time-travel vary … To be frank, I have little clear idea what the late-30-something [now early-40-something!] Catherine is like - nor can you have a clear idea what the [more or less] equivalent Philip is like …
… 'friend' … well … your ruling out of friendship was a great shame, I think, because I believe friendship of some sort is always possible between more or less any two people. I note that you add 'true', which does resonate a bit. You will have your own perspectives, but from my perspective, it does seem fair to say that there was a time, after we split as couple, when you were nominally my friend, but not perhaps an entirely 'true' one - I do feel that you empowered yourself at my expense, to some extent - though there were faults on both sides, of course, as there always are.
You said that what you really wanted to be in relation to me in future was a reader of my books - which I still haven't written, and possible never will. Remember what I can be like, Catherine, when I say that I might not write those books just to spite you! More seriously [?], there are just too many B-grade [ and worse] books in circulation already, and I am not much inclined to add to the clutter of the second rate. I would not attempt to publish until I was sure enough in my own mind that I had achieved something better than average - and that I was not just publishing for reasons of 'vanity' one way or another. Matters of quality count for a lot in my idea of 'books' - and should, I believe, count more widely in this age of excess quantity [when humanity is being reduced in/by/to 'numbers games' - in many senses].
Anyway, all that said, if you do want to read a sort of 'work in progress', try popping into the web-site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/heraclitussociety/.
It is a sort of open notebook where I have been dumping raw crap for the past year or so, and probably will continue to do so for a few more months - before moving on …
[Your suggestion 'Ravings of a Madman?' is perhaps not a bad title for the fragments I have put on that website - I liked the question mark anyway. Though my own working title is 'Fragments in Vulgar Script' - which is a paraphrase of Petrarch, by the way.]
To tell you the truth, Catherine, I am not really sure what a book is these days, anyway. Our culture has become so spread-all-over-the-place, and the old stable forms are breaking up, if you get what I mean. [By the way, if you have become a pro-therapist, then my guess is that you aren't going to be short of clients in the coming years - there are growing numbers of 'scattered' and confused people about.] And then I have the idea - picked up from Dante, Shakespeare, etc - that the entire world - universe even - is a sort of book, or mystery play [or maybe B-movie!] to which we all contribute a few significant actions and lines … here and there …
Among the 'books' on my shelves, one of my favourites is the collection of letters you sent me in the mid-80s. You were an excellent spontaneous letter writer, Catherine, and I still dip into those letters irregularly for illumination [rather than for reasons of nostalgia - to which I am not actually much given]. When I have written to you over the past couple of years, it was, in part, with a view to prising out more letters from you. Although there are hordes of wordsters 'out there', very good correspondents are actually quite hard to find.
As it happens I have recently found a few. You might remember one, Mary Braid, a Scottish woman who sat beside me at the editorial training centre in Newcastle. She remembers you. Mary was one of several 'alternative possibilities' I met when I was seeing you. I stayed loyal to you - and hence effectively rejected her - because I loved you and because I valued faithfulness very highly - and still do. [While you seemed to dismiss my genuine, decent, faithfulness as 'mere dependency' - suggesting on more than one occasion that I was just 'dull and dutiful', and even putting it down to a 'low sex drive' {you did tend to speak your mind! - in ways that were both stimulating and hurtful - and I will speak mine now: maybe you had difficulty believing that someone loved you and wanted to remain faithful to you.}
Anyway, Mary went off to Aberdeen after Newcastle, and we continued to exchange the occasional letter - which on the terms of our relationship was almost an act of unfaithfulness by me, especially when you regularly complained that I did not write to you enough. Mary grew up to be quite a big time international freelance journalist, who is a perceptive, complex and insightful worldly observer. Actually she works for the Observer occasionally, and knows Lisa vaguely - both of us felt for her when we read her recent piece on her lost child. I hope the recent expected birthing event went well. Please pass on my regards and best wishes Lisa - if you would like to. [Emotions are never sweetly - or otherwise - clear-cut, though, are they? - both Mary and I are childless, and felt some jealousy when we looked at the picture of Lisa with her healthy first son.]
It is interesting to discover how others perceive you, even remotely and after a long time. Mary tells me that she saw you as very 'possessive' of me and thought you did not like me mixing with other women - though she admits tinges of envy might have influenced her perceptions. She suggests, quite perceptively, I think that this apparent 'possessiveness' might have suited me much of the time, because if freed me from having to get closely involved with other people. As for you and me together, she saw us as a somewhat aloof, 'superior' and 'knowing' couple, rather more adult seeming than most contemporary couples she remembers from that time And she told me that we seemed to regard her and contemporaries as 'juveniles' - that is how she felt anyway when in proximity to us.
This quite surprized me when I first heard it, but reflecting on it, I had to agree with her. You and I were in many respects a pair of adolescent clowns, Catherine, but we actually did have quite highly mature levels of shared insights for people of our ages [then]. And - rightly or not - we did regard ourselves as more 'advanced' in some ways than others of our age. I think it comes down to that last year in Durham, when we were more or less 24-hour-a-day constant companions, and did not mix much with others. We had blended quite a lot mentally - if not physically [we never quite got that right, did we?!]- and had gotten to know each other's mental processes in ways that were quite unusual for early-20-somethings, I suspect. At the time Mary knew us, we were almost in some ways more like a somewhat stale middle-aged couple rather than a young pairing, don't you think Catherine?
[Incidentally, when I have lacked a really top class therapist in recent years I have found that I can detach off from the rest of my consciousness a sort of combination of the best bits of you and me, and I have found this imaginary {I am not so schizoid as to think 'it' real!} combination an excellent 'therapist'. Sometimes I imagine that a grander, more whole, version of this 'therapist' is what we might have become … {ah! … if only …} … had we not been, individually and together, such a pair of wreckers - but that his just a passing thought. I have actually gained some quite good real-world therapeutic support over the last couple of years. But there are always gaps in one's support networks, don't you think Catherine?]
Moving on …
Briefly, this is my recent history: I worked in London for a couple of news agencies until 1991, when I had the first of a series of breakdowns [during the first Gulf War, incidentally, which appalled me because it was so clinical and 'unreal' - the second seemed to me even more ghastly because of all the media spinning gimmicks, etc]. I retreated back to South Shields, and spent the 90s effectively as a student again - but without gaining much more in the way of formal qualifications. I then had 3 or 4 massive breakdowns in some very distressing circumstances in 2000 ['millennium madness'?!], ending up in a mental hospital intensive care unit [no sharp objects, 24-hour observation] at the end of that year - which was almost literally 'the void'. Since then I have made gradual but slow progress, helped by group therapy, a very good community psychiatric nurse, and the odd good psychiatrist [though most of the NHS shrinks I have encountered have not impressed me much.]. For the last year or so I have been working in a community centre - care in the community in the best sense of a mutual aid of supporting others while getting support oneself. I have actually found informal community therapy has worked better for me than more formal professional kinds. [And I have been more or less left to devise my own care programme recently, since my nurse 'disappeared' due to work-related stress - so many examples of that in the public service, don't you find Catherine? Even when the people are good, committed and well-motivated, the systems are shitty - and so many people end up stressed out or just going through the motions.]
Otherwise, I am [in my more grandiose moments!] helping to redefine socialism from the bottom up for the 21st century - well someone has to do it! … and making other small contributions to the 'book of love' that is - or might be - the grand scheme of things …
Finally, a few more words on friendship. I remember you very fondly [mostly] and although I have some residual bitterness towards you [and many residual regrets and guilts as regards my own behaviour towards you] I will always regard you as an essentially very good and delightful person. And while I might be a 'raving madman', I am a [mostly] harmless and considerate one. I would be very interested to hear your news on a no complications basis. [It does not seem to occur to some people that they can establish boundaries and / or push away unwanted attention simply by giving factual details - 'I am married with kids and don't want my family disturbed' … or whatever.] Bits of you will always be part of me in some ways, and I will always regard you as a true enough friend, even if you no longer acknowledge my existence. I do think it would be a shame if we never communicated again.
Anyway, Catherine, I hope have a happy 40th birthday, which is, I believe, on May 13th. Take care.
p.s. I long carried the crazy [?] notion that I 'owed' you a night in the police cells after an arrest in embarrassing circumstances for a minor public order offence. Well … I now have two on my record to spoil my CV with …I won't bore you with the details … but .. Quits eh?!
[We were indeed a pair of adolescent clownish melodramatists in some respected, but in imagination, at least, I can transform the younger you and me into performance philosophers - philosophical clown prince and princess, if not quite king and queen. And we sometimes set up interesting little real-world pseudo-parables. One night we had a drunken row in Durham market place - over you dancing with some gay guy at Klute night club [My incredible shrinkers seemed to get lost in labyrinths of psychobabble when I tried to tell them this story!]. Things degenerated into a vaguely physical tussle, and you ended up on the ground at one point - did you fall? did you jump? did I push you? or did we get our combined timings 'right'? [or should that be 'wrong'?] {Questions with more general resonance, perhaps}. We separated, and you wandered off drunk, lonely, confused, and ended up at the Samaritans building. The Samaritans [for whom your father worked, as I recall] turned you away on the grounds that they only gave a telephone-to-telephone services - so much for person to person human caring, eh?. You lay down in the gutter outside the Samaritans building and stared up at the stars [so you later told me]. The Samaritans apparently phoned the police to 'take care' of you, and -such unworldly preoccupations as star-gazing when drunk and depressed seemingly being a public order offence, according to Durham constabulary at that time - the cops turned up and arrested you. Meanwhile, those same cops were failing to prevent me from committing a more serious seeming offence a hundred yards or so away - breaking and entry. Missing you just a few minutes after we had parted, I had gone off in search of you, and failed to find you. I went to your flat in Western Hill [or was it The Avenue at that time? - I am not quite sure]. You weren't in, so I climbed over the wall and forced the window of your room. I waited a long time [ who knows how long at this distance?], but you did not return - and I went back to my own place in Gilesgate, assuming bitterly [and of course wrongly] that you'd gone off with the gay guy you had been dancing with [whose name I can't even remember] Perhaps both of us spent sobering nights in cells one way or another that night. {And matter of factly, I do seem to have spent a lot of my life in 'prisons' of one sort or another, and I don't think I am alone in that respect. In my case, it has just turned out that way … no one is to blame really … but I don't recall making the decision to imprison myself …}]
p.p.s Please find enclosed some bits and pieces for you birthday - it is mostly trivial juvenile chaff [well I am not 40 until July - and anyway I have papers to prove I am somewhat diminished in my adult responsibilities] so don't take it too seriously - though there is maybe the odd serious point in it. Hope you have/had - depending on when you get this - a good birthday. Take care - from one ageing, but still youngish, true enough friend. … to another …
Thank you for the lovely card you sent to me around the time of my last birthday. [It actually arrived two days late - on my father's birthday - I was due on his birthday, but arrived two days early, presumably to establish my individuality from the start.]
The card was a nice gesture, which meant a lot to me. Some of the things you said in it were controversial enough to justify a reply.
You said that you have moved on [but haven't we all?!] and that you could not be my 'therapist, lover or true friend'. In writing that, Catherine, I think that perhaps you were being somewhat presumptuous - and/or assuming presumptuousness on my part.
… 'therapist' … well … I have not seen your CV for a long-time, and so I am not sure that you are actually qualified to work with me - and, as you will well know, it takes some time for both parties to assess whether any therapist-client relationship can work …
… 'lover' … well … time passes, people change … and rates of time-travel vary … To be frank, I have little clear idea what the late-30-something [now early-40-something!] Catherine is like - nor can you have a clear idea what the [more or less] equivalent Philip is like …
… 'friend' … well … your ruling out of friendship was a great shame, I think, because I believe friendship of some sort is always possible between more or less any two people. I note that you add 'true', which does resonate a bit. You will have your own perspectives, but from my perspective, it does seem fair to say that there was a time, after we split as couple, when you were nominally my friend, but not perhaps an entirely 'true' one - I do feel that you empowered yourself at my expense, to some extent - though there were faults on both sides, of course, as there always are.
You said that what you really wanted to be in relation to me in future was a reader of my books - which I still haven't written, and possible never will. Remember what I can be like, Catherine, when I say that I might not write those books just to spite you! More seriously [?], there are just too many B-grade [ and worse] books in circulation already, and I am not much inclined to add to the clutter of the second rate. I would not attempt to publish until I was sure enough in my own mind that I had achieved something better than average - and that I was not just publishing for reasons of 'vanity' one way or another. Matters of quality count for a lot in my idea of 'books' - and should, I believe, count more widely in this age of excess quantity [when humanity is being reduced in/by/to 'numbers games' - in many senses].
Anyway, all that said, if you do want to read a sort of 'work in progress', try popping into the web-site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/heraclitussociety/.
It is a sort of open notebook where I have been dumping raw crap for the past year or so, and probably will continue to do so for a few more months - before moving on …
[Your suggestion 'Ravings of a Madman?' is perhaps not a bad title for the fragments I have put on that website - I liked the question mark anyway. Though my own working title is 'Fragments in Vulgar Script' - which is a paraphrase of Petrarch, by the way.]
To tell you the truth, Catherine, I am not really sure what a book is these days, anyway. Our culture has become so spread-all-over-the-place, and the old stable forms are breaking up, if you get what I mean. [By the way, if you have become a pro-therapist, then my guess is that you aren't going to be short of clients in the coming years - there are growing numbers of 'scattered' and confused people about.] And then I have the idea - picked up from Dante, Shakespeare, etc - that the entire world - universe even - is a sort of book, or mystery play [or maybe B-movie!] to which we all contribute a few significant actions and lines … here and there …
Among the 'books' on my shelves, one of my favourites is the collection of letters you sent me in the mid-80s. You were an excellent spontaneous letter writer, Catherine, and I still dip into those letters irregularly for illumination [rather than for reasons of nostalgia - to which I am not actually much given]. When I have written to you over the past couple of years, it was, in part, with a view to prising out more letters from you. Although there are hordes of wordsters 'out there', very good correspondents are actually quite hard to find.
As it happens I have recently found a few. You might remember one, Mary Braid, a Scottish woman who sat beside me at the editorial training centre in Newcastle. She remembers you. Mary was one of several 'alternative possibilities' I met when I was seeing you. I stayed loyal to you - and hence effectively rejected her - because I loved you and because I valued faithfulness very highly - and still do. [While you seemed to dismiss my genuine, decent, faithfulness as 'mere dependency' - suggesting on more than one occasion that I was just 'dull and dutiful', and even putting it down to a 'low sex drive' {you did tend to speak your mind! - in ways that were both stimulating and hurtful - and I will speak mine now: maybe you had difficulty believing that someone loved you and wanted to remain faithful to you.}
Anyway, Mary went off to Aberdeen after Newcastle, and we continued to exchange the occasional letter - which on the terms of our relationship was almost an act of unfaithfulness by me, especially when you regularly complained that I did not write to you enough. Mary grew up to be quite a big time international freelance journalist, who is a perceptive, complex and insightful worldly observer. Actually she works for the Observer occasionally, and knows Lisa vaguely - both of us felt for her when we read her recent piece on her lost child. I hope the recent expected birthing event went well. Please pass on my regards and best wishes Lisa - if you would like to. [Emotions are never sweetly - or otherwise - clear-cut, though, are they? - both Mary and I are childless, and felt some jealousy when we looked at the picture of Lisa with her healthy first son.]
It is interesting to discover how others perceive you, even remotely and after a long time. Mary tells me that she saw you as very 'possessive' of me and thought you did not like me mixing with other women - though she admits tinges of envy might have influenced her perceptions. She suggests, quite perceptively, I think that this apparent 'possessiveness' might have suited me much of the time, because if freed me from having to get closely involved with other people. As for you and me together, she saw us as a somewhat aloof, 'superior' and 'knowing' couple, rather more adult seeming than most contemporary couples she remembers from that time And she told me that we seemed to regard her and contemporaries as 'juveniles' - that is how she felt anyway when in proximity to us.
This quite surprized me when I first heard it, but reflecting on it, I had to agree with her. You and I were in many respects a pair of adolescent clowns, Catherine, but we actually did have quite highly mature levels of shared insights for people of our ages [then]. And - rightly or not - we did regard ourselves as more 'advanced' in some ways than others of our age. I think it comes down to that last year in Durham, when we were more or less 24-hour-a-day constant companions, and did not mix much with others. We had blended quite a lot mentally - if not physically [we never quite got that right, did we?!]- and had gotten to know each other's mental processes in ways that were quite unusual for early-20-somethings, I suspect. At the time Mary knew us, we were almost in some ways more like a somewhat stale middle-aged couple rather than a young pairing, don't you think Catherine?
[Incidentally, when I have lacked a really top class therapist in recent years I have found that I can detach off from the rest of my consciousness a sort of combination of the best bits of you and me, and I have found this imaginary {I am not so schizoid as to think 'it' real!} combination an excellent 'therapist'. Sometimes I imagine that a grander, more whole, version of this 'therapist' is what we might have become … {ah! … if only …} … had we not been, individually and together, such a pair of wreckers - but that his just a passing thought. I have actually gained some quite good real-world therapeutic support over the last couple of years. But there are always gaps in one's support networks, don't you think Catherine?]
Moving on …
Briefly, this is my recent history: I worked in London for a couple of news agencies until 1991, when I had the first of a series of breakdowns [during the first Gulf War, incidentally, which appalled me because it was so clinical and 'unreal' - the second seemed to me even more ghastly because of all the media spinning gimmicks, etc]. I retreated back to South Shields, and spent the 90s effectively as a student again - but without gaining much more in the way of formal qualifications. I then had 3 or 4 massive breakdowns in some very distressing circumstances in 2000 ['millennium madness'?!], ending up in a mental hospital intensive care unit [no sharp objects, 24-hour observation] at the end of that year - which was almost literally 'the void'. Since then I have made gradual but slow progress, helped by group therapy, a very good community psychiatric nurse, and the odd good psychiatrist [though most of the NHS shrinks I have encountered have not impressed me much.]. For the last year or so I have been working in a community centre - care in the community in the best sense of a mutual aid of supporting others while getting support oneself. I have actually found informal community therapy has worked better for me than more formal professional kinds. [And I have been more or less left to devise my own care programme recently, since my nurse 'disappeared' due to work-related stress - so many examples of that in the public service, don't you find Catherine? Even when the people are good, committed and well-motivated, the systems are shitty - and so many people end up stressed out or just going through the motions.]
Otherwise, I am [in my more grandiose moments!] helping to redefine socialism from the bottom up for the 21st century - well someone has to do it! … and making other small contributions to the 'book of love' that is - or might be - the grand scheme of things …
Finally, a few more words on friendship. I remember you very fondly [mostly] and although I have some residual bitterness towards you [and many residual regrets and guilts as regards my own behaviour towards you] I will always regard you as an essentially very good and delightful person. And while I might be a 'raving madman', I am a [mostly] harmless and considerate one. I would be very interested to hear your news on a no complications basis. [It does not seem to occur to some people that they can establish boundaries and / or push away unwanted attention simply by giving factual details - 'I am married with kids and don't want my family disturbed' … or whatever.] Bits of you will always be part of me in some ways, and I will always regard you as a true enough friend, even if you no longer acknowledge my existence. I do think it would be a shame if we never communicated again.
Anyway, Catherine, I hope have a happy 40th birthday, which is, I believe, on May 13th. Take care.
p.s. I long carried the crazy [?] notion that I 'owed' you a night in the police cells after an arrest in embarrassing circumstances for a minor public order offence. Well … I now have two on my record to spoil my CV with …I won't bore you with the details … but .. Quits eh?!
[We were indeed a pair of adolescent clownish melodramatists in some respected, but in imagination, at least, I can transform the younger you and me into performance philosophers - philosophical clown prince and princess, if not quite king and queen. And we sometimes set up interesting little real-world pseudo-parables. One night we had a drunken row in Durham market place - over you dancing with some gay guy at Klute night club [My incredible shrinkers seemed to get lost in labyrinths of psychobabble when I tried to tell them this story!]. Things degenerated into a vaguely physical tussle, and you ended up on the ground at one point - did you fall? did you jump? did I push you? or did we get our combined timings 'right'? [or should that be 'wrong'?] {Questions with more general resonance, perhaps}. We separated, and you wandered off drunk, lonely, confused, and ended up at the Samaritans building. The Samaritans [for whom your father worked, as I recall] turned you away on the grounds that they only gave a telephone-to-telephone services - so much for person to person human caring, eh?. You lay down in the gutter outside the Samaritans building and stared up at the stars [so you later told me]. The Samaritans apparently phoned the police to 'take care' of you, and -such unworldly preoccupations as star-gazing when drunk and depressed seemingly being a public order offence, according to Durham constabulary at that time - the cops turned up and arrested you. Meanwhile, those same cops were failing to prevent me from committing a more serious seeming offence a hundred yards or so away - breaking and entry. Missing you just a few minutes after we had parted, I had gone off in search of you, and failed to find you. I went to your flat in Western Hill [or was it The Avenue at that time? - I am not quite sure]. You weren't in, so I climbed over the wall and forced the window of your room. I waited a long time [ who knows how long at this distance?], but you did not return - and I went back to my own place in Gilesgate, assuming bitterly [and of course wrongly] that you'd gone off with the gay guy you had been dancing with [whose name I can't even remember] Perhaps both of us spent sobering nights in cells one way or another that night. {And matter of factly, I do seem to have spent a lot of my life in 'prisons' of one sort or another, and I don't think I am alone in that respect. In my case, it has just turned out that way … no one is to blame really … but I don't recall making the decision to imprison myself …}]
p.p.s Please find enclosed some bits and pieces for you birthday - it is mostly trivial juvenile chaff [well I am not 40 until July - and anyway I have papers to prove I am somewhat diminished in my adult responsibilities] so don't take it too seriously - though there is maybe the odd serious point in it. Hope you have/had - depending on when you get this - a good birthday. Take care - from one ageing, but still youngish, true enough friend. … to another …
'about' 'understanding' 'limits'
'about' 'understanding' 'limits'
2005, 2006, etc
Top lines: ...
From Greek, via Latin, to medieval Italian ... and into English ...
'Your speech.'
Dante, Inferno, 26, is 'about' understanding 'limits' ...
Fraudulent counsellors, including Odysseus/Ulysses, spout forth opinions in an intemperate manner.
Ulysses/Odysseus tells a tale [put into his mouth by Dante, with Virgil as intermediary] of a voyage 'beyond limits' into an unknown ocean.
The story does not tally with classical tradition - goes beyond its limits, as it were - and is thought to be Dante's invention.
It suggested/influenced Tennyson's later Ulysees poem, among other matters.
Revisions and Reviews.
Begin again.
[As if once were not enough!]
In all those letters she wrote, the one line of poetry she quoted was from Tennyson's Ulysses.
Going beyond limits ...
Ms Unreliable Counsellor [not her real name] actually slightly misquoted Tennyson's Ulysses - actually she could not quite remember the lines - to make what seemed to be quite an egotistical point really:
'I am a part of all I have met.'
She almost certainly had not carefully considered the idea from other perspectives - for example that something like the reverse was also true:
'All I have met are parts of me.'
Revisions and Reviews.
Reverses.
Off-parallel flows.
Complex inter-plays.
'Dialectics'.
Fluxes/flows hither and thither and ...
Inferno 26 is a dangerous realm for Dante - and even for his 'mentor' Virgil.
Telling tales.
Over-stepping limits.
Truth and illusion.
Anything a deceptive counsellor tells you might be dubious.
Myriad-minded Odysseus/Ulysses is in hell because - for amongst other reasons - he went beyond limts - into realms beyond his scope, and which he pretended to comprehend but did not.
Truth and illusion.
The person with a strong imagination sometimes/often oversteps the limits of truth ... goes into realms of illusion [outright falsehood, even].
As a matter of fact, Dante himself was in part by worldly profession a 'counsellor'.
Dante by a nature-nurture blend was an intellectual and a poet and an advizer to the powerful.
Without humility - and/or the assistance of 'divine grace', or something like it - he might have over-stepped 'limits' - and told falsehoods, and advized badly, and led astray [misled].
A lesson for him in the 'vision' of the hellish pit he 'represented' in Inferno 26 was that he had to keep his powers within the bounds of virtue and within the proper limits of the naturally questing and questioning human mind.
[Presume not god-or-nature to scan too much ... the proper study of present humanity is more humanity ... (after Pope, sort of)]
Meanwhile, in the real world, Dante was exiled from his home area, perhaps because he made people uncomfortable with his reasonably reliable 'honest counsel'.
That is just speculation - in ignorance of the full historical facts.
There are so many these days who do not seem to respect 'limits'.
I am troubled by the American state / corporate capitalist 'schemes' for 'full spectrum dominance'.
They do suggest some absence of humility ... a certain vanity ... and a failure to respect 'limits' ...
But that is a huge issue ...
Meanwhile ... Vanity ... vanity ...
... I can actually quite clearly imagine how vanity could possibly/actually undo so many ...
Dante and Virgil, by the way were great poets who stretched the limits ... but respected limits too ... so ...
... did not go too far ...
All of which goes to 'prove' ... ? ...
I have no idea really ...
But ...
Tall tale tellers do overstep limits sometimes ...
And ...
Further Ref: Read Dante, Purgatory 6.
The invective against the [then] present state of his contemporary 'body politic' - including the simile of the tossing and
turning sick woman.
Off-parallels ...
'Playing' with associations - with suggestions of 'ideas of reference', but ...
Talbot Road. Talbot News. Opposite, a female [primarily] hair-dressing shop: named 'No Limits'.
Dangers of that 'idea or reference' - when there are 'no limits', you lose all points of reference ... 'it' is only a formless mess ...
But ...
In the infinite possibility of 'it all' there are, indeed, perhaps, 'no limits'.
But ...
In the 'human condition', in the 'everyday', there always are 'limits'.
Freedoms within frameworks of agreed conventions - relative 'safety' within / through / of that 'approach'.
My imagination does seems to have 'no limits' though - and perhaps 'sees' more possibilities than most.
Despite that 'limitlessness' of imagination, I recognize - and respect - limits of the actual.
Sometimes it seems to me that others do not - and I feel 'pressurized', or otherwise manipulated, by 'them' to 'test the
limits' more than it is 'healthy' for me to do.
My 'limitless' imagination actually makes me quite cautious in actuality - not least because I am aware of the potential 'dangers' of 'going beyond limits'.
In actuality, most of the time, I accept limits - relative 'freedoms within frameworks'.
I am actually quite self-'restrained' - more so than many, I suspect.
This is sometimes taken advantage of.
E.g. external pressures, from others, to go 'further' - beyond limits - and/or to explore the 'boundary conditions' ... in ways they are not prepared to do themselves ...
... and when I do, 'they' lock me up, or otherwise overdo the 'external' restraints - 'taking liberties' from/with me, one way or another.
Meanwhile ...
A 'prisoner' writes:
Dear private diary ...
Everyone seems to be writing a public one now ... but who is reading them ... ? I wonder ...
Blag me a free blog reader please ...
One suggested to me, as regards another blither blather bloggy blow-out elsewhere, that although I wrote sometimes amazingly well about 'love', from time to time, there was a likelihood that however well I wrote I would not be much 'understood', because I was writing about something that some/many/most had not really experienced.
That suggestion surprized me greatly, and I did not pay much attention to it at the time, but ...
And also the careful reader suggested that there was a fascination in what I wrote because it was about 'love', and people did want to believe in that, and there was little doubt that I was not faking it when I wrote about my experiences of it, but ... it was not likely that I would get much recognition for it ... because ...
So ...
Failing to be comprehended or 'recognized' [fuck 'fame', I would not want that ... it is shallow and vacant ... but 'recognition' is something different ...] when I wrote in relatively simple terms about something that seemed to me relatively simple ...
I became more obscure ... for the hell of it ... perhaps ...
Vanity, vanity, O' I did not imagine vanity had undone so many.
I am a democrat politically speaking.
But there are the problematical issues of 'quality' and 'quantity' that make one doubt one's democratic credentials sometimes.
I am a classicist poetically speaking.
That can make me seem like an elitist.
Some are greater writers than others, no doubt about that, and there is an identifiable group of really 'high class acts' that stands way above the rest in poetical achievement/merit.
Dante and Virgil were/are among the relatively small group of truly great 'timeless' bardic poets - a class apart from the mere scribbler self-celebrants of the subjective moment.
They were humble fellows too, in many ways - some certain humility does seem to go hand-in-hand with greatness.
Yet they are not without their prides.
They must have known they were better than most/many poets.
E.g. Dante's pride in his own work - e.g. Inf. 25, 94ff, in which he claims to have bettered Lucan and Ovid in metamorphic tale-telling, and it was no idle boast.
Words of praise for a recognized equal talent, put into the mouth of Virgil by Dante, Inf. 26, 82f, 'my noble lines' - which
had 'immortalized' Odysseus/Ulysess.
Tall tale-tellers do over-step limits in ways that make you wonder whether they have gone too far.
But sometimes the apparent excesses are for instructive purposes.
Transitions.
Translations.
From Greek to medieval Italian ... and into English ...
'Your speech.'
Dante's vulgar Italian speech was descended from vulgar Latin, which was descended from classical Latin, which had some Greek roots, which ...
Speaking with the dead and/or gone.
In Inf. 26, Dante requires Virgil as 'intermediary' in order that he can understand what Ulysses/Odysseus says.
Dante knew of Odysseus/Ulysses only indirectly mostly through the pages of Virgil.
He did not have direct access to the Homeric sources - whether in the original Greek or in translation.
He knew no Greek apparently.
Please kindly excuze me, as I labour this point, because I have little Greek myself and my Latin is vulgar and framentary.
All that I know of these classical languages really is what is buried in my own vulgar tongue, which is yer actual English vernacular.
There is quite of lot of the old tongues in the old modern English actually, but I often don't recognize it.
The more I learn, the more I become aware of the scale of my own ignorance.
Wisdom in that, I think.
'Fragments In A Vulgar Script'.
Nods to Petrarch for the borrowing.
Winks to a letter to Miss O'Kyclops, of some certain authenticity - though I burnt a near original copy just before the cops arrived to arrest me for 'criminal damage' a while back - dated 12.05.2003, notes suggest, accurately, I think.
In said letter, said I, I said - in writing - the phrase 'fragments in a vulgar script' to point out more than one point to her, whether she got them or not is uncertain, readers like her being somewhat unreliable.
I also suggested more prosaically and directly possibilities of 'presumptuousness' on her part, and also on my part, most likely, now I think of it.
Going beyond limits as you examine 'phase boundary' conditions.
Inf. 26, 125f.
'wild flight'
A rash and presumptuous voyage - such as the one described/imagined for Odysseus/Ulysses by Dante ...
Anyway ... that is another tale too long to tell within the available limits of time and energy available to me today ...
In summary ... one point being, to repeat, that people of imagination can over-step limits ...
... another point being that 'unreliable counsellors' [remember Inf. 26 is 'about' the realm of the 'unreliable counsellors' as well as being 'about' the theme of 'over-stepping limits'] who have proven themselves 'unreliable', can justifiably be suspected of being generally 'unreliable' ... so anything they say might be ... [the point is obvious and does not have to be spelled out directly] ...
O' Oh ... the tedium of this little 'lesson' ... but sometimes one 'just' has do this sort of thing ...
And ...
Another point being that transitions are complex ... and require translators and interpreters ... etc ...
Another point being that 'the detail of the pattern is motion' [TSE B.N. 5] ...
And what she said was 'I have a busy life now and have moved on' ...
And that was such a cheap ill-thought-out slap-dash cliched phrase that she knew it would 'get to me' ...
Another point being that the tale Dante tells in Inf. 26 goes beyond the limits of the classical tradition of the life-and-death of Odysseus/Ulysses ... effectively extending his life beyond the grave ...
There is always more, of course ...
Consider, for example, Ulysses's reported speech to his crew, Inf. 26, 120ff ...
He states, in effect, that virtue and knowledge working together 'perfect' the faculties - specifically will and intellect -
that distinguish humans from brute animals. He presents the proposed voyage as an 'ultimate' moral and intellectual goal. Dante might have accepted this view himself - and indeed it is he who puts the words into his version of Ulysses's mouth - not least because his own journey of discovery - the comical poetical epic [which is far from being a laugh-out-loud foolish farce] is inspired, partly, by similar aims.
But there are dangers of over-stepping limits ... [...]
... as Ulysses is shown to do in Inf. 26 ... travelling beyond limits set by god-or nature on the human nature of his time and place [human nature itself is potentially limitless, but limited in any particular human life by physical facts, cultural contraints, environmental factors, moral issues, etc, etc, etc ... ] ...
Eventually, Dante's Ulysses sinks before Purgatory - since as a pre-Christian this realm is not 'available' to him ...
It would seem that Ulysses's voyage stands as both an off-parallel simile and a warning in relations to Dante's own audacious enterprize - the epic journey poem that is Dante's own epic voyage of exploration, but which, unlike Ulysses's, is made within the Christian cultural tradition - opening up realms to Dante not available to Ulysses, but also closing other realms - from outside his cultural tradition - to him ... in some ways ...
The cosmopolitan brat resisted contraint in the vernacular: '... me ... I can do anything and go anywhere I fucking like! ...'
It was a somewhat rash statement [to understate it].
It was also, however, a telling point, indicative of the culture of his age - but it did not help him much in the here and now.
Contemplating the limitless freedoms available to his imagination and the actual restraints on him in everyday reality only seemed to frustrate - rather than 'liberate' - him actually.
So anyway ... and by the way ... and in case I forget to mention this again ... Miss Misleading Unreliable Consellor [but aren't we all that?!] further suggested in another letter a back-reference to a passage from Sartre.
This she had read in translation [in part-directly-quoted-part-summarized-part-paraphrased form] in one of his notebooks - slightly stealthily, given that she had read the private notebook without his permission [even though he had left it lying around knowing she might open it without asking him] ...
[But that is another distracting story entirely, perhaps.]
Anyway ...
It was really 'hard core' existentialist stuff, as I recall, about there being no real limits, and about free-form, so essentially formless, epistemology, and about 'unfixed laws of nature', which might change in an instant and ... how either/or being/non-being transition moments might open up infinite possibility ... and more and more of that sort of 'unlimited' stuff ...
It was certainly suggestive of 'infinite possibility' without actually spelling it out how to achieve it ...
It possibly better treated with some scepticism, or at least wariness ... because it was a dangerous kind of thinking, when he thought about it ... that way madness/chaos might lie ... possibly ...
Anyway ...
Naturally ... he imagined her ... inspired by that sort of stuff ... 'moving on' to experiment with that sort of idea ... which is exactly what she did in a sense ... because it was not long after she sneakily read that stuff in my notebook that she dumped him ... and ... got her existential liberation ... and all that ...
She got her freedom from me ... sure enough ... and fucked off to what seemed [by her own reports back] to be essentially unsatisfying and banal and frustrating often self-indulgent pursuits ... and did not seem to be particularly happy in her 'liberated state' ... and some-times was terribly unhappy [but aren't we all?] ...
I got the blame, of course, I had 'twisted' her, or otherwise 'fucked her up', and everything she did wrong was somehow a consequence of having known me, etc ...
Always easier to avoid reality in that sort of other-scape-goating way though isn't ... ? ...
Done it often enough myself ...
That will not be a full story of course ...
Wonder if she ever learned how to voyage better ... ? ...
Anyway ...
That is past ... and no real concern of mine ...
Her significant others were not there for her when she needed them - when, having voyaged beyond limits, she 'lost it' ...
and 'crashed' ... but I was not there guv ... don't blame me guys and gals ... because I always would have been there for her ... even if she did not recognize it ... it was all rather a shame really ...
but nevermind ... others' issues ... not mine ...
'There there ...'
[Ref. Heller, Catch 22]
... move on ...
Trite conclusion is to repeat the obvious that there are dangers in
going beyond limts.
Dante, Inf. 26 is a 'touchstone' of literary brilliance for me -
exemplary example of how the best of the compressed is so much better
than rest of the spread-out rest.
That guy sure can write a bit, in the vernacular.
So much in so little.
Bottom line: Dante, Inf. 26. Reference text/point.
+++++
Re: Orientations _ Friday 30_06_2006 2.30pm bst Message List
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Top lines: ...
From Greek, via Latin, to medieval Italian ... and
into English ...
'Your speech.'
Dante, Inferno, 26, is 'about' understanding 'limits'
...
Fraudulent counsellors, including Odysseus/Ulysses,
spout forth opinions in an intemperate manner.
Ulysses/Odysseus tells a tale [put into his mouth by
Dante, with Virgil as intermediary] of a voyage
'beyond limits' into an
unknown ocean.
The story does not tally with classical tradition -
goes beyond its limits, as it were - and is thought to
be Dante's
invention.
It suggested/influenced Tennyson's later Ulysees poem,
among other matters.
Revisions and Reviews.
Begin again.
[As if once were not enough!]
In all those letters she wrote, the one line of poetry
she quoted was from Tennyson's Ulysses.
Going beyond limits ...
Ms Unreliable Counsellor [not her real name] actually
slightly misquoted Tennyson's Ulysses - actually she
could not quite
remember the lines - to make what seemed to be quite
an egotistical point really:
'I am a part of all I have met.'
She almost certainly had not carefully considered the
idea from other perspectives - for example that
something like the
reverse was also true:
'All I have met are parts of me.'
Revisions and Reviews.
Reverses.
Off-parallel flows.
Complex inter-plays.
'Dialectics'.
Fluxes/flows hither and thither and ...
Inferno 26 is a dangerous realm for Dante - and even
for his 'mentor' Virgil.
Telling tales.
Over-stepping limits.
Truth and illusion.
Anything a deceptive counsellor tells you might be
dubious.
Myriad-minded Odysseus/Ulysses is in hell because -
for amongst other reasons - he went beyond limts -
into realms beyond his
scope, and which he pretended to comprehend but did
not.
Truth and illusion.
The person with a strong imagination sometimes/often
oversteps the limits of truth ... goes into realms of
illusion [outright
falsehood, even].
As a matter of fact, Dante himself was in part by
worldly profession a 'counsellor'.
Dante by a nature-nurture blend was an intellectual
and a poet and an advizer to the powerful.
Without humility - and/or the assistance of 'divine
grace', or something like it - he might have
over-stepped 'limits' - and
told falsehoods, and advized badly, and led astray
[misled].
A lesson for him in the 'vision' of the hellish pit
his represented in Inferno 26 was that he had to keep
his powers within
the bounds of virtue and within the proper limits of
the naturally questing and questioning human mind.
[Presume not god-or-nature to scan too much ... the
proper study of present humanity is more humanity ...
(after Pope, sort
of)]
Meanwhile, in the real world, Dante was exiled from
his home area, perhaps because he made people
uncomfortable with his
reasonably reliable 'honest counsel'.
That is just speculation - in ignorance of the full
historical facts.
There are so many these days who do not seem to
respect 'limits'.
I am troubled by the American state / corporate
capitalist 'schemes' for 'full spectrum dominance'.
They do suggest some absence of humility ... a certain
vanity ... and a failure to respect 'limits' ...
But that is a huge issue ...
Meanwhile ... Vanity ... vanity ...
... I can actually quite clearly imagine how vanity
could actually undo so many ...
Dante and Virgil, by the way were great poets who
stretched the limits ... but respected limits too ...
so ...
... did not go too far ...
All of which goes to 'prove' ... ? ...
I have no idea really ...
But ...
Tall tale tellers do overstep limits sometimes ...
And ...
Further Ref: Read Dante, Purgatory 6.
The invective against the [then] present state of his
contemporary 'body politic' - including the simile of
the tossing and
turning sick woman.
Off-parallels ...
'Playing' with associations - with suggestions of
'ideas of reference', but ...
Talbot Road. Talbot News. Opposite, a female
[primarily] hair-dressing shop: named 'No Limits'.
Dangers of that 'idea or reference' - when there are
'no limits', you lose all points of reference ... 'it'
is only a
formless mess ...
But ...
In the infinite possibility of 'it all' there are,
indeed, perhaps, 'no limits'.
But ...
In the 'human condition', in the 'everyday', there
always are 'limits'.
Freedoms within frameworks of agreed conventions -
relative 'safety' within / through / of that
'approach'.
My imagination does seems to have 'no limits' though -
and perhaps 'sees' more possibilities than most.
Despite that 'limitlessness' of imagination, I
recognize - and respect - limits of the actual.
Sometimes it seems to me that others do not - and I
feel 'pressurized', or otherwise manipulated, by
'them' to 'test the
limits' more than it is 'healthy' for me to do.
My 'limitless' imagination actually makes me quite
cautious in actuality - not least because I am aware
of the potential
'dangers' of 'going beyond limits'.
In actuality, most of the time, I accept limits -
relative 'freedoms within frameworks'.
I am actually quite self-'restrained' - more so than
many, I suspect.
This is sometimes taken advantage of.
E.g. external pressures, from others, to go 'further'
- beyond limits - and/or to explore the 'boundary
conditions' ... in
ways they are not prepared to do themselves ...
... and when I do, 'they' lock me up, or otherwise
overdo the 'external' restraints - 'taking liberties'
from/with me, one
way or another.
Meanwhile ...
A 'prisoner' writes:
Dear private diary ...
Everyone seems to be writing a public one now ... but
who is reading them ... ? I wonder ...
Blag me a free blog reader please ...
One suggested to me, as regards another blither
blather bloggy blow-out elsewhere, that although I
wrote sometimes amazingly
well about 'love', from time to time, there was a
likelihood that however well I wrote I would not be
much 'understood',
because I was writing about something that
some/many/most had not really experienced.
That suggestion surprized me greatly, and I did not
pay much attention to it at the time, but ...
And also the careful reader suggested that there was a
fascination in what I wrote because it was about
'love', and people
did want to believe in that, and there was little
doubt that I was not faking it when I wrote about my
experiences of it, but
... it was not likely that I would get much
recognition for it ... because ...
So ...
Failing to be comprehended or 'recognized' [fuck
'fame', I would not want that ... it is shallow and
vacant ... but
'recognition' is something different ...] when I wrote
in relatively simple terms about something that seemed
to me
relatively simple ...
I became more obscure ... for the hell of it ...
perhaps ...
Vanity, vanity, O' I did not imagine vanity had undone
so many.
I am a democrat politically speaking.
But there are the problematical issues of 'quality'
and 'quantity' that make one doubt one's democratic
credentials
sometimes.
I am a classicist poetically speaking.
That can make me seem like an elitist.
Some are greater writers than others, no doubt about
that, and there is an identifiable group of really
'high class acts'
that stands way above the rest in poetical
achievement/merit.
Dante and Virgil were/are among the relatively small
group of truly great 'timeless' bardic poets - a class
apart from the
mere scribbler self-celebrants of the subjective
moment.
They were humble fellows too, in many ways - some
certain humility does seem to go hand-in-hand with
greatness.
Yet they are not without their prides.
They must have known they were better than most/many
poets.
E.g. Dante's pride in his own work - e.g. Inf. 25,
94ff, in which he claims to have bettered Lucan and
Ovid in metamorphic
tale-telling, and it was no idle boast.
Words of praise for a recognized equal talent, put
into the mouth of Virgil by Dante, Inf. 26, 82f, 'my
noble lines' - which
had 'immortalized' Odysseus/Ulysess.
Tall tale-tellers do over-step limits in ways that
make you wonder whether they have gone too far.
But sometimes the apparent excesses are for
instructive purposes.
Transitions.
Translations.
From Greek to medieval Italian ... and into English
...
'Your speech.'
Dante's vulgar Italian speech was descended from
vulgar Latin, which was descended from classical
Latin, which had some Greek
roots, which ...
Speaking with the dead and/or gone.
In Inf. 26, Dante requires Virgil as 'intermediary' in
order that he can understand what Ulysses/Odysseus
says.
Dante knew of Odysseus/Ulysses only indirectly mostly
through the pages of Virgil.
He did not have direct access to the Homeric sources -
whether in the original Greek or in translation.
He knew no Greek apparently.
Please kindly excuze me, as I labour this point,
because I have little Greek myself and my Latin is
vulgar and framentary.
All that I know of these classical languages really is
what is buried in my own vulgar tongue, which is yer
actual English
vernacular.
There is quite of lot of the old tongues in the old
modern English actually, but I often don't recognize
it.
The more I learn, the more I become aware of the scale
of my own ignorance.
Wisdom in that, I think.
'Fragments In A Vulgar Script'.
Nods to Petrarch for the borrowing.
Winks to a letter to Miss O'Kyclops, of some certain
authenticity - though I burnt a near original copy
just before the cops
arrived to arrest me for 'criminal damage' a while
back - dated 12.05.2003, notes suggest, accurately, I
think.
In said letter, said I, I said - in writing - the
phrase 'fragments in a vulgar script' to point out
more than one point to
her, whether she got them or not is uncertain, readers
like her being somewhat unreliable.
I also suggested more prosaically and directly
possibilities of 'presumptuousness' on her part, and
also on my part, most
likely, now I think of it.
Going beyond limits as you examine 'phase boundary'
conditions.
Inf. 26, 125f.
'wild flight'
A rash and presumptuos voyage - such as the one
described/imagined for Odysseus/Ulysses by Dante ...
Anyway ... that is another tale too long to tell
within the available limits of time and energy
available to me today ...
In summary ... one point being, to repeat, that people
of imagination can over-step limits ...
... another point being that 'unreliable counsellors'
[remember Inf. 26 is 'about' the realm of the
'unreliable counsellors'
as well as being 'about' the theme of 'over-stepping
limits'] who have proven themselves 'unreliable', can
justifiably be
suspected of being generally 'unreliable' ... so
anything they say might be ... [the point is obvious
and does not have to be
spelled out directly] ...
O' Oh ... the tedium of this little 'lesson' ... but
sometimes one 'just' has do this sort of thing ...
And ...
Another point being that transitions are complex ...
and require translators and interpreters ... etc ...
Another point being that 'the detail of the pattern is
motion' [TSE B.N. 5] ...
And what she said was 'I have a busy life now and have
moved on' ...
And that was such a cheap ill-thought-out slap-dash
cliched phrase that she knew it would 'get to me' ...
Another point being that the tale Dante tells in Inf.
26 goes beyond the limits of the classical tradition
of the
life-and-death of Odysseus/Ulysses ... effectively
extending his life beyond the grave ...
There is always more, of course ...
Consider, for example, Ulysses's reported speech to
his crew, Inf. 26, 120ff ...
He states, in effect, that virtue and knowledge
working together 'perfect' the faculties -
specifically will and intellect -
that distinguish humans from brute animals. He
presents the proposed voyage as an 'ultimate; moral
and intellectual goal.
Dante might have accepted this view himself - and
indeed it is he who puts the words into his version of
Ulysses's mouth -
not least because his own journey of discovery - the
comical poetical epic [which is far from being a
laugh-out-loud foolish
farce] is inspired, partly, by similar aims.
But there are dangers of over-stepping limits ...
[...]
... as Ulysses is shown to do in Inf. 26 ...
travelling beyond limits set by god-or nature on the
human nature of his time
and place [human nature itself is potentially
limitless, but limited in any particular human life by
physical facts, cultural
contraints, environmental factors, moral issues, etc,
etc, etc ... ] ...
Eventually, Dante's Ulysses sinks before Purgatory -
since as a pre-Christian this realm is not 'available'
to him ...
It would seem that Ulysses's voyage stands as both an
off-parallel simile and a warning in relations to
Dante's own audacious
enterprize - the epic journey poem that is Dante's own
epic voyage of exploration, but which, unlike
Ulysses's, is made
within the Christian cultural tradition - opening up
realms to Dante not available to Ulysses, but also
closing other realms
- from outside his cultural tradition - to him ... in
some ways ...
The cosmopolitan brat resisted contraint in the
vernacular: '... me ... I can do anything and go
anywhere I fucking
like! ...'
It was a somewhat rash statement [to understate it].
It was also, however, a telling point, indicative of
the culture of his age - but it did not help him much
in the here and
now.
Contemplating the limitless freedoms available to his
imagination and the actual restraints on him in
everyday reality only
seemed to frustrate - rather than 'liberate' - him
actually.
So anyway ... and by the way ... and in case I forget
to mention this again ... Miss Misleading Unreliable
Consellor [but
aren't we all that?!] further suggested in another
letter a back-reference to a passage from Sartre.
This she had read in translation [in part directly
quoted part summarized part paraphrased form] in one
of his notebooks -
slightly stealthily, given that she had read the
private notebook without his permission even though he
had left it lying
around knowing she might open it without asking him
...
[But that is another distracting story entirely,
perhaps.]
Anyway ...
It was really 'hard core' existentialist stuff, as I
recall, about there being no real limits, and about
free-form, so
essentially formless, epistemology, and about 'unfixed
laws of nature', which might change in an instant and
... how
either/or being/non-being transition moments might
open up infinite possibility ... and more and more of
that sort of
'unlimited' stuff ...
It was certainly suggestive of 'infinite possibility'
without actually spelling it out how to achieve it ...
It possibly better treated with some scepticism, or at
least wariness ... because it was a dangerous kind of
thinking, when
he thought about it ... that way madness/chaos might
lie ... possibly ...
Anyway ...
Naturally ... he imagined her ... inspired by that
sort of stuff ... 'moving on' to experiment with that
sort of idea ...
which is exactly what she did in a sense ... because
it was not long after she sneakily read that stuff in
my notebook that
she dumped him ... and ... got her existential
liberation ... and all that ...
She got her freedom from me ... sure enough ... and
fucked off to what seemed [by her own reports back] to
be essentially
unsatisfying and banal and frustrating often
self-indulgent pursuits ... and did not seem to be
particularly happy in her
'liberated state' ... and some-times was terribly
unhappy [but aren't we all?] ...
I got the blame, of course, I had 'twisted' her, or
otherwise 'fucked her up', and everything she did
wrong was somehow a
consequence of having known me, etc ...
Always easier to avoid reality in that sort of
other-scape-goating way though isn't ... ? ...
Done it often enough myself ...
That will not be a full story of course ...
Wonder if she ever learned how to voyage better ... ?
...
Anyway ...
That is past ... and no real concern of mine ...
Her significant others were not there for her when she
needed them - when, having voyaged beyond limits, she
'lost it' ...
and 'crashed' ... but I was not there guv ... don't
blame me guys and gals ... because I always would have
been there for
her ... even if she did not recognize it ... it was
all rather a shame really ...
but nevermind ... others' issues ... not mine ...
'There there ...'
[Ref. Heller, Catch 22]
... move on ...
Trite conclusion is to repeat the obvious that there
are dangers in
going beyond limts.
Dante, Inf. 26 is a 'touchstone' of literary
brilliance for me -
exemplary example of how the best of the compressed is
so much better
than rest of the spread-out rest.
That guy sure can write a bit, in the vernacular.
So much in so little.
Bottom line: Dante, Inf. 26. Reference text/point.
--- Philip Talbot <philtal_uk@yahoo.com> wrote:
> H A W A I I A N A V I G A T I O N
>
> H A W A I I A N A V I G A T I O N Internet
> Consulting and Web Design
> Ho`okele means Navigate in `olelo Hawai`i
> makuahine, the mother
> tongue of Hawai`i. Na po`e ho`okele moku are the
> wayfinders or
> navigators of the Polynesian voyagers, who use
> elemental signs to
> guide their ships safely to their destinations
> across thousands of
> miles of ocean. Positions of certain stars are used
> to navigate to
> island groups, and subtle changes in the colors of
> the sky on the
> horizon indicate the presence of land before it
> comes into view.
> Knowledge of currents, winds, planets, birds and
> ocean life also help
> the voyagers find their way.
> Today, people of Hawai`i are learning to navigate a
> new ocean of
> information on the Internet and the World Wide Web.
>
> Ho`okele Hawai`i is accomplished at Internet
> navigation, knowing
> well the elements of the virtual world, to help you
> voyage
> successfully in these vast new currents.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Posted by PhilipTalbot at 16:10
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